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9 - The conqueror-governor
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Don Francisco Pizarro, conqueror and governor of Peru, marques and adelantado, in Lima, to Sebastian Rodriguez, his solicitor at the royal court, 1541
… I will be left the governor of sandflats …
The reward of the members of a successful expedition was an encomienda for each; the reward of the leader was the governorship of the area. If the new land was already somewhat known and the venture well planned and financed, the leader might have capitulated with the crown for the governorship in advance of the expedition. If the leader had only an ad hoc captaincy and license from the governor of the region where the expedition originated, he would proceed to apply for a royal appointment after the fact. Usually he would get what he asked for; he was in a very strong position locally, and the practice was firmly established in the customs of the Indies, so that the crown officials had little choice in the matter. They had little reason to disapprove in any case. One should not imagine a Machiavellian crown, plotting the immediate replacement of the conquerorgovernors in favor of pliable bureaucrats and viceroys. Many of the first governors received lifetime appointments, which were honored. But the pressures were such that those lives were often short. The crown was well served to let the conquerors’ momentum follow through to the establishment of a preliminary eq uilibrium, and wait for the natural course of further immigration, internal rivalries and Indian fighting to accomplish the replacement of the founder-governors quickly enough.
The whole sequence is well illustrated by the case of Francisco Pizarro and Peru. In Letter 2 we saw the origins of the venture under Governor Pedrarias de Avila of Tierra Firme; in Letter 4, indirectly, Pizarro's continued direction of the exploratory phase, and in Letter 1 the high point of the conquest, with Pizarro already styled governor on the basis of a capitulation obtained in Spain before the final expedition of 1532. He received high titles and honors. (Not the least of them was the don. Note that not another correspondent in this section, including Pedrarias, bore that title; today we can speak of Pizarro with propriety minus the ‘don’ only because, like Hernando Cortes, he had been without it for most of his lifetime.)
Contents
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- 26 March 1976, pp vii-viii
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13 - The miner
- from Part II - The Variety of Life in the Indies
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Nicolas de Guevara, mining entrepreneur, in Potosi, to Simon Ruiz, merchant, in Medina del Campo, 1595
… I soon came up here to the imperial town of Potosi, where I have lived the whole time, occupying myself in the business of extracting silver …
We have seen that encomiendas dominated the economy of much of the sixteenth-century Spanish American countryside, channeling labor and goods to the cities, as later other types of estates would do. To be complete, to be even tolerable for the Spaniards, the system had to include some way for them to buy iron, cloth, wine, and many other things obtainable only from Europe. Therefore the encomenderos showed a sharp interest in extracting precious metals (as in Letter 11). But placer gold soon ran out in most areas, while silver, though abundant in the central regions, proved to be concentrated in a few rich, longlasting, mainly remotely located sites: in Mexico, at Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and some others; in Peru, at Potosi, the great Cerro Rico or Rich Mountain. There could not be a silver mine on every encomienda. Instead of everyone becoming a miner, the whole Spanish American economy oriented itself towards the mines as the ultimate source of currency. The mines did not become the greatest centers in themselves, being mainly in forbidding places and distant from the densest Indian populations (though Potosi was an impressive town for a time); but Spaniards in all walks of life flourished economically only to the extent that they could sell supplies and services to the mines, or profit from them through extensions of loans or credit, or participate indirectly, selling things in the Spanish cities to others who had closer contact. In some fashion they had to have access to the mine silver that alone would pay for European things.
The Mexican situation is complex because the greatest mines were altogether outside the area of dense sedentary Indian population; the encomienda could not be brought to bear directly. To take the example of Peru and Potosi (belonging to colonial greater Peru though in today's Bolivia), the encomenderos of the whole area from Cuzco south received tribute in silver because their Indians went to work in the mines, and they got yet more silver by selling in Potosi products as unusable by Europeans as chunu and coca, to supply the Indian work force.
