The Conquistadors, page 2
On October 19, 1469, Ferdinand, the eighteen-year-old king of Sicily and heir to the Aragon throne, married Isabella, nineteen-year-old sister of Castile’s king Henry IV. The importance of this match was evident ten years later when, with the death of Ferdinand’s father, Aragon and Castile were joined in the persons of this energetic, well-matched pair. Spain was born. But not without a struggle. With the death of the almost imbecile King Henry IV, the position of Castile was lower than it had been at any time since the collapse of the Visigoth kingdom. Portugal’s King Alfonso supported the claims of Joanna, Henry’s daughter. The thirteen-year-old Joanna was betrothed to prince John of Portugal and the pair proclaimed sovereigns of Castile. The War of Succession had begun.
In the low ebb of the kingdom’s fortunes, Ferdinand and Isabella could barely muster 500 horse. Two months later, however, they had gathered together an army of over 40,000. But it was mainly composed of ill-disciplined militia from the towns. Defeated at Toro, Ferdinand fell back on guerilla tactics, sending light cavalry from Estremadura and Andalusia to wreak havoc in the undefended valleys of Portugal itself. Another battle at Toro resulted in a crushing defeat of Alfonso and his Portuguese. Nevertheless, the war lasted four and a half years and by the end of it Ferdinand and Isabella had taken the measure of each other’s qualities, their fortitude and resilience in the face of adversity. They were ready to face their main task, the final eviction of the infidels and the unification of their country. But first it was essential to reorganize their own kingdom.
The power of the nobility had always been the most disruptive force in Castile; indeed, the kingdom’s name originated from the multiplicity of their castle strongholds. In the long struggle against the Moors the higher echelons of the nobility, the ricos hombres, provided the bulk of the sovereign’s armies from the retainers on their estates. These forces were led by the lesser nobility, the hidalgos, and by the caballeros, the knights who constituted the cavalry and were an essential counterpart of the vicious and highly successful Arab light horse. The towns and their militia were primarily defensive. Not surprisingly, considering the costs and the risks they bore, the nobility shared the spoils of war with their sovereign. As a result, their estates became ever larger, and through the years all sections of the nobility grew in power and riches. They were exempt from taxation, a privileged class living largely above the law; they could not be imprisoned for debt or subjected to torture, and could even renounce allegiance to their sovereign and serve his enemies. Thus, whenever the central authority was undermined by a weak king, the country split up into innumerable small states.
At the succession of Ferdinand and Isabella, the nobility were all-powerful, their estates larger and richer than ever before. There was one organization, however, outside their control. This was the Holy Brotherhood of the cities, the Santa Hermandad, a sort of police force formed for the maintenance of civil order. Its concern was the prevention of ordinary crime, but as the abuses of the nobility were such that their own or their retainers’ actions often contravened the ordinary criminal code, Isabella’s re-establishment and expansion of the Hermandad met with great opposition. However, she had her way, and with a new code of laws, the Ordenanças Reales, agreed in 1485, a court of two alcaldes in every town of thirty families to administer it, and a mounted and well-equipped police to enforce it, the bandits and warlords that had produced such chaos throughout the country were rapidly suppressed. The Hermandad was a potent instrument in the hands of a determined sovereign. It worked because it was a disciplined, highly trained force that could be deployed in strength and immediately in any part of the kingdom.
One by one, the great families, whose long-standing feuds had fostered anarchy, were banished to their estates, the lands and castles they had annexed returned to the crown. The whole legal system was overhauled, the power of the privy council, which had been packed by the nobility and clergy, was curtailed, the position of the alcaldes de corte, the high court, strengthened, the supreme court of appeal permanently established at Valladolid. Merit became the path to preferment and the nobility were curbed from aping royalty and from building new castles. Moreover, the right of the crown to nominate its own nationals to vacant sees was re-established, and Isabella was able to promote men of learning and piety to positions of ecclesiastical power. Nevertheless, it was this outstandingly able woman who opened her realm to one of the greatest abuses of history.
