Prescott's Conquests
Would that those now in friendship bound,
We whom Love's thread circles round,
Death's cruel edge might see!
Since good on earth is insecure,
And all things must a change endure
In dark futurity!
Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco, 15th century
I first discovered Prescott's The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru at one of the institutions of higher learning I attended, can't quite remember which one. I went to college right when the Federal government began its unlimited subsidizing of college administration and bureaucracy by indenturing their students into corporate wage servitude – call it American Dreaming. At this time, you may have still half-justified not getting a professional trade like computer science, engineering, or accounting, but studied history, philosophy, or lord help you all, literature.
In a South American history course, a professor had us read a few sections of The Conquest of Peru. I always remember this prof at the front of the class describing the Spaniards' quest to fulfill their unquenchable lust for gold. Imitating the indigenous people meeting the Spanish, he'd wave his arm pointing across the room, while emphatically stating, “No, no gold here. It's way over there, whole cities.” – Just keep moving.
A few months ago, entering one of the almost extinct used bookstores in Chicago, there for seven bucks sat both Prescott books in one massive volume. Having long ago been duly impressed by those snippets, it was time to dive full-in. Not only have I not been disappointed, but I can easily say Prescott's books are two of the great works of world history. A history, in many ways, close to fantasy, endlessly page turning, written with poetic flair by a wonderful intellect.
Prescott was a Norteamericano, living in Boston in the first half of the 19th century. The Conquests were published in the 1840s. Prescott used the few eyewitness accounts of events, in regards to Mexico, Cortes' letters to the Spanish crown, one of his soldiers, Bernal Díaz del Castillo's recollections, and writings from immediately after the events such as the Dominican Friar turned converted indigenous champion, Bartolomé de las Casas. He also included extensive archive materials from Spain and the Americas, along with various histories written in the intervening centuries.
There is little perspective from the Aztec and Inca themselves, except through Spanish eyes and ears. The conquests' resulting destruction of the cultures of both civilizations is one of the great, though in no way unique crimes of history. Prescott's writes of the destruction of the vast Mexica codex, a type of hieroglyphic writing,
“The strange, unknown characters inscribed on them excited (Spanish) suspicion. They were looked on as magic scrolls; and were regarded in the same light with the idols of the temples, as the symbols of pestilent superstition, that must be extirpated. The first archbishop of Mexico, Don Juan de Zumarraga―a name that should be as immortal, as that of Omar―collected these paintings from every quarter, especially Tezcuco, the most cultivated capital of Anahuac, and the great depository of the national archives. He then caused them to be piled up in a “mountain heap”―as it is called by the Spanish writers themselves―in the market-place of Tlatelolco, and reduced them all to ashes! His greater countryman, Archbishop Ximenes had celebrated a similar auto-da-fe of Arabic manuscripts, in Granada, some twenty years before. Never did fanaticism achieve two more signal triumphs than by annihilation of so many curious monuments of human ingenuity and learning!”
Prescott's history owes much to the classical stylings of Thucydides, Livy, and Polybius. They are the stories of two extensive and, in many ways, fantastical military campaigns, the first in Mexico, the second in Peru. The books contain extensive backgrounds on the Aztec and Inca civilizations, along with perceptive insights of the main actors' personalities and character traits. Prescott writes with a magnificent historical perspective and humanitarian philosophy, and, as if it were fiction, these elements are contained in a page turning adventure saga.
The two main characters are Hernan Cortes in Mexico and Francisco Pizarro in Peru. Prescott has a more or less grudging respect for their deeds. He definitely thinks more highly of the character of Cortes. Pizarro comes off not much better than an illiterate thug, not to anyway diminish Cortez's own immersion in thug-life. In a classic sense, say of Xenophon's march out of Persia in his Anabasis, or Caesar's Gallic Wars, they are indeed heroic characters. However, Prescott tempers any such regard writing,
“We contemplate with indignation the cruelties inflicted by the early conquerors. But indignation is qualified with contempt, when we see them thus ruthlessly trampling out the spark of knowledge, the common boon and property of all mankind. We may well doubt, which has the strongest claims to civilization, the victor or the vanquished.”
