Romans in A New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America

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By David A. Lupher

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2003 David A. Lupher
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0472112759

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Chapter One - Conquistadors and Romans

"The greatest event since the creation of the world, apart from the Incarnation and death of its creator, is the discovery of the Indies; and that is why they call it the New World."1 So begins the dedicatory epistle to Charles V, "Emperor of the Romans, King of Spain, Lord of the Indies and the New World," that Francisco Lopez de Gomara, secretary and chaplain to Hernan Cortes, placed at the beginning of his Historia general de las Indias (1552). Gomara's proud proclamation of the world-historical significance of the Spanish enterprise in America is a conveniently arresting introduction to the mental world of the conquistadors and their publicists. As we shall see, it was the fall of the Aztec empire to Cortes and a handful of obscure adventurers that inspired the chroniclers of Spanish deeds in the Indies to launch their boldest and most sustained challenges to the prestige of those exemplary European culture heroes, the great generals of Greece and Rome. Julius Caesar, conventionally regarded as the institutional ancestor of the reigning king of Spain, was the favorite defeated rival of Cortes and his men, but the model of Titus also exerted a powerful attraction, for the destruction of the great city of Tenochtitlan in 1521 insistently called to mind-- and, Spanish chroniclers would claim, dwarfed--the Roman siege and sack of Jerusalem in the year A.D. 70. The frequency and intensity of these challenges to classical exempla transcended the boisterous emulation of the ancients that was a commonplace in Renaissance writings. As the ringing tone of Gomara's orchestral pronouncement implies, unprecedented experiences, trials, and exhilarations shaped the view of the distant past of the "Old World" expressed by those Spaniards who were struggling to come to terms with their bracingly disorienting "New World."

"The Most Famous Romans Never Performed Deeds Equal to Ours": Conquistadors and Their Publicists Challenge the Prestige of the Romans

It was a fitting coincidence that the venture in which Cortes was to challenge the prestige of the ancients should begin with a mandate to track down some refugees from classical mythology. When Diego Velazquez, the governor of Cuba against whom he promptly rebelled, named him caudillo of an expedition to Yucatan on October 23, 1518, item 26 of the formal instructions ordered him to find out "where the Amazons are, who, according to the Indians you are taking with you, are in that vicinity." Cortes had other things on his mind than Amazons over the next few years, but news of a society of warrior women did reach his ears at last, and he assumed that Charles V would be eager to hear the report. Accordingly, he dispatched an expedition to the Pacific coast to search for them, assuring its leader, his cousin Francisco Cortes de Buenaventura, that "these women follow the practices of the Amazons described in the istorias antiguas." But while these eagerly sought classical adversaries displayed their customary propensity to recede into the distance (this time northwards to a long "island" soon christened California, after the land of the Amazon queen Calafia in Rodriguez de Montalvo's romance Sergas de Esplandian), the conquistadors repeatedly grappled with classical warriors even more vividly present to their minds than the Amazons. These imaginary competitors were the celebrated generals and conquerors of classical antiquity.

At first glance, the eagerness of the conquistadors to compete with the fame of classical, especially Roman, heroes might seem nothing more than the familiar emulation of ancient models so characteristic of the Renaissance--and indeed of the medieval and classical periods as well. As both Julius Caesar and his rival Pompey had emulated Alexander the Great, so Cortes was presented by the conquistador-chronicler Bernal Diaz del Castillo as a man in the mold of all three of those ancient conquerors, as well as more recent models such as the heroes of the Reconquest of Spain from the Moors. But what is especially arresting about such passages in the writings of the conquistadors and their champions is an unmistakable note of defiance fueled by the nervous megalomania of many of these adventurers, particularly those embarked on expeditions as dangerous and as shakily authorized as that of the quasi-renegade Cortes. Against a constant undertone of such insecurity one might have expected Bernal Diaz to emphasize his caudillo's sufficiently respectable hidalgo origins ("a gentleman by four lines of descent," he termed him) and more especially his eventual title of Marques del Valle de Oaxaca. Instead, he insisted upon referring to him as simply Hernan Cortes, for that name by itself "was as honored both in the Indies and Spain as that of Alexander in Macedon, and those of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Scipio among the Romans, and that of Hannibal among the Carthaginians, and that of Gonzalo Hernandez, the 'Great Captain,' in Castille." Thus the deeds of Cortes allowed the stark simplicity of his name to transcend the complications, the indignities, and the inadequate honorifics of its particular historical reality to join the great names of the heroes of antiquity. From cattle rancher and debt-plagued alcalde in Cuba to neighbor of Julius Caesar in the pantheon of historic conquerors, the self-charted trajectory of Cortes's career streaked serenely beyond the ken of jealous governors, nervous royal councilors, or even the shrewd emperor himself.

