Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (17 page)

The presence of the religious in the Antilles meant that the activities of the settlers, especially in relation to the indigenous population, were now exposed to the scrutiny of those who came to the New World with a very different agenda. The effects of this became apparent with the arrival in Hispaniola in 1510 of four Dominicans, one of whom, Fray Antonio de Montesinos, preached a sermon on the island on the Sunday before Christmas 1511 that was to reverberate across the ocean. His denunciations of the settlers for their barbaric treatment of the Indians was to affect many lives, including that of a priest on Hispaniola, Bartolome de Las Casas, who had his own repartimiento of Indians, but would later join the Dominican Order, and, as the `Apostle of the Indians', would become a tireless campaigner on their behalf. Montesinos's sermon made a public issue of the whole question of the legality of the encomienda and the status of the Indians under Spanish rule. At least symbolically, it marked the opening of ,the Spanish struggle for justice in the conquest of America', and forced the crown, which initially reacted adversely to Dominican meddling in such sensitive matters, to address the issue in the light of its own obligations under the papal bulls. The outcome was the convocation by Ferdinand in 1512 of a special junta of theologians and officials in Burgos, and the publication of the Laws of Burgos, the first comprehensive code of legislation for the Spanish Indies.17

The junta, which included among its members partisans of both the Indians and the encomenderos, laid down a series of principles which were to be fundamental to Spain's future government of the Indies. While the junta did not condemn the encomienda it stipulated that the Indians must be treated as a free people, in conformity with the wishes of Ferdinand and the late Queen Isabella. As a free people, they were entitled to hold property, and - although they could be set to work - they must be remunerated for their labour. In conformity with the bull of Alexander VI they also had to be instructed in the Christian faith.58

The reassertion of the need to instruct Indians in the faith underlined the crown's commitment to the process of evangelization - a commitment that was reinforced by the series of concessions granted it by the papacy for the establishment of a church in America under royal control. In 1486 Rome had granted the crown the Patronato of the church in the kingdom of Granada, thus conferring on it the right of presentation to all major ecclesiastical benefices in a realm that was still not fully liberated from Moorish control. A series of papal bulls in the following years, starting with Alexander VI's Inter caetera of 1493 with its concession to the crown of exclusive rights to evangelization in its transatlantic possessions, cumulatively extended the royal Patronato to the Indies. In 1501 Alexander granted the crown in perpetuity all tithes collected in the Indies, in order to support the work of evangelization, and in a bull of 1508 Julius II gave Ferdinand the right for which he had been patiently working, of presenting to all cathedrals and ecclesiastical benefices in Spain's American territories. Once its Patronato was recognized, the crown began to establish the first dioceses in America, in the Antilles in 1511, and on the mainland in 1513.59

While the framework for an institutional church in Spanish America was now in place, it was the religious orders which launched and led the campaign for the conversion of the Indians. Cortes, deeply suspicious of the pomp and corruption of the secular clergy, urged the crown in his fourth letter, of 15 October 1524, to turn to the friars for the evangelization of the conquered peoples of Mexico.60 In fact they had already made their appearance. Twelve Franciscans under the leadership of Fray Martin de Valencia - the famous `twelve apostles' - had reached Mexico four months earlier, the precursors of what was to be a vast programme of conversion and indoctrination. They were followed in 1526 by twelve Dominicans, and seven years later by the Augustinians. In Peru a similar process was soon under way, starting with the three Dominicans who embarked with Pizarro in Panama. One of these was Father Valverde, famous for his confrontation with Atahualpa, who accompanied Pizarro throughout the conquest and became the first Bishop of Cuzco. As numbers increased, so convents were founded and churches built. In New Spain by 1559 there were 802 Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians, and between them they had established 160 religious houses.61

