Moses, Caesar, Hero, Anti-hero: The Posthumous Faces of Hernando Cortés (Restall 2016) (original) (raw)
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Nahuas Stage Imperial Conquest: The Destruction of Jerusalem in New Spain
Ethnohistory, 2024
The Roman destruction of Jerusalem—as portrayed in medieval Christian legend—was a common referent in Spanish colonial historiography. In this context, it served to convey a sense of the magnitude of conquest in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Multiple colonial texts also apply the anti-Semitic message that fundamentally characterizes this legend to the context of New Spain, justifying wars of imperial conquest as divine justice for perceived offenses against God. An anonymous Nahua translator-playwright also accommodated a version of this legend for performance to Nahua audiences. As scholars note, this play is an abridged translation into Nahuatl of an Iberian source text. This article shows how this version modifies key passages, conveys polemical commentaries in an unmistakably Nahua voice, and undermines the common application of this medieval narrative in New Spain. Rather than blame the rigors of conquest on the victims of conquest, it instead highlights error on the part of Christian empire.
This essay considers four woodcut images included in the Praeclara Ferdinadi Cortesii in order to position the Nuremberg codex as an announcement to Europe of the Spanish monarchy’s evangelical ideology regarding the New World. The images enabled the codex to herald the transformation of New Spain from idolatry to Christianity under the control and direction of the Spanish Habsburg king and with the blessing and sanction of the pope. The image of Pope Clement VII highlights the papacy’s role in the New World’s spiritual formation, providing the linchpin for understanding the volume in a new way. Coupled with the other texts and images, it helped communicate the impending establishment of that world as Christian. I link apocryphal images of Jerusalem and medieval mappae mundi to the organization of the Map of Tenochtitlan, and suggest that Renaissance concepts of Ambrosius Holbein’s image Utopia, provided a model.
The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 2019
Scholars have barely begun to explore the role of the Old Testament in the history of the Spanish New World. And yet this text was central for the Empire’s legal thought, playing a role in its legislation, adjudication, and understandings of group status. Institutions like the Council of the Indies, the Inquisition, and the monarchy itself invited countless parallels to ancient Hebrew justice. Scripture influenced how subjects understood and valued imperial space as well as theories about Paradise or King Solomon’s mines of Ophir. Scripture shaped debates about the nature of the New World past, the legitimacy of the conquest, and the questions of mining, taxation, and other major issues. In the world of privilege and status, conquerors and pessimists could depict the New World and its peoples as the antithesis of Israel and the Israelites, while activists, patriots, and women flipped the script with aplomb. In the readings of Indians, American-born Spaniards, nuns, and others, the correct interpretation of the Old Testament justified a new social order where these groups’ supposed demerits were in reality their virtues. Indeed, vassals and royal officials’ interpretations of the Old Testament are as diverse as the Spanish Empire itself. Scripture even outlasted the Empire. As republicans defeated royalists in the nineteenth century, divergent readings of the book, variously supporting the Israelite monarchy or the Hebrew republic, had their day on the battlefield itself.
Aztec and Roman-German Empire seemed to share a similar religious legitimacy and the same hope of a Messiah, although they had never had contact before 1519. The arrival of Cortés is said to have been awaited by Moctezuma II: Quetzalcoatl was expected to return and renew his reign. This article will compare Quetzalcoatl's legitimizing function with that of Jesus Christ. The comparison will reveal that the messianic image of Quetzalcoatl was created after the Conquest as an Aztec adaptation of the Christian ideology of power. Cortés had invented the legend of the returning leader. By identifying this Messiah with Charles V, who had the right to be also a Mexican Emperor, Cortés sought to justify his rebellion against his superior. The Aztec adaptation of Cortés’ invention can be interpreted as a further development of the myth of the returning Emperor. It shows the mutual influence of religion and politics. This is a preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Iberian and Latinamerican Research on 2016, Vol 22, No 2: 135-153, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13260219.2016.1229806
2020
This article offers a brief textual history, summary, analysis, and complete edition of Chapter 17 of Diego de Valdés’s De dignitate regum regnorumque Hispaniae (1602). This little-studied text merits our attention as a uniquely layered assertion of Spanish rights to the throne of Jerusalem in the early modern period. Valdés is unique among his contemporaries in not simply insisting on the legal validity of Spanish pretensions to Jerusalemite kingship but, more interestingly, in situating such claims within the broader historical sweep of dynastic transmissions of the title from the eleventh century to the present. Valdés’s granular view of the history of the title yields a diachronic critique of Spain’s perennial rival, France, that at the same time inscribes a more polyphonic set of Spanish connections to the throne of Jerusalem across the centuries.
