6

6. On coaches

[A favourite chapter, linking the ideas of fantastic luxury, generosity and princely magnificence with fantastic cruelty, vulgarity and ostentation. Coaches (which for Montaigne means all sorts of wheeled vehicles including Roman chariots) were the symbols of luxury. They are contrasted with the simplicity of those American Indian cultures which had never invented the wheel, had no horses and used gold for its beauty alone. Their simplicity emphasized the horrors of the Spanish conquest of Peru, with its naked cruelty and avarice.

Montaigne’s three main sources are a work of Pietro Crinito, De honesta disciplina; another, by Justus Lipsius, De amphitheatro; a third by Francisco Lopez de Gomara, one of the Conquistadores, whom he read in the French translation by J. Fumée: Histoire générale des Indes.]

[B] It is very easy to prove that, when great authors write about causes, they not only marshal those which they reckon to be true but also those which they do not believe, provided that they have some [C] originality and [B] beauty.1 If what they say is ingenious they think that their words are sufficiently useful and true. We cannot be sure of the mastercause, so we pile cause upon cause, hoping that it may happen to be among them:

namque unam dicere causam Non satis est, verum plures, unde una tamen sit.

[since it suffices not to give one single cause, many must be given, one of which only may be true.]2

You ask me: ‘What is the origin of our custom of saying Bless you when people sneeze?’ Well, we break three sorts of wind: the one which issues lower down is very dirty; the one which issues from the mouth comports an element of reproach for gluttony; and the third is sneezing, to which, since it issues from the head and is blameless, we give that honourable greeting.

Do not mock such subtle reasoning: it is (so they say) from Aristotle…3

I came across, in Plutarch I think (and he is of all the authors I know the one who has best blended art with nature and judgement with erudition), the explanation that the vomiting from the stomach which befalls men on sea-voyages is to be attributed to fear.4 (He had already found some reason or other to prove that fear can produce such an effect.) Now I am very subject to seasickness and I know that that cause does not apply to me; and I know it not by argument but compelling experience. I shall not cite what I have been told, that animals, especially pigs, which have no conception of danger, get seasick; nor what one of my acquaintances has told me about himself: he is much subject to it yet on two or three occasions when he was obsessed by fear during a great storm the desire to vomit disappeared –[C] as it did to that man in Antiquity: ‘Pejus vexabar quam ut periculum mihi succurreret.’ [I was too shaken for the danger to occur to me.]5[B] Though many occasions for being afraid have arisen (if you count death as one) I have never felt, on water nor anywhere else, such fear as to confuse or to daze me. Fear can arise from lack of judgement as well as from lack of courage. All such dangers as I have encountered have been with my eyes open, with my sight free, sound and whole: besides, to feel fear you also need to have courage. Once when I did have to flee, I was able to manage my flight well and, compared with others, to maintain some order because I did so [C] if not without fear nevertheless [B] without ecstatic terror; fear was aroused, but not the kind which is thunderstruck or insane. The souls of great men can go far beyond that, showing us retreats which were not merely tranquil and sane but marked by pride.

Here let me quote the flight which Alcibiades relates: it concerns Socrates, his companion in arms:6 ‘I came across him (he said) after the rout of our army; he and Laches were the last to retreat. I could watch him at leisure and in safety, since I was on a good horse while he was on foot; that is the way we had fought. I noted first his presence of mind and the resolve which he showed in contrast with Laches; next it was his confident walk, in no ways different from his usual one; then the controlled and steady eyes with which he weighed and evaluated what was going on about him, staring now at some who were friends, now at others who were foes, encouraging the friends and showing the others that he was a man to sell his life-blood very dear should any assay to take it from him. That saved them, for you do not willingly attack men like that: you hunt the fearful.’

There you have the testimony of a great Captain, teaching us (what we can assay every day) that nothing casts us into dangers so much as a rash hunger to get out of them: [C] ‘Quo timoris minus est, eo minus ferme periculi est.’ [As a rule, where you feel less fear you experience less danger.]7

[B] People today are wrong to say ‘That man is frightened of dying,’ when they really mean that he dwells on it and anticipates it. Anticipation equally concerns whatever affects us, for good or evil. In some ways, weighing and evaluating a danger is the opposite of being thrown into amazement by it. I do not think I am strong enough to sustain the violent onslaught of fear nor of any other passion which disturbs the mind. If ever I were once to be vanquished and thrown to the ground by it I would never wholly get up again; should anything make my soul lose her footing I could never set her back straight in place again. She is ever probing and feeling herself too vigorously and examining herself too deeply; consequently she would never allow the wound which had pierced her to grow together and become strong. It is a good thing for me that no malady has so far overthrown her. Each onslaught against me I confront and oppose equipped in full armour, so the first to get the better of me would leave me without resources. There is no question of doing anything twice: let the storm once breach my dyke anywhere and all of me is open, irremediably drowned. [C] Epicurus asserts that no wise man can become the opposite of wise.8 I know something about that judgement the other way round: no man who has been a real fool once will ever be really wise again!

