Hugh Thomas (1) (1931–2017)

A very impressive bit of narrative history. Thomas and his research assistants obviously spent a long time going through vast piles of archive material to put this together, and the result is a highly-detailed picture of what went on, but it always reads like a connected story, not a mere compilation of data. I don't know enough about the subject to comment in detail on the conclusions Thomas comes to, but everything certainly looks measured and scholarly: if you wanted to disagree with him, show more you would be able to follow the chain of his reasoning back to the sources he uses easily enough.

I came across this by chance, and decided to read it largely because I was so impressed with Thomas's book on the Spanish civil war (which I read earlier this year), but also because it is a subject I knew absurdly little about. Just about the only thing I knew about Cortés — since I'd read the footnotes in my school poetry book — was the rather useless piece of information that Keats got it wrong and it was not he but some other stout Spaniard who stood upon a peak in Darien and looked at the Pacific (Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Wikipedia tells me). Now I see from the engraving Thomas reproduces of Cortés in old age that he wasn't even particularly stout! (Apparently I was also mistaken in thinking that the people running Mexico before the Spanish arrived were called Aztecs: Thomas tells us that they should properly be referred to as Mexica. We live and learn.)

More seriously, what really jumped out at me from this account of the conquistadors in Mexico was, firstly, what a small-scale, unofficial, private-enterprise operation it all was; and secondly, how it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the Mexican civilisation should fall before European power: had Cortés been less cunning and determined, or had Montezuma II been less of a defeatist, Mexico might perhaps have gone the way of Japan and kept the foreigners on its fringes for a few more centuries.

Obviously, the conquistadors were treasure-hunting bandits and vandals (like most imperialists, although they were a lot more open about their aims than many who came later). But you can't help having a sneaking respect for someone who in the space of a couple of years, and with no more than a few hundred soldiers and little or no outside support, manages to take over one of the great empires of the day, a polity substantially bigger and richer than Spain itself. Western technology played a role, but not a very big one: Cortés had only very limited supplies of firearms, horses, and crossbows, and the "terror effect" these produced soon wore off. His victory evidently came mostly through diplomacy: understanding and exploiting existing divisions in the Mexican empire, convincing the leaders of tributary states of the empire that it would be in their interest to support him against Tenochtitlan. When he managed to kidnap Montezuma and use him as a hostage, he came within a whisker of taking control of the empire without a serious fight. Without the unplanned landing of a rival Spanish force under Narváez, he might have got away with it: as it turned out, the Mexicans had a chance to regroup under a new, more aggressive emperor, and Cortés was faced with a bitter siege in which he had no choice but to destroy the city in order to take it.

More like an adventure story than most adventure stories! show less

This still gets referred to as the standard single-volume history of the Spanish civil war, and it thus seemed the obvious one to go for when I made my mind up to find out some more about the background to a period that has cropped up in a great many novels, poems and memoirs I've read over the years.

Obviously, when you've only read one history of the war, you can't say anything about how it stands up to the competition - and there clearly are a lot more books about the war around now than show more there were fifty years ago when Thomas first came out - but I suspect that it holds its own rather well. Thomas seems to have updated it progressively as more sources became available to him, so it's quite lengthy now, but it never feels excessively detailed. It does have a bit of an old-fashioned atmosphere, but in a generally good way: it sticks to talking about politics, economics, diplomacy and the conduct of the actual war, and doesn't let itself get distracted into projecting the author’s personality, expounding grand theories, or trying to explain to us what it's like to experience the horrors of war. Thomas in 1962 was writing for readers most of whom would have first-hand knowledge of modern warfare: he can simply let the facts speak for themselves, without needing to manipulate our emotions. They are certainly grizzly: if you had any illusions about the character of either side in the conflict, they will be dispelled quickly enough when you read about all the arbitrary executions, torture and imprisonment that went on behind the lines and after the battles.

Thomas doesn't seem to be in the business of defending either side in the conflict: he clearly finds the republicans more interesting than the nationalists and devotes a greater proportion of time to them, but it looks as though that's simply because there was so much more going on on the republican side. Franco seems to have had his allies so well under the thumb that there was never much scope for dissension in the nationalist camp, whilst the Republic expended far too much of its energies in internal squabbles.

It is rather easy to pick up the false idea from other accounts that the Spanish Civil War was fought by armies consisting principally of left-wing British and American poets and novelists on one side and German and Italian professional soldiers on the other, with a few Spaniards here and there on the sidelines. Thomas does his best to correct this, putting the foreign intervention into proportion, and reminding us that most of the volunteers in the International Brigades were working-class trade unionists, predominantly from France.

