The Conquistadors (3 page)

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.

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?

Who was Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of learning, who was tall and white-skinned, with long hair and flowing beard, and who came out of the east, out of the sunrise, and who disappeared into the sea as mysteriously as he had come? This was the god of Aztec mythology that the Mexicans were to confuse with Cortes. And the Incas, too – who was their Tici-Viracocha? The appearance recently of a new map acts as a timely reminder that, in the five centuries that have elapsed since the days of Portuguese discovery, much vital information has been lost. Indeed, the acceptance of Columbus as the discoverer of America has obscured at least one Portuguese voyage, that of Joâo Vaz Corte-Real in 1472, who is recognised by half a dozen countries, including Portugal and Denmark, as the real discoverer of America. The sea route that the Viking longships took, and possibly also the Irish monks, was by way of Iceland and Greenland. Here the open sea passages are nowhere greater than four hundred miles and the Danes were regularly sailing the first three of these. Why not the last?

Such speculation was even more rife in the days of Columbus, and what is so frustrating is that we do not know on what information he based his belief in the possibility of reaching land beyond the Western Ocean. All we know is that he was so dedicated to the idea that, failing support for it in Lisbon, he went to Spain. The war with Granada was then at its height, nobody had any time or money to spare for such visionary exploits. He tried the nobles of the Mediterranean
coast, and failed again. But interest had been aroused, and when Granada fell Ferdinand and Isabella were prepared to listen to his arguments. On April 17, 1492, at Santa Fe, they signed a capitulation appointing him admiral, viceroy and governor-general of all islands and mainlands he might discover in the Western Ocean with jurisdiction over commercial transactions and entitlement to one-tenth of the profits and a further eighth if he contributed that proportion of the costs of the voyage.

Regarded as a crank by most of the merchants and sailors of the day, he got little support from the main ports of Seville and Cadiz. It was Alonso Niño, a merchant of Moguer in the Rio Tinto estuary, who finally backed him, together with the Pinzón family, who were shipbuilders. By the end of July 1492 his small and inadequate fleet of three ships – the
Santa María,
a carrack of about 80 tons, and two small caravels, the
Pinta
and the
Niña
(the feminine of Niño) – lay in the little creek port of Palos de la Frontera just over a mile from the open sea. The creek has now silted up, but in Palos itself you can still see the fontanilla, or house-well, from which his seamen filled their water casks for the last time. After a dedication service in the church at Moguer the ships dropped down-river to the bar at Saltes. The convent at La Rábida, on the low hill above the river mouth, still houses the Virgin of Milagros to whom Columbus offered up his final prayers for the success of the voyage. He sailed on August 3, his Admiral's flag flying from the
Santa María,
whilst three of the Pinzón family acted as pilots. At the mouth of the Rio Tinto there is now a huge statue to Columbus facing west towards the New World; otherwise the river has changed little, a broad-flowing ribbon of water flanked by acres of mud, and below La Rábida a wide creek most suitable for anchoring the small caravels that the Pinzón family were then building. His total complement on this voyage was about a hundred sailors and adventurers.