CONQUISTA

Germans played a minor but nevertheless notable role in the European expansion to the New World. In the first half of the sixteenth century, when Spain embarked on the conquest of the Central and South American mainland, merchant houses from the south German imperial cities of Augsburg and Nuremberg were among the most important bankers of the Spanish crown.

In 1519, the Augsburg firms of Jacob Fugger and Bartholomaus Welser financed the election of Charles V as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and over the next three decades the Fuggers, Welsers, Herwart, and Sebastian Neid- hart, among others, continued to advance large sums to the Spanish crown. These financial activities paved the way for direct participation in transatlantic commerce and the conquest of the South American continent.

Initially the German firms set up warehouses (factories) in Seville, the Spanish entrepot for trade with the West Indies. In i525 the printer Jacob Cromberger and his son-in-law Lazarus Nurnberger were the first Germans to receive permission to enter the American trade, which had until then been exclusively reserved for Spaniards. Lazarus Nurnberger sent agents to the island of Santo Domingo, where they exported sugar and precious metals and imported textiles, metal goods, and books. One of his agents on Santo Domingo, the carpenter Bartholomaus Blumel (Flores) from Nuremberg, traveled to Peru in 1536, accompanied Pedro de Valdivia on the expedition that led to the conquest of Chile (1540—1541), and acquired an extensive landed estate there. Lazarus Nurnberger also traded in pearls and slaves and represented the interests of leading south German merchant houses in Seville.

Even before Charles V opened the American trade to foreign merchants in 1526, the Welser representatives Ambrosius Talfinger and Georg Ehinger received permission to travel to the New World and establish a factory on Santo Domingo.

In March 1528 Heinrich Ehinger and Hieronymus Sailer, acting for the Welsers, concluded a treaty with the emperor that gave them jurisdiction over the territory that became known as Venezuela. Ehinger and Sailer agreed to build three fortresses, found two towns, and settle each of them with 300 colonists. Moreover, they were to administer the province, distribute land among the colonists, and Christianize the Indians. In return, they received a number of special privileges. These included the right to transport 4,000 African slaves across the Atlantic, mining concessions in Venezuela and the neighboring province of Santa Marta, monopolies on Venezuela’s foreign trade and on the production of salt, tariff reductions, and the right to send three commercial vessels directly from South America (Santo Domingo) to Flanders.

Since no documents concerning the Welsers’ plans for Venezuela have been uncovered, their motives remain obscure. Some scholars have claimed that the firm, which was also engaged in mining activities in Saxony and Bohemia at the time, was primarily interested in exploiting precious metals, and the Welsers did send about fifty miners from Saxony to the New World. Others have argued that the firm’s primary aim was the conquest of a rich Indian civilization. Most likely, the Welsers initially considered a range of economic options that also included plantation agriculture and trade in tropical goods. In any case, the Welsers’ governors and military leaders in Venezuela—Ambrosius Talfin- ger, Nikolaus Federmann, Georg Hoher- muth, and Philipp von Hutten—soon fixed their attention on the extraction of booty from the region’s Indians and conducted a series of military expeditions into the interior parts of Venezuela and neighboring Colombia. The origins of the myth of El Dorado, an Indian cacique whose body was ritually covered with gold, lie in these entradas, which may have covered a total distance of 20,000 kilometers (about 12,500 miles).

Ambrosius Talfinger founded a settlement on Lake Maracaibo on his first expedition in 1530 and was killed on his second entrada to the interior parts of the province in 1532.

Nikolaus Federmann, whose narrative of his first expedition through the llanos (lowlands) of southeastern Venezuela has survived, came closest to the goal of conquering a rich Indian people on his second entrada, when he succeeded in crossing the Andes to the Colombian valley of Cundinamarca. Unfortunately for him, the Spanish conquistador Goncalo Jimenez de Quesada had arrived there before. Although Quesada, Federmann, and a third conquistador, Sebastian de Benalcazar, jointly founded the city of Bogota in 1539, Spain eventually rejected the Welsers’ claims to Colombia. The last and longest of the expeditions was headed by Philipp von Hutten, a Franconian knight who had already participated in Georg Hohermuth’s 1535—1538 foray, and Bartholomaus Welser the younger. Their arduous five-year journey (1541—1546) was a complete failure in economic terms, and upon their return the two leaders were murdered by rival Spanish officers. The crown suspended the Welsers’ jurisdiction in 1546 and, after extensive litigation, officially took the province away from them a decade later.

Contemporaries like the clergyman Bartolome de las Casas and later Spanish chroniclers have accused the Welser governors and captains general of treating the Indians with particular brutality and savageness. Although their accounts are often biased, the German conquistadors were certainly no less hesitant than their Spanish counterparts to recruit Indian laborers by force, torture and kill natives, and loot and burn their villages. During the 1530s and 1540s, the Indian slave trade was one of the major activities of the Venezuelan colonists. Why the Welsers abandoned other economic goals in favor of conquest remains a matter of debate, but there is evidence that the provincial governors, who were indebted to the firm and interested in quick profits, discouraged and even sabotaged a more farsighted policy of colonization and development.

Compared to the Welsers, the role of other German merchant houses in the conquest of South America was much more limited.

For a while the Fuggers were interested in obtaining a South American province for themselves. In 1531 their representative Veit Horl even negotiated a treaty with the Spanish crown that would have given the firm jurisdiction over present-day Chile, but it was never ratified. Four years later, the Nuremberg branch of the Welsers and the Augsburg merchant Sebastian Neidhart financed and outfitted two ships of the fleet that carried the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Mendoza and his army to the La Plata region. Mendoza founded the city of Buenos Aires but did not discover the rich Indian civilization he had hoped for. One

of the roughly eighty German participants, the Bavarian Ulrich Schmidel, wrote an eyewitness account that constitutes one of the most important sources on this phase of Spanish colonization.

Mark Haberlein

CONQUISTA

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