[B] God sends us cold according to our garment; he sends me emotions according to my means of sustaining them. Nature, having exposed me on one flank has covered me on the other: having stripped me of fortitude she has equipped me with an inability to feel and with blunted balanced powers of anticipation.

Now I cannot put up for long with coach, litter or boat (and could do so less still in my youth). I loathe all means of conveyance but the horse, both for town and country. But litters I can tolerate less than coaches; and for the same reason I can better tolerate being thrown about on a rough sea – which produces fear – than I can the motion experienced during calm weather. Just as I cannot suffer a rickety chair under me, similarly I cannot suffer that slight jerk made by the oars as they pull the boat from under us without it somehow disturbing my brain and my stomach. Now, when sail or current bears us smoothly along or when we are towed, the unified motion in no wise bothers me; what upsets me is that series of broken movements, the more so when it is slow. I cannot describe its characteristics any other way. Doctors have prescribed binding a towel as a compress round the lower part of my belly; I have never assayed it, being used to fighting against my defects and vanquishing them by myself.

[C] If my memory were adequately furnished with them I would not regret time spent listing here the infinite variety of historical examples of the applications of coaches to the service of war, varying as they do from nation to nation and century to century; they are, it seems to me, most effective and very necessary. It seems a marvel to me that we have forgotten all about it. I will merely say this: quite recently in our fathers’ time the Hungarians put them to excellent use against the Turks; in each coach a soldier with a round buckler was stationed beside a musketeer, together with a number of harquebuses in racks, already loaded. They clad the sides of each coach with rows of shields rather like a frigate. They drew up a line in front of their troops consisting of three thousand such coaches; after the cannon had played their part they either sent them ahead towards the enemy who had to swallow that salvo as a foretaste of what was to come (no slight advantage), or else they threw them against the enemy squadrons to break them up and open a way through. In addition there was the help they could give in covering the flanks of their troops when marching through ticklish country or in speedily defending an encampment by turning it into a fort.9

In my own day there was a gentleman living on one of our frontiers; he was an invalid and could find no horse able to bear his weight; he was involved in a feud and campaigned in a coach such as I have described and managed very well. But let us finish with those war-coaches.

The kings of our first Gaulish dynasty used to travel the land in a cart drawn by four oxen.10 [B] Mark Antony was the first to be drawn through Rome – with a minstrel-girl beside him – by lions harnessed to a coach. Heliogabalus did the same somewhat later, claiming to be Cybele the Mother of the gods; then, drawn by tigers, he pretended to be the god Bacchus. On other occasions he harnessed two stags to his coach; once it was four dogs; then he stripped naked and was drawn in solemn procession by four naked girls. The Emperor Firmus had his coach drawn by ostriches of such extraordinary size that he seemed to fly rather than to roll along. The oddness of such novelties leads me on to the idea that it is a sort of lack of confidence in monarchs, a sign of not being sure of their position, to strive to make themselves respected and glorious through excessive expenditure. It would be pardonable abroad but among his subjects, where he is the sovereign power, the highest degree of honour to which he can attain is derived from the position he holds. Similarly it seems to me that it is superfluous for a gentleman to take a lot of trouble over how he dresses when at home: his house, his servants, his cuisine are enough to vouch for him there.

[C] Isocrates’ advice to his king does not seem to lack good sense: let his furniture and his tableware be magnificent, for such expenditure is of lasting value and is passed on to his successors: let him avoid all magnificence which drains away immediately from use or memory.11

[B] When I was a young man, in default of other glories I gloried in fine clothes. In my case they were quite becoming; but there are folk on whom fine clothes sit down and cry.

