A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (23 page)

The Spanish conquerors arrived just as these tensions were at their sharpest. A great famine had hit the Aztec lower classes in 1505, forcing many to sell themselves into slavery. The level of loot from conquest was in decline, and Moctezuma had increased his own power within the ruling class using the blood sacrifice cult. Yet the challenge to the cult was great enough for him to fear Cortés was the returning Quetzalcoatl and to welcome him accordingly. More important, perhaps, the peoples who had been subjugated by the Aztecs rushed to back the invaders. There were more indigenous troops fighting on the Spanish side than on the Aztec side in the final battle for Tenochtitlan.

Both the Aztec and the Spanish empires were based on tribute, backed by vicious retribution against those who tried to rebel. Both held to the most inhuman of religions, with the Spanish being as prepared to burn heretics at the stake as the Aztecs were to sacrifice people to appease the gods. After the conquest the Spanish established a permanent
auto da fé
(place for burning heretics) on the site of the Tenochtitlan marketplace.
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But Spain had the use of the iron-based technologies which had developed across Eurasia and north Africa in the previous two millennia, while the Aztecs were dependent on stone and wood-based technologies, even if they had advanced these further than people anywhere else in the world. Of the metals, they had only gold and copper—and copper was rare and used only for decoration. Their weapons were made of obsidian, a stone that can be given a razor sharp edge but which breaks easily.

The lack of metal led to other lags in Aztec technology. For instance, the Aztecs had no wheeled vehicles. Gordon Childe suggested this was because wheels need to be shaped by a saw, something not easy to make without a metal harder than copper.
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Why had the Aztecs not learned metallurgy? Jared Diamond points to certain geographical disadvantages similar to those in Africa. The peoples of Mexico could not draw on innovations made thousands of miles away. Mexico was separated by the tropical belt of Central America from the other great Latin American civilisation in the Andes—which had moved further towards metallurgy, but was still not acquainted with iron.
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But the Mexicans also did not have any great incentive to adopt metallurgy. They had managed to develop sophisticated methods of food production and build impressive cities without it. If they faced periodic famines, so did the iron based civilisations of Europe and Asia. It was only when they were suddenly faced with the iron armaments of the Europeans that their lack of metallurgy became a fatal disadvantage, causing them to be overthrown by people who in other respects were not more ‘advanced’.

The subjection of Peru

History rarely repeats itself closely. But it did when a relative of Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, sailed south from Panama down the Pacific coast of South America in the early 1530s, a decade after the conquest of Mexico.

He had made two previous surveillance trips and knew that somewhere inland was a great empire. This time he landed at the coastal town of Tumbez with 106 foot soldiers and 62 horsemen. There he received news of a civil war in the great Inca Empire as two half brothers, Atahualpa in the north and Huascar in the south, quarrelled over the inheritance of their father, the Great Inca Huana-Cupac. Pizarro was quick to make contact with representatives of Atahualpa, assuring him of his friendship, and received an invitation to meet him at the town of Cajamarca in the Andes. The journey inland and up into the mountains would have been virtually impossible for the Spanish contingent without Inca guides to direct them along a road which had well provisioned rest places at the end of each day’s march.

At Cajamarca the Spaniards stationed themselves within the walls of the town, most hiding with their guns and horses. Atahualpa left most of a huge Inca army behind and entered the town in ceremonial fashion with 5,000 or 6,000 men, in no way prepared for fighting. Pizarro’s brother Hernando later recounted:

A Dominican monk with the Spaniards began speaking to Atahualpa, trying to persuade him to convert to the Christian religion and pay tribute to the Spanish king—on the grounds that the pope had allocated this part of Latin America to Spain. The Inca is said to have replied:

