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Puritan Conquistadors
Puritan Conquistadors
Iberianizing the Atlantic,
1550–1700

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

stanford
university
press
Stanford,
California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California

© 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior

University. All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of a University

Cooperative Society Subvention Grant awarded by The University
of Texas at Austin.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy-
ing and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system
without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-

quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge.
Puritan conquistadors : iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 /
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn -13: 978-0-8047-4279-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn -10: 0-8047-4279-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn -13: 978-0-8047-4280-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn -10: 0-8047-4280-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. America—History—To 1810—Religious aspects—
Christianity. 2. America—Civilization—European
influences. 3. Colonization—Religious aspects. 4. Puritans—
New England—Intellectual life. 5. Spaniards—America—
Intellectual life. 6. Demonology—America—History.
7. Indians, Treatment of—America—History. 8. Devil in
literature. 9. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—
History and criticism. 10. Spanish American literature—
To 1800—History and criticism. I. Title.
e18.82.c36 2006
970.01—dc22 2006005162

Typeset by BookMatters in 10/13 Electra

For my dad, whose life first taught me to see our continent whole
For Jeff Speicher, whose mind and friendship I cherish
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi

1 Introduction 1
2 The Satanic Epic 35
The Iberian Satanic Epic 39
The Satanic Epic in the Catholic Atlantic 50
The Elizabethan Satanic Epic 54
The Puritan Satanic Epic in America 68
The Spanish Conquest as Hell 71
Our “Elizabethan” Lady of Guadalupe 76
Iberian Traditions in Milton’s Paradise Lost 80
Conclusions 81
3 The Structure of a Shared Demonological Discourse 83
Satan’s Tyranny 84
Cannibalism 88
Collective Harassment and Amerindian Emasculation 95
The Geographical Mobility of Demons: The Geopolitics of Evil 97
Satan: God’s Ape in America 100
Satan and Typology: The Aztecs’ History as the Inverted
Mirror Image of the Israelites’ 104
Driving out Demons with the Cross 110
Anglican Crosses/ Puritan Bibles 115
Conclusions 118
4 Demonology and Nature 120
The Tempest 121
Storms 123
Chapter 1
Contents

Plants 126
Monsters 132
Satanic Snakes 136
Catholic Providence in Nature 141
Protestant Providence in Nature 152
America as False Paradise 155
Conclusions 176
5 Colonization as Spiritual Gardening 178
Gardening as Type and Metaphor 179
Flowers and Patriotic Anxieties in Spanish America 186
Puritan “Plantations” 205
Conclusions 214
6 Toward a “Pan-American” Atlantic 215
Bolton’s Legacy 216
The National and the Global 218
The Comparative and the Transnational 220
Sudden Divergence 221
Could Spanish America Ever Be Normative? 223
The Exclusionary Force of the Narrative of “Western Civilization” 224
Historiographical Barricades 226
Ideas . . . Where? 227
Should Latin Americans Embrace the Atlantic? 230
Away from Tragic Narratives 231

Notes 235
Select Bibliography 289
Index 319

viii
 Illustrations

1.1. Anonymous, The Conquest of Peru 2

1.2. The Cross protects Franciscan friars 4
1.3. The twelve labors of Hercules 6
1.4. David and Goliath 8
1.5. The Beast of the Apocalypse represented in the lakes of the
central valley of Mexico 10
1.6. Luis de Riaños, The Road to Hell 13
1.7. “Emblem of things the friars do in the Indies” 21
1.8. “Tandem aquila vincit” from Lope de Vega, La Dragontea 25
2.1. The faithful maiden Spain slays Leviathan 37
2.2. Philip IV subdues Neptune 38
2.3. Three heroes cross the ocean, guided by Providence 51
2.4. The hero confronts Leviathan at sea 55
2.5. John Smith as crusading knight 64
2.6. John Smith and the devil 67
2.7. The Miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe 78
3.1. The devil enslaves Amerindians 85
3.2. A sinner in chains 86
3.3. Anonymous, Hell (detail) 89
3.4. Cannibal detail of Fig. 3.1 90
3.5. Bodies hang in a Peruvian slaughterhouse 91
3.6. Preternatural signs announce the defeat of the Chilean natives 108
3.7. Caribbean natives attack the Cross of la Vega 115
4.1. Aerial demons attack Amerindians 127
4.2. Dragon image found inside the fruit of the sangre de drago tree 131
4.3. Satan herding dormice in the forests of Slovenia 133
4.4. The Patagonian su and the Chinese bat 134
4.5. Teuhtlacocauhqui, or Domina Serpentum 137
4.6. Frans Post, Franciscan cloister in Igaraçú, Brazil 139

ix
Illustrations

4.7. The duc de Guise as American king, with American livery

servants, squires, and grooms 140
4.8. Our Lady of Guadalupe drives away demons 145
4.9. Passionflower and vine 148
4.10. Tree in the shape of a crucified Christ, Chile 151
4.11. The weeds of idolatry are rooted out from the Peruvian garden 156
4.12. Sir Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, slays the Dragon
of Vice and Temptation 159
4.13. Substituting the Cross for the devil 161
4.14. America as a false paradise. 164
4.15. Ballet at the court of Louis XIII representing the captivity
of Rinaldo 166
4.16. Ulrich Schmidel as a knight in America and Brazil as an
island paradise 169
4.17. America as a garden with golden apples and Golden Fleece 170
4.18. America rescued by a knight from the clutches of the devil 173
4.19. Herbals and Hercules 175
5.1. Sor Catalina de Jesús María Herrera 179
5.2. Fresco of anonymous martyr and miracle of the Martyrs
of Gorcum (1623) 180
5.3. José de Ibarra, Christ with Flowers in the Garden of the Church 183
5.4. Mysteries of the rosary 185
5.5. Mariana de Jesús, the Lily of Quito 187
5.6. Rosa de Lima 188
5.7. The Rose of Bohemia 191
5.8. The Fertile Garden of the Franciscans 193
5.9. True treasures of the Indies 196
5.10. Christ as the Tree of Life 198
5.11. Maria Josefa de San Felipe Neri and Francisco Santa Ana 200
5.12. Connecticut Seal 206
5.13. Title page from William Perkins’s A Graine of Musterd-Seede 208
6.1. Traditional Indians as modern Latin America 229

x
 Acknowledgments

The day we went to the health care center, my father was scared. While
visiting the United States, he had suddenly developed double vision, a neu-
ropathy of the sixth cranial nerve pair typical of diabetics. Fortunately for
all of us, he once had served in the U.S. Army and was entitled to medical
care from the Department of Veterans Affairs. My father is a veteran of the
Korean War. After moving to the United States from Ecuador at age twenty
in 1950, he was drafted. The war proved a blessing for him, because the GI
Bill allowed him to pay for college and go to Mexico to study. In Mexico, he
obtained a degree in medicine and a doctorate in cellular biology. He soon
became a professor and full-time researcher at the Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México (UNAM). In the meantime, he met my mother, a
Colombian studying architecture in Mexico, got married, and had children
(myself included). In 1968, my father signed documents supporting the
student movement of Tlatelolco, and since foreigners were not supposed to
get involved in national politics, UNAM did not renew his contract. So, in
1969, after having lived in Mexico for fourteen years, he (we) left for Quito,
his hometown. In Ecuador, my father went on to (re)build a successful
career. Although he was never good at making money, he was good at creat-
ing institutions. He established a blood bank and a hematology service from
scratch and over the years created a sophisticated laboratory of hematological
research; working under adverse conditions, he managed to publish several
articles in leading hematological journals. Over the years, he saw three of
his four children leave Ecuador, just as he had once left. Now, he travels all
over the world visiting his children. The day he suddenly developed double
vision, he was visiting me. Being relatively poor by U.S. standards, he could
not afford specialized private medical care, so we turned to the Veterans
Administration.
My father is short, thin, and looks “Hispanic,” and the VA doctor who
saw him immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was a case of
badly managed diabetes in a poor, uneducated Hispanic man. He brusquely

