The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Hugh Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in 2010 in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, as The Golden Age: The Spanish Empire of Charles V.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thomas, Hugh.

  The golden empire : Spain, Charles V, and the creation of America / Hugh Thomas.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-904-8

  1. Latin America—History—16th century. 2. Latin America—Discovery and exploration—Spanish. 3. Latin America—Civilization—Spanish influences. 4. Spain—History—Charles I, 1516–1556. 5. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 1500–1558. 6. Spain—Colonies—America—Administration—History—16th century. I. Title.

  F1411.T46 2011

  980’.01—dc22 2010035313

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  To Vanessa

  A constant inspiration

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Prologue

  A TALE OF TWO CITIES: NEW SPAIN AND OLD

  1. Cortés and the Rebuilding of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, 1521–1524

  2. Valladolid, 1522

  3. Charles, King and Emperor

  4. Christianity and the New World

  5. Charles at Valladolid, 1522–1523

  6. Cortés in Power, 1521–1524

  Book I

  VALLADOLID AND ROME

  7. Charles V: From Valladolid to the Fall of Rome, 1527

  8. Four Brothers in a Conquest: The Alvarados and Guatemala

  9. Charles and His Empire

  10. Pedrarias, Panama, and Peru; Guzmán in New Spain

  11. Giants of Their Time: Charles, Cortés, Pizarro

  12. The Germans at the Banquet: The Welsers

  13. Narváez and Cabeza de Vaca

  14. Ordaz on the Orinoco; Heredia at Cartagena

  15. Cortés and the Audiencia in New Spain

  16. Montejo in Yucatán

  17. To Pass the Sandbar

  Book II

  PERU

  18. Birú

  19. Pizarro’s Preparations

  20. Cajamarca

  21. The End of Atahualpa

  22. News of Peru

  23. The Battle for Cuzco

  24. Almagro

  25. Pizarro’s Triumph and Tragedy

  26. Vaca de Castro in Peru

  27. Gonzalo Pizarro and Orellana Seek Cinnamon and Find the Amazon

  28. Orellana and New Andalusia

  29. The Defeat of the Viceroy

  30. Gonzalo and La Gasca

  31. Valdivia and Chile

  32. Valdivia’s Consummation

  Book III

  COUNTER REFORMATION, COUNTER RENAISSANCE

  33. Carolus Africanus

  34. The Indies Finance Europe

  35. Federmann and Jiménez de Quesada

  36. The Return of Cabeza de Vaca

  37. Soto in North America

  38. The Magic Lure of the New World

  39. Buenos Aires and Asunción: Pedro de Mendoza and Cabeza de Vaca

  40. New Spain with Antonio de Mendoza

  41. Coronado and the Seven Magic Cities of Cibola

  42. Montejo and Alvarado in Yucatán and Guatemala

  Book IV

  THE INDIAN SOUL

  43. Las Casas, Pope Paul, and the Indian Soul

  44. Controversy at Valladolid

  45. Las Casas and Sepúlveda

  ENVOI

  46. The Knight of the Black Eagle

  47. The Emperor at Bay

  Appendix 1: GENEALOGIES

  Appendix 2: MAPS

  Photo Insert

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Additional Illustrations

  Preface

  This book, though I hope it will be seen as complete in itself, is the second in a series of volumes I am writing about the Spanish empire. The first volume was Rivers of Gold, published in 2003. I am now at work on a third volume, which takes the extraordinary story to 1580, when Spain ceased to expand her responsibilities. King Philip II decided in that year not to try to conquer China.

  I have several acknowledgments: first to Stuart Proffitt and his colleagues at Penguin in London. Stuart showed himself a publisher from whose friendship I gained as much as I did from his expertise and judgment. Also I am grateful to David Ebershoff and his staff at Random House in New York. They were patient, meticulous, and a pleasure to work with. Dana Isaacson of Random House made many helpful suggestions. I am grateful, too, for his work on the text, to Martin Davies, an excellent and learned editor. I am also thankful to Ana Bustelo of Planeta for much help, especially collecting the illustrations, and I am also most grateful to the Museo de Santa Cruz in Toledo. My editorial thanks also go to my agent, my imaginative friend Andrew Wylie, and his remarkable assistants. Teresa Velasco typed and retyped the manuscript with care and accuracy. I owe her and Cecilia Calamante a great deal for their hard work on my behalf.

