The ceremony had been held in the presence of five or six thousand people, some of whom had come from a hundred miles away to see them, cresting the passes that led to the city and seeing the whitewashed glare of the colonial city below. The audience had come having been told, as Thomson said, that ‘wee were hereticques, infidels, and people that did despise God, and his workes, and that wee had bene more like devils than men’.3 Strangely, though, when Thomson and the Italian entered the church, ‘the women and children beganne to cry out, and made such a noise that it was strange to see and heare, saying, that they never saw goodlier men in all their lives, and that it was not possible that there could be in us so much evill as was reported’.4 Cases like that of Thomson made the authorities feel that a growing threat was posed by Protestant enemies (‘pirates’) in the New World. This feeling, combined with the atmosphere that had accompanied the autos in Valladolid and Seville in 1559, led to the foundation of the tribunals in Lima, Peru in 1569 and Mexico in 1571.
Reaching Mexico City, the inquisitorial staff found several thousand Spanish households and 300,000 Indians in the suburbs.5 On arrival, Contreras and his assistants concentrated on the Protestants. Inquisitor Contreras knew all about the castaways of the pirate Hawkins who had been captured by Luis de Carvajal and sent to Mexico City in chains in 1568.*2 Some of them had been arrested on the authority of the Inquisition even before Contreras’s arrival and one, Robert Barrett, had been sent back to Seville where he was burnt at an auto in 1573.6 These Englishmen made a very easy first target, particularly since, as one of them, Miles Phillips, pointed out, the inquisitors ‘had perfect knowledge and intelligence that many of us were become very rich’.7
Within a few months of the tribunal’s installation, the English who had settled throughout Mexico after their abandonment by Hawkins were summoned to Mexico City. Dozens were arrested and thrown into jail in solitary confinement, where they stayed for 18 months. All of them were tortured three months before the final judgements were pronounced.8 The night before the auto, Phillips said, ‘[the inquisitorial authorities] were so busied in putting on their coats [sanbenitos] about us, and bringing us out into a large yard, and placing and pointing us in what order we should go to the scaffold or place of judgment upon the morrow, that they did not suffer us to sleep the whole night long’.9
The auto began early. Each morning twenty to thirty canoes would enter the city on a canal bringing apples, pears, pomegranates, quinces and tortillas, fodder for the horses, lime and brick for building, and coal and wood for fires.10 Today, however, there were no canoes. The motionless crowd lent drama and legitimacy to the ritual of punishment and condemnation.
At the auto a small number of prisoners were executed and the rest lashed before beginning their penances of imprisonment or the galleys.*3 Phillips was one of those sentenced to imprisonment in a monastery, and here he found the monks very courteous, as ‘many of the Spaniards and Friers themselves do utterly abhorre and mislike of that cruell Inquisition, and would as they durst bewaile our miseries and comfort us the best they could, although they stood in such feare of that divelish Inquisition, that they durst not let the left hand know what the right doth’.11
Miles Phillips’s sense of general opposition in Mexico to the Inquisition is confirmed by the account of the earlier arrest of his compatriot Thomson, who had said that many of the Spaniards who lived in the New World were opposed to the new body.12 Unlike in Spain, people in Mexico had not been brought up to respect the Inquisition. They feared the control which it might come to exert over their daily activities. There was a general sense that this oppressive institution was an enemy of the freedom which was taken as a birthright in America.
