March 1, 1519: Sanudo, Díaz; Not the Men but the Means

Most places in Europe from the 11th to the 16th century marked the new year with Easter and as that date changed year to year, so did the marking of the new year. Venice was an exception. The Republic of Venice regularly marked the beginning of the New Year on March 1st. This also was the date that Sanudo chose to start his diaries. Marin Sanudo had been elected to a post in that part of the Senate, the zonta, in the fall of 1518. He accepted the post and carried it out with such a seriousness, passion and apparent joy that when he was voted off the following year he seemed to take it very hard. But for the new year, as our Editors tell us [pp 20-21], in the preface to his 27th volume of diaries, Sanudo sees his work at the desk as a good influence on policy and those seeking position in office.

Sanudo Diaries: March 1, 1519 (27:5); "In the past years I have described as they occurred all the events of Italy and beyond, with no little fatigue, producing a work of great length and an enduring record of past events, an excellent instruction for patricians, senators, and others who take pleasure in history and aspire to the government of the state. Therefore, without further introduction, I shall continue this undertaking. I shall here write daily whatever seems to me worthy of note for the eternal memory of my country, beginning with the first day of the month and year according to the Venetian custom, that is, the month of March, and I shall daily go on writing as I have done in the other volumes."

All quotes as Sanudo Diaries or editor's notes from Venice, Cita Excellentissima, Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo translated by Linda L Carroll,  editors: Patricia H LaBalme and Laura Sanguineti White, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008

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Meanwhile in the Caribbean, Bernal Díaz, as he tells it, in the company of Pedro de Alvarado, was to be newly found on Cozumel, on the Yucatan coast. The date was very near or on the first of March, 1519.

"We arrived in Cozumel two days before Cortés, and we anchored in the port. Cortés had not yet arrived with his fleet because in bad weather the ship captained by Francisco de Morla broke its rudder. The rudder was replaced with another from the ships that came with Cortés, and they all came in convoy. Let us return to Pedro de Alvarado. When we arrived in the port, we went ashore with all the soldiers to the town of Cozumel, and we found no Indians because they had all fled.Pedro de Alvarado ordered us to go immediately to another town a league from there where the natives had also escaped and fled but could not carry their household goods, so they had left hens and other things. Pedro de Alvarado ordered us to take some forty of the hens. In a house for idol worship, there were some hangings from old cloths, some small chests in which there were something like crowns, idols, beads, and ear pendants made of low-grade gold. He also seized two Indian men and an Indian woman."

from The True History of the Conquest Of New Spain  Bernal Díaz del Castillo, translated and with an introduciton and notes by Janet Burke, Ted Humphrey, Hackett Publishing Company, 2012. pp 25,6

While picking up right where I left off with Bernal Díaz's chronicle, already, there is some need for clarification. Cortés himself in a letter to the King had explained that the men on this expedition were not really soldiers.They were men on horse or on foot. Matthew Restall * makes a case for the very term, in fact, not being used regularly in accounts of the conquest until 1556 and after. He points out that Cortés and Pedro de Alvarado didn't use the term soldados when they meant troops under their command like Díaz did even when referring to himself. Restall looks at all the sources and sees the use of the term soldados didn't come into common use until after the 1550's. He explains this was a time when European armies were growing in size, forms of artillery and other methods advancing at alarming rates. The nature of warfare itself was expanding and new terms for its forms were being reshuffled and expanded as well. The words used in describing War in Europe and conquest in the New World, he says, were changing and their uses expanding.

This is also true of the way the focus was more often on the individual. The 'myth of a few men' conquering millions, he counters, is a central myth to the entire age.  The Conquest must have happened the way it did, because God willed it so, for those in those days. And those 'few men' must have been exceptional. And the vanquished millions must have been primitive, etc. These are some of the central myths surrounding the Conquest of New Spain as it is still remembered, after all. That a Nation on the side of God, with a 'few good men' can bring order and civilization to far off lands because God has made it our duty, our manifest destiny, etc.

Matthew Restall makes a case that this is not really how it was, in reality. At least, regardless of how it was interpreted and retold over centuries, that that's not really how it happened. That it wasn't a few good men, or even soldiers as understood in the time that the conquest occurred. That the providential air that Cortés wore, for himself, as he himself would describe it in letters to the King of Castile - and were published and distributed and retold by Franciscans, and others - everywhere, was just that. That's what he said, and people believed it.
So, they were footmen or horsemen, not professionally trained soldiers, with 'a thirst for gold'.

Again, only partly true. Restall explains the thirst for gold was really just a part of a means to an end. All these individuals in the company of Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado, Diego Velasquez or Bernal  Díaz were in it for themselves. What they all really wanted was their own mining company or equivalent run by indigenous servants with all the product sent back to the Old World. Well, most of it.

This basic extractive economy was not a new concept either. In Spain it had been used the generation before  in reconquering previously held Moorish lands there. Granada, in one of the very last of these was taken in 1492. Many of these same conquistadors would go on with Columbus, Pizarro, Diego Velasquez, trying to find their own colony. This was the means as well, becoming part of a group in a part of society at large willing to undergo anything to secure a grant and a farm of natives somewhere.

"Spaniards, then, joined conquest expeditions not in return for specified payments, but in the hope of acquiring wealth and status. They were, in the words of historian James Lockhart, "free agents, emigrants, settlers, unsalaried and ununiformed earners of encomiendas and shares of treasure." An encomienda was a grant of native American labor. The holder, or encomendaro, had the right to tax the natives of a given community or cluster of towns in goods and labor. Such grants allowed the recipient to enjoy a high status and often a superior lifestyle among his fellow colonists." [p.35]*

 Restall even goes so far as to say these investors were like armed entrepreneurs. Spaniards called these ventures "companies" and investors who had the greatest resources going in, like Velasquez, like Cortés, could expect the highest returns. "While powerful patrons played important investor roles, it was the captains who primarily funded companies and expected to reap the greatest rewards .... The spirit of commercialism thus infused conquest expeditions from start to finish, with participants selling services and trading goods to each other throughout the endeavor."*

I am just getting into this here and will return of course as it pertains to other  European notions of class, how they were before the period, ascendancy in those changing structures, such as that around probanza - roughly 'letters of merit' - and the relations of capital and class mobility later as this story goes on. And even the changing nature of merit or, at least, what was considered laudatory. And by whom. And for whom.

* This whole section  is extensively drawn from chs. 1-2 and the (*) asterisked sections are quoted from p 35  in  Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest by Matthew Restall, New York, Oxford University Press Inc., 2004