He threw to the ground a Bible that had been handed to him. The monk said to Pizarro, ‘Do you not see that while we stand here wasting our breath or talking with this dog, the field is filling with Indians. Set on them at once. I absolve you’.
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Pizarro waved a white scarf, the hidden Spanish troops opened fire and, as the noise and smoke created panic among the assembled Incas, the cavalry charged at them. There was nowhere for the Incas to flee. According to Spanish estimates, 2,000 Incas died, according to Inca estimates 10,000.
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Atahualpa was now a prisoner of the Spanish, forced to act as their front man while they took over the core of his empire. He assumed he could buy them off, given their strange obsession with gold, and collected a huge pile of it. He was sorely mistaken. Pizarro took the gold and executed the Inca after a mockery of a trial at which he was charged among other things with ‘adultery and plurality of wives’, ‘idolatry’ and ‘exciting insurrection against the Spanish’. He was taken to the city square to be burnt at the stake, where he said he wanted to convert to Christianity—believing the Spanish would not burn a baptised Christian. He was right. After his baptism, Pizarro ordered he should be strangled instead.
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The massacre and the murder of Atahualpa set the pattern for the conquest of the rest of the Inca Empire. As hundreds more Spanish soldiers joined him, attracted by the lure of gold, Pizarro established one of Atahualpa’s brothers as puppet emperor and set off on a march to the Inca capital, Cuzco, burning alive another Inca leader, Calicuchima, who tried to oppose him. On taking the city, the Spaniards stole gold from the houses and temples and seized Inca princesses. The 56 year old Pizarro was proud to have a child by a 15 year old, who he married off to a follower. The treatment of ordinary Incas was later described by a priest, Cristobal do Molina, who accompanied a Spanish column south into Chile:

The Spanish conquerors aimed to enrich themselves and resorted to slavery as well as the looting of gold. They divided the country into
encomiendo
districts over which chosen colonists had the power to extract forced labour, relying on the Laws of Burgos of 1512-13, which ruled that Indian men were compelled to work for Spaniards for nine months of the year. The decree was meant to be read out to the Indians, who were told their wives and children would be enslaved and their possessions confiscated if they did not obey.
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There was also tribute to be paid to the priests who, in some cases, ‘maintained private stocks, prisons, chains and ships to punish religious offenders’.
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The Spanish did not have things all their own way. They faced a succession of revolts. One of Pizarro’s brothers was besieged in Cuzco for months. Inca resistance was not crushed until the execution of the last emperor, Tupac Amura, in 1572. But the Incas were doomed for similar reasons to the Aztecs in Mexico. They had copper, but not iron, and llamas rather than the much stronger horses and mules. A Bronze Age civilisation, however refined, could not withstand an Iron Age one, however crude. The horses were, as Hemmings put it, ‘the tanks of the conquest’.
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It was only when Indians further south in Chile acquired the use of horses that the advance of the conquerors suffered serious setbacks.

A few members of the imperial family did manage to survive under the new set up, integrating themselves into the Spanish upper class. As Hemmings relates, ‘They were as eager for titles, for coats of arms, for fine Spanish clothes and unearned income as any Spanish
hidalgo
’.
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But for the masses who had lived in the Inca Empire, life became incomparably worse than before. One Spaniard noble wrote to the king in 1535, ‘I moved across a good portion of the country and saw terrible destruction’.
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Another contrasted the situation under the Incas with that after the conquest: ‘The entire country was calm and well nourished, whereas today we see only infinite deserted villages on all the roads in the kingdom’.
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The harm done by the conquest was made worse by the obsession of each of the new rulers with gaining as much wealth as possible. This led to bitter civil wars between rival Spanish commanders and to risings of the newly rich settlers against representatives of the Spanish crown. As rival armies burned and pillaged, the irrigation canals and hillside terraces which had been essential to agriculture went to waste, the llama herds were slaughtered, the food stocks kept in case of harvest failure were eaten. The hungry were hit by the same European diseases which had caused so much harm in the Caribbean. The effect was even greater than that of the Black Death on 14th century Europe. In the valley of Lima only 2,000 out of a population of 25,000 survived into the 1540s. The indigenous population of the empire fell by between a half and three-quarters.

