My working hypothesis here is that, despite what Las Casas would like us to believe, the so-called prologue is not to be read as a repository of information regarding an extrinsic referent—the historical event of the Discovery—but as an essentially rhetorical composition, which is therefore referentially unreliable. Rather than serving an informative function that is, communicating accurate information about extrinsic events , the prologue has as its primary purpose a hortatory, or performative, function.
It seeks to engender an attitude in the recipients of the message, conducing its readers to action of a particular kind. To speak about the prologue's performative force is an essentially pragmatic consideration. It situates the act of reading in the interface between writer and addressee, words and their effects. In the case of the prologue, such a position is especially problematic because the original text has been lost since the sixteenth century.
The version we have was copied and manipulated by scribes and later edited by Las Casas. It is possible, however, to speculate about alternatives to the text's condition and status before Las Casas. Perhaps the most momentous consequence of his intervention was the explicit labeling of the text in question as a prologue—a simple, seemingly neutral operation that altered the way the account of the first voyage is read.
As the earliest Spanish dictionary—Covarrubias's, published in —notes, the adjective antiguo implies "priority" from ante , "before" and also "authority. The existence of this prologue, however, is not mentioned by Ferdinand Columbus, the other early biographer of Columbus to have consulted the primary sources directly. If the text Las Casas labels the prologue to the Diario was not a prologue until he made it so, then it may well have been what it most patently appears to be in form and pragmatics—the first letter about the voyage-in-progress from Columbus to the Crown.
Like most of what Columbus is known to have written, this text probably was conceived and executed as a letter. Perhaps it prefaced the account of the first voyage in the now lost manuscript Columbus presented to the Crown, but, more likely, it simply accompanied that manuscript as a covering letter. Nothing intrinsic to this Letter of as I will refer to the "prologue" from here on indicates that it was composed specifically to serve a prefatory role in the account of the first voyage, although the only extant copy is the one that prefaces the Diario.
Conceivably, the piece could have been written for mailing directly to Isabella and Ferdinand from the Canaries during the fleet's hiatus there for repairs on the first leg of the voyage. Consistent use of the present tense, however, indicates that this text was not written in chronological sequence with the voyage itinerary.
The diario proper begins with the entry for 3 August , with the departure from Palos narrated in first person plural of the preterite tense: Nor, apparently, was the Letter of composed after the account of the journey was completed, in typical prologue fashion, for the verb tenses imply that it was written in , some time after the fleet arrived in the Canaries.
For Columbus to have placed the letter at the very beginning of his account, as Las Casas did in the Diario , would have involved at the very least some revision and rearrangement of the account of the journey. More importantly, however, it would have constituted a violation of Columbus's promise to the Crown, made in the letter itself, that his account would be a strict, chronological, "day-by-day" record of the navigation.
The solemnity with which Columbus must have approached the composition of the Letter of is not difficult to imagine. Given the royal addressee and the circumstances in which the text was prepared, it must have been one of the most deliberate and carefully crafted pieces Columbus ever wrote. Far from any casual intimacy or spontaneity, understandable in the day-by-day account, the letter had to achieve the highest degree of epistolary eloquence. It would be expected to conform to the standards and guidelines of the ars dictaminis the art of letter writing , which prescribed the conventions of medieval correspondence, from the loftiest epistles to distinguished authorities to the most pedestrian of missives.
Following the guidelines recommended in dictaminal manuals, the Letter of opens with a lavish salutatio , or greeting, exalting Isabella and Ferdinand. There follows an elaborate exordium , often referred to as the captatio benevolentiae and considered the most important part of an epistle because in it the writer had to capture the addressee's attention, invoke his or her benevolence, and lead into the matter at hand by relating it to an attractive general principle or theme.
The exordium was the most rhetorically intense and demanding section of a letter since the reader's favor and receptiveness to the writer's purpose depended on its effective "priming" of the addressee. The historical errors for which the Letter of is famous are found precisely in this section. The exordium was typically followed by the narratio i. The narratio portion of Columbus's letter relates his taking leave of the sovereigns at Granada, his arrival at Palos and the equipping of the three caravels, his departure for the Indies by way of the Canaries, and the purpose of his mission: It presents a succinct, precise account of the enterprise to that point, correctly dated and in some cases detailed down to the day of the week and time of day when the events in question took place.
Presumably this was to be an illustrated account of the voyage. As a closing, it seems clumsy, for it leaves the letter uncomfortably open-ended. As an introduction to the subsequent day-by-day account of the voyage, it is equally clumsy, however, since it introduces not one but three different textual entities—the day-by-day record of the voyage, the cartographic "text," and the illustrated "libro"—only the first of which follows in the Diario. The final three lines of the letter allude to Columbus's zeal in carrying out his mission and are reminiscent of the popular rhetorical topic "idleness is to be shunned.
To rename as the Letter of the text Las Casas labeled the prologue to the Diario is to bring into relief important differences in the way the text functions if read as a letter to the Crown instead of as a prologue to the Diario.
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Though similar in their rhetorical effects, however, prologues and letters are not equivalent genres in their discursive pragmatics—a crucial distinction in understanding the significance of this Columbian text with respect to the larger context of writing in which it was produced. The hypothetical recontextualization of the text from a prologue to the Diario to Columbus's first direct in-progress communication with the Crown draws to the fore the text's most distinctive characteristics—its performative qualities and, more specifically, its predominantly hortatory thrust.
Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Golden Age / by Daniel Eisenberg
The majority of the documents generated by the Discovery are implicitly, if not explicitly, dialogic; that is, they are rejoinders in an ongoing colloquy in which information was requested, supplied, questioned, and interpreted, back and forth, by both the Crown and Columbus. This dialogue of texts was initiated by Ferdinand. The Letter of , as Columbus's first response, establishes not only the terms, but the tone and tenor of his voice in the exchange. It was in fact the first opportunity for Columbus to "speak" directly to the sovereigns in his official capacity as their envoy in the enterprise of the Indies.
He must have also been acutely aware that it was his first opportunity to speak to posterity since the letter, as part of the official record of the first voyage, would ultimately be preserved in the royal archives. Like many other Columbian texts, including the diarios of the three later voyages, however, neither the original nor any registered copy is known to have survived. Pragmatically speaking, the Letter of belongs to the group of prediscovery documents that defined the parameters of the enterprise and the nature of the relationship between the Crown and Columbus.
That the letter was conceived with an eye to the contractual prediscovery documents issued by the Crown is suggested by the insistent manner in which the year is repeated as the date of composition. The letter may not have reached the sovereigns until , with the account of the now-completed first voyage, but Columbus took great pains to establish this text as a document of the same vintage as the prediscovery texts that defined the scope of the enterprise and the soon-to-be admiral's privileges.
Despite Columbus's concerted effort to situate the text in the same historical moment as the prediscovery "Capitulaciones" and the "Carta de Merced," the letter's significance resides in the ways in which it deviates from those documents with which it sought to be identified. The "Capitulaciones" is an overtly imperialistic document, calling for the subjugation of all territories and peoples encountered by the expedition, as Rumeu de Armas has noted.
For example, the verbs referring to Columbus's duties and privileges— ganar, descubrir, regir acquire, discover, govern —describe actions that are accessories to the stated commercial goals of the voyage— comprar, trocar, hallar, haber buy, barter, locate, possess. Political domination is articulated, not as the primary goal of. The fundamental issue the "Capitulaciones" addressed was acquisition, not so much of territories or subjects, but of markets.
The type of expansion it prescribed was quite distinct from the reconquest of Muslim territories that had just culminated on the Iberian peninsula with the defeat of Granada. Surprisingly, there is no mention of any evangelical purpose whatsoever in the documents commissioning the expedition, and no religious were listed among the men who sailed with Columbus.
There were probably some ex-convicts, however, pardoned by the Crown by special decree 30 April to fill out the crew for the dangerous voyage—hardly what one would expect of a mission with evangelical intentions. The "Carta de Merced" describes and confirms, in highly technical terms, the political concessions and privileges promised Columbus in the "Capitulaciones," to be conferred upon the successful completion of the voyage.
Although this document does not delve into the economic aspects of the remuneration, neither does it mention evangelization as part of Columbus's obligations to the Crown or as grounds for the conferring of any of the royal favors. Yet it was the Columbian Letter of , and not the royal documents of commission and confirmation, that introduced the evangelical element into the contractual terms of the enterprise of discovery. The prediscovery documents generated by the Crown are also curiously enigmatic about Columbus's destination.
Not once is it explicitly stated as Asia, which most historians believe to have been the goal of the voyage. Although Rumeu makes a strong case that such ambiguity was intended to confound Portuguese spies, it is equally conceivable that the blanket terminology was intended to serve whatever eventuality might result, reflecting the degree of uncertainty at. In any case, Ferdinand Columbus concedes that his father expected to run into some large island in the western Ocean Sea before reaching Asia. As he writes in the Letter of And you commanded that I should not go to the East by land, by which way it is customary to go, but by the route to the West, by which route we do not know for certain that anyone has previously passed.
The passage could hardly be less ambiguous on the destination and the purpose of the voyage: Just as the Letter of rewrites the "Capitulaciones" by adding the religious dimension, it also revises the earlier document by deleting any mention of the economic goals that defined the enterprise in the Crown's contract. Under the circumstances, one would expect Columbus to have at least acknowledged the commercial transactions he had been commissioned to undertake. He did take the time in the Letter of to recapitulate almost verbatim the. Taken together, the supplying of the evangelical element so conspicuously absent in retrospect from the Crown's definition of the enterprise and the simultaneous suppression of the mercantile character of the voyage of discovery appear to share the same strategy.
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The Letter of responds to the documents of commission and confirmation daringly—by emendation. Columbus's detractors have argued that the omission of economic matters must be understood as an attempt to shift attention away from the meager yields of the first voyage, a resounding failure in commercial terms, by substituting souls for the gold that is so elusive in the Diario.
For this explanation to be plausible, however, the letter would have to have been written after the navigation was completed despite internal evidence to the contrary for the purpose of blunting or masking the disappointing economic returns of the voyage. But the pragmatics of the letter clearly situate it in the context of an ongoing process of communication with the Crown, a dialogue that exceeds the historical and textual limits of the first navigation. The economics of the first voyage and its immediate contractual conditions are of secondary importance when compared to the larger ideological economy of the enterprise.
