CONQUISTADORES

Broad-ranging survey of Spain’s campaigns of conquest in the Americas.

Cervantes opens with a provocation, asking that the Spanish conquistadors be considered with a touch less “revulsion” and in the context of an era during which religious conversion was a key goal. As he notes, the year Columbus set sail on his first voyage was the year that the last outposts of Moorish rule surrendered and Muslims and Jews who did not convert to Christianity were exiled. Soldiers such as Cortés and Pizarro were given to conversion by force and not in the least bit shy about killing anyone who opposed the process and their subsequent rule. However, writes the author, they faced considerable criticism from the Spanish crown and clergy, the former promulgating policies that forbade slavery, the latter holding that forced conversion was sinful. Columbus may have overlooked such niceties to enslave the inhabitants of Hispaniola far from royal oversight and “without fearing any objections from moral theologians back in Spain.” Even so, enslavement, Queen Isabel feared, was “a hurdle to effective evangelization,” and that evangelization was, in the end, as important to Spain’s rulers as the wealth that began to flow into their treasury from Mexico and Peru. The soldiers of Spain have dominated the literature, but it’s often forgotten that their violence not only brought censure, but also inspired rivals to resist them. Columbus died without the honors he felt he deserved, Pizarro was stabbed to death by rebellious lieutenants, and Cortés was put under the watchful eye of royal overseers who enjoyed salaries far higher than his. In the end, the business of the conquista was complex, for all the military might of the “brutally pragmatic enemy” that Native peoples faced, and one effect of the conquistadors’ behavior was for the Spanish royals to withdraw support from further campaigns of conquest in favor of conversion by missionaries.

A worthy if somewhat contrarian addition to the history of colonialism and European expansion.