New Peoples, New Lands

J. H. Elliott

When Cortés and his men landed on the coast of central Mexico in April 1519 and established their encampment as a new town, the Villa Rica de Vera Cruz, the Spaniards had already had twenty-seven years of exposure to the New World of America. During those twenty-seven years they had been confronted in the Caribbean with a series of challenges to which, by a process of trial and error, they gradually developed a set of responses. Two challenges, in particular, faced them from the moment they began to colonize their first settlement, the island of Hispaniola. They had arrived in what to them was a New World, whose very existence came as a total surprise. Faced with new peoples and new lands, they had to determine what kind of people these were, and how they should be governed. In other words, they had to devise a mental and an institutional framework within which to set this new American world.

By 1519 at least the lineaments of these two frameworks, mental and institutional, were in place. A far as the nature of the inhabitants of Hispaniola was concerned, Columbus had already established that they were not monsters, nor blacks, but well-formed and rational beings.1 In spite of the common European assumption that the gospel had been preached to the ends of the earth, they seemed, surprisingly, to have no knowledge of Christianity, and therefore would need to be evangelized and converted.

First contacts suggested that they were rational enough to be persuaded to abandon what Spaniards regarded as their bestial practices and assimilate the truths of Christianity. This assumption would be central to the legitimizing of Spanish rule over them. The papacy specifically entrusted the Spanish crown with the task of converting them in order to ensure their salvation, and this papal donation, in the form of Alexander VI’s bull of 1493, Inter caetera, became the bedrock of Spain’s title to the Indies. At the same time, the Spanish crown was anxious to avoid total dependence on the papacy for the justification of its empire in the Indies, in order to preserve room for manoeuvre. There is a careful ambiguity in the words to be found in the great compilation of the laws of the Indies drawn up by the Spanish crown: ‘By donation of the Holy Apostolic See, and by other just and legitimate titles, we are lord of the western Indies, and of the isles and mainland of the Ocean Sea that have been discovered and remain to be discovered.’2 The ‘other just and legitimate titles’ is the vaguest of phrases, and therefore conveniently elastic. It included rights deriving from conquest, and from the formal surrender of sovereignty by native rulers. When Cortés claimed that Montezuma had voluntarily transferred his empire to the Emperor Charles V he was in fact providing Charles with another ‘just and legitimate’ title.

Once the right of the Spaniards to lordship over the inhabitants of ‘the isles and mainland of the Ocean Sea’ had been established, and their rationality confirmed, it obviously became necessary to determine how these new subjects of monarchs of Castile should be treated and governed. By the time of the conquest of Mexico, a number of guidelines had been established, in response to the Caribbean experience. It was accepted that, in accordance with the principles of natural law, which were deeply embedded in medieval Christian society, the indigenous populations of the Indies were free peoples, entitled to full rights of liberty and property. They could only be deprived of these rights if their behaviour was such as to justify the waging of war against them. What constituted a ‘just war’ was traditionally dictated by a number of specific preconditions, such as legitimate authority and upright intention. It was in order to conform with these traditions that the famous jurist, Dr. Palacios Rubios, drew up for Pedrarias Dávila’s Darien expedition of 1513 the notorious legal document known as the requerimiento, which had to be read aloud to the Indians before the opening of hostilities. After being subjected to a brief account of the history of the world since the creation, the Indians were formally ‘required’ to accept two obligations: to acknowledge the pope’s jurisdiction over the world, and his delegation of part of it to the kings of Castile; and to allow the faith to be preached to them. If they refused, then ‘just war’could be waged against them. This procedure was followed by Cortés on several occasions, and - famously - it left Las Casas not knowing whether to laugh or cry.3