The nature of the justice wielded by the new institution in Mexico was shown by these first trials of English Protestants. One prisoner, William Collins from Oxford, explained how he had planned to become a priest before the destruction of the Catholic churches and monasteries under Henry VIII, and that after the death of Mary Tudor and the accession of Elizabeth he had been arrested as a Catholic sympathizer in London.13 Collins described in detail the lack of Catholic ritual in England and the hatred of the pope, holding that mass, communion and confession were ‘so abominable . . . that he dared not recount them’.14 It was apparent from his statements that he had no fondness for the Protestant religion yet the inquisitorial prosecutor then used Collins’s own confession to formulate sixty-eight charges against him, many of which did not refer to Collins himself but to events in England which he had been forced to witness. Collins was lashed and sentenced to ten years in the galleys.15
Another of those tried at this time was David Alexander from South Looe in Cornwall. Alexander was only nineteen in 1573, and had been just thirteen when he set sail with Hawkins for Africa and the New World. Something of the extraordinary shock that awaited him on this voyage is revealed by his declaration that when he embarked he had thought ‘that the Protestant faith of England was believed and kept throughout the whole world’ and that ‘he [did not] know that there was any other faith [in existence]’.16 As he travelled through Africa and America, such naivety must have given way to the feeling that he was entering something like a dream, where the unimaginable was true and all that was certain slipped away.
This export of the Inquisition to Mexico (and Peru) represented an attempt by Philip II to turn the Spanish institution into a power across the world. It was a decision that would change life for some in Mexico, but in order for the institution to develop the same reputation as its counterpart in Spain, a case of similar proportions was needed to that of Archbishop Carranza – one which would make it clear that no one was free from suspicion and would feed the culture of fear. Such a case was not long in coming.
WHILE THE INQUISITION was establishing itself in America, an old friend was busy making his fortune. The dramatic events which had accompanied Luis de Carvajal’s arrival in the colony had made him a close confidant of the most powerful man in Mexico.*4 He was Viceroy Martín Enríquez’s trusted tamer of the north. Few among the Spaniards knew what this fastness was really like, but Carvajal had begun to reduce it. It was no longer such a fearful emptiness. It would be brought under control.
In 1576 Enríquez delegated Luis to crush the Indians of Huasteca in the north. The expedition was successful, and the kingdom of Nuevo León was founded. In 1578 Luis returned to Spain for his wife and family, and also to seek some sort of reward. Who would inflict such suffering on themselves in so many penurious expeditions, without the prospect of some recompense for burning desire? On the recommendation of Viceroy Enríquez, Philip II decided to make Carvajal the kingdom’s first governor. The decree was signed on 14 June 1579.18
Carvajal’s transformation from inquisitorial fugitive to colonial governor is unique in the history of the New World. He must have been an attractive personality to others in power. One cannot doubt that at the same time he was a ruthless enemy to those who crossed him. The two attributes went together in lawless spaces like Nuevo León, in the crowded ships crossing the Atlantic and in the vegetation that entombed the ruins among the jungles of the Mexican coast.
Thus when Carvajal arrived with the other colonists in Nuevo León, kindness and sympathy were not qualities to the fore. He and the other
colonists hunted the Indians ‘like hares’. As if in reflection of his life in west Africa, Carvajal sent them on as slaves to Mexico City and mining centres.19 The doomed men were chained together in groups of up to a thousand, and once in the mines were forced to work without pay on starvation rations.20 Punishments meted out to the powerless in Mexico included castration, the dropping of pork fat or pitch melted over a candle onto the victim’s skin, cutting off an ear, hand or leg, and hanging.21 The transference of persecution that Luis had learnt in Lisbon and Cape Verde would be continued in Mexico.
Once chosen as the first governor of Nuevo León in Spain, Luis had set about finding colonists for his new fiefdom. He travelled to Medina del Campo and the home of his sister Francisca, whose husband Francisco Rodríguez de Matos traded at the great fairs. Francisca had nine children, the sisters Anica, Catalina, Isabel, Leonor and Mariana, and the brothers Balthasar, Gaspar, Miguelico and Luis, who would become known as Luis the Younger to distinguish him from his uncle.*5 22 Luis promised that Luis the Younger would succeed him in Nuevo León and that Balthasar could be the treasurer there, and the family decided to leave with their illustrious relation for the New World.23
The Carvajals left Medina del Campo and after twenty days reached Seville, where they stayed at the house of Luis and his wife Doña Guiomar. Like many wives of adventurers in America, Guiomar had stayed in Spain while her husband made his fortune in the New World. However, she had decided not to come with him this time either, for while Luis was a devoted Catholic, Guiomar kept some of the ancestral Jewish rites. In Seville she taught these to Isabel, the sister of Luis the Younger, and asked her to tell Luis in Mexico to keep the Mosaic laws. ‘I don’t dare say that to him’, Guiomar told Isabel, ‘because I’m afraid that he would kill me’.24
The new colonists crossed the ocean. Most of the Carvajals fell ill on the Atlantic, and Luis the Younger was almost dead when they reached Veracruz.25 The governor took them to Tampico to recuperate. The whole family was still accustoming itself to the different climate and atmosphere of America and, struggling to accommodate themselves to the new, they fell back on the family tradition of Judaism.
