The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (24 page)

metals or centralized states worth pillaging, the Spaniards turned to

slave raiding. They usually ignored metropolitan authority despite

122 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

enthusiastic declarations of loyalty to the Crown, and a leader’s

control over his men rested almost entirely on his ability to feed

their limitless craving for plunder. Many of these desperate fortune

hunters lost their lives to war or disease, while others slunk home

penniless. This explains why there never were enough men to fi ll out

the conquistador bands, and so the Spaniards often augmented their

forces with mercenaries, Africans, and local auxiliaries. At the same

time, Francisco Pizarro’s share of Atawallpa’s ransom came to 57,220

gold and 2,350 silver pesos, thereby demonstrating that the rewards

of successful conquistadorism were truly prodigious.11

As a Genoese, Christopher Columbus was not a conquistador in

the strictest sense, but Queen Isabella, who partially bankrolled his

attempt to discover new sea routes to Asia, granted him a
capitu-

lación
. As a governor, captain general, and admiral, he was entitled

to a share of the commerce and plunder of the New World, but the

miserable pickings on the island of Hispaniola, where he established a

base after fi rst making landfall in the Bahamas, led his men to revolt.

The Arawak peoples who inhabited most of the islands in the Caribbean had an agricultural economy that produced little in the way of

lootable treasure. Following the template of the Romans and Umayyads, the Spaniards soon realized that the real wealth of the West Indies

lay in the Arawak themselves. Spanish settlers on Hispaniola raided

them for slaves, and Columbus and succeeding governors rewarded

their restless followers with rights to the labor of entire Arawak communities.

By the early sixteenth century, Hispaniola was the seat of Spanish power in the New World and a base for conquistador operations.

Spreading like a virus in all directions, they conquered Puerto Rico,

Jamaica, and Cuba and gained footholds in Florida and Panama within

the fi rst two decades of the century. From the Panamanian colony at

Darien, Vasco Núñez de Balboa scoured the Pacifi c coast of Central

and South America for treasure.

The conquests born of these early explorations produced relatively modest returns. The real prize lay in central Mexico. Building

on centuries of imperial rule in the region by the Toltecs and other

groups in the Valley of Mexico, Nahuatl-speaking invaders from the

north founded the Aztec Empire in the thirteenth century. The Aztecs

ruled over hundreds of smaller client states and were expanding into

Guatemala and the coastal regions of the Gulf of Mexico when the

Spanish

Peru 123

Spanish fi rst arrived in the Caribbean. With approximately ten million to fi fteen million subjects, they were enormously wealthy and

seemingly impregnable in Tenochtitlán, their island capital, that

would eventually become Mexico City. As imperial rulers, they were

no more benevolent than the Inkas, and the dedication of their temple

to the imperial god Huitzilopochtli included tens of thousands of

human sacrifi ces.12

The Aztecs’ breathtakingly rapid capitulation to a small band of

Spaniards was due more to the willingness of their restive subjects

to ally with foreign invaders and to epidemic disease than to the conquistadors’ martial prowess. By themselves, they were hardly a formidable fi ghting force, and Spanish accounts from the period made

virtually no mention of the thousands of New World auxiliaries and

African slaves and freedmen who fi lled out their armies.13 Moreover,

Hernán Cortés, who arrived in Hispaniola as a clerk, was not a great

military tactician. But his naked ambition and reckless aggressiveness earned him command of a Spanish expedition to the Yucatán

Peninsula. Drawn by rumors of a wealthy empire in the interior, he

landed with a force of fi ve hundred men, sixteen horses, and several small cannons in 1519. The Cuban governor tried to recall the

conquistador chieftain after realizing that he had slipped his control, but Cortés pressed inland. The conquistadors took enormous

risks in charging into the heart of such a powerful empire, but their

horses and artillery gave them a few quick victories that impressed

the Aztecs’ subjects. Hoping to escape bondage, local rulers raised

thousands of auxiliary troops for the Spanish attack on the Aztec

heartland. Romantic accounts of Cortés’s expedition suggest that he

almost single-handedly defeated a great empire, but he would not

have stood a chance against the military might of the Aztecs without

Mesoamerican help.

The Aztec ruler Montezuma II certainly recognized that the

Spaniards were in a position to touch off a widespread anti-imperial

uprising among his subjects. He therefore offered to become a vassal

of Charles V if Cortés halted his march on Tenochtitlán. But the conquistadors were driven more by greed than by loyalty to the Crown.

Making the same desperate gamble that Pizarro would take in Cajamarca thirteen years later, Cortés took the Aztec ruler hostage upon

reaching the capital in 1519. He and a thousand of his local allies

withstood a siege by the massed Aztec forces while fending off an

124 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

attack by a Spanish “relief” column the Cuban governor had sent

to replace him. Montezuma, whose weakness cost him the support

of his own nobles, died in the fi ghting, and a well-timed smallpox

epidemic killed his successor and much of the besieging force.

Cortés executed the last emperor in 1524, thereby setting the stage

for the transformation of the former Aztec empire into the Viceroyalty of New Spain in 1535. By the 1560s, its dependencies even

included the Philippine archipelago, which the Spaniards annexed in

a bid to challenge the Portuguese monopoly of the Asian spice trade.

Cortés personally reaped the benefi ts of these audacious conquests

and became an inspiration for every conquistador. Although Spanish

aristocrats sniffed at his common origins, they could not ignore the

plundered wealth of the Aztecs. Charles made him the Marqués del

Valle de Oaxaca, which allowed his children to marry into the Castilian nobility. Cortés’s successors in New Spain pushed the Spanish

frontier into North America searching for the next great plunderable

New World empire, while other conquistador bands went south into

the Yucatán to loot the city-states that were the remnants of the great

Mayan empire.

