His own wife, Doña Catalina Xuarez, was among those who came over from the Islands to New Spain. According to Bernal Diaz, her coming gave him no particular satisfaction.[173] It is possible; since his marriage with her seems to have been entered into with reluctance, and her lowly condition and connections stood somewhat in the way of his future advancement. Yet they lived happily together for several years, according to the testimony of Las Casas;[174] and, whatever he may have felt, he had the generosity, or the prudence, not to betray his feelings to the world. On landing, Doña Catalina was escorted by Sandoval to the capital, where she was kindly received by her husband, and all the respect paid to her to which she was entitled by her elevated rank. But the climate of the table-land was not suited to her constitution, and she died in three months after her arrival.[175] An event so auspicious to his worldly prospects did not fail, as we shall see hereafter, to provoke the tongue of scandal to the most malicious, but, it is scarcely necessary to say, unfounded, inferences.
In the distribution of the soil among the Conquerors, Cortés adopted the vicious system of repartimientos, universally practised among his countrymen. In a letter to the emperor, he states that the superior capacity of the Indians in New Spain had made him regard it as a grievous thing to condemn them to servitude, as had been done in the Islands. But, on further trial, he had found the Spaniards so much harassed and impoverished that they could not hope to maintain themselves in the land without enforcing the services of the natives, and for this reason he had at length waived his own scruples in compliance with their repeated remonstrances.[176] This was the wretched pretext used on the like occasions by his countrymen to cover up this flagrant act of injustice. The crown, however, in its instructions to the general, disavowed the act and annulled the repartimientos.[177] It was all in vain. The necessities, or rather the cupidity, of the colonists, easily evaded the royal ordinances.{*} The colonial legislation of Spain shows, in the repetition of enactments against slavery, the perpetual struggle that subsisted between the crown and the colonists, and the impotence of the former to enforce measures repugnant to the interests, at all events to the avarice, of the latter. New Spain furnishes no exception to the general fact.
{*} [This remark would imply that the instructions were published and some attempts at least made to enforce them. That such was not the case we learn from a remarkable private letter of Cortés to the emperor, sent with the “Relacion Quarta,” and bearing the same date,—October 15, 1524. Referring first to an order that the Spanish settlers should be allowed to have free intercourse with the Indian population as a means of promoting conversion, he declines to comply with it on the ground that the effects would be most pernicious. The natives, he says, would be subjected to violence, robbery, and vexations of all kinds. Even with the present rigorous rule forbidding any Spaniard to leave his settlement and go among the Indians without a special license, the evils resulting from this intercourse were so great that if he and his officers should attend solely to their suppression they would be unable to effect it, the territory being so vast. If all the Spaniards now in the country or on their way to it were friars engaged in the work of conversion, entire freedom of intercourse would no doubt be profitable. But, the reverse being the case, such also would be the effect. Most of the Spaniards who came were men of base condition and manners, addicted to every sort of vice and sin; and if free intercourse were allowed, the natives would be converted to evil rather than to good, and, seeing the difference between what was preached and what was practised, would make a jest of what was taught them by the priests, thinking it was meant merely to bring them into servitude. The injuries done them would lead to rebellion; they would profit by their acquired knowledge to arm themselves better, and being so many and the Spaniards so few, the latter would be cut off singly, as had already happened in many cases, and the greatest work of conversion since the time of the apostles would come to a stop.
Turning then to the emperor’s prohibition of the repartimientos, as a thing which his conscience would not suffer, the theologians having declared that since God had made the Indians free their liberty ought not to be taken away, Cortés states that he has not only not complied with this order, but he has kept it secret except from the officials, whom he has forbidden to make it public. His reasons for thus acting are as follows: 1st. The Spaniards are unable to live except by the labor of the Indians, and if deprived of this they would be obliged to leave the country. 2d. His system of repartimientos is such that by it the Indians are in fact taken out of captivity, their condition under their former masters having been one of intolerable servitude, in which they were not only deprived of all but the barest means of subsistence, but they and their children were sacrificed to the idols in numbers horrible to hear of, it being a certified fact that in the great temple of Mexico alone, at a single festival, one of many that were held annually, eight thousand persons had been sacrificed; all this, with innumerable other wrongs, had now ceased; and the surest punishment which could be inflicted on the Indians was the threat to send them back to their former masters. 3d. Enumerating the various provisions he has made for obviating the evils of the system as practised in the Islands, where, during a residence of twenty years, he had ample knowledge of its workings, he asserts that, in the mode in which it has been established and regulated by him, it will lead not to the diminution but to the preservation and increase of the natives, besides securing a provision for the settlers and large revenues to the crown, and he contends that the repartimientos, instead of being abrogated, should be made hereditary, so that the possessors might have a stronger interest in the proper cultivation of the soil, instead of seeking to extract from it the most that was possible in a given time.