xi
Introduction
Acknowledgments

asked my father about Ecuador: Are you “primitive” there? Do you have
cars? Buildings? Highways? TVs? My father and I smiled, half puzzled
and half amused, and said nothing. This book, in part, seeks to answer the
doctor’s questions. It is also meant to be a tribute to my father, that most pan-
American of men.
Many people have helped me complete this book. Jeffrey Speicher has
always been there for me. He has read drafts of every chapter, offering sty-
listic suggestions and witty criticism. Richard Kagan read a version of the
entire manuscript, and his thoughtful advice prompted me to reorganize
the book. I got a good deal of research done while I was a fellow at the
Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard (2001–2). At the
center, Joyce Chaplin and Charles Rosenberg nourished me intellectually,
while Pat Denault took care of my everyday concerns. Lino Pertilo (mas-
ter) and Sue Weltman and Francisco Medeiros (administrators) offered my
family and myself housing at Eliot House and made our stay at Harvard
memorable. The unparalleled resources and knowledgeable librarians of
the Fine Arts, Houghton, and Widener Libraries at Harvard proved a bless-
ing. Part of the research and writing was done at the Huntington Library
on an Andrew Mellon Fellowship (2003–4). I not only enjoyed the splendid
gardens there but also the support of a most professional staff of librarians.
I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Roy Ritchie, director of research. The
remainder of the writing was done at the University of Texas at Austin, where
I enjoyed a Harrington Faculty Fellowship (2004–5), and I am grateful to
Larry Faulkner, president of University of Texas, for his generous invita-
tion. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Susan Dean-Smith, Christin Marcin,
John Dollard, and Victoria E. Rodriguez. Now that I am permanently at
the University of Texas I have felt welcomed by my new colleagues at the
History Department. But this book could not have been written without
the emotional and professional support of my former colleagues at the State
University of New York, Buffalo (SUNY–Buffalo). Erik Seeman in particular
has been an endless source of information on Puritan studies, and Jim Bono
has been unsparing in his friendship.
Bernard Bailyn, Ralph Bauer, Patricia Gardina Pestana, Richard Godbeer,
Jean Howard, Brian Levak, and Erik Seeman read different drafts carefully,
offered guidance and countless references, and often forced me to rethink
all or parts of my argument. Jim Sidbury, John Slater, John Smolenski, Dan
Usner, and Walter Woodward provided key references at different times in
the evolution of my research. Alison Frazier and Neil Kamil opened their
graduate seminars at the University of Texas to try out my argument, lending

xii xii
 Acknowledgments
Introduction

a sympathetic ear. I also owe thanks for feedback on various chapters to the
following friendly audiences: the USC–Huntington Early Modern Studies
seminar; the History Department at the University of Texas–Austin Brown
Bag (Bruce Hunt, Dolora Wojciehowski, James Sidbury, Michael Stoff,
and Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo); the “Imperial Identity: Construction and
Extension of Cultural Community in the Early Modern World” conference
at the University of Minnesota (Ted Farmer); the “Beyond the Line: The
North and South Atlantics and Global History, 1500–2000” conference at
SUNY–Buffalo; the Latin American Studies Program at Miami University of
Ohio (Charles Ganelin); the History Department of Florida State University,
Tallahassee (Robinson Herrera, Matt Chides, and Joan Cassanovas); the
History Department at the University of Pittsburgh (Donna Gabaccia, Marcus
Reddiker, and John Markoff); the History Department of the University of
California, San Diego (Clinton D. Young; Erick van Young); the Institute for
Advanced Historical Studies, University College, London (Felipe Fernández-
Armesto and David Brading); the Center for History, Society and Culture at
the University of California, Davis (William Hagen, Tom Halloway, Charles
Walker, and Andrés Reséndez); the Humanities and Social Science Division
at the California Institute of Technology (Mordechai Feingold); the History
Department at Johns Hopkins University (Richard Kagan, John Pocock, and
David Nirenberg); the Center for Early Modern Studies at the University
of Washington, Seattle (Benjamin Schmidt); the History Department at
Pennsylvania State University (Londa Schiebinger and Mathew Restall); the
workshop “Witnessing in Latin America: Interdisciplinary Conversations”
at Princeton University (Michelle Cohen and Chris Garcés); the Kaplan
Lectures, University of Pennsylvania (Catalina Muñoz, Nancy Farris, Roger
Chartier, and Barbara Fuchs); and the University of Miami (Laura Matthews,
Mary Lindemann, Guido Ruggiero, and Richard Godbeer).
For the concluding chapter on historiography, I received sympathetic
readings, references, and helpful suggestions from Jeremy Adelman, Anthony
Grafton, Jack P. Greene, John Markoff, Jaime Rodríguez O., Erik Seeman,
and Eric Van Young. Thanks to Jordana Dym for an invitation to present the
argument of this chapter to a sympathetic audience at Skidmore College,
and to Erik Slaughter and Lisa Voigt for their invitation to air my views at the
conference “In Comparable Americas” organized by the Newberry Library
and the University of Chicago..
Had I relied on my own knowledge of Latin, this book would have been
plagued with errors of all kinds. Fortunately, David Lupher came to my aid
at the last minute. He double-checked most of my transcriptions and transla-

xiii
Acknowledgments

tions and generously offered corrections, which I have followed. All remain-
ing errors are, of course, my own. I received help from many people dur-
ing the process of securing permission to publish images, including Jaime
Cuadriello, Enrique Florescano, Illona Katzew, Alexandra Kennedy, Doña
Lydia Sada de González, and Vit Ulnas. A University Cooperative Society
Subvention Grant awarded by the University of Texas at Austin helped defray
part of the costs of publication. At the Stanford University Press, Norris Pope
and Anna Eberhard Friedlander skillfully guided me through the process of
publication, while Peter Dreyer lent his erudition and meticulous reading
skills to turn a half-baked text into a publishable manuscript.
As always, Sandra C. Fernández created the emotional and intellectual
environment that made writing possible for me. Sebastián and Andrea will
one day turn to this book to make sense of their father. May you find his soul
in these pages. Sandra, Sebastián, Andrea: your smiles and love have kept
me warm over the years, making tolerable even the coldest of winters.

xiv
Puritan Conquistadors
 chapter 1

Introduction

On Sunday, September 19, 1649, multitudes gathered along the roads between
the Franciscan convent of Lima and the city’s cathedral to witness the reloca-
tion of the holiest of relics, a sliver of Christ’s Cross donated by the late pope
Urban VIII (1568–1644) to the Peruvian Church. The event was timed to
coincide with the launching of a new campaign to extirpate idolatries in the
archbishopric of Lima. Seven of the most learned priests and missionaries in
the capital had been charged by the recently appointed archbishop, Pedro de
Villagómez (1585–1671), with spearheading this campaign. These seven now
waited for the order to march into the hinterlands. They carried white pen-
nants, each with a green cross, bearing the mottoes “Levate signum in genti-
bus” (Set ye up a standard among the nations) and “Ecce Crucem Domini,
fugite partes adversae” (Behold the Cross of the Lord, flee ye enemies) in
scarlet letters.1 As Villagómez explained in a pastoral letter addressed to all
the clergy in his archdiocese, these visitadores were soldiers of Christ about
to begin the second chapter of an ongoing epic struggle against the devil in
Peru. Drawing on Paul’s letters to the Ephesians (6:10–17), Villagómez asked
both visitadores and parish priests to be knights of the Lord: “Finally, my
brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the
whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the
devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiri-
tual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour
of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all,
to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having
on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation
of the gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall
be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of
salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”2
This crusading spirit was necessary, Villagómez thought, because the New
World had long been under Satan’s control. A trickster and master of deceit,

1
Chapter 1

F i g . 1 . 1 . Anonymous, Cuzco school of painting (seventeenth century), The Con-

quest of Peru. Colección Poli, Lima. Taken from José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert,
Historia de la pintura cuzqueña, 2: 507. The conquest of Peru is presented here as a
cosmic epic battle pitting God against the devil. In heaven, the struggle is overseen
by the Virgin Mary and a crusading Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moor-Killer),
while the archangel Michael slays Satan. On earth, two legions of Spaniards (one lay,
the other religious) advance to take on the Inca armies of Atahualpa.

the devil had for centuries enjoyed absolute mastery over the easily duped
natives of Peru. This uncontested sovereignty, however, had been challenged
with the arrival of the armies of Francisco Pizarro. The conquistadors had
begun the process of liberating the natives from Satan’s brutal, unrelenting,
tyrannical rule, but the devil did not stand by idly; he fought back (fig. 1.1).

