This sense of time as a speeding arrow, its destination sure, was one that Columbus always took for granted. It gave to him – even as he might feel small before the ineluctable potency of God’s plans, and the vagaries of his own career – his feelings of self-assurance, of purpose, of destiny. Yet there existed in the New World, in cities as yet unglimpsed beyond the western horizon, a very different understanding of time. In 1519, more than a decade after Columbus’ death, a Spanish adventurer named Hernán Cortés disembarked with five hundred men on the shore of an immense landmass that was already coming to be called America. Informed that there lay inland the capital of a great empire, Cortés took the staggeringly bold decision to head for it. He and his men were stupefied by what they found: a fantastical vision of lakes and towering temples, radiating ‘flashes of light like quetzal plumes’,14 immensely vaster than any city in Spain. Canals bustled with canoes; flowers hung over the waterways. Tenochtitlan, wealthy and beautiful, was a monument to the formidable prowess of the conquerors who had built it: the Mexica. It was also a monument to something much more: their understanding of time itself. The city, only recently built, existed in the shadow of other, earlier cities, once no less magnificent, but long since abandoned. The emperor of the Mexica, going on foot, would often make pilgrimage to one of these massive ruins. No more awesome warning could have been served him that the world was endlessly mutable, governed by cycles of greatness and collapse, than to visit the wreckage of such a city. The anxiety of the Mexica that their own power might crumble shaded readily into an even profounder dread: that the world itself might darken and turn to dust. So it was, across Tenochtitlan, that they had raised immense pyramids; on the summit of these, at times of particular peril, when the very future of the cosmos seemed to hang in the balance, priests would smash knives of flint into the chests of prisoners. Without sacrifice, so the Mexica believed, the gods would weaken, chaos descend, and the sun start to fade. Only chalchiuatl, the ‘precious water’ pumped out by a still-beating heart, could serve to feed it. Only blood, in the final reckoning, could prevent the universe from winding down.
To the Spaniards, the spectacle of dried gore on the steps of Tenochtitlan’s pyramids, of skulls grinning out from racks, was literally hellish. Once Cortés, in a feat of unparalleled audacity and aggression, had succeeded in making himself the master of the great city, its temples were razed to the ground. So Charlemagne, smashing with his mailed horsemen through dripping forests, had trampled down the shrines of Woden and Thunor. The Mexica, who had neither horses nor steel, let alone cannon, found themselves as powerless as the Saxons had once been to withstand Christian arms. The true clash, though, had been not between Toledo sword and stone axe, but between rival visions of the end of the world. The Spanish were prepared for it as no Christian people had ever been before. A decade before the conquest of Granada, Ferdinand had proclaimed it his intention ‘to dedicate Spain to the service of God’.15 In 1478, he had secured permission from the pope to establish, as the one institution common to both Aragon and Castile, an inquisition directly under royal control. 1492, the year of Granada’s fall and of Columbus’ first voyage, had witnessed another fateful step in the preparation of Spain for its mission to bring the gospel to the world. The Jews, whose conversion was destined to presage Christ’s return, had been given the choice of becoming Christian or going into exile. Many had opted to leave Spain; more, including the chief rabbi of Castile himself, had accepted baptism. It was hardly to be expected, then, three decades on, that agents of the Spanish monarchy would spare the altars of a people who knew nothing of the God of Israel. Travelling to Mexico in Cortés’ wake, Franciscans were revolted by the demands of sacrifice imposed by the Mexica’s gods. None doubted they were demons. There was Huitzilopochtli, the great patron of the Mexica, whose temple in Tenochtitlan, it was said, had been consecrated with the blood of eighty thousand victims; Xipe Totec, ‘the Flayed One’, whose devotees wore the skins of those offered to their patron, and stabbed their penises with cactus thorns; Tlaloc, the god of the rains, whose favours could be won only by the sacrifice of small children who had first been made to weep. Such cruelties cried out to the heavens. ‘It was the clamour of so many souls, and so much blood shed as an affront to their Creator,’ wrote one Franciscan, that had inspired God to send Cortés to the Indies – ‘like another Moses in Egypt.’16
Yet even Cortés himself had lamented the cost. The glories of Tenochtitlan had been obliterated; its canals filled with floating corpses. In the Spaniards’ wake had come killers even more terrible: diseases borne from Europe, against which the Indians had no resistance. Millions upon millions would die. And then there were the Spanish themselves. The wealth of the Indians, fallen into Christian hands, was not spent on bringing the world into the fold of Christ. Instead, shipped back to Spain, it was used to fund wars against the king of France. The Indians, crushed beneath the hooves of Spanish greatness, were worked as slaves. Resistance was savagely punished. Friars who travelled to the New World, labouring to bring the natives to Christ, reported in consternation on the atrocities they had seen: men wrapped in straw and set on fire; women cut to pieces like sheep in an abattoir; newborn infants smashed against rocks, or tossed into boiling rivers.
What kind of Moses, then, had Columbus and Cortés proved?
Sheep among Wolves
In 1516, any lingering hopes that Ferdinand might prove to be the last emperor were put to rest by his death. He had not led a great crusade to reconquer Jerusalem; Islam had not been destroyed. Nevertheless, the achievements of Ferdinand’s reign had been formidable. His grandson, Charles, succeeded to the rule of the most powerful kingdom in Christendom, and to a sway more authentically globe-spanning than that of the Caesars. Spaniards felt no sense of inferiority when they compared their swelling empire to Rome’s. Quite the contrary. From lands unknown to the ancients came news of feats that would have done credit to Alexander: the toppling against all the odds of mighty kingdoms; the winning of dazzling fortunes; men who had come from nowhere to live like kings.
Yet there lay over the brilliance of these achievements a pall of anxiety. No people in antiquity would ever have succeeded in winning an empire for themselves had they doubted their licence to slaughter and enslave the vanquished; but Christians could not so readily be innocent in their cruelty. When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’17 Even in the Indies, though, there were Spaniards who worried whether this was truly so. ‘Tell me,’ a Dominican demanded of his fellow settlers, eight years before Cortés took the road to Tenochtitlan, ‘by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully in their own land?’18 Most of the friar’s congregation, too angered to reflect on his questions, contented themselves with issuing voluble complaints to the local governor, and agitating for his removal; but there were some colonists who did find their consciences pricked. Increasingly, adventurers in the New World had to reckon with condemnation of their exploits as cruelty, oppression, greed. Some, on occasion, might even come to this realisation themselves. The most dramatic example occurred in 1514, when a colonist in the West Indies had his life upended by a sudden, heart-stopping insight: that his enslavement of Indians was a mortal sin. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, like Augustine in the garden, Bartolomé de las Casas found himself born again. Freeing his slaves, he devoted himself from that moment on to defending the Indians from tyranny. Only the cause of bringing them to God, he argued, could possibly justify Spain’s rule of the New World; and only by means of persuasion might they legitimately be brought to God. ‘For they are our brothers, and Christ gave his life for them.’19