The Bishop's Utopia. Emily Berquist Soule
data with reports by historical contemporaries who visited the same locations in the late eighteenth century, as well as historical maps, newspaper accounts and official documentation produced by the massive bureaucratic machinery that hummed at the heart of the Spanish Empire in America. I read widely in secondary sources for additional texturizing details—as in the case of the San Francisco church in Bogotá, one of the sites of several of the funeral services held in honor of Martínez Compañón. These scenes became not only opportunities to make the Bishop more real but also chances to immerse myself—and, I hope, my readers—in the sights, smells, and sounds of the world in which he lived.
American Utopias
By the time Martínez Compañón arrived in Trujillo, Europeans had been dreaming about America and its potential for almost three hundred years. The very first reports from the Indies depicted lush tropical gardens with peaceful, accommodating natives. Calling the island of Hispaniola a “wonder,” Christopher Columbus insisted that “there are six or eight kinds of palm trees … and fruits and herbs … marvelous pine groves … honey, and many kinds of birds, and very diverse fruits … many mines and an immeasurable number of people.” He breathlessly reported to his benefactors in Spain that “the hills and mountains and the plains and countryside and the earth [are] so beautiful and fertile.” Not only was Hispaniola’s natural world richly fecund, he wrote, but its people were also ideal vassals. Columbus reported that they lived in spacious, orderly towns, with competent, forthright officials who oversaw their most precious resource: gold. Even better, the “Indians,” as Columbus called them, were inherently generous. “Whatever thing they have, if you ask them for it they would never say no,” he insisted. Although they were not yet Catholic, “they do not know idolatry; rather, they believe with certainty that all strength, all power, and all good exists in the sky.” Conveniently for Columbus and his crew, the Indians were convinced “that I have come down from that highest mansion with my ships and my sailors.” Perhaps this was why they were so “inclined to the love and service of Their Majesties [the Catholic Kings of Spain] and of the whole Castilian nation.”21
Since Columbus wrote these words at the end of the fifteenth century, generations of readers have tirelessly scanned them for hyperbole, inaccuracy, and outright fabrication. His disastrous career as governor of Hispaniola only cemented his reputation as a selfish charlatan: he was condemned as a ruthless tyrant and brought back to Spain a prisoner, where he lived his last days in shame and poverty. He, with his invented tales of an American utopia, died lonely and humiliated. But such debacle aside, there was something utterly compelling about his letters, both now and in the early modern period. Renaissance Europeans were so drawn to his lavish descriptions of the wealth and prosperity awaiting them in America that they printed his first letter eighteen times within four years of its appearance, making it available in Latin, Italian, Spanish, and German. Columbus’s writings soon inspired others to produce similar accounts—so many that by 1597, a Venetian bibliographer estimated that the first letter from the Americas had inspired twenty-nine other titles about the Indies. Although a generation previously, Europeans had wondered whether the world beyond them teemed with monstrous Cyclops, vicious Amazons, and dog-headed humans, Columbus’s reports from the Indies confirmed that in some ways, America was much more familiar than they had guessed.22
This fascination with a newfound world engendered a veritable a rush toward utopias in the literary culture of the Renaissance, one that included such popular books as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Tomasso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623), and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627). These works imagined idealized states where educated, peaceful people wanted for nothing. Some scholars have suggested that the utopia genre was so popular because it offered a momentary escape from the religious wars and economic dislocation that plagued early modern Europeans’ everyday lives. But escapism was not the only reason readers scanned their library shelves for tales of faraway lands of perfection. Utopias were also comfortably familiar because they appealed to some of the most fundamental beliefs of Christianity. Paradise in the New World could easily be equated to the abundant Garden of Eden, the perfect afterlife in the celestial heavens, and the longed-for millennial end of times that would save the souls of the converted during the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The New World utopia could also be conveniently slotted into popular tropes of classical mythology, such as the idyllic pastoral state of Arcadia or the mythical continent of Atlantis, which seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher even went so far as to map in his Mundus Subterraneus.23
In 1515, when Thomas More was writing about the original fictional utopia, his imagined society of Bensalem, from the dark streets of London, he certainly had America on his mind. The book’s narrator claims that its stories are based on the experiences of a young man called Raphael Hythloday, who “took service with Amerigo Vespucci” and “after much persuasion and expostulation … got Amerigo’s permission to be one of the twenty-four men who were left in a fort at the farthest point of the last voyages.” This fictitious narrator described Utopia as an island of cities “identical in language, customs, institutions, and laws” as well as in their physical appearance, since all had been erected “on the same plan.” The walls surrounding the towns contained public hospitals and primary schools, and priests were the citizens revered over all others.24
Scholars have long recognized that More was inspired by the encounter between America and Europe, an interaction that was, at that time, indubitably dominated by the Spanish.25 By 1515, the Spanish could already claim that Columbus had completed his four voyages under their flag; the pope had divided the world in two, to be shared between them and the Portuguese; and Diego de Velázquez had conquered Cuba. They had also seen five years of “success” at their first permanent settlement in the Western Hemisphere: Santa María in the territory that would later be known as Panama.
As the words of Utopia emerged on the paper before him, More may have thought of how America was not the only place where the Spanish were enjoying unprecedented predominance. Charles I’s ascension to the throne of Spain in 1516 and his designation as Holy Roman emperor three years later meant that his territory now encompassed Burgundy, the Low Countries, parts of Germany and Austria, the Iberian Peninsula, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, the Spanish Indies, and even outposts in North Africa. Never one for modesty, Charles immediately began a campaign to make over Spain’s imperial image in a manner befitting its burgeoning global dominance. He ordered that the front of the Spanish eight-real coin (see Plate 7) be emblazoned with an emblem that he commissioned to reflect Spain’s new role at the center of a rapidly expanding world. It featured two pillars towering above ocean waves, with the motto plus ultra (more beyond) on a banderole flag, and later, a Spanish crown floating above it. The king and his contemporaries would have recognized the columns as the Pillars of Hercules, which the mythical hero erected at the known boundaries of Europe and North Africa. Beyond these pillars, the legend told, lay the great mysteries of the unknown. By designing an emblem that claimed this untapped potential as part of Spain’s imperial destiny, Charles permanently and publicly marked what he imagined would be a glorious future of Spanish expansion in the New World and beyond.26
But for all his enthusiasm, Charles was well aware that remaking the myth of Hercules required a bit of revision. The symbol needed to convey a sense of emboldening, not fear of what lurked in the vast “out there” where man had yet to venture. So he enlisted Spanish historian Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa to do a key bit of public relations. In his popular History of the Incas, Sarmiento reworked the myth of Hercules and the pillars, claiming that though Hercules had originally inscribed the columns with Ultra Gades nil, or “there is nothing beyond Cádiz,” after the discovery of America, Charles sent workers to correct the inscription accordingly. According to Sarmiento, the king ordered Gades (Latin for Cádiz) and nil (“nothing”) removed, replacing them with a new inscription: ne plus ultra, which Sarmiento translated as “farther beyond there are many lands.” Placing this symbol on the Atlantic’s most commonly circulated coin was an obvious claiming of Spain’s leading role in the ever-expanding universe of man’s consciousness. It reflected the emperor and empire’s wildly optimistic hopes for the immeasurable potential of Spain’s “New World.” It was a tactile reflection of a utopian moment when the world seemed full of promise