Part 32 (2/2)
[Sidenote: Colonies]
Quite different in its nature was the colonial empire, but in this it resembled the other windfalls to the house of Hapsburg in that it was an almost accidental, unsought-for acquisition. The Genoese sailor who went to the various courts of Europe begging for a few s.h.i.+ps in which to break the watery path to Asia, had in his beggar's wallet all the kingdoms of a new world and the glory of them. For a few years Spain drank until she was drunken of conquest and the gold of America. That the draught acted momentarily as a stimulant, clearing her brain and nerving her arm to deeds of valor, but that she suffered in the end from the riotous debauch, cannot be doubted. She soon learned that all that glittered was not wealth, and that industries surfeited with metal and starved of raw materials must perish. The unearned coin proved to be fairy gold in her coffers, turning to brown leaves and dust when she wanted to use it. It became a drug in her markets; it could not lawfully be exported, and no {431} amount of it would purchase much honest labor from an indolent population fed on fantasies of wealth.
The modern King Midas, on whose dominions the sun never set, was cursed with a singular and to him inexplicable need of everything that money was supposed to buy. His armies mutinied, his s.h.i.+ps rotted, and never could his increasing income catch up with the far more rapidly increasing expenses of his budget.
The poverty of the people was in large part the fault of the government which pursued a fiscal policy ideally calculated to strike at the very sources of wealth. While, under the oppression of an ignorant paternalism, unhappy Spain suffered from inanition, she was tended by a physician who tried to cure her malady by phlebotomy. There have been worse men than Philip II, [Sidenote: Philip II, 1556-98] but there have been hardly any who have caused more blood to flow from the veins of their own people. His life is proof that a well-meaning bigot can do more harm than the most abandoned debauchee. ”I would rather lose all my kingdoms,” he averred, ”than allow freedom of religion.” And again, to a man condemned by the Inquisition for heresy, ”If my own son were as perverse as you, I myself would carry the f.a.ggot to burn him.”
Consistently, laboriously, undeterred by any suffering or any horror, he pursued his aim. He was not afraid of hard work, scribbling reams of minute directions daily to his officers. His stubborn calm was imperturbable; he took his pleasures--women, _autos-da-fe_ and victories--sadly, and he suffered such chagrins as the death of four wives, having a monstrosity for a son, and the loss of the Armada and of the Netherlands, without turning a hair.
Spain's foreign policy came to be more and more polarized by the rise of English sea-power. Even under Charles, when France had been the chief enemy, {432} [Sidenote: Spain vs. England] the Hapsburgs saw the desirability of winning England as a strategic point for their universal empire. This policy was pursued by alternating alliance with hostility. For six years of his boyhood Charles had been betrothed to Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, to whom he sent a ring inscribed, ”Mary hath chosen the better part which shall not be taken away from her.” His own precious person, however, was taken from her to be bestowed on Isabella of Portugal, by whom he begot Philip. When this son succeeded him, notwithstanding the little unpleasantness of Henry VIII's divorce, he advised him to turn again to an English marriage, and Philip soon became the husband of Queen Mary. After her death without issue, he vainly wooed her sister, until he was gradually forced by her Protestant buccaneers into an undesired war.
Notwithstanding all that he could do to lose fortune's favors, she continued for many years to smile on her darling Hapsburg. After a naval disaster inflicted by the Turks on the Spaniard off the coast of Tripoli, the defeated power recovered and revenged herself in the great naval victory of Lepanto, in October 1571. The l.u.s.tre added to the Lions and Castles by this important success was far outshone by the acquisition of Portugal and all her colonies, in 1581. Though not the nearest heir, Philip was the strongest, and by bribery and menaces won the homage of the Portuguese n.o.bles after the death of the aged king Henry on January 31, 1580. For sixty years Spain held the lesser country and, what was more important to her, the colonies in the East Indies and in Africa. So vast an empire had not yet been heard of, or imagined possible, in the history of the world. No wonder that its s.h.i.+mmer dazzled the eyes not only of contemporaries, but of posterity.
According to Macaulay, {433} Philip's power was equal to that of Napoleon, and its ruin is the most instructive lesson in history of how not to govern.
