Axtell
Part Two
At center stage of the Columbian Encounters was the Spanish conquest of what cartographers quickly called "The Indies," which included not only the Caribbean islands but Central and South America. Since Columbus was sailing on behalf of Castile and the Spanish established hegemony over what became known as Latin America within fifty years, we should not wonder that the great majority of Quincentenary books pertain to Spanish exploits in the Americas. The best books on the Caribbean appeared before 1992. Later and weaker is Columbus and the Golden World of the Island Arawaks by D.J.R. Walker, a retired colonial civil servant. The unoriginal narrative leans uncritically on Spanish accounts for data on Arawak culture and on Samuel Eliot Morison and anthropologist Irving Rouse for interpretations. Walker's view of the pre-Columbian islanders is as idyllic and implausible as Kirkpatrick Sale's in The Conquest of Paradise.(40) Much more nuanced is Peter Hulme's and Neil L. Whitehead's Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day, a splendid anthology of thirty-six accounts of the Island Caribs by explorers, missionaries, colonial administrators, travel writers, and film makers. This well-illustrated book is a history of Western perceptions of the Caribs rather than their own history or even a history of their relations with outsiders. The editors argue that the Caribs were closer to their allegedly peaceful Arawakan neighbors and enemies in both culture and language than the Columbian myth of Carib-cannibals has allowed and that their reputation for anthropophagy is grossly inflated. Unlike the Taínos, who are virtually extinct, populations of Caribs have flourished on the Carib reserve of Dominica (since 1903) and as so-called Black Caribs in Central America (since their forced relocation in 1797).(41) Their survival provided a rare reason to celebrate in 1992. Hugh Thomas argues in The Real Discovery of America that the event occurred not in the Caribbean but in Mexico on November 8, 1519, when Cortés entered the lake-bound Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán for the first time.(42) The Spanish conquest of Mexico has attracted some of the best scholarship during the Quincentenary. The excavation of the Templo Mayor in downtown Mexico City (1978-1982) greatly enhanced our understanding of Aztec art, architecture, history, and ritual. Project director Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and religious historian Davíd Carrasco summarize the latest scholarship in Moctezuma's Mexico: Visions of the Aztec World. Anthony F. Aveni and Elizabeth Hill Boone contribute essays on Aztec astronomy and the notion of landed empire to accompany 150 color illustrations of temples, artifacts, and codices.(43) Igna Clendinnen takes a different tack in searching for the mood or "distinctive tonalities" of everyday Aztec life and culture. Taking "multiple, oblique and angled approaches, where possible against the grain of expectation," she focuses less on the words than on the ritual actions of both male and female, elite and non-elite Mexicas, including war captives slated to lose their hearts to foreign gods. Clendinnen's sensitive reading of cultural symbols shows how ordinary citizens of the capital city made sense of their world, at once poetic and mannered and horribly violent.(44) The narrative lines of the three-year conquest are familiar from William H. Prescott's classic History of the Conquest of Mexico(1843), but Lord Thomas has outdone Prescott (who never visited Mexico) in an 825-page grand retelling of Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico, which adroitly adds insights drawn from 150 years of archaeological and codex scholarship and his own assiduous mining of Spanish archives. Although the Spanish and the Aztecs shared many cultural propensities and forms, Thomas argues that the Aztec empire was based on a "large static monarchy," unable to respond creatively to new challenges. Montezuma's "exceptional" superstitiousness and vacillation remain a mystery but help explain why the innovative Spanish adventurers under Cortés eventually won the day. We also learn about the lethal efficiency of Smallpox and other imported diseases in weakening the Aztecs, who blamed their own blasphemies for this onslaught of the gods. Thomas is strong on the background of events. His thorough use of the 6,000-page judicial inquiry into Cortés conduct (1529-1535), for example, has raised the number of accessible eyewitness Spanish accounts from ten to over a hundred. His description of Cortés's upbringing as a sickly only child in a poor, lower noble family in bellicose Extremadura explains much about the conqueror's ambition and military daring. (45) At one-fourth the size, Ross Hassig's Mexico and the Spanish Conquest offers the best explanation of the Aztec defeat, particularly for the classroom. An ethnohistorian of Aztec Mexico, Hassig restores the native side of the story by arguing that the Aztecs lost not because of any ideological or spiritual collapse but because Cortés was able to enlist some 200,000 native allies. "Mexico was not conquered from abroad but from within...The Aztecs did not lose their faith, they lost a war...fought overwhelmingly by other Indians, taking full advantage of the Spanish presence...The war was more of a coup, or, at most, a rebellion, than a conquest. Conquest came later, after the battles, as the Spanish usurped the victory for which their Indian allies had fought and died."(46) The subsequent conquest of Mexico is the subject of excellent books by two of the best ethnohistorians of colonial Mexico, Serge Gruzinski and James Lockhart. Gruzinski's The Conquest of Mexico subtly charts "the least spectacular but perhaps most insidious manifestation" of Europeanization of Indian life--the revolution in native "modes of expression and communication, the disruption of memories, [and] the transformations of the imaginaire."