The man who brought the Inquisition to Spain was her confessor, Tomás de Torquemada. The Jews were very numerous and they were believed to have assisted the Moorish invasion; certainly they were accepted by the Moors. Great travellers, physicians, writers, scientists, they contributed more than any other race to the culture and knowledge of the period. But they were born moneylenders, and as such they were hated. Their riches made them envied, and as the Moorish power declined, they were subjected to increasing persecution. Conversion to Christianity became ever more expedient, and consequently ever more open to the charge of apostacy. Fanatical churchmen, particularly the Dominicans, called for the introduction of the Holy Office. And since failure to satisfy such an enquiry involved confiscation of property, Ferdinand was not unagreeable. On November 1, 1478, the Pope issued a bull authorising the appointment of inquisitors.
What started in 1231 as a counter to the revival of Manichaean doctrines in parts of France and Italy, its object conversion rather than punishment, had already become a much wider and more insidious instrument. In Spain it was to reach its epitome of evil. The first edict issued by the court required all to aid, not only in the apprehension, but also in the accusation of any persons suspected of heresy. In the inflamed mood of the times, those arrested on hearsay, and such flimsy evidence as the wearing of better or cleaner clothes on the Jewish sabbath, or merely the drinking of something prepared in a special way or the eating of meat that had been slaughtered with their own hands, were so numerous that the inquisitors moved their court to the great fortress of Triana. The anonymity of accusers, even of witnesses, was so carefully preserved that only the most garbled version of the charge was ever shown to the victim. Counsel was allowed, but he could not confer with his client. Each variation in the evidence of witnesses was made the subject of a new charge. The proceedings were secret. There was no appeal. Torture was common-place. To us of the twentieth century this is all horribly familiar, but nothing we have experienced quite matches the ghastly setpiece finale of the auto de fe. This was the ultimate penalty – death by burning. Europe was then only just emerging from the Dark Ages. It was a period not notable for its sensibility. But the act of faith, with its priests and its elaborate ceremony, was something more than a public execution; it was the nearest the then known world had come to religious sacrifice since the Phoenicians slaughtered their first-born in worship of Baal. During the eighteen years that Torquemada was Inquisitor-General of Castile and Aragon more than ten thousand people are said to have died in this way. The effect upon an impressionable, superstitious and backward people must have been extreme. And yet, the conquistadors, most of whom must have witnessed an auto de fe, professed horror when confronted by another race practising human sacrifice in the name of religion.
The years 1481 – 1492 were largely occupied by the war against Granada, and some account of this is necessary, since the behaviour of Ferdinand and his captains set the pattern for colonial conquest.
In the early stages the war was fought by local landlords, rather than the crown, and it was the peasants in the area of hostilities who were the chief sufferers. Troops of both sides, accustomed by centuries of war to living off the land, were hardened to the destruction of crops and dwellings. Booty was their right, their only pay. But in 1484 a scorched-earth policy was adopted and thirty thousand foragers went with the troops to cut a broad swathe of desolation along the whole line of march. The Aragon fleet blockaded the Moorish ports. Deficient in artillery and other weapons, the Moors resorted to poisoning the arrows of their crossbows. At the same time Isabella’s efforts to support the war were yielding results. Militia, recruited from even the most distant provinces, were trained into the semblance of a regular army. Volunteers flocked in from the rest of Europe, spurred by religious fervour and the romantic call of chivalry. One by one the frontier strongholds of Granada fell, and in 1487 Ferdinand moved on Malaga with a force of more than fifty thousand. This city, which fell after a three months’ siege, was given vicious treatment as a warning to others. The whole population, assembled in the courtyard of the great fortress overlooking the sea, was informed that one-third would be sent to Africa in exchange for Christian prisoners, one-third sold into slavery to pay for the war, the rest allocated as slaves abroad in return for help received. Having announced this sentence to the entire city, Ferdinand offered them an alternative, an enormous ransom to be paid within nine months. The wretched Moors had no hope of raising such a sum, but it had the effect intended, every family revealing their hidden wealth in the hope that by so doing they could buy themselves out of slavery. It was a clever device to be repeated later in far-off Peru.
