The Conquistadors, page 1
The
Conquistadors
Hammond
Innes
Dedicated to
Billy and Pierre
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
PART ONE Ferdinand & Isabella
1 The Eight-Hundred-Year Crusade
2 Birth of an Empire
PART TWO Cortés
3 Prelude to Conquest
4 The March to Mexico
5 The Aztecs
6 The Enigma of Moctezuma
7 Defeat and Conquest
PART THREE Pizarro
8 The Gold Seekers
9 Expeditions to the Andes
10 The Incas
11 Massacre, Gold and Civil War
PART FOUR The Aftermath
Author’s Notes
A Note on the Author
Footnotes
FOREWORD
The period of the great Discoverers has always appealed to me, but for a novelist to be asked to write a history is a great challenge. It was one I hesitated to accept. Three things finally decided me: First, I am essentially a story-teller, and the stories of Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru are among the greatest and most terrible in history; secondly, all my novels have grown out of the realities of the countries in which I have set them, so that respect for the truth is a built-in habit of work; finally, the physical characteristics of a country have always seemed to me the key to the nature of its people and their history.
Three years’ study of contemporary records, and the much more voluminous later accounts, left me far from satisfied. So many were politically biased and posed questions that could only be resolved when I stood where Cortés and Pizarro had stood. As a result of the journeys I then undertook, I came to realise how terrain had dominated, even compelled, events. Not only terrain, but the sea as well – and here, with a sailor’s eye, I hope I have been able to add something to the reader’s understanding of what it is like to be the first to probe the shores of unknown lands.
My thanks are due to Dr John Street, Director of the Centre of Latin-America Studies in Cambridge University, for reading and advising on the main body of the work, and to Dr G. H. S. Bushnell, Reader in New World Archaeology at the same University, for advising on the chapters dealing with the Aztec and Inca civilizations. Also to all those who, in their official capacity, or unofficially, assisted me in my travels and researches in Spain, Mexico and Peru – in particular to Sir Robert Marett for his information about Zempoala, to Captain B. Hokansen for making me free of his chartroom and his thirty years’ experience of the South American coast on the run down from Panama to Callao, to Dr J. J. Wilson of the Carta Geologica Nacional for his very detailed information about the topography of the Andes above Cajamarca, and to Senora Elejalde for introducing me to all the private collections in Lima.
I would also like to thank my friend John Hadfield for initiating the project, and George Speaight, who not only edited the book, but has contributed so much to it in maps and pictures, many of these previously unpublished. Finally my thanks are due, as always, to my wife Dorothy for her assistance with the text, and also for her work in listing items of outstanding interest in museums and private collections, and to my secretary, Nora Anderson for her untiring efforts in keeping pace with all the various drafts.
H.I.
PART ONE
Ferdinand & Isabella
1 The Eight-Hundred-Year Crusade
The Conquistadors, like most human phenomena, were the product of history. They were Spaniards and they explored and conquered new worlds for the glory of God and their own profit in the early 1500s. Behind them they had centuries of constant fighting to clear their Iberian Peninsula of the Moorish invaders. They were men trained in war, crusaders in their own land who had pushed the infidel back step by step, breeding kingdoms and principalities as they advanced. The result was that their nobility were little better than armed and castled warlords. And then, in 1492, it was all over, the last Moorish stronghold taken. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain had newly emerged as a nation. The eight-hundred-year crusade was at an end, and her chivalry, born to the saddle and the sword, and burning with a wild religious fervour, was suddenly unemployed. The Italian wars provided an immediate outlet, but Spain’s geographical position pointed inexorably west, to the new world Columbus had recently discovered.
The men who had fought their last battle against the Moors turned soldiers of fortune and followed the sailors across the sea to seek out new infidels and blaze a trail of murder and heroism that is unique in the history of European peoples. Their lust for gold was infinite, their religious fervour genuine. This strange mixture of motive, their fantastic fortitude in the face of the most frightening terrain and the most appalling odds, their ability to carve their way by guile and force through armies two hundred times their number, requires explanation. Otherwise all that is contained in this account of the conquistadors is incredible.
