1 The incomprehensibility of the encounter
Here Las Casas foregrounds the incomprehensibility of the atrocities committed against Indians. See p. 30.
Throughout Las Casas there is a sort of implicit meditation on what it means to be human. The conquistadors challenge the limits of the comprehensibility of human evil. (The conflict between Europe and America challenges the limits of comprehension in part because Europeans become deranged ‘over there’.) At the same time the indigenous people appear as unfathomably innocent and well-meaning. In short, there is no shared or intelligible conception of what it means to be human. Suppose everything in Las Casas is true, or even more pointedly that you know nothing about humans except what you read in Las Casas. A ‘theory’ of human ‘nature’ would seem impossible.
One way—one trope—through which this inner tension is expressed most explicitly is through a pairing of the trickery of the conquistadors and the innocence of the indigenous. Consider the stories on pp. 30–31. Or the Spaniards slaughtering Indians during a festival, p. 33.
2 Being human, being modern
If you aren’t acquainted with the brutality of the encounter of Europeans and indigenous Americans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I encourage you to finish reading this excerpt as long as you can stomach it. I have no interest in dwelling on it except to the extent that it helps us keep in mind what we’re talking about in fact when we talk about challenges to the limits of human nature and experience that are distinctively modern.
Now, in terms of methods, the treatment of indigenous people in the Americas was not without precedent. Many of the conquistadors were veterans of the ‘Reconquista’ of Spain, which also gave rise to the encomienda system that was exported to the Americas. Slave trades predated the North Atlantic slave trade by centuries and existed throughout the Mediterranean and elsewhere. ‘Conquest’ and ‘crusade’ were familiar forms of war, with similarly exterminatory practices, before the conflict between Europe and the Americas.
Perhaps what is novel here, and also distinctively modern, is a conjunction of global and universal projects:
- the Church’s universal mission, encompassing a spectrum of interests from global dominion to a universal duty to preach; and
- the global project of material extraction (and exploitation etc.).
And, in the customary construction, the first justifies the second.
Now, Las Casas accepts some version of the first, but sees it as inconsistent with the second. One of the operative justifications of colonial plunder in the period for example is that it was predicated on the disobedience of indigenous Americans to the Spanish king, their purported ruler. But Las Casas sees the universality of the Church’s mission as implying the universality of certain moral claims that upend this entire operation. The universal address of the Church (the fact that its gospel is purportedly for all) is predicated on the universality, in humans, of receptivity to that address—which in turn implies the universality of moral judgment—which in turn implies the universality of capacities for consent, refusal, deliberation, understanding, and so on.
3 Cholula
One interesting episode in all this is the massacre at Cholula just described. Las Casas and Cortés and Bernal Díaz and Sahagún all describe the exact same scene: The Cholulan elite, between 3000 and 6000 of them, all unarmed, are rounded up by Cortés and his men, and slaughtered. No one disputes the basic facts. What is the significance of it? How do the accounts otherwise differ?
3.1 Cortés’ account
The interpreter whom I have. . . was told . . . that many of Montezuma’s people had gathered close by . . . intending to fall upon us and kill us all . . . . As well on account of this information as from the signs I had observed, I determined to anticipate them, rather than be surprised, so I had some of the lords of the city called, saying that I wished to speak with them, and I shut them in a chamber by themselves. In the meantime I had our people prepared, so that, at the firing of a musket, they should fall on a crowd of Indians who were near to our quarters, and many others who were inside them. It was done in this wise, that, after I had taken these lords, and left them bound in the chamber, I mounted a horse, and ordered the musket to be fired, and we did such execution that, in two hours, more than three thousand persons had perished.
3.2 The account from the Florentine codex
Then they began to cry out loudly to the leaders and lords and all the other people [of Cholula] to come to where the Spaniards were, and they all assembled in the square of the great cu [temple] of Quetzalcoatl. When they were together there, the Spaniards, affronted by the little notice they had taken of them, entered on horseback, having secured all the entrances to the square, and began to put them to the lance, killing as many as they could, and it is to be believed that the friendly Indians killed many more. The Cholulans bore neither offensive nor defensive weapons, but went unarmed, thinking that what was done would not be done, so that they died a bad death. As soon as all these things happened, Moteucçoma’s messengers came to tell him of them; the whole road was full of messengers from here to there and there to here, and all the people here in Mexico and in the districts where the Spaniards were coming went about very agitated and upset. It seemed that the earth moved; everyone went about shocked and stunned.