Even if the reading of the requerimiento was a farce, it indicated at least an intention on the part of the crown to ensure that Spaniards conducted their relations with the indigenous peoples of the New World in accordance with a set of fixed rules and standards. Although in practice these rules would all too often be broken by conquistadores, settlers and royal officials alike, it is important to bear in mind that from the beginning the Spanish monarchs took their obligations to these newly found peoples seriously. It was not only a question of abiding by the terms of the papal donation, but also a matter of conscience - and in matters of conscience they were not alone, but had royal confessors to guide them. When Columbus sent back a shipload of Indian slaves from the Caribbean in 1499 Isabella the Catholic burst out in fury, insisting that these people, as vassals of the Crown of Castile, were entitled to liberty. It was therefore established from an early stage that, unless the Indians had been captured in the course of a just war, they were not to be enslaved. They were, and remained, vassals of the crown, and were subject to its protection. In order to give reality to this protection, legislation began to be introduced to regulate their treatment by the Spaniards, starting with the laws of Burgos in 1512, and culminating in another major attempt at codification, the famous New Laws of 1542.

Inevitably, however, from the earliest stages of conquest and colonization, high ideals and practical necessities came into conflict. Crown and clergy - at the beginning largely the mendicant orders - were committed to bringing these benighted peoples of the New World into the Catholic fold. But at the same time, immigrants had to be attracted from Spain, and the new settlements had to be set on a viable footing, and this required the development of local resources. Some gold was found on the island, and new forms of agriculture had to be introduced - wheat and sugar-growing in particular. But the development of Hispaniola’s economy along European lines was dependent on a good supply of labour. This meant that the indigenous inhabitants were seen not only as souls to be saved, but also as a potential labour force, waiting to be mobilized and exploited. There was therefore from the beginning a tension that would persist over the period of colonization - a tension between high aspirations for the salvation and well-being of the indigenous population, and the aspirations of conquistadores, settlers and the crown itself to make Castile’s new overseas investment a profitable enterprise.

The institutional framework within which this was to be accomplished was put in place during the first two decades of the sixteenth century. In Hispaniola, and subsequently in Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba, as these islands too came to be settled, the same pattern was established. Towns, laid out where possible on a grid-iron plan, were to be the basis of Spanish settlement. The food supply of the towns was to be secured by the use of native labour - but, since this could not be slave-labour, a system had to be devised which would ensure that the indigenous population worked for the Spaniards without technically being deprived of its liberty. The solution was found in the repartimiento-encomienda system, under which a set number of Indians were allocated by local chiefs - the caciques - to Spanish settlers, who were entitled to use their labour in return for a working wage. The encomenderos, for their part, were under an obligation to ensure the instruction of their Indian charges in the rudiments of the Christian faith. In this way, the twin needs of God and mammon would be satisfied.

This evolving colonial society was to be ruled by a governor appointed by the crown, and responsible initially to the Council of Castile at the Spanish court, until in 1523 a special Council of the Indies was created to handle the increasing amount of American business. An audiencia, or supreme judicial tribunal, was set up in Santo Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola, in 1511. The control of emigration to the Indies, and the regulation of the transatlantic trade, were entrusted to the so-called House of Trade - Casa de la Contratación - established in Seville in 1503 on the model of the India House established in Lisbon to run Portugal’s trade with Asia. A year later, in 1504, Ferdinand the Catholic, whose chief interest in the Indies was as a potential source of gold, established that a fifth of any precious metals found in the Indies should be reserved for the crown. The creation of the royal fifth would lock the crown firmly into the process of the exploitation of American resources.

Although an institutional framework was now in place, Spain’s colonization of the New World - its ‘enterprise of the Indies’ - nearly ended in disaster before it had properly begun. Essentially there were two reasons for this. The adventurers and settlers who were arriving in the Indies from Castile, Andalusia and Extremadura had come to make their fortunes. Conditioned by centuries of warfare against the Moors of southern Spain, they thought of wealth primarily in terms of booty - in particular gold - and of lordship over vassals. Hispaniola failed to satisfy them on both counts. Gold was only available in small quantities, and not every new arrival from Spain could be given Indians in encomienda. The temptation, therefore, was to indulge in slave-raiding expeditions conducted under the guise of ‘just wars’, and to move on, in search of new land and new opportunities. The first two decades of the sixteenth century were therefore years of island-hopping in the Caribbean, as bands of adventurers moved outwards from Hispaniola, and began probing the American mainland. And everywhere they went, they left a trail of devastation in their wake.