Simply, the histories are remarkable, indeed fantastical stories. Cortes and his 500 hundred men, Pizarro and his several hundred, landing respectively in Mexico and a decade later in Peru, swiftly conquering the two greatest civilizations of the Americas. Detailing the events makes both outcomes no less remarkable, in some ways even more so. It certainly drives home how a little technological advantage, especially in warfare, can be overwhelmingly advantageous. A few horses, steel in the form of weaponry and armor, and a handful of guns and artillery proved decisive for the Spanish. Prescott concludes,
“The light of civilization would be poured on their land. But it would be the light of a consuming fire, before which their barbaric glory, their institutions, their very existence and name as a nation, would wither and become extinct! Their doom was sealed, when the white man had set foot on their soil.”
Both the Aztec and Inca civilizations were entirely centrally controlled, the Inca to an even greater extent than the Aztecs, proving deathly detrimental as the Spaniards marched their way to the capitals of Tenochtitlan and Cuzco. With cunning and deception, the Spaniards took prisoner the Aztec leader Montezuma and the Inca Atahualpa, decapitating both hierarchical societies, literally in the case of the great Inca.
It is in the clash of civilizations where the story is of most interest. Civilizations that were distinct in many ways, yet in other ways more similar than either, especially the Spaniards, ever cared to admit. The magnificence of the cities and physical welfare of the majority in the American societies equaled or surpassed those of Europe. The greatest differences presented themselves with religion, especially to such an evangelical lot as Christian Europe. Prescott writes,
“The Castilian, too proud for hypocrisy, committed more cruelties in the name of religion than were ever practiced by the pagan idolater or the fanatical Moslem. The burning of the infidel was a sacrifice acceptable to Heaven, and the conversion of those who survived amply atoned for the foulest offences. It is a melancholy and mortifying consideration, that the most uncompromising spirit of intolerance―the spirit of the Inquisitor at home, and of the Crusader abroad―should have emanated from a religion which preached peace upon earth.”
The Spaniards were completely appalled by the Aztec practice of human sacrifice—a large contributing factor to the Aztec's defeat. Instead of aiming to slay opponents on the battlefield, Aztec warfare sought to take the opponent prisoner for later sacrifice. With each engagement, Aztec losses were substantial, Spaniard losses limited.
Undoubtedly, most abhorrent to the Spaniards was the Aztec practice of dining on the flesh of the sacrificed prisoners. However, the most amusing thought on this great clash of civilizations was provided by Montezuma. In captivity, the Aztec ruler was extensively proselytized by Cortes and the priest Bartolomé de Olmedo, of whom Prescott writes admirably, “Afforded the rare example—rare in any age—of the union of fervent zeal with charity.” Both evangelists repeatedly and harshly condemned the Aztec dining practice. Finally, Montezuma told his two Christian missionaries, “I do not understand how eating the flesh of your god is better than consuming the flesh of your enemies.”
As Prescott wrote, “We may well doubt, which has the strongest claims to civilization.” The Aztec were in many ways an extremely brutal and imperial culture. In fact, their harsh rule of others was important for Cortes gaining allies of many of the peoples the Aztec previously conquered. The Inca, just as imperial, though not so outwardly brutal in their rule, sat atop what in many ways was a mass, quasi-slave culture, similar in ways to the ancient Egyptians.
The brutality of Spanish rule was a brutality long established and practiced liberally upon each other well before they landed in the Americas. The Pizarro brothers in all respects represented this violence. Francisco had three brothers, by three different mothers. He and two others were bastards of their Spanish noble father. The way to any legitimacy in Castilian society for the illegitimate was through the army.