On the voyage from Seville the Carvajals had been befriended by a Portuguese doctor, Antonio de Morales, whose father-in-law had been burnt by the Inquisition in Lisbon for Judaizing. Morales and his wife Blanca had discussed Jewish rites with Luis’s sister Francisca and with Isabel. This came to seem providential when, shortly after reaching Tampico, Balthasar and Luis the Younger were caught out in a hurricane. The two brothers were sleeping in a shack. Worried it would be destroyed they got out just before the building was blown to pieces. The rain was so thick that they could not see the path in front of them. Lightning illuminated the darkness in flashes, confusing them even more. But somehow the brothers made their way back to the house where the rest of the family were staying. Believing that this ‘miracle’ confirmed that they had made the right religious choice, the family began concertedly to Judaize.26
Already, before leaving for Mexico, Francisco Rodríguez de Matos had taught his wife Francisca and their oldest son Balthasar to Judaize. In Tampico Isabel joined them, and Francisco later taught Luis the Younger to Judaize in Mexico City.27 The family kept many of the Jewish festivals and the sabbath.28 When one of the children, Leonor, married the rich mine owner Jorge de Almeida, Francisca and her children Isabel, Balthasar and Luis the Younger all went to join them. They kept the Jewish rites there,29 praying fervently in an orchard on the Jewish Sabbath, preventing their servants from working on Saturdays and trying to convert them as well.30
Yet there was one man who did not fit into this picture of ideological sedition: the veteran of Cape Verde and Mexico, the governor himself. After arriving in Tampico Isabel had followed the instructions of Luis’s wife Guiomar. One afternoon she invited her uncle to come with her into a room as she wished to ask him a great favour. Once they were alone, she got him to swear that he would never repeat what was said there. Then she told him that he was making an error in keeping the law of Christ. The governor rose in a fury ‘covering his ears, and told her that she was a disgrace to her whole family, and when she asked him to listen, he swore that if she did not return to God and the Virgin, he would kill her himself’.31 He rushed out of the room and went to tell his sister Francisca that she should kill or strangle her daughter. Francisca replied that Isabel had only been trying to help him.32
The governor did not want this sort of help. He disowned the family but adopted Luis the Younger, who had yet to be converted by his father in Mexico City. Uncle and nephew toured the towns of the north. They enslaved Indians and set up those flyblown camps smelling of dead animals in the desert. One day, in 1583, the governor said to his nephew, ‘Do you realize that your father lives in the Law of Moses?’ and Luis the Younger burst into tears and said, ‘It’s a great sin’. Having spent his entire life escaping from the Inquisition, the governor was pleased by this answer. He had yet to realize that it was this very nephew who would prove the most intractable heretic of all when confronted by the inquisitors of Mexico.