For all the differences between the Orders, the religious in America, at least in the early years of evangelization, entertained high hopes of the prospects before them. Here was an opportunity to re-create among the uncorrupted and innocent peoples of the New World a church that would resemble the primitive church of the early apostles, untainted by the vices that had overwhelmed it in Christendom.62 The programme for the evangelization of Spanish America was therefore launched on a wave of fervour and enthusiasm generated by members of the religious orders who saw in the New World incomparable prospects for the winning of new converts and the salvation of souls. It enjoyed, too, the full support of the crown, which normally bore the travelling costs of those religious who requested a passage to the Indies,63 and would use the tithes conceded by the papacy for paying the salaries of those in charge of parishes, and for building and endowing churches and cathedrals. The programme began with the mass baptism by the Franciscans of vast numbers of Indians in the valley of Mexico and was followed up by preaching, catechizing and the founding of schools.

The word doctrinero, used first of the friars and in due course, also, of the parish priests working independently or alongside them in doctrinas or Indian parishes, is suggestive of the character of the programme that was now under way64 It was a programme to instruct, or indoctrinate, in the elements of Catholic Christianity, its belief systems, its sacraments and its moral code. Such an ambitious programme, conducted on so vast a scale, inevitably raised fundamental questions about the capacity of the Indians to understand and assimilate the new faith, and about the extent and sincerity of the `conversion' hailed with such enthusiasm by the first Franciscans. Sceptics were soon able to point to some spectacular failures, like the discovery in 1539 of a cache of idols in the house of Don Carlos de Texcoco, a former prize pupil of the College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, established by the Franciscans for the education of the sons of Mexico's indigenous elite.65 In Peru, where the Andean peoples were to show themselves incorrigibly reluctant to abandon their huacas, or sacred objects and sites, the vicar-general of Cuzco in 1541 identified idolatry as the greatest obstacle to the establishment of the faith.66

The setbacks and the failures prompted a variety of reactions. They encouraged some ecclesiastics, like Bishop Diego de Landa in Yucatan, to make a bonfire of sacred texts which could only perpetuate among the indigenous population the memory of the pernicious beliefs and practices with which the devil had for so long held them in thrall.67 But others responded in a more positive fashion. In the opinion of the Dominican Fray Diego Duran, `a great mistake was made by those who, with much zeal but little prudence, burnt and destroyed at the beginning all their sacred pictures. This left us so much in the dark that they can practice idolatry before our very eyes.'68 In other words, to extirpate idolatry one had first to understand it. This could only be achieved by a systematic attempt to explore and record for posterity the character and beliefs of a rapidly vanishing world - the world of the indigenous peoples of America before the arrival of the Spaniards.

The result was an intensive effort by a number of friars to understand the history and the customs of the peoples whom they were attempting to indoctrinate (fig. 11). In order to present the gospel, many of them had already laboriously mastered one or more native languages. Several of these languages were transcribed into the Latin alphabet, and grammars and dictionaries were compiled, like the Quechua dictionary published in 1560 by Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas.69 At the same time native informants who still had some knowledge of life before the conquest were asked to interpret and flesh out the pictographic evidence provided by the surviving codices, and to answer carefully constructed questions about ancient practices and beliefs. Fray Bernardino de Sahagun's great History of the Things of New Spain, completed in 1579 in a bilingual text, Nahuatl and Castilian, may have been ethnography with a purpose - the more effective evangelization of the Indians - but it was ethnography none the less. Sahagun and his colleagues in the Spanish mendicant orders were the pioneers in Europe's attempt to study on a systematic basis the beliefs and customs of the non-European peoples of the world.70

While a growing knowledge of indigenous social and political organization before the coming of the Spaniards evoked admiration in some circles, and provided Las Casas with the ammunition he needed to argue for the rationality of the peoples of America and their aptitude for the gospel, it was insufficient to win over those who saw everywhere around them the footprints of the devil. It was firmly believed that the devil stalked the New World, and everything in native society that allowed him to work his diabolical contrivances had to be systematically eradicated if true Christianity were ever to take root.7'