The letter, which concludes by noticing and rejecting some minor points in the emperor’s instructions, has been recently discovered, and is perhaps the ablest document that has come down to us with the signature of Cortés. It has been published by Señor Icazbalceta, in his Col. de Doc. para la Hist. de México, tom. i.—K.]
The Tlascalans, in gratitude for their signal services, were exempted, at the recommendation of Cortés, from the doom of slavery. It should be added that the general, in granting the repartimientos, made many humane regulations for limiting the power of the master, and for securing as many privileges to the natives as were compatible with any degree of compulsory service.[178] These limitations, it is true, were too often disregarded; and in the mining districts, in particular, the situation of the poor Indian was often deplorable. Yet the Indian population, clustering together in their own villages and living under their own magistrates, have continued to prove by their numbers, fallen as these have below their primitive amount, how far superior was their condition to that in most other parts of the vast colonial empire of Spain.[179] This condition has been gradually ameliorated, under the influence of higher moral views and larger ideas of government, until the servile descendants of the ancient lords of the soil have been permitted, in republican Mexico, to rise—nominally, at least—to a level with the children of their conquerors.
Whatever disregard he may have shown to the political rights of the natives, Cortés manifested a commendable solicitude for their spiritual welfare. He requested the emperor to send out holy men to the country; not bishops and pampered prelates, who too often squandered the substance of the Church in riotous living, but godly persons, members of religious fraternities, whose lives might be a fitting commentary on their teaching. Thus only, he adds,—and the remark is worthy of note,—can they exercise any influence over the natives, who have been accustomed to see the least departure from morals in their own priesthood punished with the utmost rigor of the law.[180] In obedience to these suggestions, twelve Franciscan friars embarked for New Spain, which they reached early in 1524. They were men of unblemished purity of life, nourished with the learning of the cloister, and, like many others whom the Romish Church has sent forth on such apostolic missions, counted all personal sacrifices as little in the sacred cause to which they were devoted.[181]
The presence of the reverend fathers in the country was greeted with general rejoicing. The inhabitants of the towns through which they passed came out in a body to welcome them; processions were formed of the natives bearing wax tapers in their hands, and the bells of the churches rang out a joyous peal in honor of their arrival. Houses of refreshment were provided for them along their route to the capital; and when they entered it they were met by a brilliant cavalcade of the principal cavaliers and citizens, with Cortés at their head. The general, dismounting, and bending one knee to the ground, kissed the robes of Father Martin of Valencia, the principal of the fraternity. The natives, filled with amazement at the viceroy’s humiliation before men whose naked feet and tattered garments gave them the aspect of mendicants, henceforth regarded them as beings of a superior nature. The Indian chronicler of Tlascala does not conceal his admiration of this edifying condescension of Cortés, which he pronounces “one of the most heroical acts of his life!”[182]
The missionaries lost no time in the good work of conversion. They began their preaching through interpreters, until they had acquired a competent knowledge of the language themselves. They opened schools and founded colleges, in which the native youth were instructed in profane as well as Christian learning.{*} The ardor of the Indian neophyte emulated that of his teacher. In a few years every vestige of the primitive teocallis was effaced from the land. The uncouth idols of the country, and, unhappily, the hieroglyphical manuscripts, shared the same fate. Yet the missionary and the convert did much to repair these losses by their copious accounts of the Aztec institutions, collected from the most authentic sources.[183]
{*} [A singular tribute to the thoroughness of the instruction thus given, and the facility with which it was imbibed, is rendered in a long complaint on the subject addressed to the emperor by Gerónimo Lopez, under date of October 20, 1541. The writer, a person evidently commissioned to send home reports on the condition of the country, denounces the system of education instituted by the Franciscan monks as diabolically pernicious,—“muy dañoso como el diablo.” He considers that the Indians should at the most be taught to repeat the Pater Noster and Ave Maria, the Creed and the Commandments, without any expositions, or any distinction of the persons of the Trinity and their attributes, above all without learning to read and write. Instead of this, they are taught not only these pernicious branches of knowledge, but punctuation, music,—nay, even grammar! Their natural ability is so great, and the devil is so largely interested in the matter, that they have acquired a skill in forming different kinds of letters which is marvellous, and a great number of them are thus enabled to carry on a correspondence and learn what is going on in the country from one sea to the other. There are boys among them who speak as elegant Latin as Tullius. They have translated and read the whole of the Scriptures,—the same thing that has ruined so many in Spain and given birth to a thousand heresies. A secular ecclesiastic told him that, having visited one of the colleges, he found there two hundred students, who stunned him with questions about religion, till the place seemed to him hell, and its inmates disciples of Satan.—Icazbalceta, Col. de Doc. para la Hist, de México, tom, ii.—K.]