The Cross and the Sword: Ideological Rancors?

On the Spanish conquest

The commemoration of the Fifth Centenary revived, as was foreseeable, the stubborn anti-Catholic and anti-Hispanic hatred of old and well-known date. And so much hatred feeds injury, blinds one to justice and clouds the order of reason, as Saint Thomas well explained in a forgotten teaching. As a result, truth is adulterated and hidden, and resentment and falsehood spread with force. It is not merely, then, a historical or scientific insufficiency that explains the number of impostures thrown into the arena. It is an odium fidei fed by ideological rancor. A fatal lack of love for everything that bears the sign of the Cross and the Sword.

It would be enough to accept and understand this hidden motive to dismiss, without more, the fallacies that are again being spread here and there. But an immense and interested power has given them diffusion and acceptance, and today they are presented as serious arguments of an academic sort. There is nothing of the kind. And as soon as the most repeated commonplaces against Spain’s action in America are analyzed, their inconsistency and weakness become visible. Let us look briefly at the three inevitable accusations hurled by the left.

The dispossession of the land

It is said, first, that Spain appropriated indigenous lands in a typical act of imperialist rapacity.

It is striking that, contrary to Leninist theses, Imperialism is made to arise at the end of the fifteenth century. And the zeal shown in defense of individual private property is likewise surprising. But Marxism has accustomed us to these contradictions and, above all, to its appeal to the Christian conscience in order to obtain solidarities. For, in effect, without the appeal to the Christian conscience—which understands private property as a right inherent in creatures, and only before which the alleged dispossession would be blameworthy—what is all this privatizing and possessive zeal about? There is no answer.

The truth is that before the arrival of the Spaniards, concrete and individual Indians were not owners of any land, but unpaid and punished employees of an idolized State and of despotic chiefs regarded as supreme divinities. Lacking any legislation regulating their labor rights, abuse and exploitation were the norm, and plunder and dispossession habitual practices. Taxes, burdens, forced payments, violent exactions and heavy tributes were common currency in indigenous relations prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. The stronger subjected the weaker and held him fast with punishments and reprisals. Not even the most destitute were exempt, and they often bore, as stigmas of their sad condition, evident mutilations and shameful badges.

A clearly discriminatory “justice” distinguished between the powerful and slaves, to the detriment of the latter; and these are not data drawn from Hispanic chronicles, but from the protests of Karl Marx himself in his studies on “Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations and Primitive Accumulation of Capital.” And from commentators unsuspected of Hispanophilia such as Eric Hobsbawm, Roberto Oliveros Maqueo or Pierre Chaunu.

The truth also is that the principal owners of the land whom the Spaniards found—Mayas, Incas and Aztecs—were so at the expense of other owners whom they had invaded and displaced. And this was the reason why a considerable part of the aboriginal tribes—Carios, Tlaxcaltecs, Cempoaltecs, Zapotecs, Otomíes, Cañaris, Huancas, and so on—naturally allied themselves with the conquistadors, seeking their protection and the consequent redress.

And the truth, finally, is that only from the Conquest onward did the Indians come to know the personal meaning of private property and the juridical defense of their obligations and rights. It is Spain that raises the question of the just titles, with such solid self-demands that they call into question the very authority of the Monarch and of the Pontiff. It is Spain—with that admirable master of the Law of Nations called Francisco de Vitoria—that founds territorial possession on the highest reasons of the common good and social concord; that insists again and again on the protection owed to the natives as subjects; that guarantees and promotes an equitable distribution of prices; that attends to abuses and grievances; that did not hesitate to punish harshly even its own wayward officials; and that distinguished between possession as fact and property as right, because it knew that founding a city in the desert and making it one’s own was very different from sacking a private granary. For this reason there were repartimientos only in unpopulated lands and encomiendas “in the Indians’ estates.” For despite so many ignorant fables, the encomienda was the great institution for the custody of the property and rights of the natives. Silvio Zavala demonstrated this well long ago, in an exhaustive study commissioned not by any “reactionary international,” but by the Jewish Guggenheim Foundation, based in New York. And it is proven in countless documents that are unknown only to the makers of the black legends.

Through the encomienda, the Indian possessed private and collective lands without their being able to be taken from him with impunity. Through the encomienda he organized his own local and regional government, under a tribute system that distinguished incomes and conditions, and whose revenues did not reach the King—who renounced them—but the Conquistadors. For them this did not mean any uncontrolled enrichment, but rather many headaches, as emerges from the testimonies of Antonio de Mendoza or Cristóbal Álvarez de Carvajal and of innumerable judges of the audiencias. As Ramón Carande himself has noted in “Charles V and His Bankers,” protection for the Indians was so firm and economic uncertainty for the encomenderos so great that America was not a settlement colony where everyone came to get rich easily. It was a difficult and strenuous enterprise, with lights and shadows, with upright men and rogues, but with a testimony that indigenist tirades have not been able to overthrow to this day: the gratitude of the natives. Whoever has the honesty to verify and follow that gratitude in its artistic, religious and cultural expressions cannot fail to recognize it objectively.