2
 Introduction

Although the natives had already received the Gospel, it was clear that
Satan was still very much alive in the coastal valleys and highlands of
Peru, where Amerindians still continued to worship rivers, mountains, light-
ning, rainbows, and all sorts of sacred objects in the landscape. Pablo José
de Arriaga (1564 – 1622), a Jesuit whose 1621 work on idolatries Villagómez
greatly admired, had already described the scale of this satanic, idolatrous
worship. A member of one of three extirpating teams between 1616 and 1618,
Arriaga reported that in less than eighteen months, his party alone had man-
aged to elicit 5,694 confessions; to identify some 750 wizards; and to gather,
smash, and burn in autos-da-fé 603 huacas (sacred objects worshipped by a
community), 3,140 canopas (household deities), and at least 1,100 mummi-
fied ancestors, to say nothing of dozens of corpses of infant twins kept in jars
and hundreds of other holy curiosities.3
In this epic struggle over sovereignty in Peru, visitadores were first and
foremost exorcists. For example, Villagómez, who decried the use of tor-
ture and considered exile the harshest acceptable punishment, reserved for
unrepentant wizards, ordered his spiritual knights to exorcise each repentant
idolater on holy ground after preaching to and eliciting confessions from
him or her. Thus Villagómez advised visitadores to gather the population
in the local church and deliver the following incantation: “In the name of
the Almighty God, and Jesus Christ his son, and the Holy Spirit I exorcise
you filthy spirits. Withdraw [filthy spirits] from these servants of God, whom
God our Lord [wishes to] free from your error and bewitchment.”4
Facing the daunting task of uprooting the devil from Peru, Villagómez
turned to the Cross (see fig. 1.2). He therefore timed the departure of the
seven knights to coincide with the transference of the relic of the Cross
(given originally by Patriarch Nicephorus [758–829] to Pope Leo III [795–
816]),5 because he thought that in Peru the Cross would work against idola-
try in the same way that the Ark of the Israelites had destroyed the image
of the Philistine god Dagon (1 Sam. 5: the Philistines rout the Israelites in
battle, capture their holy Ark, and take it to the temple of Dagon). Peru was
like the temple of Dagon, a space temporarily inhabited by both the devil
and God.6 As explained by Blas Dacosta, the learned Franciscan to whom
Villagómez had entrusted the sermon that would cap the day’s festivities,
the Cross was designed by God to be “the fatal knife of all idolatries.”7
Drawing on the interpretation by Tommaso de Vio Cajetan (1469–1534) of
John 12:31–32 (“Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of
this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all
men unto me”), Dacosta argued that the devil was a tyrannical prince and

3
F i g . 1 . 2 . The Cross protects Franciscan friars from demons. From Diego Muñoz
Camargo (1529 – 99), Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala. Muñoz
Camargo was a mestizo. According to Fernando Cervantes (1994), the indigenous
peoples of central Mexico quickly embraced European ideas about the devil. Like
Christ’s twelve apostles, twelve Franciscan missionaries were dispatched to Mexico
in 1523 to oust the devil. The Franciscan minister-general, Francisco de los Angeles,
sent off the twelve as the vanguard of an army of knights, saying: “Go . . . and armed
with the shield of faith and with the breastplate of justice, with the blade of the spirit
of salvation, with the helmet and lance of perseverance, struggle with the ancient
serpent which seeks and hastens to lord himself over, and gain the victory over, the
souls redeemed with the most precious Blood of Christ” (Francisco Angelorum,
“Orders Given to ‘the Twelve’ [1523],” in Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary
History, ed. Mills and Taylor, 64).
 Introduction

that Christ had come to dispossess the devil from this position by means of
the Cross.8
But Villagómez demanded more from the clergy under his command,
for he thought that the struggle in Peru was not merely about “rooting out,
destroying, mowing down, and dispersing” (ut evellas, et destruas, et disper-
das et dissipes) the forces of Satan in Peru by wielding the Cross; it was also
about “building and planting” (et aedifices et plantes).9 Thus Villagómez
asked his subordinates to be gardeners, “turning into smooth valleys the
rugged landscape that was the wilderness in the hearts and customs of the
Indians.”10 Priests and visitadores were destined to “cultivate this orchard
that God planted in a sterile desert, dry and out of the way.” These farmers
needed to be cautious, however, for just as God acted as “fertilizing rain,”
Satan behaved as “[hail and gale], scorching, drying, and destroying the
fruit of virtue growing in the hearts and souls of the Indians.”11 In its original
struggle against the devil in Peru, Villagómez explained, the Church had
overextended itself, creating a vineyard whose vines’ shallow roots could
not withstand the withering force of Satan’s freezing rain and gales. It
was now time to create a sturdy plantation in Peru.12 By manipulating a
number of common early modern European tropes about the devil, which
have not received sufficient attention from historians, Villagómez connected
demonology in the New World to the idioms of epics, the crusades, and
gardening.
The 1649 episode in Lima summarizes in a nutshell the themes I seek
to explore in this book, namely, that demons were thought to enjoy great
geographical mobility and extraordinary power over people and Nature; that
the devil was considered to rule over the natives as a tyrannical lord, for he
had chosen the New World as his fiefdom; that colonization was perceived
as an ongoing epic struggle against a stubbornly resistant Satan; and that
the New World was imagined either as a false paradise or as a wilderness
that needed to be transformed into a garden by Christian heroes. Although
paradigmatically captured in the story of Villagómez’s staged campaign of
spiritual knights who both wield crosses to slay the dragon of idolatry and
use plows to root out weeds and plant orchards, these themes should not be
assumed to be typical of Iberian colonization alone.
Iberians, we have often been told, saw themselves as crusading heroes
engaged in an expansionist campaign of reconquista, first against the Moors
and later against the Amerindians. So Villagómez’s image of knightly priests
battling Satan fits in well with this stereotype of Iberian expansionism.
There is no denying that the crusading and chivalric played a crucial role

5
 Introduction

in early modern Iberia. Recent works by Felipe Fernández-Armesto on

Columbus, Sanjay Subrahmanyam on Vasco da Gama, and Peter Russell on
Prince Henry the Navigator demonstrate in vivid detail how the crusading
and chivalric acted as driving forces in the Spanish and Portuguese colo-
nization of the New World, Africa, and India.13 Conquistadors set sail into
the unknown hoping to find treasure and allies so as to launch, yet again,
a crusade to recapture Jerusalem. By the same token, conquistadors set sail
hoping to establish their own fiefdoms through sheer chivalric prowess.
The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century conquest of the Canaries, Azores,
Madeira, and the Cape Verde islands gave vassals and lands of their own
to Iberian, Italian, and French fortune seekers with chivalric names like
Lancelot and Gadifer (see fig. 1.3).14
Yet the ethos of the crusading and the chivalric has been used to separate
the Iberian Catholic colonial expansion from the British Protestant one.
William Prescott, for example, made popular among nineteenth-century
U.S. audiences the image of Spanish conquistadors as both benighted medi-
eval throwbacks and chivalric heroes, explaining why Spanish America
had developed so differently from British America.15 This book seeks to

F i g . 1 . 3 . (opposite) The twelve labors of Hercules. From Pietro Martire d’Anghiera,

De orbe novo (Alcalá de Henares, 1530). Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San
Marino, California. This image first appeared in Heredoti libri nomen (Cologne,
1526). The frontispiece allegedly represents all of Hercules’ labors. This is the first
explicit visual document that ties the European colonization of America to the dis-
course of the demonological and the epic. In the imagination of Miguel de Eguia, the
editor of this posthumous edition of the chronicle written by Anghiera (1457–1526),
the Spanish conquest of the New World promises to bring the conquistador-hero
untold riches (here represented by the golden apples of the Hesperides). Yet to get
this wealth (material as well as spiritual), the hero needs first to slay the multiheaded
dragon of idolatry, defeat the giant Antaeus, and fool Atlas. I have identified the fol-
lowing scenes clockwise from the top left: Hercules, with his half brother Iphicles,
plays with serpents in his cradle (not a labor); first labor, Nemean Lion; second labor,
Lernean Hydra; eleventh labor, Hercules defeats Antaeus; eleventh labor, Hercules
in the Hesperides; tenth labor, Cattle of Geryon; Hercules’ self-immolation in a pyre
(not a labor); twelfth labor, Cerberus; ninth labor, Hippolyte’s Belt; third labor, Hind
of Ceryneia; eleventh labor, Atlas and Hercules; eighth labor, man-eating horses
of Diomedes; fourth labor, Erymanthean boar. The fifth (Augean Stables), sixth
(Stymphalian Birds), and seventh (Cretan Bull) labors are not represented. Tellingly,
three of the images on this frontispiece chronicle Hercules’ pursuit of the golden
apples of the Hesperides.