The treatment of Baza was very different. This stronghold was invested by Ferdinand’s army, now nearly a hundred thousand strong, in May 1489. It did not surrender until December 4 of that year, and then on the most generous terms, the population being given the chance of retiring into Granada with all their chattels or remaining as subjects of the Spanish crown. Cidi Yahye, the man who had directed the defence, was encouraged to enter the service of his conquerors. This again was a shrewd move. A visit to his kinsman, El Zagal, resulted in the cities of Almeria and Guadix being surrendered on the terms Baza had accepted. Extreme severity, followed by the most liberal treatment of cities subsequently surrendered, had the effect of weakening Granada’s will to resist when the main fortress and capital of the Moors was finally invested in April 1491. Backed by the mountain barrier of the Sierra Nevada, Granada was a formidable fortress, its bastions facing across the vega. The siege had a strangely unreal quality. There was a tournament atmosphere on the surface, the Moors sallying out, singly or in groups, to engage in knightly combat, and the whole scene made splendid through the hot summer by the luxurious state maintained by the Spanish sovereigns and their grandees. The surface, however, was deceptive. The determination of the Spaniards was made abundantly clear when they converted their camp into a solidly constructed city. Santa Fe was completed in three months, and its construction did more than any assault to undermine the resistance of the Moors. Negotiations for surrender began in October, and on January 2, 1492, the city opened its gates to the Spaniards on even more liberal terms.
Barely four months later, popular clamour and the representations of Torquemada resulted in the publication of an edict expelling all Jews. Such total proscription was harsh retribution for the failure of the Jews to integrate, but it was no more than other European countries did with less excuse, and the mood of the people probably made it inevitable. The crusading enthusiasm of the Spaniards was at its peak when Granada finally fell, and their hatred of heretics had been inflamed for several years by the proceedings of the Inquisition and the public demonstrations of the auto de fe. To this was added the intolerance of a new-found national unity. The Jews fled in their thousands, to Portugal, Africa, Italy, Turkey and the Levant; and Spain herself was the loser, for they represented the most cultured, industrious and knowledgeable section of the community.
2 Birth of an Empire
This then was the world into which the conquistadors were born: a world of religious and racial intolerance, of crusading knights and marching armies, of war and devastation and change. The atmosphere in which they were brought up was entirely dominated by a sense of crusading fervour and of the invincibility of Spanish arms. Santiago and the Virgin – what more did a man need to sustain him as his horse thundered into battle? The two greatest of the conquistadors both came from the same province, Estremadura; Hernán Cortes being born in 1485 in the small town of Medellín, Francisco Pizarro about ten or twelve years earlier in the city of Trujillo. There was, too, a family connection. Cortés was the son of Martin Cortés de Monroy and Doña Catalina Pizarro Altamarino. The Cortés, Monroys, Pizarros and Altamarinos were all old families of the nobility, so that his parents were hidalgos. Pizarro was the son of Gonzalo Pizarro, an infantry colonel, who later served with some distinction in Italy under El Gran Capitán, Gonsalvo de Córdoba. He was, however, a bastard, his father having had an affair with Francisca González, a woman of humble birth in Trujillo.
These two men, Cortés and Pizarro, meet once, possibly twice, during their careers. Their stature as conquerors is entirely in keeping with their backgrounds, Cortés towering head and shoulders above the other. Both had courage of no ordinary sort. Both were adventurers, soldiers of fortune, men born to lead in an age of medieval chivalry when the only proper activity for a gentleman, indeed his only raison d’être, was to fight. Moreover, they were from Estremadura, and it was from this high, bleak upland area that they recruited the best of their men.
