Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Chapter 1 (The Myth of Exceptional Men): ● Two accomplishments considered the greatest in history: the “discovery” of the new world and the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope ● In the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, “the exploratory achievements of mankind are placed within a trajectory beginning with Columbus’s transatlantic voyages…” again, Columbus being considered as a beginning point in history as if no other discoveries/explorations had been made until he came along ● The characterization of the European discovery and conquest of the Americas as the achievement of a few great men… a “handful of adventurers.” This idea of a small number of Europeans defeating entire empires is repeated over and over in written records ● This was supposedly possible because the conquistadors were “exceptionally great men” ● Two important elements of the Columbus myth: his brilliant use of the technology of the time and the genius of his vision. ● First of all, Columbus’s geographical vision was all wrong. Secondly, there were definitely more than “a handful” of men ● Cortés, Columbus, and Pizarro are the most recognized of the conquistadors. Cortés and Pizarro led the initial expeditions that discovered and partially destroyed the two major empires that existed in the Americas in the early 16th c. (the Aztec and the Inca). So in the simplest sense, yes, the Spanish empire was made possible by the actions of these three men ● This notion of these 3 conquistadors as larger-than-life characters is appealing because it’s simple and it personalizes history...reduces the narrative down ● **this “great men” approach ignores the roles played by larger processes of social change, and it makes the Native Americans and Africans invisible** ● One part of the Columbus myth is his supposedly exclusive knowledge that the world was round….this was a belief “shared by all educated Europeans of the day” ● Columbus spent much of his life from the 1470s on in Portugal. In the late 1470s, he married the daughter of a Portuguese Atlantic colonist, and he repeatedly sought Portuguese patronage before and after first approaching the Castilian king and queen ● Why have Columbus’s connections to the Portuguese historically been ignored? ○ Columbus’s contract with Isabella (queen of Spain) led to conquests that were for more Spanish than Portuguese ○ History taught in schools that is rooted in the Columbus myth ○ Columbus’s own writings gave rise to myth and legends about him ● Columbus had “neither a unique plan nor a unique vision”...many others created and contributed to the expansion Process that Columbus became part of ● 1291: Vivaldi brothers set off from Genoa west across the Atlantic (never returned) ● 14th and early 15th c.: exploration of Canary Islands, Azores, and Iberian-African coasts ● 1450s and 60s: Cape Verde islands, Canary islands, and Madeiras are settled and turned into sugar-plantation colonies ● ***Portugal dominated this expansion!!!!!!***** ● 1487: the Pope issued a papal bull condoning Portguese imperial ambitions ● In the 1480s, Columbus tried and failed to become a part of this process but he lacked the connections and persuasive ideas of other navigators ● The extent of Columbus’s success was questioned even after his first voyage...the islands he found in the Caribbean fell within the Portuguese territory ● 1494: Treaty of Tordesillas: redefined the Castilian/Portuguese territories (leaving Portuguese with nothing west of Brazil) ● It became clear in the 1490s that Columbus had been lying about finding the East Indies, and a Portuguese explorer (Vasco da Gama) returned from a successful expedition around the Cape in 1499 ● Columbus seems to have lied for the sake of his contractual rewards...so the Castilian Crown sent an agent to the Caribbean to arrest Columbus and bring him back ● C. was allowed to go on subsequent voyages but he was forbidden to revisit the Carribean and he was stripped of the titles of Admiral and Viceroy of the Indies (titles that he had really wanted). He was disgraced!!! ● ****Columbus’s discoveries were “an accidental geographical byproduct of Porutugese expansion two centuries old, of Portuguese-Castilian competition for Atlantic control a century old, and of Portuguese-Castilian competition for a sea route to India older than Columbus himself” (p. 9)**** ● Had Columbus not reached the Americas, any one of numerous other navigators would have done so within a decade ● 1499: Alonso de Ojeda and Florentine Amerigo Vespucci sailed to Venezuelan coast. Amerigo’s letters were better than Columbus’s and were published and sold well in the years right after his voyages, so a German cartographer assigned his name to Brazil in a map of 1507, and this name caught on and was applied to all of the Americas ● Columbus did not live to see “America” named ● Columbus’s decline can also be attributed to his status as an Italian in an ethnocentric Castilian world in which Italians were often derided ● Late 16th century: Columbus began to appear in Italian epic poetry...but at the time he still remained a distant second (if that) to Cortés as the symbolic hero of the discovery and conquest of the Americas ● This narrative changed in the US 300 years after Columbus’s first landfall in the Americas. October 12, 1792: celebrations held in Boston, New York, and