Dan Snow's History Hit - The Conquistadores

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

Fernando Cervantes joined me on the podcast to reframe the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World, set against the political and intellectual landscape from which its main actors emerged.

Welcome to Dan Snow's History It, everybody. We've got a big one for you today. It's the Conquistadors, that group of conquerors, traders of men that crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of empire, of wealth, of domination, in what they called the New World. He's the Professor of Early Modern History at the University of this week is the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. And we have got a season of programs and podcasts commemorating that decisive naval battle in October 1805. So if you use the code TRAFALGAR, T-R-A-F-A-L-G-A-R, you get a month for free. And in three months, just one pound, euro or dollar. We're doing everyone a favour here. We're trying to make this service as cheap as possible through these lean winter months.

So please head over to history.tv, use the code TRAFALGA, and you get a sweet introductory offer. Fernando Cervantes talking about the conquistadors. Enjoy. Fernando, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Pleasure. Do you know, as someone who's descended from a first world war general on the Western front, I've always been quite fascinated by these little groups, these little cadres of usually men from the past, who everyone can agree that we absolutely hate. And it strikes me that First World War generals are there and conquistadors

are also there. I mean, how do you define conquistadors first? Well, it's quite a tricky one, because obviously the name came much later. They call themselves conquistadors after what they did. But of course, they had the background in Spain of what is known as the Reconquista, which is already known as that, you know, the fight against the Muslim territories in southern Spain. So that's where they're coming from, really. We tend to see them as very, very much early modern people who started something that led to the modern world. But what I was interested in is actually trying to place them in their proper context, because they didn't know what was going to happen. Most of the time they were looking back to what they knew in Spain.

It took a very long time for them to realise that they were actually somewhere new for the first 20, 30 years. They still thought that they were going somewhere towards Asia, where they would get the support of the people who had seen Preston John, who had promised to help Christians fight the Muslims. So it was still very much in that crusading ethos of the fight against Islam that the whole experiment began. I'm so struck by that, especially early Portuguese imperial impulse

was all towards recapturing Jerusalem. Yes, yes. And that obviously really caught the imagination of the Spaniards, because the kingdom of Aragon had inherited the kingdom of Naples since the time of Alfonso the Magnanimous. And the king of Naples was sovereign over Jerusalem in theory. So when Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabel of Castile, the idea among the thinkers of the time, the millenarians, especially among the Franciscan millenarians, they really began to convince Ferdinand that his mission was the reconquest of Jerusalem. And that was, I mean, Columbus in the early days,

he put his whole energy into this enterprise. He said, all the wealth that I find in the newly discovered lands will be for the reconquest of Jerusalem. So it's something that we've completely lost sight of, because we tend to concentrate on the origins of capitalism and the modern world and exploitation and everything that is shameful, for very good reasons. But what I worry about is that we're missing the point of where exactly they were. And that's what interests me, to try to understand where these people were, where they came from, and their mentality. Talk to me about how they are rooted in that late medieval so-called Reconquista, and how they must have felt they were on the right side of history,

they had caught the wave. Yes, they really had. 1492, of course, is a very famous year, not just because of the fact that Columbus stumbled across some islands in the Caribbean, but also because Granada had just been taken. That had taken about 10 years of very, very serious military strategic effort on the part of the Castilian and Aragonese crowns. And it gathered momentum by uniting all sorts of people who normally did not communicate in that effort. So that's another thing that you need to realise, that the whole of Spain had focused on the reconquest of Granada, especially the aristocrats.

So when that was over, a lot of people were left with, you know, what next? So when the news of Columbus came back, many of these people decided to take the plunge and go to the New World. So that's another composition of the people who went out there. It's very heterogeneous, but it's still very much rooted in that ethos of their reconquest. It's a very, very medieval rather than early modern ethos. You mentioned it was heterodox, the group of people who went out. Sometimes with these imperial missions of Europeans,

you often see people of lower and middle rank going out and making their fortune on the imperial frontier. Is that less true of the conquistadors? Are these people very much part of the elite at home in Iberia? No, I think a lot of the members of the nobility went out there, the so-called Hidalgos, because of the methods of inheritance. It meant that a lot of well-established families, a lot of the members of these families were left without any prospects because the wealth went to the first male heir. So there were lots of lower, the second and third brothers of a noble family would have been very tempted to go out there. So there is quite a strong element of Halguía,

