Fernando Cervantes
Win luxury hampers plus Waitrose vouchers & guidebooks
We are so accustomed to the existence of America that it is hard to think of the challenges that its “discovery” posed to contemporaries. To get some sense of the novelty we would need to conjure up a comparable event nowadays. Let us therefore imagine that New Horizons, the spacecraft headed for Pluto, launched in 2006, mysteriously crashes into an invisible barrier. Subsequent expeditions reveal that the barrier is made of a complex substance that reflects the light of the sun by breaking it up into a myriad shining dots of various sizes and degrees of intensity and then reflects the light of those dots against its own back by breaking them down further to give the impression of an infinite space behind it, seemingly filled with stars and galaxies. Further investigations suggest that the impression of constant expansion beyond the barrier is produced by the movement of the sun, which does in fact rotate around the earth just as Aristotle had assumed, but whose reflection on the complex structure of the barrier produces a false impression of immobility that has deceived astronomers since the time of Copernicus.
I would expect the reaction to this sort of “discovery” to be quite marked. Yet – and this is the crucial point – it would not be immediate and decisive. The news, in other words, would not come as a shock. The investigations needed to establish exactly what had happened to the spacecraft would take several decades; the new fragments of information would need to be slowly and often painfully assimilated; and the challenges to our received wisdom would be stubbornly resisted by the majority, not least by able scientists adamant to fit the new evidence into familiar paradigms. And it was just so with America. In The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic encounters in the age of Columbus, David Abulafia writes that his aim “has been to recover something of the [explorers’] sense of wonder” – to shed light on, for example, Columbus’s well-known insistence that he had reached some part of Asia, and his stubborn response “to the shock of the new by asserting all the time that it was not new”.
As a medievalist, Abulafia is particularly well placed to attempt this, for Columbus’s mental world sinks roots deep into the medieval past. Take Giovanni Boccaccio’s reinterpretation of the startling information he received from a Florentine friend in Seville about the inhabitants of the Canary Islands: from “a description of strange wonders at the edge of the world”, writes Abulafia, Boccaccio developed “an ethnography of primitive peoples who were otherwise only familiar from his reading of classical texts”. This set a trend among Italian humanists, who became enthralled by the possibility of the existence of pastoral idylls.
Writing in the 1590s, for example, the Dominican Alonso de Espinosa recounted an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1400 to a group of shepherds in Tenerife. The obvious snag that the event happened before the evangelization of the island was given short shrift: the apparition, Espinosa insisted, was evidently a reward for the natural piety and innocence of the native inhabitants. There were of course other, more “natural” explanations for the puzzling similarities between certain native practices and Christian rites, notably the possibility that the islanders had been evangelized in apostolic times by St Bartholomew and later, in the sixth century, by St Brendan. But, interestingly, Espinosa stuck to his conviction that the islanders lived in accordance with the natural law in a pre-lapsarian idyll and that, as a reward, their real evangelizer had been none other than the Virgin Mary herself.
Little seemed to have changed during the century since Columbus claimed to have found the Garden of Eden in the valley of the Orinoco, or since that other, more illustrious Dominican, Bartolomé de las Casas, came across a native in the Caribbean who made him think of “our father Adam when he enjoyed the state of innocence”. Similar assumptions had led Vasco da Gama, who did reach the real Asia in 1498, to see the Virgin Mary and the saints figured in the most explicitly erotic sculptures of the Hindu temples.
In other words, classical and sacred texts were much more persuasive than the brittle facts that humans could gather from mere empirical observation. But the surprising resilience of the “pastoral” trend did not necessarily, or even predominantly, work in favour of an idyllic image of the natives. Gerald of Wales’s view of the Irish in the twelfth century, with its echoes of St Bernard’s opinion of them as “Christians in name, pagans in fact”, already anticipated many of the European impressions of “savages”. Petrarch himself had wasted no time in opposing Boccaccio. After all, it seemed disingenuous to fit the inhabitants of the Canaries into a classical idyll: their solitude was “more the outcome of natural instinct than of rational choice”, and their “lack of refinement” was “so little unlike brute beasts” that “they did not so much lead the solitary life as roam around in solitude with wild beasts”. This subtle interplay between perceptions of bestiality and innocence provides Abulafia with a fascinating means of revisiting the full range of late medieval attitudes towards non-Christians: from the conviction, best represented by the thirteenth-century Franciscan Ramón Llull, that if faith and reason went together Christianity would be irresistible, to the depressing “tabloid journalism” of Amerigo Vespucci, who, Abulafia writes, “lodged in the minds of his readers a dramatic image of the New World, with its cannibals and other marvels – not simply the outer edges of Marco Polo’s Asia, but something fabulous in its own right, and totally new”.