7
F i g . 1 . 4 . David and Goliath. Frontispiece detail from Benjamin Tompson, Sad
and Deplorable Newes from New England. Courtesy of the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California. Tompson’s book is an epic poem on King Philip’s War.
Like Edward Johnson, Tompson presents the natives as Satan’s minions, who, like
demons in hell, dismember bodies. The settlers, on the other hand, appear as epic
heroes like David, who slew the demonic Philistine giant Goliath. This illustration
points to the importance of typology in the colonization of the New World.
 Introduction

overcome such distinctions and to demonstrate that some justifications for

colonization in Puritan colonial Massachusetts were really not that dif-
ferent from those espoused in, say, Catholic colonial Lima. It postulates
that British Protestants and Spanish Catholics deployed similar religious
discourses to explain and justify conquest and colonization: a biblically
sanctioned interpretation of expansion, part of a long-standing Christian
tradition of holy violence aimed at demonic enemies within and without.
Around the time Villagómez sent his spiritual knights to uproot Satan
from the Peruvian Andes, for example, the Puritan divine Edward Johnson
(1599–1672) published a remarkably similar epic of Christian heroes battling
the devil in the New World (fig. 1.4). Johnson’s history of the New England
colonies (1654) opens with a call to arms to his Puritan comrades: “You are
called the faithfull Souldiers of Christ . . . pulling downe the Kingdome of
Antichrist . . . take up your Armes and march manfully on till all opposers of
Christ Kingly power be abolished . . . be not daunted at your small number,
for every common Souldier in Christ Campe shall be as David who slew the
great Goliath.”16 Johnson wanted his Puritan knights to be armed and pre-
pared for battle with Satan, for “the people of Christ ought to behave them-
selves in war-like Discipline. . . . Store your selves with all sorts of weapons for
war, furbish up your Swords, Rapiers and all other piercing weapons.”17
This martial, epic tone surfaces throughout Johnson’s narrative. Before
departing for the New World, Johnson’s Puritans first have to confront
Satan in the shape of Papists and Antinomian sectarians.18 Once at sea,
they engage in pitched battles with the devil. Soon after lifting anchor
with her Puritan cargo destined for Massachusetts, the flagship Arbella is
threatened by demon-induced storms. God, however, intervenes: “many
of these people amazed finde such opposition in nature . . . [and grow sick
and disenchanted] but he who is very sensible of his peoples infirmities,
rebukes the winds and Seas for their sakes.”19 Fearing the arrival of the mil-
lennium, when he will be chained in hell, and “seeing how these resolved
Souldiers of Christ in New England with indefatigable paines laboured, not
only the finall ruine of Antichrist, in both, but also the advance of Christs
Kingdom,” Satan “sets upon a new way to stop (if it were possible) this
worke of Reformation” by stimulating among the colonists the emergence of
such sectarians as Gortenists, Familists, Seekers, Antinomians, Anabaptists,
Arminians, Arians, and Formalists, whose “heads of Hydra” will fortunately
be “cut off” by the “sharpe sword of the Word.”20
But Satan had more than Protestant dissenters to threaten the survival of
the New Israelites in the American Canaan, for his true minions were the

9
F i g . 1 . 5 . The Beast of the Apocalypse represented in the lakes of the central valley
of Mexico. From Gemelli Careri, Giro del mondo (Naples, 1699–1700). Courtesy of
the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I. The image rather
vividly captures Edward Johnson’s claim that the American landscape itself was one
of four allies of Satan in the New World (the others being the Amerindians, ocean
storms, and Protestant dissenters). Gemelli Careri was an Italian traveler who visited
Mexico in the 1690s on the last leg of a trip that also took him to Siam, China, and
Japan. In Mexico, he was given this map representing the drainage system of the cen-
tral valley at the time of the European arrival. The rivers in the valley drained into a
collection of small and large lakes, one of which, the Lake of Mexico, often flooded
Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital. Early seventeenth-century Flemish civil engineers
drew the map while developing a system to open sluices through the surrounding
mountains to dry the valley and thus end Mexico City’s periodic floods. Later in
the century, Creole Mexican scholars concluded that this hydrographic map of the
valley demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that Satan himself had carved out the
Mexican landscape: the rivers draining into the upper end of Lake “Calco” (Chalco)
represented the horns of the beast; the elongated Lake Calco its neck; the round lake
of Mexico, the beast’s belly; the rivers “San Juan,” “Escoputulco,” and “Taneplanda,”
its legs and claws; and the rivers of “St. Gioan” and “Papalo,” its wings. In confirma-
tion of this view of Mexico’s alliance with Satan as revealed in the basin’s drainage
system, Creole scholars offered Careri cabalistic readings of the names of the ten
Aztec monarchs from “Acamapichtli” to “Quauhtimoc” (Cuauhtemoc), the com-
bined numerical value of which added up to 666, the number of the Beast.
 Introduction

Amerindians. Thus the Puritans first face the “Tarratines,” who, like demons
devoted to dismembering bodies in hell, would “eat such Men as they caught
alive, tying them to a Tree, and gnawing their flesh by peece-meals off their
Bones.”21 However, the Puritans’ most formidable Amerindian enemies were
the Pequot, who, like the Tarratines, “feasted [on] their corps in a ravening
manner.” War broke out between the settlers and the Pequot in 1636–37.
The quarrel, Johnson thought, was “as antient as Adams time, propagated
from that old enmity betweene the Seede of the Woman, and the Seed of
the Serpent, who was the grand signor of this war.”22 Clearly, the Pequot
were “not onley men, but Devils; for surely [Satan] was more then ordinaryly
present with this Indian army.”23 According to Johnson, the most threatening
enemies among the Pequot were their shamans, who were capable of manip-
ulating nature and producing “strange things, with the help of Satan.”24
Satan, Johnson argued, had the Puritans completely surrounded on the
American battlefield. To the one side (the right), he had aligned “the dam-
nable Doctrines” of the Antinomians, “as so many dreadful engines set
by Satan to intrap poore soules.” In front of the Puritan troops, Satan had
positioned the “barbarous and bloudy people called Peaquods.” In the rear,
the ocean, the devil had demons setting off tempests so as to cut off any pos-
sible route of escape. Finally, to the other side of the settlers (the left), Satan
had placed the “Desert and terrible Wildernesse” of America.25 Along with
storms at sea, Dissenters, and satanic attacks by the Amerindians, the very
landscape itself was allied with the devil in the struggle to uproot the settlers
(see fig. 1.5).26
Why then would anyone “passe the pretious Ocean and hazard thy per-
son in battell against thousands of Malignant Enemies there?”27 Johnson
answered that question by simply pointing to “wonder-working providence,”
for in the epic battle against Satan, God was on the side of the settlers. To
keep the Puritans from starving and drowning, God sends rain in time
of drought and calms the storms unleashed by Satan at sea. In short, for
every obstacle thrown by Satan in the Puritans’ way, God steps in to res-
cue the settlers from hardship. This providential logic is often carried to
extremes. In Johnson’s scheme, famines and plagues wreaking havoc among
the Amerindians appear as God’s means to clear the land for the Puritans
to enjoy.28
The epic element in Johnson’s history far outdoes that in Villagómez’s
pastoral letters. Whereas Villagómez’s heroes are anonymous visitadores
wielding the Cross as sword and swearing by Christ, Johnson’s heroes
far surpass Hercules, Aeneas, and Ulysses. Unlike these classical heroes,

