The crusade for gold (1963)

Book Reviews from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Conquest of New Spain. Bernel Diaz. Translated by J. M. Cohen. Penguin Books, 6s.

Chronicles of the Crusades. Villehardouin and Joinville. Translated by M. R. B. Shaw. Penguin Books, 5s.

Many books have been written about Hernando Cortes and the conquest of Mexico. Many more still have been written about the Crusades. But very few books on either event came from those who were there at the time, and even of these only a handful have survived.

Penguin Books have recently had the happy idea of publishing translations of three of these personal histories. In the first, The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Diaz, a humble soldier in the Cortes expedition, gives his account of how several hundred Spanish adventurers with a few dozen horses invaded the powerful Aztec empire, overthrew its ruler Montezuma, and conquered his capital of Mexico. The second book, Chronicles of the Crusades, combines two stories: of the Fourth Crusade seen through the eyes of a French feudal lord, Villehardouin, and of the Seventh by a later compatriot Joinville.

Roughly three hundred years separate these two periods, three hundred years which saw the final crumbling of feudalism before the forces of expansion in which the discovery of the New World played such an overwhelming part. The books reflect the deep gulf between the two societies, but even more interesting and striking is the way they reveal the factor common to both of them—the drive of economic interest.

All three histories purport to be written by religious men. Both the chroniclers of the Crusades tell us frequently of their Christian mission, of their joy at the “taking of the Cross" against the Saracen and the infidel. And throughout his story Diaz tells us again and again of the way he and his companions shattered the Mexicans’ “heathen idols” and of how they tried to get them to see the “true faith.” All their disasters (and they were many) were sent by God to punish them for their misdeeds, and their escapes and triumphs were due solely to his intervention.

But through all three stories comes the asides, the complaints, the intrigues, the reproaches, the admissions, that make it clear that whatever the ostensible reason for their campaigns, the real motive was wealth, land, booty, and loot.

Gold is the word that weaves its way into every thread of Diaz’s story. Gold was what he and his companions were after, the fabulous mines in the west which would make them rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Every settlement through which they passed on their long road to Mexico was assessed in terms of the gold it possessed; every present given by Montezuma in an effort to buy them off was meticulously valued in pesos. Gold was the prize for which they went through innumerable and fantastic hardships and for which so many of them died—to have their hearts torn from their still living bodies and their limbs thrown to their opponents to feast upon. And, supreme irony of all, and as so often happens, it was the leaders and rulers who got most of the spoil and Diaz and his fellows nothing.

Our two Crusaders tell the same story. It was the Venetian merchants who supplied the ships and provisions for the Fourth Crusade—at a good price, plus one-half “of everything we win." And whatever may have been the depth of religious conviction of the two authors, it is certain that most of their companions embarked on their adventure for the booty to be won and the lands to be conquered. The Fourth Crusade, in fact, never got further than Constantinople and ended in a bloody struggle between the French and Germans against the Greeks who were, incidentally, also Christians and whose lands bad been seized by the Crusaders. As for the Seventh Crusade, the feudal barons who left so eagerly in search of loot and land were soon tempted to leave their “saintly king Louis'’ in the lurch when they found the opposition keener than they had expected. Louis himself was captured and had to buy himself back to France at the cost of a heavy ransom. The whole campaign was in fact a fiasco, ruined by the greed of the big feudal lords and their primary concern for their own economic interests.

It should be remembered that the wealth to permit these feudal aristocrats to go out on their jaunts, either for religious or just for mercenary gain, was extracted from the vast inert, mass of Western European serfdom. Then, as now, a small minority of privileged lived on the backs of a majority who did all the useful work of society, pawns who were passed from one feudal lord to another as the tide of battle fluctuated between the various warring actions.

By Diaz's time this system had virtually broken up and a new one was evolving. He was only one of many who thought to get rich quick by volunteering for expeditions to open up new lands. The old order was disappearing and the world becoming bigger, but much of it was illusion. Most of them died, or came back crippled or broken with disease. Their leaders, true, often shared the same hardships but did have somewhat of a better chance of looking back and considering them worthwhile. But the real winners, as always, were the big men behind the scenes who financed the expeditions—and, of course, the rulers of the time who couldn't lose anyway because they were automatically entitled to a fifth of everything that was going.

Courage, adventure, cruelty, and privation—these two books recount such things on a scale to make us marvel. But, underlying everything, they confirm once more that then, as now, history was shaped by economic interest. The holy cross might have stood out brightly on the banners, but it was the urge for gold, land, booty, and profit, that burned in the breasts of most of those who fell in behind.

Stan Hampson