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2: Before the Coronado Expedition: Who Knew What and When Did They Know It?
- University of New Mexico Press
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TWO Before the Coronado Expedition: Who Knew What and When Did They Know It? WILLIAM K. HARTMANN AND RICHARD FLINT FOR MOST PARTICIPANTS in the Coronado expedition of –, it was first and foremost a financial enterprise, in which the members and backers invested and from which they expected handsome returns. As Shirley Cushing Flint shows in chapter , three major investors, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and Pedro de Alvarado, contributed about , pesos each— substantial fortunes—to finance the expedition. Most rank-and-file members of the expedition also spent funds to participate, outfitting and supplying themselves, often borrowing money to do so. Total investment in the expedition was at least half a million pesos. The supposition was that investors would see substantial profits in a matter of months, and certainly in no more than two years. On the other hand, if gold or other “hard wealth” could not be appropriated from Cíbola or other nearby communities, then nearly every member of the expedition stood to return south in severely straitened circumstances, as indeed most eventually did. The huge monetary investment in the expedition testifies to the widespread expectation of extraordinary wealth in Cíbola. On what was this popular presumption based? Modern historical accounts of the Coronado expedition assign to fray Marcos de Niza the role of originator of the belief in Cíbola as a place rich in gold and silver. In this view, fray Marcos’s reports, following his six-month trip to the north in , planted visions of a glittering Cíbola in the minds of restless young European adventurers. This explanation greatly oversimplifies the situation in Mexico City, and indeed in Spanish America at large, in the late s. Our intention in this chapter is to delineate the deep-seated and long-building web of geographical knowledge, belief, and rumor that held fray Marcos and the other European residents of Mexico City even before the friar was appointed to make his famous reconnaissance to the north. What past experience, European folklore,NewWorldstories,officialreports,andgrapevinefactsmadeuptheevolving store of knowledge of Spanish conquest in March as Marcos and Esteban set off toward the north from Culiacán? The State of Geographical Knowledge and Surmise in the s We begin with what members of the expedition itself had to say. Writing in the s, Pedro de Castañeda opened his chronicle of the Coronado expedition by retelling what in his opinion was the earliest account to have been received that specifically told about the seven cities in the north. In his telling, first notice came in from a native of Oxitipan, whom the Spaniards called Tejo. This Tejo told of having visited seven large towns, so grand that he liked to compare them to Mexico City. In these towns he had purportedly seen streets of silversmiths’ shops (platería). In Castañeda’s version, this news was sufficient to inspire the launching of an expedition of nearly four hundred Spaniards and twenty thousand Indian allies by Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán. Guzmán’s expedition—always in pursuit of Tejo’s seven cities, according to Castañeda—got only as far as Culiacán, without finding them. It was left to the Coronado expedition ten years later to seek them out. What Castañeda ignored in his narrative were the many other reports that led European settlers of Nueva España to expect that there were communities far to the north where gold and silver were plentiful. In fact, a crescendo of reports served to prime European residents of Nueva España to hear in messages from fray Marcos in confirmation of the existence of those seven wealthy cities. To adequately represent the state of knowledge and belief in concerning prosperous societies in the interior of the Indies, we must go back much farther than Nuño de Guzmán. To begin with, a robust heritage of thought led Europeans of the sixteenth century to believe that the Indies of Christopher Columbus harbored unimaginable stores of gold and silver and other precious goods. Two powerful notions that were part of the common conception of the world in late medieval and early modern Europe and especially in Spain were, first, a vision of the East as a place of limitless wealth and, second, a tradition of seven Catholic bishops and their congregations who had fled the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in the early s. Routine, if perilous, connection between Europe and the...