After Tamerlane (10 page)

The real secret of the Spanish blitzkrieg was cultural and biological. What made the Aztec Empire so vulnerable to Spanish attack, it has been argued, was the inability of its high command to grasp the origins, aims and motives of their European enemy or to imagine the reasons for its sudden appearance. The result was paralysing mental disorientation which destroyed the Aztec emperor's capacity to resist.
¹⁵
Lacking any contact with the Old World and its wandering community of pilgrims, pedlars, merchants and mercenaries through whom news and rumour were carried to its remotest regions, Aztec civilization was baffled by a ‘supernatural' event which no ritual, sacrifice or prayer could hope to influence. Military defeat was thus total and inevitable. But the rapidity and completeness of the Spanish military conquest and the collapse of any popular will to resist were also a biological phenomenon. After the cultural shock of inexplicable triumph came the biological shock of demographic catastrophe brought by lack of immunity to the diseases of the Old World. Between the time of Cortés's arrival and the end of the sixteenth century, the
population of Mexico fell by 90 per cent from perhaps 1 2 million to just over 1 million.
¹⁶
The psychological impact upon the indigenous population is hard to imagine. At the physical level, the basic preconditions of administrative control were abruptly transformed in a way inconceivable in tropical Africa, India or China, as the ratio of rulers to ruled and settlers to natives lurched from one extreme to another.

It was in these bizarre circumstances – more like science fiction than history – that Spanish rule in Meso-America was rapidly extended over the central plateau (the Aztec heartland), Mayan Yucatén and the arid tableland towards what became New Mexico. This was the northern, or Cuban, thrust of Spanish imperialism, driven by settlers and adventurers from the local Caribbean centre of Spanish maritime power. Meanwhile, a more southerly movement had brought Spanish goldseekers to the Tierra Firme of the South American mainland – modern Venezuela and Colombia – and to the isthmus region known as Castilla del Oro. It was from here and the settlement founded at Panama in the early 1520s that the Spanish launched another blitzkrieg conquest (as it turned out) of the second great pre-Columbian empire.

In many ways the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire in the Andean highlands was even more astonishing than the triumph over the Aztecs. The Inca dominions lay much further away from the Caribbean bridgehead. They were less accessible from the sea, and extended over a much greater area – from modern Ecuador into the northern part of modern Bolivia. The great interior plateau that the Spanish called the Altiplano formed the core of the empire. It was richer in minerals and ecologically more diverse than Aztec Mexico.
¹⁷
The Incas had successfully incorporated all the areas of stable peasant cultivation in the Andean highlands into their empire. Their system of taxation, designed to accumulate large quantities of produce as well as precious metals, sustained a standing army, rewarded local and regimental elites, and was more complex and efficient than anything seen in Mexico. The wealth that it yielded and the conscription of labour under the
mit'a
system enabled the Incas to construct a remarkable network of roads, fortresses, magazines, bridges, terraces and irrigation works, as well as a magnificent imperial capital at Cuzco with a population of between
100,000
and
300,000
people.
¹⁸
This was the empire that Francisco Pizarro entered in 1532 with 167 followers – the ‘Men of Cajamarca'.

Like some of the later
entradas
into Central America, Pizarro's expedition had been paid for by the profits from the looting of Amerindian treasure. This was how Gaspar Espinosa, Pizarro's main backer, had made his fortune and become the richest settler in Panama.
¹⁹
Pizarro, like Cortés, enjoyed the advantage of surprise and had weaponry unknown to his American opponents. Both these factors played a key part in the ruthless coup by which, with almost one blow, the Spanish were able to throw the entire Inca system into political chaos. On 16 November 1532 Pizarro met the Inca ruler at Cajamarca in northern Peru. Atahualpa may have believed that such a small band of strangers could be easily captured by his vast retinue, or that they were mere mercenaries who could be bought off with treasure. He was quite unprepared for the scale of their ambitions. Within hours of his entering the square at Cajamarca, he was a captive of Pizarro, his closest political followers were dead or dying, and some thousands of his army had been cut down by Spanish cavalry. This devastating onslaught virtually decapitated the empire. With the failure of the Inca counter-attack, the conquistadors were free to fight a fratricidal war for the spoils of victory before Peru was finally brought under the effective control of the Spanish authorities in faraway Madrid.