Columbus was tied to Ferdinand and Isabella in a relationship of vassalage, with duties and obligations for all the parties concerned, a bond that transcended the specific circumstances of the first navigation. The Letter of refers to this greater economy and, in that context, the corrective tenor of Columbus's inaugural reply in his exchange with the Crown acquires its full significance.
The ideological terms of the relationship of vassalage as set forth by Columbus in this letter place his immediate obligations to the Crown on the plane of a higher, divine authority. The letter opens with a phrase Las Casas claimed was customary in Columbus's writing and demonstrated his extreme piety: For if the letter was written "in the name of Christ" so, the text tells, was the navigation itself carried out in his name:. Varela, 15; emphasis added.
The sentence is long and complicated by many clauses, but the syntax unambiguously albeit tortuously links Ferdinand and Isabella's decision to send Columbus sailing with the report he had given them earlier regarding the Grand Khan's ignored petition to be instructed in the Christian faith. Explained in this way, the voyage becomes the long-awaited and repeatedly requested Christian mission to the Tatar emperor's realm.
Here, the expedition's sole purpose is to minister the Faith to "so many peoples It would be difficult to exaggerate the self-consciousness and premeditation that must have accompanied the act of writing such a statement of purpose, especially one that was so obviously different from the Crown's. The initial draft must have been subject to various careful revisions before achieving a form worthy of its royal ad-.
And yet the letter contains blatant "errors" concerning the time and place of key historical events mentioned in the text. It affirms that in the year , in the same month of January , Ferdinand and Isabella took Granada and there made the decision to send Columbus on his embassy to the Grand Khan. Moreover, it states that in the same month and in the same place they decided to expel the Jews from Spain.
The historical record, however, shows that the facts were as follows: Granada surrendered in early January, the "Capitulaciones" commissioning Columbus were not signed until mid-April in Santa Fe, not Granada the last breakdown in the negotiations between the Crown and Columbus occurred precisely in January , and the decree of expulsion of the Jews was signed at the end of March, before Ferdinand and Isabella entered Granada. These chronological and geographical inaccuracies are especially surprising in a text presumably written by Columbus during the Palos-to-Canaries portion of the voyage, in early August , that is, just a few months after the events had taken place.
In linking disparate events chronologically and geographically, Milhou argues, Columbus was establishing an important conceptual connection among the Reconquest, the expulsion of the Jews, and his own mission to the Indies and the Grand Khan. Milhou also points out that this apparent attempt at ideological coherence conformed to the official political messianism that had dominated the royal policies of Aragon and Castile since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
This is arguably the most penetrating and cogent explanation offered to date for these so-called errors. Moreover, it has the additional elegance of not relying on the presumption of someone's bad faith to make its case. The Columbian enterprise had no expressed evangelical purpose until it was represented as such in the Letter of Perhaps this explains why the evangelical dimension of the colonization developed so slowly that the first native of the Indies was not baptized until late Yet the letter's considerable ideological novelty with respect to the other prediscovery documents must be situated in a rhetorical context if its point is not to be missed.
The sense of the enterprise this text expresses is ultimately not the product of abstract values suspended in some kind of historico-ideological soup, but is a specific articulation of those values in light of the pragmatics dictated by the circumstances. Above all, the letter's rhetorical profile indicates that it was fashioned in the dictaminal tradition as an instrument of persuasion; strict historiographical exigencies of accurate and disinterested recording were subsumed by the intent to influence royal favor and policies regarding territorial and commercial expansion.
A reading that looks to the Letter of only for its informative qualities i. Viewed rhetorically as well as ideologically, the misrepresentations become central elements in a discourse whose modality is predominantly figurative and whose communicative pragmatics are essentially persuasive. From this perspective, Columbus comes into focus as a man of letters, an adept practitioner of the medieval art of letter-writing, a genre that straddled the boundaries of poetics, oratory, and the notarial arts. The blending of literary, political, and juridical modes of discourse was quite typical of medieval epistolography; indeed, it was not unusual to find poets moonlighting as secretaries and notaries.
The most interesting part of the Letter of , considered rhetorically, is the exordium , where the famous "errors" appear. It is in this section that the figurative dimension of the letter's discourse predominates. Columbus's purpose appears to be simple enough at first glance—to give the background of historical events that immediately preceded, and therefore helped explain, the sovereigns'. Such a concurrence could only be achieved at the expense of historical accuracy. While ideological coherence may have been one of the desired results of this operation, both the process by which it was achieved and its effect on the reader have their source in epistolary rhetoric.
The letter manipulates the facts in order to predispose the reader to grant the writer the ends he seeks. We can speculate that the sought-after results included one or more of the following: If the Letter of constitutes a radical departure from the terms that defined the enterprise in the "Capitulaciones de Santa Fe" and the "Carta de Merced," it does so not by explicit statement and direct polemic, but through a figurative rewriting of the historical record. The letter purposefully violates historiographical norms in favor of greater rhetorical efficacy. Moreover, it rejects the objective juridical mode characteristic of the royal diction in the prediscovery documents to embrace an essentially tropological and hortatory mode of representation and argumentation.
The significance of the "errors," the import that makes them meaningful rather than simply mistaken, consists in the figurative relations the letter establishes among the historical events in order to render them parts of a greater whole—that is, the evangelical mission considered a fundamental duty of all Christians under the militant ecumenical Catholicism that inspired the Crusades, the Re-conquest, and the expulsions of heterodox elements from the Christian community.
