A History of the World (43 page)

During the centuries of al-Andalus, only a narrow band in the mountainous north of Spain, the kingdom of Asturias, had remained Christian. As we have seen, Christian kings exploited Muslim division to slowly fight their way south. Under the austere Almoravid dynasty which arrived from North Africa to impose a more repressive form of Islam, many Jews and others found that the squabbling Christian states made them welcome, and there had been a major emigration north. Most of the ‘reconquest’ had been achieved centuries before the reign of Isabel and Ferdinand. The crucial victory had been at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, when the kings of Castile, Navarre, Aragón and Portugal broke the habit of their lifetimes and fought on the same side, crushing the Almohads, a Berber dynasty whose troops came from as far inside Africa as Senegal, as well as from today’s North Africa.

By the 1490s all that was left to mop up was the small kingdom of Granada. Muslim forces put up a long and brave resistance, but were eventually starved into surrendering Granada itself, lured by a generous-seeming treaty. The Christians promised that anyone who wished to do so could leave and return to Africa, but that Muslim law would be retained for the Muslims who stayed. Hundreds of thousands chose to stay and live under Christian rule. Some found this intolerable because the original treaty was soon torn up; but many Muslims converted to Christianity. The Jews, perhaps 200,000-strong, were also offered the choice of converting to Catholicism or leaving Spain. It is now reckoned that only around forty thousand went, initially mostly to Portugal, though later to Amsterdam, Constantinople, Venice and even Rome.
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The wealth of those who did not convert was seized by the state, and indeed helped fund Columbus’s missions. But these were probably
the minority. The Bishop of Burgos was a former rabbi; St Teresa of Avila, one of the great mystics of the Counter-Reformation, came from a family of Jewish converts; so, probably, did Bartolomé de Las Casas, the friar and historian who revealed the dark underside of Spanish colonialism in America. Though the Spanish Inquisition was just as brutal and remorseless as its popular image suggests, constantly testing the sincerity of Marranos, or crypto-Jews, and handing over as many as four thousand for execution, Jews and Muslims killed apostates too. For Ferdinand and Isabella, the Inquisition and the forced Christianizing of all Spain was basic to the political union of their kingdoms, Castile and Aragón; an absolute ideological rock on which the new country with its single people would be built.

They were a curious pair, these Catholic monarchs so readily admired in Rome. Isabella, of the royal house of Castile, had had a rocky childhood, including times of real poverty while living with her mentally disturbed mother. The problem was probably genetic: Isabella’s daughter was known as Joanna the Mad. Her dynastically ambitious father had touted Isabella around the courts of half the crowned heads of Europe. She had found none of them appealing, and had learned how to nimbly dodge much older men. On one occasion she prayed to God to let her escape betrothal to a titled forty-three-year-old. He died from a ruptured appendix on his way to woo her. (This may explain Isabella’s famous piety in later life.) Instead, with the special blessing of the pope – needed because their grandfathers were cousins – in 1469 she absconded in order to marry Ferdinand, of the royal house of Aragón, apparently against everyone’s wishes.

Ferdinand seems from his portraits to be a doughy, melancholy-looking man. He became a formidably ambitious ruler, engaged in the endless wars and treaties of the age as he extended the power of the two kingdoms. He was a ferociously hard worker, too, sometimes apparently tying a bandage across his face to help him concentrate. When it came to Moors, heretics and Jews, he was tougher even than Isabella, who liked to be with her troops at the kill. He was genuinely egalitarian in his attitude to his wife (though not to anybody else). ‘
Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando
’ was their joint motto – ‘Isabella, Ferdinand, it’s all the same thing’ – about as good a recipe for marital happiness as history offers. Sadly for both, he outlived her by a dozen years.

All of this matters because Ferdinand and Isabella established the most powerful dynasty in the West, and probably in the world, at the time. Joanna the Mad married Philip the Handsome, a Habsburg and son of the Holy Roman Emperor: their son, as Charles V, would link the Spanish monarchy to that of Austria, as well as inheriting swathes of Burgundy and the Low Countries, southern Germany, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia. With his election in 1519 as Holy Roman Emperor (buttressed by the fact that his brother ruled Bohemia and Hungary too), Charles would become the first man since classical times to have a chance of uniting Europe. It was a chance that seemed all the greater because of the huge quantity of silver soon pouring into his coffers from the new American empire – to which we now return.