Like the conquest of Mexico, the conquest of Peru can be explained in part by the brittleness of the imperial regime that the Spanish had faced. Like the Aztec Empire, Inca rule depended upon the collaboration of many smaller ethnic units only recently subjugated or of doubtful loyalty. It may also be true that, at the moment of the Spanish invasion, both empires had reached a critical stage in their imperial expansion when adverse logistics and diminishing returns had begun to drive their rulers into new exactions and unpopular reforms. Prophecies of doom in pre-Columbian Mexico, and actual civil war in pre-Columbian Peru, were symptomatic of dangerous internal stresses.
²⁰
But it was not these circumstances alone that made these empires so uniquely vulnerable to the aggression of a handful of seaborne invaders, whose predatory onslaughts elsewhere on the mainland yielded very mixed success or no success at all. What singled out
the two great pre-Columbian empires was the very sophistication of their centralized political systems, pivoted upon an omnipotent, godlike emperor whose sudden capture disabled the whole imperial mechanism. What made this worse was the cultural isolation, which denied these omnipotent rulers sufficient knowledge of their alien invaders. With no advance warning, they failed to apply prudential rules of statecraft and self-defence. The Spaniards' weapons and tactics, especially their firearms and warhorses, inflicted the
coup de grâce
. The biological shock of Old World disease – a form of involuntary germ warfare – proved in both cases a deadly means of preventing the secondary resistance that might otherwise have sprung up as the effects of foreign conquest began to be felt. It was the combined effect of these different factors that turned the Spanish encounter with the two great mainland civilizations into blitzkrieg conquests of almost negligible cost. Perhaps any of the great Eurasian states would have enjoyed a similar success: Tamerlane would have made short work of Montezuma. It was the Occident's good fortune that its geographical position – closest to the Caribbean antechamber of the pre-Columbian empires – gave it a decisive lead in the acquisition of new lands in the Outer World.

It remained to be seen whether the conquistadors could transform the gargantuan pillaging expeditions that had wrecked the Aztec and Inca states into a more durable expansion of Spanish wealth and power. Would they be able to turn the fantastic windfalls of treasure into an economic system, and build a neo-Europe in the Americas? In economic terms, at least, the two great viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Lima (Peru) seemed a striking success. The cycle of short-lived gold rushes whose exhaustion had driven the Spanish beyond Hispaniola and Cuba was not repeated in Mexico and Peru. The early caches of gold, which had enriched the first conquistadors beyond their wildest dreams, were quickly supplemented by the discovery in the 1540s of large reserves of silver at Zacatecas in Mexico and at the great mountain of Potosí in modern Bolivia. By the later 1500s both viceroyalties were sending large quantities of bullion back to Spain in the great annual convoys of the Carrera das Indias. This stream of mineral wealth had important consequences. It sucked in new migrants from Spain and funded the import of slaves from Africa.
It paid for a colonial administration and a judicial system vastly more elaborate than the semi-feudal regime of the early conquest. It helped to pay for the massive presence of the Catholic Church, whose cathedrals, churches, cemeteries, ubiquitous imagery and public ritual were the most visible sign of the
conquista
.
²¹
In Mexico alone, the Church had deployed some three thousand priests amid a rapidly declining Amerindian population of about 1 million by the end of the century. By 1622 there were thirty-four dioceses in Spanish America. In short, it was gold and chiefly silver that turned the brutal fact of conquest into a structure of colonial rule.