  To sum up one’s indebtedness to other writers is difficult. But I should be singularly ungrateful were I not to put on record how much I owe to Manuel Fernández Álvarez, whose work on the sixteenth century is an example to us all; and to the conquest of Peru’s great historian John Hemming, whose research and writings have placed all students of the matter under a lasting obligation. He also corrected the proofs and saved me from many mistakes. The extent of my debt to the writings of this close friend of mine is by no means covered by the references in the text. My wife, Vanessa, also read the proofs with attention. I am also grateful to James Lockhart for his remarkable study The Men of Cajamarca (Austin, Tex., 1972), and his earlier work Spanish Peru (Madison, Wisc., 1968). Like everyone who has worked on Peru in the sixteenth century, I have been much assisted by the work of the late Guillermo Lohmann, whom I used to see at eight o’clock in the morning on the steps of the Archivo de Indias waiting for entrance to the salón de lectores in the old building of Herrera in Seville. He was always at his table before me. Other works that were of great value to me included Marcel Bataillon’s Erasme et l’Espagne and José Martínez Millán’s La corte de Carlos V. Sir John Elliott kindly corrected some howlers.

  Like others who have written of the conquest of Peru, I have depended greatly on the numerous contemporary accounts which I have been able to study, such as those written by Garcilaso de la Vega, Pedro de Cieza de León, Hernando Pizarro, Francisco de Jerez, Pedro Sancho de Hoz, Fray Tomás de Berlanga, Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán, Miguel de Estete, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Cristóbal de Mena, and Agustín de Zárate. But I have missed the great number of informaciones de servicios y méritos that characterized the contemporary history of New Spain/Mexico.

  A WORD ABOUT NOMENCLATURE

  Carlos I and Carlos V are rendered “Charles” as a matter of course.

  In Rivers of Gold, I elected to speak of Ferdinand, king of Aragon, as “Fernando.” I do the same here. But once the infante Fernando, Charles V’s brother, becomes established in Austria, I call him (the archduke) Ferdinand.

&n
bsp; “Moctezuma” is rendered “Montezuma,” the English translation of the name. I have found it so spelled by Spaniards several times in the sixteenth century.

  On the other hand, I have rendered the Aztecs by their more accurate designation, “Mexica.” I have normally rendered the capital, Mexico City, by the Spanish usage, “Mexico.”

  A NOTE ON CURRENCY

  The usual item of currency was the maravedí, a piece of copper worth 1/96 of a gold mark, which in its turn was equivalent to 230,045 grams. A ducado (ducat) was worth 375 maravedís, 1 real was 34 maravedís, 1 peso was 450 maravedís, and 1 castellano was equivalent to 485 maravedís. A cruzado was an old coin, sometimes gold, sometimes silver, and occasionally copper, each of different value. An escudo was worth 40 reales, and a cuento had an indeterminate value.

  HUGH THOMAS, MAY 5, 2010

  Illustrations

  Click on the illustration numbers below to navigate to each illustration. You can then click the illustration number beneath the image to navigate back to this section.

  1. Charles V as a young man (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

  2a. Mercurino Gattinara (Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid)

  2b. Gonzalo Pérez (Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid)

  3a. Francisco de los Cobos (Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli, Seville)

  3b. Granvelle (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

  4a. The empress Isabel of Portugal (Museo del Prado)

  4b. The archduchess Margaret of Austria (Monastère royal de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse)

  5a. Pope Clement VII (Musei Vaticani, Rome)

  5b. Pope Paul III, Alessandro Farnese (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples)