As always in history, geographical position and the nature of the country played a dominant role. The Iberian Peninsula is the ultima thule of Western Europe, its coast line part Mediterranean, part Atlantic, its southern apex facing Africa ten miles across the Gibraltar straits. It was from across these straits that the first known invaders came 4,500 years ago. Others were to follow. Placed as Spain is on the periphery of Mediterranean cultural growth, its rivers and rich valleys separated by wild mountains, the successive influences of Phoenician and Greek traders were confined to the southern and eastern coasts. So, too, was the Carthaginian influence, which began about 540 B.C. and lasted for three centuries. More important at this time was the advance of the Celts across the Pyrenees, intermingling with the peoples of the central plateau to form the Celtiberi. Carthage never had a strong hold on the country, so that the Romans, by a policy of conciliation, gradually replaced them. At first, this infiltration followed upon the need to protect their Italian homeland from the incursions of the two great Carthaginian generals, Hamilcar and Hannibal. But by 197 B.C. the Romans were so firmly established in the Peninsula that the areas previously occupied by the Carthaginians were designated the Roman provinces of Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior. Conciliation was now replaced by a more positive policy, and in the two centuries B.C. the Roman legions steadily conquered the whole Peninsula. The Celtiberi, centred around the head-waters of Duero and Tagus, had never been conquered by the Carthaginians. Like all Celts, they were a brave independent people. They held Rome at bay for half a century, were defeated by Scipio in 133 B.C. and thereafter contributed greatly to Rome’s auxiliaries.
For nearly five centuries the country had peace. The influence of Rome on the development of Spanish culture was thus very great. The people became Christian, lived under Roman law, and, because of the nature of the land and the Roman method of garrisoning, the towns increased in importance at the expense of tribal organization. But at the beginning of the fifth century A.D. Spain, or Hispania as it was then called, suffered with the rest of Europe the effects of the power vacuum created by the decline of Rome. The Vandals, Alans and Sueves poured in from Europe, to be followed fifty years later by the Visigoths. The conquered Romano-Hispanic people remained Catholics, continued to live under their Roman laws, whilst the conquerors, who were Christians of the Arian sect and whose social structure was based on Germanic customs, were a Teutonic élite under their own elected kings. By the beginning of the seventh century, however, with the conversion of their king to Catholicism, and many of the clergy also conforming, the segregation of the two races ceased to be effective. Latin became the official language, Catholic bishops assumed a dominant role in politics, and about 654 a unified legal system was established. Part Roman, but basically Germanic, the Forum Judicum was a powerful influence that outlasted the Visigoth kingdom by many centuries to provide the basis for the local codes or fueros of the Spanish medieval towns. Moreover, the unification of law and religion had the effect of breaking down the barriers between conqueror and conquered. Inter-marriage, banned by Roman, not Visigothic, custom, now produced a mingling of the races, so that the Iberian Peninsula became a single unit under a king who remained elected and not hereditary. Short though this domination was, the Visigoths exercised an extraordinary influence on Spanish race and customs, an influence that was to make medieval Spain entirely different from the rest of medieval Europe.
The third great moulder of Spanish character fell upon the country in 711 in the form of Islamic hordes from across the Gibraltar straits. In seven years the Moors – mainly North African Berbers, but including Arabs and Syrians – had conquered almost the entire Visigoth kingdom of Spain and had killed the king, Roderick. They then swept across the Pyrenees into the land of the Franks. Only the north and north-western Atlantic coastal areas remained, secured by their mountain bastions, to form a nucleus for the later Christian kingdoms.