But did Cortes himself concur with Bernal Diaz's ranking of him with the likes of Julius Caesar? It is true that such classical comparisons are utterly lacking in his four surviving Cartas de relacion to Charles V, but that is scarcely surprising. In reports to an "invictisimo Cesar" and a "cesarea majestad," references to one's own emulation of Caesar would be tactless, to say the least. Bernal Diaz, however, claimed that Cortes invoked precisely this comparison as he announced his famously bold decision to scuttle the ships to prevent defections to Cuba: "he uttered many other comparisons and heroic deeds of the Romans. And we all answered that we would do as he ordered, and that the die was cast for good fortune, as Julius Caesar said at the Rubicon." (No less an authority than that connoisseur of exemplary heroes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, similarly linked these actions of Caesar and Cortes in an epideixis on fame delivered to Sancho Panza.) Intriguing hearsay evidence that Cortes did see himself as a second Caesar is Bernardino Vazquez de Tapia's charge in the residencia of 1529 that Cortes had been in the habit of repeating Cesare Borgia's motto aut Caesar aut nihil and also of uttering a Machiavellian maxim from Euripides (Phoen. 524-25) that Cicero claimed was constantly on the lips of Julius Caesar.

To compare a nonroyal adventurer with Julius Caesar was bold enough, to be sure, but Cortes's admirers--and perhaps the man himself--did not stop there. They insisted that Cortes must in fact be recognized as superior to the great conquerors of antiquity. The most sustained example in Bernal Diaz's narrative is his account of Cortes's handling of a near mutiny during the campaign in Tlaxcala. Seven leading grumblers came to the capitan's hut and observed, inter alia, that, according to the history books, "both those about the Romans and those about Alexander, as well as those about others of the most famous leaders who had ever existed in the world, no one had dared to scuttle his ships and attack with such a small force such large populations containing so many warriors." Cortes's alleged response to this history lesson was this: "And as for your claim, gentlemen, that never did a Roman capitan, not even one of the most famous, accomplish such great deeds as we have performed, you speak the truth. And from now on, with God's help, they will say in the history books that people will make far more mention of this deed than of those of men in the past." Elsewhere, in the process of correcting Gomara's ascription to Cortes of an action rightly belonging to Juan de Salamanca, Bernal Diaz insisted that he meant no disrespect to Cortes, for "while the Romans granted triumphs to Pompey and to Julius Caesar and to the Scipios, our Cortes is more worthy of praise than the Romans." In the same vein, Gomara himself claimed that Cortes's capture of Moctezuma elevated him well above the heights scaled by classical worthies: "Never did Greek or Roman, or man of any nation, since kings have existed, do what Cortes did in seizing Montezuma, a most powerful king, in his own house, a very strong place, surrounded by an infinity of people, while Cortes had only four hundred and fifty companions." (In a briefer but similar aside in his Historia general de las Indias, Gomara noted that "ninguno romano" had ever equaled Balboa's feat of not losing a single man in the battles he fought on his famous expedition of discovery to the Pacific.)

A more sustained testimony to Cortes's habit of making classical models obsolete is to be found in Francisco Cervantes de Salazar's dedication to him of his continuation of Perez de Oliva's Dialogue on the Dignity of Man, published in Alcala in 1546, the year before the conquistador's death. At the time, Cervantes de Salazar was a professor at the University of Osuna, but the depth of his fascination with the New World can be gauged by the fact that in 1551 he left for Mexico, where he became rector of the university and author of a chronicle celebrating Cortes's deeds, the Cronica de la Nueva Espana, written 1558-66. In his dedication to Cortes of the earlier work, he presented the magnanimocapitan as a paragon of human dignidad who took second place to no one--least of all to any Greek or Roman. To begin with, there was the obvious point that the conquistador had acted on a stage untrodden by earlier Europeans, for "none of the ancients knew the existence of that which Your Excellency has conquered and subjected to the Royal Crown." Then there was the fact that Cortes had "more speedily than Alexander or Caesar defeated so many thousands of men and conquered such a great expanse of land." His shrewdness in the field was another challenge to the prestige of the Greeks and Romans, for "Your Excellency has shown so many new stratagems in matters of war that it cannot be said that in any of them you have imitated the ancients." But the most dazzling triumph over Alexander and Julius Caesar that Cervantes de Salazar ascribed to Cortes was founded upon the paradoxical basis of his inferiority to them in one self-evident respect: his lack of comfortably commanding social status or sweeping political power.

Alexander with the Macedonians, as their king, and Julius Caesar with the Romans, as their emperor, conquered the territories of which we read, but Your Excellency, attended solely by your own valor (virtud), without any other advantage, came to equal them--and I'm not sure I shouldn't rather say that you came to surpass them. Hence it is clear that your valor ought to be illustrious and marvelous, for it has proved strong enough that you have come by yourself alone (con sola su persona) to be lord of so many caciques and lords.

Thus it was the lonely striving of Cortes, conquering vast territories "without the help of any king" [sin ayuda de rei alguno], that most spectacularly elevated him above the more politically powerful, socially prominent, and hence more efficiently supported heroes of antiquity.