31 - The concerns of a judge
- from Part III - officials and Clerics
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Licenciate Diego Delgadillo, judge of the Royal Audiencia of New Spain, in Mexico City, to Juan de la Torre, merchant, in Seville, 1529
… I know you will be glad I do things for my relatives and friends …
The First Audiencia of New Spain, headed by Nuno de Guzman as President, was dismissed in disgrace not long after its creation for various impolitic actions, but above all for dispensing patronage with too little regard for the rights of the conquerors. Ever since, the First Audiencia has had a consistently bad press with historians. The present personal letter from one of its members indeed demonstrates blatant awarding of office to relatives for profit, as well as the judge's large-scale economic ventures on his own behalf. But in truth, Audiencia members in later times acted quite similarly, though more under wraps and with greater limitations on them, as competing interests grew more numerous and more watchful. When viceroys came to rule in Mexico and Peru, Audiencias there lost some of their patronage (in areas such as Guatemala and Quito, however, the Audiencia under its president was still the governing body and retained full appointive power). Judges of later years tended to limit their visible participation in the economy to real estate and indirect investment; their favorite means of public penetration into society was the marriage of their children into locally prominent families. Even in the later period high court judges may have continued active business enterprise privately, as don Luis de Velasco (Letter 30) suspected.
Licenciate Delgadill∼ goes into some detail here about the entourage which judges as well as governors brought with them to the Indies. In doing so he illustrates the toll that disease sometimes took of new arrivals from Spain. And though he singlemindedly takes his judgeship as a business operation, throughout the letter he evinces a liveliness of mind as well as, in the second part, a tangible homesickness for Seville, his friends there, and even his mule, to whom he sends greetings. Delgadillo was no monster, but a complex human being whose ambitions and activities were like those of other government officials of his time. If his outspokenness seems a little unusual, his thoroughness in pursuing his ends was less so, and his manner of using the family tie not at all.
25 - The nobleman
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Don Alonso Enriquez de Guzman, with Almagro's forces at Guaytara, Peru, to fray Francisco de Bobadilla, provincial head of the Mercedarian order, with Pizarro's forces at Lima y Caxca, 1538
. .. I will come there over the objections of wretches, knowing it will anger the devil; and I would be no bad acquisition for hell …
Since it had people of all types and estates, the Spanish Indies also had some high noblemen, bearing the title ‘don’ by birthright, related to counts and dukes, habitues of the Spanish royal court or the courtly circles of Seville. Not much in evidence in the conquest itself, the courtly nobles began to be attracted to the- Indies after the wealth of Peru and Mexico had made itself felt. Some set out alone, more went in the entourage of governors and viceroys of the central regions, until there came to be a good contingent of them in the great capitals, frequenting the viceregal courts. Having experienced the court of Spain and learned its manners, they were little impressed with what they saw in the Indies, and were not inclined to make adjustments. A large proportion of them returned to Castile, with or without the fortune they needed to mend their positions there.
Don Alonso Enriquez de Guzman was an early representative of this group (though’ his brother preceded him, as can be seen in Letter 31). When he arrived in Peru in 1535 both Governor Pizarro and the Spanish populace made much of him, and he might have had almost any position. But before long he was on the other side of the Pizarro-Almagro conflict, and by 1539 he was on his way back to Spain.
The present letter illustrates the extent to which the high nobles in America continued to act as though they were at court. The situation here is serious; Almagro has returned disappointed from Chile, seized Cuzco, and advanced far north towards Lima with an armed camp. Pizarro has come out from Lima to face him, and fIghting seems imminent. In the event, the decisive battle will not occur for four months yet. (See Letters 9 and 10.) Don Alonso, with the Almagrists, addresses himself to an influential ecclesiastic on the other side, fray Francisco de Bobadilla, head of the Mercedarian order in Tierra Firme and Peru. But what is don Alonso at?
10 - The conqueror in jail
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Hernando Pizarro, in the fortress of La Mota in Medina del Campo, Spain, to his majordomo the priest Diego Martin in Peru, 1545
… Being in prison like this is the cause of it all …
As we said in introducing the preceding letter, royal officialdom did not take too active a hand with the governors who emerged from the expeditions of conquest. Letting nature take its course, however, led not infrequently to the ruling conquerors murdering and committing outrages on upstart subordinates or other rivals who threatened their jurisdictions. For these political crimes many were jailed and variously sentenced or deprived. Sebastian de Be nal cci.zar, for one example, died while appealing a death sentence for having executed a rival governor. While the early giants were thus at a disadvantage, their enemies would descend on them with claims and suits, and new powers would rise in the areas they ruled. The other side of the matter was the resilience of the apparently toppled great; even in jail they were powerful figures, and if not they, then generally their families long survived with wealth, influence and high title, though sometimes in Europe rather than in the Indies (as with both the Cortes and the Pizarro descendants).