(47) The Spaniards' imposition on, and often ready adoption by, the Indian nobility of alphabetic writing and Western artistic conventions,entailing new ways of seeing, experiencing, and representing reality, time, and space, the natural and supernatural--when combined with 97 percent mortality in central Mexico within a century--created such deep fissures in Indian society and "tore the nets" of native culture so badly that true syncretism and integration into Spanish colonial society were not possible. Yet the confusion and mixing of codes and genres, peoples and practices, allowed some room for cultural creativity and hybridization, at least in the first century of domination. This possibility is nowhere better illustrated than in Gruzinski's sumptuous Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance, a study of the pre- and postconquest codices that evolved to reconcile native religion, land titles, and histories with the new realities of Spanish lords, priest, and encomenderos.(48) Although traditional conventions, subjects, and colors were altered and written texts in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl were added, the persistence of pre-Columbian glyphs on Europeanized maps and painting testifies to the tensile strength of even the torn net. For more than twenty years, James Lockhart has studied Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and a large corpus of Nahuatl documents from central Mexico between 1545 and 1770. In his prize-winning book The Nahuas after the Conquest, he establishes the key importance of the "cellular or modular" organization of Nahua society and life based on the altepetl or ethnic state unit. "Everything the Spaniards organized outside their own settlements in the sixteenth century--the encomienda, the rural parishes, Indian municipalities, the initial administrative jurisdictions--was built solidly upon individual, already existing altepetl." After exploring the cellular character of kinship, the household, politics, social orders, land tenure, and religion, Lockhart discerns in the evolution of the language three major stages of acculturation, which mirror very closely parallel stages in all the other facets of culture, including naming patterns, songs, history, art, and architecture. The three stages are: 1) a generation (1519 to ca. 1545-50) during which despite great revolution, reorientations, and catastrophes, little changed in Nahua concepts, techniques, or modes of organization; 2) about a hundred years (ca. 1545-50 to ca. 1640-50) during which Spanish elements came to pervade every aspect of Nahua life, but with limitations, often as discrete additions within a relatively unchanged indigenous framework; and 3) the time thereafter, extending to Mexican independence and in many respects until our time, in which the Nahuas adopted a new wave of Spanish elements, now often more strongly affecting the framework of organization and technique, leading in some cases to a true amalgamation of the two traditions. Rather than a model of stubborn resistance and crushing deculturation, Lockhart views isolation from Hispanic people and culture as the key explanation of the rates of Cultural change. The Nahuas adopted and adapted Spanish introductions pragmatically, if they saw them as not too distinct from items in their own cultural repertoire. As isolation progressively broke down, so did Nahua resistance to the new items. Spaniards and Nahuas both suffered from what Lockhart calls "Double Mistaken Identity," whereby each side entertained "a flat, one-dimensional, simplified view of the other" and assumed that any foreign form or concept was and operated like one of its own. Fortunately, the cultural and social similarities were so marked that each side was able to operate for centuries on this false but workable presumption. The hypotheses have tremendous explanatory potential for the experience of other sedentary peoples subject to European conquest and dominion.(49) The Nahuas after the Conquest should be seen as a rich complement to Charles Gibson's durable Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century and The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, both of which rely largely on Spanish sources. Likewise, Lockhart's Nahuas and Spaniards and We People here are worthy companions to his own magnum opus. Nahuas and Spaniards contains a dozen essays on Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology, written between 1970 and 1990. The first chapter is an accessible summary of the Nahuas book, and two others locate the author in the historiography of Central Mexico, particularly relative to the work of Gibson and recent Nahuatlist. We People here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, edited and translated by Lockhart, is the beautifully produced, long awaited inaugural volume of the UCLA Repertorium Columbianum. It contains six native documents, the longest being the Nahuatl and Spanish twelfth book of the Florentine Codex, begun around 1555 by Nahua speakers and writers trained by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. This is the only contemporary document that mentions omens prophesying the fall of the Aztec empire and draws a picture of Montezuma as quaking, indecisive, and effete and only one of three--all dated at least two decades after the conquest--that suggest that the Spanish were regarded initially as gods (a problematical term per se). Lockhart warns that we should not look to these documents for accurate expressions of the first Mexican reactions to the Spaniards because the main one was written by losers, seeking retrospective explanations of their defeat, and all were written many years after the events, allowing even oral tradition to adjust to changing circumstances. But these vivid documents, translated in parallel columns and illustrated with codex drawings, are the clearest windows we have into the natives' view of their own experience. As such, it is salutary to learn that "none of the versions could be said to be about the Spaniards, or even primarily concerned with them." When the Spanish are mentioned, in passing, moral evaluation is lacking. "Castilians" or "Christians" simply stand outside the inclusive category of altepetl members who count.