Nuño de Guzmán
Nuño de Guzmán | |
---|---|
President of the Real Audiencia of Mexico | |
In office 9 December 1528 – 9 January 1531[chronology citation needed] | |
Preceded by | Alonso de Estrada & Luis de la Torre as Governor of New Spain |
Succeeded by | Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal of the second Audiencia |
Governor of Pánuco | |
In office May 1527 – 1533 | |
Governor of Nueva Galicia | |
In office 1529–1534 | |
Personal details | |
Born | 1490 Guadalajara, Castile |
Died | 1558 (aged 67–68) Valladolid[ambiguous] |
Parent(s) | Hernán Beltrán de Guzmán and Doña Magdalena de Guzmán |
Occupation | Conquistador, colonial administrator |
Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán (c. 1490 – 1558) was a Spanish
Originally a bodyguard of Charles I of Spain, he was sent to Mexico to counterbalance the influence of the leader of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, Hernán Cortés, since the King worried he was becoming too powerful. As Governor of Pánuco, Guzmán cracked down hard on the supporters of Cortés, stripping him and his supporters of property and rights. He conducted numerous expeditions of conquest into the northwestern areas of Mexico, enslaving thousands of Indians and shipping them to the Caribbean colonies. In the resulting power struggles where he also made himself an enemy of important churchmen, Guzmán came out the loser.
In 1537, he was arrested for treason, abuse of power and mistreatment of the indigenous inhabitants of his territories, and he was sent to Spain in shackles. He was eventually released, dying in poverty in 1558.
His subsequent reputation, in scholarship and popular discourse, has been that of a cruel, violent and irrational tyrant. His legacy has partly been colored by the fact that history was written largely by his political opponents such as Hernán Cortés, Juan de Zumárraga and Vasco de Quiroga.
Early life
Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán was born ca. 1485 in
Governorship of Pánuco
In 1525 the Spanish crown appointed him governor of the autonomous territory of Pánuco on the Gulf Coast in what is now northeast Mexico, arriving to take up the appointment in May 1527.
Guzmán's rule as a governor of Pánuco was stern against Spanish rivals and brutal against the Indians. He cracked down harshly on Cortés's supporters in Pánuco, accusing some of them of disloyalty to the Crown by backing Cortés's claim to the title of viceroy. Some were stripped of their property; others were tried and executed. He also incorporated territory from adjacent provinces into the province of Pánuco. These actions brought New Spain on the verge of a civil war between Guzmán and supporters of Cortés' led by Governor of New Spain Alonso de Estrada, when Estrada sent an expedition to reclaim the lands expropriated by Guzmán. During the court case against Cortés in 1529, Guzmán accused Cortés himself of being a traitor and a rebel. Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, who had traveled with Guzmán to Hispaniola, in turn accused Guzmán of being allied with the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez and having been a sworn enemy of Cortés even before setting foot in New Spain.[2]: 149–54
As governor Guzmán instituted a system of Indian slave trade in Pánuco. During a raid along Río de Las Palmas in 1528 he allowed every horseman to take 20 Indian slaves and each footman 15. In 1529 he gave out individual slaving permissions amounting to more than 1000 slaves. Initially Guzmán did not allow Spaniards to sell slaves for export except in exchange for livestock, but later he gave more than 1500 slave licenses (each permitting the taking of between 15 and 50 slaves) in an eight-month period.
In spite of his lack of success as governor, in 1529 he was appointed President of the First Audiencia, which the Council of the Indies and the Crown instated to check the ventures of industrious private individuals, such as Cortés, in New Spain.
As President of the Real Audiencia
This section needs additional citations for verification. (February 2020) |
In the years following the conquest of Central Mexico by
At the time Guzmán was serving as governor of Pánuco, so Charles ordered the judges to assemble in Veracruz and from there make a joint entrance into the capital. The four from Spain, however, did not wait for the arrival of Guzmán, and proceeded directly to the capital. They arrived on December 8, 1528, taking over the government on the following day. They were given a splendid reception by the city government. Guzmán arrived a few days after the others.
The first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, had arrived in the capital only a few days before the oidores.
The instructions given to the Audiencia included a recommendation for good treatment of the indigenous people and a directive that the investigation into the conduct of Cortés and his associates Pedro de Alvarado, Alonso de Estrada, Rodrigo de Albornoz, Gonzalo de Salazar and Pedro Almíndez Chirino be concluded within 90 days. Most of these associates had participated in the government in the proceeding few years while Cortés was in Honduras, with a lot of in-fighting among themselves and injustices to the population, both Spanish and Indigenous.
Cortés himself was now in Spain, where he was defending his conduct and appealing his loss of authority to Charles. Cortés had some success with his appeal, being named Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca and receiving some other honors.
Nevertheless, Guzmán was now in charge in New Spain. Among his official acts was placing plaques bearing the royal coat of arms on the principal buildings of the capital, to stress that sovereignty resided in the king, not in Cortés. He had Pedro de Alvarado arrested for questioning the loyalty of Gonzalo de Salazar. There was already some animosity between Cortés and Guzmán, because the former had been reluctant to recognize the latter as governor of Pánuco. The later events made the two enemies.
The Audiencia also banned direct communication with the court in Spain. This was so effective that Bishop Zumárraga felt the necessity of hiding a letter sealed in wax in a cask, to be smuggled to the Spanish authorities by a confederate sailor.
In 1530, upon Hernán Cortés' return to New Spain, Guzmán was removed from the office of President of the Audiencia and instead appointed governor of
As conqueror of western Mexico
In 1529, Guzmán put Juan Ortiz de Matienzo in charge of the Audiencia. Then, gathering a military force of 300 to 400 discontented conquistadors and between 5,000 and 8,000 indigenous Nahua allies, Guzmán set out on December 21, 1529, to the west of Mexico City to conquer lands and peoples who until then had resisted the conquest.[3]: 56 Among the officers on this expedition was Pedro Almíndez Chirino.