Those who attempted more cautious assessments were, if anything, more bewildered. Working among the Taínos of the Caribbean, for example, the Catalan Hieronymite friar Ramón Pané reached the conclusion that the native deities were “part of a seamless world in which gods, living humans, dead humans, animals, crops and the forces of nature existed side by side”. To convert the Taínos, therefore, would involve changing their entire cosmology. The gulf between their beliefs and Christianity was wider than any the Christians had experienced. Pané was continuing a tradition established by Catalan friars and their interest in Islam and Judaism; but the early explorations found nothing comparable in the New World: no “sects” or “idolatries”, Abulafia writes (paraphrasing Pané), “in the sense of organised religious cults with temples and sacrifices”, but rather “something . . . even stranger: a whole world view that was unfathomable”.
This sense of disillusionment perhaps accounts for the long twenty years that elapsed before the Spanish Crown began to consider seriously the question of what today we refer to as “Indian rights”, years when the natives continued to die in unimaginable numbers. With this seemingly decisive triumph of Petrarch’s vision, Abulafia chooses to end his rich survey on a negative note: “Few heeded the words of the prophet Malachi: ‘have we not all one father? Has not one God created us?’”. Nor, it would seem, did the subsequent encounter with organized religious cults, temples and sacrifices lead to the revival of the Boccaccian perspective. To add to the tragic brutalities of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico and Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, J. Michael Francis now offers us an admirable reconstruction of the hitherto unexplored events that took place to the east of Peru. His Invading Colombia: Spanish accounts of the Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada expedition of conquest is the result of an exhaustive exploration of Sevillian archives. Accompanied by a lively introduction, and by commentaries and annotations that are as reliable as they are readable, the book poses the intriguing question of why an exploration that led more Spaniards into Colombia than Cortés led into Mexico, or Pizarro into Peru, should have remained almost completely unknown. Francis’s book is well complemented by the second volume in the Latin American Originals series from Pennsylvania State University Press, Invading Guatemala: Spanish, Nahua and Maya accounts of the conquest wars, in which Matthew Restall, well known for having laid to rest a number of misconceptions about the wars of conquest in his book Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, joins forces with Florine Asselbergs to demolish the generally accepted vision of the conquest of Guatemala. The vivid picture that emerges is a much more complex, prolonged and tragic affair than traditional historiography would have us believe.
Both these books highlight the brutal, sanguinary nature of little-known episodes in the history of Spanish colonialism, and in so doing lend further weight to Abulafia’s Petrarchan conclusion. But it would be misleading to underestimate the persistence of the Boccaccian tradition which often lies dormant in the very accounts that seem opposed to it. As Restall provocatively asks, “Is it possible that the well-known invasions that brought down empires tell us less about the Spanish Conquest – and are in the end less interesting – than disastrous invasions such as Jiménez de Quesada’s?”. It is easy to forget that the official condemnations of indigenous cultures were largely the result of determined attempts to present the Conquest in triumphalist terms. What happened in practice can be gauged only by going beyond the official evidence and by remembering that the bulk of immigrants arriving in Spanish America had no qualms about deferring to what they accurately perceived as the superior knowledge of native leaders, not only about the physical environment but also about local spiritual forces. What is of particular interest is that such concessions were most readily and effectively made by mendicant friars – predominantly Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians – whose ministrations were seen by the natives as being comparable to those of indigenous healers. In a comparatively understated way, the mendicant friars embraced and gradually reduced to order a large number of conflicting systems of explanation, instilling in the natives an image of Christianity as a new power filled with spiritual forces that seemed stronger than the nature spirits of the local religious systems, but not for this reason dramatically different from their existing world view.