The essential weaknesses of the Moslem state were that Spain was administered as a province, subject, rather nominally, first to faraway Damascus, later to North Africa, and that its provincial emirs and caliphs were absolute and hereditary rulers. The inevitable result was that, whenever the central rule weakened, the country disintegrated into smaller provincial units. Cordoba, Seville, Granada, Valencia, Toledo, Badajoz, Saragossa were all at one time or another separate states, the unit dictated by the geography of mountain, valley, river or coast. Nevertheless, in spite of the weaknesses of the system, the Moslems were in Spain for almost eight centuries.
The basis of Moorish domination was their Arab cavalry and their single-mindedness. They were conquerors carrying the word of the Prophet at the point of the scimitar, their fast Arab horses the motive power to drive the point home. At first there was no pressure on Christians to change their religion or their laws; there was even some degree of integration. And the Moslem invasion brought to Spain the culture and knowledge of the older civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean. The development of irrigation opened up arid lands to agriculture. Education was encouraged; the townships became literate; music, poetry, arts and science, particularly mathematics, all flourished.
But the wars went on, the free Christians, from their mountain fastnesses, pushing into the plains, in search of the crumbs of better living, hating the infidel who had raped the best of their country’s land, building up within themselves a religious fervour quite as strong as that which had carried the Moors to Spain. Other European countries might embark on strange crusades to wrest the Holy Land from the Saracens; the Spaniards, locked away from the rest of Europe by the formidable barrier of the Pyrenees, had their own crusade always on their doorstep. The Cross and St James was their battle-cry. No man with any claim to breeding regarded himself as other than a fighting machine. This was his job, his life, an integral part of his faith for eight centuries. It stamped him indelibly.
This crusade against the Moors was, however, an intermittent one. True to their history, the Spanish were cursed with internecine strife. Split by racial origin and terrain into petty states based on fortified towns, or on the castled strongholds of traditional nobility, they lacked the national unity and community of interest necessary to drive the invader into the sea. Indeed, they spent more time, energy and blood squabbling amongst themselves than in fighting the Moors, and it was only the lure of the lush valleys, so well developed by the conquerors, that brought them down from their bleak mountain fastnesses. Here in the plains, they were at the mercy of the speedy Arab cavalry, and when they were successful, it was often only to exchange bleak impregnability for futile vulnerability, their labour and their crops exposed to ruthless counter-attack. Not until they had pushed the invader back over the Duero river did they have a natural barrier along which they could erect some proper form of defence work, and this was only achieved after a century and a half of sporadic fighting. Six hundred years were to pass before they reached the Tagus.
Nevertheless, disunity amongst themselves was overlaid by the unity of faith. They might resent, in their pride, the growing power of the Pope, but they were ardent soldiers of Christ, their priests assuming greater and greater power in the affairs of state and also in martial matters, even leading them into battle. Minstrels immortalised the heroic deeds of their knights. Great bardic poems like the Poema del Cid exercised an extraordinary moral influence, so that chivalry was raised to a peak of romantic heroism.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, the long-drawn-out crusade had pushed the Moors back into the southern stronghold of Granada, and the petty states of Christian Spain had coalesced into the three kingdoms of Portugal, Castile and Leon, and Aragon, with the little kingdom of Navarre still land-locked and independent within the fastnesses of the Pyrenees. We are now at the threshold of an era in which Spain was to emerge as a nation, and which was to give her, almost reluctantly, the New World and a great colonial empire.
The pioneers of this golden age of discovery were the Portuguese. The capture of the Moorish city of Ceuta in 1415 started them on their long and expensive quest for a route to the spice islands of the Moluccas. From the Tagus ship after ship sailed out into the Atlantic, probing an ocean that was believed by many to pour its waters over the lip of the world in a roaring cascade.
