Did a Spanish Enlightenment predate and influence later English and Scottish Enlightenments?
Lead Essay The Spanish Enlightenment
“Liberty, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts given by heaven to mankind. To her, neither the treasures held in the earth nor those covered by the sea can compare.”
– Don Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes (1616)
Those of us within the Liberty community, especially among the North Atlantic nations, often suffer from an excessively Anglo-centric myopia; our language (and thus the thinking, in the Wittgenstein sense) is trapped within Anglophone boundaries. John Locke, for example, is widely touted as the “Father of the Enlightenment,” despite the fact that he cribbed a great deal of his foundational philosophy from Baruch Spinoza and leading lights of the Salamanca School, Juan de Mariana and Francisco de Vitoria. This is not to suggest that we are woefully unaware of contributions from outside the English sphere, but rather to recall to our collective consciousness the deeper roots of what we now term the liberal project. It takes extra effort to peer beyond the linguistic horizon and recognize that many ancestral liberal impulses sprang from the sun-drenched soils of Iberia.
Take, for example, Miguel de Cervantes. Though we grant him a certain glancing homage, few English speakers have read him in the original or are aware of his profound personal attachments to the cause of liberty, abstractly understood. Even if aware of his contributions, many tend to assume he was an anomaly, a lone advocate speaking to a late medieval culture ill-prepared to understand or accept his positions—a man ahead of his time, as it were—writing before things “really got going” in England. But in fact this rather gets it backward: His tremendous popularity in early-modern Spain reflects the fact that what we now consider “modern” conceptions of human dignity, individual liberty, and rule of law were quite firmly established in the dark days we associate with the “pre” Enlightenment.
It’s worth noting, by way of background, that Cervantes spent some five years enslaved in Africa, a prisoner in the baños (dungeons) of Algiers. When he speaks of liberty, then, as “one of the most precious gifts,” he speaks from experience. Before this, in 1571, he had led a twelve-man skiff in the Battle of Lepanto—arguably one of the greatest naval engagements in military history—and was wounded in the left arm so badly he never regained its use. In 1575 he was swept into the pirate hold of a Barbary frigate and spent some of the prime years of his life in slave labor and dank cells, hoping against hope for a reprieve. It came, eventually, through the intercession of Catholic Trinitarian monks, an order specifically devoted to ransoming Christian slaves in Africa, the Middle East, and Moorish Spain.
Indeed, it is the Catholic Church, for all its modern associations with illiberality, that helped shape and encourage many early liberal impulses (while admittedly stifling others). Especially within the mid-16th-century Spanish Empire, a vigorous scholarly and political debate raged over the nature of individual rights and limits on secular power. The Jesuit School of Salamanca was a major source of intellectual grist for this mill: Francisco Vitoria, one of the school’s early founders, was a staunch defender of individual human dignity and rights (including indigenous people’s rights in the New World) as well as one of the earliest promulgators of formal notions of free trade and private property rights. Juan de Mariana, said to have been a formative intellectual influence on Cervantes, was one of the first to recognize (and decry) inflationary monetary policy stemming from abusive central authority and to make the case that a “King” does not commit arbitrary violence against his own subjects–only a Tyrant can do that.
Thus we see in Don Quixote a famous scene featuring a dozen galley slaves, chained by the neck and handcuffed to one another. Sancho Panza informs Don Quixote that they are, “…men sentenced by the king and forced to row in his galleys.”
“What do you mean forced?” asks Don Quixote. “Is it possible that the king is forcing anyone?”“I’m not saying that—” replies Sancho, “only that these are people who, because of their crimes, are sentenced to serve the king in galleys, by force.”
“So, no matter,” retorts Don Quixote, “these people are being taken away by force and not of their free will?”
“That’s right,” says Sancho.
“In that case,” says the knight-errant, “here’s where I can do what my profession requires: to set forced actions right and to succor and aid poor wretches.”“Be careful, your grace,” warns Sancho, “for Justice, which is the king himself, isn’t using force or striking out against these people, but rather is punishing them for their crimes.”
Upon investigation, Don Quixote finds that these “crimes” are ludicrously suspect—a mere pretext for manning the galley oars: criminal confessions extracted under torture, petty victimization by unscrupulous magistrates, and trivial indebtedness are standard. The irony of all this “kingly” justice was not lost on Cervantes’ audience, which was primed to read its appeal to common-sense notions of justice and liberty. The book, though panned by many elites, was a sensation in its time. Seven or perhaps even eight editions were printed in the first year (1605) alone, an unheard-of level of popularity for the era. The work was eagerly embraced by the “common” reading public who loved it both for its antic humor and acid wit.
But most importantly of all, it was loved for its subtle advocacy for liberty. Cervantes wrote directly into a rich cultural tradition that had been grappling (in decidedly modern fashion) with the complexities of individual rights and limits on state authority for generations. Cervantes’ advocacy for fundamental human dignity and natural right struck a resonant chord in Spanish society, a society shaped by the unsettling influences of the Reconquista, the inquisition, and the discovery of an unanticipated New World.
