What was at stake? Critics across Europe also actively disputed Spain’s claim to the Americas. With the Reformation, Protestant rulers had little regard for the papal bulls granting dominion to Spain. Even Catholic monarchs such as Henry VII of England and Francis I of France held differing opinions from those of the Spanish Crown about the role of papal intervention in secular matters of state.15 They argued that papal authority did not extend to granting the Americas to Spain, and they financed their own voyages under John Cabot and Jacques Cartier to explore the lands north of the territories settled by Spain. Spanish jurists soon found themselves having to defend papal authority against the wave of disturbing images in manuscripts and printed books surging across Europe.16 Theodor de Bry produced vivid engravings of Amerindians and Protestants ravaged by Spanish soldiers and the Inquisition in his 1594 and 1596 editions of Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del Mondo Nuovo (1565).17 Other polemical images critical of Spanish dominion conflated Spaniards with cannibals in their Eucharistic devotion, fanning rival nations’ expansionist claims and aiming to challenge Spain’s moral title to the Americas.18 As late as the seventeenth century, Spanish jurist Juan de Solórzano y Pereira continued to defend the Crown’s title to the Americas. He argued that indigenous peoples possessed humanity and a right to dominium, and only papal support for their conversion to Christianity to ensure their salvation justified Spanish rule.19 The English and Dutch built up fleets to challenge Spanish dominance in the Caribbean, yet Spanish defenders of papal power, as late as Solórzano, hoped their bid for the “spiritual welfare” of indigenous peoples would stave off English, French, and Dutch interference with their activities, by articulating a legal basis for conquest.20
The Spanish sovereigns’ determination to present themselves as Catholic monarchs, who complied with the papal bulls that established their title to the Americas, had a profound impact on their imperial policies. These included religious restrictions on settlement and emigration. Official policies issued by the Crown in royal decrees were often met with differing attitudes and projects on the ground. As a result, they issued restrictions on the emigration of recent converts to Christianity—Moriscos and conversos. Emigrants also had to prove their upstanding behavior and pious comportment. Because it was a matter of faith, church and state both defended these exclusions, through institutions such as the Inquisition and the ecclesiastical courts, and even the Casa de Contratación. Individuals such as Estevanico in the early and still fluid period of exploration had an opening to the Americas, yet they were always vulnerable to accusation. As valuable as he had been to Cabeza de Vaca and Friar Marcos de Niza, the vivid description of his downfall by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado tells a more complicated story.
ARABIC SPEAKING INTERMEDIARIES IN THE EARLY ATLANTIC VOYAGES
A number of Europeans, including Magellan and Columbus, recruited or captured Arabic speakers to act as interpreters in the lands they traded in or conquered, due to their perceived linguistic skills.21 They followed patterns well established by the Portuguese, who left individuals behind to learn local languages and then picked them up again for future voyages. In the case of many of the Arabic speakers, the Spanish and Portuguese also used captives from North Africa or Asia to act as interpreters in their first meetings with local rulers to establish trading relationships. For example, in his first voyage to the Antilles, Columbus brought as interpreter Luis de Torres, who was familiar with several languages, including Hebrew and some Arabic.22 Portuguese chronicler and historian João de Barros described how Pedro Álvares Cabral used speakers of Arabic and West African languages to try to communicate with the peoples of coastal Brazil. When Cabral realized indigenous peoples did not understand these languages, he switched strategies to leave a group of criminal exiles (degradados) behind to learn the local languages.23 Bringing Arabic speakers on initial voyages must have seemed an obvious choice to the Portuguese who were familiar with seizing Berbers during their attempts to conquer parts of North Africa, then carrying these men and women south as interpreters to sub-Saharan African ports.24 On Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India, Arabic speakers facilitated trade with Muslim merchants in Mozambique and acted as interpreters during both his and Cabral’s encounters with the Muslim ruler of Calicut.25 Estevanico’s home city of Azemmour, a Portuguese protectorate in the Kingdom of Morocco from 1508 to 1540, was described by Leo Africanus as attracting Portuguese merchants in the 1520s who had been trading in Africa since the conquest of Ceuta.26
Estevanico’s involvement in the Pánfilo de Narváez and Friar Marcos de Niza expeditions demonstrates the precarious turns his role as interpreter could take. Following several years of wandering what is today the American Southwest, in 1536, Estevanico and Cabeza de Vaca finally stumbled across a group of “Christians,” including Captain Diego de Alcaraz who had participated in Nuño de Guzmán’s 1530–31 conquest of Nueva Galicia. Having learned the local trade language that enabled him to communicate with the peoples of northern Mexico, Estevanico returned with indigenous escorts. They guided the remaining two survivors of the Narváez expedition, Andrés Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo, and a group of six hundred indigenous peoples from Sonora and Sinaloa, back to join the Spaniards in San Miguel.27 The reaction of some Spaniards, according to Cabeza de Vaca, was to try to enslave them, and Estevanico had to persuade the Indians that they were not like the other Spaniards. Although many Spaniards in the first entradas into “hostile” frontier regions hoped to enslave Amerindians, others acknowledged the Crown’s emphasis on evangelization and limiting enslavement and personal service, so they spoke out.
In 1537 Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza purchased Estevanico from Andrés Dorantes to act as a guide, being a “persona de razón” who had prior knowledge of northwestern New Spain.28 In 1539 Estevanico joined the expedition of Friar Marcos de Niza. The friar describes him as having perished alongside three hundred Indian allies near the legendary city of Cíbola, amidst the Zuni pueblos, although they most likely never made it beyond northern Sonora.29 A more contradictory and negative portrayal is provided by the 1540 report of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. He had written to Viceroy Mendoza that Estevanico was killed because “the Indians of Chichilticale said that he was a bad man, and not like the Christians who never kill women, and he killed them, and because he assaulted their women, whom the Indians love better than themselves.”30
Estevanico’s contradictory characterization as both a good Christian and “person of reason,” and as a violent and unpredictable man, lie in his liminal status in the colonial documentation as being labeled a negro alárabe. Alárabe was a loaded term in the period, which was associated with Islam and used by sixteenth-century writers to refer to the seminomadic peoples inhabiting North Africa.31 Regardless of Estevanico’s actual background, the mere association with alárabes would have raised concerns among his contemporaries. Estevanico and his supporters would have had to constantly justify his position and his behavior as a good Christian. For example, when Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza requested that the king grant encomiendas to the first conquerors of New Spain, and by extension their direct descendants, he portrayed his father’s slave Estevanico as a Christian martyr who was “shot through with arrows like a Saint Sebastian, in the service of His Majesty.”32
Estevanico is perhaps the best-known interpreter among this group of Arabic speakers in New Spain. Yet other enslaved North Africans and Moriscos learned indigenous languages upon their arrival in the Americas.33 Knowledge about captivity in the Muslim world played a role in everyday interactions between Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the so-called frontier regions of Spanish America. During the 1530s, Spaniards brought interpreters to northern New Spain, and there were some who were Moriscos or North African Muslims conversant in Arabic dialects. Their perceived facility with languages made these individuals attractive candidates for becoming naguatatos, or translators of Nahuatl, the language spoken in much of central Mexico.34
Records from the earliest entradas into northern New Spain during the 1530s reveal the growing need for interpreters to translate between Spaniards and their Nahuatl speaking allies, and