Hugh Thomas (1) (1931–2017)

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

This is a remarkably good, detailed but highly readable account of the Spanish Civil War that still stands up decades after its first publication (but make sure that you get the 1977 Edition or later since Thomas was perfectly happy to revise his views with new research).

It is, as they say, 'magisterial' which implies breadth and depth - over 1,000 pages covering the run up to the war, wisely not trying to giving us the later history of Spain under Franco while helpfully telling us something show more of what happened to the combatants.

The notes are excellent and lie on the pages themselves as they should do, so informative, in fact, that the bulk of them were read with pleasure because they added important detail and anecdote to an otherwise fluid narrative. This is narrative history at its best.

There are decent maps although it might be useful to have a map of Spain by your side as you read the book. Wars need to be understood geographically even if this is not only a military but a political and social history with coverage of economic and cultural matters.

There has been much work done since this book, notably by Paul Preston. Some facts and interpretations will now be superceded but it nevertheless gives a grounding for later study. Personally I read it not so much for definitiveness but as good narrative history in its own right.

And what of the subject matter? A quarter of the book is devoted to the origins of the war but, once the rebellion of the generals (not just Franco) has taken place, it becomes a history of Spain over just three years from 1936 to 1939.

Thomas is, above all, fair-minded, humane and allows us to make our own moral judgements - some of which are easy to make amidst the vileness of civil war. There is a necessary abandonment of partisanship to let the facts speak for rhemselves. I hope the same can be done for Syria one day.

The overwhelming sense here is of despair at the horror of it all as civilisation crumbles in the hands of largely inept liberal politicians and callous generals but I am afraid it is not quite the simple tale of good and evil that either side might like us to think it is.

On the Republican side, bitter working class rage at conditions and hatred of clericalism resulted in an anarchism that had become a millennial tradition. It performed atrocities that were easily equal to the deliberate use of terror by the generals, especially by Franco.

Why was Franco so brutal to his own people? Part of the answer lies in the importation of methods used in imperial warfare in Morocco (Moroccan troops were central to the revolt against the Republic) in which the Spanish working class and Left intellectuals were to be deemed 'savages'.

This re-importation of imperial policing into the homeland is not unique to Spain. It is an extreme example of similar tendencies elsewhere. It is an expression of an elite fearful of its own people and seeing them as the enemy within. Any methods become tolerable to survive.

British policing of ethnic communities would later rely on methods and habits derived from its Empire. Colonial counter-terrorism methods were to be applied to Ireland but no other country saw such imperial methods introduced under full national civil war conditions.

In fact, the Falange (the fascist movement) comes across as surprisingly decent and moderate at its leadership level, possibly more so than a vengeful Catholic Church or the Carlists although the rapidly growing Falangist rank-and-file were more than happy to engage in brutalities.

The fascism of Antonio Primo de Rivera, untested in office, strikes this reader as more thoughtful and less brutal than that of Mussolini or the Spanish Generals but we will never know whether he would have been a restraining influence or the opposite.

The Falange was simply appropriated after APdR's murder in the Republican zone. merged with the Carlists and turned into a different sort of fascist movement. Was Franco a fascist? He certainly cannot simply be written off as a catholic authoritarian any more. He was a moral monster.

He was easily as brutal as Mussolini (who had his own blood lust to satiate in Spain) and, if not atheist and corporatist in the same way, he was methodologically no less fascistic than his interwar peers and certainly introduced a cultural totalitarianism under a manufactured one party state.

Were the Republicans any better? Terror was not a instrument of top-down policy except amongst the Communists whereas Nationalist terror was deliberate and encouraged, horribly under what purported to be a Christian polity (as usual, few clerics spoke out and some participated).

But terror took place regardless in the Republican zone. Anarchist atrocities were early in the game and they did not have the excuse of barbarism in response to barbarism. It was also an instrument of policy for the Communists especially against their Trotskyist rivals in the POUM.

Not that the POUM were saints - I think we should be in no doubt that, if POUM had been stronger, it would have behaved in an equally barbarous way. Clerics and middle class nationalists in one zone, workers and republicans in the other - both were slaughtered just for being who they were.

Thomas gives a good account of the conduct of the war itself and of the international interventions (Fascist and Nazi on one side and Soviet on the other) as well as the rather repulsive and weak non-interventionist manouevrings of the democratic countries.

If you are a military history nerd and want precise numbers and makes of aircraft in particular battles or the formations engaged and how the battle front moved, you will get that alongside the problems of arms supply and the details of arms trading.

Sometimes you sense that many of the Republican officers who opposed the Nationalist rebellion did not always have their heart in it. A few were traitors, most did their best but the Republic was not inspiring when many of its proponents were as interested in revolution.

The naval history is almost an allegory of the larger war - not involved in the original plot (the air force was largely Republican and progressive as is often the case in this era), the naval forces split and the Republican side played minimal role while the Nationalists controlled the seas.

If Franco's Moroccans had not been able to cross the Straits in force (and he required German help to get the first of them across by air) and if nationalist exports and imports, especially arms, could have been blockaded, it is probable that a better organised Republic could have won.

As it was, the opposite happened - ships (including British ships) intended for Republican ports were sunk and the French border was only intermittently open for arms trades. Without the Soviets, 'democracy' would have crumbled much more quickly.