How hollow was this semblance of might was demonstrated by the first stalwart peoples that dared to test it, first by the Dutch and then by England. The story of the Armada has already been told. Its preparation marked the height of Philip's effort and the height of his incompetence. Its annihilation was a cruel blow to his pride. But in Spain, barring a temporary financial panic, things went much the same after 1588 as before it. The full bloom of Spanish culture, gorgeous with Velasquez and fragrant with Cervantes and Calderon, followed hard upon the defeat of the Armada.
[Sidenote: War with the Moors]
The fact is that Spain suffered much more from internal disorders than from foreign levy. The chief occasion of her troubles was the presence among her people of a large body of Moors, hated both for their race and for their religion. With the capitulation of Granada, the enjoyment of Mohammedanism was guaranteed to the Moors, but this tolerance only lasted for six years, when a decree went out that all must be baptized or must emigrate from Andalusia. In Aragon, however, always independent of Castile, they continued to enjoy religious freedom. Charles at his coronation took a solemn oath to respect the faith of Islam in these lands, but soon afterwards, frightened by the rise of heresy in Germany, he applied to Clement to absolve him from his oath. This sanction of bad faith, at first creditably withheld, [Sidenote: 1524] was finally granted and was promptly followed by a general order for expulsion or conversion. Throughout the whole of Spain the poor Moriscos now began to be systematically pillaged and persecuted by whoever chose to do it. All manner of taxes, t.i.thes, servitudes and fines {434} were demanded of them. The last straw that broke the endurance of a people tried by every manner of tyranny and extortion, was an edict ordering all Moors to learn Castilian within three years, after which the use of Arabic was to be forbidden, prohibiting all Moorish customs and costumes, and strictly enjoining attendance at church.
As the Moors had been previously disarmed and as they had no military discipline, rebellion seemed a counsel of despair, but it ensued. The populace rose in helpless fury, and for three years defied the might of the Spanish empire. But the result could not be doubtful. A naked peasantry could not withstand the disciplined battalions that had proved their valor on every field from Mexico to the Levant and from Saxony to Algiers. It was not a war but a ma.s.sacre and pillage. The whole of Andalusia, the most flouris.h.i.+ng province in Spain, beautiful with its snowy mountains, fertile with its tilled valleys, and sweet with the peaceful toil of human habitation, was swept by a universal storm of carnage and of flame. The young men either perished in fighting against fearful odds, or were slaughtered after yielding as prisoners. Those who sought to fly to Africa found the avenues of escape blocked by the pitiless Toledo blades. The aged were hunted down like wild beasts; the women and young children were sold into slavery, to toil under the lash or to share the hated bed of the conqueror. The ma.s.sacre cost Spain 60,000 lives and three million ducats, not to speak of the harm that it did to her spirit.
[1] A Portuguese in Spanish service.
SECTION 2. EXPLORATION
[Sidenote: Division of the New World between Spain and Portugal]
When Columbus returned with glowing accounts of the ”India” he had found, the value of his work was at once appreciated. Forthwith began that struggle for colonial power which has absorbed so much of the {435} energies of the European nations. In view of the Portuguese discoveries in Africa, it was felt necessary to mark out the ”spheres of influence” of the two powers at once, and, with an instinctive appeal to the one authority claiming to be international, the Spanish government immediately applied to Pope Alexander VI for confirmation in the new-found territories. Acting on the suggestion of Columbus that the line of Spanish influence be drawn one hundred leagues west of any of the Cape Verde Islands or of the Azores, the pope, with magnificent self-a.s.surance, issued a bull, _Inter caetera divinae_, [Sidenote: May 4, 1493] of his own mere liberality and in virtue of the authority of Peter, conferring on Castile forever ”all dominions, camps, posts, and villages, with all the rights and jurisdictions pertaining to them,”
west of the parallel, and leaving to Portugal all that fell to the east of it. Portugal promptly protested that the line was too far east, and by the treaty of Tordesillas; [Sidenote: 1494] it was moved to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, thus falling between the 48th and 49th parallel of longitude. The intention was doubtless to confer on Spain all land immediately west of the Atlantic, but, as a matter of fact, South America thrusts so far to the eastward, that a portion of her territory, later claimed as Brazil, fell to the lot of Portugal.