The other reason for the near failure of these first attempts at colonization was the impact of the arrival of the Spaniards on the indigenous population of the Antilles. It was subjected to brutal maltreatment by the settlers - a maltreatment which would become the subject of fierce denunciation by the friars who had come to save Indian souls; its way of life was turned upside down by incessant demands for labour and tribute; and it was exposed to the full brunt of European diseases against which it had developed no immunity. By 1520 the original Taíno population of Hispaniola was virtually extinct, and the island’s economy on the brink of collapse.

It is against this sombre background that one needs to set Cortés and the conquest of Mexico. Cortés, a man with immense ambitions for wealth, lordship, status, and glory, had seen for himself in Hispaniola and Cuba the devastating impact of Spanish conquest and settlement, and had drawn his own conclusions. His aim, like that of all the other leaders of expeditions, was to conquer, but having conquered, to settle - the word ‘settle’ (poblar) runs like a thread through his correspondence. He would secure for his sovereign, Charles, King of Castile, and soon to be Holy Roman Emperor, a great new realm, and he and his fellow-conquerors would be duly rewarded with land, vassals and riches by a grateful monarch. His discovery and conquest of the empire of Montezuma would allow him to achieve this ambition, even if his subsequent career was to be dogged by disappointment.

The conquest of Mexico, followed ten years later by Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, proved to be the salvation of Castile’s faltering enterprise of the Indies. For the first time in the New World the Spaniards came across large sedentary populations, many of them living in cities. This was a wealthy country, with a fertile soil, and it was apparent from the beginning that there was gold in Mexico, although nobody knew how much. Even before he was in a condition to deliver on his promise, Cortés had seen enough to be able to write to Charles that ‘the things of this land... are so many, and of such a kind, that one might call oneself the emperor of this kingdom with no less glory than of Germany, which, by the Grace of God, Your Sacred Majesty already possesses.’4 The prospects were glittering, although nobody realized exactly how glittering until the discovery of silver in Taxco in 1534, and then of the vast silver deposits of northern Mexico, initially at Zacatecas in 1546, began the transformation of Spain into a silver-rich empire.

Through military conquest and the nominal and involuntary transfer of sovereignty from Montezuma to Charles V, which was skilfully engineered by Cortés, the empire of the Mexica was incorporated into the dominions of the monarchs of Castile under the name, chosen by Cortés, of the ‘Kingdom of New Spain.’ It thus became part of the complex of kingdoms, principalities, duchies and smaller territorial units that would come to be known collectively as the monarquía española. The institutional framework for its incorporation was already in place, and the model of colonization developed in the Caribbean was transferred to the American mainland. Once again, towns and encomiendas were to be the basis of settlement. New towns were founded, indigenous cities were taken over, and a Mexico City built on the grid-iron plan in the Spanish style was constructed on the ruins of Tenochtitlan to serve as the capital of the new kingdom, thus providing an element of continuity between the old and the new that was to be of enormous importance for the subsequent development of New Spain. In the early post-conquest period tribute would continue to flow into Mexico City just as it had formerly flowed into Tenochtitlan.

In a bid to prevent what had happened in the Caribbean, Cortés sought to anchor his conquering soldiers to the land by transforming them into citizens of the new colonial towns, and allocating to them Indians in encomienda, even before receiving the authorization of the king. Encomiendas were grants of service Indians, not of land, and if the ambition of the conquistadores and the first settlers of New Spain was to become great landowning lords of vassals, like the magnates of Spain, the Spanish crown was determined to prevent this. It consistently struggled to prevent the growth in the New World of a territorial aristocracy capable of challenging its authority, and it sought to do so by developing an elaborate bureaucratic superstructure, dependent on the newly created Council of the Indies.

