History of Central America, Volume 1, 1501-1530 / The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume 6

by Hubert Howe Bancroft

Inequalities of power and wealth, unless arrested by extrinsic causes, ever tend to wider extremes. In Spain, the increase of wealth in the hands of priests and princes was checked by long-continued war. The products of the country must be used to feed the soldiery, and the power of the nobility must be employed against the common enemy. There was neither the time nor the opportunity to grind the people to the uttermost. Though the war bore heavily upon the working classes, it proved to them the greatest blessing; while the masses elsewhere throughout Europe were kept in a state of feudalistic serfdom, the necessity of Spain being for men rather than for beasts, elevation followed. Further than this, race-contact, and the friction attending the interminglings of courts and camps, tended in some degree towards polishing and refining society. "Since nothing makes us forget the arbitrary distinctions of rank," says Hallam, "so much as participation in any common calamity, every man who had escaped the great shipwreck of liberty and religion in the mountains of Asturias was invested with a personal dignity, which gave him value in his own eyes and those of his country. It is probably this sentiment transmitted to posterity, and gradually fixing the national character, that had produced the elevation of manner remarked by travellers in the Castilian peasant."

CASTE AND SOCIAL STRATA.

And yet there were caste and social stratification enough. The stubborn manliness of the lower orders did not make them noble. Royalty alone was divine. The nobles loved money, yet for them to traffic was disgraceful. The ecclesiastic, whose calling placed him on a plane distinct from these, aside from his religious teachings, stood out as the earnest advocate of honest labor. Work was well enough for Moor, and Jew, and Indian; but he whose line of fighting ancestors had not beginning within the memory of man, must starve rather than stain his lineage by doing something useful.

The several social strata, moreover, were jealously kept distinct. The first distinction was that which separated them from foreigners. In the days of Cæsar and Cicero, Rome was master of the world; Rome was the world; were any not of Rome they were barbarians. So it was with Spaniards. To be of Castile was to be the most highly favored of mortals; to be a Spaniard, though not a Castilian, was something to be proud of; to be anything else was most unfortunate.

The next distinction was between the Spaniard of pure blood and the Christianized native of foreign origin. In the eyes of the Castilian baptism could not wholly cleanse a Moor or Jew. Moriscos the Church might make; heretics the Inquisition might reconstruct; but all Spain could not make from foreign material a Christian Spaniard of the pure ancient blood. About foreign fashions, foreign inventions, foreign progress, foreign criticism, they cared nothing. And probably nowhere in modern times was this irrational idea of caste carried to such an absurd extent as in the New World. Children of Spanish parentage, born in America, were regarded socially as inferior to children of the same parents who happened to be born in Spain. To be born a Spanish peasant was better than hidalgo, or cavalier, with American nativity; for at one time the former, on migrating to America, was entitled by virtue of that fact to the prefix 'Don.' Under the viceroys native Mexicans, though of pure Castilian ancestry, were too often excluded from the higher offices of Church and State; and this notwithstanding that both canonical and civil law, if we may believe Betancur y Figueroa, provided that natives should be preferred in all ecclesiastical appointments from the lightest benefice to the highest prelacy. "But notwithstanding such repeated recommendations," says Robertson, "preferment in almost every different line is conferred on native Spaniards." Mr Ward, English consul at Mexico in 1825-7, affirms that "the son, who had the misfortune to be born of a creole mother, was considered as an inferior, in the house of his own father, to the European book-keeper or clerk, for whom the daughter, if there were one, and a large share of the fortune were reserved. 'Eres criollo y basta;' You are a creole and that is enough, was a common phrase amongst the Spaniards when angry with their children." Truly it was a good thing in those days to be at once 'of Christ' and 'of Spain.' It was positively believed by some that blood flowed in accordance with the majesty of law, and that the quality of one was inferior to the quality of another. The blood of the Indian was held as scarcely more human than the blood of beasts, and was often shed as freely.

Then, too, there was a distinction between the profession of arms and all other professions. Following republican Rome again, the education of no man aspiring to a public career was complete until he had served as a soldier. No one can truthfully charge the Spaniards of the sixteenth century with lack of courage. Military skill was the highest type of manhood. Of danger they made a plaything, not only in their wars but in their sports. Life was dull unless brightened by blood.

In Aragon the barons were limited to a few great families who traced their descent from twelve peers, called ricos homes de natura. Although obliged to attend the king in his wars, in every other respect they were independent. They were themselves exempt from taxation and punishment, and held absolute authority over the lives and property of their vassals. The next lower order of nobility in Aragon was called infanzones, corresponding to the hidalgos of Castile. The caballeros, or knights, were the immediate followers of the ricos homes, and were possessed of important privileges.

In La Mancha the peasantry were of a quality different from those sent by Castile and Estremadura to the New World. Quintana writes of them, "He who travels through La Mancha will see the scaffold before he sees the town. They are lazy, dirty, quarrelsome, and never suffer from hunger, for when they wish to become the owners of anything they take it;" and remarks another, "They live on parched garbanzos, and pass the winter lying on their bellies like reptiles in the sun." See Murillo's matchless pictures.

JEWS AND MOORS.

Another class and race, broken fragments of which we have before encountered, secured more rest in Spain than elsewhere, yet from a different cause. Homeless Israel in the Arab found a friend. Not that the Mahometans loved the Jews, but because the Christians hated them, was their condition made so tolerable in Spain under Saracen rule. Then, and until their expulsion, they occupied an important position, being the chief money-handlers, merchants, and bankers. Overcome in their dislike for each other by a more bitter hatred against their common enemy, the Jews and Moors lived upon terms somewhat approaching equality. The Jews surpassed their Moorish masters in wealth, and were but little inferior to them in arts and letters. They were not only usurers, but husbandmen, artisans, and doctors. As Christian domination extended southward, this comparatively happy state of the Spanish Jews disappeared. Under pretext of justice, their moneys were wrested from them by the nobles; indeed, if too stubborn they were not unfrequently put to death; and with the capitulation of Granada and the loss of their Moorish allies, the condition of the Jews became pitiable in the extreme. Two incidents of the crowning of Pope John XXIII., in 1410, as related by Monstrelet, give us a tolerably fair idea of the feelings entertained toward the Jews. In his progress through Rome, these people presented him with a manuscript copy of the old Testament. He, "having examined it a little, threw it behind him, saying, 'Your religion is good, but this of ours is better.'" And again, "There were before and behind him two hundred men-at-arms, each having in his hand a leathern mallet, with which they struck the Jews in such wise as it was a pleasure to see."