Cervantes de Salazar's encomium of Cortes as a magnificent loner, dwarfing the ancients as conqueror "by himself alone" of a vast world unknown to them, would have infuriated Bernal Diaz del Castillo. For the old soldier never tired of reminding his readers that it was not Cortes alone who put the Romans to shame; he may not have had a king's help, but he had the strong arms and stout hearts of men like Bernal Diaz himself. We may recall that the old soldier proudly remembered Cortes as casting in the first-person plural his boast in the "mutiny scene" in Tlaxcala: "Never did a Roman capitan, not even one of the most famous, accomplish such great deeds as we (nosotros) have performed." A similar celebration of the rank and file by means of classical exempla occurs in his account of the defeat of the numerically superior expedition sent by Diego Velazquez under the command of Panfilo de Narvaez to put down the freebooting "rebel." Not only did Bernal Diaz proudly record the words of Guidela, Narvaez's black jester, that "the Romans never did such a deed," but he also put into the mouth of Narvaez himself, in conversation with another Cortesian victim, Francisco de Garay, a sweeping classical encomium of "every single one" [cada uno] of Cortes's followers:

I want you to know that there has not been a more fortunate man in the world than Cortes, and he has such captains and soldiers who could be named who are each and every one of them as fortunate in his undertakings as Octavian, as fortunate in conquering as Julius Caesar, and more fortunate in toiling and engaging in battles than Hannibal.

In attributing these words to the defeated Narvaez, Bernal Diaz was not only claiming for himself and his companions a dignity equal to that of the Romans, he was also appropriating words originally intended for a major figure of the Reconquest and the civil conflicts of mid-fourteenth-century Castile. For in one of the most famous poems in Spanish literature, the Coplas por la muerte de su padre, Jorge Manrique (1440-79) celebrated his late father Don Rodrigo as

En ventura, Octaviano; [In luck, Octavian; Julio Cesar en vencer Julius Caesar in winning e batallar; and giving battle; en la virtud, Africano; in virtue, (Scipio) Africanus; Anibal en el saber Hannibal in wisdom e trabajar.17 and toiling.]

With these words Jorge Manrique began a pair of stanzas of Roman comparisons characterized by Ernst Robert Curtius as "the monumental conclusion and highpoint" of a "national Spanish historical tradition" that had for at least two centuries sought to equate medieval Spain with ancient Rome. Indeed, it is tempting to imagine that the great poem that Bernal Diaz was here quoting and paraphrasing was securely lodged at the back of his mind as he wrote his Historia verdadera. Just after the "Roman stanzas," Jorge Manrique had declared that his father "did not leave behind great treasures, nor did he gain great riches," but, as the concluding lines of the poem note, "though he lost his life, he has left us as ample consolation his memory." Similarly, Bernal Diaz lamented in his preface: "I have no riches to leave my sons and descendants other than this truthful and important account of mine."

Audacious though Bernal Diaz may have been in usurping, along with his companions, a great Moor-slayer's place alongside Roman heroes, a reader may still be forgiven for being taken aback by the defiant boldness of the following words near the end of the Historia verdadera:

And furthermore I want to say something to let you see that I deserve more praise than I give myself, and that is that I have been in far more battles and engagements than the 53 battles writers say Julius Caesar was in. Also, though he had fine chroniclers, he didn't rest content with what they wrote of him, but he wrote with his own hand in his Commentaries about the fighting he had done personally, and so it's not out of line for me to write the heroic deeds of the brave Cortes-- and my own deeds and those of my companions who found themselves fighting alongside one another.

Thus the celebrated Julius Caesar, though he may have been a "great emperor, whose chroniclers say he was very prompt in arms and mighty in giving battle," was surpassed a millennium and a half after his death by one among many valiant young conquistadors in the ranks. So, at least, it appeared to that conquistador's octogenarian older self, who grandly proceeded to bury Caesar's 53 battles under the crushing weight of a catalog of the 119 "battles and encounters in which I found myself," an astonishing climax to these latter-day Commentaries.

Bernal Diaz's boast that the Romans had been surpassed not only by the larger-than-life Cortes but also by his less conspicuous soldiers might seem a personal eccentricity of one whom Juan Gil has labeled "el mas prodigo en reminiscencias clasicas" of all the chroniclers of New Spain. But this same boast was regretfully recalled by one of his companions, Francisco de Aguilar, who likewise wrote his memoirs in old age, though in his case from the unusual and repentant perspective of conquistador-turned-Dominican. Recording the lightning return of Cortes's party to Tenochtitlan to relieve the beleaguered Pedro de Alvarado, Aguilar recalled that "all of them went around very proud" at having achieved "an exploit and labor so great, greater than those of the Romans." True enough, Aguilar looked back upon this boast as the dangerous folly of men who failed to give due thanks and credit to God, thereby inviting the epic sufferings of the subsequent Noche Triste. As we shall soon see, he thus shared the jaundiced view of classical models for New World conquests taken by his fellow Dominicans. But for the moment the importance of Aguilar's recollection is its support for Bernal Diaz's testimony that ordinary conquistadors felt that they had all surpassed the ancient Romans.



Continues...

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Excerpted from Romans in A New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America by David A. Lupher Copyright © 2003 by David A. Lupher. Excerpted by permission.
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