[Sidenote: Spanish adventurers]
Spain lost no time in exploiting her new dominions, during the next century hundreds of s.h.i.+ps carried tens thousands of adventurers to seek their fortune in the west. For it was not as colonists that most of them went, but in a spirit compounded of that of the crusader, the knight-errant, and the pirate. If there is anything in the paradox that artists have created natural beauty, it is a truer one to say that the Spanish romances created the Spanish colonial empire. The men who sailed on the great adventure had feasted {436} on tales of paladins and hippogrifs, of enchanted palaces and fountains of youth, and miraculously fair women to be rescued and then claimed by knights.
They read in books of travel purporting to tell the sober truth of satyrs and of purple unicorns and of men who spread their feet over their heads for umbrellas and of others whose heads grew between their shoulders. No wonder that when they went to a strange country they found the River of Life in the Orinoco, colonies of Amazons in the jungle, and El Dorado, the land of gold, in the riches of Mexico and Peru! It is a testimony to the imaginative mood of Europe, as well as to the power of the pen, that the whole continent came to be called, not after its discoverer, but after the man who wrote the best romances--mostly fictions--about his travels in it.
[Sidenote: Exploitation of natives]
In the Greater Antilles, where Spain made her first colonies, her rule showed at its worst. The soft native race, the Caribs, almost completely disappeared within half a century. The best modern authority estimates that whereas the native population of Espanola (Haiti) was between 200,000 and 300,000 in 1493, by 1548 hardly 5000 Indians were left. In part the extinction of the natives was due to new diseases and to the vices of civilization, but far more to the heartless exploitation of them by the conquerors. Bartholomew de las Casas, the first priest to come to this unfortunate island, tells stories of Spanish cruelty that would be incredible were they not so well supported. With his own eyes he saw 3000 inoffensive Indians slaughtered at a single time; of another batch of 300 he observed that within a few months more than half perished at hard labor. Again, he saw 6000 Indian children condemned to work in the mines, of whom few or none long survived. In vain a bull of Paul III declared the Indians capable of becoming {437} Christians and forbade their enslavement. In vain the Spanish government tried to mitigate at least some of the hards.h.i.+ps of the natives' lot, [Sidenote: 1537] ordering that they should be well fed and paid. The temptation to exploit them was too strong; and when they perished the Spaniards supplied their place by importing negroes from Africa, a people of tougher fibre.
Spanish exploration, followed by spa.r.s.e settlement, soon opened up the greater part of the Americas south of the lat.i.tude of the present city of San Francisco. Of many expeditions into the trackless wilderness, only a few were financially repaying; the majority were a drain on the resources of the mother country. In every place where the Spaniard set foot the native quailed and, after at most one desperate struggle, went down, never again to loose the conqueror's grip from his throat or to move the conqueror's knee from his chest. Even the bravest were as helpless as children before warriors armed with thunder and riding upon unknown monsters.
But in no place, save in the islands, did the native races wholly disappear as they did in the English settlements. The Spaniards came not like the Puritans, as artisans and tillers of the soil intent on founding new homes, but as military conquerors, requiring a race of helots to toil for them. For a period anarchy reigned; the captains not only plundered the Indians but fought one another fiercely for more room--more room in the endless wilderness! Eventually, however, conditions became more stable; Spain imposed her effective control, her language, religion and inst.i.tutions on a vast region, doing for South America what Rome had once done for her.
The lover of adventure will find rich reward in tracing the discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto, of Florida by Ponce de Leon, and of the whole course of {438} the Amazon by Orellana who sailed down it from Peru, or in reading of Balboa, ”when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific.” A resolute man could hardly set out exploring without stumbling upon some mighty river, some vast continent, or some unmeasured ocean. But among all these fairly-tales [Transcriber's note: fairy-tales?] there are some that are so marvellous that they would be thought too extravagant by the most daring writers of romance.
That one captain with four hundred men, and another with two hundred, should each march against an extensive and populous empire, cut down their armies at odds of a hundred to one, put their kings to the sword and their temples to the torch, and after it all reap a harvest of gold and precious stones such as for quant.i.ty had never been heard of before--all this meets us not in the tales of Ariosto or of Dumas, but in the pages of authentic history.
[Conquest of Mexico]
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