Rhetorical Conquests: Cortés, Gómara, and Renaissance Imperialism
Hispania, 2007
Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp makes a fascinating statement at the very beginning of her book: "there are many ways to be Mexican in the twentieth century"(1). Some ten years ago she started her dissertation research compiling a database of Middle Eastern immigrants who came to Mexico and registered with the Department of Migration in the 1930s. That is how her travels began and luckily for us, readers, we too can travel back with the author through this detailed and well documented text. The title of the book, the author clarifies, derives from President Porfirio Díaz saying, "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States" (1). Her study intends "to broaden notions of mexicanidad and illustrate the diversity of Middle Eastern immigrants" (1). Even though the term Allah has come to signify those of Islamic faith in North American culture, Alfaro-Velcamp clarifies that it is not her intent. She is rather using the word to speak generally about God and how Arabic-speaking immigrants acculturated in Mexico. The subtitle of the book, Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico, refers to the journey that the Middle Eastern community experienced from their arrival in Mexican lands to becoming Mexican citizens. Along this journey, as it happens with other groups in different nations, many of these immigrants were able to retain aspects of their "foreignness" as well as become part of their new adopted country. The Introduction offers the reader an overview of the book with comments by chapter, as well as other information, revealing to us what brought the author to begin studying Middle Eastern immigration to Mexico: her own interest in finding the origins of her great-grandfather who arrived in Mexico from Lebanon in 1907. Alfaro-Velcamp comments on her sources of information during her time of research, her painstaking work through the archives in Mexico, her conversations and visits to different people in Lebanon and the United States. A meticulous historian, Alfaro-Velcamp presents (in the first chapter, titled "Amplifying Mexicanidad") why Middle Eastern immigrants came to Mexico, where they settled, how many came, where they came from, how Mexicans responded to them, why some areas were more attractive to the immigrants than others and how they positioned themselves. The author emphasizes that in each chapter she asks the questions how and why Middle Easterners are important to the Mexican Nation. The first chapter also explains the different migratory phases that took place and how various historical events affected these different groups as they moved to Mexico and how they settled and changed over time. In chapter 2, "Locating Middle Easterners in National and Transnational Histories,"
2018
The project discusses the fluidity of religion in post conquest Mexico. It examines Spanish documentation of the evangelistic methods used by the Franciscan friars in Mexico during the late 1520s with records of religious history written by the natives of Mexico, the Nahuas, about twenty years after the conquest. Fray Toribio Motolinia, was one of the first twelve friars to go to Mexico in 1524. Motolinia wrote about Nahua culture, reflecting his Christian, Spanish lens on his experience of their culture. The Nahua scholars matured to adulthood under the influence of Christianity and also recorded their history. They created, guided by the Franciscans, a collection of texts about Nahua culture and history, eventually known as the Florentine Codex. This study compares the varying attitudes towards Nahua religious history expressed in the Florentine Codex with the Motolinia’s perception of Nahua religion. The inconsistencies in language in the Codex point to an ambiguous attitude towa...
“That Kingdom is Mine”: On Spain’s Early Modern Polemics of Possession Over Jerusalem, circa 1605
Quidditas, 2020
Spanish claims to the throne of Jerusalem in the early modern period have often been viewed in light either of royal mythologies connecting the Habsburgh monarchy to the biblical kings David and Solomon or to prophetic discourses of imperial Messianism relating to universal monarchy. This paper broadens our understanding of Spanish claims to Jerusalem through close reading of two archival documents produced in 1605. In defending Spanish preeminence and sovereignty in Jerusalem, I argue that these documents participate in a "polemics of possession" that crucially informed cultural production related to the Holy City in the period more broadly. These documents further urge us to recognize Jerusalem's role within early modern Spanish culture and politics as a location bound up in pragmatic geopolitical, diplomatic, economic, and material concerns that demand our attention. This novel recontextualization of Spanish cultural production surrounding Jerusalem ultimately advances scholarly conversations by mapping the contours of Spain's Jerusalemite "polemics of possession," thereby inviting us to consider new relationships between otherwise disparate material and textual phenomena. The idea that the king of Spain is also king of Jerusalem was propagated widely in the 16 th and 17 th centuries in Spain. The claim appears in devout histories, travelogues, and descriptions of the Holy Land; 1 in epic poems; 2 in architectural treatises; 3 in works of royal counsel (arbitrios), political histories, and mirrors of princes; 4
Rethinking the Spanish-Aztec War of 1519–1521
The Oxford Handbook of Mexican History, 2024
This chapter presents a rethinking of the Spanish-Aztec War of 1519-1521. For the past ve centuries, narratives of the 1519 Spanish invasion of Mexico have tended to focus on the activities of the invading Spanish conquistadors and initial colonial settlers. The events triggered by the Spanish arrival on the Gulf Coast in April of that year, through to the fall of the besieged city of Tenochtitlan in August 1521, have traditionally been known as "the Conquest of Mexico." As such, these narratives re ect the Spanish point of view. Within the last half-century, however, and especially in the last quartercentury, scholars have begun to look at the period using documents written in Indigenous languages