The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America Page 3

  An essential activity in these early days was a Spanish attempt to implicate numerous leaders of old Mexico in their plans. Thus Cortés gave the ancient city of Tula to Pedro, son of Montezuma. Tacuba, with 1,240 houses and several hundred naturales, went to Isabel (Techuipo), Montezuma’s daughter and an ex-mistress of Cortés.26 It was understood that the surviving monarchies and leaders in society would be accepted as such by the conquerors, provided that they not direct themselves against the Christian religion.27 This rule would be observed for many years in the empire. The indigenous lords would have to accept the absolute prohibition of polygamy and of human sacrifice. Encomenderos would have the right to the labor of the people in the place concerned, and to receive appropriate produce. In return, the encomendero would concern himself with the religious life of the people in his district. He would not live there, but in a plot (solar) in Mexico-Tenochtitlan allocated to him within García Bravo’s traza. Here was the link between the urban and agricultural arrangements in New Spain that reflected what had been done in the Caribbean colonies—La Española, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica—and in Pedrarias’s domain in Darien and Panama. These plans would be copied elsewhere in the Spanish empire in South America.

  In 1522, Cortés sent back to Spain a map of Tenochtitlan, which was published in the Latin editions of his second and third cartas de relación to Charles V. It had, some modern authors point out, both fantastical and realistic features. This Latin production was completed in Nuremberg, the capital of German printing at that time. It was “a capricious representation of the Aztec capital” in the style of the so-called islands in the Isolario, by Benedetto Bordone (Vitto), in which there were illustrations of the most famous islands in the world. Bordone completed at least four editions after one in Venice in 1528, and in one there was a plan of Mexico-Tenochtitlan deriving from Cortés’s map.28 We were approaching the era of good maps, after all.

  2

  Valladolid, 1522

  If a war threatens, popes must use all their efforts either to secure a settlement without bloodshed or, if the tempest in human affairs makes that impossible, to urge that the war is fought with less cruelty and does not last long.

  ERASMUS, Enchiridion

  Charles of Ghent, Karl von Habsburg, King of Spain and Emperor in Germany, duke of many European lands, and lord of many more beyond the ocean, reached his temporary, many-towered capital of Valladolid, in northwest Spain, at the end of August 1522, a year after Cortés’s triumph in Mexico. Already a much-traveled monarch, though still only twenty-two years old, he had come from the Low Countries with two thousand people and more than one thousand horses. This entourage had seemed too large for the English when, along the way, Charles had visited his uncle by marriage, Henry VIII. Half had, therefore, been left in Calais. Henry signed his letters to Charles “votre père, frère, et cousin et bel oncle Henry.”1 This itinerant court included chambermaids, butlers, grooms, and tapestry cleaners, as well as soldiers and clerks, courtiers, and counts.

  In those still chivalrous days, kings traveled with tapestries. So in the court of Charles V, the keeper of tapestries, Gilleson de Warenghien, was particularly important. His family had been in the royal Burgundian service for several generations. When Charles’s aunt Margaret arrived in Spain in 1497 to marry the Infante Juan, she was met at the port of Santander on the north coast by 120 mules laden with plate and tapestries.2

  The Emperor and his friends entered Valladolid over a big bridge across the river Pisuerga—deep, rapid, and clayey—just where a smaller torrent, the Esqueva, joins it. Charles then crossed the Paseo de las Moreras (Mulberry Walk), before passing the substantial new palace of the multititled ducal family the Benaventes, on the edge of what had been, till a generation before, the Jewish quarter. Charles had stayed with the Benaventes on his previous visit to the city, in 1517. Now, in 1522, he went to live in the rambling mansion of the Enríquez, his Spanish cousins. (Charles’s great-grandmother had been an Enríquez, a semi-royal noblewoman who had been the mother of King Fernando the Catholic; Charles, however, was the last king of Spain to have had commoners as near cousins.) The Enríquez dwelling was in the center of Valladolid, in the Calle de las Angustias.3 The remainder of the court lodged in rented houses, mostly to the east of the town.