But the extent to which this mineral bonanza had secured the economic and cultural integration of the New World into a ‘Greater Spain' by 1620 should not be exaggerated. Vast areas of ‘Spanish' America lay outside the enclaves of effective Spanish occupation: the
llanos
of Venezuela; the tropical lowlands of Central America; the deserts of northern Mexico; the dense forests east of the Andes; and the grasslands stretching away to the estuary of the Río de la Plata. There, unsupported by mineral wealth, Spanish influence was frail or non-existent. Nor was American silver a wholly reliable means of binding together the economies of Europe and the Americas. Supply and demand fluctuated. By the early seventeenth century, Mexican silver shipments to Europe (although not Mexican silver production) were in decline. Mexico's commercial links with East Asia, to which a large proportion of its silver was exported, were becoming more important. As Europe's population growth and commercial activity slowed down after 1620, its thirst for Spanish-American silver slackened: metropole and colony were drifting apart.
²²
Culturally, too, the consequences of conquest were mixed. In both Mexico and Peru, the fury of the Spanish onslaught (both physical and biological) had quickly dismantled pre-conquest religious institutions. By 1531 the Spanish had demolished 600 temples in Mexico alone, and destroyed
20,000
idols.
²³
The old priestly elite was dethroned. A wide degree of religious conformity was imposed upon the subject population, who adopted Christian cults and festivals with little resistance.
²⁴
Amerindian notables were assimilated to some degree into the administrative structure. At a humbler level, Spanish clothes supplanted the traditional costume, on which the Church had frowned.
²⁵

Yet Spain's cultural impact was blunted by circumstances. Limited in numbers and concentrated in towns, Spanish settlers had only spasmodic contact with the Amerindian populations of the hinterland.
²⁶
This tendency was reinforced by the decision of the Spanish government to segregate Amerindian communities from what administrators and churchmen saw as the corrupting and exploitative behaviour of the settlers. Combined with the remoteness and inaccessibility of much of the interior (especially in the Andean highlands), this helped to ensure that the landscape retained its old religious and magical significance for the indigenous peoples. Even where Amerindians were more directly exposed to Spanish colonial influence, the results were often ambiguous. To a large extent, the administrative divisions of New Spain re-created the old ‘city states' of pre-Columbian times, with considerable continuity among the local ruling elite. Destroying the structure of pre-conquest religion did not mean the end of traditional healers, prophets and soothsayers, the
conjuros
, who continued to enjoy great prestige in the countryside.
²⁷
Nor of course could Spanish supplant the pre-conquest languages. It was well into the seventeenth century, argues a recent study, before Spanish began to affect the grammatical structure of Amerindian languages: until then, its influence was limited to the use of certain borrowed 28 nouns.
²⁸

If Spanish America remained residually and tenaciously Amerindian, it also became much more ethnically diverse. It was true that in both Mexico and Peru enough Spanish arrived – drawn from both sexes and a wide range of occupations – to create ‘complete' societies, capable of preserving and reproducing Spanish communities along Old World lines.
²⁹
But from the early days of conquest Spanish males had interbred with the indigenous population to create the ‘mestizo' people. To supplement the dwindling and reluctant native labour force, they had introduced African slaves in the mid sixteenth century, and interbred with them as well, to form a ‘mulatto' community. By the mid seventeenth century the population of New Spain consisted of some
150,000
white Spanish,
150,000
mestizos,
130,000
mulattos and
80,000
African slaves, as well as perhaps 1 million Amerindians. A similar pattern obtained in Peru; and throughout Spanish America there were perhaps
330,000
African slaves by the 1640s.
³⁰
The out
come was the birth of complex, racially stratified societies in which occupation and status reflected ethnic origin, and where political and economic power was largely in the hands of the whites, whether Spanish-born or locally born ‘
criollos
'.

To an extent unthinkable in the Old World of Eurasia, Spain had wrought the dissolution of the most powerful societies in pre-Columbian America, and the virtual annihilation of some of the weaker. It had created the space in which a new post-conquest society could be created, potentially receptive to Spanish needs and ideas. But by the middle of the seventeenth century, after more than 150 years in the Americas, it had achieved the conquest but not the incorporation of its American possessions. New Spain would not be another Spanish kingdom, a replica of Castile. Instead, the outcome of conquest had been the creation of a new ethnic geometry, and a distinctive if still protean Spanish-American culture, a new Creole society.