Yet it very quickly became clear that this involved far more than the eradication of pagan rites and superstitious practices. It was one thing to put an end to the practice of human sacrifice which had so horrified the Spaniards on their arrival in Mexico, but it was quite another to overthrow the belief-systems and cosmologies which had given rise to such barbarities. The friars sought as best they could to fill the spiritual vacuum created by the destruction of the old gods and their priests, and provided their charges with new rites and ceremonies, new images, and a new liturgical calendar that would help to reconnect them to the sacred.72 It also became apparent that the imposition of Christian morality implied major changes in social habits and traditional ways of life, and it was not always easy to draw the line between what should be abolished and what allowed to remain. So far as marriage customs were concerned, it was clear that polygamy, practised among the ruling class of pre-conquest Mexico, must be banned, and concepts of incest be revised to conform to Christian notions.73 But in matters of dress there was more room for latitude. The maxtlatl or loincloth worn by Mexican men offended Christian notions of decency, and gradually lost out over the course of the sixteenth century to trousers; but traditional women's dress, seen as more modest, was allowed to survive.74 Although the friars might struggle to prevent their flocks from being contaminated by European vices, the whole programme of conversion carried with it an inexorable subtext of hispanicization, as spiritual and social pressures alike pushed the Indians into the orbit of the Europeans, and notions of Christianity and civility became hopelessly entangled. Sahagun might be critical of those who wanted to `reduce' the Indians to `the Spanish way of life', but the whole rationale of conquest culture was to compel them to live, in the words of Bishop Landa, `incomparably more like men' .71

In practice many Indians, especially in central Mexico and the Andes, were to adapt with remarkable speed to the culture of the conquerors, soon equalling or surpassing them in some areas of craftsmanship, and assimilating, often with apparent enthusiasm, those elements of Christianity which would enable them in due course to rediscover their own route to the sacred.76 But because they moved at their own pace and in their own ways, clinging fast to practices which branded them as unregenerate idolaters in European eyes and obstinately failing to conform to Spanish notions of civility, they became the objects of increasing disparagement, pity or contempt. Between the heady days of early evangelization and the later sixteenth century, the image of the Indian changed, and changed for the worse. Partly this was a result of changes among the Indians themselves, as traditional social disciplines and norms of behaviour crumbled in the aftershock of conquest. But it was also a reflection of lowered expectations bred by closer acquaintance, and perhaps too by a generational change among the friars themselves. Where the first friars brought with them something of the optimism and curiosity of Renaissance Europe, the second generation came to maturity in the age of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, deeply imbued with Augustinian notions of original sin. This more pessimistic attitude, already apparent in the campaign led by the Dominicans for the evangelization of Peru, induced a greater wariness in the approach to conversion, together with a reduced estimate of the capability of the Indians to assimilate the faith. The Indians no doubt responded in kind.

The result was the gradual emergence of a new, and depressing, consensus about the nature of the Indian, far removed from the generous enthusiasm of Las Casas and his friends. The College of Santa Cruz came to be regarded as a failure, and strong opposition closed the entry of Indians to the priesthood. 77 With the Indians regarded as unfit for ordination, the Spanish church in America was to remain a church run by the conquerors on their own terms. The scepticism about the aptitude of Indians for the priesthood came to pervade the whole missionary enterprise. Where Las Casas saw the mind of the Indian as a tabula rasa on which it would not be hard to inscribe the principles and precepts of Christianity,78 others increasingly saw him as an intellectually feeble and inconstant creature with an inherent inclination to vice. Deficient in rational capacity, did he not conform all too well to Aristotelian notions of natural inferiority?

To the plaudits of the encomenderos, the distinguished humanist scholar, Juan Gines de Sepulveda, argued that the deficiencies of the indigenous peoples of America condemned them to the status of natural slaves.79 Others insisted that at best they were children, who should be fed only the simplest rudiments of the faith. As children, they needed guidance and correction, as Fray Pedro de Feria, the Bishop of Chiapas, argued before the third Mexican provincial council in 1585: `We must love and help the Indians as much as we can. But their base and imperfect character requires that they should be ruled, governed and guided to their appointed end by fear more than by love.'80 Wayward children cried out for a paternalist approach.