We have just seen much of the background of the present situation in Letter 9. Hernando Pizarro, Francisco's haughty brother and right-hand man, led the forces that defeated Almagro, and it was Hernando who ordered Almagro's execution. Hernando then went off to Spain (sent by Francisco) to justify the action, with the result that he was kept in jail under various kinds of legal assault for over two decades. Here we see him after a reversal, but not humbled, still browbeating and mistrusting his employees, plotting to smuggle money from his large Peruvian estates into Spain, asking for documents which he hopes will throw the blame onto his now dead brother the Marques. Worse was yet coming for Hernando; just at this time his younger brother Gonzalo was leading Peru's most serious revolt to ultimate defeat. Nevertheless, Hernando eventually got out of prison, kept his estates in Peru and Spain, consolidated the family titles and entails, and established a lasting prominent position for the family in its ancestral Trujillo, Extremadura.
32 - bishop and the governor
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Fray Francisco de Toral, bishop of Yucatan, to the king, 1567
… Your majesty saw fit to place me here in this land as investigator and look-out (for that is the function of the bishop) …
The obligatory rivals of colonial Spanish America were the governor and the bishop (or viceroy and archbishop, or in a lesser Spanish city the corregidor and whoever the locality's senior ecclesiastic might be). As fray Francisco de Toral intimates, the crown, which appointed the bishops, expected them to observe and report on the activities of government officials. Often a newly arriving prelate carried the mission of formally reviewing the governor's management of affairs; bishops and archbishops also served as interim governors and viceroys on occasion. All this, aside from long having been the practice, was based on the fact that bishops were highly placed members of a hierarchy as much within the crown's appointive domain as was the secular government, but quite separate from it. Spanish settlers perceived the situation in the same way. Whenever there was a conflict among them, if one party got the governor's ear, the other would run to the bishop. Disaffected government officials sought alliance with the bishop; dissident ecclesiastical groups (here the Franciscans) with the governor. The constant jockeying between ecclesiastical and secular courts over jurisdictional matters often led to governor-bishop confrontations. Everything tended to play the two off against each other as institutional opposite poles, from which beginning they not infrequently became cordial enemies as well. Inexperienced practitioners of Spanish American history often ascribe conflict of this kind to the irascibility of the individuals, but it was so standard that governors thought nothing of being excommunicated and excoriated from the pulpit.
For all these reasons, criticism of governors takes up much space in the correspondence of bishops with the crown. The present letter is an unusually pure example, launching after the briefest courtesy formulas into a detailed enumeration of the governor's faults. Though this particular battle seems a bit more entrenched than usual, the complaints registered are among the commonplaces of the literature.
14 - Commerce across the Atlantic
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Francisco de Escobar, merchant of Seville, to his junior partner Diego de Ribera in Lima, 1553
… I have written you with this fleet all about everything going on.…
The third great constituent of the life-support system of Spanish American cities, along with the encomiendas and the mines, was commerce. Since the reader has already been exposed to two merchants’ letters of progressive difficulty (Letters 4 and 5), we now present him with the maximum challenge of a voluminous letter from the nerve center of one of the large trans-Atlantic companies, at a time when the trade had reached full maturity. The other two letters were written by junior partners in the Indies; this one is from a senior partner in Seville to the factor-partner in Lima. Francisco de Escobar, the merchant in Seville, is no novice to the Indies, however, for he had typically enough been active in Peru for years, accumulated capital during the ftrst boom of Potosi, and advanced to head his own company based in Seville. On a several-year term, the company arrangement included two partners in Seville, a representative on the Isthmus to forward goods toward Peru, a partner in Lima seeing to distribution there, and underlings in Lima and other places in Peru.