3.3 Bernal Díaz’s account
When our Captain, mounted on his horse, with many soldiers round him for a guard, saw that the Caciques, papas, and warriors had assembled, he said: ‘How anxious these traitors are to see us among the ravines so that they can gorge themselves on our flesh. But Our Lord will prevent it.’ He then asked for the two papas who had revealed the plot, and was told that they were at the gate of the courtyard with some other Caciques who were about to enter; and he sent the interpreter Aguilar to tell them to go home, since we had no need of their presence now. For they had done us a good turn and he did not want to repay it by killing them. Still on his horse, with Doña Marina beside him, Cortes then asked the Caciques why they had turned traitors and decided the night before that they would kill us, seeing that we had done them no harm but had merely warned them against certain things as we had warned every town through which we had passed: against wickedness and human sacrifice, and the worship of idols, and eating their neighbours’ flesh, and sodomy. All we had done was to tell them to lead good lives and inform them of certain matters concerning our holy faith, and this without compulsion of any kind. For what purpose, he asked, had they recently prepared long, stout poles, with collars and many ropes, and stored them in a house near their large cue? And why three days ago had they raised barricades and dug holes in the streets, and built breastworks on the roofs of their houses? And why had they sent their wives and children and goods out of the city? Their hostility was plain to see, and their treachery also, which they could not conceal, for they had not even brought us food, but only water and firewood as a mockery, and had said they had no maize. He was well aware, he said, that they had many companies of warriors lying in wait for us in some ravines nearby ready to carry out the treacherous attack they had planned, with many other bands of warriors who had joined them the night before in the belief that we should be passing that way on our march to Mexico. So in return for our coming to treat them like brothers, and tell them the commands of our lord God and the King, they were planning to kill us and eat our flesh, and had already prepared the pots with salt and peppers and tomatoes. If this was what they wanted, he said, it would have been better if they had made war on us in the field like good, brave warriors, as their neighbours the Tlascalans had done. He knew very well all that they had planned in the city, and even that they had promised their god, the god of war, to sacrifice twenty of us before his idol, also that three nights ago they had sacrificed seven Indians to him so that he might give them victory, which he had promised them. But being both wicked and false, he neither had nor would have any power over us, and all the crimes and treacheries they had planned and carried out were about to recoil on themselves. Doña Marina translated this speech and made it perfectly clear to them. When they heard it the Caciques and papas and captains said that what she stated was true but it was not their fault, since Montezuma’s ambassadors had commanded them to do it, by order of their master. Then Cortes told them that the King’s laws decreed such treachery should not go unpunished, and that they must die for their crime. Then he ordered a musket to be fired, which was the signal we had agreed on; and they received a blow they will remember for ever, for we killed many of them, and the promises of their false idols were of no avail. In less than two hours our Tlascalan allies, who as I have said had remained in the fields, arrived after fighting a tough battle in the streets, where the Cholulans had posted other companies to defend the town and prevent their entrance, which had been quickly defeated however. The Tlascalans went about the place plundering and taking prisoners, and we could not stop them. Next day more bands arrived from the Tlascalan towns, and did great damage too, for they hated the Cholulans. The sight of this destruction aroused compassion in Cortes and his soldiers, and we stopped the Tlascalans from doing any more harm. Cortes ordered Cristobal de Olid to summon all their captains so that he could talk to them, and they very promptly came. He told them to collect their people together and camp in the fields, which they did and only the Cempoalans remained with us.
3.4 Las Casas’ account
When all the dignitaries of the city and the region came out to welcome the Spaniards with all due pomp and ceremony, the priests to the fore and the high priest at the head of the procession, and then proceeded to escort them into the city and lodge them in the houses of the lord and the leading citizens, the Spaniards decided that the moment had come to organize a massacre (or ‘punishment’ as they themselves express such things) in order to inspire fear and terror in all the people of the territory. This was, indeed, the pattern they followed in all the lands they invaded: to stage a bloody massacre of the most public possible kind in order to terrorize those meek and gentle peoples. What they did was the following. They requested the local lord to send for all the nobles and leading citizens of the city and of all the surrounding communities subject to it and, as soon as they arrived and entered the building to begin talks with the Spanish commander, they were seized without anyone outside getting wind of what was afoot. Part of the original request was that they should bring with them five or six thousand native bearers and these were mustered in the courtyards when and as they arrived. One could not watch these poor wretches getting ready to carry the Spaniards’ packs without taking pity on them, stark naked as they were with only their modesty hidden from view, each with a kind of little net on his shoulders in which he carried his own modest store of provisions. They all got down on their haunches and waited patiently like sheep. Once they were all safely inside the courtyard, together with a number of others who were also there at the time, armed guards took up positions covering the exits and Spanish soldiers unsheathed their swords and grasped their lances and proceeded to slaughter these poor innocents. Not a single soul escaped. After a day or two had gone by, several victims surfaced, soaked from head to foot in the blood of their fellows beneath whose bodies they had sheltered (so thick was the carpet of corpses in the courtyard) and, with tears in their eyes, pleaded for their lives; but the Spaniards showed them no mercy nor any compassion, and no sooner did they crawl out from under the pile of corpses than they were butchered. The Spanish commander gave orders that the leading citizens, who numbered over a hundred and were roped together, were to be tied to stakes set in the ground and burned alive. One of these dignitaries, however, who may well have been the first among them and the king of that whole region, managed to get free and took refuge, along with twenty or thirty or forty others, in the great temple of the city, which was fortified and was known in the local language as quu.57 There they put up a stout defence against the Spaniards which lasted for the best part of the day. But the Spaniards, against whom no resistance is really possible, especially when it is mounted by unarmed civilians, set fire to the temple, burning those inside alive, the victims shouting all the time: ‘Oh, wicked men! What harm had we done to you? Why do you kill us? Wait till you get to Mexico City, for there our great king, Montezuma, will avenge our deaths.’
3.5 Same but not same
One of the most interesting aspects is the speech Díaz attributes to Cortés. Cortés says, in essence, We know you are going to attack us, so your punishment is an inevitability. In other words, he speaks to them as rational, moral agents. Here you see fairly straightforwardly how the global project of exploitation, killing, etc. is predicated on a supposition about the universality, in humans, of a certain, if very basic, rational and moral sense. (We could imagine how differently this would have gone if, instead of human beings, Cortés had wanted to round up and slaughter pigs or horses.)
Obviously there are the rhetorical differences, but, importantly, again, there are no differences about the basics of what happened: locals rounded up and slaughtered. The differences all have to do with the meaning of the killing, and in particular the status of those killed.
- Cortés and Díaz sees them as conspirators, and the killing therefore one of self-defense
- Sahagún and Las Casas see them as entirely innocent, and the killing therefore a more or less random act of brutality