The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (23 page)

Unlike their Muslim predecessors, the Spanish Habsburgs eventually exercised more direct control over their empire. But during

the heyday of the conquistadors in the early sixteenth century they

practiced empire by franchise. The Crown delegated the exploration,

conquest, and exploitation of the New World to private imperial contractors such as Pizarro. These reckless adventurers were the heirs of

the Christian warlords and military orders who had taken Iberia from

the Muslims. Backed by the Castilian Crown, zealous nobles (
hidal-

gos
) won plunder and landed estates in Al-Andalus through their

exploits on the battlefi eld. The New World conquistadors had much

more common origins, but they also pursued noble status by winning

Spanish

Peru 117

new lands for Christendom. In this sense they were not unlike the

Muslim fi ghters who built the original Arab caliphate.

As with Islam, Christianity also had the capacity to provide a

powerful moral justifi cation for empire. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI

granted the Spanish Crown the exclusive right to all land in the New

World beyond an arbitrary north-south line drawn 370 leagues west

of the Cape Verde Islands. The Spanish thus had the right to wage

a “just war” against resisting New World peoples who rejected the

Pope’s commandment. Although he probably never believed that he

could convert Atawallpa to Christianity, Vicente de Valverde’s seemingly nonsensical pantomime at Cajamarca served the very important purpose of giving the Pizarrists a legitimate right to use violence

against the Inkas.

Upon encountering New World peoples, representatives of the

Crown read out a formal statement, in Spanish, declaring that the

Pope had given their lands to Spain. Drafted in 1510 by the Council of

Castile, this
requerimiento
(requirement) warned resistors:

With the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country,

and shall make war against you . . . and shall subject you to the yoke

and obedience of the Church and of their [Spanish] Highnesses; we

shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make

slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their

Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and

shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can.

The pronouncement concluded with a breathtakingly hypocritical addendum: “We protest that the deaths and losses which shall

accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or

ours.”6 Valverde most likely did not actually read out this statement

to Atawallpa, but the Inka lord’s violent rejection of his Bible gave the

Pizarrists the right to act as if he had formally defi ed the
requerim-

iento
.

To the Spanish, indigenous Americans who rejected Christianity

were degenerate heathens who needed to be saved from damnation

by force. Stateless peoples were sinful enough, but the Inkas were

depraved tyrants who preyed on their Andean subjects. In other words,

they were guilty of empire building. Explicitly imagining themselves

as the heirs of ancient Rome, the Spanish believed that these “barbarians” could be “civilized” through imperial domination. Charles’s son

118 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Philip II ordered Spanish offi cials to teach the defeated Amerindians

to be western: “Have them dress and wear shoes and let them have

many other good things heretofore prohibited to them. . . . Give them

the use of bread, wine, oil, and other foodstuffs, cloth, silk, linen,

horses, cattle, tools, arms and all the rest that Spain has had.”7 While

these seemed generous instructions, the Spanish jurist and entrepreneur Juan de Matienzo was more frank in describing the real cost of

these “good things”: “We give them religious instruction, we teach

them to live like men, and they give us silver, gold or things [of]

worth.”8

The Andeans paid a terrible price for Spain’s imperial lessons.

Ancient and medieval empire builders exploited their subjects on

the grounds that they were alien barbarians, but they also gave at

least some of them an opportunity to escape subjecthood through

romanization, islamicization, and other forms of cultural assimilation. Atawallpa undoubtedly looked upon Pizarro as a barbarian, but

the Spaniards’ victory at Cajamarca demonstrated that the real measure of civilization in an imperial context was military supremacy.

As imperial conquerors themselves, the Inkas were confi dent in their

superiority over their own Andean subjects, but their loss to the

Pizarrists now made them the barbarians. Times were changing, and

Spanish rule in the Americas was shaped in part by a larger ideological shift taking place in Europe that deemed nonwesterners and nonChristians inherently and irrevocably inferior regardless of whether

they were nobles or common subjects.

Philip’s paternalistic order to uplift his Amerindian subjects obscured

the reality that early modern subjecthood entailed a higher magnitude

of dehumanizingly ruthless exploitation. Most of the laborers and peasants in sixteenth-century Iberia were barely free themselves, but in

the Andes new subordinate imperial identities justifi ed unprecedented

levels of systematic plunder, sexual exploitation, and permanent servitude. We know little about how Britons and Iberians felt about becoming imperial subjects, but the chronicler Don Felipe Huamán Poma de

Ayala, a direct descendant of Inkan nobles, complained bitterly to Philip

about the hypocrisy of Spanish rule in the Andes.

Just imagine, Your Majesty, being an Indian in your own country and

being loaded up as if you were a horse, or driven along by a succession

of blows from a stick. Imagine being called a dirty dog or a pig or a

Spanish

Peru 119

goat. . . . What would you and your Spanish compatriots do in these

circumstances? My own belief is that you would eat your tormentors

alive and thoroughly enjoy the experience.9

In the new overseas empire, Andeans such as Don Felipe were now

inferior to Spaniards of all classes, regardless of their status or nobility. Later generations of nationalist historians protested that these

negative depictions of Spanish rule were a “black legend” concocted

by jealous French-and Englishmen, but there was no denying that

the conquistadors destroyed the culture and civilization of the Andes

in their unrelenting quest for treasure.