There are tales of the extraordinary meanness of some of our kings over both personal expenditure and donations – and they were kings great in reputation, wealth and fortune. Demosthenes fought unsparingly against one of his city’s laws which authorized monies to be spent on parades of athletes and festivals (he wanted his city’s greatness to be displayed in the number of its well-armed fighting-ships and in good, well-equipped forces). [C] And Theophrastus is rightly condemned for asserting the opposite doctrine in his book On Riches, in which he maintained that expenditure on festivals was the true fruit of opulence. Such pleasures, says Aristotle, have an effect only on the lowest of the low; they immediately vanish from their memory as soon as they have had enough of them; no serious man of judgement can hold them in esteem.12

Such funds would seem to me to be more regal, useful, sensible and durable if spent on ports, harbours, fortifications and walls, on splendid buildings, on churches, hospitals and colleges, and on repairing roads and highways. In my time Pope Gregory XIII left a favourable reputation behind him by so doing; and, by so doing, our own Queen Catherine would for many a long year to come leave witnesses to her natural generosity and munificence, if only her means were sufficient for her desires.13 Fortune deeply distressed me by interrupting the construction in our capital city of the Pont neuf, a beautiful bridge, so cheating me of the hope of seeing it in regular use before I die.

[B] Moreover to their subjects who form the spectators of these festivities, it seems that it is their own wealth that is being flaunted and that they are being feasted at their own expense. Their peoples are always ready to assume about kings what we assume about our servants: that their job is to provide abundantly for everything that we want but never to spend anything on themselves. That is why the Emperor Galba, when he was delighted by a musician during dinner, called for his chest, plunged in his hand and gave him a fistful of crowns saying, ‘This is my own money not the government’s.’14 Be that as it may, the people are usually right: money earned to feed their bellies is used instead to feed their eyes.

Even munificence is not truly resplendent from a sovereign’s hands: it more rightly belongs to private citizens; for strictly speaking a king has nothing which is properly his own: even his person belongs to others. [C] Sentences are not passed in the interests of the judge but of the plaintiffs. We never appoint our superiors for their own advantage but for that of their inferiors; we appoint a doctor for his patients not for himself. All public offices, like all professional skills, aim at something beyond themselves: ‘nulla ars in se versatur’ [no art is concerned with itself].15

[B] That is why those tutors of youthful princes who pride themselves on impressing upon them that there is virtue in lavishness, who exhort them not to know what it means to reject anything and to hold that money is never better spent than when given away (teaching, greatly honoured, I know, in my own lifetime), are either thinking more of their own good than that of their own master or else they do not know what they are talking about. It is all too easy to stamp ideas of generosity on a man who has the means of fulfilling them with other people’s money. [C] And since generosity is measured not against the gift but the means of the giver, in such powerful hands it always proves useless. To be generous, they discover, they have to be prodigal. [B] So it is not highly honoured compared to the other kingly virtues: it is, said Dionysius the Tyrant, the only virtue to be fully compatible with tyranny itself.16 I would rather teach a king this line from one ancient ploughman:

that is, ‘If you want a good crop, you must broadcast your seed not pour it from your sack.’17 [C] Seed must be drilled not spilled. [B] So when a king has to make gifts or, to put it better, has to make payments to so many persons for services rendered, he should distribute royally but advisedly. If a prince’s generosity is indiscriminate and immoderate I would like him better as a miser.

It is in justice that kingly virtue seems mainly to consist. And what most distinguishes a king is that kind of justice which is the companion of generosity; kings readily dispense all other kinds of justice through intermediaries: that one they reserve to themselves.

Liberality without moderation is a feeble means of acquiring good-will, since it offends more people than it seduces. [C] ‘Quo in plures usus sis, minus in multos uti possis. Quid autem est stultius quant quod libenter facias, curare ut id diutius facere non possis?’ [The more people you have helped by it, the fewer you can help in the future… Is there a greater folly than doing something you like in such a way that you can do it no longer?]18 [B] And if it is exercised without due regard for merit, it embarrasses the recipient, who receives it without gratitude. There have been tyrants who have been sacrificed to the people’s hatred by the very men they have unjustly advanced, since [C] men of that sort [B] reckon that19 they can insure their possession of ill-gotten gains by showing hatred and contempt for the one they got them from; in that way they seek to placate the judgement and opinions of the people.

The subjects of a prince who is lavish in giving become lavish in their demands. They base their assessments not on reason but example. We certainly ought often to blush at our shamelessness. We are already overpaid by just standards once the reward is equal to our services. Do we owe nothing to our princes by natural obligation? If our prince meets our expenses he has already done a great deal. Should he contribute to them, that is enough: anything above that is called a bounty: as such it cannot be demanded. (The very word liberality has the sound of liberty.) By our fashion there is no end to it: goods already received do not figure in our accounts: we only love future liberality. So the more a prince exhausts his wealth in giving, the poorer he is in friends. [C] How could he possibly slake desires which grow bigger the more he pours wealth into them? The man whose thoughts are set on getting thinks no longer of what he has got. The property of covetousness is, above all, ingratitude.20

