The Conquista from the beginning was with rare exceptions not so much directed by the Crown of Castile as authorised by it. The bands of at most a few hundred men that in a scant half-century had fanned out first from Española, then from Mexico, Panama and Peru, were private enterprises, working as it were under licence and to guidelines laid down from Spain, but themselves normally setting the immediate targets: ‘profit-making enterprises financed by contracts stipulating how the profits were to be shared. These enterprises resembled government in some respects, business in others.’^[55] This flexibility enabled the expansion to be extraordinarily rapid—with each new focus of Indian wealth taken over, new options appeared, until by the end of the ‘exponential phase’ about 1536, before the first check in Chile, it covered some 2·5 to 3 million square kilometres, from the 500mm isohyet bounding humid Mexico to the southern frontiers of the Inca Empire; basically the great plateaus and the littoral strips essential for access to them. The Spanish hold was of course by no means even: the Conquista was most solid where it seized upon and supplanted solid economic and political structures; there was a net of towns, the nuclei of control, surrounded by zones more or less completely farmed out in encomiendas but with interstices and a vast penumbra where Indian life went on much as before. Chaunu stresses that the Conquista acted much more on men than on their land, basically seeking to control the Indian labour force and to take over its surplus product.^[56] Hence the leap-frogging over non-productive pockets and the much slower extension of control—hardly completed even in this century, with its new forms of mobility—over the marginal areas of the Amazonian slopes.

The executants came for the most part from the gentry, younger sons of- 79 -the minor nobility, and semi-professional soldiery. One cannot escape the impression that for such people the enterprises of the Indies provided a vast liberating hope; not only of material wealth, though that was a most material factor, but also of adventure, honour, fame, self-expression, and for those so inclined, ample sexual opportunity. Attaining these, however, entailed not only a commitment to months or years of most desperate hardships and hazards, but first of all getting the royal warrant, often in the face of cut-throat competitors, and arranging finance, usually on hard terms: ‘The small and informal armies … were bound together by personal loyalty, by joint hope of gain and by debt.’^[57] There was a constant tension between a fantastic individualism and an equally fantastic legalism; and between the lure of another Eldorado in the next valley but two and the desire to settle down as a man of property. Those who lost out in the scramble for encomiendas, habituated as they were to the hand-to-mouth but exciting existence and the rough mateship of the entrada, provided the raw material for new ventures, and indeed were often eased on their way by the more provident (or lucky) and respectable. The clearest case, but it is only one of many, is the quest for Eldorado by Pedro de Ursua in 1560, which was taken over by Lope de Aguirre, of whom Peru was obviously better rid: Aguirre, a vicious psychopath, left a trail of rape and murder all along the Rio Negro and the Orinoco to the sea.^[58]

Gold and God, in that order, were at bottom the main motivations of the average conquistador; the official vindication of the Conquista put God first, and the Crown from time to time made efforts, usually unavailing, to live up to this priority. In effect, the Indians were to mediate the gold to the Spaniards, the Spaniards to mediate the true God to the Indians. This was at the root of the greatest tension of Spain in the Indies: that between the Crown's struggle for social justice, and the tempering, or rather blunting, of its efforts by the sheer brute facts of colonial life.

Once the immediate loot, the tangible gold, silver and jewels had been shared out (the Crown taking its quinta or fifth), the aim of the more sober conquistador was to obtain an encomienda. This was not exactly a feudal fief, though it became something like it; it was not a grant of land, but rather a grant of the labour service of the Indians of a given tract of land; a concept stemming from the Reconquista from the Moors in Old Spain. The encomendero was supposed in turn to ‘instruct the Indians in the Christian religion and the elements of civilized life, and to defend them in their persons and property’.^[59] But, since any economic life beyond sheer robbery depended on the exploitation of Indian labour, the possibilities of abuse were obvious and enormous. The question of tenure was important: it could be argued that a mere life tenure meant more racking exploitation for a quick fortune; but, apart from humanitarian considerations (which however bulked large), the Crown was naturally fearful of allowing a hereditary feudality in these distant scarce-controllable realms.- 80 -The first royal attempts to protect the Indians were in 1502; encomiendas were accepted by the Laws of Burgos in 1512, with careful (but unenforceable) regulation in Indian interests; there was an attempt at abolition of encomiendas in 1530, with such disastrous economic results in New Spain that in 1535 life grants were extended to the life of a widow or one child. The New Laws of 1542 forbade new encomiendas and the inheritance of old ones; we have seen their fate. But in New Spain, at least, they did to some extent ‘tame the encomienda’, and the continuing decline in Indian numbers enforced attention by encomenderos to their more positive functions; in the seventeenth century the system faded away as a really significant economic factor, being succeeded by debt peonage. The exploitation went on, and indeed the public sector took an increasing share with the Viceroy Toledo's codification of the Peruvian mita in the 1570s; this massive corvée swept the Indians by thousands into Potosi and the yet more hellish mercury mining of Huancavelica.