Their close contact with the Moors gave the seafarers not only the means of navigation, but a new type of vessel, the caravel. The descendants of this vessel can be seen in the Tagus to this day, the broad-beamed, shallow-draft wine ships known as fragatas. The caravel, with its lateen sails derived from the Arab dhow, was the first ocean-going vessel capable of making to windward without the use of oars. This was the key to Portuguese discovery, and the man who used it was the son of King John I of Portugal and a daughter of England’s John of Gaunt – Henry the Navigator.
This extraordinary prince, who became obsessed with the desire to explore beyond the confines of existing maps and charts, set up his court at Sagres on a remote headland in the extreme south-west corner of his kingdom. This headland is the one we now know as Cape St Vincent, a low-cliffed promontory running out into the sea, the one place on the whole of that rugged coast where you look south, as well as west, across the Atlantic. It was a position from which the imagination of every seaman could easily be stirred. Anyone who has sailed his own boat past that jutting point of land, running hard under full sail before the prevailing north wind of summer – the Portuguese trades – will understand how, in the days of predominantly square-rigged ships, the sailors’ attention would inevitably be rivetted to discovery southward.
Here, in what amounted to a naval operations centre, Henry gathered together cartographers, astronomers, books and charts. Here he briefed his navigators, sending them down the coast of Africa in repeated attempts to probe beyond the reefs of Cape Bojador, from which point all previous voyagers had been swept into oblivion by the combination, deadly to square-riggers, of the north-east trades and the north equatorial drift. His attempts went unrewarded for fourteen years. In 1434, however, one of his most daring navigators, Gil Eannes, sailed seaward to the tip of this fifteen-mile barrier of reefs and then beat back in his caravel, against the wind, to the flat sand coast of the Sahara. Bojador, which had been the southern limit of the Atlantic for a thousand years, was finally conquered, and after that Henry’s captains probed rapidly south along the African coast. Existing maps, which dated back to the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa almost six hundred years before Christ, all showed the continent much fore-shortened. By 1458 the Portuguese had reached the Rio Grande, reporting the coast running away to the south-east, so that at the time of Henry’s death, in 1460, it seemed as though they were on the verge of success. But a year later they probed the Bight of Biafra and found the coast of Africa continuing south. It was a bitter disappointment.
Thereafter Portuguese interest in African coastal exploration declined. But a country, so dedicated and so geared to mercantile expansion, does not suddenly cease all exploration because its hopes have been dashed. Having failed in one direction, they would undoubtedly have probed in another. They had the ships, the men and the experience. The question that has fascinated students of maritime history ever since is, where did their ships go after 1461? Whereas, before, they had been prepared to publish their knowledge, now, like the Phoenician traders, their policy became one of absolute secrecy. The death penalty was introduced for revealing information about their voyages, and as late as 1503 the Basque cartographer, Juan de la Cosa, who three years earlier had drawn his mappemunde, was only released from arrest after he had falsified two charts for dispatch to Spain.
Portugal, by concentrating her efforts on maritime expansion, became virtually dissociated from the mainstream of events on the Iberian Peninsula. This left the two other large kingdoms of Castile and Aragon free to develop into a separate national power. These two kingdoms were very dissimilar in character. Castile, with Leon, ran from the Biscay coast of the Basques, south across the mountains and west-flowing rivers of central Spain, through all the land that her soldiers had won from the Moors, to the fortified stronghold of Islamic Granada. The long history of war caused all towns to be fortresses, their citizens to be trained in arms. Those who had settled newly conquered land, frontiersmen who faced the full brunt of retaliation, had been granted extraordinary privileges. Thus town and country were inhabited by free men living under their own democratic laws, governed by their own elected officers; this at a time when almost all the rest of Europe was feudal, the mass of the people existing in a state of serfdom. Aragon, on the other hand, became a mercantile kingdom when the union with Catalonia, and later the conquest of Valencia, gave her control of all the east-facing Mediterranean ports. Where Castile was supported by the armies of her militia and her nobility, Aragon relied on her sailors and her ships. With them she conquered the Balearic Isles, Sardinia, even Sicily.
