The Conquistadors (43 page)

It was the end of an era. The swarm of officials that had plagued Cortés in New Spain now had access to South as well as Central America. But the new laws they introduced came too late to save the Indians. Manco, Pizarro's ‘puppet' Inca, who had so nearly succeeded in destroying the Spaniards at Cuzco in 1536, carried on a guerilla resistance until his death at the hands of the Young Almagro's forces eight years later. Thereafter, the few Indians who continued to resist were forced to retreat deeper and deeper into the Andes. Their last strongholds were in the mountains between the Urubamba and the Apurimac. Machu Picchu was almost certainly one of them. The impenetrable nature of these mountains offered no incentive to Spaniards intent upon the rapid acquisition of wealth, and it was their failure to penetrate this area that gave rise to rumours of lost cities and hidden hoards of Inca gold. The majority of the Indians, however, passively accepted the destruction of their civilization and the condition of virtual serfdom that followed. For the
puric,
the
encomienda
system was not very different from that of the Incas; both involved the exploitation of their labour.

Not all the viceroys and governors who administered the colonies for the crown were of the calibre of Gasca and the two Mendozas who followed him in Peru. In any case, the colonial régime, based on the theory of supreme royal authority, was never rigidly uniform. The Indies were, in fact, a collection of kingdoms attached to the Crown of Castile, not to Spain, and its laws were issued in the Sovereign's name by the Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies. The King's
alter ego
was the Viceroy, and the legal side of the Council of the Indies was represented by the
audiencias,
high courts of law, established in colonial centres. The colonial
audiencia
was an exceedingly powerful combination of Court of Appeal, administrative council, local legislature and royal fifth column. It acted as watch-dog over
all officials and as protector of the Indians. It was undoubtedly the most important link in the chain of checks and balances which were built into the legislation for the Indies, and through its strength intolerably bad government was made rare and relatively short-lived; more important, the loyalty of the Indies was assured to the distant and frequently perplexed crown.

It has to be remembered that Spain had no precedent on which to base her administration of such large and distant territories. It is, therefore, somewhat remarkable that her empire lasted longer than most – for three centuries. This was largely due to the fact that she had two highly developed instruments of bureaucracy ready to take over from the conquistadors – the Church and the Council of the Indies.

The power of the Catholic Church was at its zenith in Spain, following the defeat of the Moors and the development of the Spanish Inquisition under Torquemada. Its seminaries turned out a dedicated cadre, skilled in diplomacy and organization; and since it was the chief fount of education its doctrines permeated every section of Spanish administration. Unfortunately, the attitude and behaviour of some of its representatives in the Indies was distorted by early training, based on the need to root out Moslem and Jewish influence at home, and the spiritual brief of the more bigoted was too often interpreted as requiring the complete obliteration of all Indian culture and civilization. Nevertheless, without the Church the position of the native American Indians would undoubtedly have been much worse; Las Casas is the best known of many dedicated priests who worked unceasingly to spare them the extremes of exploitation that followed upon the granting of
encomiendas.

Peru was too distant and too new a conquest for conditions there to influence decrees governing the Indians. It was the older colonies that provided the basis for the New Laws, particularly Mexico, or New Spain, where the blatant abuse of the
encomienda
system, introduced of necessity by Cortés, and continued by the crown's representatives as the only means of satisfying the labour requirements of the settlers, made legislative control essential. And it was primarily in Mexico that, hand-in-hand with forced conversion, the Inquisition, the destruction of temples and all Indian religious institutions, pious and charitable priests fought against the worst excesses of a brutal conquest.