  There is a fine picture of Valladolid in the sixteenth century in the collection of drawings by the Flemish artist Anton van den Wyngaerde. Wyngaerde, who came from Antwerp, worked, when young, in the Netherlands; in middle life in England and Italy; and later in Spain, where he became an official artist to King Philip II. He sketched most of the towns of Castile—so carefully that in 1572, he retired to Madrid with his hands crippled. His drawings form a fine topographical guide.4

  Valladolid was a place of churches, convents, and private palaces, some of which had become public buildings, such as the supreme court (audiencia) and the royal chancellery. The audiencia was established in the palace of the Vivero family, built by the chief accountant to King Juan II, Alonso Pérez de Vivero, who had been murdered in 1453, a violent time in Spanish history almost forgotten by the 1520s. Pérez de Vivero’s son, Juan, had had the same task in the household of Enrique IV. The family were converted Jews, conversos, like most high officials of the Trastámara dynasty. They served the Crown well, and Juan de Vivero had enabled King Fernando to meet Queen Isabel in his palace, and then to marry there, in the Sala Rica. That palace became the seat of the audiencia in 1479.

  There must have been several hundred señorial houses in Valladolid in the early sixteenth century. These were stone buildings often in whitewashed Mudejar style, but it was easy to see that the Renaissance, which took so long to reach Spain, had come to Valladolid. Windows there seemed larger than they were elsewhere; doors were carefully placed in the centers of façades. Italian-style medallions depicting individuals could sometimes be seen above the main entrances. Patios were bigger than in other cities, as were the façades. At first sight, the palace of the Benaventes looked like a medieval fortress, but on examination, the courtyard there had an air of the Renaissance, with acanthus leaves at the tops of pillars, cameos recalling old family members, and a plateresque frieze. Soon there would also be a Renaissance garden there, organized by the count-duke, who had been one of the regents of the country during the recent time of troubles.

  Other noblemen were building in Valladolid, as it was becoming evident that the town was, for the time being at least, the capital of the newly united kingdom of Spain. Thus the marquesses of Astorga, Villafranca, Denia, Viana, Villasantes, Poza, and Villaverde—marquess being a title much more used in Spain than in England5—sponsored imposing edifices, with their coats of arms over their main doors; so did the counts of Miranda and Ribadavia. These dwellings were mostly in the west of the town, and since they were new or even still being finished, they had an invigorating effect on the citizenry. The owners did not live continuously in them, but they provided both curiosity and employment for many of the forty thousand or so inhabitants of the city, a figure that made the town the largest in Castile. The noble houses also had often to lodge the Court; and if some courtiers, such as the chancellor Gattinara, Juan de Vergara, the enlightened secretary to Alonso de Fonseca, archbishop of Toledo, or the royal secretary Alfonso de Valdés might have been a pleasure to have as guests, others would have been merely demanding.

  Even more striking to the eye than the palaces were about thirty convents or monasteries—half for women, half for men—as well as a beaterio, or guesthouse, for Dominicans and later, an oratory for the fathers of San Felipe Neri.6 A foreign traveler would have been impressed to have found so many large buildings in the hands of religious professionals. Of these, the biggest was the Jeronymite foundation established in the mid-fifteenth century and now surrounded by gardens. When Charles had been in residence before, in 1517, some of its monks had preached against the Flemings who seemed to surround the monarch.7 Almost as large was the Franciscan monastery, built in the late thirteenth
century, in the Plaza del Mercado near the Plaza Mayor. The garden of that building occupied all the nearby land.8 Then there was the rambling monastery of the Dominicans, with its magnificent church of San Pablo, in the center of the town.

  San Pablo had been begun in the thirteenth century and much expanded by María de Molina, the astute widow of King Sancho IV of Castile. (She died in Valladolid in 1321.) The façade of that palace had been rebuilt by the theologian Cardinal Torquemada9 in the 1460s, and the church was added to by Fray Alonso de Burgos, using two famous brother-architects from Germany, Juan and Simon of Cologne. Burgos, like Torquemada a converso, was a coarse, immoral but clever Dominican who had been for a time confessor to Queen Isabel. He became bishop of Cuenca and then of the rich dioceses of Palencia, in which Valladolid lay. His sermons were a pleasure to hear. Perhaps it was because he had lived for years in a cell cultivating solitude that he later spoke well.