In the fifteenth century the united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were the vanguard of this mission. The figurative coincidence of these events in the same month, year, and place transforms the time, January , and the place, Christian Spain represented through synecdoche by the conquered city of Granada, the last stronghold of the infidel on the Iberian peninsula , into a historical paradigm of Christian evangelism and a metaphor for expressing the meaning and purpose of Christian history. Originally a commercial endeavor, a trading expedition, it is reconceptualized as a Christian mission.
From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that the Letter of suppresses the original commercial rationale for the enterprise expressed in the documents of commission and confirmation. There is yet another important consequence of this inscription of the voyage into a Christian economy. The prediscovery documents established not only a verbal exchange between the Crown and Columbus, but a reciprocity of action, of duties, responsibilities, and rewards pertaining to the very specific set of circumstances of the first voyage.
Had this voyage been deemed insufficiently successful in economic terms, the commission undoubtedly would have been terminated. Under the new terms of the Letter of , the duty to perform and the obligation to fulfill falls to both Columbus and the Crown. From this angle, the "Capitulaciones" between the Catholic Monarchs and Columbus becomes a subcontract, as it were, under the greater Christian "contract" in which all the parties concerned were ultimately obliged to perform before God.
Once the commercial enterprise has been transformed into an evangelical mission to the Grand Khan, the apostolic duty as prescribed under the terms of Christian kingship resides with the Crown first of all. Columbus's obligations, in turn, transcend the strictly commercial and political limits prescribed in the "Capitulaciones. Varela, 16—17; emphasis added. His compliance in deed and word i. Columbus's duty to perform, as articulated in the Letter of , is ultimately that of any Christian vassal aiding his sovereigns in the fulfillment of their duty as Christian kings to the Pope and through him to God.
Additionally, this redefinition of the mission to the Indies makes Columbus and the Crown all protagonists of the same historical action. The letter thus includes Isabella and Ferdinand, not just as addressees in the salutatio , but as actors in the exordium. This adds an attractive twist to the captatio benevolentiae , allowing the recipients to admire themselves as copartners with the author in the saintly and heroic mission the letter so eloquently describes. Earlier I noted that the Letter of may have served as a cover letter to the account of the first voyage Columbus presented to the Crown upon his return, but it was probably not intended as a prologue in the literary sense in which Las Casas conceived of it in the Historia and the Diario.
I develop this argument more fully in the next essay, but here want to touch on the fundamental differences between reading the text as a letter and reading the same text recast by Las Casas as the prologue to the Diario. In ars dictaminis the epistle is conceived as a fundamentally communicative vehicle, within the context of specific pragmatic circumstances. Prologues are essentially supplemental, accessory texts whose sole reason for being is the main text that follows.
Moreover, prologues derive their significance principally in relation to the main text, functioning as a reader's guide to or commentary upon the arguments of the ensuing text. Typically, prologues contain very specific references to the text that follows, especially comments concerning its significance, sense, and the rationale for writing it. They are guides to interpretation, in effect "illustrating" the narrative.
The genre's primary function is to constitute a method or model for reading the main text. The Letter of performs these prefatory duties with respect to the Diario only partially and imperfectly. As noted earlier, the piece explicitly alludes to three distinct textual entities the voyage itinerary, the illustrated book, and the cartographic text , none of which had been completed at the time of its own composition according to its internal testimony. Its anomalous relation to the diario of the first navigation is especially pointed: In constructing a paradigm of the enterprise of discovery as a Christian mission, the letter deliberately transgresses the limits of the first navigation, and the account of it, in order to exhort the Crown to sustain a comprehensive enterprise of conversion of "all the peoples and lands of India.
Thus the Letter of becomes fully coherent only in the context of the prediscovery exchange between Columbus and the Crown, which established the duties, obligations, and rewards of all the parties concerned. As a rejoinder in this dialogue, the letter corrects and amends the original mercantile and political terms of the enterprise defined by the Crown, adding the missing religious element. In this way, it renders Isabella, Ferdinand, and Columbus ultimately accountable to a divine authority, and thus seeks the.
Crown's favor for future expeditions with more than a little spiritual arm-twisting. From the vantage point of this exchange, the Letter of comes into focus as an essentially hortatory composition, in the Augustinian sense of rhetoric as language crafted to serve and promote the new world order of Christian imperialism—even as it promoted Columbus's more worldly interests in future voyages. The factual "errors" render the letter an unreliable historical source but also one of the most influential pieces of writing ever produced.
Soon after, Spain's colonization of the Indies began to adjust to the terms and obligations set forth in the figurative discourse of the Letter of It was this text, and not the royal documents of commission and confirmation, that defined the Discovery as an evangelical enterprise, a negotium crucis business of the cross.
So begins the Diario of Columbus's first voyage, a text whose importance to scholars of the Discovery and lay readers alike would be difficult to overstate. Yet there is no convincing evidence to suggest that anyone since the sixteenth century has seen the complete text of the day-by-day account Columbus himself wrote. The original manuscript, the copy of it made at Queen Isabella's request, and any other copies that may have been made have all disappeared. Both men were extremely interested readers of Columbus. Ferdinand was involved in lawsuits pertaining to the succession of the Admiralty and ransacked the diarios in order to highlight the unique and heroic nature of his father's achievements.