The Council of the Indies was primarily based on the personal bureaucratic machine developed by Bishop Fonseca. He had been appointed head of the Committee of the Council of Castile shortly after Columbus's first voyage, and in 1503 established the
Casa de contratacion de las Indias
to regulate the trade, navigation and settlement of the New World. This prototype of colonial administration, which had its headquarters in Seville, was sufficiently well organized by the time Charles came to the throne for it to be expanded into a fully-fledged government department. In 1524 the administration of the colonies ceased to be the personal prerogative of one man and became a committee of six councillors and a secretary.
With the committee dominated by such powerful personalities as the Chancellor Sauvage and Cardinal Adrian, the newly-styled Council of the Indies was strong enough to begin the task of wresting control of the New World from the men who had won it for their king. The methods employed were the ones we know only too well in this bureaucratic century – the proliferation of laws, taxes, officials and paperwork, bureaucratic procrastination and the usual official ingratitude. Vaca de Castro's case was typical. Had Núñez Vela not been appointed viceroy over his head, his sound administration in Peru might have saved that country from the anarchy that followed. Yet on his return to Spain, he was arrested, and spent twelve years in prison before he was finally cleared of all the blatantly false charges brought against him. The Council's relations with Cortes and their takeover of Mexico are even more revealing of the power of the bureaucratic machine. The last pages of Gómara's
Historia
make sad reading.

When Cortés died on December 2, 1547, at the age of sixty-three, he was a pathetic old man, broken in health and seeking endlessly and hopelessly for redress of his grievances. It is a startling metamorphosis, considering the position of absolute power he had held after the fall of Tenochtitlan twenty-five years before. It shows how envy can tarnish, and faceless stonewalling of official ‘policy' ultimately destroy, a great reputation. Cortés could have done what the Pizarros did, what his detractors at the Emperor's court accused him of planning: he could have founded an independent kingdom, for in 1524 he controlled most of Central America, the Indians and the Spanish alike deferring to him as the absolute ruler. Instead, inhibited by family upbringing and the ingrained loyalty of his class to the crown, he abided by the rules, accepting the indignities heaped upon him by upstart officials sent out from Spain, and seeking only constitutional redress. It was partly his own fault, for when Olid mutinied in Honduras, he decided to lead his forces himself, instead of sending one of his lieutenants. ‘I bethought me that my own person had now long been idle', he wrote at the opening of his fifth letter to the Emperor. The spirit of the conquistador was obviously restless, but at the same time he may have been conscious of a similarity between Olid's action and his own behaviour towards Velázquez. He was away almost two years, and it was only reports of dissension amongst the officers he had left in charge in Mexico that prevented him from marching into Nicaragua, and possibly adventuring even further south. Those two reckless, arduous years damaged, not only his health, but his whole position. Rumours of his death, and reports of the chaotic situation in Mexico, sowed doubts, even grave suspicion, in the minds of Charles and his councillors. As a result, the Council of the Indies considered the appointment of Diego Columbus as governor in his place.

Fortunately for Cortés, it was at this moment that Diego de Soto reached Spain with the considerable treasure got together before the Honduras adventure. ‘I am sending in addition'. Cortés wrote in his fourth letter to the Emperor,
‘a silver culverin cast from 24
cwts of silver which cost me some 24,500 pesos for the metal.' It was decorated with a phoenix motif and bore an inscription that was perhaps a little too indicative of a sense of his own importance for home consumption – ‘Peerless this bird is by birth. Peerless you are on earth. Peerless is my service's worth.' The culverin was melted down for Charles's ever-hungry exchequer, but the treasure did the trick. Columbus's appointment was not confirmed; instead. Ponce de León was sent out as judge of a
residência,
or Royal Commission of Enquiry, and also as governor. He died almost immediately on his arrival in Mexico, and, as in the case of Garay's death. Cortés was inevitably accused of poisoning him. The indignities that followed forced him to retire from the city into voluntary exile on his estates.