Royal officials were quick to arrive in the wake of the conquistadores, and many of them proved to be equally greedy. An audiencia, on the model of the audiencia of Santo Domingo, was set up in Mexico City, and, following a disastrous start and the introduction of a new set of judges in 1530, began to bring some order out of the chaos of the immediate post-conquest period. Finally, in 1535, New Spain became a viceroyalty, with the appointment of Don Antonio de Mendoza as the first viceroy. The system of government now established would survive, with modifications, throughout the three centuries of Spanish rule: a viceroy holding court in Mexico City; an audiencia, later joined by others as more territory to the north and the south of central Mexico was brought under Spanish control, to administer justice and keep check on the activities of the viceroy and other agents of the crown; and a Council of the Indies in Spain, to which the viceroy and the other royal officials were answerable. It was a pioneering system of imperial government which, for all its deficiencies, succeeded in maintaining the nominal, if not always the effective, authority of the crown over vast areas of territory thousands of miles from Spain.

Administratively, therefore, the effect of the conquest of Mexico was to give an enormous impetus to the institutions of empire. These combined to create a massive bureaucratic structure which was at once a machine for the government of the indigenous population and the rapidly developing settler society of conquistadores and immigrants, and a fiscal agency for the extraction of wealth from the conquered lands. It was a formidable state apparatus which took over from the empire of the Mexica, and in the first post-conquest years in particular it would work through the chains of command established by the Mexica, and make use of survivors from among the old native elite as intermediaries acting for the crown in its relations with the indigenous population.

Alongside the incorporation of new lands - initially central Mexico, Yucatán and central America - into the framework of empire, the Spaniards were also faced, as they had been in the Caribbean, with new peoples to be transformed into Christians and into loyal subjects of the Crown of Castile. But both in terms of the scale of the populations involved, and of the nature of their way of life, the challenge was of a totally different order. It was clear to the Spaniards from the beginning that the peoples of central Mexico and Yucatán were of a higher order of civility - policía, as they called it - than any other peoples they had yet encountered in the course of their discoveries. They lived in cities or self-governing city-states which reminded Cortés of ‘Venice or Genoa or Pisa’.5 They held great markets, which reminded him of the market in the plaza mayor of Salamanca.6 And their artefacts - their jewels and feather-work - were of a quality of craftsmanship which filled him with admiration and awe. Their only serious defect appeared to be their horrific idolatry and their practice of human sacrifice. But Cortés believed that many of them were apt for conversion, and it was in response to his urging that the twelve Franciscan ‘apostles’, under the leadership of Fray Martín de Valencia arrived in New Spain in 1524, to be followed by the Dominicans two years later, and the Augustinians in 1536. Very shortly, the indigenous population of central Mexico was being baptised on a massive scale.

These early years in the history of New Spain were characterized, at least in certain quarters, by a highly positive, and indeed optimistic, evaluation of the capacity of the indigenous inhabitants, and of their aptitude for Christianity. We can see this in Cortés himself; we can see it in the enthusiasm of many of the first generation of mendicant evangelists for their native charges; and we can see it in the attitude of some of the more enlightened judges and officials, like Vasco de Quiroga, one of the judges of the second audiencia, who would establish Indian communities, inspired by his reading of More’s Utopia, on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro. To some extent this optimism reflects the striking difference observed by the Spaniards between the kind of lives lived by the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean islands and those of the inhabitants of central Mexico. But it may also be seen to reflect the heightened hopes and expectations of Europeans in the age of the Renaissance and of movements for spiritual reformation. Royal officials with a humanist background, like Alonso de Zorita, were inclined to see the New World through humanist lenses, while friars with millennial expectations saw in it an opportunity to recreate on the farther shores of the Atlantic the primitive church of the early Apostles.7