The relative ease and stunning rapidity of these sweeping victories appeared to validate the conquistadors’ conviction that they

were morally and spiritually superior to New World peoples. Spanish chroniclers even advanced the hardly believable theory that the

Aztecs deferred to Cortés because Montezuma mistook him for the

god Quetzalcoatl, whose expected return coincided with the conquistador invasion. More plausible explanations for the Spanish success

emphasize the superiority of their horses, armor, and guns over the

stone weapons of the Mesoamericans. These signifi cant advantages

offset the Spaniards’ sparse numbers and gave them a temporary

measure of military superiority in the Americas that the Romans and

Umayyads never achieved in their wars of imperial conquest.

However, the most potent weapons in the Spanish imperial arsenal

were smallpox, measles, malaria, typhus, typhoid, infl uenza, and the

plague. These were endemic maladies in the Old World, but they produced virulent pandemics when Europeans inadvertently introduced

them into immunologically defenseless American populations. Exacerbated by warfare and abusive Spanish rule, these diseases virtually

wiped out the Arawak population of Hispaniola less than half a century after Columbus’s landing. The population of Mexico similarly

Spanish

Peru 125

dropped from roughly twenty-fi ve million to eight hundred thousand

people between Cortés’s invasion in 1518 and the early seventeenth

century.14 The devastating shock of these virgin-soil epidemics, which

occurred when populations had had no contact with a disease during

the lifetime of their oldest members, made the trauma of imperial

conquest even worse. It is easy to imagine how New World peoples

could have believed the world was literally coming to an end when

faced with such catastrophes.

Those who survived the brutality of the Spanish conquest became

an exploitable imperial resource. Although the conquistadors had the

means to seize all the land they wanted, it was worthless without people to work it. The Spanish authorities therefore exported an Iberian

institution known as the
encomienda
to the New World. Conferred

by the Crown and based on the Spanish verb
encomendar
, meaning

to “give in charge or entrust,” it accorded knights and warlords the

right to collect tribute in newly conquered territories in return for

military service.15 In the Americas, this system evolved into a royal

grant entitling the conquistadors to tribute in the form of labor from

designated communities. While the Spanish made extensive use of

African slaves, their reliance on Christianity to legitimize their New

World conquests led the Crown to ban the enslavement of Native

American peoples in the 1540s. The conquistadors adopted less obviously coercive methods to get their subjects to work. Eventually even

clergymen and Hispanized American nobles acquired
encomienda

grants, but the original
encomienderos
were conquistadors who

needed labor tribute to develop conquered lands. To justify this royally sanctioned exploitation they made a show of instructing their

charges in Christianity.

In theory, an
encomienda
was thus both extractive and civilizing,

but in practice it was simply systematic imperial domination dressed up

in moral garb. Not surprisingly, the conquistadors-turned-
encomien-

deros
were shameless and ruthless in their demands for labor. Many

were so successful that the
encomiendas
ultimately proved far more

lucrative than unsustainable looting. Enterprising
encomienderos

forced their Indian tributaries to grow cash crops, mine precious metals, weave cloth, raise livestock, and provide domestic labor. Metropolitan Spanish authorities tried to cap the number of people subject

to a single
encomienda
at fi ve hundred, but Cortés personally controlled more than one hundred thousand Mesoamericans.

126 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Seeking to establish themselves as landed New World nobility, the

encomienderos
strove to make their grants heritable by their offspring,

but the Crown wisely refused. It was hard enough to exercise royal

control across the vast expanse of the Atlantic without giving men

such as Cortés and Pizarro more power. Moreover, even metropolitan

Spanish offi cials, who had no reservations about oppressing Iberian

Jews and Muslims, were embarrassed by the conquistadors’ brutality. Taking their obligation to convert New World populations seriously, reformist Spanish clerics were the fi rst to draw attention to

the abuses of the
encomienda
system. In 1511, the Dominican friar

Antonio Montesinos preached a blistering Christmas day sermon to

an
encomiendero
congregation on Hispaniola:

You are in mortal sin . . . by reason of the cruelty and tyranny that you

practice on these innocent people. Tell me, by what right or justice do

you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? . . . Why

do you so greatly oppress and fatigue them, not giving them enough

to eat or caring for them when they fall ill from excessive labors, so

that they die or rather are slain by you, so that you may extract and

acquire gold every day? And what care do you take that they receive

religious instruction and come to know their God and creator? . . . Are

they not men? Do they not have rational souls?16

Montesinos’s passionate homily was a new kind of attack on

empire. Although Roman and Umayyad critics worried about its contaminating infl uences, they never concerned themselves with the fate

of foreign subjects. Montesinos and Bartolomé de Las Casas, who held

an
encomienda
on Hispaniola before joining the priesthood, were certain that indigenous Americans were inferior and alien, but they also

believed that they could become fully human through conversion,

honest labor, and paternal supervision by benevolent clergymen.

Documenting Spanish abuses in the Americas, the reformist

clerics petitioned the Spanish Crown and the Pope to supervise the

encomienderos
. Las Casas asserted that the papal bull did not give the

Spanish monarchs the authority to claim property in the Americas

and maintained that political power in the New World carried a moral

obligation to govern justly. Although the central role of Catholicism in early modern Spain prevented the Spanish authorities from

dismissing Las Casas’s impertinent arguments outright, this was a

debate he could not win.

Spanish

Peru 127

In answering their critics, Spanish imperial proponents painted