Choked on Silver

It was one of the most one-sided and momentous ambushes of all time, but it did not seem like that to the waiting Spanish as they shivered out of sight behind whitewashed walls. ‘Many of us urinated without knowing it, in sheer terror,’ confessed one later. Their leader, an illiterate, illegitimate and grizzled fighter called Francisco Pizarro from a dirt-poor town in Spain, had with him just 168 men, sixty-two of them with horses. On that morning, Saturday 16 November 1532, he was facing the ruler of Tahuantinsuyo – we call it Peru – and his army of eighty thousand troops. It is true that the Spanish had guns while the Inca army had weaponry more suitable to a Bronze Age battle – slingshots, bows and arrows, clubs and truncheons, and helmets of wood. But the Spanish arquebuses were slow and unwieldy and Pizarro had only about ten or twelve of them.

The odds still seemed hugely against the impertinent invaders, who had invited the Inca emperor Atahualpa to meet them in the huge square of the town of Cajamarca in the lush green Peruvian highlands. Cajamarca had temples and military buildings, constructed according to a monumental stone jigsaw technique, which still seems far cleverer than any European masonry. At its centre was a large open space surrounded by low-lying buildings used to house worshippers and travellers. Inside these the Spanish were hiding.

Atahualpa had no notion of a trap. He was on his way to be
crowned at the Inca capital Cuzco after defeating the army of his half-brother in a civil war. Though the Spanish had been causing mayhem further north for years, he had never heard of the conquistadors. Pizarro’s arrival on the coast had been reported to him by messengers and there was worrying news of looting, but it probably seemed a sideshow compared with the epic Inca civil war. An envoy had told Atahualpa that these were people of little account – unwarlike, disorganized creatures with pale skins, wearing shiny metal shells and sitting on big llamas. These ‘horses’ were not to be worried about; they did not eat people. One of the new arrivals, a priest called Friar Vicente de Valaverde, wore ‘crossed sticks’, said the Inca envoy. Atahualpa, therefore, was merely curious. He later told Pizarro he had designs on the horses, which he thought could be useful. As to the Spanish men, he was thinking of taking them as interesting oddities to guard his harem. When he arrived on his litter, decorated with parrot feathers, silver and gold and carried by eighty of his lords dressed in bright blue, six thousand crack soldiers were running jauntily alongside, singing songs, while other troops brushed the road ahead of him. They were largely unarmed and in their ceremonial costumes.

Because they would succumb so easily to Spanish weapons, it is sometimes assumed that the Inca army was a poor one. It was not. These were men trained with ferocious severity, who had beaten every rival force they had ever faced, warriors who expected to fight hand to hand, to the death. When they arrived at the square, it was empty. Eventually the priest appeared and told the emperor he had been instructed to bring him the Christian faith. Friar Vicente held out a Bible, an object Atahualpa had never seen before. Taking it, the Inca struggled to open it. The friar tried to help, but Atahualpa knocked him aside. When he opened the book, he stared at the squiggly black lines and threw it to the ground in disappointment. What a boring reception. What a useless gift!

The priest, outraged at this blasphemy. summoned the ambush. ‘Come out, come out, Christians!’ he yelled. ‘Come at these enemy dogs!’ Pizarro, in a prearranged signal, then dropped a cloth he had been holding. Two of his four small cannon fired (the other two failed). The Spanish, forgetting their fear and their uncomfortably wet boots, charged out on horseback and on foot. The noise and surprise caused utter panic among the Inca. They had never faced guns, steel
weapons or horses. Men fled in all directions. During the two hours left before sunset at least seven thousand Incas were killed, either trying to protect their sun-god emperor in his litter, or fleeing over a mud wall and rushing away into the fields. The Spanish speared and stabbed and hacked until they were exhausted. Atahualpa’s litter was eventually sent flying by mounted horsemen and Pizarro captured him, dragging him inside.