In many respects the population of central Mexico, even though traumatized by conquest and colonization, responded with remarkable success to the hopes and expectations being placed upon them. Some of the converts, with their old gods overthrown, seem to have embraced Christianity with genuine fervour, while others displayed what to mendicant eyes seemed an exemplary docility as they were instructed in the truths of the gospel. Spaniards were impressed, too, by the speed and aptitude with which native craftsmen mastered European arts and skills, for instance in the construction and decoration of churches, or in the working of metals. The pupils in the College of Santa Cruz at Tlatelolco, founded by Bishop Zumárraga in 1536 for the sons of the native nobility, learnt Latin and became invaluable assistants to the friars as they sought their help in interpreting and translating Nahuatl texts in an attempt to secure a better understanding of pre-conquest society, and its beliefs and rituals. The Nahuas of the post-conquest period showed themselves to be a remarkably adaptable people.

When Pope Paul III, in his bull Sublimis Deus of 1537, pronounced - probably at the prompting of a Spanish Dominican with first-hand knowledge of Mexico - that ‘the Indians are truly men’,8 he was in fact affirming not only their rationality but also their capacity to adopt Christianity and European norms of civility. But the very need to make such an affirmation, forty-five years after the European discovery of America, and sixteen years after the conquest of Mexico, was a reflection of the brutal realities of life in central New Spain for the overwhelming mass of its indigenous inhabitants. As in Hispaniola in the 1490's, they were subjected to ruthless demands for tribute and labour services by a rapidly growing Spanish settler society. As in Hispaniola, too, they were ravaged by round after round of European epidemics - smallpox, measles, influenza - which sapped their strength and drastically reduced their numbers. And, as in Hispaniola, the interested parties - settlers, crown, and the religious - engaged in what would become a triangular contest for the control of this shrinking population, which was assessed, according to one’s standpoint, as a labour force, as obedient and productive vassals, and as souls ripe for salvation.

With alarming reports being sent back to Spain by the friars, the cause of the Indians was taken up in convents and universities, and in the court itself. In 1539 the Dominican scholar Francisco de Vitoria delivered his famous series of lectures at Salamanca questioning the rights of Spain to jurisdiction over the Indies. The same year, Bartolomé de Las Casas returned after two years of experimentation in Guatemala with a peaceful approach to the conversion of the Indians, to lobby against the encomiendas and to plead the right of the Indians to liberty. Although Charles V rebuked the theologians for calling his titles to the Indies into question, the campaign of the pro-Indian lobby in fact had its advantages for the crown, since it provided it with a useful weapon in its struggle with the encomenderos in their efforts to turn themselves into a Spanish-style aristocracy. It was in this climate of agitation and concern about what was happening in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru that the Council of the Indies promulgated the famous New Laws of 1542, which included a renewed ban on the enslavement of Indians, and, most importantly, a provision that all encomiendas should revert to the crown on the death of the current holder.

Reports of the New Laws led to rumblings in New Spain, where viceroy Mendoza thought it prudent to suspend their application, and to open revolt among the conquerors and settlers of Peru. With revolt, or potential revolt, in the American viceroyalties, and intensive lobbying going on at the Spanish court by the pro-Indian and the pro-settler factions, the Council of the Indies had to manoeuvre with care, and eventually the crown had no option, in the face of settler resistance, but to revoke the proviso for the reversion of encomiendas to the crown, although it stood fast against authorizing the encomenderos to transmit them automatically from generation to generation in perpetuity. The intense controversy at court culminated in the famous debate convoked by Charles V at Valladolid in 1550, in which Las Casas defended the Indian cause, adducing innumerable examples of the rationality and capacity of the Indians, like their ability to build and live in cities, and to lead well-disciplined family lives, while his opponent, Sepúlveda, arguing on behalf of the encomenderos, took exactly the contrary line. For Sepúlveda, the all too obvious incapacity of the Indians - on whom in fact he had never set eyes - meant, in accordance with Aristotelian principles, that they were naturally inferior beings, and consequently born to serve.9