(50) Until recently, we knew very little about the conquistadors of Mexico that a few famous participant-observers had not told us. Now, in addition to the letter of Cortés and the memoirs of Bernal Díaz de Castillo, we have Bernard Grunberg's 1992 Sorbonne dissertation on "The World of the Conquistadores during the Conquest of New Spain in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century," a prosopographical study that has been summarized in English in "The Origins of the Conquistadores of Mexico City." Of the 2,100 conquerors, nearly 60 percent were killed. Grunberg has compiled records of 1,212 individuals, largely from their service records. About 80 percent of these 1,212 came from Andulusia, Léon, Extremadura, and Old Castile, as did most immigrants. Most of the conquistadors were men in their twenties and thirties, but a fair portion was under twenty, often ship's boys or pages. About twenty were women, most in their thirties. Perhaps 10 percent were true hidalgos. As in the entradas of Peru and Central America, the rest practiced an array of occupations: sailors, carpenters, merchants, letrados (notary-secretaries), writers, navigators.(51) "Real soldiers were very few, and officers nonexistent." Eighty-four percent (96 percent of the hidalgos) could sign their names. Rather than bloodthirsty killers in search of gold, "they were primarily men who tried to find what they could not obtain in their native country." Their success lay in their courage and adaptability to new and dangerous circumstances.(52) The most successful invaders were granted encomiendas--the right to the tribute (goods and services) of the Indians of a native polity--for their services in the conquest of Tenochtitlán or in subsequent entradas. Robert Himmerich y Valencia provides for the first time a detailed prosopography of The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555, which distinguishes, as officials did, four degrees of antigüedad or seniority of arrival in New Spain. If the claimant did not possess obvious social status, preferably hidalguia (gentry) status, antigüedad was his greatest asset. Of the 506 encomenderos studies, 17 percent were hidalgos before arriving in Mexico, and 61 percent had arrived by 1520, before completion of the conquest the following year. On average, grantees received 1.5 encomiendas; more than half of all encomiendas were located within seventy-five miles of the encomendero's urban residence. Even as the Indian population fell precipitously after conquest and the crown moved to emasculate the encomienda system, many encomenderos managed to consolidate their holdings through dynastic marriages, rights of succession, office holding, and partnerships.(53) Himmerich's final chapter compares his findings with those of his graduate mentor, Lockhart, whose 168 Men of Cajamarca--the conquerors of Peru in 1532--formed a much smaller sample. Peru's liquid wealth and distance from crown control were greater than Mexico's` attracted more hidalgos, fomented fierce civil wars, and led to more rapid turnover of encomiendas. Both sets of encomenderos had about the same New World experience and followed the same occupations. More Cajamarcans, however, used their war booty to return to Spain, whereas the more numerous Mexicans modest wealth forced them to make their mark in America.(54) Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, eight excellent essays edited by Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno, also focuses on the Peruvian theatre of conquest. One by Lockhart dismisses the myths and discusses the rationality of Spanish and Indian economic activities along "Trunk Lines [from Atlantic ports to interior silver deposits] and Feeder Lines [indigenous supply routes to the Spanish capitals]." Another by adorno deepens her study of indios ladinos--Indians who knew Hispanic customs and language--by describing their contemporary roles as messianic leaders, church assistants, petitioners, and writers. Perhaps the best piece is John F. Guilmartin, Jr.'s analysis of Spanish military superiority over the Incas,not in firepower but in steel weapons, horses, cohesion, and desire to kill rather than capture the enemy. "The suddenness and totality of the Inca military defeat," Guilmartin concludes, "lessened the amount and scope of cultural transfer in other areas of human endeavor. Having learned to despise the Indians as armed foes, the conquistadors and their descendants were ill-disposed to respect them as subjects."(55) The early conquistadors in eastern North America showed equally little respect for the Indians. Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón's short-lived colony on the South Carolina-Georgia coast in 1526 was predicated on the enslavement of local Indians. When three-quarters of the 600 colonists perished, many of the survivors headed for Mexico and Peru to try to make their fortunes.