SECOLAS 2016 Presentation

Vesa-Matti Kari Conference Presentation SECOLAS 63rd Annual Conference, Cartagena, Colombia, March 9.–13.2016 Session 62: Legacies and Futures of Indigeneity in Latin America and the Caribbean

Notions of honour of the Spanish conquistadors of the Aztec Empire

I will be talking to you about the notions of honour of the Spanish conquistadors who conquered the Aztec Empire under Hernán Cortés between 1519 and 1521. First, I would like to thank Dr. Muñoz and all of you for being here. This paper is based on my dissertation project which I am conducting at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Research on the Spanish conquistadors’ notions of honour has mostly been restricted to limited comparisons between the conquerors of America and the people who lived in Spain. For example, John Elliott has seen the old Castilian pursuit of honour and the will to “be worth more” (valer más) as one of the motives for the conquistadors in the conquest of America. This interpretation claims that the conquistadors’ actions can be explained by the obligations of the Spanish notion of honour. By contrast, the early modern Spanish notion of honour has been a subject of numerous studies. For several decades, historical studies have concluded that the early modern Spanish were obsessed with honour. According to these studies, the Spaniards valued honour more than their life. They were controlled by a rigid code of honour that demanded them to behave in a certain manner to maintain their honour. Because of this they lived on a razor’s edge as they could lose their honour in a numerous ways. The studies on the Spanish honour have used 16th and 17th century theatre plays or statutory codes as primary sources. Using these kinds of sources has been criticized during the last decades. The theatre plays and law codes represent an ideal view of honour. In these sources it is connected with a code of honour that an individual had to obey or he lost his honour. Another approach is to see honour as rhetoric. In his study of Castilian honour during the 16th and 17th centuries, Scott K. Taylor identifies the rhetoric of honour as a means for individuals to convey information how they saw their place in their community and their views on proper and improper behaviour. Taylor maintains that the rhetoric of honour works better than the code of honour.

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According to him early modern Spanish honour did not have strict rules of conduct. On the contrary individuals could bend these rules. They could use the components of honour to build a counterimage to defend themselves against criminal charges. Therefore, an individual who highlighted one’s honour was not only obsessed of maintaining one’s honour. He was also using honour as a rhetoric tool to manipulate and persuade one’s audience to gain something he wants in the particular context. The primary sources of the studies on the Spanish conquistadors’ honour have been limited. Most of historians have used only published sources such as Cortés’s letters, Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s memoirs and chronicles written after the conquest that have been available for centuries. Archival sources have been consulted only in studies about the phases of Spanish conquests or about the background of the conquistadors. One category of the archival sources is the proof (probanzas) or information of merits and services (informaciones de méritos y servicios). The probanzas were addressed to the king or to royal officials with hopes of gaining rewards for services to the crown. Common rewards the conquistadors wanted included pensions, titles, crown offices or encomiendas, a right to tax a certain amount of Indians. These documents contain numerous references to the conquistador’s notion of honour. Therefore it is surprising that they have not been used when studying the conquistadors’ notion of honour. My study uses previously mentioned published sources and probanzas written by the men who participated in the conquest of the Aztecs under Hernán Cortés between 1519 and 1521. The questions I am answering are: what was honour according to the Spanish conquistadors? How did they communicate honour to manipulate the crown to grant them rewards? The most common quality that was regarded honourable by the conquistadors was having a title of gentry. There were no members of the titled nobility among Cortés’ men. Instead, some of them possessed lower ranks such as that of a hidalgo or a caballero. The number of these individuals was only around 5 percent. However, hidalgos and caballeros were well represented among captains who served under Cortés and also among the individuals who had probanzas compiled. Why were hidalgos and caballeros considered honourable? In the Spanish culture having a noble title did not mean itself that an individual was honourable. Yet, the nobles were expected to behave in virtuous manner because of their birth. Members of the nobility were given offices of the crown because of their birth and not by merit.

