The 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Americas — almost all of South America except Brazil and much of the southern tier of what is now the United States — is one of the extraordinary chapters in human history: extraordinary for the determination, courage and resourcefulness of the conquistadors; extraordinary as well for the violence they inflicted upon the native population, for the zeal with which they promoted Indian and African slavery, for the rapaciousness with which they exploited the region’s abundant natural resources. It is an exciting and engrossing story, but by no stretch of the imagination can it be called a pretty one.
A portion of the story has now been retold by Hugh Thomas, the distinguished British historian whose specialty is Spain and whose many books include “The Spanish Civil War” (1961), “The Conquest of Mexico” (1994) and, most recently, “Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan” (2003), the first in “a series of volumes which I am writing about the Spanish empire.” The present volume is the second in that series, predictably packed to the rafters with Thomas’s celebrated erudition and tireless research but curiously lacking in narrative momentum. It is history for the general readership, an honorable genre in which Thomas has labored to impressive effect for more than half a century (he turns 80 later this year), but “The Golden Empire” is more likely to leave that readership benumbed than spellbound.
Part of the reason doubtless is that Thomas has told much of this story before, most importantly in “The Conquest of Mexico,” with the result that some of this book’s long opening section, “A Tale of Two Cities: New Spain and Old,” reads like a rewrite. Another part of the reason is that here, as in “Rivers of Gold,” Thomas inflicts upon the reader a seemingly endless succession of names, relatively few of which are actuallyessential to his story. Yet another is that the most important phases of the conquest already have been covered far better elsewhere: the first phase in “The Conquest of Mexico,” the second in John Hemmings’s brilliant “The Conquest of the Incas” (1970, revised 1993), the indisputably definitive and ceaselessly readable account of Francisco Pizarro and the defeat of Peru.
Readers of these earlier books will note that in “Rivers of Gold” and “The Golden Empire” more attention is paid to Charles V of Spain, the remarkable “international man” whose ancestors included “one German, a Habsburg, alongside a great gallery of Castilians, Aragonese, and Portuguese,” not to mention “an English forebear, in John of Gaunt,” and a Flemish upbringing. He assumed the Spanish throne while still a teenager and soon thereafter took command of the Holy Roman Empire. He was “magnanimous, liberal, generous,” though he could “bridle at the slightest criticism” and had a messianic view of himself: “He was assured [by courtiers], and came himself to think, that God had chosen him to be the supreme universal monarch. Charles believed that he was the second sword of the Christian Commonwealth, with the Vicar of Christ, the pope, the first.”
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