The example of Cyrus would not fit in badly here to serve our kings today as a touchstone for discovering whether their gifts are well or ill bestowed (and to show them that that Emperor distributed his gifts better than they do; by their extravagance they are reduced to raising loans from subjects unknown to them or from those whom they have harmed rather than from those whom they have helped, receiving ‘gratuities’ from them which have nothing gratuitous about them but the name). Croesus reproached Cyrus for his bounty, calculating what his treasure would have amounted to if he had restrained his hands a little more. Cyrus sought to justify his liberality: so he dispatched messengers all over the place to those magnates of his empire whose interests he had individually advanced, begging each of them to help him with as much money as they could for some urgent need and to write to him disclosing the amount. When all the letters of credit were brought to him, none of his friends had reckoned that it was enough to offer merely as much as they had received from his munificence but included much of their own wealth. He found that the sum amounted to far more than Croesus’ economies. Whereupon Cyrus said to him, ‘I love riches no less than other princes do; if anything I am more sparing. You can see by what little outlay I have acquired the countless riches of so many friends, and how much better Chancellors of the Exchequer they are than hired men would be with no bonds of affection, and how my wealth is better lodged with them than in my own treasure-chests, calling down upon me the hatred, envy and contempt of other princes.’21

[B] The Roman Emperors justified the lavishness of their public games and parades by the fact that their authority in some ways depended (in appearance at least) on the will of the people, who had ever been accustomed to be courted by such extravagant spectacles. Yet it was private citizens who had encouraged this custom of pleasing their fellow-citizens and their equals with such a profusion of magnificence drawn mainly from their own purses. It took on a quite different savour when their masters came to imitate them. [C] ‘Pecuniarum translatio a justis dominis ad alienos non debet liberalis videri.’ [Taking money from rightful owners and giving it to others ought not to be regarded as liberality.]22 When his son assayed winning the support of the Macedonians by sending them gifts, Philip reprimanded him in a letter with these words: ‘What? Do you desire that your subjects should consider you not their King but their bursar? If you want to seduce, seduce them by deeds of virtue not by deeds of your purse-strings.’

[B] Yet there was beauty in providing a great quantity of mature trees, with thick green branches, and in planting them beautifully and symmetrically in the arena to make a great shady forest, and then, on the first day, in releasing within it a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand wild boars and a thousand deer and in handing it over to the populace to pillage; then, on the following day, in killing off before them a hundred full-grown lions, a hundred leopards and three hundred bears; then, on the third day, in having three hundred pairs of gladiators fight to the finish, as did the Emperor Probus.23 Beautiful too to see those great amphitheatres incrusted on the outside with marble and decorated with works of art and statuary, the inside gleaming with rare and precious stones –

Baltheus en gemmis, en illita porticus auro [Here is the circular partition clad in gems; here, the portico, daubed with gold]

– with all the sides surrounding that vast space completely encircled from top to bottom with sixty to eighty tiers of seats, also of marble, covered with cushions –

exeat, inquit, Si pudor est, et de pulvino surgat equestri, Cujus res legi non sufficit;

[‘Shame him out’, they say: ‘he has only paid for the cheapest seats, not for the cushioned ones of the knights]

– where you could seat a hundred thousand men in comfort; beauty, too, to have the base of the arena where the games took place dug up and divided into caverns representing lairs which spewed forth the animals destined for the spectacle; subsequently to flood it with a deep sea of water, sweeping along many a sea-monster and bearing armed warships to enact a naval engagement; then, thirdly, to flatten it and drain it out afresh for the gladiatorial combats; and then, for the fourth act, to strew it, not with sand but with vermilion and aromatic resin in order to prepare upon it a formal banquet for that infinite crowd of people – the final scene on one single day!

Quoties nos descendentis arenæ Vidimus in partes, ruptaque voragine terræ Emersisse feras, et iisdem sæpe latebris Aurea cum croceo creverunt arbuta libro. Nec solum nobis silvestria cernere monstra Contigit, æquoreos ego cum certantibus ursis Spectavi vitulos, et equorum nomine dignum, Sed deforme pecus.

[How often have we beheld a section of the arena drop down, forming a gaping chasm from which emerged wild beasts and whole forests of golden trees with barks of saffron! Not only have we seen the denizens of the forests in our amphitheatres but sea-beasts set in the midst of fighting bears and those monstrous hippopotamuses honoured by the name of ‘river-horses’.]