Still stunned by what had happened, the Inca emperor was offered a deal by Pizarro. The Spanish were already amazed by the quantities of gold and silver dishes, jugs, goblets and jewellery they had seized from the enemy. Atahualpa admitted to Pizarro that there was much more where that had come from. For the Inca, gold was associated with the sun, and thus the sun-god. The real value of the objects was in their workmanship and elegance, but for the Spanish the value was merely the metal, the commodity value. Soon they started to melt the crafted objects into ingots. Atahualpa, already aware of the Spaniards’ strange obsession, offered, as the price of his freedom, to fill the room he was being held in with gold. It was 22 feet long by 17 feet wide – it still exists – and would be filled to a depth of eight feet. It would then, he promised, in the same way be filled twice over with silver objects. All this would be done within two months. Astonished, Pizarro agreed and promised Atahualpa his freedom – a promise he had no intention of keeping.

At the end of the metal-searching and gathering, which in fact lasted until the following June, the greatest works of the Inca gold- and silversmiths were melted down to make more than 13,000 pounds of sullen yellow ingots and 26,000 of dull silver blocks.

By now the Spanish were thrusting further into the Inca empire, fighting and double-crossing and dividing their enemies. Atahualpa had been useful throughout because of the absolute authority he claimed over his people, even in captivity. This allowed the Spanish to move around largely unhampered while the Inca planned for the eventual recovery of his freedom and his empire.

It was not to be. Charged with trying to raise an army to free himself, Atahualpa was offered a choice of being burned to death or converting to Christianity and being strangled. Since the Inca believed in the preservation of the body through mummification, he chose conversion, and was duly garrotted. Pizarro then had his body burned anyway.

It is easy to see this as a classic confrontation between wicked early imperialists and noble locals. Easy, but wrong: if any leaders were selfconsciously imperial it was the Inca, whose empire had erupted out of its base at Cuzco, far to the south, then started seriously to spread just ninety years earlier. Cajamarca had fallen under their control sixty years before Pizarro got there, and the greatest period of Inca advance had come only three decades before the Spanish invasion. Skilled, militaristic engineers rather like the Romans, they had built ten thousand or so miles of roads, taking over cultures throughout the Andes and the Pacific coastal plain by a combination of military prowess and the bribery and intimidation of rival elites.

The Inca had no wheeled transport or writing, and hardly any metal weapons; their communications and bureaucracy were managed by means of an ingenious system of coloured, knotted strings called
quipu
, with runners to carry them from place to place. But Inca overlordship was harsh. All land belonged to the empire, and the people were organized in units of families owing service to the emperor and were not allowed to move. Atahualpa was hardly a saint: he expected slavish obedience to his every whim, casually ordered executions, and liked to drink out of the mummified head of an enemy general.

The weakness of the Inca empire, going well beyond its lack of horses and guns, was its extreme centralism, which would greatly help the Spanish. This system gave them, as long as they controlled Atahualpa, the brain-stem of the entire Inca administration. After killing Atahualpa, they made his brother Yupanqui emperor, and managed to continue to exert some control through him while waging war against the Inca resistance – a war that would go on for another forty years. This was already the Spanish pattern. As in their defeat of the Aztec empire further north under Hernando Cortés during 1519–21, the invaders found that many of the peoples conquered by that recently arisen empire were happy to ally themselves against the local oppressor, having little idea of the deal that they were making. Again, once they had captured the Aztec ruler, Montezuma, the Spanish were able to use his residual authority to control his people – and loot his gold.

Once the local Spanish commanders were in position in Mexico and Peru, they used native control systems and others imported from
Spain – notably the
encomienda
, a system of grants to noble Spaniards which imposed on the indigenous people conditions not far removed from slavery and which had first been deployed against the Muslims at home. In Peru, they simply appropriated the Inca custom of forced labour and applied it to their own needs, particularly to silver-mining at Potosí. One imperial system, after all, was merely replacing two others, so there was nothing of the transformation in relations between peasant and ruler that would happen in North America a little later.

The Spanish had not started out to build a new world in the sense of a new social start, a beginning-again. Far from it. They were adventurers after portable plunder and owing fealty to the Spanish court. Plenty of building went on – of schools, hospitals and barracks as well as churches – but reforms suggested from Madrid happened slowly or not at all. Antonio de Mendoza, an important early Spanish viceroy and marquis in New Spain, advised his successor to do little, and to do it slowly. Many of the key figures of the conquest, and of the decades after it, chose to end their days at home in Spain – Cortés among them.