Baltimore. North American historians generated interest in Columbus among English-speaking readers of the 19th century (p. 11) ● Increasing academic and popular interest in Columbus approaching the 400th anniversary of his landfall ● 1912: Columbus Day became an official holiday ● Probanza de mérito: genre of the report that conquerors sent to the crown upon completion of their activities of exploration, conquest, and settlement. This was to inform the monarchs of events and newly acquired lands, and to petition for rewards in the form of offices, titles, and pensions ● Probanzas are important because thousands were written and the nature of these probanzas was to play up one’s own action and achievement. Only the best-connected petitioners had a chance of the King reading their letters ● Cortés’s series of probanzas to the King were published shortly after reaching Spain and the letters sold so well (in 5 languages) that the crown banned the letters so that Cortés’s cult status wouldn’t become a political threat (but the letters continued to circulate and Cortés basically became a celebrity) ● Within months of Columbus’s return from his first voyage, a letter supposedly written by him (but actually crafted by royal officials based on a document written by Columbus) was published in Spanish, Italian, and Latin. This letter promoted his “discovery” as a favorable Spanish achievement, and made Columbus appear more Spanish ● Bernal Diaz’s probanza of over 600 pages is one of the best known of the conquest accounts, but he was denied due reward in Mexico by Cortés because he was a relation of Diego Velázquez, an enemy of Cortés ● The probanza evolved into the chronicle ● “Official chronicler positions, created in 1532 and 1571, were intended to control the dissemination of information about the Conquest”...but these efforts were in vain ● Eyewitness accounts like Cortes’s letters “framed the justification of personal actions and roles within a larger context of imperial justification.” The chroniclers developed the theme of justification “into an ideology of imperialism that represented the Conquest as a dual mission, bringing both civilization and Christianity to the Americas” ● Cortés became so recognizable as one of “God’s agents” b/c his letters to the King were rapidly published and widely circulated...these letters argued that God had blessed the Conquest of Mexico. Also, the Mexica (Aztec) empire was of an impressive size. Also, Franciscans (first Spanish priests in Mesoamerican regions) who were central to the activities of the church throughout colonial Spanish America...they supported Cortés so that he would support their entry into Mexico ● The Franciscans saw the Conquest as a great leap toward the conversion of all mankind and the subsequent second coming of Christ ● In Gómara’s account of the conquest, Cortés emerges as an idealized figure “to whom the entire Discovery and Conquest is subject” ● Bernal Díaz also portrayed Cortés as a larger-than-life (albeit flawed) character...but the flaws added ruggedness to his character ● The conquest of Mexico, through these writings that praised and chronicled Córtes’s life, became a symbol and model of the entire Conquest ● William Prescott’s histories of the conquests of Mexico and Peru were very successful. His books “repackaged the Conquest myths” and “reworked them into an ideology of imperial justification by the colonial chroniclers.” His audience was eager to read that a “handful” of Europeans (bc of their inherently superior qualities) could defeat “barbarous natives” despite the odds and hardships. Prescott’s accounts were “credible and comforting,” and the readers could feel that the “occasional” acts of cruelty or excess were justified by the mission of converting everyone to Catholicism ● 1519: shortly after landing on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, Cortés supposedly burned his ships...but this is a MYTH...they were just sunk/grounded, but in 1546, Cervantes de Salazar referred in print to Cortés’s ship burning, and that’s where the myth comes from ● Conquistadors who came after Cortés are often characterized as imitating him...he becomes a legend...he was an “exception” and an “archetype”; he was “remarkably gifted” ● But Cortés was really just following Conquest procedures that were consolidated during the Caribbean phase of conquest (1492-1521). So later conquistadors weren’t necessarily mimicking Cortés; they were following the established Spanish procedure ● One aspect of Conquest procedure: using legalistic measures to lend a veneer of validity to an expedition (like reading out a legal document, which was ridiculous b/c they would be read aloud to native people who didn’t speak Spanish) ● Other measures: the declaration of a formal territorial claim, and the founding of a town. For Spaniards, living in a city was equated with civilization, social status, and security. This also provided legal grounds for conquistadors to turn themselves into a town council and make laws, etc. ● Cortés and his fellow captains founded Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico coast in 1519...Cortés and his guys stated that founding a town was “better” than carrying out the orders of Diego Velázquez (the governor of Cuba and patron to Cortés) (these orders were to get as much gold as possible to be shared between Cortés and Velázquez….so Cortés is portrayed