Re-envisioning the Spanish Conquest

Contemporary Mixe Indians

My tour guide in Oaxaca gave me a piece of information that altered my understanding of the Spanish Conquest.  He told me that there was an indigenous group, the Mixes, that had not known about the Spanish Conquest until 150 years after the event.  This group, or at least a part of this group, had been hiding from the marauding Mexica (Aztecs) in the mountains and were so well sequestered that they had missed the big news.

Aztec sacrifice

We all have heard of the Aztecs, but most of our education about the Conquest has been limited and because of this, distorted. What we term the Aztecs (more properly called Mexicas), were a group of relative newcomers to the scene that had emerged as political victors by the time Cortes arrived.  In truth, they had only been top dogs for some one hundred years.   These Nahua speakers had started off centuries earlier as a nomadic group from the north,  as "Chichimecas"( the Mesoamerican equivalent of barbarians), and had migrated to central Mexico, adopting the customs of the more sophisticated peoples they encountered.  They became politically ascendant in 1427 through the "Triple Alliance" they created with two other groups and became severe overlords  exacting tribute both material and human ( sacrificial victims) from those they conquered.  Although many Mesoamerican groups had practiced human sacrifice, the Aztecs, by their own account, brought the practice to new heights.   The statistics cannot be verified, but one report has it that in 1487 for the reconsecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan some 84,000 prisoners were sacrificed over a period of four days.  That's a lot of blood.  

Tlaxcalans fighting alongside Spanish

As you can imagine, the Aztecs had made numerous enemies and some of them, most notably the Tlaxcalans but others as well, played an important role in the Spanish victory.  There is a book entitled "Indian Conquistadors"  which explores the indigenous 
participation in the Conquest.  Sources indicate that everyone was happy to be rid of the Aztecs, although the Spanish victory presented them with a whole new set of challenges.  It is these challenges and the many sorts of resolutions and compromises that evolved that have been the focus of this blog.

Location, location, location: Churches on top of Pyramids

Nuestra Senora de los Remedios, Cholula, Puebla

This church (first built in 1594-1666) appears to be sitting on top of the crest of a hill and this is both true and not true.  It actually is built on top of a grown-over, immense Pre-Hispanic pyramid,  which was excavated beginning in 1931. Today, visitors can walk through the extensive tunnel system of the pyramid, which was built over the course of 11 centuries (300 BC-900 CE).  

True, at the time of the conquest, this pyramid-temple complex had been abandoned, was overgrown with vegetation and looked like a hill.  Yet, according to my guide in Cholula, even at that time, there were stories going around about the presence of the pyramid within the hill.  Why would the Spanish chose this place, on top of a pagan structure, to locate the church of the very important Virgen de los Remedios (Virgin of the Remedies), an historically significant,  miracle-working image of the Virgin that had come from Spain?

 As we shall later see, there were very good reasons for putting a church on top of a pre-Hispanic holy site and that this was a basic principle of Colonial Mexican church location. Take a look at the following photo:

San Antonio de Padua, Izamal, Yucatan

                                 

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As you can see, this church complex was built well above street level, in fact, on the foundation of an old pyramid.  It was common practice to re-use many of the stones from the old structure. Re-using the stones was a both a practical matter as well as having additional significance as will be discussed later.  Below, you will see one of these re-used stones with a Mayan glyph in the steps leading up to the convent complex.  

Stone in Izamal staircase showing Mayan Glyph

The Cathedral in Mexico City (Catedral Metropolitana de la Asuncion de Maria)
was built on the grounds of the Templo Mayor, one of the main Aztec temples in 
Tenochtitlan their capital, now known as Mexico City.

Mexico City Cathedral seen from the Templo Mayor ruins

The geology of the Yucatan peninsula was very different than that of Central Mexico.
In the Yucatan the ground was limestone and there were many cenotes, pond-like bodies of water formed by the collapse of the limestone, as well as caves.  These were both considered holy sites, places of communication with the realm of the gods. The friars built shrines on the edges of these cenotes.

Cenote in Yucatan

In any case, the same principles were operating whether the new Christian building was put  either directly on or close to an indigenous holy site, as with the cenotes: 

• It demonstrated continuity between the power of the old religion and the new
• The power of the old religion, by the proximity, was absorbed into the new
• pre-Hispanic buildings were often only partly torn-down and their materials re-used for the church
• The sanctity of the old site was preserved

As we have seen in this post and the previous one, "From Pyramid to Church",  there was a great deal of intuitive spiritual psychology that went into  the church architecture of Colonial Mexico as well as that of the rest of the Colonial Latin American world.  All of the churches are fascinating just on the level of the way they look, but understanding more of what went into them makes the experience of seeing and being in them even more exciting. 