The positive and negative views of Indian capacity expressed by Las Casas and Sepúlveda in the Valladolid debate in fact reached back to the earliest years of colonization, when differing opinions were put forward as to whether the inhabitants of Hispaniola were innocent beings living lives reminiscent of the Golden Age or of Eden before the fall, or creatures whose mode of life was closer to that of beasts than of humans. Sepúlveda was in effect an advocate of a more sophisticated version of the bestiality thesis - a thesis that was extremely convenient to Spanish settlers and their descendants because it appeared to give legitimacy to their attempts to exploit the indigenous population of New Spain and keep it in a state of permanent dependence and subordination.

In spite of the relative success of Las Casas in the Valladolid debate, what we see in the second half of the sixteenth century is the dissipation of the hopes and expectations which were invested in the indigenous population in the immediate post-conquest period, and the gradual emergence of a generally negative consensus about Indian capabilities and the Indian character. This lowering of expectations is to be explained both by changing attitudes to the nature of man in Europe itself, and also by the rapidly changing situation in Spanish America.

In Europe, the replacement of age of the Renaissance by that of the Counter-Reformation brings a more sombre assessment of human nature, and a renewed emphasis on original sin. By the 1550's the first generation of friars and officials is passing away, and with it some of the idealism that had brought an element of hope and creativity as New Spain began to rise from the ashes of the Mexica empire. The new generation was more hard-headed in its approach to the New World, and certainly more sceptical than its predecessor about the prospects of creating an American utopia. But to a considerable extent these generational changes of attitude also reflected changing American realities. As far as the programme of evangelization was concerned, a number of incidents of backsliding began to raise serious questions about the reality and sincerity of the conversions which had previously been hailed with such enthusiasm. In particular, the discovery in 1536 that one of the prize pupils of the college of Santa Cruz, Don Carlos de Texcoco, possessed a secret store of idols, administered a terrible shock to the whole enterprise, and was probably the decisive element in the fatal decision to abandon plans for the creation of a native priesthood. There was a growing sense among the clergy and members of the religious orders that evangelization had gone only skin deep. In 1572 we find a Jesuit writing to the president of the Council of the Indies: ‘As regards the Indians, Your Excellency may consider the majority of them as resembling the Moors of Granada. Most of them are only Christian in name and outward ceremony, and inwardly they have no conception of the truths of our faith, and, what is worse, no affection for them, and do what they do only to oblige, or out of fear of punishment.’10

At the same time, the upheaval and devastation caused by the imposition of Spanish rule were leading to profound changes in indigenous society. The intention of the Spanish crown had been to maintain the indigenous population of the viceroyalty of New Spain as a partially self-governing corporate community, a república de los indios, shielded from incursion and exploitation by the settlers. In practice, it proved impossible to maintain the policy of segregation. Many Indians gravitated to the Spanish towns in search of employment, while Spanish settlers who were converting themselves into landowners encroached on Indian communities. Tribute demands and labour services disrupted the old communities, and the development of silver mining led to large movements of population to the north. Above all, epidemics wiped out vast numbers. A population of central Mexico assessed at anything between 5 and 25 millions in 1519 was down to some 2 ½ millions by the 1560's. In the light of this overwhelming catastrophe, it is not surprising that Spanish observers were inclined to dwell on the idleness, listlessness and proclivity to drunkenness of the Indian population. The old hierarchies of indigenous society were in process of crumbling, demoralization was widespread, and the traditional moral and religious order had been swept away. With it went many of the traditional restraints. In the pre-conquest period, for instance, pulque-drinking had been a controlled and ritualized collective activity, and now it became a private solace.11