The letter is written in stages, over a two-month period, and is really several letters in one. Certain leitmotifs run through the whole, one of the more charming being the advancing pregnancy of Escobar's wife Marcela de Carvajal. Not advancing, rather constantly being harped upon, are the 780 pesos that Juan Lopez, the Panama man, double-charged Escobar for transportation of goods. Escobar is unable to forget it for more than a couple of pages, and mentions it in every conceivable connection. The death of Juan Lopez and the company reorganization made necessary thereby are the real occasion and substance of the letter. Escobar considers one type of company, then another, then yet another, with both organization and personnel changing constantly.
In the course of the discussion Escobar brings up some matters vital to an understanding of the evolution of trans-Atlantic commerce.
26 - The Hispanized Indian
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Don Martin, Indian nobleman, interpreter and encomendero, to rebel governor Gonzalo Pizarro in Lima, 1547
… I have my hair cut, by which I would be very easily recognized …
The Indians of the whole vast reach of South and Central America were affected by the sixteenth-century European presence: by epidemic disease, demands for new kinds of tribute and labor, reduction of their own interregional trade, addition of new techniques, plants and animals, reorganization of local political and religious life, and much more. The majority of the population, however, long continued to live in the same provincial and local units as before, within a functioning Indian society which retained its vitality and viability. These people had little direct contact with the Spanish life of the cities, to which they were tied only through encomienda obligations and the relatively few secular and ecclesiastic encomienda representatives who came out into the countryside.
Two types of Indians did come into direct and frequent contact with Spaniards. The first, and the more important for the growth and transformation of Spanish American society, were the Spaniards’ permanent servants, employees and dependents. The tribute and temporary labor provided by the encomienda were not enough. The Spaniards needed auxiliaries, people on a permanent basis who would learn something of their skills and their language, and who could then be their trusted retainers, or work at skilled crafts, or help with maintenance and supervision in their enterprises. The most prominent such auxiliaries were the ubiquitous blacks, whether as slaves or freedmen. From the beginning there were Indians in this role as well, who came to outnumber the blacks by far, and before the end of the colonial period had supplanted them in many areas.
Indian societies of many parts of America already knew not only nobles and commoners, but a third type: the person, often an outsider, who was the direct dependent of a nobleman, rather than sharing in general community obligations and rights. It was easy for the Spaniards to utilize such people, simply transferring the allegiance from an Indian nobleman to a Spaniard; even when the persons employed or commandeered were not of the dependent class, the existence of the type and function in preconquest society gave a framework of expectations.
16 - The new arrival
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Alonso Morales, tailor, in Puebla, Mexico, to his cousin in Trujillo, Extremadura, 1576
… Imagine that if back there in Spain we got 8 reales for a coat and short cloak, here they give us 32 …
On previous pages we have seen evidence of the fact that private correspondence from the Indies to Spain consisted in good part of propaganda inducing relatives to migration. The appeals take many forms. One of the most characteristic is the letter written by the settler just off the boat. Genuinely struck by the differences between the new land and the old, though not understanding the new things too deeply yet, still missing home and kinfolk sharply, the new arrival perhaps more than others was responsible for creating the image of a land of opportunity, where everything is bigger and better, that same half-truth, half-lie that has been told to people of the old country since there has been migration.
Young Alonso Morales, probably still under twenty, has recently arrived in Puebla in the company of his older cousin, who paid his way from Spain, and he is now working off the debt in his cousin's tailor shop. The picture he paints has elements seen again and again in such letters. Food is good, plentiful, and cheap. Everyone (every Spaniard, that is) has a horse. There is plenty of work, and it is very well paid, three or four times as well as in Spain. Spanish things are scarce and expensive, but since one earns much, one can afford them. The homeland is the reverse, ‘that misery,’ ‘that wretched country,' which is tolerable only for the rich. Such an image of the Indies, enthusiastic but stopping a good deal short of streets paved with gold, was perhaps all the more convincing in its relative solidity and modesty. This particular letter did not fail of its effect, since the recipient brought it to Seville to buttress his application for license to emigrate.
Dear cousin:
Since I know you'll be glad to hear from me, I will write, and by this letter I wish to announce that, bless the Lord, we had such good weather on the sea that you could think sea-voyaging a pleasant pastime; everything went so smoothly it couldn't have been better.