While composing his summary, Las Casas was immersed in a lifelong political and literary campaign to defend the rights of the conquered and promote their peaceful evangelization. Thus began his advocacy of Indian rights, to which he remained committed some would say obsessed for the rest of his life. Among his principal political achievements, beginning with his appointment as priest-procurator of the Indies, was his successful lobbying of Charles V's consent to establish "towns of free Indians," where Spanish farmers and natives would work together to create a new Christian society.
He promoted sweeping reforms in colonial policy toward the Indians, many of which were enacted under the New Laws of He even managed to persuade the king to declare a moratorium on new conquests, while their legitimacy was being officially debated by Las Casas himself and others back in Spain. In he returned to Spain from the Indies for good. He would never again see the lands and peoples he continued to champion until his death in Yet many scholars consider this his most fruitful period. It was certainly his most prolific as a writer.
Many of the texts that passed through Las Casas's hands between the mids and the early s survive today only in the copies he made. No other readers, with the possible exception of Ferdinand, have had at their disposal the wealth of Columbian sources that Las Casas consulted for the composition of his histories and treatises. Traces of this intimate acquaintance with Columbus's writings are found throughout Las Casas's works, most clearly and profusely in the Historia de las Indias , his history of the early decades of Spanish colonization in the New World.
Much of Las Casas's history of the first decade, devoted to Columbus's voyages, was composed through the paraphrase or outright quotation of the Admiral's writings. Indeed, his principal "primary" source is the Diario , his own version of Columbus's diario of the first voyage; almost the entire Diario is paraphrased or quoted in the Historia. Las Casas's writings, like his political activities, were singlemindedly and without exception committed to liberating the Indians from the abuse of the colonizers and to promoting their peaceful evangelization.
All of his writings, both the overtly polemical and the historiographical texts, have a critical, even denunciatory edge intended to undermine the theory and practice of Spanish conquest. One target of his ire was the terminology in which Spanish relations with the Indians were articulated. The program of reform to which Las Casas had committed himself so completely and the accompanying ideological position he. As such, it would not need to have been a complete or even a representative version of the journal. Las Casas would have transcribed passages selectively, with an eye to those that could serve his purposes in future works.
The very nature of the Diario , with its clarifying interpolations, marginal commentaries, crossouts, and errors, suggests a deliberate yet hasty, utilitarian, and above all selective method of transcription colored by Las Casas's commitment to the indigenes' cause. On closer examination, it becomes evident that Las Casas produced the Diario through a systematic and comprehensive editorial manipulation of Columbus's account of the first navigation. Yet owing to the disappearance of the original diario and its copies, Las Casas's edition has been allowed to take its place, as if it were a literal transcription of Columbus's exact words.
The textual problems posed by Las Casas's editorial intervention in the transmission of the diario of the first voyage have been studied only partially, usually with the purpose of speculating on the integrity of his version with respect to the lost original and on his fidelity as a copyist. The authenticity of the text, on the other hand, has been debated since the manuscript was discovered at the end of the eighteenth century.
Carbia, both of whom considered much, if not all, of the edition a fraudulent fabrication. Fuson, for example, have pointed out probable lexical, orthographical, and grammatical interventions made by Las Casas in order to emend linguistic errors presumably committed by Columbus, whose command of Spanish was far from perfect. These critics have also identified probable errors committed by Las Casas, especially in the miscorrection of Italian and Portuguese interference in Columbus's Spanish, and in the spelling of certain Arawak terms.
However, after pointing out numerous instances of editorial. It is not my purpose here to evaluate the criticism on the Diario but rather to underscore that the vast majority of studies address the text's integrity at the level of content, its historiographical authenticity as the primary source on the Discovery. Yet by reducing Las Casas's role in the transmission of the text to that of a mere copyist, this type of criticism ignores the fundamental consequences of Las Casas's intervention in the transcription of Columbus's journal. His interventions in the Diario are frequently ideologically charged with the same interests that motivated his writing practices elsewhere, and they go far beyond simple changes to facilitate the faithful transcription of Columbus's words.
Las Casas not only summarizes and paraphrases Columbus; he insinuates himself as a new subject into the text by imposing on it an editorial rhetoric that could not have existed in the original journal. Through a selective process of transcription and omission, these editorial interventions altered the original text's content and, perhaps even more fundamentally, also altered the way in which the text can be read. To put it another way, the mediating presence of the editor's voice in the text intervenes in the process of reading and interpretation as well as in the Diario's representation of the Discovery.
Thus we must move beyond a historical-philological assessment of Las Casas's accuracy and fidelity as transcriber if we are to appreciate fully the definitive role Las Casas played in the transmission of Columbus's words. Las Casas insinuates himself as a new third-person subject in the text, and his editorial presence is felt at all levels. Perhaps the most salient intervention is an editorial commentary that assumes two distinct forms—evaluative and nonevaluative—both marked by a grammatical change of person.
Among the other operations per-. In every instance the intervention consists of a manipulation of the "exact words of the Admiral" through the introduction of a new editorial subject who comments, reorganizes, adds, subtracts, highlights, or subordinates various aspects of the original text. The editorial commentary introduces a new voice into the narrative, a voice that stands out from what are presented as Columbus's "very words" by assuming a metalinguistic and critical attitude toward them.