Cartagena, Goa, Lima and Mexico 1543–1609
IN 1994, AS THE Mozambique civil war came to an end, Mozambique Island offered an unexpected window onto the past. The island is a sliver of land barely a mile wide by a few hundred metres across. Here the houses press close together in the manner of a medina. History runs deep. The Islamic heritage of this furthest reach of the Swahili coast was evident in the only building of any height, the mosque with its tower and green domes. A few hundred metres away was the cathedral, in the heart of a warren of lanes. To the side of the cathedral a small sign for the Museu de Arte Antiga brought one up to an old sacristy where priceless relics of the Portuguese empire were found. Here lay tapestries and icons from Goa, images of devotion that had somehow survived the crossing of the Indian Ocean and the years of civil war. Now all was abandonment. The objects were left almost uncared for in this reliquary of an empire and a dream that had died.
Few visitors would have expected to find these connections between Goa and Mozambique, hinting at the vast reach that Portuguese power had once had. Yet in the heyday of the Inquisition in the middle of the 16th century the Portuguese had developed an extraordinary web of international influence. In Africa they had important trading settlements in Cape Verde and Guiné, Sierra Leone, Kongo, São Tomé and along the coasts of modern Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya; they controlled trading posts at Hormuz in Arabia, at Goa and in many parts of western India, at Macao in China, and in the Malacca Islands, from where they traded with China and Japan. Spain, meanwhile, had at least nominal control of most of Central and South America, with the exception of the Brazilian coast, which was also in Portuguese hands; the Spanish had also established a trading station at Manila in the Philippines.
The Iberian countries were thus the first to have anything like what could be called global empires. Little of this was visible on Mozambique Island in 1994, amid the ruins of the old fort, pockmarked with explosions and overgrown by elephant grass. The only hotel was a relic of the 20th-century Portuguese colonial regime, full of grand rooms where doors banged in the wind and the plumbing system had packed up. Seawater served to flush the toilets, and the swimming pool was full of algae. The sea itself stretched out in a drab grey back to the mainland, where two fishermen said that they had been unable to catch anything for three days; during the cold war the Russians had come with industrial trawlers and fished the seas empty. A sense of desolation gripped what had once been a centre for trade and imperial power; the way in which that power had spread across the world before being eroded to nothingness was difficult to grasp.
Naturally, the rapid rise of Iberian power in the 16th century had not been achieved through kind words. Where violence had begun at home, it did not take long for it to find its way abroad. In the Spanish takeover of America violence was integral to the process of conquest but in Asia, where Portugal established centres of
power but did not conquer large areas, a different outlet was required for the violence which in the late 15th century had been targeted at the conversos. Thus the organized spread of the Inquisition to the overseas colonies of Spain and Portugal began not in America, but in India; Philip II’s establishment of the Inquisition in America was a development of an existing Portuguese structure.
Goa had been conquered for Portugal in 1510 by Afonso de Albuquerque, who took advantage of local divisions and resentment of the shah of Bijapur to gain control of this port on the west coast of India.33 Goa’s importance lay in the fact that it was a centre for the import of horses into the region. With the new strongholds in Sofala in Mozambique, Hormuz and Cochin in south India, a chain of forts had thus been created which would make the Portuguese vital middlemen in the trade of the Indian Ocean, where their zone of control was known as the Estado da Índia.34
Goa became the seat of the Portuguese viceroys in Asia in 1530. Here the pepper trade was controlled, and there were links to Portuguese factories in other parts of India such as Bengal, Coromandel and Gujarat, as well as to places further afield.35 From Goa, Portuguese traders conducted operations in Macao and Nagasaki, acting as middlemen between China and Japan; Macao was made a town in its own right in 1583, and traded with the Philippines and Japan, meaning that Portuguese enterprise and settlement now straddled Asia.36
The way in which this isolated fringe of the European continent achieved global influence in the space of less than a century is one of the stranger stories in history. Portugal had never shown any sign of such ambition before in its brief trajectory as a nation, and had been defined most by its struggles to achieve independence from Spain. But once the last in a succession of conflicts with the Castilians was won by King John I in 1385, Portugal’s achievement was to project its violence outward in its explorations rather than inward through factionalism. The first stage was John I’s conquest of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415; this led to further exploration along the African coast under John’s son Henry the Navigator, and eventually to the entrepôts of Asia.