20 - The garden and the gate
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Juan Prieto, in Potosi, to his wife in Valladolid, Old Castile, 1551
… so that they will build me a double door and a stone arch into the garden …
Spaniards were by no means immune to nostalgia. No people were ever more insular, more attached to locality and lineage. The original intention of a great many of the migrants was to make money and return with it to Spain, and even those most deeply entwined in the affairs of the Indies were often tempted by the thought of returning, as several of these letters attest. Here is the letter of a man absorbed by thoughts of home. Juan Prieto is a small trader of some kind, perhaps one of those who bought Indian products in the country and sold them in Potosi, or one of the small independent merchants who brought shipments of goods from Arequipa. His business has gone quite well; at the moment there is a lull. For weeks he has been dwelling on what he will do when he gets home to Valladolid: improve relations with the important people who were once his patrons have parties with compatriots who will go home at the same time; retrieve his family from the in-laws with whom they are staying; start seeing about a good marriage for his daughter Sabina. At the center of his dreams is the vision of a sheltered garden, the garden of his own house, which is to be a green oasis, full of fruit trees, doves and rabbits, completely closed in from the outside ('there should be no aperture anywhere’). The crowning point is to be a double wooden door at the garden entry, framed in a cut stone portal, toward which Prieto is sending a good sum of money, and for which he gives lovingly detailed instructions.
Most Spaniards probably felt something like this at times. Surely no place was so conducive to nostalgia, though, as the mining towns: raw, unpleasant, and remote from the amenities of the capitals. Not one Spaniard in ten thought to stay in such a place longer than it would take him to amass a decent fortune. Meanwhile, thoughts of home were a morale builder and diversion, to which the only alternatives were the bullfights and tournaments Prieto mentions, or the gambling and fighting the mining camps were famous for.
24 - The Flemish tailors
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Pedro de Anver to a compatriot in Cuzco, 1547
… J os del Miere says you should be sure to come to his house …
'Foreigners,’ that is, non-Spanish Europeans, were a minority in the Spanish Indies, held in low esteem and often drifting towards marginal areas and occupations, but they were a standard phenomenon nonetheless, appearing everywhere, quite essential to the Spaniards as mariners and in certain specialized trades. Over time, they melted into the lower and middle reaches of the Spanish population, losing their distinctiveness. But in the first generation, precisely because they were in such a minority position, lines of common ethnicity and craft structured their lives, even more than with the Spaniards. The Greek gunners were one world, the Genoese sailors another, the Flemish silversmiths another; inside that framework each group had its principal friends, enemies, and business connections. Those little worlds had great cohesion and independence, and were not easily disturbed by even cataclysmic events outside.
Here, our world is that of Flemish clothing makers in Peru. The writer, ‘Peter of Antwerp,’ is a tailor, and so is the Maestre Diego Flamenco (Master Jacob Fleming) who is mentioned. Jos del Miere (Joos van der Meer) is a hosier, while the recipient of the letter seems to be more of a producer of leather items. They write and visit each other; they give each other news on prices and demand; they use each other as a business network to collect debts from Spaniards around the country for whom they have done work; and they come into conflict with each other, since we see that Maestre Diego has had the man in Cuzco thrown into jail for a debt. At this time, 1547, Peru was under the rebel government of Gonzalo Pizarro and was approaching the climax of its most shattering civil war. There is some mention of this in the letter, along with some rather poorly informed gossip, that ‘Dr,’ actually Licentiate, Gasca had arrived in the north with ‘a few’ men, actually plenty to attract the whole of Spanish Peru to the royal side in quite short order. And indeed, Maestre Diego was quite heavily involved in the rebellion itself. But the emphasis is on visits, prices, loans, and family news: Jos del Miere's wife has had a baby.