Sometimes they produced in the arena a great mountain covered with green trees, many bearing fruit, and a river running from its summit as from the source of a flowing stream. Sometimes they had a great ship sail into the arena; it opened up and fell apart automatically, spewed forth from its belly four or five hundred beasts of combat, reassembled itself unaided and vanished from sight. Sometimes down there in the arena they produced fountains and water-jets which spouted immensely high, sprinkling perfume over that vast multitude. To protect themselves from the hot weather they caused that immense area to be covered either with awnings of purple needlework or with variously coloured silks, which they drew or withdrew at will:

Quamvis non modico caleant spectacula sole, Vela reducuntur, cum venit Hermogenes.

[Although the fierce sun beats down on the amphitheatre they draw back the awnings whenever Hermogenes appears.]24

Even the netting erected in front of the crowd to protect them from the ferocity of the wild beasts once they were loosed was plaited with gold:

auro quoque torta refulgent Retia.

[The very nets glisten with woven gold.]

If anything can justify such excesses, it is the cases where the amazement was caused not by the expense but by the originality and ingenuity.

Even in vanities such as these we can discover how those times abounded in more fertile minds than ours. The same applies to that sort of fertility as to any other which Nature produces. Which is not to say that she then employed her utmost forces.25 [C] We cannot be said to progress but rather to wander about this way and that. We follow our own footsteps. [B] I am afraid that our knowledge is in every sense weak; we cannot see very far ahead nor very far behind; it grasps little, lives little, skimped in terms of both time and matter.

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona Multi, sed omnes illachrimabiles Urgentur ignotique longa Nocte.

[Great heroes lived before Agamemnon; many they were, yet none is lamented, being swept away unknown into the long night.]

Et supera belium Trojanum et funera Trojœ, Multi alias alii quoque res cecinere poetœ.

[Before the Trojan War and the death of Troy many other poets have sung of other wars.]26

[C] And while on this subject I think we should not reject the testimony of Solon’s account of how he had learned from the priests of Egypt the long history of their State and their way of teaching and preserving the history of other peoples: ‘Si interminatam in omnes partes magnitudinem regionum videremus et temporum, in quam se injiciens animus et intendens ita late longeque peregrinatur, ut nullam oram ultimi videat in qua possit insistere: in hac immensitate infinita vis innumerabilium appareret fomarum.’ [If we were vouchsafed a sight of the infinite extent of time and space stretching away in every direction, and if our minds were allowed to wander over it far and wide, ranging about and hastening along without ever glimpsing a boundary where it could halt: from such an immensity we would grasp what almighty power lies behind those innumerable forms.]27

[B] Even if everything that has come down to us about the past by report were true and known to someone, that would be nothing compared with what we do not know. And against the idea of a universe which flows on while we are in it, how puny and stunted is the knowledge of the most inquisitive men. A hundred times more is lost for us than what comes to our knowledge, not only of individual events (which sometimes are turned by Fortune into weighty exempla) but of the circumstances of great polities and nations. When our artillery and printing were invented we clamoured about miracles: yet at the other end of the world in China men had been enjoying them over a thousand years earlier.28 If what we saw of the world were as great as the amount we now cannot see, it is to be believed that we would perceive an endless [C] multiplication and [B] succession of forms. Where Nature is concerned, nothing is unique or rare: but where our knowledge is concerned much certainly is, which constitutes a most pitiful foundation for our scientific laws, offering us a very false idea of everything.

Just as we vainly conclude today that the world is declining into decrepitude using arguments drawn from our own decline and decadence –

Jamque adeo affecta est ætas, affectaque tellus [Our age lacks vigour now: even the soil is less abundant]29

– so that same poet concluded that the world was yet newly born and young, from the vigour of the minds of his day, fertile in new inventions and the creation of various arts:

Verum, ut opinor, habet novitatem summa, recensque Natura est mundi, neque pridem exordia cæpit: Quare etiam quœdam nunc artes expoliuntur, Nunc etiam augescunt, nunc addita navigiis sunt Multa.

[In my opinion our universe is new; the origin of the world is recent: it is but newly born. That is why some arts are still developing nowadays and growing still; the art of navigation is even now progressing.]

Our world has just discovered another one: and who will answer for its being the last of its brothers, since up till now its existence was unknown to the daemons, to the Sybils, and to ourselves? It is no less big and full and solid than our own; its limbs are as well developed: yet it is so new, such a child, that we are still teaching it its ABC; a mere fifty years ago it knew nothing of writing, weights and measures, clothing, any sort of corn or vine. It was still naked at the breast, living only by what its nursing Mother provided. If we are right to conclude that our end is nigh, and that poet is right that his world is young, then that other world will only be emerging into light when ours is leaving it. The world will be struck with the palsy: one of its limbs will be paralysed while the other is fully vigorous, yet I fear we shall have considerably hastened the decline and collapse of that young world by our contagion and that we shall have sold it dear our opinions and our skills.