The fifth, and last, of his letters to the Emperor concludes with a bitter attack on ‘various and powerful rivals and enemies' who have ‘obscured the eyes of your Majesty … declaring that I have refused obedience to royal decrees and hold this land not in the might of your name but in a tyrannical and abominable manner, to which end they give base and diabolical reasons which are nothing more than false and idle conjectures'. Concluding his reply to this charge of treason, he writes: ‘But of late the malice of those who have made such accusations has been more clearly and openly revealed, for were their accusations true I should never have journeyed six hundred leagues away from this city through uninhabited land and by dangerous roads nor left the land in charge of your Majesty's officials, whom one might have thought the persons most likely to display the greatest zeal in your Majesty's service, although their actions were far from corresponding to the trust I reposed in them'. The rest is a detailed answer to the charge of pilfering for his own purposes the revenues of the crown. But his statement that he remains a poor man and in debt to the tune of over half a million gold pesos, ‘without so much as a castellano with which to pay it', hardly squares with the magnificence of his entourage when he returned to Spain in 1528 to put his case before Charles V in person.

In fairness to the Council of the Indies, there was another side to the picture, represented by the equally bitter complaints of Diego Velázquez. Fonseca was not only financially involved, but, until his fall from power, had strongly supported the governor of Cuba as the official best suited to govern the mainland in the interests of the crown. One of the most revealing passages in Cortés' dispatches occurs in the Fourth Letter: ‘I propose to send a force over to Cuba, arrest Diego Velázquez and send him as a prisoner to your Majesty; for once the root of all evils has been cut, and truly this man is such, all other branches will wither.' Fonseca regarded Velázquez as safe. Cortés as dangerous, and this passage, showing as it does how absolute power had affected Cortés, suggests that, from the official and long-term point of view, Fonseca was probably right. In any case, a man like Cortés inevitably attracts the suspicion and envy of civil servants at home.

Success, however, and Charles's desperate need of money, won Cortés most of what he demanded. He was received by Charles at his court at Toledo, was created Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, confirmed in the title of Captain-General, and given large tracts of land that included, among many others, the towns of Oaxaca and Cuernavaca. But instead of being created Commander of the Order of Santiago, he received only a knighthood – a title he never used. The governorship of New Spain, the one title that would have made him absolutely secure, was denied him. Thus, it was not as absolute ruler that he returned to New Spain after his marriage into the ducal family of Zúñiga. He reached Vera Cruz on July 15, 1530, to find that Nuno de Guzmán, president of the
audiencia
or high court of law governing Mexico, had reduced the country to a state of anarchy and had encouraged every sort of accusation against him, even including that of murdering his previous wife, Catalina. He was threatened with arrest, and at Texcoco, according to Gómara, he was ordered not to enter Mexico ‘on pain of confiscation of his property and the displeasure of the king'. Nevertheless, as Captain-General, he appears to have exerted his authority again, until the arrival, in 1531, of the new
audiencia,
agreed upon before he left Spain. But though this was composed of more sensible officials, a legal wrangle developed over exactly what the Emperor had granted him in the way of land and vassals. The result was a compromise, and Cortés withdrew to Cuernavaca, where his palace remains to this day. Shrewdly, Charles had given him an outlet for his energies by granting him a capitulation covering the South Sea coasts. For the next eight years, till his final return to Spain in 1540, following disagreements with the viceroy, Cortés concentrated on Pacific exploration, his ships ranging from Tehuantepec to California.

By the time he left Mexico, control had passed absolutely into the hands of the bureaucracy, and the Indians were, legally at any rate, free people; forced labour was prohibited and the death penalty had been introduced for the branding of slaves. The first viceroy, who took office in 1535, was the sagacious Antonio de Mendoza; later he was sent to replace Gasca in Peru. Thus the two most important of Spain's colonies had the benefit at an early stage of fairly liberal administration. With the death of Cortés in 1547, and the execution of Gonzalo Pizarro the following year, the Council of the Indies had finally taken over the colonies, and some at least of the injustices that had followed upon the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires were ended. This was important for Spain, for it was the wealth of Mexico and Peru that supported her dominant position in Europe and made the wars of Charles V and Philip II possible. In spite of this, the Council continued to maintain its headquarters at Seville, and to control the Atlantic trade exclusively in the interests of Spain.