as selflessly giving up this opportunity for a lot of gold ● But Cortés needed direct approval of the crown to claim governorship of whatever lands he conquered, and Velázque had that license that he needed, so he betrayed Velázquez and wrote to the king. He scuttled all his ships to prevent Velázquez loyalists from going back to Cuba to warn him ● Francisco de Montejo was one of the agents sent to Spain to argue Cortés’s case. Montejo also lobbied to have Yucatán defined as a territory separate from Mexico with HIMSELF the recipient of a license to conquer it, which he got (so he betrayed Cortés) ● Francisco Pizarro stabbed his partner, Diego de Almagro, in the back...he got titles and honors for himself from the monarch to lay claim to the land in South America, but none for Almagro. Pizarro had Almagro executed in 1537 ● One of the captains of a expedition from Quito into Amazonia in 1540, Francisco de Orellana, supposedly betrayed Gonzalo Pizarro (Fran.’s brother) by going off with a small party and successfully making it to the Caribbean and then to Spain. Orellana said he just wasn’t able to get back b/c of the river’s current, but colonial Chroniclers (and later historians) took Pizarro’s side, calling Orellana a traitor ● El dorado=a mythical ruler or city of gold. Gonzalo Pizarro was trying to find the source of this gold, which was also part of conquest procedure (finding precious metals) ● Conquistadors like Pizarro needed to find gold in order to obtain the governorship, b/c the Spanish conceived of the precious metals as money (they called them dineros around this time) ● Precious metals were THE most valuable thing that conquistadors could find in the New World, and this was part of conquest procedure ● Fourth aspect of conquest procedure: looking for native populations so they could have native allies ● Fifth aspect of conquest procedure: getting a native interpreter. Cortés’s interpreter was a woman named Maliche ● Sixth aspect: the theatrical use of violence...b/c Spanish forces were usually so outnumbered, they would carry out dramatic displays of violence in order to terrify the native people into obeying them. Severing hands/arms of prisoners killing women or men by burning them alive in front of other natives. Also massacres of unarmed natives ● The public seizure of a native ruler was common practice (like Cortés seizing Moctezuma and taking him prisoner.) When Moctezuma was no longer useful to the Spaniards, they murdered him, but claimed that a native person had killed him. Cortés is given credit for this “genius” strategy but it was all really just crown procedure...capturing a native leader was common ● “Collective achievement...is less appealing both to the participants and to those later reading about it as the human impulse is to look for the heroes and villains” (p. 26) Chapter 2 (The Myth of the King’s Army): ● When Columbus returned on his second voyage to Hispaniola, there is an image of him being accompanied by an army, and same with Cortés...this is “the myth of the King’s army” ● But the Spaniards were NOT an army...Cortés had written that he had “300 men on foot,” and some translators and historians chose to interpret/write that as “300 soldiers” ● Cortés does NOT use the term “soldado” ...this term was used to refer to the conquistadors later on in the late 1500s and onward. This was influenced by artwork that ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● showed Cortés at the head of an army (makes more sense aesthetically to show him with an army rather than just a bunch of normal guys) Military revolution: ○ The size of military forces grew dramatically ○ Developments in artillery meant that there were more guns and more gunpowder used ○ Campaigns grew longer and larger and more complex, so that “war became a permanent state of affairs” ○ There were just 9 years of peace in sixteenth century Europe! Only in the seventeenth century were permanent, professional armies created like the ones we call “armies” today. These were armies loyal to a state, not one leader 16th century: Spain lacked the resources to dispatch large forces and significant numbers of weapons across the Atlantic Spaniards learned that the New World required different military methods; namely, guerrilla warfare (small, covert fighting units dedicated to search-and-destroy missions carried out over several years) Beyond the central regions of Mesoamerica and Peru, most expeditions comprised fewer than 100 Spaniards **when Spanish imperial authorities did start to establish a professional army in the seventeenth century, it was not to enforce colonial rule over Native Americans, but to defend their empire from French, English, and Dutch pirates ***Conquistadors, long after their time, were characterized as soldiers b/c of the military revolution in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries*** The conquistadors did not have formal military training. Conquistador groups did not have the formal ranking system that Spanish forces did at the time...there was only a captain and two categories of the rest: guys on horseback and guys on foot. Spaniards went on these conquest expeditions not in return for specified payments, but in the hope of acquiring wealth and status. The conquistadors were like “armed entrepreneurs.” these people had various jobs and skills, including artisans encomienda= a grant of Native American labor Some