8 - The unsuccessful conqueror
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Bartolome Garcia, citizen of Asuncion, Paraguay, to the Council of the Indies, 1556
… And now, after twenty-one years, when I expected the reward for my efforts, you have left me without a share …
A companion piece to letter 7, this letter illustrates the case of a conqueror not granted a rich encomienda, an occurrence frequent enough that the volume of these complaints to governor, viceroy or king was great. Two types of attributes come into play here, personal and regional. Let us look first at the personal. Our Bartolome Garcia was not close to the governor (he was from Seville, while the governor was a Basque); he was no big man in the original expedition of don Pedro de Mendoza, no leader who would have to be respected over and above politics; and by all indications he was not well born. The plebeiansounding name is ambiguous and tells us little, but the lack in this whole complaint and petition of the slightest claim to be an hidalgo or gentleman tells us much. Low on all three counts, Bartolome Garcia emphasizes his services. Even through the heightening, we can see that they were great. But they were not the right kind. There were several skills and pursuits most useful in the Spanish conquests which had a public image such that accomplishments in them could not be brought to bear on encomienda grants. Great runners, scouts and spies had just as well not apply. Nothing related to the maritime profession counted. The most egregious example of this was in Mexico, where Martin Lopez, a ship's carpenter, supervised the building of the brigantines without which the siege of Tenochtitlan might have gone on indefinitely, and for his trouble received a quite minimal encomienda, shared with a colleague. As to Bartolome Garcia, he was a great huntsman and a fine crossbow shot, not the stuff encomenderos were made of, no matter how many deer he bagged and big cats he brought down.
In Mexico or Peru, even those first conquerors who were slighted had a half-tolerable situation, because their ‘small' encomiendas numbered some hundreds of Indians who sustained their households handily, produced some money revenue, and gave the encomenderos a base for their own entrepreneurial activity related to the strong local city markets.
Index
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- 26 March 1976, pp 261-267
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4 - The merchant and the conquest of Peru
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Martin de Zubizarreta, Basque merchant, in Nombre de Dios, Tierra Firme, to his employers Juan Saez de Aramburu, Francisco de Churruca, Martin Perez de Achotegui and company, in Seville, 1526
… There was some breakage in the olive oil …
The conquests would have been impossible without the European equipment, metal and supplies that Spanish merchants delivered to America; nor, without the prospect of a Europeanstyle life that the merchandise held out, would the conquerors have had as strong a motivation for their campaigns. Thus merchants are woven into the fabric of the conquest as one of its characteristic phenomena, and their letters are most informative, throwing the process into quite a different light, with their talk of horseshoes and nails, casks of wine, or considerations of currency and credit. Sometimes a merchant would actually accompany an expedition, but his more usual station was at the base of operations, where he would receive shipments from Spain, sell them or send them on to the conquerors, and send remittances back. When the focus of conquest in Tierra Firme shifted to Panama and the west coast, the merchants stayed for a while in Nombre de Dios on the Caribbean, where we find Martin de Zubizarreta, writer of the present letter. It may be viewed as a sequel to Letter 2, which is from the same region a year earlier. By now Governor Pedrarias has gone to assert his authority in Nicaragua, but the limitations of Nicaraguan wealth are already becoming apparent, and attention is shifting towards Peru, Pizarro and Almagro. A little later, as Peru becomes dominant, the merchants will make Panama their base, and subsequently Lima as well.
Import merchants in the Indies at this time were usually representatives of trans-Atlantic commercial networks with headquarters in Seville. Sometimes the merchants in America were partners, having made an investment; or sometimes, as here, they were factors who were paid a salary or commission. In either case they were junior men, quite dependent on the s.enior figures in Seville for their advancement. They could not make too many decisions independently, and they were under pressure to sell quickly and send a steady stream of money back. Their letters show this state of things in their often wavering tone and extraordinarily weak statements: ‘I believe that pleasing God I will sell everything … as quickly as I can.’
Part II - The Variety of Life in the Indies
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There are many farmers and craftsmen here, and many others who make a living by their work and sweat.
Fray Toribio de Motolinia, Mexico, 1555.
Here is the core of our interest. Conquest, as conquest, was an episode. True, it divided the history of the Western hemisphere into two sharply distinguished periods, but only because of its aspect as occupation, reorganization, foundation; there it stretched forward without break into the following decades and centuries. Even before the fighting was over, the Spaniards began to fill in the framework, bare but durable, that the conquest created - the system of Spanish cities, estates to tie them to the Indian countryside, and export of precious metals as their economic leverage with Europe. Immigrants poured into the richer areas (nearly all the letters of this section relate to Mexico and Peru). Even in the first moments there had not been an encomienda for literally every Spaniard, and before long encomenderos were a small minority of a Spanish population devoted to every pursuit known in early modern Europe.