It is not Spain that dispossessed the Indians of their lands. It is Spain that instilled in them the right of property, that restored to them the estates seized by the powerful and bloodthirsty tribal States, that guarded them under human and divine justice, that placed them on equal terms with its own children, and even in better conditions than many European peasants and proletarians. This too has been recognized by historians who are not Hispanists. It is Spain, in short, that rehabilitated Indian authority over its domains; and if one studies how and when that authority was weakened and violated, one will not find behind it the conquest, nor evangelization, nor discovery, but the liberal and Masonic administrations that betrayed the missionary meaning of that glorious deed. One will not find the Catholic Monarchs, nor Charles V, nor Philip II. Nor the conquistadors, nor the encomenderos, nor the adelantados, nor the friars. Rather, one will find the apron-wearing Enlightenment Bourbons and their epigones, who have been uprooting America and reducing it to the colony it never was in the days of the Hispanic Empire.

The thirst for gold

It is said, secondly, that the arrival and presence of the Hispanics had no higher end than the economic one; specifically, the purpose of keeping the precious metals of America.

And here Marxism again offers us another aporia. For if we propose the existence of higher motives, we are accused of angelism; but if they see only fallen angels worshiping Mammon, they are scandalized with cherubic blushes. If economics determines history and the struggle of classes and interests is its internal engine; if men are nothing more than transmuted chemical elaborations, placed here for earthly enjoyment, without later rewards or punishments, what is this new appeal to philanthropy and charity among nations? Only the Christian conscience can coherently condemn—and does condemn—such outrages. But the complaint has no place in the name of dialectical materialism. We admit it forcefully when looking at time sub specie aeternitatis. It makes no sense in historicism sub lumine oppresionis. It is reproach and protest if we know man to be a “bearer of eternal values” or homo viator, as the Fathers said. It is cold and irreproachable logic if we do not cease to conceive him as homo acconomicus.

But let us clarify matters a little better.

Let us say first of all that there is no reason to hide the economic purposes of the Spanish conquest. Not only because they existed, but because they were legitimate. The aim of profit in an enterprise in which one has invested, risked and worked tirelessly is not at odds with Christian morality or with the natural order of operations. What is wrong is precisely when, once persons and nations have departed from the Christian sense, they put financial reasons before all others, exacerbate them to the detriment of honest goods, and proceed with vile methods to obtain material wealth. But these are, no less, the constant teachings and warnings of the Catholic Church in Spain. For this reason agiotage and usurious practices, lending at interest, the “breeding of money,” and ill-gotten gains were repudiated and admonished. For this reason later compensations and reparations were urged—and they took place in countless cases; and for this reason, above all, stock-exchange and financial activities were marked as suspect of anti-Catholicism. It is not we who note this. It is materialist historians who have launched this formidable and accurate “accusation”: neither Spain nor the Catholic countries were capable of fostering capitalism because of their anti-Protestant and anti-rabbinic prejudices. Calvinist and Jewish ethics, by contrast, would have led, as in so many places, to prosperity and development, if the Austrias and Habsburgs had set aside their medieval and ultramontane habits.

From this there results a new contradiction. Spain would be very bad because, calling itself Catholic, it sought gold and silver. But it would later be even worse because of its Catholicism, which supposedly made it unable to become prosperous and led it to irremediable decline.

Such, in summary, is what Hamilton came to tell us—despite himself—around 1926, with his thesis on “American Treasure and the flowering of Capitalism.” And after him, corroborating him or partially correcting him, authors such as Vilar, Simiand, Braudel, Nef, Hobsbawm, Mousnier or the already cited Carande. The gold and silver that left America (it is never said that it was in payment for goods, products and structures arriving from the Peninsula) did not serve to enrich Spain, but to integrate the European capitalist circuit, chiefly enjoyed by Great Britain.

The makers of black legends, who constantly return to and stir up the thirst for gold as the determining end of the Conquest, should also explain why Spain arrived, remained and settled not only in mining zones, but in inhospitable and rugged territories. Why the enterprise was not quickly abandoned, if only in the second half of the sixteenth century were the richest mines discovered, such as those of Potosí, Zacatecas or Guanajuato. Why the condition of the American indigenous peoples was notably superior to that of the European proletariat enslaved by capitalism, as observers in no way Hispanist—Humboldt or Dobb, Chaunu, or the English merchant Nehry Hawks, condemned to exile by the Inquisition in 1751 and certainly reluctant to praise Spain—have recognized. Why Bravo Duarte could say that all America benefited from Mining, but not the Spanish Crown. Why, in short—and we see no argument of greater common sense and therefore of greater metaphysical strength—if only gold mattered, what remained as testimony to Spain’s action in America is not merely a slave market or an enormous financial square, but a conglomerate of nations rich in Faith and in Spirit. The effect contains and shows the cause: this is the decisive argument. For this reason we do not write these lines from a South American Carthage sheltered by Moloch and Baal, but from the City named the Most Holy Trinity and Port of Saint Mary of Buenos Aires, by the noble voices of its founding heroes.