Yet it is difficult to see that, given the premise of spreading the Faith by Empire and the agents available for the task, any other system could have worked; and in the conditions of colonisation, no government could have controlled it effectively. The Crown's efforts were sincere, its discussions anguished, caught between economic and political necessity, and the claims of human—or divine—justice. The reiteration of protective ordinances attests their failure; nothing could bridge the inevitable gap between the impeccable humanity and morality of the cédula real and the inhumane immorality of the very peccant frontier; a problem of empires in all ages.

This is perhaps best illustrated by the procedure of the Requerimiento, which might sardonically be described as a strange form of Justification of Empire, or murder, by Faith. Since the moral justification of conquest was to mediate the Gospel to those sunk in blind idolatry, they had to be given the opportunity to freely embrace the new Faith:

This was to be secured by insisting that a formal and sonorous proclamation should be read to the Indians for their acceptance or rejection; if they persisted in their blindness, their blood would be upon their own heads. The results were of course a bloody farce: the Requerimiento was read out of arrow-range, in deserted villages, in camp before moving out, even from shipboard.…^[61] It should be recalled also that if many royal laws were entirely humane in intent, others were exceedingly discriminatory and exploitative; and these there was no difficulty in enforcing. The royal interventions ‘proposed to commit iniquities humanely, and to consummate injustices equitably’.^[62]

The human suffering of the Conquista cannot be estimated but was certainly immense, probably more terrible even than that of the greater wars and revolutions of our times. In its own day the burning protests of Dominican- 81 -Bartolomé de las Casas—himself a one-time encomendero—provoked much heart-searching and some real, though mostly ineffective, action by the royal authorities. It is undeniable that the unscrupulous use of his work, illustrated by the gruesome and perennially reprinted engravings of de Bry, fixed on the Spanish name the disgrace of the leyenda negra. Perhaps the best attitude to this ‘black legend’ should be Dryden's to another black legend, the Popish Plot: complete acceptance, complete rejection, are alike mere foolishness.^[63]

Certainly some of the modern ‘revisionist’ defences seem naïve or disingenuous in the extreme; it is difficult to find in the Third World the ‘universal plebiscite’ in favour of ‘that genial colonising Europe which has radiated its high culture and its well being over all the earth's round’ of which Menéndez Pidal speaks; truly, Don Quixote rides again!^[64]

Concentration of the debate on the highly emotional las Casas obscures the evidence of the conquistadores themselves; their matter-of-fact recording of their own atrocities is as terrible as any of his searing protests.^[65] It also obscures the fact that las Casas was far from alone in his stance: many a missionary friar and some courageous officials made full use of the right, positively encouraged by the Crown, to comment freely to the authorities in Spain on any aspect of Spanish activities in the Indies: the testimony and the protest are not from partisan outsiders but from Spaniards themselves. (Nor should we overlook the fact that many aspects of Aztec and Inca society were very far from idyllic, in fact extremely brutal.) This internal criticism contributed to the very high intellectual and moral standard of the debate on the very fundamentals of Faith and Empire initiated by Francisco de Vitoria, the virtual founder of International Law, at the University of Salamanca in 1539. For another example of a great empire permitting such profound questioning of its very right to be an empire, one might have to go back to Buddhist India, to Asoka's reaction to the horrors of his Kalinga war. This is highly to the honour of Spain; the dishonour of the Conquista is black, but in the last resort we are all the children not only of Adam, but of Cain who slew his brother.…^[66]

The vast destruction of Indian life, and lives, cannot of course be ascribed mostly to direct assault; the disruption of the norms of social life, hunger and over-work in the mines and perhaps above all as human beasts of burden, accounted for very much; but most was due to epidemics of new diseases—Chaunu makes the point that, unlike such devastating invasions as those of the Mongols in Eurasia, the Conquista ‘came by sea, not by land; this implies fewer invaders, but an incomparably greater microbiotic shock’.^[67]

On these ruins, from these remnants, the Spaniards built a unique and fascinating culture; but this was not the work of the conquistadores themselves—though they laid the foundations of power—but of the officials, clerics, lawyers, merchants and artisans who followed them. The Crown very soon took in hand the taming of its too individualistic and too turbulent advance agents:- 82 -