11
Chapter 1

who gave in to the temptations the flesh, the Puritan warriors do not pay
attention to the “pleasant embraces . . . and syren songs” of the “lady
of Delights.” “Such Souldiers of Christs, whose aymes are elevated by
[God],” Johnson concluded, “[are] many Millions above that brave Warrier
Ulysses.”29 John Winthrop, “eleven times governor” of New England,
appears in Johnson’s history as a knight armed with a sword leading the
elect against Babylon.30
Even the crusading spirit supposedly typical of Iberian colonization makes
its appearance in Johnson’s narrative. In his account of the Pequot War, the
Mohawks are transformed into a satanic enemy whom the Puritans must
slay: the Moor-hawks.31 Readers might be tempted to argue that Johnson
was an oddity, so disoriented and lost in a crusading world of his own as to
find Moors in New England. But he was not alone. Take, for example, the
case of the anonymous account of the history of King Philip’s War (1675–76)
titled News from New England (1676). After sketching a satanic portrayal of
the Amerindians, the author coolly adds the following entry to his tally of
the dead in battle: “At Woodcock 10 miles from Secouch on the 16th May
was a little Skirmage betwixt the Moors and Christians, wherein there was
of the later three slain and two wounded and only two Indians kild.”32 These
examples seem to give the lie to the historiographical tradition that, since
Prescott, has sought to exaggerate the cultural differences between Anglo-
Protestant and Catholic-Iberian discourses of colonial expansion in the New
World. It is clear that the Puritans were also willing to launch a reconquista
against the devil in America to recover the continent for God.
While typical of their age, the ideas of Villagómez and Johnson confront
us with mental structures that jar our modern sensibilities, for theirs was a
world in which demons roamed the earth unleashing tempests and possess-
ing entire peoples.33 By the mid seventeenth century, colonists of European
descent were absolutely certain of the overwhelming presence of demons
in the New World. Satan appeared to the settlers as a tyrannical lord, with
castles and ramparts all over America, whose subjects were willing to go
down fighting to the last man (see fig. 1.6).
After having lorded it over the continent for centuries, Satan was suddenly
facing an unexpected onslaught by a determined vanguard of Christian
knights. For the settlers, colonization was an ongoing epic battle. In the
world of the Europeans, demons were real, everyday physical forces, not
figments of the imagination or metaphors standing for the hardships of
colonization, as we might condescendingly be prone to assume.34 Plainly
put, in the eyes of European settlers, colonization was an act of forcefully

12
F i g . 1 . 6 . Luis de Riaños, The Road to Hell (ca. 1618–26). Church of
Andahuailillas, Department of Cuzco, Peru. Taken from José de Mesa
and Teresa Gisbert, Historia de la pintura cuzqueña, 2: 399. The mural
is a copy of an engraving by Jeronimus Wierix (1553–1619) illustrating
Psalm 106 (on the idolatrous corruption of the nation of Israel among the
Canaanites). Notice that the road to hell leads to a fortified castle with a
moat, drawbridge, and archers.
Chapter 1

expelling demons from the land. Whether it was by defeating external plots
devised by Satan to weaken colonial settlements (by means of, say, pirates,
heretics, indigenous religious revivals, frontier wars, imperial policies seek-
ing to weaken colonial autonomy, etc.) or by physically casting out demons
using charms such as crosses (Catholics/Anglicans) or Bibles (Puritans), one
way that Europeans saw colonization was as an ongoing battle against the
devil. This simple yet powerful insight has often been assumed, but rarely
adequately explored, for historians have focused rather on elucidating the
European legal discourses of territorial possession.
Historians have been only partially right to argue that the British were
more “modern” than the Spaniards when justifying territorial possession.
It is now common to maintain that the British deployed Lockean theories
of property: land and objects belonged to those who had transformed them
through labor. Since the British colonists did not find traces of “labor” in
the New World, they considered the lands of the natives empty and ripe
for the picking. Spaniards, on the other hand, were more “medieval.” They
justified territorial possession by claiming that the pope had dominium and
imperium over pagan territories. As the pope had transferred that sovereignty
to the Spanish kings, the latters’ vassals felt entitled to the newfound lands.35
This distinction not only blurs important chronological differences (Puritan
colonization was launched some 150 years after the Spaniards first arrived in
the New World), it also leaves out the more important biblical foundations
of European colonial expansion. For Puritans and Catholics alike, coloniza-
tion was an act foreordained by God, prefigured in the trials of the Israelites
in Canaan. Just as the Israelites had fought against the stiff resistance of
Satan’s minions, the Philistines, Puritans, and Spanish clerics felt entitled
to take over America by force, battling their way into a continent infested by
demons. Ultimately, the objective of both religious communities became to
transform the “wilderness” into blossoming spiritual “plantations.”
This common demonological discourse is the subject of this book. But
before plunging into it, a question needs to be answered: Why specifically
compare the Puritans of New England, rather than some other group in
British America, to the Spanish Catholics? Given that Jack Greene has
demonstrated that New England’s politics, culture, and economy were not
representative of the British American experience, it would appear to make
more sense to study the ideologies of colonization in the middle and south-
ern British American colonies.36 In fact, as the work of Edward L. Bond sug-
gests, the crusading discourse of colonization as an epic battle against the
devil seems to have run as deeply in seventeenth-century Virginia as it did in

14
 Introduction

Puritan New England.37 But the findings of scholars like Greene have not yet
dislodged the Puritans from the public imagination as the quintessentially
“American” colonists. This reason alone justifies my choice: I want to reach
and challenge a wide audience. Furthermore, there is the issue of sources.
Simply put, Puritans left behind a far larger cache of primary sources than
other English colonists. I have nevertheless not completely overlooked other
British colonies, particularly Virginia.
At first sight, positing resemblances between the Puritan and Spanish
clergies makes little sense, for the literature on the Reformation has famil-
iarized us only with the differences. The Puritans were followers of John
Calvin (1509–64), whereas the Spaniards were staunch defenders of the
pope, leaders of the Counter-Reformation. These two communities there-
fore developed very different views of God, salvation, Church organization,
and conversion. As followers of Calvin, for example, the Puritans believed
that God was an almighty sovereign whose plans for humanity were inscru-
table. In their view of things, Catholics, who thought that it was up to them
to work out their own salvation (by either practicing virtues or praying to
God), were deluded. Catholics had a ridiculous view of God as a petty
merchant whose will could be bought (by buying indulgences, for example)
or bent at will (through confession and prayers). According to the Puritans,
however, salvation was a preordained act of God, and nothing humans did
could change the outcome. Catholics had deviated from the original mes-
sage of God as revealed in the Old and New Testaments. Over the centuries,
Catholics had added institutions and ceremonies never mentioned in the
Bible. The Puritans in fact owed their name to their efforts to “purify” the
Church of these inventions and live according to the religious, social, and
political institutions found in the Bible. For the Puritans, Catholic “inven-
tions” were not really products of the human imagination but demonic
deceptions: Counter-Reformation Spain stood for the Antichrist.38
These theological differences manifested themselves concretely in the
ways these two religious communities approached colonization. Spanish
Catholics, for example, had a more inclusive idea of Church membership,
along with a more hierarchical understanding of how to communicate with
God. Spaniards therefore approached conversion by demanding that indige-
nous peoples conform to certain rituals and external behaviors, but allowed
great variations in practice. This attitude toward conversion allowed for the
multiplication of micro-Catholicisms all across the empire. The Puritans,
however, saw things differently. For them, conversion implied God’s elec-
tion: the individual had to be touched by God’s grace after protracted