The result of these changes, both in perception and in reality, was to create during the second half of the sixteenth century an undifferentiated and increasingly negative evaluation of ‘the Indian’ both in terms of character and of any prospects for improvement. There was an emerging consensus among Spanish clerics and officials, as well as among the creoles, who had their own good reasons for playing down the capacity of the indigenous population, that, in the words of Alonso de la Vera Cruz, a professor of theology in the recently founded university of Mexico: ‘even the most outstanding of them, if compared with us Spaniards, are deficient in many respects.’ 12 This suggested that the proper response lay in an almost indefinite tutelage for peoples who, at best, were little more than children.

At the very time, therefore, when the progressive intermingling of indigenous and Spanish blood was creating a new race of mestizos, the distinctions between people of Spanish descent (creoles) and a population of different tribal groupings now being indiscriminately lumped together under the brand-name of ‘Indians’, were becoming more sharply drawn. The attempt to raise the Indians to Spanish levels of civility was, it was coming to be believed, a doomed enterprise. But why should this be? What prevented the Indians from being transformed into Spaniards?

In the eyes of contemporaries, one possible explanation was the supernatural. The devil stalked America and held the Indians in his thrall. But there appeared to be psychological as well as physical differences between the indigenous population and the Spaniards and their American-born descendants, and these demanded, and received a ‘natural’ explanation. The most immediately obvious difference was, of course, that of colour. But although blackness possessed a series of negative connotations in sixteenth-century thought, the colour of the Indians, described by contemporaries as resembling that of ‘cooked quince’,13 did not of itself condemn them to a status of natural inferiority. In so far as colour was regarded as the result of exposure to the rays of a strong sun beating down on them in the fields, it hardly represented grounds for discrimination.

In the sixteenth century at least it was Christianity and civility, rather than colour, which primarily differentiated Spaniard from Indian in the eyes of the Spaniard. In the attempt to explain why the majority of Indians signally failed to conform to Spanish standards in either, increasing recourse was had, as the sixteenth century advanced, to a theory of an essentially determinist character. This was the theory of climate. The natural humidity of the Indies, a part of the world that was increasingly perceived to be dominated by negative constellations, had emasculated the Indians and made them phlegmatic by temperament.14 This in turn could be used to justify coercive labour systems. We find for instance a famous seventeenth-century jurist and councillor of the Indies, Juan de Solórzano y Pereyra, arguing that the rulers of the Aztecs, faced with subjects who were ‘extremely weak’ (flojos en gran manera), drafted them for great public works; and for this reason, too, Spaniards could reasonably demand labour services of them.15

The overwhelming Spanish perception, therefore, of Mexico’s indigenous population by the seventeenth century was depressingly negative. Deceitful, idle, drunken, they stood in need of careful spiritual and secular control, and of constant correction. The contrast with the hopes of the 1520's and 1530's - the hopes of Cortés, and of the early friars and humanist officials - is very striking. The crown still retained its commitment to the protection of its Indian vassals, and it still sought to shield them from excessive exploitation by an increasingly dominant settler population. It did this partly for reasons of conscience, and partly because the demographic catastrophe had reduced Indian numbers to such an extent that it was vital to Spain’s imperial enterprise to save the survivors. But the earlier creative optimism of the period of Mendoza’s viceroyalty had gone. Now, everything was subordinated to the need for silver for remittance to Spain, and the maintenance and regulation of the labour supply of indigenous labour was the crown’s first and overwhelming priority.