Once a frame of reference is set, these people can speak for themselves. Through their own communications they emphasize the extent and earliness of development, the endless variety of occupations and types. And they express even more directly the humanity, universality and ready intelligibility of themselves and of the whole process. There is hardly a word they say that would not fit equally well in the mouths of immigrants - and non-immigrants - much nearer to our time and place. Even the humblest Spaniards wrote letters, or found someone who could. The numerous black slaves and servants who lived beside them did not have the opportunity; at least we have found no letters from them, though they are often mentioned in the letters of the Spaniards. As to the millions of Indians among whom the whole Spanish population was a minority, and on whom it was having an enormous destructive-creative effect, a certain number of them were already producing correspondence in the European fashion, of which we include three examples.
36 - The Franciscan reply
- from Part III - officials and Clerics
- Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
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Fray Toribio de Motolinia, in Tlaxcala, Mexico, to the emperor, 1555
… If Las Casas called the Spanish residents of New Spain tyrants, thieves, robbers, murderers and cruel assailants only a hundred times, it might pass …
Letter 35 is the merest hint of the great campaign, carried on above all by Dominican fray Bartolome de las Casas in thousands of scalding pages, opposing not only the Franciscans, but the encomienda, the conquest, even the very notion of a Spanish civil occupation of the Indies. Renewed again and again in Spain, the debates swirled in one area after another of Spanish America, always after the conquest was well past and a Spanish presence fully established: in the Caribbean in the second decade of the century; in Mexico in the middle decades; and in Peru yet later. The attacking parties were, when not Dominicans, usually lawyers, late-comers, or people still in Spain; the defenders were Franciscans, settlers, sometimes viceroys and governors. Las Casas himself was in Spain far more than in the Indies. In view of this and also considering that former Licentiate Las Casas’ favorite genres were the treatise and the brief, not the letter, we include as representative of this kind of invective a well-known letter by Franciscan fray Toribio de Motolinia, defending views much like those of the ordinary settlers to whom most of this volume is dedicated. Fray Toribio, one of the Franciscan Twelve, changed his earlier name of Benavente to a Nahuatl form meaning ‘one who is poor or afflicted,’ since the Indians are supposed to have uttered the word repeatedly on seeing the Franciscans in their simple habits. Motolinia became one of the principal powers among the Mexican Franciscans, taking his turn in all the more important posts and becoming (as he does not fail to make clear) the best of the first generation of Franciscan writers on Nahua culture and history.
The letter is the product of a thoroughly exasperated man. Having written page on page and brought the letter to a conclusion, Motolinia got notice of yet further infuriating publications by Las Casas, and returned to write almost as much more. One understands the exasperation. The arguments were necessarily deflected ones.
2 - A standard conqueror's report
- from Part I - Conquest
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Pedrarias de Avila, governor of Tierra Firme, in Panama, to the emperor, 1525
We hear news of great wealth.
It is a shame, in away, that the best-known early official reports from the Indies are Columbus’ hand-waving Italianate pictures of an island paradise, and Cortes’ university prose, elegantly magnifying himself and his conquest. As fine and informative as these writings are, they are not representative of the scores of reports that Spanish leaders sent the crown every year from new areas rich and poor, important and unimportant. There, sobriety and woodenness ruled. Yes, there were bows to the king, and some talk of spreading Christianity, far more than in private letters, and even some mention of marvels of nature and divine intervention, but all in few words, one item after the next, in matter-of-fact, unexcited language corresponding well to the conquerors’ generally Spartan temperament. The message usually went to the basics of whether or not the climate was tolerable for Europeans; whether the Indians were settled and agricultural, capable of sustaining encomiendas and Spanish cities; and whether there was gold, silver or some other product that could subsidize imports from Europe and pay the crown the revenues it desired.
We have chosen the present letter because it has a little of everything; it illustrates the points above, and more. In the second and third decades of the sixteenth century, Tierra Firme and its capital Panama were the clearing house for exploration and conquest in both directions along the South Sea (the Pacific, with the North Sea in this context being the Caribbean). Thus two major conquests appear underway in this letter, that of Nicaragua led by Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba and others, and that of the ‘east’ or Peru led by Pizarro and Almagro. The relay system of conquest, with each new area conquered by people and resources from the immediately preceding one, is seen very clearly here, as well as the tensions that grew out of it. The governor would aid some important citizens in outfitting expeditions which he sent out in his name to add new territories to his own jurisdiction. But the subordinates, who usually took much of the initiative and bore most of the expense, invariably sought independence, and often attained it.