of what we might call nobility, rather than aristocracy, because there was a big conflict going on in Spain at this time between the old nobility, which was not exactly titled, but they had been there since the early years of the Reconquista, and the new nobility that emerged after the Hundred Years' War and the Civil War of Peter the Cruel, with the takeover of the Trastamara dynasty. So most of the famous names in Spain at the time, the Velascos, the Ayalas, the Ponce de León, people like that, had been quite recently ennobled. So there was a conflict between them and the members of the old nobility

that saw themselves as much, much better, because they were committed to service and not very interested in commercial gains or wealth. You know, they had this idea that too much wealth was a sign of moral weakness. If you had too much, you had the obligation to give it away to help the orphan, the widow, all that kind of thing. So this is the conflict that's going on at the time of the Civil War between Ferdinand and Isabel and they decided that they didn't want that tension in the new world they did everything they could to make sure

that the settlers would go back to the old values of nobility as some kind of service but of course a huge amounts of non-aristocrats and of the members of the new commercial classes got very interested as well so that the same conflicts were repeated and in some cases even exaggerated in the new world if you look at british and french moves into the indian ocean there's a lot of economic arguments being made about new cash crops and things is that true of this imperial surge or Or are some of these conquistadors just conquering land for king and god? It wasn't a driving force in the same way as it became in the later empires of England, France and Holland. Their outlook was much more

feudal in that respect. The conquistadors wanted to bring back the age of feudal fiefs. They were much more seniorial in their approach. They wanted to be lords with vassals, very much based on that, you know, the vassals would provide protection in theory, and instruction in the Christian faith in exchange for service. And it was basically forced labour, what they set up there. But one thing that we always lose sight of is the efforts that were made to ensure justice, because this was really a very interesting struggle. Back in Spain, there were lots of campaigners. The Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas is the most famous, but he was not working

in a bubble. I mean, he was surrounded by other members of the religious orders, and certainly quite a few conquistadors that were very genuinely interested in the welfare of the natives. They were very preoccupied with the spread of smallpox and the depopulation. So they were doing their best to improve their standard of living, to make them more comfortable. So all this kind of stuff that was going on and that very few people have noticed is something that I really thought needed attention. people have noticed is something that I really thought needed attention. The reputation of conquistadors is of being very few in number, being extraordinary physically tough and courageous, albeit of course cruel and everything, but rather courageous, taking extraordinarily risky decisions with very few numbers. And obviously the technological

advantage. As you study their, well, really their remarkable success in the new world in terms of imperial colonial expansion, do you see those traits, that reputation is deserved? Yes, to a certain extent, but I think it's a mistake to concentrate too much on technological superiority. Of course, steel and horses were essential for the early triumphs, but the indigenous peoples were very, very quick to learn. By the time Cortes was engaged in the recapture of Tenochtitlan after the horrendous defeat that he had had in 1519 he arrived in Tenochtitlan imprisoned Moctezuma then there was a massacre which enraged the Indians and they chased the Spaniards out of the city the Spaniards lost about 600 Spaniards there

were about a thousand there at the time 600 were lost in that just one night, together with an unspecified number of indigenous allies, but they must have been in their thousands. They went back, and by the time they were reconquering, well, conquering for the first time, because the first attempt wasn't really a conquest, it was much more of a getting to know each other, as it were. But when Cortes was actually engaged in the recapture of

the city, these people had recovered all these lances from the lake, they had learned to ride horses, they were engaging in battles on a very similar level. So it became extremely difficult for the Spaniards just to rely on their technical superiority. What they were relying on, and this is what makes the story so interesting, is a number of alliances, because they were very quick to realize that the indigenous peoples were at each other's throats. The Aztecs, or the Mexicas, as they're now known, were not exactly popular in the center of Mexico. A lot of people resented the way in which they had imposed themselves through taxation, and especially through the capture of victims for sacrifice. had imposed themselves through taxation and especially through the capture of victims for sacrifice.

So Cortés and his allies very soon realised that it was very easy for them to attract the support of these people. By the time he was reconquering Tenochtitlan, he had the support of practically everyone around. It was only the Mexica who were left out. And they put up a very, very good fight. I mean, it took months for the siege to work. And it was a ruthless, awful, I mean, the brutalities and atrocities, left, right and

centre. But they were not just Spaniards against Indians, they were everybody was at each other's throats at the time. And that's something that needs to be emphasised in order to understand what was going on from the inside rather than with the benefit of hindsight. It's so common to hear that the Spaniards just went out there and killed everybody. And that's what everybody thinks. So I think the record needs to be straightened up a little bit. I am always struck by the extraordinary audacity of famously Pizarro in South America and Cortes in Mexico, what is now Mexico. They advanced deep into unknown