  It was in the church of San Pablo in 1517 that the nobility of Spain had sworn homage to Charles of Ghent, led by the Count of Oropesa carrying a sword of justice.10 Three archbishops, seven bishops, eight dukes, five marquesses, twenty-one counts, two viscounts, five comendadors, and seven archivists of military orders had mounted the three steps before the altar to subject themselves to the King. That homage had been a religious as much as a political ceremony, and was concluded by the oath Charles himself swore on a cross and the Bible. The Te Deum was then sung. It was an occasion for celebration, and many noblemen who did not swear homage came simply to observe.

  Other important churches in Valladolid included Santa Clara, founded by a friend of that saint herself in 1247, though the new buildings were of the 1490s; and Santa María la Antigua, with its beautiful pillars and square Romanesque tower.

  We should remember, too, Santa María de las Huelgas,11 a convent for Cistercian nuns, built to the east outside the town, on the site of the palace of María de Molina, who had left it to them. The beautiful Church of Santiago, recently built by the merchant Luis de la Serna, would soon be adorned by a marvelous picture by Pedro Berruguete, The Adoration of the Kings, on the reredos. Berruguete was the best Spanish painter of those days, and the emperor Charles made him notary of the chancellery in Valladolid, a sinecure that gave him leisure to paint. Charles’s aunt Margaret of Austria would surely have approved of the arrangement since it gave her patronage a point. Berruguete had been in Rome when the famous Greek marble sculpture of Laocoön had been discovered in 1506 on the Esquiline Hill, the greatest archaeological discovery of the Renaissance and a sight that excited him all his life. He had been born in Paredes de Nava, forty miles to the north of Valladolid, a little town with which another Spanish Renaissance master was associated, the great poet Jorge Manrique, whose father was count of the place.12

  The Benedictine monastery had been a royal palace and had been given to the monks by King Juan I at the end of the fourteenth century; and the church had been commissioned by Alfonso de Valdivieso, bishop of León. A small chapel had been added by Inés de Guzmán, the widow of the resilient chief accountant, Alonso Pérez de Vivero. The stalls in the main church were well carved by Andrés de Nájera, an illegitimate offspring of the great noble family of that surname. (“We do not descend from kings but kings descend from us” was a famous boast of the dukes of Nájera.) The educational church known as the Colegiata was expanded on the insistence of its abbot Juan and a town councillor of another great family, Nuño de Monroy, though the plans were incomplete. The Church of San Andrés was famous for being the burial place of those executed by the state—Álvaro de Luna, the long-lived first minister of King Juan II during the previous century, among them.

  Valladolid had its secular life like any modern city. Printing had begun there in 1476, the first press being that at Nuestra Señora del Prado, which started by publishing bulls of indulgence. But a Frenchman, Jean de Boncour—many of Spain’s first printers were foreigners—set up a private printing house, and in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century, many belles lettres were published, including romances such as the delightful Valencian work Tirant lo Blanc, in its first Spanish translation (from Valencian). At that time, only Seville, Salamanca, and possibly Toledo surpassed Valladolid as a printing town. The court could thus have much to read if it needed it. Even Boccaccio would be printed there in 1524.

  For members of the court with less intellectual tastes, Valladolid had other charms. The Count-Duke of Benavente had an elephant. The women, thought the Venetian ambassador in the 1520s, Andrea Navagero, were beautiful even if, as the Flemish courtier Laurent Vital commented, they were heavily painted.13 There were, in these happy days before the Reformation, many fiestas: “Tout est pretexte à fêtes.”14 There was much dancing in summer along the banks of the river Pisuerga and many special celebrations for Christmas, Holy Week—especially Holy Thursday, when the procession leaving the Church of Magdalena was spectacular—and Corpus Christi, not to speak of the night of San Juan in July, the day of the Assumption in August, and the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in September. On Good Friday, two brotherhoods (cofradías) would set out, that of Our Lady at the Foot of the Cross, and that of the Prayer in the Garden of Olives. The second of these processions had in the early sixteenth century more than two thousand pilgrims (nazarenos) and several beautiful floats, including a model of the Last Supper and a Saint Veronica. All these splendid religious occasions were excuses for music and dancing, as well as for bullfights.15 Plays were often performed, especially brief sketches of everyday life known as sainetes.