  6a. Bishop Quiroga (Cathedral, Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico, photograph by Vicente Guijosa, published in La Utopia Mexicana del siglo XVI, lo bello, lo verdadero y lo bueno, Presentación de Octavio Paz, edited by Grupo Izbiche [1992], p. 73)

  6b. Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga (Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico, photograph by Rafael Doniz, published in La Utopia, as above, p. 45)

  7. Antonio de Mendoza (Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico, photograph by Javier Hinojosa, published in La Utopia, as above, p. 21)

  8a. A Spanish galleon (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt)

  8b. Spanish lombard of the fifteenth to sixteenth century (Museo del Ejército, Madrid, now Toledo)

  9a. Bartolomé de las Casas (Fundación José Manuel Lara, Seville)

  9b. Portable altar (Museo de la Catedral, Burgos)

  10a. Francisco Pizarro and his mistress Inés (on the wall of the Palace of the Conquest, photograph by Stuart Stirling, published in his Pizarro: Conquistador of the Inca, Stroud, 2005)

  10b. Stone effigy of Hernando Pizarro in Trujillo (Palace of the Conquest, photograph by Stuart Stirling, published in Pizarro, as above)

  11a. Inca wall in Cuzco (see John Hemming, Monuments of the Incas, London, 2010, p. 34)

  11b. Inca fortress (see Monuments of the Incas, p. xx)

  12a. The Franciscans who walked barefoot from Veracruz to Mexico (Franciscan monastery of Huejotzingo, Mexico, photograph by Jorge Vertiz, published in Antonio Bonet, ed., Monasterios Iberoamericanos, Iberdrola, Madrid, 2001, p. 95)

  12b. Augustinian monastery of Acolman, Mexico (photograph by Jorge Vertiz, published in Monasterios Iberoamericanos, as above, p. 104)

  13. The Franciscan monastery in Quito (photograph by Christoph Hartz, published in Monasterios Iberoamericanos, as above, p. 158)

  14. The church of San Pablo at Valladolid (Bridgeman)

  15. Philip II (Museo del Escorial)

  16a. The emperor Charles V (Museo del Prado)

  16b. The monastery at Yuste (Photasa)

  Maps

  Click on the map numbers below to navigate to each map. You can then click the map number beneath the image to navigate back to this section.

  1. Mexico: the city in 1535

  2. Valladolid in 1522

  3. Divisions of the world in place in the sixteenth century

  4. Charles V’s Europe, 1522

  5. The origins of the conquistadors

  6. Seville in the sixteenth century

  7. The slave trade in the sixteenth century

  8. The first migrants from Andalusia to America

  9. The West Indies, c. 1530

  10. The Isthmus, c. 1530

  11. Cortés on his way to Hiberas/Honduras

  12. The Spanish explorers in the New World

  13. The Pearl Coast

  14. Montejo in Yucatán

  15. Muisca territory

  16. The routes of the great expeditions to Bogotá

  17. The struggle for Italy

  18. The conquest of Peru, 1531–33

  19. Cuzco at the time of the conquest

  20. The fortress of Sacsahuaman

  21. The conquest of Cartagena

  22. The conquest of Chile

  23. Orellana on the Amazon

  24. The journey to the Indies

  25. The opening of the Pacific

  26. The Netherlands in the 1550s

  1

  Cortés and the Rebuilding of

  Mexico-Tenochtitlan, 1521–1524

  I assure your Caesarian majesty that these people are so turbulent that at any novelty or opportunity for sedition, they rebel.

  CORTÉS TO CHARLES V, Fourth letter

  Hernán Cortés’s life was triumphant in a way that has rarely been known by any captain of men. Cortés, who looked on himself as Charles’s agent, had both discovered and conquered a great indigenous empire: a regime marked by a sophisticated culture allied to barbarism.1 In 1522, he was the commander of a small successful Spanish army of about two thousand men, with the assistance of numerous indigenous allies, who relished the chance of rebellion and revenge against their old suzerains, the Aztecs (the Mexica). He was surrounded by a praetorian guard of about five hundred horsemen and four thousand foot, all the latter being Indians.2 He had no title to any command, but all the same, in the ruins of the old Mexican capital he had all the power. The new world was an echo of the old: Cortés was a great European commander who had conquered indigenous people. He had given the territory the name New Spain, no less, which would remain its designation for three hundred years.