This is the rich theme of Jaime Lara’s Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and liturgy in colonial Mexico, a superb study that will benefit by being read in conjunction with the author’s previous book, City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological architecture and liturgical theatrics in New Spain (2004). In the latter, which was based on an analysis of more than 250 catechumenical centres in central Mexico, Lara stressed the importance of what he called “the liturgical imagination” of the mendicants, showing that “enacted worship had a more profound impact on the emerging societies than political hegemony”. Lara’s new study is a sort of companion volume, lending further weight to the conclusions of the first book through an exhaustive examination of a huge range of catechetical texts.
Like Abulafia, Lara lays particular emphasis on the medieval background. The works of Bede and Gregory the Great, for example, were widely available in Mexican libraries, and the famous letter of Gregory to Bishop Mellitus often cited. This gave rise to the widespread practice of erecting Christian churches on top of former pagan temples and of burying idols underneath new Christian altars. An illustrative glimpse of the process can be gained from a liturgical play entitled The Sacrifice of Isaac, performed in Nahuatl (the indigenous lingua franca of central Mexico) during the 1538 Corpus Christi pageant.
From a modern perspective, it might be thought there was an obvious risk in having God demand the sacrifice of Abraham’s son on stage on the very feast day that commemorated the voluntary sacrifice of a human being whose broken body and spilled blood were to be sacramentally ingested. But this seems not to have bothered the friars. Inspired by the words of Gregory – “the Lord revealed himself to the Israelite people in Egypt, permitting the sacrifices formerly offered to the devil to be offered thenceforward to himself instead” – they built on indigenous notions and made a clear Christological link between the sacrificial son and the victim venerated on the feast of Corpus Christi.
This was no isolated instance: barely a year later, the junta eclesiástica of 1539 stated that the situation in Mexico was “the same” as in Augustine’s England and Boniface’s Germany. Even after the narrowing strictures of the Tridentine decrees enforced a more cautious approach, the Dominican Diego Durán could still write enthusiastically about the idea of turning the sacrificial receptacles known as cuauhxicalli – literally “eagle basins” – into baptismal fonts: for “it is good that . . . what used to be a container of human blood, sacrificed to the devil, may now be the container of the Holy Spirit”. His Jesuit contemporary José de Acosta agreed: “on those points in which their customs do not go against religion and justice, I do not think it is a good idea to change them; rather . . . we should preserve anything that is ancestral and ethnic”.
This neglected aspect of the conquests sheds valuable light on the development of a vernacular vocabulary, full of visual and verbal metaphors, in the music, poetry and art that came to surround native liturgical celebrations. Baptism, for instance, soon came to be addressed in terms of precious jewellery, like jade or the iridescent blue-green of the feathers of the quetzal bird, which in turn recalled the male efflorescence of the maize plant. The mendicants were quick to notice that the Nahuatl verb for “sacrifice” was the same as that for “kneading” or “spreading out”. They were therefore happy to associate the sacred maize deity not only with the many extant maize crucifixes dating from the sixteenth century, but also with the Eucharistic host itself – often depicted in elaborate feathered headdress to evoke the sun’s rays. Indeed, in many early representations the sun’s rays appear as the three potencias, or powers of the soul – memory, understanding and will – which in medieval theology were usually attributed to Christ’s soul and believed to be especially manifested or “released” in moments of suffering and sacrifice. This suggests that the mendicants were happy to build on the obvious association between the potencias and the Mesoamerican “trinity” of vital energies – the tonalli, linked to the head and perception; the teyolia, linked to the heart and consciousness; and the ihiyotl, linked to the liver and to strong emotions.
Lara observes that, despite the intense interest in solar symbolism in Renaissance Europe, and its associations with the Eucharist, the first overt associations of the sun with the Eucharistic host took place in New Spain. This in turn explains why some of the earliest European examples of sunburst monstrances are actually imports from the New World. Pope Paul IV’s 1558 instruction is unambiguous: “the days which the Indians, according to their ancient rites, dedicated to the sun and to their idols should be replaced with feasts in honour of the true sun, Jesus Christ”. As Lara puts it, this was “the perfect cosmic sign of a new age . . . in the new Indian Jerusalem that friars and neophytes were labouring to establish”.