Indigenous People’s Rights in the Americas:
Many of the Spanish Enlightenment’s more interesting features can be discerned in the complex tapestry of conquest. If you are anything like the majority, the image that comes to mind of the conquest of the New World is of swarthy, swashbuckling bullies, mad for gold, lusting for power, and ruthlessly domineering toward indigenous peoples. This caricature is built (as stereotypes generally are) on a promontory of truth. There are, after all, enough documented instances of brutality to buttress such a jaundiced retrospective, but like most caricatures it also misses most of the complexity and richness of real life. One of the missing truths in this simplified popular conception is just how surprisingly liberal (failures notwithstanding) Spain was to the indigenous societies of North America. Especially today, when “slavery” and “colonialism” are white-hot topics in the ongoing culture wars, it is a surprise to discover that many Spaniards (even conquistadors) were not only sympathetic to indigenous people’s rights, but actively sought to defend them.
The Dominican and Franciscan orders were especially effective political advocates for a “humane” conquest in the Indies, and heavily shaped official policies there. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar, was named “Defender of the Indians” (a paid royal position) and spent his life carefully documenting infractions against indigenous people’s rights. The Spanish court itself was keen to end abuses against indigenous peoples as seen, for instance, in Hernando De Soto’s 1537 royal authorization to embark on his exploration of Florida:
[“We,” The King], having been informed of the evils and disorders which occur in making discoveries and new settlements…a general provision of chapters is ordained and dispatched, respecting what you will have to observe in the said settlement and conquest…for the good treatment and conversion to our Holy Catholic Faith of the natives of it…
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s appointment in January 1540 to command a mission to explore what is now the American Southwest, is similarly remonstrative:
In regard to treatment of the native Indians of the lands through which you may travel…we order you to observe and fulfill the directive [for benevolent treatment] which we have ordered given to the persons who go, as you are going, to reconnoiter and pacify lands and new provincias… under [pain of] penalties referred to in the directive.
Such orders were not mere cynical lip service. Many a conquistador was charged with mistreatment of indigenous peoples and forced to legally account for his actions. Coronado, for instance, was forced to defend himself for years in court, convening innumerable witnesses to testify that he had forbidden his army from touching “so much as an ear of [Indian] corn” without their express permission and willing barter. Though such defenses might seem suspiciously convenient and self-serving to modern ears, thorough review of pesquisa testimony shows that the principles of adversarial jurisprudence were upheld scrupulously. Conquistadors who failed to bring such exculpatory evidence were fined, banished, or imprisoned as the cases of Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, and even Christopher Columbus amply demonstrate.
This attention to indigenous people’s rights was held by more than just clerical elites or official functionaries: conquistadors themselves were often deeply critical of trespasses against indigenous peoples. “Why,” asked conquistador Rodrigo Rangel of his leader Hernando De Soto, did he “not settle down to a colony, but rather disturb and devastate the land and take away the liberty of all the natives?” Conquistadors were generally attentive to, and often keen to redress, cruel abuses against what they saw as the natural liberty of indigenous peoples. Melchior Pérez, a participant in Coronado’s expedition, testified in court that he “doubted the word” of a fellow conquistador (García López de Cárdenas), deploring his mistreatment of indigenous peoples caught in the siege of Tiguex, saying that his actions were intolerable and cruel. In the De Soto expedition, an anonymous Gentleman “from Elvas” writes scathingly:
Those who were cruel, because they showed themselves inhuman, God permitted their sin to confront them, very great cowardice assailing them in sight of all..
Conquistador chronicles sometimes relayed the various “speeches” and conversations with indigenous peoples in ways that reveal as much about the Spanish understanding of liberty as about the indigenous people themselves. Chief Tascaluça, “lord” of the Mabila kingdom (modern-day Alabama), is described in 1540 thus:
…about giving obedience to the king of Spain, Tascaluça replied that he himself was king in his own country and there was no necessity for becoming the vassal of another who had as many as he. Those who put themselves under a foreign yoke when they could live free he regarded as very mean-spirited and cowardly. He and all his people protested that they would die a thousand deaths to maintain their liberty and that of their country. And he gave that reply once and for all.
Tascaluça surely did not speak these exact words (“yoke,” for one thing, was incomprehensible to a society without large domestic livestock), yet the sentiment was no doubt accurate. More to the point, the sentiment resonated with a Spanish reader, one that was primed to be sympathetic to liberty.
The Spanish empire, for all its nascent liberality, was not, of course, a shining beacon of human freedom (nor, for that matter, was the English one of Locke’s day). For a variety of complicated reasons this early Spanish Enlightenment did not flourish as it might have. But without it, the English and Scottish Enlightenments may well have never coalesced either. The political revolutions that ultimately enshrined so many of our modern liberties owe much of their formative influence to the intellectual ferment present in 16th and 17th century Iberia.
There were enormous moral failings, to be sure and the point here is not to whitewash examples of deplorable illiberal acts. The point, rather, is to show how surprisingly respectful the Spanish could be (even by modern standards) toward the peoples were so evidently bent on conquering. Though this counters today’s understanding of colonialism generally, and the conquest in particular, the fact is that Spanish treatment of indigenous people in the Americas was not the monolithically brutal affair it is so often portrayed to be. In short, it is time to update the caricature. Part of ‘getting our history right’ means not infantilizing indigenous peoples as passive victims, nor portraying Spaniards as diabolical thugs. Such two-dimensional ‘good-guy/bad-guy’ history is not only inaccurate, but also taints our modern political discourse. We need instead to rescue living, breathing human stories from what E.P. Thompson called the “enormous condescension of posterity,” and see the basic humanity in our common history.
“Liberty is one of the most precious gifts given by heaven to mankind.” Gracias a los cielos y a nuestros antepasados también – Thanks be to heaven, and to our Spanish forebears as well.
