Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (117 page)

The frayed texture of Portuguese empire-building contrasted with spectacular parallel achievements under the Spanish monarchy. In 1492, the same year that the Muslim kingdom of Granada fell, the adventurer Christopher Columbus rewarded Fernando and Isabel's trust by making landfall across the Atlantic on islands in the Caribbean. His achievement caused tension with the Portuguese, which prompted Pope Alexander VI (a former subject of King Fernando) to partition the map of the world vertically between the two powers in 1493, intending the Spaniards to enjoy the fruits of their new discoveries westwards. As the King of Portugal remained aggrieved at the result, the kingdoms revised this agreement in 1494 with the Treaty of Tordesillas. Uncertain conditions of mapmaking meant that the revised line was still not as clear a division through Atlantic waters as intended, and the Portuguese were later able successfully to appeal to the geographical bounds established at Tordesillas when they established their transatlantic colony of Brazil. Nevertheless, the bulk of westward activity was Spanish (technically their new dominions became part of the kingdom of Castile), while the Portuguese put most of their efforts into Africa and Asia. Over the next three decades the Spaniards realized that their westward discoveries promised not merely Columbus's scattering of islands, but a whole continent.

An important part of this militantly Latin Christian enterprise was the promotion of its faith among peoples now encountered, although Ferdinand and Isabel had originally envisaged evangelizing Asia (hence the Spanish named the native peoples 'Indios', in allusion to Columbus's ever more desperately messianic belief that God had sailed him to Asia). Pope Julius II further granted the Spanish monarchy a
Patronato
, exclusive rights to preach the Gospel in its new territories: a major step in a gradual papal abdication of real authority within Spanish dominions. He granted the Portuguese a similar right in their empire, the
Padroado
, and his successors rapidly regretted both concessions, without being able to withdraw them. Now good intentions clashed with naked greed and brutality.

There had in fact been a precedent both well intentioned and ultimately unhappy. The earliest Western conquests and missionary work outside continental Europe were in the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa, while successive Iberian powers fought for mastery there up to a Castilian conquest in the 1480s - the Canaries were the first place in which medieval Europeans encountered the Stone Age. Even before the Castilian conquest, there were missionary friars in the Canaries, first Aragonese Catalans and Majorcans, latterly Franciscans from Castile's southernmost province, Andalusia; their behaviour contrasted with that of later Portuguese in Africa. They spoke out strongly against enslaving native people who had converted to Christianity, and sometimes made a leap of imagination to oppose enslaving those who had not converted. They also persuaded the authorities in Rome to allow ordination of natives. But in any case, in a sad anticipation of what was to happen elsewhere in Iberian conquests, by the sixteenth century most of the indigenous people were dead from European diseases, and some had been deported to Spain as troublemakers.
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Franciscan attitudes in the Canaries offered possible precedents for what Europe now came to call 'the New World', or, through a somewhat tangled chain of circumstances, 'America'.
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One problem with improving on the Canary Islands model was the contrasting and appalling record of military adventurers who undertook Spain's forward movement in America: notably Hernan Cortes against the Aztecs in Central America and Francisco Pizarro against the Inkas of Peru. Many who took part in these unsavoury and unprovoked feats of treachery, theft and genocide saw themselves as agents of the crusade begun back home with the
Reconquista
, the destruction of Spanish Islam and Judaism. Crusading rhetoric there was in plenty, but there was something else. It has been well said that the Spanish Empire is unequalled in history among similar great territorial enterprises for its insistent questioning of its own rights to conquer and colonize.
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From 1500 there were Franciscans in America, and within a decade Dominicans had also arrived. Very soon the Dominicans began protesting against the vicious treatment of the natives. The authorities at home did go some way to responding to such appeals to conscience. As early as 1500 Fernando and Isabel formally forbade enslavement of their subjects in America and the Canaries. The Laws of Burgos tried in 1512 to lay down guidelines for relations, and even created a set of 'rules of engagement' for further conquests: newly contacted peoples were to be publicly read (in Spanish) a so-called Requirement, formally explaining the bulls of Alexander VI which granted Spain overlordship of their territory. If they cooperated and agreed that Christianity could freely be taught among them, then no force would be used against them.

Alas, the atrocious exploits of Cortes and Pizarro postdated the Laws of Burgos. The friars' fury at the injustice continued. Their most eloquent spokesman was a former colonial official and plantation owner, Bartolome de las Casas, galvanized out of making money by hearing a Dominican sermon about the wickedness of what he and his fellow colonists were doing. The shock turned him to ordination, and he made it his especial task for half a century from 1514 to defend the natives - he became a Dominican himself in 1522. He won sympathy from the aged Cardinal Ximenes; later his insistence that native Americans were as rational beings as Spaniards, rather than inferior versions of humanity naturally fitted for slavery, sufficiently impressed the Emperor Charles V that debates were staged at the imperial Spanish capital at Valladolid on the morality of colonization (with inconclusive results).