Lara demonstrates particularly well the way in which the “performative quality” of Mesoamerican public worship converged with an equally vibrant European liturgical tradition stemming from the allegorical exegesis of Scripture as developed by Origen, Eusebius, Augustine and Gregory. It found forceful expression in the thought of William Durandus, whose Rationale divinorum officiorum circulated widely in sixteenth-century Mexico. In enthralling detail, Lara makes it clear that the indigenous Christian culture that emerged from this interaction was neither a covert survival of pre-Hispanic paganism nor a pessimistic surrender to conquest. Rather, it was a marvellously spontaneous outpouring, fed by the imagination of a group of remarkable mendicant friars who, Lara tells us, “dared to use the metaphors, symbols, and values of the peoples of Mesoamerica” to bring about a “rich transfusion of the message into the very blood of a sophisticated culture”. The way in which the surviving evidence of these processes later became the cause of great anxiety among religious reformers, and even now continues to deceive observers who are too keen to find any evidence of subversive indigenous movements of resistance, must surely rank as one of the most pointed ironies in the history of Christian conversion.
David Abulafia
THE DISCOVERY OF MANKIND
Atlantic encounters in the age of Columbus
379pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
978 0 300 12582 5
J. Michael Francis
INVADING COLOMBIA
Spanish accounts of the Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada expedition of conquest
125pp. Pennsylvania State University Press. Paperback, $20.95.
978 0 271 02936 8
Matthew Restall and Florine Asselbergs
INVADING GUATEMALA
Spanish, Nahua and Maya accounts of the conquest wars
132pp. Pennsylvania State University Press. Paperback, $19.95.
978 0 271 02758 6
Jaime Lara
CHRISTIAN TEXTS FOR AZTECS
Art and liturgy in colonial Mexico
362pp. University of Notre Dame Press. $75.
978 0 268 03379 8
Fernando Cervantes is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Bristol. His books include The Devil in the New World: The impact of diabolism in New Spain, 1994, and The Hispanic World in the Historical Imagination, published in 2006.
Read the training tips and advice that helped our London Triathletes
Times Online's new TV show helps you make the right decisions for your pet
Read our exclusive 100 Years of Fleming and Bond interactive timeline, packed with original Times articles and reviews
The latest travel news plus the best hotels and gadgets for business travellers
Shortcuts to help you find sections and articles
2007
£47,995
2008
£42,945
06/2006
£40,850
Great car insurance deals online
£33,000
Macmillan Cancer Support
Central/South West
£50k
NHS
Nationwide
£
£30k OTE
Meltwater News
Nationwide
circa £70k
Central Office of Information
London
5% below developer pre-launch price!
Luxury Appts, beautiful gardens w/ Thames views
Great Homes Available on a shared Ownership Basis
Great Investment, River Views
Visit the ‘entertainment capital of the world’
at great sale prices!
Christmas Cruises
From only £995pp
APTs East Coast now from only
£2425pp.
Great travel insurance deals online
Contact our advertising team for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times. Globrix Property Search - find property for sale and rent in the UK. Visit our classified services and find jobs, used cars, property or holidays. Use our dating service, read our births, marriages and deaths announcements, or place your advertisement.
Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. Please read our Privacy Policy.To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from Times Online, The Times or The Sunday Times, click here.This website is published by a member of the News International Group. News International Limited, 1 Virginia St, London E98 1XY, is the holding company for the News International group and is registered in England No 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.
We are witnessing a rediscovery of América in some european writers, that is evident in a number of publications on the matter, even here in the TLS. Abulafia, Francis, Restall, Asselbergs, Lara and Cervantes join the hosts of new voices who once again are surprised with inconclude story of América.
Luis Felipe Valencia T., Manizales, Colombia
I believe some of the fertile immixture described in the review can be found to great esthetic literary delight in the novels by Alejo Carpentier, especially in Los Pasos Perdidos (The Lost Steps) and El Reino de Este Mundo (The Kingdom of this World).
Dr Liliana Singer, Tel Aviv, Israel
Christians are not mad then?
Eric Skelton, Cardiff, Wales