That world was an infant: we whipped it and subjected it to our teaching, but not from any superior worth of ours or our natural energy; we neither seduced it by our justice and goodness nor subjugated it by our greatness of soul. Most of the responses of its peoples, and most of our negotiations with them, witness that they are in no ways beholden to us where aptitude and natural clarity of mind are concerned. The awe-inspiring magnificence of the cities of Cuzco and Mexico and, among similar things, the gardens of that king where all the trees and fruits and all the plants were, in size and arrangement, as in a normal garden, but all excellently wrought in gold, as were in his museum all the creatures which are born in his estates or in his seas;30 the beauty of their works of art in precious stones, feathers and cotton as well as in painting shows that they were not behind us in craftsmanship either.

And as for their piety, observance of the laws, goodness, liberality, loyalty and frankness: well, it served us well that we had less of that than they did; their superiority in that ruined them, sold them and betrayed them.

As for bravery and courage; as for resolution, constancy and resistance to pain, hunger and death, I would not hesitate to compare the examples provided by them with the most celebrated ones of the Ancients written in the annals of our own world on this side of the seas.

As regards those men who subjugated them, were you to take from them the trickery and sleight-of-hand which they used to deceive them, the justified ecstasy of amazement which struck those peoples at the sight of the totally unexpected landing of bearded men, differing from them in language, religion, build and facial features, coming from a world so remote and from regions in which they had never even dreamed that there were any humans dwelling whatsoever; men mounted on big unknown monsters confronting men who had never seen not merely horses but any animal whatsoever trained to be ridden by man or to bear any other burden; men whose skin was shining and hard, men armed with a glittering cutting-instrument confronting men who would barter a vast wealth of gold or pearls for a looking-glass or a knife, the sheen of which to them appeared miraculous; men who, even if they had had the time, had neither the knowledge nor the materials to discover ways of piercing our steel; to which add the lightning flashes of our cannons, the thundering of our harquebuses (able to confuse the mind of Caesar himself in his day if they had surprised him when he was as ignorant of them as they were) opposed to people who were naked except in those areas which had been reached by the invention of a kind of woven cotton-cloth; peoples with no arms except (at the most) bows, stones, staves [C] or wooden shields; [B] peoples who, under pretence of friendship and good faith, were caught off their guard by their curiosity to see things strange and unknown: remove (I say) from the Conquistadores such advantages and you strip them of what made so many victories possible.

When I reflect on the indomitable ardour with which so many thousands of men, women and children came so many times and threw themselves into certain danger in defence of their gods and their freedom, and when I reflect on that great-souled stubborn determination to suffer any extremity, any hardship including death, rather than to submit to the domination of those who had so disgracefully deceived them – some of them preferring once they were captured to die slowly of hunger than to accept food from the hands of enemies so vilely victorious: I maintain that, if they had been attacked equal to equal in arms and experience and numbers, then the conflict would have been as hazardous (or more so) as any other that we know of.

Oh why did it not fall to Alexander and those ancient Greeks and Romans to make of it a most noble conquest; why did such a huge transfer of so many empires, and such revolutions in the circumstances of so many peoples, not fall into hands which would have gently polished those peoples, clearing away any wild weeds while encouraging and strengthening the good crops that Nature had brought forth among them, not only bringing to them their world’s arts of farming the land and adorning their cities (in so far as they were lacking to them) but also bringing to the natives of those countries the virtues of the Romans and the Greeks? What a renewal that would have been, what a restoration of the fabric of this world, if the first examples of our behaviour which were set before that new world had summoned those peoples to be amazed by our virtue and to imitate it, and had created between them and us a brotherly fellowship and understanding. How easy it would have been to have worked profitably with folk whose souls were so unspoiled and so hungry to learn, having for the most part been given such a beautiful start by Nature. We, on the contrary, took advantage of their ignorance and lack of experience to pervert them more easily towards treachery, debauchery and cupidity, toward every kind of cruelty and inhumanity, by the example and model of our own manners. Whoever else has ever rated trade and commerce at such a price? So many cities razed to the ground, so many nations wiped out, so many millions of individuals put to the sword, and the most beautiful and the richest part of the world shattered, on behalf of the pearls-and-pepper business! Tradesmen’s victories! At least ambition and political strife never led men against men to such acts of horrifying enmity and to such pitiable disasters.

