Mexico by James A. Michener

10

SPANISH ANCESTORS: IN SPAIN

During my college years I frequently found myself in trouble with certain professors, ardent Presbyterians mostly, who promulgated with vigor the notorious Black Legend, which held that Spanish culture, especially as manifested in Spain's colonies in the New World, was somehow degenerate and certainly less moral than what either England or France exhibited in their territories. The college's handful of students with Spanish names or backgrounds chafed under this constant denigration because they knew it to be grossly unjust.

"This is a Presbyterian college," a boy from Ecuador explained. "There's a strong influence of John Knox, and he hated Catholics. To be a good Presbyterian you almost have to despise Catholic Spaniards."

When I pointed out that although I had a Spanish background I was a Protestant, the group wanted to know how that had happened and I said, "As long as I was under my mother's domination I was a Catholic, but after they separated my father made me a Protestant, like him."

A very wealthy boy from Bolivia whose father owned tin mines voiced an opinion that he believed settled the matter: "The hatred comes from Spain's introduction of the Inquisition at about the time Columbus discovered the Americas. Protestant textbook writers do love to include in their history books those horrible woodcuts of Catholics burning Jews and Protestants alive. " I remember that when he said this he sighed: "It's a cross we have to bear, because it did happen," but the boy from Ecuador was more contentious: "What infuriates me, in England and New England they burned and hanged just as many witches as we did Protestants and Jews, but the professors don't harp on it. They don't fill the textbooks with pictures of those infamies. We get the Black Legend thrown at us, but they get praise heaped on them because of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth."

The young men from South America elected not to fight back against their professors in an attempt to defend Spain against the infamous charges of the Black Legend, but I was not reluctant to engage in the battle. "I'm proud of what Spain gave to the world. Cervantes, Velázquez, bringing civilization to the New World. " I doubt that I changed any professorial attitudes, for the Black Legend was a convenient cudgel with which to lambaste Catholic Spain, and the Inquisition was an institution easy to hate, but my public defense of Spain did gain me friends among the Hispanic students.

One evening, after a particularly vigorous attack by one professor and my valiant attempt at refutation, the young fellow from Bolivia asked me: "Sometimes you say you're an American, sometimes a Mexican. Who are you? And why do you defend Spain so vigorously?"

"I'm both, American and Mexican Indian, but spiritually I'm heavily Spanish. And I know what I'm talking about, better than any of the professors, because the Inquisition touched my family with a cruel and heavy hand. They talk abstract principles. I talk reality."

It was late in the winter of 1524 in Salamanca in western Spain that Mexico became linked to my Spanish heritage. This is how it happened:

The University of Salamanca, which then stood in premier position, was playing host to a convocation of learned men from Europe's three other principal universities: Bologna, in Italy; the Sorbonne, in France; and upstart Oxford, from England.

This particular convocation had been summoned to deal with interpretations of religious matters that were of interest to the Catholic world, particularly the schismatic effect of occurrences in Germany, where the monk Martin Luther had been causing trouble. When the more weighty concerns of Church doctrine had been settled, the professors turned their attention to a curious letter that had been sent from Antwerp, then as preeminent in trade as Salamanca was in learning. It had been submitted by a group of merchants who were perplexed by a matter of business morals and who sought guidance from the professors. The letter read, in part:

What confuses us in Antwerp is this. If the broker Gregorio fears God and wishes to live within His law, but if he also makes his living as a broker and wishes to prosper, how must he deal with the merchant Klaus who comes to him one day and says, "Broker Gregorio, next week begins the Fair of Mid-Lent here in Antwerp and to conduct my business I require one thousand ducats which I don't have. Do you give them to me in cash and I will repay them three months later at the May Fair at Medina del Campo in Spain. " To this request of the merchant, the broker Gregorio replies, "I will give you the thousand ducats here in Antwerp but when you repay them three months hence in Medina del Campo you must pay me not only the thousand ducats which you owe me but one hundred more to cover my expense in transferring the money, my risk of loss, and my salaries to my assistants."

We desire to know, learned doctors, whether the action of the broker Gregorio in supplying the money and charging for the risks he is taking falls under the category of usury, which is forbidden by Holy Writ, or whether it is not, as we merchants hold, a necessary and permissible exercise of business and thus excused from the condemnation which is properly placed on lending money at interest, which we admit is forbidden by the Bible.