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Having been born to nobility brought an individual certain amount of honour which was respected by others and some privileges. It should be pointed out that the conquistadors also regarded illegitimate children of hidalgo fathers as honourable as those born to married parents. Unlike studies on the early modern honour in Spain, the conquistadors did not regard limpieza de sangre or lineage without Jewish or Moorish ancestry important component of honour. Only very few conquistadors mentioned the purity of blood. In Spain it is said to have become a crucial for one’s honour, especially among the nobility. The reason for the said difference is the fact that the sources of my study are from earlier part of the 16th century. The purity of blood began to gain more importance in Spain and its overseas possessions around the 16th century, reaching its greatest importance after the time scale of my research. Having a rank of nobility also brought responsibilities such as serving the crown. In case of conquistadors this could be done by managing crown’s offices or by participating in conquests “with arms, horse and servants like an honourable man”. Participating in battles and showing bravery and military skills was regarded particularly honourable. The bravery was so important for the conquistadors that a mere suggestion of lack of it in a battlefield endangered one’s honour. An honourable conquistador was expected to always participate in fighting when he was physically able to do so. The only acceptable reasons for not fighting were serious wounds and illnesses. The conquistadors underlined in their probanzas how many times they had been wounded and how severe their wounds had been. Receiving wounds was a sign of bravery as it clearly demonstrated that a conquistador had put his life at risk in battles. Often even wounds did not prevent conquistadors from fighting. One example can be found in Juan González Ponce de León’s probanza. In it he claimed that despite of having been badly wounded a couple of days before in his legs and thighs he took part in taking a fortified temple pyramid even when Cortés asked him to go to rest with other wounded men. When the Spaniards withdrew from the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán he was so badly wounded that he was being carried by his comrades. He claimed to have jumped down from his stretcher, armed himself and saved the lives of fellow the conquistadors who were fighting with the Aztec warriors. According to himself and his witnesses he was afterwards carried away “more dead than alive” and “about to draw his last breath”.

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These examples demonstrate how conquistadors underlined their will to participate in battles and to gain honour when they were physically able to do so. They only stopped fighting when they were “about to take their last breath”. There are numerous similar testimonies in the probanzas. But being brave did not mean absence of fear. Many conquistadors described the terror they felt while facing numerous enemies and their dreadful weapons. The conquistadors often exaggerated the dangers they faced to underline their bravery and their honour. This was particularly important if a conquistador retreated from a combat. In such situation, he described the circumstances being so dangerous that it had been a great achievement to even escape with his life. The conquistadors regarded winning a battle as a source of honour. If they had been forced to retreat, they added later that they won the same enemies in another battle. The conquistadors complained in their probanzas that they were too poor to live according to their status. Diego de Colio claimed he was poor and did not have anything to sustain himself nor his family. His witnesses a fellow conquistador Andrés de Tapia said that it was a shame to see such an honoured man who for such a long time had served the king being so poor”. Some conquistadors were said to have been too poor to arrange the marriage of their daughters according to the quality of their person. In the first example, they referred to their masculine duties as men who were providers for their families. The message was that if he was unable to fulfil this responsibility his manhood that was closely connected with his honour would suffer and he would lose his honour. In the latter example the conquistadors appealed to their daughters’ honour that according to them would suffer if they could not be married with a husband of similar status. The information I have provided demonstrates how the conquistadors used honour as a rhetoric tool to further their petitions for rewards. Since honour and serving the king went hand in hand, it was practical to underline one’s honour because the components of honour were those that made an individual a good servant of his king. Thus, they were entitled to rewards. Furthermore, honour was very important for the early modern Spaniards and a possibility of losing it was considered a terrible fate. The crown officials who read the probanzas were put in a position where they could save the endangered honour of conquistadors who had served the crown. Spain was a patrimonial society built around the idea of mutual obligation between the king and his vassals. The monarch was seen as God’s vicar on earth who supervised within the framework of the law. The monarch was to provide good government and justice in the sense of ensuring that each vassal received the rights and fulfilled the obligations that were his by virtue of his station. The good king was to see that evil are punished and the just rewarded. The king was to recompense the services of deserving in

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consonance with a carefully calibrated system by which theoretically every service by a vassal was compensated by a royal favour. However, several acts of insubordination had convinced the crown that the conquistadors could not be trusted with political or economic power. The king preferred to grant offices and other privileges to immigrants who had arrived after the conquest. Furthermore, the crown limited the encomienda system during the 16th century that was already suffering from the decline of the indigenous population. As a result it became more and more difficult for a conquistador to gain rewards that could have given them any political or economic power. In this manner, honour served as a moral blackmail: if the crown did not give rewards to the conquistadors for the services they had performed for it, the conquerors would lack financial means to live how honour obliged them to and thus they were in a danger of losing their honour. They used rhetoric of honour to further their petitions for rewards they were entitled to according to the twoway agreement between the king and his vassals.

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