34 - Franciscans and the Indians
- from Part III - officials and Clerics
- Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
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Fray Pedro de Gante, in Mexico City, to the emperor, 1532
… There are very good scribes and preachers or speakers of great fervor, and singers who could sing in your majesty's chapel choir …
Either secular priests or friars could man the ecclesiastical component of the encomienda, taking the chief encomienda town as a headquarters and from there instructing the Indians of the region in Christianity. In the Mexico of the first generation, friars of the mendicant orders were most associated with this function, and of these the Franciscans were preeminent. Arriving in the country ftrst, they evolved methods which the other orders followed by and large, building great monastery churches and cloisters which became the primary public places of the Indian towns and even, since they often contained three or four friars and served a corresponding number of encomienda districts, tended to free the order from too great a local dependence on any individual encomendero. The rural monasteries were satellites of the even larger ones in the cities, above all Mexico City.
In the larger centers there took place the most famous episode in early Spanish American cultural history: a concerted Franciscan effort ftrst to learn Nahuatl, and then using this tool to teach a selected number of Indians the refmements of European culture, including writing, grammatical and rhetorical principles, all the arts and crafts, sometimes even Latin. It is quite hard to get a proper perspective on the success of the program. The achievements are formidable. The monasteries, if they as works of art are considered part of the effort, dominate the Mexican countryside to this day. Literacy in Nahuatl was another result with lasting signiftcance; the first generation of notaries whom the friars taught taught others in turn, so that a selfsustaining Nahuatl literacy and record-keeping continued to flourish in the Indian towns until the end of the colonial period.
But if such were the results, one must wonder if the welldeveloped Mesoamerican traditions of glyphic-pictorial writing and prolific monumental building were not the most important causative factors. In discussing the general progress of acculturation in central Mexico, one must remember how few people in how few places were involved in such programs, and that the effort slacked off to almost nothing in a generation or two.
6 - The non-hero
- from Part I - Conquest
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Maestre Baltasar, on Gallo Island off Ecuador, to his brother in Panama, 1527
… Two years is long enough to go about begging without servants …
Readers of Prescott or the Spanish chroniclers get no inkling of what expeditions of discovery and conquest in the Indies were like. Hardships, high mortality, and sometimes fierce fighting were indeed involved. But what the chroniclers took for granted, and Prescott did not know, was that the expeditions were joint economic ventures shot through with capitalism and commercialism. The leaders were the largest investors, in ships and supplies, to which they gave their men access - practically always for a price; but all the men invested something, if only their person and clothing, and the shares the conquerors won were adjusted more than anything else to the size of their investments. Owning a horse doubled one's share. The ships may have left most of the import merchants behind, but commercialism and lively trading continued to be part of the picture. The wealthier expedition members took stocks to be sold to their fellows later, when supplies would be scarcer and higher priced. The expeditions contained blacksmiths, tailors, surgeons, notaries and others who charged for their services. And trading back and forth of horses, weapons, clothing and slaves went on constantly.
Another aspect not much spoken of, and which for lack of sources scholars still know too little about, is the large number of Indian and black helpers the Spaniards always took with them on expeditions, outnumbering themselves at least two to one. Their direct role in the fighting was not great, but they freed the conquerors by carrying the baggage, searching for provisions, bringing wood and water, and helping with other tasks; the women among them were also cooks, mistresses, companions. Blacks, as highly expensive slaves, were the minority. The bulk were Indians, who might either be informal permanent dependents, simply commandeered somewhere, or slaves like the blacks, though much lower priced (Indian slavery, while short-lived in the central regions, was a standard phenomenon of the conquests); in either case, they originated in areas already conquered, usually close to the expedition's point of departure. Rather than operating as a corps, the helpers in most cases belonged to the individual conquerors; each Spaniard normally expected to have two or three, an expectation that did not vanish with the culmination of the conquest.