(56) One of those who struck it rich in Peru was Hernando de Soto, who returned to the Southeast to launch a fruitless and destructive search for wealth from 1539 to 1543. The De Soto Chronicles, published in two volumes in 1993, provides translated accounts by three members of the expedition and the longer, more literary account by Garcilaso de la Vega, "The Inca," who obtained his information in Spain from an officer and two soldiers some forty or fifty years later. A general introduction by Paul E. Hoffman, two substantial biographies of de Soto, several new documents from the General Archives of the Indies in Seville, a detailed itinerary of the expedition, and an extensive bibliography enhance the usefulness of these volumes. Three of the texts are newly translated--the fourth was well done in 1933--in order to render them more literal for the sake of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and literary critics interested in the entrada.(57) Pinning down de Soto's tortuous route through the Southeast requires a daunting interdisciplinary effort. De Soto's artifacts must be distinguished from those left in Indian villages by other expeditions. Place names must be sorted out and allocated to known archaeological sites and modern locations. Textual descriptions must be related to culturally specific Indian practices. Distances and directions traveled must be plotted on modern and historical maps. Most of all, the texts themselves must be analyzed for their genetic relations and generic influences. (Patricia K. Galloway and seventeen other scholars have tackled many of these problems in a volume of studies in the historiography of the expedition, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press.) Charles Hudson has taken the lead in yoking disciplines together to establish the complete route and to assess the Spaniards' abusive and bloody relations with numerous native groups along the way. Hudson and Jerald T. Milanich have reconstructed the route's origins in Hernando de Soto and the Indians of Florida. The tail end of the journey receives detailed treatment in eighteen essays edited by Gloria A. Young and Michael P. Hoffman in The Expedition of Hernando de Soto West of the Mississippi, 1541-1543. David Henige throws a bracing dose of cold water on the scholarly enterprise's argumentation and sources in a chapter that should be required reading for every student of early modern exploration. Until Hudson's comprehensive study of the entrada, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms, is published, followers of the controversies can enjoy Joyce Rockwood Hudson's sprightly and often irreverent research travelogue, Looking for De Soto.(58) Charles Hudson gives a preview of his latest thinking on the route and on de Soto's Indian relations in The Forgotten Centuries; Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704, a collection of eighteen related essays he edited with Carmen Chaves Tesser. The chapters fall into four sections on exploration; the native chiefdoms that dominated the Southeast when de Soto arrived but declined quickly in his lethal wake; structural changes due to disease, trade, and missions; and the formation of new peoples and polities from the remnants of the old. The freshest work is John E. Worth's "Late Spanish Military Expeditions in the Interior Southeast, 1597-1628" and Galloway's essay on the Choctaw "Confederacy as a Solution to Chiefdom Dissolution," which summarizes some of her forthcoming book on the Choctaws from the University of Nebraska Press.(59) The Quincentenary's reminder that the Spanish were active North as well as Central and South America should prompt more research on our Hispanic legacy, if modern ethnic politics does not. Those interested in taking up the challenge will be aided considerably by two guides on the voluminous collections of Spanish archival materials in the United States, primarily photostats or microfilms of colonial archives in Spain, Mexico City, and Havana. Both books resulted from a meeting of archivists, librarians, and historians at the Library of Congress in September 1987. The Hispanic Experience in North America: Sources for Study in the United States, edited by Lawrence A. Clayton, consists of the sixteen papers delivered on that occasion by users and curators. The Hispanic World 1492-1898/El Mundo Hispánico 1492-1898 is a bilingual, 1,071-page guide to Spanish documents on all the Americas that have been copied and preserved in the United States and its dependencies. In addition to a detailed guide to the collections of fifty-three research libraries, it contains a 3,600-entry bibliography on Spanish exploration and colonialism as well as sixty-one illustrations from important or striking photocopied document.(60) Another kind of visual research may be pursued in our national parks and historic sites. Bernard L. Fontana provides a brief, well-illustrated overview of Hispanic-related history and parks in Entrada: The Legacy of Spain and Mexico in the United States. Conceived as a book for park visitors to savor once home, its ninety-nine black-and-white illustrations (most quite small in the wide margins), fifteen-page color portfolio of park sites, twenty-page bibliography, and detailed index make it equally useful for armchair explorers seeking a quick glimpse of the general subject. Those in search of more coherence and interpretation should turn to David J. Weber's masterly The Spanish Frontier in North America.