Over the course of five or six decades, therefore, the peoples who once formed part of the empire of the Mexica were both mentally and physically incorporated into the empire of Spain as a subordinate population, to be treated like wayward children, and cajoled and pushed as far as possible into the acceptance and assimilation of Spanish manners and values. Yet, in spite of the general disparagement of their capacity, they showed a remarkable resilience during those difficult years of the late sixteenth century. They appropriated aspects of Spanish culture, technology and civilization where it seemed advantageous to them, and began to evolve a distinctive hybrid culture whose originality and creativity are brilliantly displayed in the Royal Academy’s ‘Aztecs’ Exhibition. Indian communities forming part of the república de los indios learnt how to use the Spanish legal and political system to defend their communal rights. And they defended them with remarkable success. The city of Tlaxcala, for instance, capitalized to the maximum on the privileged status it had acquired as the ally of Cortés in the conquest of Mexico.

These successes bear witness to the innate skills and adaptability of the Nahuas. But in drawing up the final balance sheet, it is important to recognize that they also owed a considerable amount to the character of Spanish the imperial structure which weighed so heavily upon them. This was a structure grounded in a belief in the moral obligation of the rulers to promote the well-being of the governed in a corporate and hierarchical society in which each community and corporation possessed a recognized position and was entitled to specific rights. Throughout the period of Spanish rule the legalism and the moralism which permeated this imperial structure enabled concerned clerics and royal officials, both in Mexico and in metropolitan Spain, to speak out on behalf of justice for the Indians, and to take their case to the Council of the Indies and the crown.

At the same time, the complex character of the imperial apparatus, with its innumerable checks and balances, contained its own self-correcting mechanisms. The Spanish empire of the Indies was one in which each of the component parts - the crown, the mendicant orders, the secular clergy, the viceroys, the audiencias and the creole town councils - had its own distinctive agenda. Since none was strong enough to impose itself, tactical manoeuvre, negotiation and eventual compromise were essential to the workings of the system. The crown could not count on getting its way, but nor, for that matter, could the settler community. In the interstices of this complex structure, the survivors of the indigenous population were able to carve out a little space for themselves. Seizing the opportunity, they clung to what they prized and were able to preserve of the old; adapted to their own purposes what was imposed upon them, or what they chose of their own volition, from the new; and, in the process, forged for themselves a distinctive identity which has linked modern Mexico across the centuries to its Aztec and pre-conquest past.

© J.H. Eliott, 2003.

References

Cañizares Esguerra, Jorge (1999), New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600-1650, The American Historical Review, vol.104, pp.33-68.

Clendinnen, Inga, 1990, Ways to the Sacred. Reconstructing ‘Religion’ in Sixteenth Century Mexico, History and Anthropology, vol.5, pp. 105-141.

Cortés, Hernán, 1986, Letters from Mexico, trans. and ed. Anthony Pagden, New Haven and London, Yale Univversity Press.

Egaña, Antonio de, 1954, La visión humanística del indio americano en los primeros Jesuitas peruanos (1568-1576), Analecta Gregoriana, vol.LXX, pp.291-306.

Elliott, J. H., 1989, Spain and its World, 1500-1700, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

Hanke, Lewis, 1949, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hanke, Lewis, 1959, Aristotle and the American Indians, London, Hollis and Carter.

Phelan, J. L., 1970, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, Berekely and Los Angeles, University of California Press.

Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, 1791 ed, Madrid, 1791.

Solórzano y Pereyra, Juan de, 1972, Política Indiana, 5 vols., Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles.

Zorita, A. de, 1965, The Lords of New Spain, trans. and ed. Benjamin Keen, London, J.M. Dent.

Endnotes

1. Elliott (1997) 40
2. Recopilación (1791) libro III, título 1, ley 1.
3. Hanke (1949) 31-36.
4. Cortés (1986) 48.
5. Cortés (1986), 68.
6. Cortés (1986), 103.
7. Zorita (1965); Phelan (1970)
8. Hanke (1949), 73.
9. Hanke (1959), chs.4-6.
10. Egaña (1954), 302.
11. Clendinnen (1990), 105-41.
12. Elliott (1989), 52-3.
13. Elliott (1989), 48.
14. Cañizares Esguerra (1999), 33-68.
15. Solórzano y Pereyra (1972), vol. 1, 176.