15
Chapter 1

“preparation.” God acted like a seal on the wax of the body and soul (justi-
fication), transforming them forever (sanctification). To belong to a Puritan
Church, individuals needed to prove, through protracted interviews and
testimonials (which could last several months), that they had in fact been
touched by the grace of God. When the Puritans arrived in the New World,
they instituted such strict rules of conversion that not even the children of
the Church elders were guaranteed membership. Although the Puritans
did seek to convert Amerindians to hasten the arrival of the millennium, in
practice native converts were few and far between.39 In short, whereas by the
seventeenth century, there were thousands, if not millions, of Amerindians
in Spanish America practicing their own versions of Catholicism, only a
handful of Amerindians in New England could bear witness to the grace of
God.
It is clear that there were important differences separating the Puritans
from the Spanish Americans. But there were also significant resemblances,
and the scholarship on the Atlantic world has paid little attention to them,
because it has imagined that world in largely national terms. In the pages
that follow, I explore the discourse of demonology and spiritual gardening
and argue that British American Puritans and Spanish American Catholics
in fact saw the world of colonization in remarkably similar terms.
But before plunging into the substance of this book, let me provide some
clarifications about my approach. Although Europeans had been confronting
Satan for millennia and thought that demons hovered over the entire world,
their battle with them in the New World was thought to be qualitatively dif-
ferent. It was not that the New World was afflicted with more demons than
Eurasia. Europeans believed that there were millions of good angels and
bad angels, organized as armies, all over the world. The problem was one of
entrenchment. The devil and his minions had exercised uncontested sover-
eignty over the New World for 1,500 years, ever since Satan took a group of
Scythians, his own elect, to colonize the empty land that was America right
after or around the time the Gospel began to spread in Eurasia. Thus the
devil had had time to build “fortifications” in the New World and set deep
roots both in the landscape and among the people. The Europeans therefore
battled an external enemy, not only the devil within, whom they knew well.
Suffering, sin, temptation, and possession had long been considered mani-
festations of demonic power laying siege to the individual soul. To be sure,
the battle to overcome satanic temptation and to avoid sin would continue
in the New World, and Satan’s attacks on the individual soul, often mani-
fested themselves as outright external physical aggression, especially when

16
 Introduction

he targeted females.40 It is also true that for the Puritans, as Richard Slotkin
has noticed, fears of satanic external enemies, particularly Amerindians and
the wilderness, were simply projections of dark Calvinist views of the inner
soul: rotten, postlapsarian human nature.41 The struggle of individual souls
to achieve sanctity or salvation in the Indies is partly the focus of this book,
especially as both Puritans and Iberians sought to transform their souls and
the colonies into spiritual gardens. Yet I am also concerned with the battles
that pitted Europeans against powerful “external” enemies — both human
and nonhuman — dedicated to destroying the polity: storms, earthquakes,
epidemics, pirates, foreign enemies, heretics, witches, imperial bureaucrats,
Amerindians, and African slaves.
It has been my priority throughout to reconstruct the logical structure,
the grammar, of a discourse. Each of the myriad sources I discuss emerged
in unique social and political contexts and was devised to persuade par-
ticular audiences and to address particular agendas. I have not sought to
reconstruct these various contexts. Rather than historicizing each source,
I have sought to reconstruct a worldview (of demonology as it pertains to
colonization). At every turn, however, I have avoided anachronistic, conde-
scending readings of the past. Like Brad S. Gregory, who has masterfully
reconstructed the alien world of martyrdom among early modern Christian
communities (Protestant, Anabaptist, and Catholic), marked by a willing-
ness to kill and to be killed that offends our modern views of toleration and
psychological “normality,” I seek to reconstruct a worldview that is equally
violent, alien, and offensive to our modern sense of what is physically
possible.42
Another important element to keep in mind while reading this book is that
the discourses of demonology and gardening were only two of many in the
Atlantic bazaar of ideas.43 I am aware that I deal mostly with the ideas of the
learned (clergy and laity). We should not, however, dismiss the study of the
discourse I have identified on account of its being both elite and one of many.
By the end of this book, it will be clear, I hope, that demonology and garden-
ing are discourses scholars need to treat seriously if we want to gain a deeper
understanding of early modern European colonialism.
Third, I am aware that using categories such as “Iberians” and “Puritans”
is a reductive stance toward these historical actors. There were to be sure
many strands within the so-called orthodox Puritan tradition (to say noth-
ing of the variations at the fringes of this Reformed movement), and that a
similarly mind-boggling array of doctrinal positions can easily be discerned
in the “Iberian” sources.44 In the case of demonology, one could, for exam-

17
Chapter 1

ple, cite the debate over toleration between the “Puritans” Roger Williams
(1604? – 1683) and John Cotton (1584 – 1652) in the 1630s in Massachusetts.
Williams argued that heretics were weeds in the garden of the Church, but
that the Bible did not authorize their being rooted out. Moreover, Williams
argued that the weapons with which to battle the devil were not physical
but spiritual. Thus, according to Williams, toleration was the orthodox posi-
tion to take. John Cotton, on the other hand, found biblical passages that
allowed him to claim the opposite, namely, that heretics were both weeds to
be cleared from the enclosed garden of the Church and agents of Satan to
be fended off physically, not spiritually.45 This controversy alone shows that
there were important differences when it came to the thinking of the devil
as an external enemy of the New England polity. It should be noticed, how-
ever, that Williams was so far outside the pale that he was excommunicated.
When it came to the threat represented by Satan as enemy of the polity,
there was indeed a “Puritan” orthodoxy. This is also true of all the other
groups discussed in this book.
Fourth, I assume that the satanization of the American continent gained
momentum in the seventeenth century. Most of the sources I use in this
book originated in this period. Many explanations have been offered as to
why Europeans grew more fearful of the devil in the seventeenth century.
John Bossy, Fernando Cervantes, and Stuart Clark have argued that the
Reformation altered the conception of sin. As morality came to be organized
around the Ten Commandments, rather than around the cardinal virtues
(the avoidance of social sins), the Deuteronomic sanction against false wor-
ship turned the triad “heresy, idolatry, and witchcraft” into a continuum of
crimes against religion. Such focus heightened fears of the power of Satan.
Cervantes and Clark have also argued that the rise of nominalism contrib-
uted to bolstering the image of a powerful deity ruling over a cosmos unre-
strained by natural laws. Belief in the preternatural and the supernatural,
therefore, gained ground. It should be noticed that the preternatural was not
only the realm of the occult and marvels but also the domain of the devil.46
Finally, I rely throughout on images as primary sources. Images are often
used by historians simply as illustrations to enliven their narratives. My
intention has been rather to present images as additional evidence to writ-
ten sources. Many of the images therefore have long captions and should be
read as extended footnotes. In some cases, images are the sole extant source
available to elucidate an argument. It will become obvious that with a few
exceptions most of the images discussed in this book are from the Iberian
world. This imbalance would seem to point to a major difference between

18
 Introduction

Spanish and British America, the former allegedly a culture that privileged
the visual and the oral and the latter one that relied on the printed word. But
such dichotomies oversimplify the past. It is not only that Spanish America
enjoyed a thriving printing industry but also that British America possessed
lively scribal and oral cultures, particularly in the Chesapeake. More impor-
tant, the mental re-creation of biblical imagery was central to Puritan piety,
meditation, and prayer. Extant Puritan sermons are laced with striking
visual imagery, remarkably similar to the images discussed in this book.47
I am concerned both with changes over time and with the persistence
of the discourse of demonology and colonization. The devil as an external
enemy changed strategies over time. In the case of the Spanish American
sources I study, Amerindians were originally seen as Satan’s most powerful
allies in the New World, but once the colonial regime was established in
places like Mexico and Peru, the main demonic enemy became somebody
else. In the case of the Spiritual Franciscans in Mexico, the twelve “apostles”
arrived loaded with three centuries of accumulated Joachimite apocalyptic
predictions in a ruined Tenochtitlán. The friars thought that the preaching
of the Gospel to hitherto unknown peoples whom the devil held in bondage
was the long-anticipated sign of the beginning of the millennium. To them,
the Aztecs were Satan’s elect. Satan had long been known for his parodies of
God. Over the course of the Middle Ages, it was increasingly believed that
the Antichrist was an exact inverted replica of Christ: a false prophet, per-
former of miracles, bound to have his own Annunciation and Resurrection.
In Mexico, the Franciscans found no Antichrist but Satan’s ultimate mockery
of God, namely, a society whose history and institutions seemed to be an
inverted mirror image of those of the Israelites. According to the Franciscans,
Satan had picked the Aztecs to recapitulate each and every one of the episodes
of the history of the Israelites: exodus to a Promised Land, settlement amid
Canaanites, David- and Solomon-like monarchies, the building of a temple,
and prophecies of doom and imminent destruction. Lucifer’s mockery of
the Eucharist and the miracle of transubstantiation, on the other hand, took
place every week on the steps of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, where the bod-
ies and hearts of sacrificed warriors were served to the masses to enjoy as mor-
sels. Not surprisingly, the Franciscans regarded Hernán Cortés (1485– 1547)
as a providential figure, a “General of Christ” who had waged the first battle
in the epic struggle to hasten the millennium. Franciscans saw colonization
as a spiritual holy war and built their massive mission compounds in central
Mexico with large crenellated walls as symbolic battlements against the
devil (the Augustinians, preaching to the Otomies in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo,