Although they were still deciding exactly what it meant to be

Spanish, sixteenth-century Spaniards codifi ed this new meaning of

empire by creating the world’s fi rst truly global imperial state. Building on advances in maritime technology pioneered by the Portuguese, they explored and conquered vast territories in the Americas

and Asia. For the fi rst time, the constraints of travel and communication no longer limited empires to a single continental land mass.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown ruled over

lands stretching from the Americas to the Philippines, in addition to

most of western and central Europe. Yet this was a highly decentralized conglomerate empire built through European dynastic alliances,

franchised New World conquests, and armed trade in Asia. Its global

scope was impressive and unprecedented, but it was ungovernable

by direct means. Near constant warfare in Europe and glacially slow

transoceanic communication forced the Spanish Crown to delegate

considerable authority to its representatives overseas. In the Americas, this autonomy created lucrative opportunities for privately

funded empire builders such as Pizarro, while leaving New World

communities at their mercy.

Spain’s imperial project sprang from the Iberian experience of

Muslim rule and the centuries of warfare resulting from the “reconquest” of most of the peninsula by the Kingdom of Castile. Beginning as one of the many small states on the northern periphery of

Al-Andalus in the ninth century, Castile gradually became the dominant Christian power in Iberia after the fall of the Andalusi Umayyad

caliphate. By the mid-fi fteenth century, the Iberian Peninsula consisted of four primary states: Muslim Granada and the kingdoms of

Castile, Aragón, and Portugal. In 1469, Isabella, who won the Castil-120 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

ian throne in a civil war, married Ferdinand of Aragón, thereby creating the framework of modern Spain.

The marriage did not produce a single state. Castile consisted primarily of the less productive northern highlands and the new territories

wrested from the Muslims. Its knights drove the Reconquista because

they had few alternatives to conquest and plunder. It was no accident that Pizarro and many of his fellow conquistadors came from

Extremadura, the poor Castilian frontier region that was once western Al-Andalus. Aragón, by comparison, was a commercially focused

kingdom. Ferdinand was essentially a constitutional monarch who

deferred to representative assemblies in his various realms, while

Isabella’s Castile was an emerging absolutist state. Although they

ruled together as Catholic sovereigns, they did not have a common

economy or army.

Under Isabella, Castile was a Catholic state that had no room for

non-Christians, and after Granada’s fall in 1492 she looked for further crusading opportunities in North Africa and the Canary Islands.

The Reconquista thus provided the template for Spanish conquests in

the Americas. The rulers of Castile created the precedent for conquistadorism by granting Christian knights and military religious orders

extensive estates carved out of captured Andalusi territory. Warfare

logically became an avenue to gentlemanly status if not outright

ennoblement. Most of the Pizarrists had ordinary backgrounds, but

they sought hidalgo status by replicating the feats of the Reconquista

in the New World. Indeed, the conquistadors often equated Andeans

with Muslims.

Although they were the primary agents of Spanish empire building in the Americas, the conquistadors were largely peripheral to

the main Spanish imperial project, which remained fi rmly grounded

in Europe. Aragón’s claim to the crowns of Sicily and Naples made

Ferdinand and Isabella Italian rulers, which drew them further into

European dynastic politics. Their daughter Juana married the son

of the Austrian Holy Roman Emperor, and in 1519 their grandson

Charles came into a great European empire by inheriting the crowns

of the Spanish kingdoms and Habsburg Austria. Disorder in the German lands led Charles to surrender the Austrian crown to his brother

Ferdinand, but as King Charles I of Spain and Emperor Charles V

of the Holy Roman Empire, he became the most powerful ruler in

Europe. His son Philip II, whose reign from 1556 to 1598 marked the

Spanish

Peru 121

heyday of the Habsburg Spanish Empire, ruled over Spain, Portugal,

much of Italy, and what came to be called the Spanish Netherlands.

Under the Habsburgs, Spain never achieved the unqualifi ed military supremacy that drove the empire building of its ancient and

medieval predecessors. Nor was it really an empire on the Roman or

Umayyad model. In fact, Charles and Philip fought incessant wars

to defend rather than expand their European holdings. Most early

modern European rulers waged war in the name of religion rather

than nationalism, and as committed Catholics, the Spanish Habsburgs became embroiled in enervating and seemingly endless confl icts in central Europe. Issues of sovereignty, trade, and taxation took

on bitter religious dimensions as princes and rebels in Germany and

the Netherlands embraced militant Protestantism to legitimize their

opposition to Habsburg imperial rule. Finally, the burden of defending Christian Europe from Ottoman imperial expansion also fell on

the Habsburgs.

It is therefore hardly surprising that the Spanish emperors paid

relatively little attention to the overseas possessions that the conquistadors dropped in their laps. Ferdinand and Isabella never explicitly

intended to acquire a global empire, but Pope Alexander’s 1493 bull

granting Spain primary title to the New World certainly encouraged

them. Distracted by events in Europe, they continued the traditions

of the Reconquista by granting speculators a franchise in the form

of a
capitulación
to conquer new territories in their name. Like the

Umayyad caliphs, they demanded one-fi fth of the spoils in return.

The conquistadors themselves were mostly young, unmarried,

marginal men with little military experience. In securing the license

from the Crown that raised them to the status of captain general,

the leaders of the conquistador bands and their backers assumed total

responsibility for fi nancing and organizing their speculative adventures. They were, in essence, amateurs who gambled their lives and

meager savings in a desperate bid to wring enough wealth from the

New World to become respectable Spanish gentlemen. Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztec Empire, famously remarked that he

“came [to the New World] to get rich, not to till the soil like a peasant.”10 The conquistadors’ appetite for treasure was so insatiable

that the Inkas believed they ate gold, but if a region lacked precious