  The university was already an ancient foundation. Established in 1346, it was dominated by the Church, though by 1522 it was full of humanists. Law, medicine, theology, and arts could all be studied there. New chairs were being regularly founded. It was then, with its one thousand students, the third-biggest university of Spain, following Salamanca and Alcalá.16 The best modern student of the city, the French historian Bennassar, tells us that no other city in Castile had in the sixteenthth century such a strong intellectual spirit. No doubt there were, as in most Spanish institutions of learning of that time, two ways of looking at the classical authors: There were those who, like the Sicilian Lucio Marineo, Peter Martyr, and the Geraldini brothers, thought of the beauty of the poetry; and those who, like Nebrija, Diego de Muros, and Diego Ramírez de Villaescusa, prized poetry for the truth it expressed.17

  When one mentions intellectual matters in 1522, it is a short step to talk of Erasmus. That humane Dutch scholar had declined to come himself to Spain. But his ideas had arrived and infested every place of learning and theological institute. Erasmus himself was still optimistic about the evolution of both European society and religion; he had recently written, “I could almost wish to be reborn in a few years because I see a golden age dawning.” He pointed out that all the Princes in Europe were in agreement and were leaning toward peace. “I cannot but feel,” he went on, “that there will be a new revival and in part a new unfolding of law-abiding behaviour and Christian society, but with a cleansed and genuine literature. We owe it to their pious minds that we observe the awakening and arising of glorious minds.”18

  Alas, the optimism was premature. All the same, the works of Erasmus enjoyed extraordinary popularity in Spain. No other country had a comparable experience: “At the Emperor’s court, in the towns, in the churches, in the convents, even in the inns and on the high roads, everyone has the Enchiridion [Handbook of a Christian Soldier] of Erasmus in Spanish. It had been read till then by a minority of Latinists; and even those did not always understand everything. But now it is read in Spanish by people of every kind.”19

  Erasmus had come to see the need to consider the problems of the Christianization of the new realms in the Americas. In a note of a conversation added to L’Ichtyophagi in 1526, he reflected on the smallness of the territory controlled by Christians. His spokesman asks: “Have you not seen all those southern banks and the multitude of islands marked by Christian symbols?” “Yes,” replies Er
asmus’s character Lanio, “and I have learned that from there one can bring back plunder. But I didn’t hear that Christianity had been introduced.”20

  While Erasmus was optimistic, many simpler Christians also could believe that a new, tolerant, and intellectually rewarding Catholicism was imminent. Scores of cultivated citizens of Castile also spent their hours of leisure reading one or other of the famous novels of chivalry with which Spain was awash in those years. Amadís de Gaula was still the favorite, and it was followed by sequels—Las sergas de Esplandián and Lisuarte de Grecia—and a new series, Palmerín de Oliva, and the historian Oviedo’s strange novel Don Claribalte.

  With respect to dress, Flemish courtiers were surprised at the heavy chains of gold in Valladolid, and the bright colors of the clothes. Men showed a taste for luxury as much as women did, for they wore silk, brocade, velvet damask, and taffeta. Women, too, wore damask skirts and jackets. Feminine dress in the 1520s was marked by a taste for narrow shoulders and a narrow waist, with large extensions onto the floor. Not surprisingly, there was an army of tailors in Valladolid: In 1560, there would be one tailor per two hundred inhabitants, not to speak of the many hosiers, braid-makers, shoemakers, and jewelers. The most important jewelers of Valladolid were the Arfe family from Germany. Enrique de Arfe and his son Juan not only designed beautiful objects to wear but also refined the art of making gold and silver vessels for religious purposes.