(61) For the Spanish crown, of course, the major reason for investing in the Americas was to extract their mineral wealth and to divert it to Spain, where it could finance international wars and trade and a rise in the standard of living of at least the noble and hidalgo classes. Since the publication of Clarence Henry Haring's Trade and Navigation between Spain and the Indies in the Time of the Hapsburg in 1918, we have known how the famous Spanish flotas managed to transport American gold and silver and the magnitude of the gross receipts of the Casa de Contratación, the colonial watchdog, in Seville. But details about the bullion, bars, and coins themselves, their routes out of Spain into international markets and exchanges, and their impact on the world economy over time awaited the attention of Timothy R. Walton, a trained historian, serious coin collector, and analyst for the CIA. Walton's The Spanish Treasure Fleets, which takes the story of Spanish money to 1790 and beyond, is well researched in reliable English-language secondary sources (though not in the Seville archives where the flota records are kept) and is amply illustrated, often with photographs of coins from the author's collection.(62) The claiming of native American lands, the extraction of their wealth, the often forcible conversion of Indians, and the atrocities committed against them raised serious legal and moral problems for the Spanish crown and many Spanish jurists and theologians. From his lectern at the University of Salamanca, theologian Francisco de Vitoria shook up political theorists all over sixteenth-century Catholic Europe with his scrupulous and exacting scholastic dismissal of all Spanish claims to Indian property in America and all justification for compelling the natives to convert. The verbatim notes his students took between 1526 and 1540 (he did not publish in his lifetime but held onto his chair anyway) on the American Indians, just wars, and the evangelization of unbelievers are translated by Jeremy Lawrance and edited by Anthony Pagden in Vitoria's Political Writings. They reveal that "Vitoria had not quite argued his emperor out of the larger position of his empire; but he had come perilously close to it.(63). Vitoria's more famous contemporary, Bartolomé de las Casas, also raised the crown's consciousness (in not hackles) with his relentless defense of the humanity and natural rights of the Indians, whose lives and often heinous deaths he witnessed as a priest in the Indies and as bishop of Chiapas. His first completed book, written in 1543, argued that The Only Was to Draw All People to a Living Faith was through peaceful conversion by Christ-like missionaries, not by fire and sword. Like Vitoria, he defended with scholastic rigor native rights, condemned "false evangelization" that violated mind and will, and demanded full restoration of the freedoms and property of the "pagans" against whom unjust wars had been launched. Unlike Vitoria, Las Casa enjoyed visible political success. According to Helen Rand Parish, the editor of the new translation, The Only Way was "the basis, point by point, of the great papal encyclical Sublimis Deus, proclaiming the rationality and liberty of the Indians and the peaceful way to convert them. It was the foundation of Las Casas's greatest legislative success: Charles V's epochal New Laws for the Indies and the Indians" in 1542.(64) In Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ, Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest, gives a long and careful exegesis of Las Casas's numerous writings on the Indians and peaceful conversion. The 700-page book is an impassioned historical and spiritual exploration of the roots of liberation theology, aimed at modern priests, but it is also a sound and enlightening reading of Las Casas's central concerns as they grew out of his tumultuous life. His often innovative theology sprang from practical concerns and helped to persuade many Spanish contemporaries that the Indians were treated unjustly and without the charity that Christ showed to pagans and the poor. Las Casas was one of few observers to attribute those wrongs not to a few misguided individuals but to systemic oppression caused by wars of conquest (veiled under the term pacification) and the encomienda. Without the Indians' explicit permission or invitation, Las Casas argues, the Spanish and other Europeans had no right to intrude upon native life or property and should make full restitution.(65) Debates over Indian and Spanish rights in the Americas were not confined to the sixteenth century, nor were they as lopsided as the recent attention to Vitoria and Las Casas might suggest.(66) Apologists for the crown wielded the same sharp blades of scholastic argument to condone Spanish conquests and the imposition of Christian civility on the purported savages and pagans of Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere. one of the most forceful defenders of Spanish realpolitik was Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575-1654), for twenty years a judge in the Audiencia (royal high court) in Lima and, after his return to Spain, an influential member of the Council of the Indies. This scholar-bureaucrat's two-volume De Indiarum Jure (1629-1639) represents the fullest development of a Christian theory of international relations, based on natural law and papal jurisdiction, and contains a number of biting observations on Spanish behavior in the New World. James Muldoon coolly and clearly analyzes the second book of the first volume--on the legitimate discovery. acquisition, and retention of the lands it designates as the West Indies--in The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century With still-relevant medieval texts and methods, Solórzano defended Spain's and the Church's spiritual mission and the concept of a moral world order that not only rivaled Hugo Grotius's more secular vision but also set a standard by which the Spanish in the Americas--and their monarchs--continued to be judged and found wanting, thus contributing inadvertently to the Black Legend.(67)