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Romans in A New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America

By David A. Lupher

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2003 David A. Lupher
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0472112759
Chapter One - Conquistadors and Romans

The greatest event since the creation of the world, apart from the Incarnation and death of its creator, is the discovery of the Indies; and that is why they call it the New World.1 So begins the dedicatory epistle to Charles V, Emperor of the Romans, King of Spain, Lord of the Indies and the New World, that Francisco Lpez de Gmara, secretary and chaplain to Hernn Corts, placed at the beginning of his Historia general de las Indias (1552). Gmaras proud proclamation of the world-historical significance of the Spanish enterprise in America is a conveniently arresting introduction to the mental world of the conquistadors and their publicists. As we shall see, it was the fall of the Aztec empire to Corts and a handful of obscure adventurers that inspired the chroniclers of Spanish deeds in the Indies to launch their boldest and most sustained challenges to the prestige of those exemplary European culture heroes, the great generals of Greece and Rome. Julius Caesar, conventionally regarded as the institutional ancestor of the reigning king of Spain, was the favorite defeated rival of Corts and his men, but the model of Titus also exerted a powerful attraction, for the destruction of the great city of Tenochtitlan in 1521 insistently called to mind and, Spanish chroniclers would claim, dwarfedthe Roman siege and sack of Jerusalem in the year A.D. 70. The frequency and intensity of these challenges to classical exempla transcended the boisterous emulation of the ancients that was a commonplace in Renaissance writings. As the ringing tone of Gmaras orchestral pronouncement implies, unprecedented experiences, trials, and exhilarations shaped the view of the distant past of the Old World expressed by those Spaniards who were struggling to come to terms with their bracingly disorienting New World.

The Most Famous Romans Never Performed Deeds Equal to Ours: Conquistadors and Their Publicists Challenge the Prestige of the Romans

It was a fitting coincidence that the venture in which Corts was to challenge the prestige of the ancients should begin with a mandate to track down some refugees from classical mythology. When Diego Velzquez, the governor of Cuba against whom he promptly rebelled, named him caudillo of an expedition to Yucatn on October 23, 1518, item 26 of the formal instructions ordered him to find out where the Amazons are, who, according to the Indians you are taking with you, are in that vicinity. Corts had other things on his mind than Amazons over the next few years, but news of a society of warrior women did reach his ears at last, and he assumed that Charles V would be eager to hear the report. Accordingly, he dispatched an expedition to the Pacific coast to search for them, assuring its leader, his cousin Francisco Corts de Buenaventura, that these women follow the practices of the Amazons described in the istorias antiguas. But while these eagerly sought classical adversaries displayed their customary propensity to recede into the distance (this time northwards to a long island soon christened California, after the land of the Amazon queen Calafia in Rodrguez de Montalvos romance Sergas de Esplandin), the conquistadors repeatedly grappled with classical warriors even more vividly present to their minds than the Amazons. These imaginary competitors were the celebrated generals and conquerors of classical antiquity.

At first glance, the eagerness of the conquistadors to compete with the fame of classical, especially Roman, heroes might seem nothing more than the familiar emulation of ancient models so characteristic of the Renaissanceand indeed of the medieval and classical periods as well. As both Julius Caesar and his rival Pompey had emulated Alexander the Great, so Corts was presented by the conquistador-chronicler Bernal Daz del Castillo as a man in the mold of all three of those ancient conquerors, as well as more recent models such as the heroes of the Reconquest of Spain from the Moors. But what is especially arresting about such passages in the writings of the conquistadors and their champions is an unmistakable note of defiance fueled by the nervous megalomania of many of these adventurers, particularly those embarked on expeditions as dangerous and as shakily authorized as that of the quasi-renegade Corts. Against a constant undertone of such insecurity one might have expected Bernal Daz to emphasize his caudillos sufficiently respectable hidalgo origins (a gentleman by four lines of descent, he termed him) and more especially his eventual title of Marqus del Valle de Oaxaca. Instead, he insisted upon referring to him as simply Hernn Corts, for that name by itself was as honored both in the Indies and Spain as that of Alexander in Macedon, and those of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Scipio among the Romans, and that of Hannibal among the Carthaginians, and that of Gonzalo Hernndez, the Great Captain, in Castille. Thus the deeds of Corts allowed the stark simplicity of his name to transcend the complications, the indignities, and the inadequate honorifics of its particular historical reality to join the great names of the heroes of antiquity. From cattle rancher and debt-plagued alcalde in Cuba to neighbor of Julius Caesar in the pantheon of historic conquerors, the self-charted trajectory of Cortss career streaked serenely beyond the ken of jealous governors, nervous royal councilors, or even the shrewd emperor himself.

But did Corts himself concur with Bernal Dazs ranking of him with the likes of Julius Caesar? It is true that such classical comparisons are utterly lacking in his four surviving Cartas de relacin to Charles V, but that is scarcely surprising. In reports to an invictsimo Csar and a cesrea majestad, references to ones own emulation of Caesar would be tactless, to say the least. Bernal Daz, however, claimed that Corts invoked precisely this comparison as he announced his famously bold decision to scuttle the ships to prevent defections to Cuba: he uttered many other comparisons and heroic deeds of the Romans. And we all answered that we would do as he ordered, and that the die was cast for good fortune, as Julius Caesar said at the Rubicon. (No less an authority than that connoisseur of exemplary heroes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, similarly linked these actions of Caesar and Corts in an epideixis on fame delivered to Sancho Panza.) Intriguing hearsay evidence that Corts did see himself as a second Caesar is Bernardino Vzquez de Tapias charge in the residencia of 1529 that Corts had been in the habit of repeating Cesare Borgias motto aut Caesar aut nihil and also of uttering a Machiavellian maxim from Euripides (Phoen. 52425) that Cicero claimed was constantly on the lips of Julius Caesar.

To compare a nonroyal adventurer with Julius Caesar was bold enough, to be sure, but Cortss admirersand perhaps the man himselfdid not stop there. They insisted that Corts must in fact be recognized as superior to the great conquerors of antiquity. The most sustained example in Bernal Dazs narrative is his account of Cortss handling of a near mutiny during the campaign in Tlaxcala. Seven leading grumblers came to the capitns hut and observed, inter alia, that, according to the history books, both those about the Romans and those about Alexander, as well as those about others of the most famous leaders who had ever existed in the...