So devastated was the land that even the Spanish monarchy began to worry. It wanted an empire that would provide wealth, not one denuded of its labour force. Again and again in the mid-1500s it debated measures to limit the destructiveness of the settlers and to control the exploitation of the Indians. It was then that priests like Las Casas who denounced the settlers came to prominence. Yet their efforts did not lead to much change in the former Inca Empire, since by now forced labour was essential for the profits the crown was getting from its silver and mercury mines at Potosi—a city whose population of 150,000 made it one of the largest in the world. In 1570 a commission headed by Archbishop Loyza agreed that since the mines were in the public interest, forced labour had to be tolerated.
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Columbus did not ‘discover’ America. The ‘Indians’ had done that at least 14,000 years before when they crossed the Bering Straits from Siberia into Alaska. He was not even the first European to arrive there—the Vikings had established a brief presence on the north eastern coast of North America half a millennium before him. But 1493 did mark a turning point in history. For the first time the previously backward societies on the Atlantic coast of Eurasia were showing a capacity to exercise a dominant influence on other parts of the world. So although the Spanish were as barbaric in the Americas as the Crusaders had been in the Middle East three or four centuries before, the outcome was different. The Crusaders came, saw, conquered and destroyed—and then were driven out, leaving little behind but abandoned fortresses. The Spanish came, saw, conquered, destroyed—and stayed to create a new, permanent domain.

While this was happening across the Atlantic, equally significant and ultimately world-shaking changes were taking place in Europe itself—changes in politics, intellectual life and ideology and, underlying these, changes in the ways millions of people obtained a living.

Much mainstream history is obsessed with how one monarch took over from another. It consists of little more than lists of kings, queens and ministers, with accompanying stories of manoeuvres by courtiers, princely murders and dynastic battles. The political changes beginning at the end of the 15th century stand apart from such trivia. They led to the rise of a new sort of state, which in one version or another came to dominate the world.

People often use the words ‘country’ or ‘nation’ when speaking about the ancient or medieval worlds. But the states which ruled then were very different to the modern ‘national’ state.

Today we take it for granted that a country consists of geographically continuous territory within fixed boundaries. We expect it to have a single administrative structure, with a single set of taxes (sometimes with local variations) and without customs barriers between its different areas. We assume it demands the loyalty of its ‘citizens’, in return granting certain rights, however limited. Being ‘stateless’ is a fate which people do their utmost to avoid. We also assume there exists a national language (or sometimes a set of languages) which both rulers and ruled speak.

The monarchies of medieval Europe had few of these features. They were hodgepodge territories which cut across linguistic divisions between peoples and across geographical obstacles. The emperor of the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ usually ran Bohemia as a kingdom and claimed sovereignty over various territories in the German speaking lands and in parts of Italy. The kings of England engaged in a series of wars to try to assert a claim over a large chunk of French-speaking territory. The kings of France sought to hold territory across the Alps in what is today Italy but had little control over eastern France (part of the rival Dukedom of Burgundy), south west France and Normandy (ruled by the English kings), or Brittany. There could be wholesale movement of state boundaries, as marriages and inheritance gave kings sovereignty over distant lands or war robbed them of local territories. There was rarely a single, uniform administrative structure within a state. Usually it would be made up of principalities, duchies, baronies and independent boroughs, with their own rulers, their own courts, their own local laws, their own tax structure, their own customs posts and their own armed men—so that the allegiance each owned to the monarch was often only nominal and could be forgotten if a rival monarch made a better offer. Monarchs often did not speak the languages of the people they ruled, and official documents and legal statutes were rarely in the tongue of those subject to their laws.

This began to change in important parts of Europe towards the end of the 15th century, just as Spain was reaching out to conquer Latin America. Charles VII and Louis XI in France, Henry VII and Henry VIII in England, and the joint monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand in Spain all succeeded in enhancing their own power at the expense of the great feudal lords and in imposing some sort of state-wide order within what are today’s national boundaries.