In the majority of cases this type of intervention is signaled by a change in grammatical person, although sometimes the insertion is marked only by a palpable semantic distance—typically, a detectable anachronism—from the context. In most modernized editions of the Diario , direct quotations appear in quotation marks and editorial interpolations are placed in parentheses. There are no such punctuation marks in the manuscript, however; only the editorial commentary itself signals the shift. Undoubtedly, some of Las Casas's interventions remain undiscernible as interventions.
The most common type of detectable metalinguistic intervention in the Diario comprises the phrases that introduce direct quotations, setting them apart from the indirect discourse. Moreover, by identifying them as Columbus's ipsissima verba, the editorial commentary actually privileges these passages through the increased authority the testimonial mode lends them.
The following passage, taken from the account of the exploration of Cuba, is representative of the numerous instances in which the narrative voice moves from third to first person when relating Columbus's impressions of the Indians:. He said that the Sunday before, the eleventh of November, it had seemed to him that it might be well to capture some people of that river in order to take them to the king and queen so that they might learn our language and in order to know what there is in that land, and so that, returning, they might be interpreters for the Christians, so that they would take on our customs and faith.
Because I saw and recognize says the Admiral that these people have no religious beliefs, nor are they idolaters. They are very gentle and do not know what evil is; nor do they kill others, nor steal; and they are without weapons and so timid that a hundred of them flee from one of our men even if our men are teasing them. And they are credulous and aware that there is a God in heaven and convinced that we come from the heavens; and they say very quickly any prayer that we tell them to say, and they make the sign of the cross,.
So that Your Highnesses ought to resolve to make them Christians: Here, the transition from indirect to direct discourse occurs precisely at the point where the narration of Columbus's intention to take slaves back to Spain ends and the exhortation to the Catholic Monarchs to commit themselves to the evangelization of the Indies begins.
The metalinguistic intervention "dize el Almirante" marks the exact start of the testimony on the idealized moral nature of the Indian as a creature living in a moral golden age—a state which, says Columbus, is especially apt for the implantation of the Christian faith. The change signaled here by Las Casas may seem unremarkable at first glance, a parenthetical clarification resulting in little if any interruption in the scanning of the eyes across the page. Yet it constitutes not merely a change of grammatical person but one of voice and tenor, as well.
His addition of "dize el Almirante" gives. The precise timing and timbre of this editorial intervention seem neither coincidental nor arbitrary but tactical and intentional. Invariably in the Diario the editorial commentary that marks the transition from indirect discourse to the first-person testimonial mode concurrently signals an ideological transition in the text. Typically, the first-person narration describes the Eden-like quality of the new lands and the innocence and gentleness of the Indians. In other words, Las Casas reserves the testimonial mode for the lyrical and idealizing themes, as distinct from the more prosaic and often exploitative aspects of the Discovery.
Throughout the Diario , Columbus's exhortations to the Crown to commit itself to a politics of evangelization are rendered by Las Casas as the Admiral's personal appeals, inscribed in the first person. The metalinguistic commentary also interrupts the third-person narration to reinforce the fidelity of the editorial voice, the narrative posture explicitly assumed by the new writing subject. There are also numerous interpolated comments that appear to have resulted from Las Casas's having carelessly slipped from Columbus's voice into his own without differentiation: But if there is any carelessness at all, it is in the maintaining of the illusion of scribal fidelity, not in any negligent breaching of it.
For Las Casas's edition of the Diario systematically violates the integrity of Columbus's words. Such breaks, when they are detect-. Indeed, Las Casas's manipulation of the Columbian discourse is so extensive and complex that it seems more accurate to describe the Diario as a rewriting, not a transcription, of Columbus's journal. Unless the original is recovered, it will remain impossible to determine with all certainty where and how Las Casas altered the text. However, only a reading that suppressed the editorial voice could arrive at the conclusion that the Diario is essentially equivalent to the original journal of Christopher Columbus.
That some readers have done so is both a tribute to Las Casas's dexterity and evidence of these readers' desire no doubt shared by Las Casas to suspend disbelief, to read around the cracks in the text, in order to maintain Columbus's authority, the text's integrity, and thus the Diario 's privileged status as the primary source on the Discovery.
As noted, we can identify many of the modifications performed by Las Casas relying exclusively on evidence contained in the Diario , without recourse to Columbus's original text. Far more interesting than the simple identification of these interventions, however, is the consideration of how they affect the process of signification in the edition, that is, how Las Casas's manipulation of the Columbian discourse may have altered the sense of the original, yielding a new account of the Discovery, different from whatever Columbus's may have been.
Once we approach the Diario not as a simple transcription but as an edition, we soon begin to see how Las Casas's editorial presence infuses the discourse with an alien intention, to wit, his own ideological goals. In using the third-person possessive su to identify the text he was working on as belonging to Columbus, Las Casas himself suggests a distinction between the diario and the text he was in the process of deriving from it. Mikhail Bakhtin explains the decisive role intentionality plays in defining the act of expression this way:.