While sailing along the coast on the lookout for the natives’ mines there were some Spaniards who went ashore in a fertile, pleasant and densely populated countryside; they gave the inhabitants their usual warning, declaring that they were men of peace, coming to them after sailing far across the seas, sent on behalf of the King of Castile, the greatest monarch in the inhabited world, to whom the Pope, as Vicar of God on earth, had granted dominion over all the Indies; that, if they would pay that King tribute they would be most kindly treated; then they asked for victuals to eat, and for gold… which they needed as a medicine; they incidentally insisted that there is only one God, that our religion is the true one which they advised them to adopt – adding a menace or two.

In reply they were told that, as for their being men of peace, if they were they did not look it; as for their King, he must be poor and needy since he came a-begging; as for that man who had apportioned that tribute, he was a man who loved dissension since he gave to a third party something which was not his to give, seeking to pick a quarrel with those who had long possessed it; as for victuals, they would supply some; as for gold, they had very little; it was something they did not highly value since it was of small practical use in life, whereas their aim was to live their lives in happiness and contentment; so the Spaniards could readily have whatever gold they could find, except the gold which was used in the service of their own gods. As for there being only one God, they were pleased by the argument but did not intend to change their religion, having so profitably followed their own for such a long time and being unaccustomed to taking advice from anyone but their friends and acquaintances. As for their menaces, it was a sign of lack of judgement in them to go about threatening people the nature of whose resources was unknown to them; so let them get out of their country, quickly, for they were not accustomed to take in good part such courtesies from armed men and warnings from foreigners. They would do to them what they had done to others – and they indicated the heads of men condemned to death and displayed about their city.

There is an example of their baby-talk for you!

So the Spaniards neither remained nor campaigned in that place nor in many others where they found none of the merchandise they were after, no matter what other delights could be found there. Witness my cannibals.31

The last two kings whom the Spaniards hounded were kings over many kings, the most powerful kings in that new world and perhaps also in our own.

The first was the King of Peru. He was captured in battle and put to so huge a ransom that it defies all belief; he paid it faithfully and showed by his dealings that he was of a frank, noble and steadfast heart, a man of honest and tranquil mind. The Conquistadores, having already extracted gold weighing one million three hundred and twenty-five thousand five hundred ounces (not counting silver and other booty amounting to no less, so that afterwards they even used solid gold to shoe their horses) were seized with the desire to discover what remained of the treasures of that king, no matter what it cost them in bad faith, [C] and to make free with whatever he had kept back. [B] They fabricated false evidence, accusing him of planning to get his territories to rise up in revolt and to set him free. Whereupon – a beautiful sentence, delivered by those who had got up this act of treachery! – he was condemned to be publicly hanged until he was dead, having first been compelled to buy off the agony of being burned alive at the stake by accepting baptism – which was administered to him while he was being tortured.

A horrifying, unheard-of action, which he nevertheless bore without demeaning, by look or word, his truly regal gravity and comportment. And then to placate the people who were stunned into an ecstasy of amazement by so outlandish a deed, they counterfeited great grief at his death and arranged a costly funeral.

The second was the King of Mexico: he had long held out during the siege of his city, showing (if ever a people did so) what can be achieved by endurance and constancy, yet he had the misfortune to fall alive into the hands of his enemies, but on terms of being treated like a king. (And during his captivity he showed nothing unworthy of that title.) But the Spaniards, not finding after that victory as much gold as they had anticipated, pillaged and ransacked everything and then proceeded to seek information by inflicting on the prisoners they had taken the most painful tortures that they could devise. But since nothing of value could be extorted from them, their hearts being stronger than the tortures, the Spaniards finally fell into such a fit of madness that, contrary to their word and to the law of nations, they sentenced the King and one of the chief lords of his court to be tortured in each other’s sight. That lord, overcome with pain, surrounded by blazing braziers, finally turned his gaze piteously towards his sovereign, as if to beg [C] forgiveness because he could stand it no longer. [B] That King32 proudly and severely fixed his eyes on him to reproach him for his cowardice and faint-heartedness and simply said these words in a firm hoarse voice: ‘What about me? Am I having a bat’? Am I any more at ease than you are?’ Straightway afterwards that lord succumbed to the pain and died where he was. The King was borne away, half-roasted, not so much out of pity (for what pity could ever touch the souls of men who, for dubious information about some golden vessel or other that they would pillage, would grill a man before their very eyes, not to mention a King of so great a destiny and merit) but because his constancy rendered their cruelty more and more humiliating.

When he afterwards made a courageous attempt to effect an armed escape from so long a captivity and slavery, they hanged him; he made an end worthy of a prince so great of soul.