The changes were important because they constituted the first moves from the feudal towards the modern setup. That transition was still far from complete. The most powerful of the ‘new’ monarchies, that of Spain, still had separate administrative structures for its Catalan, Valencian, Aragonese and Castilian components, while its monarchs waged wars for another century and a half to try to keep possession of lands in Italy and the Low Countries. The French kings had to endure a series of wars and civil wars before they forced the territorial lords to submit to ‘absolutist’ rule—and even then internal customs posts and local legal systems remained in place. Even in England, where the Norman Conquest in 1066 had created a more unified feudal state than elsewhere, the northern earls retained considerable power and the monarchs still had not abandoned their claims in ‘France’.

Nevertheless, the ‘new monarchies’ and the ‘absolutisms’ which later developed out of them in France and Spain represented something different to the old feudal order. They were states which rested on feudalism but in which the monarchs had learned to use new forces connected with the market system and the growth of the towns as a counterbalance to the power of the feudal lords.
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Their policies were still partly directed toward the classic feudal goals of acquiring land by means of force or marriage alliances. But another goal was of increasing importance—building trade and locally based production. So Isabel and Ferdinand conquered the Moorish kingdom of Granada and fought wars over territory in Italy, but they also financed Columbus and his successors in the hope of extending trade. Henry VIII used marriage to establish dynastic links with other monarchs, but he also encouraged the growth of the English wool industry and the navy.

This certainly does not mean these monarchies were any less brutal than their forebears. They were prepared to use any means to cement their power against one another and against their subjects. Intrigue, murder, kidnapping and torture were their stock in trade. Their philosophy is best expressed in the writings of Machiavelli, the Florentine civil servant whose life’s ambition was to see Italy unified in a single state and who drew up guidelines by which a ‘prince’ was to achieve this goal. His hopes were frustrated. But his writings specify a list of techniques which could have been taken straight from the repertoire of the Spanish monarchs or Henry VIII.

Isabel and Ferdinand followed the conquest of Granada by doing something the Islamic kingdoms had never done to the Christians—using the Inquisition to kill those who refused to convert to Christianity or flee the country. By the beginning of the 17th century the Muslim population, which had been in the country for 900 years, had been expelled. Jewish people who had been tolerated through almost eight centuries of Islamic rule were forced to emigrate, making new lives for themselves in north Africa, in the Turkish-ruled Balkans (where a Spanish-speaking Jewish community remained in Salonica until Hitler’s armies took the city in the Second World War) and in eastern Europe. Even the converts to Christianity, the
conversos
, were not secure. There was a wave of persecution against them in the 1570s.

The harsh methods of Henry VII, Henry VIII and their successors in England were not only directed against the power of the old feudal barons. They were also directed against vast numbers of the poorest people—those who were left to roam the country without a livelihood as the barons dismissed their old armies of retainers and landowners, ‘enclosed’ old common lands and deprived smallholding peasants of their plots. Successive monarchs treated them as ‘voluntary criminals’.
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A law of 1530 decreed:

The law was later amended:

The new ideas

The period of the ‘discovery’ of America and the ‘new monarchies’ was also the period of the Renaissance—the ‘rebirth’ of intellectual life and art that began in the Italian cities and spread, over a century, to the rest of western Europe. Across the continent there was a rediscovery of the learning of classical antiquity and, with it, a break with the narrow world view, stultifying aritistic conventions and religious superstition which characterised the European Middle Ages. The result was a flowering of art and literature and scientific advances such as the European world had not known since the times of Plato, Aristotle and Euclid.

This was not the first attempt to make such a break, despite the claims of some history books. There had been an earlier breakthrough two centuries before, with the translation of works from Latin, Greek and Arabic in Toledo, the efforts of thinkers like Abelard and Roger Bacon, and the writings of Bocaccio, Chaucer and Dante. But it had ground to a halt with the great crisis of the 14th century, as church and state worked to extirpate ideas that might link with the class struggle in town and country. The universities, from being centres of intellectual exploration, were increasingly characterised by scholastic disputes which seemed to have no practical relevance.