territory with not huge numbers of their own troops, obviously took advantage, of course, of both the technology and of the politics on the ground they found. But they advanced far from their supporting fleets. There seems to be something about those two expeditions in particular and others, which are peculiar to the conquistadors. You don't find Robert Clive in Bengal in the 18th century. He makes sure he stays quite close to the Royal Navy or, you know, the Navy of the East India Company, for example. Yes, I think that's undeniable. A lot of it comes through in the accounts on the Chronicles. Obviously, we're very interested in emphasising these things. You know, a lot of these people who wrote about the exploits of the conquistadors were consciously trying to compare them to the great heroes of antiquity.

They embellished the stories in a way that we find very attractive and almost not nowadays, but up until recently, they were read like kind of romantic, chivalric exploits of very virtuous people. I think a lot of that is embellished by the chronicles and by Cortés himself, who wrote several letters to Charles V, trying to give the whole idea a very, very clear imperial spin. He was trying to convince Charles V that the central indigenous people of Mexico had willingly submitted to the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire. They had acknowledged that that was their true sovereign, Roman Empire, they had acknowledged that that was their true sovereign, which of course is impossible to believe. But that's what Cortes was telling Charles V had happened. So he justified the

reconquest of Tenochtitlan on those grounds that these people were now rebels because they were vassals of Charles V. They had sworn allegiance to Charles V and they then rebelled. So that was how he was going to justify taking over. He was taking back what would rightfully belong to the Holy Roman Emperor. So all these things are embellished. When we read them, we think this is absolutely incredible. But we have to obviously take the stories with a huge pinch of salt. Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

history hits. There are new episodes every week. And what about Christianity? People have argued, haven't they, that the existence of these continents with lots of sophisticated people on them was a great challenge to Christian thinkers. Were they brutal? And if so, was that sort of religiously inspired? I mean, obviously, Christians were able to do horrific things to each other on the European continent. What role did Christianity play? Christianity was central because everybody was a practicing Christian, regardless of their behavior. It was what was taken for granted. It was a view of the world. You cannot really understand the outlook of even the most horrendous, cruel, nasty conquistadors in the absence of Christianity, because that was their point of

reference. What I try to do in the book is to see the kind of Christianity that they lived, because it is a very different type of Christianity to the one we know nowadays. We've been brought up in the age, even non-Christians understand Christianity from the perspective of catechisms, of belief, doctrine, understanding. It's a very cerebral type of thing. If you're going to be a Christian, you really have to assent rationally to the truths of the Christian faith. This is not something that was peculiar to the late Middle Ages. I mean, of course, there were lots of Christians writing and thinking seriously about all sorts of the implications of Christian mysteries etc but the the bulk of

society was educated through ritual and liturgy rather than through catechisms and learning by rote and all that sort of thing so it was really what you did that made you or didn't make you a Christian when it comes to the role of, especially the early mendicant orders that went out there, the common accepted wisdom is that, of course, they went out there to justify what the Spaniards were doing. Pope Alexander VI had given Ferdinand and Isabel the right to go out there and do whatever they wanted, appropriate these lands, as long as they converted people to Christianity. That was the only duty as far as he was concerned. So obviously the Spaniards very often used Christianity as the perfect excuse

to be there. But we must be very careful not to turn it into some kind of excuse. Christianity was imposed by force on Latin America. This is the interpretation that has been very popular since the time of the insurgency in the 19th century, because most nationalist historians were trying to paint the history of Spain as 300 years of oppression and obscurantism. And these new nations were going to break away from those heavy shackles and they looked for a good future ahead of them. So they painted all those 300 years as very dark. Christianity was the justifying element in the darkness. When you begin to analyze the actual sources, you very soon realize that neither the conquistadors nor the mendicant friars had

the will or the resources to impose themselves by force you know just like the conquistadors needed the collaboration of different kinds of alliances so that eventually the conquest took place largely as indigenous movements so too the expansion of christianity was done through assimilation accommodation, very subtle exchanges that led in the early years to lots of confusions, but that eventually emerged by the late 16th, early 17th centuries in these really remarkable indigenous cultures that are actually genuinely Christian.

And you can still see them at work nowadays. So it's a very difficult subject to investigate because you have to read between the lines of the sources, you have to get away from the overwhelming amount of sources that talk about idolatry, persecutions, trials, burnings at the stake. You know, people were obsessed that these Indians were still worshipping demons. If you see what was happening actually on the ground, it's very, very similar to what went on in European late antiquity, the early Middle Ages.