19
Chapter 1

and seeking to represent the ongoing spiritual struggles between good and
evil, had murals of bloody battles between their new Otomi charges and
their neighbors, the savage, demonic Chichimecs, including beheadings,
painted in the very mission church itself). Yet all these compounds were
also built with the layout of the New Jerusalem in mind (see fig. 1.7). This
very millenarian narrative allowed these Franciscans to embrace the natives
as God’s new elect. In creating his inverted mirror image of the Church of
Israel, Satan had chosen the Aztecs for their single-minded devotion and
piety. Seeking to outshine the priestly legislation of Moses’ Leviticus, Satan
selected a people whose willingness to abide by disciplinary rules of penance
and sacrifice far outdid those of the average Christian. These were precisely
the virtues that the early Franciscans needed to create a New Jerusalem in
the Indies: if properly catechized, the natives could easily become large com-
munities of saints. Thus the Franciscan Toribio de Benavante, aka Motolinía
(1482?–1569), maintained in his Historia de los Indios de Nueva España (ca.
1550) that the natives were so pious, so Spartan in their needs, so detached
from the pursuit of wealth, so meek, humble, and willing to endure suffering
and sacrifice that they did not have “any hindrance that would keep them
from reaching heaven, unlike the many obstacles we Spaniards have and that
keep us down.”48 Curiously, once the friars embraced the natives as the ideal
pliable clay with which to build the Church of the millennium, and once the
friars began to vie with the settlers for control of the bodies (not the souls)
of the natives, the Franciscans became more prone to see the wiles of Satan
in the New World manifested in the actions of the very descendants of the
“General of Christ,” the lay settlers. Fray Juan de Zumárraga (1468–1548),
a Franciscan and first archbishop of Mexico, denounced encomenderos as
“repulsive and disgusting” non-Christians, who gave out an “evil smell” that
contrasted dramatically with the “heavenly smell of these poor Indians.”49
The Franciscans were not alone. Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566) tire-
lessly argued that conquistadors were demons and the colonial regime was
hell. By the end of the sixteenth century, as the Spanish Crown sought to
strengthen the secular Church (clergy not belonging to religious orders) and
curtail the hegemony the religious orders had over spiritual ministration to
the Amerindians, the Franciscans most likely found Satan incarnated in the
ecclesiastical establishment.50
In the following chapters, it will become clear that the main satanic
enemy of both the Iberians and the English in the New World was a moving
target, constantly shifting according to the party involved and the circum-
stances. The Mexican Creoles, I argue, passionately embraced the cult of

20
F i g . 1 .7 . “Emblem of things the friars do in the Indies [tipus eorum que frates
faciunt in Novo Indiarum Orbe]” from Diego Valadés, Rhetorica christiana (1579).
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I.
Led by Martin Valencia and St. Francis himself, twelve Franciscans carry the Holy
(continued)
Chapter 1

Our Lady of Guadalupe because they found in their typological readings

of the image a fulfillment of Revelation 12:7–9, that is, of battles waged
between the Dragon and the archangel Michael in heaven. This text, they
thought, was a prophecy of the conquest of the Aztecs by Cortés. But the
Creoles were even more fascinated by Revelation 12:13–17, for these passages
described the battles of the Dragon against the Woman of the Apocalypse
and her descendants on earth. According to the Creole clergy, in Revelation,
St. John had anticipated the sufferings of the heirs of the conquistadors in
America at the hands of satanic peninsular upstarts. Spanish American
Creoles liked to imagine the peninsular newcomers (including conversos,
merchants, and centralizing Crown officers) as Satan’s allies.
Peninsulars, in turn, demonized the Creoles, presenting them as cor-
rupt, degenerate Amerindians. More important, peninsulars identified the
battles against Satan in the New World as part of a much larger geopolitical

F i g . 1 .7 (continued from previous page)

Roman Church into the New World for the first time (“primi sanctae romane aecle-
sie [sic] in novo indiarum orbe portatores”). The Lord has foreordained their task
in Genesis 28:14–15: “And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt
spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south . . .
And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest”
(dilatarebis ad orientem, occidentem, septentrionem, ac meridiem et ero custos tuus
et tuorum). The Church the twelve Franciscans carry is inhabited by the Holy Spirit
(“spiritus santus abitat in ea”), corresponding to the millennial, third spiritual age
of Joachim de Fiore. The Church in the Novo Indiarum Orbe is a walled garden, a
New Jerusalem: its walls rest on twelve stone foundations bearing the names of the
twelve apostles of the Lamb (Rev. 21:14) (the twelve small rectangles scattered on the
ground seem to be both the tombs of the original Franciscan apostles and the stone
foundations of the new millennial Church). The Holy Spirit that descends from the
throne of God fertilizes a path of trees where the infirm (infirmi) are taken to be
healed. The trees in the Franciscan compound thus seem to correspond to the Trees
of Life of the New Jerusalem whose leaves are “used as medicine to heal the nations”
(Rev. 22:2). In this New Jerusalem, the friars mete out justice, bury the dead, per-
form the sacraments (confession, communion, last rights, baptism, matrimony, pen-
ance, and the Eucharist), and teach the Indians music and to read and write. The
Gospel is also taught through the use of images. Notice, however, that besides books
and images, the friars use Nature, in the form of a tree, to instruct their charges in
doctrine (examen matrimonii). On the millennial architecture in the mission com-
pounds built by Franciscans, Augustinians, and Dominicans in sixteenth-century
Mexico, see Jaime Lara (2004) and Samuel Edgerton (2001).

22
 Introduction

struggle pitting God against Lucifer. Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 1651 auto
sacramental (a theatrical genre performed during Corpus Christi) La semilla
y la cizaña (The Wheat and the Tares) typifies the attitude of Spanish intel-
lectuals in Madrid. Calderón interprets Matthew 13 as a prefiguration of the
fate of the Gospel in the four continents (each standing for a type of soil) and
has Christ dressed as a farmer and the devil as a weed. Seeking to prevent
the seed planted by Christ from ever flourishing with the help of theatrical
characters clad like demons/Furies representing hurricanes (Cierzo [North
Wind]), a swarm of locusts (Ira [Fury]), and fog (Niebla), the devil (Cizaña)
stumbles upon characters that stand for each of the continents and their
main religions. One of four continents where Christ the farmer plants seeds
is “America” (with thorny soil, where seedlings are choked by weeds), who
appears wearing a feather dress, riding an alligator, and accompanied by the
lackadaisical “Idolatry.” The other three are “Asia” (rocky soil, where some
plants grow without deep roots), who appears dressed as a Jew, riding an ele-
phant, and under the supervision of “Judaism”; “Africa” (a footpath, where
seeds are easily picked up by birds), who appears dressed as a Moor, riding
a lion, and overseen by “Paganism”; and “Europe” (good soil, where seed
multiplies hundredfold), who appears dressed like a Roman, riding a bull,
and led by “Gentilism.” As the play unfolds, the devil successfully manages
to kill the harvest everywhere, except in Europe. Tellingly, the devil assigns
a continent to each Fury: “Cierzo” uproots the plants of Asia, “Ira” picks
up the seeds of Africa, and “Niebla” seeks to kill off the harvest in Europe,
sowing neguilla (869), the corncockle, Agrostemma githago, a noxious weed
that grows along with wheat, in the lands where Protestantism is born. The
devil himself, Cizaña, is in charge of America and has beautiful-looking
fields appear; on closer inspection, however, the fields of flowers turn out
to be weeds. Two things are clear from Calderón’s reading of Matthew 13.
First, the struggle between God and Satan is for control of the entire earth.
Second, America is the continent that most fully belongs to the devil, despite
its misleading paradisiacal looks. Clearly, the play exemplifies the early mod-
ern Spanish demonological global imagination. The satanic epic in the New
World reveals these global sensibilities particularly in the characters of the
pirates and the Moors.51
Lope de Vega’s La Dragontea (1598), an epic poem by another giant of
the Spanish Golden Age, is representative of how the Spanish intelligentsia
managed to cast the battles against Satan in the New World as episodes in
a global struggle in which both Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean and
English privateers in the Caribbean played their parts. As Milton would later