The campaign started with the torture and execution of the
This expedition has been described as a "genocidal enterprise".[6] Typically, the conquistadors attacked an Indian village, stole the maize and other food, razed and burned the dwellings, and tortured the native leaders to gather information on what riches could be stolen there, or from nearby populations. For the most part, these riches did not exist.[6]
As an example, the Spanish were received peaceably in
Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the actions of the Audiencia attracted the attention of Juan de Zumárraga, bishop of Mexico, who put it under an ecclesiastical interdiction on March 7, 1530. The immediate cause of the interdiction was a case of violation of sanctuary. The Audiencia had violently taken from the convent of San Francisco a servant of Cortés accused of grave crimes, and two religious, Cristóbal de Angulo and García de Llerena.
Undeterred, Guzmán continued the violent suppression on the peoples of the present-day states of
Foundation of Guadalajara in New Spain
In 1531 (probably January), one of Guzmán's captains,
Kingdom of New Galicia
Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán gave the name "Conquista del Espíritu Santo de la Mayor España" to the territories he explored and conquered. However, the queen of Spain, Joanna of Castile, mother of Charles V, did not approve of the name. By a royal decree dated January 25, 1531, she supplied the name Reino de Nueva Galicia (Kingdom of New Galicia).
This territory extended from the
One nineteenth-century chronicler of the Conquest referred to Beltrán de Guzmán as "the detestable governor of Pánuco and perhaps the most depraved man ever to set foot in New Spain."[10]
Final years in Spain
Reports of Guzmán's treatment of the Indigenous had reached Mexico City and Spain, and, at Bishop Zumárraga's request the Crown sent Diego Pérez de la Torre to investigate. Guzmán was arrested in 1536. He was held a prisoner for more than a year and then sent to Spain in fetters. He was released from the Castle of Torrejón prison in 1538. In 1539 he returned to his position as royal contino bodyguard - court records show him on the payroll every year from 1539 to 1561 (in 1561 as "deceased"). In 1552 he wrote up a memorial containing his own version of the events leading to his fall. In his account he justified his execution of the Purépecha Cazonci as being necessary in order to bring a Christian rule of law to the area, and he assured that: "in truth no execution more just has been carried out in all of New Spain, and if I were deserving of any punishment it would be for having doubted some days about whether to carry it out."[11]
In 1558 he wrote his last will which was uncovered in 1973, it shows him as a poverty stricken noble struggling to save his heirs from his debts, having had even to pawn his heirlooms to pay for medicine. In it, he requested some of the property that was confiscated from him to be returned to his heirs, and wages still due to him for his years as Governor and President be paid and turned over to his heirs. With affection he bequeathed most of his belongings to a woman Sabina de Guzmán, who had taken care of him in his illness. He also bequeathed belongings to the
Reputation
In posteriority and partly in his own time Nuño de Guzmán achieved a reputation as the worst villain of the conquistadors, in the words of his biographer Donald Chipman he has been depicted as the "personification of the
References
- ^ a b c d e Himmerich y Valencia, Robert (1991). The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555. University of Texas Press.
- ^ a b c d e f g Chipman, Donald E. (1967). Nuno de Guzman and the Province of Panuco in New Spain, 1518–1533. Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark Co.
- ^ Pennsylvania State University Press.
- ^ The discrepancy between the dates of arrival in various sources is resolved by Chipman 1967:143-144
- ^ Rojinsky, David (2010). Companion to empire: a genealogy of the written word in Spain and New Spain, c.550-1550. Foro hispánico. Vol. 37. Rodopi.
- ^ a b David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, New York: Oxford University Press US, 1993, p. 81.
- ISBN 978-0-271-03940-4.
- ISBN 978-0-292-77380-6.
- ISBN 978-1-59884-100-8.
- Archives of the Indiesto come up with his different account.
- ^ Rojinsky 2010:238 (translated from the Spanish: "cierto ninguna se ha hecho más justa en toda la Nueva España; y si yo alguna pena podia merecer es porque dudé algunos días de hacerla")
- S2CID 147449952.
Further reading
- Chipman, Donald E. (1967). Nuno de Guzman and the Province of Panuco in New Spain, 1518–1533. Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark Co.
- Rojinsky, David (2010). Companion to empire: a genealogy of the written word in Spain and New Spain, c.550-1550. Foro hispánico. Vol. 37. Rodopi.
- Krippner-Martinez, James (2001). Rereading the Conquest: Power, Politics, and the History of Early Colonial Michoacán, Mexico, 1521–1565. Pennsylvania State University Press.
- García Puron, Manuel (1984). México y sus gobernantes (in Spanish). Vol. 1. Mexico City: Joaquín Porrua.
- Orozco Linares, Fernando (1985). Gobernantes de México (in Spanish). Mexico City: Panorama Editorial. ISBN 968-38-0260-5.
- Zavala, Silvio (1952). "Nuño de Guzman y la esclavitud de los indios". Historia Mexicana (in Spanish). 1 (3): 411–428. JSTOR 25134226. Retrieved 2022-06-18.
- Marín-Tamayo, Fausto (1956). "Nuño de Guzmán: el hombre y sus antecedentes". Historia Mexicana (in Spanish). 6 (2): 217–231. JSTOR 25134487. Retrieved 2022-06-18.
External links
- Mexico Connect - Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán
- (in Spanish) Biografía de Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán
- (in Spanish) La primera Audiencia
- (in Spanish) Foundation of Guadalajara