The Renaissance represented a return to the intellectual, cultural and scientific endeavours of the 13th century, but on a much higher level and with a much broader base. In its birthplace in the Italian city states, it did not immediately challenge head on the sterility of the late medieval world view. Those states were dominated by merchant oligarchs who flaunted wealth arrived at by non-feudal means and pushed the members of the old feudal nobility aside, but who used their wealth and power to secure positions within the framework established by feudalism. The dominant family in Florence, for example, was the Medicis. They started off as merchants and bankers, but two of them ended up as popes and another as the queen of France. The culture they promoted reflected their contradictory position. They commissioned paintings and sculptures by craftsmen from plebeian backgrounds who gave brilliant visual expression to the new society emerging in the midst of the old. Michelangelo’s ‘God Giving Life to Adam’ or his ‘Last Judgement’ in the Sistine Chapel are religious works which celebrate humanity. Among his greatest works is the series of giant statues of slaves or prisoners which show men struggling to free themselves from the stone in which they are trapped. The literature encouraged by the oligarchs, on the other hand, was in some ways a step backwards from the tradition of the 13th and early 14th centuries. As the Italian revolutionary Gramsci noted nearly 70 years ago, while Dante wrote in the Italian dialect of the Florentine people, the language of Renaissance ‘humanism’ was that of a thin intellectual elite, Latin. This provided a channel of communication to scholars across Europe, but not to the mass of people of Florence, Milan or Venice. What is more, there was still an almost superstitious reverence for the ancient texts, so that a quotation from a Greek or Roman author still seemed like the clinching point in an argument.

As the Renaissance spread across Europe, its content began to change. There was a growing number of translations from the Greek or Latin into colloquial languages. And there was a growing willingness not simply to read the ancients, but to challenge their findings—best exemplified by the scientific advances of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. The 16th century may have begun with the regurgitation of 2,000 year old ideas, but within little more than another century there was an explosion of new writings in the languages of the masses—Rabelais in French; Shakespeare, Marlowe and Ben Jonson in English; Cervantes in Spanish. This was not just a matter of putting stories, plays or many of the new ideas on to paper. It was also a matter of giving form to the everyday speech used by millions. The age which saw the ‘new monarchies’ also saw the first rise of national languages.

The new religions

Twenty five years after Spanish troops took Granada and Columbus landed in the West Indies, a 34 year old friar and theology teacher, Martin Luther, nailed a piece of paper to the door of a church in Wittenberg, south Germany. It contained 95 points (‘theses’) attacking the sale of ‘indulgences’ by the Catholic church. These were documents which absolved people from their sins and promised a passport to heaven. His action precipitated the biggest split in the western church since Constantine had embraced Christianity 12 centuries before. It seemed that nothing the church or the Holy Roman Empire did could stop support for Luther growing. The cities of southern Germany and Switzerland—Basel, Zurich, Strasbourg, Mainz—swung behind him. So did some of the most powerful German princes, like those of Saxony, Hesse and Brandenburg. Soon there were converts in Holland and France—despite countermeasures by the authorities like the burning alive of 14 Lutheran artisans in the town square of Meaux in 1546.
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Henry VIII of England broke with the Catholic church after the pope (an ally of the Spanish crown) would not countenance his divorce from the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon.

Luther began with theological arguments—over indulgences, over church ceremonies, over the role of priests as intermediaries between believers and God, over the right of the pope to discipline the priesthood. But the Catholic church had been such a central part of medieval society that the issues could not avoid being social and political. Effectively, what Luther did was challenge the institution that exercised ideological control on behalf of the whole feudal order. Those who benefited from that ideological control were bound to fight back. Disputes over these issues were to plunge most of Europe into a succession of wars and civil wars over the next century and a quarter—the Smalkaldic war in Germany, the religious civil wars in France, the long war of Dutch independence from Spain, the Thirty Years War which devastated the lands of Germany, and the English Civil War.