From Pyramid to Church

The landscape of Mexico had always been a sacred one, dotted with the pyramids and temples of its inhabitants.  The ruins we have left to see are magnificent tributes to cultures that once thrived and that live on in the unique Christianity that evolved from the encounter between the indigenous beliefs and the Spanish Catholic church.  I would like to point out that the ruins were originally all vibrantly painted (as were the ruins of Greece and Rome). They were not the white/gray color that we now see. There are some books available that through transparencies show their very different original appearance.

Uxmal, Yucatan 

After the Conquest, the landscape was refurbished with conventos (churches plus living quarters for the friars) and churches springing up in large numbers in Central Mexico as well as in the Yucatan.  These convent/churches tended to be mammoth structures and were home to the friars who were  evangelizing the indigenous, as well as being worship spaces.  The very first one of these I visited was St. Nicolas de Tolentino in Actopan.

St. Nicolas de Tolentino, Actopan, MX

The first time I saw this convent,  my jaw dropped.  It loomed massive, stony and imposing in front of me,  It’s vertical stone walls crowned with jagged parapets, standing next to it I felt dwarfed.  These "fortress churches" were huge, overwhelming structures and as  we shall learn shortly, this effect was not lost on their audience.

Seen below is San Bernardino de Siena, in Coyoacan near Mexico City, one of my favorite conventos which has an elegant and beautifully restored interior.

San Bernardino de Siena, Xochimilco, MX

   

In the Yucatan, the early convents were similarly large, but tended to be different in style largely because of the needs of the different physical environment and kinds of building materials that were available.   Here are two of my favorites.  Directly below is San Antonio de Padua in Izamal, Yucatan.  This convento has the largest enclosed atrium (patio or courtyard) in the Americas and for this reason has been dubbed "the Vatican of the Yucatan".

San Miguel Arcangel, Mani Yucatan

It was here in Mani, in 1562, that the infamous Bishop Diego de Landa ordered the burning of all the Mayan codices (books).  Only three fully-authenticated Mayan codices survive and all are now located in Europe.  Notice the horseshoe-shaped opening to the left of the entrance. This is the "Indian Chapel", an out-door chapel where religious services were held
at first for the indigenous, newly acquainted with the church, and not yet used to worshipping in an indoor space.

The question remains why these buildings resembled huge fortresses.  It was not for protection of the friars who lived and worked there; this was not an area with any ongoing physical threat.  By the time that they were constructed, at least in Central Mexico, the conquest had been finalized.  True, some of their mammoth scale was functional- there were large numbers of indigenous to be evangelized and space was needed.  But there was an even more important reason.  These new buildings, symbolic of the new religion, had to compete with the structures of the old religion.  They had to be every bit as impressive and monumental as the temples and pyramids, the Templo Mayors, the Chichenitzas that spoke religious power to the indigenous.  These were people from  complex and ancient religious traditions. If the Christian god, the god who had defeated the old gods was indeed the most powerful, he needed an impressive house. The architectural marvels that the Spanish built, as we shall see with much indigenous assistance, were exactly this. 

Spanish Conquest: A Battle of Images

While it is true that the conquest of the Americas was achieved through the Spaniard's superior fire-power, there were other things to consider.  The diseases that they brought to the New World, like smallpox, to which the indigenous had no immunity, resulted in huge epidemics that reduced their population.  Plus,  there was another piece of "heavy artillery" that, as you will see,  in the long run was probably the most potent.  I am referring to the religious images of the Spanish.

The Spanish were threatened by the images of the indigenous, such as these below photographed at the Museo de Antropologia in Mexico City.   Throughout the Conquest, it was routine for the Spanish to destroy such "idols" of those they subjugated. 

Why were images so important? Weren't they just inanimate objects?  The answer, as well shall see, is no.

The Spanish were very attached to their own images, to the point of carrying them into battle in the form of battle standards.  It was routine for the Spanish to carry a banner with the Virgin Mary in the form of Guadalupe of Extremadura who differs from the later and more widely known Guadalupe.  (This diversity of representations of Mary can get confusing and I will delve into them in a future post.) The Spanish also replaced indigenous images with their own, as was the case when Cortes put a statue of the Virgin in one of Montezuma's temples, thereby claiming it for his own.