All three brothers joined Francisco in his conquest. The brothers’ individual destinies say much about Spain in the 16th century. Maybe the greatest story of the conquest of Peru is the incessant bloody infighting between the Spaniards, instigated time and again by the Pizarros themselves. Francisco would be assassinated by this fellow Spaniards in his own home, in the town of Lima he had founded. While Gonzalo, the youngest brother, under the legitimacy of the Spanish Crown, was publicly beheaded in the main square of Cuzco, the Inca capital he had helped conquer. A third brother, Juan, died in one of the few actual battles between the Inca and Spaniards. Pummeled in the head by a rock, Juan was the only brother to die at the hands of the Inca.
With plenty of his fellow Spaniards' blood on his hands, the sole legitimate Pizarro brother, Hernando, managed to sail from Peru to Spain with boatloads of gold and silver for the Crown. Upon landing, he was imprisoned for twenty years, managing to eventually be released and die nonviolently, unlike his three brothers. Such was how Spain treated her Conquistadors in the great Age of Quixotic Chivalry.
Prescott offers invaluable insights on learning from history, especially valuable in our age of self-righteous prosecutorial history. He writes,
“We reflect on the advance, in speculative morality, at least, which the nineteenth century has made over the sixteenth. But should not the consciousness of this teach us charity? Should it not make us the more distrustful of applying the standard of the present to measure the actions of the past?”
In the last decades’ unrelenting and eminently destructive sole focus on the faults of the past, we ignored the benefits and advantages the past bestowed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the degraded politics of today's American republic, where many, politically enfranchised for the first time in history, busily lament the faults of the past, losing all understanding of its meritorious values and the very workings that made their chastising positions even possible. Two hundred years ago, Prescott put forth an invaluable insight for our cultural warriors:
“It is only with increasing civilization that the legislator studies to economize human suffering, even for the guilty; to devise penalties, not so much by the way of punishment for the past, as of reformation for the future.”
Unlike many who wrote before him and far too many who followed, Prescott had a fundamental understanding that despite all cultural differences there was an underlying unity to the human experience. With this perspective came an appreciation whatever distinct social order deemed civilization in Europe, the Americas, and across the planet, all are overwhelmed by the commonalities of human social organization, most essentially our ability to think abstractly, communicate, and pass values and concepts across generations. Prescott puts it,
“It is impossible to contemplate without interest the struggles made by different nations, as they emerge from barbarism, to supply themselves with some visible symbols of thought―that mysterious agency by which the mind of the individual may be put in communication with the minds of a whole community. The want of such is itself the greatest impediment to the progress. For what is it but to imprison the thought, which has the elements of immortality, within the bosom of its author, or the small circle who come in contact with him, in contact with him, instead of sending it abroad to give light to thousands, and to generations yet unborn! Not only is such a symbol an essential element of civilization, but it may assume as the very criterion of civilization; for the intellectual advancement of a people will keep pace pretty nearly with its facilities for intellectual communication.”
There’s that word, “progress,” which in many ways has lost all meaning in the 21st century. Two centuries of industrialism associated progress’ meaning almost exclusively with technological development. But Prescott dissuaded readers from this interpretation in regards to the more technologically advanced Spaniards destruction of the American civilizations, demanding a questioning of the supposed superiority of Europe. He writes of the incapacity for progress in the Spaniard’s brutalizing of the Aztec and Inca as a lesson for his and our present times:
“The extreme solicitude to avoid these calamities (war), by the aid of peaceful congresses and impartial mediation, is, on the whole, the strongest evidence, stronger than afforded by the progress of science and art, of our boasted advance in civilization.”
Most ironically, in Prescott's statement pointing to the “mysterious agency,” of thought and its communication, the last few decades has proved incontrovertibly quality does not necessarily improve with quantity. We live in an era where oceans of information swamp our abilities to effectively communicate.
In the last half-century, it can be argued for the first time in the history of Homo sapiens we developed a rudimentary global civilization, an extremely crude understanding this species shares one very small planet, circling one star, in the inconceivable vastness of space.
In part, this global civilization was initiated by the brutal actions of the chivalrous Castilians five centuries ago, a brutality that still rages across much of the planet. While the Inca and Aztec civilizations were lost to foreign conquest, this nascent world order destroys itself from within.