Las Casas insisted that Augustine of Hippo's gloss on the biblical text 'Compel them to come in' (see p. 304) was simply wrong: Jesus had not intended conversion to his 'joyful tidings' to be a matter of 'arms and bombardments' but of 'reason and human persuasion'.
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His writings about Spanish barbarity in America were so angry and eloquent that ironically they became part of the general Protestant stereotype of Spaniards as a naturally cruel race. At one stage he suggested a fateful remedy for the exploitation of native labour: African slaves should be imported to replace natives on plantations, radically extending the slave trade which the Portuguese had pioneered in the previous century. Las Casas eventually realized his mistake, but it was too late.
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Here idealism trying to end one injustice blundered unhappily into colluding with a genocidal crime of three centuries' duration, whose consequences are still built into the politics of both Americas.

Rather more equivocally expressed, but equally important for Latin Europe's future relations with other world civilizations, was the work of a Dominican who never saw the 'New World'. Francisco de Vitoria, for the last two decades of his life highly influential as the leading theologian in Salamanca University, built on earlier Dominican thought to consider what was happening in America in the light of 'just war' theory. Conventional Christian legal wisdom saw nothing wrong in enslaving non-Christians captured in a just war, but there seemed to Vitoria little that was just in the idea of a crusade, particularly in its exploitation in America. War was only justified as a response to inflicted wrong, and the various peoples of America had offered no wrong to Spaniards before the Spaniards decided to move in on their territory. The Aztec practice of human sacrifice did offer a different justification for Spanish action in Central America, since it was a clear offence against universal natural law. There were other possible interpretations of wrong: resistance to preaching the Gospel, for instance, once the intention to do so had been proclaimed in the Requirement. Vitoria also considered authority within commonwealths. He discussed it in terms of sovereignty, a ruler's untrammelled power within the boundaries of a commonwealth or state. Such sovereign commonwealths need not be Christian: Aztecs or Ottomans were as sovereign as Fernando and Isabel. If so, Pope Alexander had no right to grant sovereignty in America to Spaniards in 1493, at the same time as he perfectly legitimately granted them exclusive rights to preach the Gospel. Such reasoning (coming from an Iberian Catholic tradition which had already put the pope firmly in his place) was a clear denial of that idea of universal papal monarchy which had originally fuelled Western Christendom's unity in the twelfth century.

Vitoria's discussions had a wider application. He was pioneering the concept of a system of international law, based on the older idea of
ius gentium
('the law of peoples/nations'), the legal principles applicable to humans everywhere. His assertions heralded the end of belief in the crusade as a means of extending Western Christendom, just when Europe began a wider mission to spread its particular brand of Christianity throughout the world. The question would soon arise as to whether Western Christianity was completely identical with authentic Christianity, but there was more to the development of international law than this. Western European political thought was to develop a relativistic concept of dealing with other cultures and other political units - eventually without reference to their religious beliefs or any sense that one religion was superior to another. Vitoria would have profoundly disapproved of this development, but it emerged as a consequence of Iberian worldwide adventures.

Christian mission nevertheless proceeded backed by military force: first in Central America including modern-day Mexico, which remained the flagship Spanish territory and was therefore styled New Spain, and later in South America. In large part because of the friars' scruples, there was no systematic intention to obliterate pre-Christian structures in government and society: a number of peoples allied with the Spaniards against their neighbours, or came to a deal with the newcomers, and preserved autonomous forms of government. Much destruction resulted not from Spanish arms but from a much more devastating weapon which Westerners did not even realize they possessed, the diseases they were carrying. No major native American kingdom succumbed to the Spaniards before disease took hold, but once it had, the effect was crippling, and maybe half the population of the Americas died in the first wave of epidemics. That in itself was a powerful argument to bewildered and terrified people that their gods were useless and that the God of the conquerors had won. It has been estimated that by 1550 around ten million people had been baptized as Christians in the Americas. Another informed and sobering estimate is that by 1800 indigenous populations in the western hemisphere were a tenth of what they had been three centuries before.
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20. The Iberian worldwide empires in 1600

COUNTER-REFORMATION IN A NEW WORLD

The Council of Trent said nothing in its official statements about the world mission of the renewed Catholic Church, but this mission became one of the most distinctive features of southern European Catholicism, a project of taking Christianity to every continent, which made Roman Catholicism Western Christianity's largest grouping, and the Spanish and Portuguese languages the chief modern rivals to English as the mode of Western communication. Trent's silence seems all the more surprising since Catholic world mission had been in operation for over half a century when the council met - this was not like the council's silence on the menace of militant Calvinism, which had only emerged as a real threat just before its last session. Committees are even more prone than individuals to miss the point in the business in front of them, but it is worth observing that there was little that Rome could do about mission - at the beginning of the century, the papacy had signed away control of Catholic activity. Ignatius Loyola was characteristically more farsighted: it was no coincidence that Portugal was one of the first kingdoms on which he concentrated the efforts of his infant Society, founding as early as 1540 a headquarters in Lisbon and only two years later a Jesuit college for missionary training, set up with royal encouragement in the university town of Coimbra. A new world mission based on Portugal would more than compensate for his abortive plans for the Holy Land.