                                     The "heavy artillery": Guadalupe of Extremadura

So what are images and why are they so important?  To make a very long story short images are not just for looking. They acquire a life and power of their own and the god or goddess in the image is charged with "presence."  Humans often respond to religious images interactively, as if they were living beings. This was the case with the subjugated indigenous as well as the Spanish and so, in addition to the outright war-fare, a sort of proxy war was fought with religious images.  

The film "La Otra Conquista" ("The Other Conquest") is a magnificent demonstration of the
deep attachment that people have to their images and I highly recommend watching this movie to understand the role that images played in the Spanish Conquest.  I also recommend David Freedberg's book, "The Power of Images", for its general theory of images. 

  

Mindset of the Spanish Conquest

Medieval " Wikipedia": The Bible

Imagine a world without Google, Wikipedia, encyclopedias, libraries, in fact without books and those only for the tiny educated elite.  There you have it- a world with just one legitimate source of knowledge, the Bible.  Everything that was known or could be known was contained in this one book and anything new that came up had to be understood in terms of it. This is the medieval mind-set, the way that people thought at the time of Columbus' journeys and the Spanish Conquest of the New World that followed. There were some like Copernicus and Galileo who were independent thinkers, but they were branded as heretics by the Church.

This was not a time that accorded equal status to all religions. Christianity to them was the crown of God's plan for mankind and the apocalyptic views prevalent at the time stated that all mankind must be converted to Christianity before the second coming of Christ and the end-times when all would be set right in the reign of Jesus the messiah.  The Spanish had been successful in this venture on their own peninsula in the reconquista and with the final expulsion of the Jews in 1492.  Completely ridding the land of Muslims was a work in process.  It is no wonder that with the discovery of new unconverted peoples in the Americas that they passionately pursued their policy of spiritual conquest. As they understood it, it was their holy mission. 

Unknown to most of us are the apocalyptic writings of Christopher Columbus, The Book of Prophecies, written after his third voyage. In it he justified his voyages in terms of the role they played in fulfilling pre-conditions for the second coming of Christ, including the spreading of Christianity throughout the world and the finding of the Garden of Eden in the Americas. This is not the Columbus most of us encountered in grade school who "discovered America".  This is the Columbus driven by the religious ideology of his time. Remember, his ships all had crosses on the sails and this was not for "X marks the spot".  They were the symbols of the faith that drove his world. 

Understanding the mindset of the times, it is easier to be less judgmental about the Conquistadors and their religious arm, the Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian and other friars (men in the religious orders) who accompanied them.  They were doing what they believed was the correct thing- saving the world. This is the imperative they were fulfilling even if we, centuries later, disagree with their methods.  

The Spanish Conquest: the good, the bad and the beautiful

Cortes and Company

Recently I taught an introductory course on Colonial Latin American Art and Architecture to a group of adults.  At the onset, one of the class members stated that she could not forgive the  Spanish.  She was angry at them for their  treatment of the indigenous peoples during the Conquest of the Americas. I had to come up with something quickly or that was the end of the class I had planned.  We could have spent the entire session expanding upon the cruelty heaped by the Spanish upon those they subjugated- not only the American Indigenous but the Jews and Muslims in their own country.  The truth was that the Spanish had a passionate sense of their own mission in Christianizing the world they knew, but those were different times with a different mind-set than ours. We will be exploring this in my next post.

My rapid response to her was this.  While it was true that Spanish colonialization was often a cruel process, it was important to see beyond that to the resulting alchemy of the blending of Spanish aims with the resistance of the Indians.  A magnificent material culture- art, architecture and customs- was born from the pain of the indigenous- the subjugated Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and others- all the people who suffered under the yoke of the Spanish, but who in turn also changed the culture of their captors resulting in an entirely new order.

The history of art tells us that there is a universal link between art and pain.  The colonial Mexican world is almost a laboratory for seeing this link.  From the brokenness of the indigenous peoples, from the attempted destruction of their pyramids, temples, their religion and culture something totally unique was born- something completely unlike anything before.  That was Colonial Latin American world with it's magnificent churches, sculpture, paintings, and celebrations. These are the equal of anything you can see in Europe and even more interesting because you can so clearly see their roots, the imprint of the suffering that went into them and the triumph that emerged.