The only thing that really struck me as something missing from his account that a more modern history would have made more of is the cultural impact of the civil war. Thomas often mentions the writers and poets who served in the war or were its victims, but beyond quoting a couple of Auden’s poems, he doesn't really look at what they wrote or what effect it had, and he doesn't go into other cultural aspects - cinema, music, posters... But there are plenty of other books about such things. show less

This isn't so much the story of the Conquistadors themselves (although they play a large part) as of the political and social background to Spanish ventures into the New World between 1492 and 1522, i.e. from Columbus to Magellan. How did Spain get from giving an eccentric foreigner minimal sponsorship to go and look for China in the wrong direction to, barely a generation later, funding a much more serious foreigner to go and look for a way around the southern end of that "new" continent show more whose existence Columbus never accepted...? And perhaps more to the point, how did they manage to exercise any kind of control over what people were doing in the name of Spain on the other side of the Atlantic.

There are a lot more thrilling tales of document-drafting in back-rooms of Castilian monasteries than there are of shipwrecks or of men in armour marching thorough tropical rain-forests, but it's by no means dry and stodgy. It soon becomes clear that it was decisions taken in those thirty years that shaped the way South America and the Caribbean would develop, and led unintentionally or not to the wiping-out of the indigenous people of the Caribbean and the start of the transatlantic slave-trade. You can see Thomas finally losing patience with Bartolomé de las Casas, whose well-intentioned but flagrantly inaccurate reporting must be an irritation to all historians, at the moment when he suggests that the best way to protect the indigenous people would be to permit the import of black slaves from Africa. Somehow the alternative strategy, of restricting migration from Spain to people whose social status doesn't make it impossible for them to do manual work, never seems to have been considered seriously by anyone.

Very interesting, and certainly a good book to read before a visit to Seville... show less

On April 17, 1521, Martin Luther stood before the Diet of Worms. He refused to recant his teachings in terms that would knock Roman Christendom to pieces: “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.”

A month later, on the other side of the world, the Spanish conquistadors of Hernan Cortés opened their siege of the Mexican capital of Tenochtitlan. How different might our world be had Spain’s incursion been delayed until after European blood and treasure had been spent in the show more Wars of Religion?

Counterfactuals like this are impossible to answer, but they’re useful for understanding this pivot in global affairs. This is especially so when approaching the topic through Hugh Thomas’s unequaled history of the 16th-century fall of Mexico, a work as thorough as it is massive.

Thomas’s work is so enormous that, in my opinion, it’s unlikely to be surpassed for a long time, if ever. This is for now the definitive work on the collision that destroyed one empire and catapulted another to the level of a global superpower.

Such voluminous depth of detail (however well-written) can make it easy to miss how much turned on the character of a single man in the person of Hernan Cortés. This is one reason I indulge in counterfactuals as a useful tool for understanding the past.

The counterfactuals that most speak to me begin with Cortés’s ambition to subject the whole world to the scepter of Christ. This ambition was not unique to him. Centuries of Reconquista had forged Spanish confidence in themselves as God’s sword to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

Cortés entered Mexican lands with no greater mandate than to open trading partnerships with the newly-discovered “islands” of Yucatan and Mexico. However, he quickly divined wider opportunities in the political instability of a Mexican empire built from blood and held by fear.

Without instructions, without support beyond his own men, Cortés changed the world. A dizzying campaign blending diplomacy with brute force culminated in the fall of Mexico to a coalition of Spaniards and local tribes which were only too eager to turn Tenochtitlan’s violence back on its head.

Evidence exists in Cortés’s letters that he cherished even greater ambitions. No one yet understood the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, and Cortés thought the riches of heathen China must be just over the horizon rather than a six-month galleon ride distant.

Cortés certainly intended to bring the Mexicans into vassalage and convert them to the true faith. However, Thomas remarks on circumstantial evidence that Cortés may also have toyed with the idea of incorporating them into a joint expeditionary force that would descend on China for the glory of God.

The prospect of Jaguar warriors wielding obsidian blades alongside Spanish steel and gunpowder to bring the Ming Dynasty under the banner of the Cross sounds absurd, but it would fit both the temper of Cortés and the methods he used to reduce Tenochtitlan. If this ever was the dream, smallpox killed it, not to mention untold scores of indigenous peoples.

Further, Thomas speculates that had Mexicans been resistant to foreign diseases, the course of Spanish Mexico might have looked more like that of British India: a small upper class of elites (sometimes intermarrying with the locals) exercising control over teeming, productive multitudes.

By the time India won its independence, the British had banned away its harsher edges, such as sati. What might it have meant for a thriving Mexico led by an indigenized aristocracy to throw off the Spanish yoke after a century or two, perhaps partly reviving ancient beliefs but without human sacrifice?

We’ll never know, but I think these counterfactuals are helpful to understand just how much these few years changed our world. Tolstoy didn’t buy the Great Man Theory of history, but I think we might live in a much different world had it not been for the energy of a minor captain with major vision. show less