of the conquistadors were completely illiterate and uneducated, and some were very educated (but fully literate people were the minority) Spanish patronage system: patrons organized and made major financial investments in expeditions, and their dependents would man the companies and recruit additional participants, investment, and supplies Montejo, the one who went to Yucatán...his company ended up falling apart 1534: Pedro de Alvarado invades Ecuador ● ***the quick Spanish victory was a myth***. The conflicts were drawn out due to the fragmented and diverse nature of native polities, and excessive Spanish demands and actions that were frequently counterproductive to the imposition of colonial rule ● Patronage networks were based on family and hometown ties Chapter 3 (The Myth of the White Conquistador): ● Conquistadors often portrayed as just a couple of men fighting off whole armies ● The Spaniards were often outnumbered by their own native allies. The “invisible warriors” of the white conquistador myth were Africans, both enslaved and free, who accompanied Spanish invaders (also native allies) ● Tenochtitlán: capital of Mexica (Aztec) empire ● There’s a song about the natives’ participation in battles and from their perspective they were also fighting their own fights between rival city-states…**native civil war*** that the Spanish inserted themselves into ● The city-state of Tlaxcala maintained independence as the Aztec empire expanded across central Mexico in the late 15th and early 16th centuries ● Tlaxcala was both a hurdle and an opportunity for the Cortés-led expedition of 1519 ● A faction formed in Tlaxcala that wanted to make an anti-Mexica alliance with Cortés...because then they would be able to destroy the Mexica empire and its capital city ● Cortés had more Tlaxcalan allies than Spaniards with him. Cortés claimed all the credit for getting this group on his side ● Huejotzingo, another city-state, also didn’t want to be in the Mexica empire and so they helped out the Spaniards. They also had a rivalry with the Tlaxcalans ● Smallpox killed the Inca ruler Huayna and his heir before the Spanish got to their empire. Atahuallpa and Huascar, two brothers, then took control of the northern and southern halves of the empire (respectively)...then a civil war broke out 2 years later ● Pizarro happened to arrive in the empire at the time that this war was occurring, and he exploited the conflict for his gain. Atahuallpa and Huascar were both killed eventually and their successor, Manco Inca, was supposed to be a Spanish puppet, but he rebelled ● The Spanish managed to survive in the region due to their supply of native allies, and with their help, they were able to build colonies in the region of the Andes ● The Spanish regularly took native allies with them from one place to another (like Cortés bringing Cubans with him to Mexico) ● Natives from other places in Mexico like Tlaxcala, Huejotzingo, and Cempoala accompanied Cortés to central Mexico to fight (mostly voluntarily...some enslaved who resisted) ● There was no sense of Maya ethnic solidarity in the 16th century ● As late as the 1690s, Mayas from over a dozen Yucatec towns fought other mayas in support of Spanish Conquest endeavors in present-day northern Guatemala ● The enslaving of Native Americans was banned by the Spanish crown, but it still happened ● Native slaves from Nicaragua participated in the Conquest of Peru ● Festivals supposedly commemorating Spanish triumphs but also representing their own complex roles in the incomplete conquest (irony) ● “Conquest of Rhodes” play in Mexico City in 1539 ● 1537: Africans in Mexico City plotted a slave revolt and crowned a rebel black king….but these people were then publicly executed ● “The widespread and central role of blacks was consistently ignored by Spaniards writing about the Conquest” b/c most were slaves and b/c racism ● Juan Valiente: black conquistador, born in West Africa around 1505, bought as a slave by the Portuguese. Was brought to Mexico and bought by a Spaniard, baptized, and lived in Puebla. ● In 1533, Valiente convinced his owner to let him go and seek opportunity as a conquistador for a period of 4 years, if he would give his owner all his earnings ● Valiente went to Guatemala to join Pedro de Alvarado’s expedition to Peru. Then he switched companies and fought with Almagro in Chile. He later became a partner in Juan de Valdivia’s company ● Even though Valiente was now a free man down in Chile, he commissioned a royal official in 1550 to purchase for him his legal freedom. Alonso Valiente (Juan Valiente’s owner) kept trying to track him down and get his money ● 1553: Juan Valiente killed by Araucanians (Mapuches!) in battle ● The first black Africans brought to the Americas probably arrived by 1502 ● By 1600, about 100,000 Africans had been shipped to the Spanish-American colonies. These African slaves tended to serve as domestic servants, as assistants in commercial enterprises, and as symbols of social status for the Spaniards who owned them ● There were also Africans along the first Spaniards in the Americas ● Juan Garrido: another black conquistador ● “As the first major conquest on the mainland, the Conquest of Mexico helped to inspire and finance a flurry of Spanish expeditions through the Americas, all of which included African slaves and servants, many of whom fought as conquistadors ● There were many Africans