All these early friars were constantly quoting from Gregory the Great and Bede and Boniface, saying that the situation was very, very similar to what had happened in late antiquity in Europe and the early Middle Ages. The letter that Gregory wrote to Miletus at the time of Augustine of Canterbury is quoted so often that you very soon realise that that's exactly what they wanted to do. Do you remember that letter of Gregory the Great to Miletus saying,

for goodness sake, don't destroy the temples because you will alienate these people. It's much better if they go back to what is familiar. And that's the remarkable thing that happens with the early friars, that they were very, very good at noticing what would work and not just preserving it and respecting it, but actually adapting it and making it attractive. They used the native languages. They used songs, rituals and dances that were familiar to them. And what they wanted was really an incorporation of all these groups of indigenous peoples into a religious culture that would make sense to them, just the Christian conquest of the Baltics or Prussia

in the early Middle Ages is, I suppose, the diseases. Is that while all this is going on, you've got something like 90% of indigenous people dying, right? I mean, that presumably is tied up with how we see these conquistadors and why we see them as a group apart from average country and garden conqueror elsewhere in the world. Yes, I mean, the diseases were absolutely devastating and it's now more or less established that that was the main cause of their depopulation. You know, to talk in terms of genocide or brutality and all that sort of thing, I mean, obviously these elements were happening at the time of the big battles,

but once the Spaniards had settled the land, it was in their interest to preserve the time of the big battles. But once the Spaniards had settled the land, it was in their interest to preserve the lives of the indigenous peoples. When the diseases began to spread, and before they built herd immunity and all that sort of thing, because eventually they did build herd immunity and the populations began to grow again towards the end of the 16th century, it was quite stable. And then it begins to grow again in the 17th century. But at the time of the catastrophe, it was very natural for Indians to see these events as punishment for having abandoned their gods, and that's how they interpreted it. You know, the arrival of the Christian god

was something that they had welcomed, because that's how they behaved in the past. Any god of a conquering group would automatically be welcome into the polytheistic pantheon because it would have been politically suicidal not to you know this was a powerful god that needed to be propitiated and that's how the christian god was regarded by the natives in the early stages when the friars began to insist that actually this was the only god and they had to abandon all the others, and then that coincided with the diseases and their deaths, they began to see this and they explain it in many sources. They say it's the arrival of the Christian god and the displacement

of the native gods that has angered our ancient deities and that's why we're dying. our ancient deities, and that's why we're dying. Added to this was the remarkable fact that the Spaniards were not dying. You know, that must have been very positive. They didn't understand how this thing worked, but the Spaniards somehow seemed immune. So that endowed them with a sense of invincibility that must have sapped the morale of the indigenous people at that stage. So that obviously made the task of the friars at the same time more challenging,

but easier in the long term, because there were explanations of the early friars saying, well, of course, when you come out of Egypt, you need 40 years in the desert, you know, so plagues and famine, suffering, and all that sort of thing. It's a kind of purgative state in order to lead these people to the true faith. Did they see race in a way that's familiar to us today, the conquistadors? How did they regard these people with different skin pigmentation, different religious beliefs when they arrived? Remarkably, I haven't found any references to skin pigmentation other than when Columbus is going up and down, trying to find similar characteristics at similar latitudes.

He does make the observation, it's very peculiar that the people of northern Venezuela are not the dark people that I expected to find at this latitude, because he had seen Africans and he expected to find the same kind of characteristics in America. They saw it much more as a product of the environment. There are letters of Cortes and especially Columbus in the early years writing desperately saying please send more olive oil, more wine and we need to grow wheat here because if we carry on eating cassava bread and rodents we're going to end up losing our beards and going brown. He really thought that that would happen to them very quickly just from the food they were consuming and living in that environment.

There isn't the concept of race that we have nowadays. It's the same with what we now call anti-Semitism because obviously you remember that 1492 was also the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. And it's quite easy to see this as, you know, the beginning of something that would lead straight to the Holocaust. But if you actually studied the way in which people were thinking about the Jews in Spain, the idea was conversion. Nobody denied that if a Jew converted to Christianity, then the problem would be solved. It's not a problem of anti-Semitism, as we understand the term nowadays. It's much more of a problem of anti-Judaism,

the presence of a non-Christian group in an overwhelmingly Christian body politic, because they didn't use the word state. It was the body politic. And obviously all the analogies were made with the human body, which you couldn't separate from the soul. So a group of non-Christians was obviously something that was seen as some kind of infection or illness that had to be purged. But it's nothing to do with race. You cannot really call it ethnic cleansing or any of these modern terms.