  His chief captains (such as the Alvarado brothers, Gonzalo de Sandoval, and Andrés de Tapia) were his political subordinates as well as his military deputies. One or two of these commanders had good connections in Spain: For example, Jerónimo Ruiz de la Mota was the first cousin of the emperor Charles’s preceptor, the bishop of Palencia, and Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia was the nephew of a member of the Council of Castile, Pedro (Vázquez) de Oropesa. Several of Cortés’s best-connected commanders had returned to Spain to spread news of what he had done: Francisco de Montejo, of Salamanca, for example, and Alonso Hernández Portocarrero, a cousin of the Count of Medellín and a nephew of Judge de las Gradas in Seville; as well as Diego de Ordaz of León, who had returned to Spain the previous year, in search of preferments of his own.

  Cortés knew that what he had done was astonishing; and he had begun to conduct himself self-consciously in the shadow of Alexander the Great, Caesar, or even the Argonauts. The defeated Mexica had been humbled, many had been killed, and several members of the late emperor Montezuma’s family had accepted the Spaniards as their new rulers: These included Montezuma’s son, Don Pedro Montezuma, who must be supposed to have been his heir, and his daughter, Doña Isabel or Techuipo. There was also Cihuacoatl (Tlacotzin), the majordomo of the old government, who was now working for Cortés in the ruined city of Tenochtitlan. The other defeated rulers of old Mexico—such as the monarch of Tlacopan and Tacuba, Tetlepanqueltzatzin, along with his colleague, the monarch of Texcoco, Ixtlilxochitl, and above all the tragic Cuauhtémoc, Montezuma’s successor as the ruler of Tenochtitlan—were prisoners of Cortés. In the immediate aftermath of the Spanish victory, Cuauhtémoc had been tortured by the royal treasurer, Julián de Alderete, o
f Tordesillas, to cause him to reveal the whereabouts of hidden gold and other treasure. Cortés had accepted that, for he badly needed something to offer his victorious but restless fellow conquistadors. But he does not seem to have initiated the cruelty.

  Cortés was the despot of the new territory that he had conquered. A great many people had died in the fighting leading to this despotism, mostly Mexican natives, but also perhaps one thousand Spaniards. That had not been Cortés’s intention. He had thought that he could overwhelm the empire of the Mexica by kidnapping its ruler. Charles the Emperor would rule New Spain through Montezuma. This scheme had been thwarted in 1520 by Pánfilo de Narváez, Cortés’s Segovia-born rival, in the first pitched battle between Spaniards in the Americas. Fighting began between Indians and Spaniards because of Pedro de Alvarado’s fatal preemptive strike, as the twenty-first century would have put the matter (he anticipated an Indian mutiny). Cortés had wanted control, power, authority, not bloodshed or massacre.

  In early 1522, Cortés was still awaiting a reaction from the emperor Charles to the news of his astonishing victory, details of which he had sent by letter the previous year—a manuscript letter, of course, like everything from the Indies.3 The delay was not surprising, since though the surrender of Tenochtitlan had been on August 13, 1521, a report of that event did not reach Spain till March 1522. Charles was still in the Low Countries and would not return to Spain till the summer of that year. Cortés had planned that his report would be accompanied not only by Alonso de Ávila; his secretary, Juan de Ribera; and the chief of his bodyguard, Quiñones, but by a substantial treasure seized from the Mexica: 50,000 pesos in gold, of which the Crown would receive 9,000 pesos, many large pearls, much jade, several obsidian mirrors framed in gold, and even three jaguars. There were also many presents of plumage in the form of turquoise mosaics, cloaks, cotton cloths, painted maps, ornamental shields, and elaborately constructed parrots and crickets of gold and silver. These were all to go to friends of Cortés, to influential Spanish officials, to noblemen and sacred places, to monasteries and churches.