brought to Peru and Chile ● Spaniards did think of the Africans as good fighters ● Blacks were often expected to live on the margins of the new Spanish towns and fill marginal posts ● “Africans were valued in the Spanish Conquest, but only if they settled after the Conquest for free but subordinate lives as gatekeepers...or fought willingly until their deaths” Chapter 4 (The Myth of Completion): ● The Conquests of Mexico, Peru, Yucatán, etc. do not go by any other names...they are always referred to as “conquests.” This vision of the conquest originated with the conquistadors themselves and has more or less survived intact up to the present ● Two main reasons why Spaniards presented their accomplishments/ctions in terms that prematurely anticipated the completion of COnquest campaigns: ○ The Spanish system of patronage, contract, and reward ○ The ideology of imperial justification that developed during the 16th century to portray the Conquest as divine intention and Spaniards as agents of providence ● In return for the title of adelantado (captain-general), and gubernatorial titles and privileges after a conquest, the recipient of the license had to bear most or all of the costs of the expedition, as well as the planning and execution of it. These contracts were of great benefit to the crown in an era when centralized state power was a fraction of what it would be in modern times ● These contracts were also sources of revenue b/c the monarchy often sold them and could claim contracts were unfulfilled if they didn’t get their fifth of all the goods from the conquest ● Over time, the crown made it easier to imprison conquistadors for contractual violations, or fine them ● This posed a challenge to the conquistadors b/c they had to avoid shipwreck, disease, capture, murder, etc., but also had to meet the royal definitions of colonial success. They couldn’t just find land and claim it...they needed to find economic viability in the form of gold or slaves ● Conquistadors were therefore quick to claim that places they visited were overflowing with “precious metals and compliant native peoples”...like Columbus’s exaggeration in his letters ● As soon as Columbus returned from his first voyage, his claim that he had reached Asia was disputed ● The ideology of the Spanish empire was rooted in medieval jurisprudence and the mythology of the Christian reconquista of the Iberian peninsula...as progressive and providential. This ideology was not just abstract: it was supposed by official statements that came from the papacy and the Spanish monarchy. After Columbus’s first voyage, the pope presided over a treaty that divided the Americas between Spain and Portugal...so Spaniards were ***the recipients of a divine grant of lands and peoples*** ● Native people were seen as Spanish subjects waiting to be located and informed of their new status...their resistance to conquest made them rebels, since they were considered to be royal subjects. Resistance leaders could be tried and executed for treason ● This justified Spanish military activities as campaigns of “pacification” rather than conquest, because natives were illegally disrupting the “colonial peace” because they were subjects who were rebelling. ● The Spanish now had a justification for their violence against the natives because they were “rebelling” ● “By insisting on the completeness of the Conquest in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, Spanish colonists bequeathed an identity crisis to their Mexican descendents” ● Cortés founds Mexico in 1521 ● 1535: Lima was founded ● 1541: Santiago de Chile is founded ● Yes Cortés and his men had dismembered the Mexica empire, but they had not conquered Mexico. They did not have control at all over the larger area that would become modern Mexico. The founding of certain cities were and are used as milestones to mark the completion of the Conquest and the start of colonial rule ● The Aruancanians of Chile resisted conquest into the 19th century ● Seven dimensions of the myth incompleteness: ○ The rapidity of the Conquest in the core areas of native and subsequent colonial settlement ○ The protracted nature of the military conquest of the marginal regions of what gradually became Spanish America ■ In some places, like where nomadic natives lived who were not amenable to colony building, it took decades to establish toeholds ○ The peace among natives and between them and the Spanish colonists that supposedly came in the Conquest’s wake. In reality, there were a lot of native revolts against colonial rule. **** “Spaniards believed that their empire was God’s way of civilizing natives and Africans in the Americas”**** ○ Resistance was an everyday part of colonial life ○ Spaniards did not seek to rule natives directly and take over their lands..they wanted to preserve native communities as self-governing sources of labor and producers of agricultural products. “The majority of natives subject to colonial rule continued to live in their own communities, speak their own languages, work their own fields, and be judged and ruled by their own elders” ○ The spiritual conquest...the myth was that native people converted easily. A lot is still not known about this ○ The persistence of native cultures: there was no campaign to force natives to learn Spanish!!! Also, native dress was mostly unaltered by the Conquest and instead changed gradually over the centuries