That would be a huge misunderstanding of what was going on. Spain at this time was the greatest power that had ever been. It was the age of print, so Spain was obviously the first victim of the print propagandists. They began, especially during the Dutch Revolt, to paint a picture of Spain as the centre of bigotry, exploitation, cruelty. You just need to think of William the Silent, the Prince of Orange, the leader of the Dutch revolt. In his Apologia, he paints a picture of Philip II as the most depraved individual that you could possibly imagine, guilty of incest, adultery, the murder of his wife and son, you know, and what else could you expect from the ruler of a

nation that had produced these monsters that were decimating half the world? And of course, they were using all the diatribes and pamphlets that Spaniards themselves were producing in the New World in order to shock the Spanish court into implementing reform. So by using that, they presented these as historical facts. And the really interesting thing is that by the time that image of Spain began to sink in, Spain itself had begun to believe the idea, because the years after the failure of the Armada,

Philip II has decided that he's not going to do anything else to expand the empire. You have a huge number of people writing in Spain about the ills of empire and how empire has completely destroyed Spain. It's the source of all its weaknesses. And that so the image was very, very easy for that anti-Spanish, mostly Dutch and then English propaganda to sink into the not just into northern Europe, but throughout the Hispanic world as well. And then it was picked up at the time of the insurgency in the 19th century. All the nationalist historians paint the same picture of this kind of obscurantist seat of cruelty, oppression, exploitation, priest-ridden bigotry, you know, all that kind of stuff. That still plagues the literature up

until now. A passing familiarity with the Dutch behaviour in the Indian Ocean means they yield to no one in bigotry, violence and rapaciousness. Ah, but that didn't, not many people know that. You don't immediately associate the Dutch with that kind of thing. You associate them with the beginning of the Enlightenment, tolerance, the acceptance of difference, all that sort of thing. They were very good at painting that image. Of course, very, very similar movements were going on throughout the Hispanic world. You know, the acceptance of difference is there for everyone to see. But that's not what's emphasized, because we have this notion that it must have been. One fascinating document I found was the letters written by the English colonists that were sent to Jamaica by Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. They wanted to take over Jamaica. And some of these letters talk about the shock they got

when they arrived. And they found many Spanish black people who were free. And not just that, but they actually believed they had rights. They saw this as proof of the laziness of the Spaniards who weren't disciplined enough to keep these people under control. But of course, what had happened is that the set of legislative measures that were imposed in the 16th century did lead to opportunities for everybody in the New World and in Spain as well to fight for their rights all the way up to the top of the judicial system. Many indigenous peoples, well most indigenous peoples and indigenous groups in the New World, knew, they became very very litigious and they knew what they needed to do in order to secure their rights. The laws of the Indies as they are called

were specifically geared to the defence of the privileges, rights, you know, what one in Spanish is known as fueros, which is a very difficult word to translate, because it's like a kind of a local historical privilege of the particular regions. But they only work if you place them within the legitimising umbrella, if you want to call it that, of the Spanish monarchy. You know, by reference to the Spanish monarch, they could defend their local rights. And that's a system that was very flexible, sometimes lent itself to quite a bit of corruption, but it was the kind of corruption that was not known as corruption or something evil. It was something that was more like a lubricant, something that kept the system running.

Of course, you would organise things in certain ways at the local level in order to make things work. And indigenous peoples knew about this. That's why there were so many communal lands preserved throughout the so-called colonial period. When the indigenous peoples began to lose their rights in a serious way was after the abolition of these legislative measures in the 19th century by liberal secular governments that saw everything from an abstract perspective. So the local privileges were erased and everybody

had the same rights. Well, of course, in a society like that, it's people with money who are going to benefit. The ones without money are going to suffer because all their lands are going to be bought and they're going to be turned into serfs. It's a big mistake to see that, all these things which we observe in modern Latin America, as rooted in the Spanish conquest. Everybody thinks that it is the legacy of the Spanish conquest, and it isn't. It's the legacy of the 19th century. That's another thing that I found out really was fascinating while doing this research. Well, thank you very much for sharing it with us today. What's the book called?

Just Conquistadores. I put the E in the Spanish plural because as a native speaker, I think if you're going to use a foreign word, you might as well stick to the foreign plural. Well, congratulations. And it's much better with that E in. So congratulations for that. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I

totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.