Incidentally, the lack of action by the British naval and political authorities in response to attacks on British shipping gives us some sense of just how weak the British Empire had become by the late 1930s compared to its Edwardian heyday. This was an empire ripe for falling.

Thomas is good on the detail of Western non-interventionism even if these are the only sections where one feels one is watching paint dry as possibly intentionally naive liberal bureaucrats are cynically played by diplomats like Neurath, Ciano and Maisky.

In fact, it is hard to see what Western democrats could have done without triggering a general European War (which the Republicans wanted to ensure more aid). They were not prepared for this eventuality. Allying with the Soviet Union for Republicanism was a bridge too far in the late 1930s.

While Italy was happy to go grandstanding around the Meditterranean for effect (before Spain it was Ethiopia and after Spain it was Albania), none of the other players actually wanted war either because it was too early (Germany) or because it was too terrifying in and of itself (everyone else).

Three sets of players, Germany, the Liberal Democracies (a weak Britain and a weaker France with the US nervous of domestic voters) and the Soviets (where Stalin was working every trick in the book to deter invasion), were dancing around each other, aware of the possibility of the 'big one'

The interventionists were certainly cynical, happy to prolong the war and not particularly interested in the victory of the side they backed. The Germans wanted mining rights, the Italians military glory and the Soviets a bargaining tool in trying to build rapprochement with the West.

Stalin sent over vast amounts of equipment and advisers, to be sure, but it was all covered by the Spanish gold reserves held in Moscow which Spain was never going to see again. The Communists were there not for revolution but to build a 'popular front' mentality against fascism.

Both sets of interventionists treated Spain like a military testing ground. Guernica now looks like an unintended blunder from soldiers learning their trade more than the deliberate act of terror that it was interpreted to be but the general attitude was one of blindness to human life.

Franco was just cleverer than the Republicans at managing his allies - tantalising and frustrating the Germans over their access to minerals, ensuring as much control as possible over allied military forces (not always successfuly) but eventually able to kick them out when it was all over.

Communist dominance in the Republic simply arose from their superior competence, especially compared to anarchists who were ill-suited to the discipline of modern warfare. It is intriguing that so many Republican military officers and administrators joined the Party just for that reason.

It turns out that the Spanish Communist Party quickly ceased to be a revolutionary workers' party and soon became a party of middle class technocrats and officers whose sole concern (whatever Stalin thought) was to defend the Republic. The officers tended to scuttle when the Party failed.

The war (so similar in complexity to the current Syrian situation) was the more complicated in having two opposing sets of monarchists as well as radical fascists on one side, two major regional separatisms and two warring Left ideologies as well as the split within Bolshevism on the other.

Liberal and moderates scarcely stood a chance even if they had not between so consistently inept and, when not inept, negative and pessimistic. Liberal moaning will have undermined morale. A rump of the Cortes remained but was no more useful than Parliament in the English Civil War.

Given the cards he was dealt, the final Prime Minister of the Republic, the Socialist Negrin, was capable of decisiveness and tough political decision-making but it was all too late in the game after the Government was forced to scuttle from Madrid, almost but not actually encircled.

There is a lot of classical heroism as well by ordinary officers and men on both sides and moral courage by a few. Nationalists holding out under fearful odds in redoubts, the battle for Madrid, the resistance in the Asturias, the International Brigades and the battles on the Aragon Front.

There is so much to ponder in this story about class conflict, petty nationalism, the burden of history, imperialism, the vulture-like behaviour of some countries and the weak self interest of others as well as the intrinsic weakness of middle class liberalism when things get existential.

Franco, though, must be accepted as a political genius who got everyone else to do his fighting for him, out-manouevred his generals and the various nationalist factions, knocked their heads together to create a 'regime' and died in office, the last fascist to survive, decades later.

He played every card well in a poker game where his own life was at stake against much weaker opponents, using his allies instead of being used by them.

The Spanish Civil War thus remains historically important not just to Spain but in wider European history as a practice run for the Second World War and as a test bed for various ideologies and military operations but also of how civil wars start, are maintained and end.

A civil war is the sign of a failure of a polity even if it wins (which it did not on this occasion), it requires the merging of social forces to the point where there is nothing but killing or being killed and, eventually, one will win and seek to wipe out all traces of the defeated.

There is no instinct for reconciliation and management of the peace as there is after one nation has defeated another in national wars, a lesson slowly learned in stages between 1870 and 1945, just the determination to re-mould the nation in the image of the victors.

The Nationalists continued their terror past victory and there is no reason to believe that Republican revolutionary terror would not have followed its own victory although with more chances for international public opinion to moderate behaviour.

The War destroyed the pretensions of romantic idealism whether anarchist, internationalist or falangist, showed that Machiavelli had it right about power and demonstrated the brutal cynicism of fascism and communism and why liberal democracies are their own worst enemies.

Civil War is an exceptionally bad thing. Here, responsibility lies as much as with the maladministration and naivete of socialists and liberals in the run-up to the rebellion as it does with the fascist brutes, anarchist millenarians and communist torturers enabled by failure.

As a guide to the war and its complexity and as a baseline for the facts required to allow sensible moral judgements, Thomas' book is invaluable - not the last word perhaps but still a book worth reading. show less

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