To study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context of that real life toward which it is directed and by which it is determined. As a living socio-ideological concrete thing. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Through his editorial interventions Las Casas not only insinuates himself into Columbus's diario , he takes possession of it, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention, as Bakhtin puts it.
There are at least two layers of writing, two scriptural acts and two intentions, cohabiting in the Diario: Columbus's and Las Casas's. It is conceivable, even probable, that Columbus himself may have done several different redactions, so that the diario was born of accretion and revision rather than of a single creative act. Scribes may also have altered the original by introducing corruptions in the copy Las Casas worked with. Las Casas actually complained of having trouble making out certain passages, attributing the difficulty to scribal sloppiness or error. Royal documents confirm that two scribes, rather than the usual one, were responsible for producing the first copy of Columbus's account.
Nevertheless, for readers of the Diario the traces of those scribal pens are hardly detectable. The suspicion or even knowledge that the original text may have been altered several times along the way does not affect the reading process significantly. The Diario acknowledges the presence of only two writings: Both appear as producers of the text, although Las Casas would have one believe they did so in fundamentally different ways: Columbus was the author, Las Casas only the passive and faithful conduit of the Admiral's words.
Yet in his brief introduction Las Casas himself alerts the reader to the contingent nature of the Diario , asserting that it is mostly an abbreviation of another text. The Diario , then, is both derivative and creative. It incorporates Columbus's journal and so is dependent on it for its own existence, but it also modifies it. The relation of the Diario to the journal implies two separate and different acts of writing, Las Casas's and Columbus's, that have been brought together to constitute a single discursive whole.
The Diario is not Columbus's journal, nor even its equivalent; it is its substitute, a new text, the. Julia Kristeva coined the term "intertextuality" to argue that all texts are constituted through the assimilation and transformation of one text by another. This formulation of the text as an intertextual phenomenon threatened to become tautologous in its amplitude and has been refined subsequently by Kristeva herself and others, but it has usually retained two fundamental characteristics: Both these ideas, the transformational and intentional aspects of the intertextual process, are essential to understanding the effects of Las Casas's editorial interventions in generating the Diario from Columbus's journal.
The intertextual model generally has been used to identify the presence of assimilated utterances and analyze their function in the signifying process of a text; in other words, to scrutinize how text A is assimilated and transformed in the process of creating a new text B, or how new texts come into being precisely by assimilating other texts. This type of analysis implies an original autonomy of the text and its intertexts which, despite the transformation suffered by the intertexts, continues to be discernible and presumably verifiable by the reader.
It is through the semantic tension arising from the initial autonomy of the intertext and its subsequent assimilation—its new formal and semantic dependency—that new meanings are produced. Even a faithful paraphrase or summary of a text involves an interpretation and a selection based on the synopsis-writer's own criteria regarding the importance of certain portions of the text relative to others. As Genette has observed, no reduction is transparent, insignificant, or innocent: But a few observations on the nature and purpose of paraphrase as it was understood in rhetorical theory from classical antiquity into the Renaissance will give us a sense of the types of activities Las Casas may have undertaken.
In the rhetorical handbooks, paraphrasing is alternately described as the alteration of the form of expression of an idea to achieve the best possible way of conveying it, or as the variation of style with the retention of the sense of the original expression. Three basic modes are identified by classical rhetoricians: But in actual practice the paraphrased text often differed greatly from the original, retaining only the general sentiment expressed. Paraphrase was also used as an exegetical tool, whether as a stylistic rephrasing of authors whose vocabulary was no longer understood as often in the case of Homer or as a work with creative literary pretensions of its own.
The concept of paraphrase as a creative interpretation that transforms the original text through a change in form, not content, was the theoretical context in which Las Casas's reworking of Columbus's words took place. This is not to say that he was striving for a new literary creation to take the place of Columbus's journal.
He clearly understood his task as a historiographical one. But his reconstitution of the Columbian text in the Diario was informed by a rhetorical tradition that emphasized the creative dimension of linguistic expression no matter what the discipline. As the classical rhetorician Isocrates put it:. Therefore we should not avoid what others have spoken on before, but try to outdo our predecessors.
For past actions are the common inheritance of all of us, while their timely use, appropriate formulation and proper verbal expression are the private domain of the cultivated. As an editorial practice, paraphrase is inherently evaluative. Even the simplest of selections entails a devaluation of the material chosen for omission and a revaluation of the material that is retained and recontextualized. This process of reconstitution through.
In assuming the role of faithful amanuensis, Las Casas attempted to downplay the transformations suffered by the journal, yet the editorial insistence that what we have in the Diario are "the very words of the Admiral" does not negate the intertextual character of the relationship. Rather Las Casas has rendered the journal an intertext of itself.
Thus it may be more precise to characterize the relationship between the Diario and the journal as intratextual, especially since the autonomy of these texts, though evoked and even promoted in Las Casas's edition, is not verifiable in the absence of the original. Historical circumstances have made the point, more poignantly than any theoretical pronouncement could, that the perceived autonomy of the text and its intertexts is fundamentally a rhetorical phenomenon, not an empirical one. Despite the disappearance of the journal as a historical object, it is nonetheless important to readers that the Diario presents it as if it were an autonomous text.