If you travel the Estremadura plateau today you will find it little changed. The holm oak still covers large tracts of the country with its dark green foliage; its outsized acorns still provide fodder for pigs, horses and cattle, even a basic subsistence diet for man; the hill settlements are still little more than a scattering of hovels perched on the bare rock outcrops, the villages mainly one-storey cottages lining cobbled streets that slope to a central drainage kennel. Old castles dominate the hills and the keeps of great fortresses, like Belalcázar, still stand. At Medellín, in the town below the huge castle, there are still traces of the Cortés family home, as well as a great statue of the man himself, and the name has become a common one. At Trujillo, too, Pizarro now rides a bronze charger in the square, and inside the old walls, up twisting alleys of this still-medieval town, you come suddenly upon the church of Santa Maria, the only church inside the walls; climb to the belfry and you are looking down on the same grey stone buildings that Pizarro saw when he was a child.
But it is the country that makes the deepest impression. It is a hard country that has changed little, the men still of the same type that Cortés and Pizarro recruited for their expeditions: short-statured and stocky, sturdy as their holm oaks, dark features lined by the hardness of the land that is their home. This is all high pastoral country, with everywhere distant vistas, the land running away to mountains that stand like islands on the horizon. Its wide skies inspire the desire to travel and it was this, as much as the poverty of the land, that drove men to seek beyond the mountains, one vista leading to another, with more hills like islands, until at last, riding north, they reached the Tagus, which flows westward to Lisbon and the ocean. The Tagus, the Guadiana and the Guadalquivir – all these rivers brought them news from the outer world, news first of the Portuguese discoveries in Africa, later of Spanish discoveries beyond the western ocean. The combination was irresistible, and the time was right.
With the fall of Granada, there were suddenly no more infidels to slaughter, no more crusades to wage. The fighting machine of the caballeros had come to a halt. It was then that Christopher Columbus appeared on the scene. He was a Genoese navigator, who had left the sea at the age of about thirty and settled in Lisbon. He was married to a Portuguese woman, and a relative of hers, a well-known sea captain, left her all his papers, perhaps even his logs. With the aid of these, Columbus not only made and sold maps, but became convinced that by sailing westward a skilful navigator would pioneer a short cut to the Indies; he even cherished the idea that unknown lands lay beyond the Western Ocean.
It is hardly credible that Columbus could have dreamed this up on the basis of hearsay and some vague reference in a dead sea captain’s papers. By then the Portuguese had almost a century’s experience of maritime exploration. The lure throughout had been, not gold, but spices. In those days spices, particularly pepper, were in great demand for the preserving of carcases slaughtered in the autumn because of the shortage of winter feed. The spice islands of the Moluccas are situated in the East Indies and the pepper was brought to Europe via Malaya, India, Egypt, and then overland to the Mediterranean. This route, littered with pirates and potentates, was so costly in lives and tribute that a bale of pepper purchased for one ducat in the Moluccas sold for 105 ducats in Europe. This was the financial lure that had motivated the Portuguese dream of a direct ocean route south round Africa to the Indies. We know why their interest in the African shore waned shortly after the death of Henry the Navigator. What remains a mystery is why, in the treaty that ended the War of Succession in 1476, they abandoned all claim to lands beyond the Western Ocean, and why they suddenly became so secretive about their voyages of discovery.
Two years before Bartholomew Diaz succeeded in rounding the Cape of Good Hope, King John II, whose maritime enthusiasm had equalled Henry’s, turned down Columbus’s pleas for financial backing with the statement that he had ‘information regarding the western lands more positive than the visions of the Genoese’. Had the Portuguese already explored the American coast? This seems incredible. Nevertheless, there is still much we have to learn about the early voyages. It is only in recent years that we have come to accept the idea that the Vikings were in America four centuries before Columbus. Irish monks, sailing their skin-hulled curraghs, may have been there as early as the sixth century. And what about the Phoenicians, who kept the details of their trading voyages to themselves – or the Greeks?