The indigenous genocide

It is said, finally, in line with the above, that the Conquest—characterized by looting and robbery—produced an aboriginal genocide, condemnable in the name of the everlasting laws of humanity that govern the destinies of civilized nations.

But such laws, it seems, do not count in two cases when evaluating the mass crimes committed by dominant Indians against the dominated before the arrival of the Spaniards; nor when evaluating the Stalinist purges or the Malthusian initiatives of liberal powers. Of these two cases, the first is truly curious. For the evidence is so impossible to hide that even the indigenist authors themselves cannot keep silent about it. In a single day in 1487, 2,000 young people were sacrificed at the inauguration of the great Aztec temple, as reported by the Indian codex Telleriano-Remensis. 250,000 annual victims is the number Jan Gehorsam gives for the fifteenth century in his article “Divine Hunger of the Aztecs.” Twenty thousand, in only two years of construction of the great pyramid of Huitzilopochtli, Von Hagen notes; countless those swallowed by the so-called flower wars and cannibalism, according to Halcro Ferguson; and even Jacques Soustelle himself recognizes that the demographic hecatomb was such that, had the Spaniards not arrived, the holocaust would have been inevitable. But what do these inevitable recorders of pre-Hispanic death statistics say? Something very simple: they were transcendent spirits who thus fulfilled their liturgies and archaic rites. They are sacrifices of “a barbarous beauty,” Vaillant will console us. “We must not try to explain this attitude in moral terms,” Von Hagen reassures us; and the theologian Enrique Dussel will provide his liberationist and cosmic reading so that we may all aggiornare ourselves. It is clear: if the Spaniards kill, they are insatiable executioners fattened on the Crusades and the struggle against the Moor; if the Indians kill, they are sweet and simple Las Casas-like sheep expressing the barbarous beauty of their telluric rites. If Spain kills, it is genocide; if the Indians kill, it is called a “threat of demographic imbalance.”

The truth is that Spain neither planned nor executed any genocidal plan; the collapse of the indigenous population—which no one denies—is not linked to military clashes with the conquistadors, but to a variety of causes, among which microbial contagion stands out. The truth is that the homicidal accusation as a cause of depopulation does not withstand the serious investigations of authors such as Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, José Luis Moreno, Ángel Rosenblat or Rolando Mellafé, who do not precisely belong to Hispanophile schools. The truth is that “the Indians of America,” says Pierre Chaunu, “did not succumb under the blows of the steel swords of Toledo, but under the microbial and viral shock.” The truth—how many times must it be repeated in these times!—is that figures are handled with frivolous lightness, without the basic qualitative analyses or the elementary safeguards of the statistical disciplines linked to history. The truth even—to say it all—is that even the mitas, repartimientos and encomiendas, far from being a cause of depopulation, are antidotes applied to prevent it. For here we are not denying that indigenous demography suffered a circumstantial decline. We are denying, yes, and emphatically, that such a decrease was produced by a genocidal plan.

Moreover, if one compares it with Anglo-Saxon America, where the few Indians who remain do not come from the areas colonized by them—where are the Indians of New England?—but from the inhabitants of territories bought from Spain or usurped from Mexico.

No dispossession of territories, no thirst for gold, no mass killings. A providential encounter of two worlds. An encounter in which, apart from all the traumatic aspects that people like to emphasize, one of those worlds, the Old one, gloriously embodied by Hispanity, had the enormous merit of bringing to the other notions it did not know about the dignity of the creature made in the image and likeness of the Creator. Those notions, the patrimony of Christendom spread by eminent sages, were not dead letter nor an object of constant violation.

They were the true program of life, the genuine salvific plan for which Hispanity struggled during three long centuries of self-sacrificing discovery, evangelization and civilization.

And if the sword, as Péguy wished, often had to measure with blood the space over which the plow could later open the furrow; and if just war had to be the prelude to the song of peace, and the implacable march of Christ’s warriors the painful means necessary to spread the Water of Baptism, nothing else was being done but to ratify what the Apostle announced: without the shedding of blood there is no redemption at all.

The Hispanity of Isabella and Ferdinand did not come to these lands with the disease of crime and the sadism of outrage. It did not come to make victims, but to offer us, amid the worst idolatries, the Immolated Victim, who from the throne of the Cross reigns over the peoples on this side and on the other side of the fearsome ocean.

Source: Revista ARBIL