The implied integrity and autonomy of the original journal is significant in this intertextual context precisely because the Diario renders its constituent parts in new rhetorical relations. The following passage from the Diario entry for 6 November is worth quoting at length because it contains the three most striking and most frequently discussed characteristics of the Columbian representation of the Discovery: Y son ellas de muy buen acatamiento, ni muy negro[s] salvo menos que Canarias.
They saw many kinds of trees and plants and fragrant flowers; they saw birds of many kinds, different from those of Spain, except partridges and nightingales, which sang, and geese, for of these there are a great many there. Four-footed beasts they did not see, except dogs that did not bark. And they saw a large quantity of cotton collected and spun and worked; in a single house they had seen more than five hundred arrobas ; and that one might get there each year four thousand quintales [of it]. The Admiral says that it seemed to him that they did not sow it and that it produces fruit [i.
It is very fine and has a large boll. Everything that those people have, he says, they would give for a very paltry price, and that they would give a large basket of cotton for the tip of a lacing or anything else given to them. They are people, says the Admiral, quite lacking in evil and not warlike; [and] all of them, men and.
It is true that the women wear a thing of cotton only so big as to cover their genitals and no more. And they are very respectful and not very black, less so than Canarians. I truly believe, most Serene Princes, the Admiral says here , that, given devout religious persons knowing thoroughly the language that they use, soon all of them would become Christian.
And so I hope in Our Lord that Your Highnesses, with much diligence, will decide to send such persons in order to bring to the Church such great nations and to convert them, just as you have destroyed those that did not want to confess the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that after your days for all of us are mortal you will leave your kingdoms in a tranquil state, free of heresy and evil, and will be well received before the Eternal Creator, may it please Whom to give you long life and great increase of your kingdoms and dominions and the will and disposition to increase the Holy Christian Religion, as up to now you have done, amen.
Today I pulled the ship off the beach and made ready to leave on Thursday, in the name of God, and to go to the southeast to seek gold and spices and to explore land. All these are the Admiral's words. He intended to leave on Thursday, but because a contrary wind came up he could not leave until the twelfth of November. For the sake of argument, let us accept the touted fidelity of Las Casas's version with respect to the content of Columbus's journal.
A more provocative question is whether the Diario 's sense of the Discovery is, therefore, the same as that conveyed by the journal. Several observations on this topic can be made even in the absence of the original text.
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First, one notices that Las Casas's editorial rhetoric in the passage presents the mercantilistic portions of the narrative indirectly, from the third-person point of view. The reader is given a valuation of the land, its flora and fauna and, especially, its fertility in producing marketable commodities.
The language in this portion of the passage is characterized by the proliferation of quantifiers mucho, harto, cantidad, quinientas arrobas, cuatro mil quintales, vil precio , underscoring the sheer abundance of goods. The quantifying tendencies of this mercantilistic discourse are abandoned in favor of comparative evaluation when the focus turns to the Indians. The idealizing discourse on the moral qualities of the natives is pre-.
The editorial comment "dize el Almirante" apparently is intended to highlight the testimonial character of Columbus's utterance, but since Las Casas never used quotation marks—these were imposed only much later by modern editors—the matter is ambiguous. In contrast, the Christian-evangelical discourse addressed to the Catholic Monarchs is thrice marked as being in the first-person testimonial mode: The latter formula serves not only to indicate the end of the quoted material but, more pointedly, to remind readers of the accuracy and authority of the statement.
The editorial voice accentuates the authority of these testimonial remarks by announcing that they are Columbus's ipsissima verba, a literal and faithful rendering of the original text, and by inserting comments in the first person into the third-person narrative. Whether Las Casas's paraphrases are reductive or accurate renderings of the words Columbus himself used and the emphasis he placed on them in his diario , we cannot say.
O sea, hasta El elegido no fue, sin embargo, un miembro de la rama de Ahuizotl, aunque es muy probable que para esa fecha, y tras el largo gobierno de su antecesor, don Juan Coatlhuitzilihuitl ya hubiera muerto. Las fuentes revelan que los alborotos del pueblo a lo largo de no se hicieron de esperar. Las fuentes nunca mencionan si dejaron descendencia y hasta el momento no hay rastro de la misma. Tizoc, Ahuizotl y Axayacatl. Ahora bien, la importancia de la carta radica en que reconoce estar embarazada y explica que por ese motivo no puede presentarse ante Ceynos para solventar un problema con unas tierras de su propiedad.
Los motivos son los siguientes: Empero, no tuvo la acogida esperada. En cualquier caso, a don Valeriano lo sustituyeron jueces-gobernadores de otros pueblos, e incluso su nieto en De esta alianza nacieron Axayacatl, Tizoc y Ahuizotl, quienes gobernaron sucesivamente en el altepetl.
A partir de la llegada del virrey Mendoza se restaura el linaje gobernante en Tenochtitlan. Anales de Juan Bautista: Anales de Tecamachalco, Mann Verlag, Berlin, Aguilar, La conquista de Tenochtitlan. Diego Luis de Moctezuma. Handbook of Middle American Indians en http: Gillespie, Susan D, Los Reyes aztecas. Origen de los mexicanos. Tira de Tepechpan, Tira de Tepechpan. Moctezuma Ilhuicamina tuvo un hijo llamado Iquehuac, pero fue asesinado. Ni el documento la representa como tal, ni ninguno otro. AGI, Audiencia de Mexico 95, exp.