On another occasion they set about burning, at one time and in the same pyre, four hundred and sixty men – every one of them alive – four hundred from the common people, sixty from the chief lords of the land, all straightforward prisoners of war.

These accounts we have from the Spaniards themselves.33 They do not merely confess to them, they [C] boast of them and proclaim them. [B] Could it be34 in order to witness to their justice or to their religious zeal? Such ways are certainly too contrary, too hostile, to so holy a purpose. If their intention had simply been to spread our faith, they would have thought upon the fact that it grows not by taking possession of lands but of men, and that they would have had killings enough through the necessities of war without introducing indiscriminate slaughter, as total as their swords and pyres could make it, as though they were butchering wild animals, merely preserving the lives of as many as they intended to make pitiful slaves to work and service their mines: so that several of the leaders of the Conquistadores were punished by death in the very lands they had conquered by order of the Kings of Castile, justly indignant at their dreadful conduct, while virtually all the others were loathed and hated.35 To punish them God allowed that their vast plunder should be either engulfed by the sea as they were shipping it or else in that internecine strife in which they all devoured each other, most being buried on the scene, in no wise profiting from their conquest.

The gold actually received, even into the hands of a wise and thrifty Prince, corresponds so little to the expectations aroused in his predecessors and to the abundant riches discovered when men first came to these new lands (for while they draw great profit from them we can see that it is nothing compared with what they could have expected); that is because the Indians knew nothing about the use of coinage. Consequently all their gold was gathered in one place, used only for display and parade; their gold was moveable-goods handed on from father to son by several puissant kings who always worked their mines merely to make great quantities of vessels and statues to decorate their palaces and their temples. All our gold circulates in trade. We break it down, change it in a thousand ways, spread it about and so disperse it. Just imagine what it would be like if our kings, over several centuries, had likewise piled up all the gold they could find and kept it idle.

The peoples of the Kingdom of Mexico were somewhat more urban and more cultured than the other peoples over there.36 In addition, like us, they judged that the world was nearing its end, taking as a portent of this the desolation that we visited upon them. They believed that the world’s existence was divided into five periods, each as long as the life of five successive suns. Four suns had already done their time, the one shining on them now being the fifth. The first sun perished with all other creatures in a universal Flood; the second, by the sky falling on mankind and choking every living thing (to which age they ascribed giant men, showing the Spaniards bones of men of such proportion that they must have stood twenty spans high); the third, by a fire which engulfed and burnt everything; the fourth, by a rush of air and wind which flattened everything including several mountains; human beings were not killed by it but changed into baboons (what impressions cannot be stamped on the receptive credulity of men!). After the death of that fourth sun the world was in perpetual darkness for twenty-five years, during the fifteenth of which was created a man and a woman who remade the human race. Ten years later, on a particular day which they observe, the sun appeared, newly created; they count their years from that day. On the third day after it was created their old gods died; new gods were subsequently born from time to time. My authority37 could learn nothing about how they believed this fifth sun will die. But their dating of that fourth change tallies with that great conjunction of the planets which (eight hundred years ago, according to the reckoning of our astrologers) produced many great changes and innovations in the world.38

As for that ostentatious magnificence which led me to embark on this subject, neither Greece nor Rome nor Egypt can compare any of their constructions, for difficulty or utility or nobility, with the highway to be seen in Peru, built by their kings from the city of Quito to the city of Cuzco – three hundred leagues, that is – dead-straight, level, twenty-five yards wide, paved, furnished on either side with a revetment of high, beautiful walls along which there flow on the inside two streams which never run dry, bordered by those beautiful trees which they call molly. Whenever they came across mountains and cliffs they cut through them and flattened them, filling in whole valleys with chalk and stone. At the end of each day’s march there are beauteous palaces furnished with victuals and clothing and weapons, both for troops and travellers who have to pass that way.

My judgement on this construction takes account of the difficulty, which in that place is particularly relevant since they build using blocks never less than ten-foot square; they have no means of transporting them except to drag them along by the force of their arms: they do not even have the art of scaffolding, knowing no other method than to pile up earth against a building as it rises and then to remove it afterwards.

But let us drop back to those coaches of ours.

Instead of using coaches or vehicles of any kind they have themselves carried on the shoulders of men. The day he was captured, that last King of Peru39 was in the midst of his army, borne seated on a golden chair suspended from shafts of gold. The Spaniards in their attempts to topple him (as they wanted to take him alive) killed many of his bearers, but many more vied to take the places of the dead, so that, no matter how many they slaughtered, they could not bring him down until a mounted soldier dashed in, grabbed hold of him and yanked him to the ground.