23
Chapter 1

do with the devil, Lope transforms Francis Drake (1542–96) into a satanic
hero worthy of admiration: Draco, the very Dragon of the Apocalypse
(fig. 1.8). Drake is a creature of Satan who unsuccessfully wreaks havoc in
Panama and the Caribbean, seeking to weaken the Spanish empire in the
same way that Muslim Barbary corsairs with names like “Chafer, Fuchel,
Mamifali, and Morato” are doing in the Mediterranean (1.23). Eventually,
the satanic hero dies, after having been unable to capture Nombre de Dios
(God’s Name), the strategic port in Panama where silver from Peru was
accumulated to be sent back to Spain. Having presided over the death of
the Antichrist himself, Philip III turns out to be a harbinger of the millen-
nium, free now to crush the Muslim corsairs (10.689–91, 695, 719–32).52
The 1711 epic poem Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (Life of St. Rose of Lima)
by Luis Antonio de Oviedo y Herrera (1636–1717) is also representative of
how Satan was thought to operate globally, mobilizing not only earthquakes
and Amerindians but also Protestant pirates. In this, the Peruvian Santa
Rosa of Lima (1586–1617) is presented as a godly heroine, who, to save
Lima from destruction, fights great preternatural battles against earthquakes
induced by Lucifer, calls by Yupanqui (Lucifer’s Inca ally in the poem) for
the Amerindians of Peru to rebel and for the Araucanians to join in Dutch
attacks, and Protestant pirates’ raids.53 Demons fly all over the world lining
up English, Dutch, and Amerindian allies to expel the Iberians.54
Clearly, the Amerindians were not the only allies of the devil in the New
World. In fact, the first great battle pitting the Inquisition against the devil
in Peru, for example, did not involve the natives but prominent Spanish
religious figures in Quito, Lima, Cusco, and Potosí. In 1572, the newly cre-
ated Inquisition of Lima arrested a group of friars led by the prestigious
Dominican theologian Francisco de la Cruz for having communicated
with demons through séances that masqueraded as meetings to exorcise
the maiden María Pizarro. A trial-investigation that lasted six years forced
the provincial of the Dominicans to flee, caused the death in prison of the
Dominican Pedro Toro, and led in 1578 to the burning at the stake of de
la Cruz in an auto-da-fé that also included others parading in penitential
garb. The drama began when a group of learned Jesuits, Theatines, and
Dominicans, who eventually spread all over the viceroyalty, sought to expel
the demons possessing María. The clergy, however, came across evidence
that María was also visited by good spirits of saints and archangels. The
archangel Gabriel liked to chat with de la Cruz in particular, for the latter
was a magus who cast horoscopes and dabbled with talismans. Soon the
archangel handed down to the Dominican amulets to exorcise demons and

24
F i g . 1 . 8 . “Tandem aquila vincit” (The Eagle Wins at Last) from
Lope de Vega, La Dragontea (1598). Lope de Vega casts Francis
Drake as the Beast of the Apocalypse, which is finally slain by the
archangel Michael/ Philip II. God protects the Habsburg, enabling
him to “trample down lions and poisonous snakes . . . to crush
fierce lions and serpents under your feet [conculcabis leonem et
draconem]” (Vulg. Ps. 90). Engaged in a global battle against the
forces of God, Lucifer finds allies not only among the Indians but
also among Protestant and Moorish pirates.
Chapter 1

to protect the wearer from committing sins. The archangel also gave de la
Cruz a blueprint for a new millenarian Church in the Indies. Suddenly, the
former leading orthodox theologian found himself advocating the end of
celibacy for priests; the spread of polygamy among the laity; the uselessness
of the sacrament of confession and inoffensiveness of idolatry among the
Amerindians; the restitution of the feudal rights that Charles V had taken
away from the conquistadors and their heirs in the mid sixteenth century;
the impending collapse of the corrupt Church of Rome; and the restoration
in the New World of the ancient Israelite Church. De la Cruz himself would
become the new David, head of both the state and the Church, pope and
emperor at the same time. The Inquisition insisted that the priests who com-
municated with the archangel Gabriel through María had failed to “discern”
that the spirits dwelling in the young woman were all demons intent on
engineering a coup in Peru against the new viceroy, Francisco de Toledo (r.
1569–81). The devil was determined to uproot the authority of Spain and the
Catholic Church in the Indies, working this time through a group of influ-
ential priests led by the lascivious, self-aggrandizing de la Cruz, who turned
out to be a satyr, tirelessly having sex with both pious women and men and
impregnating hapless victims like María. The devil set no limits as to whom
he recruited as allies to undermine the Catholic regime in the Indies.55
By the time the Puritans arrived in New England, the colonists of Spanish
America had already drastically changed their perceptions of who were the
preferred minions of the devil in the New World. It is very revealing that the
Holy Office of the Inquisition was set up in America in 1571 by Philip II not to
persecute Satan’s followers among the Amerindians but to stem the demonic
plots of conversos (falsely converted Jews), alumbrados (those whose emphasis
on silent prayers and direct communication with God suspiciously resembled
Lutheran notions of grace), and witches, blasphemers, and sexual offenders
within the “Hispanic” urban communities. Although inquisitors in the Indies
did find their share of conversos and alumbrados to prosecute and punish,
they acted on the assumption that the devil privileged the sins of promiscu-
ity, blasphemy, and petty witchcraft over all others in the New World.56 It is
worth mentioning, however, that in the Spanish empire, by and large, witches
were not seen as devil worshippers akin to learned necromancers like de la
Cruz, that is to say, as members of a threatening heretical sect, but rather as
traditional practitioners of amorous and harming spells. In the minds of the
inquisitors, bigamy, sodomy, blasphemy, and non-learned witchcraft were
more prevalent in the New World due to the contaminating influences of
Native Americans and Africans.57 The devil operated in the New World by

26
 Introduction

eroding the racial and social hierarchies of the well-ordered polity that the
Spanish state had sought to establish, causing the pious to be easily trapped.
Mestizaje—interbreeding—was perceived as one of the weapons deployed
by the devil to undermine the spread of Christianity in America. The art
of determining whether the spirits that visited the expanding communities
of mystics among hermits, friars, nuns, and beatas (beguines) in the Indies
were godly or satanic, for example, was linked to the threat of mestizaje.58
Besides the traditional emphasis on probing the theological soundness of
women’s visions, always inherently suspect, inquisitors in the Indies were
moved to evaluate not only the racial and social status of the alleged mys-
tics themselves but that of their followers and confessors as well. Those
who experienced the typical preternatural manifestations of mystics (i.e.,
visions, dreams, stigmata, levitation, torturing by demons, and bilocation)
and whose origins or relations were closest to the poor, castas, Amerindians,
and blacks became immediately suspected of being agents of the devil, not
God.59 Blacks and mulattoes in particular were considered potential allies
of the devil. On May 2, 1612, for example, on the grounds that they had
long been planning an uprising, 35 blacks and mulattoes were hanged in
Mexico City, and their bodies were either quartered or decapitated. The
planned uprising was deemed part of a larger strategy by Satan to wreak
havoc. Reportedly groups of urban blacks and mulattoes seeking to create
an “African monarchy” would poison and kill all male Spaniards and keep
Spanish women and Amerindians as slaves. According to one account, the
plot had been concocted by an old black slave, Sebastian, and his disciples:
a band of “witches” and “sorcerers,” masters of the “black arts.”60
It is clear that the process of colonization in Spanish America unfolded
amid evidence of ongoing demonic threats carried out by all sorts of ene-
mies, including frontier Amerindians, pirates, heretics, false mystics, and
African slaves. And the multipronged attack by the devil caused the colonists
to develop a siege mentality. Evidence of this siege mentality also surfaces in
the Protestant versions of the satanic epic, particularly in Puritan ones.
English Protestants first found the devil in America among the Spaniards,
not the Amerindians. Later, however, the satanic epic, as originally con-
ceived by the Spaniards, was embraced by the Protestants. The satanic
epic was a literary tradition that first evolved in Portuguese and Spanish
America. It lionized Iberian colonization as a battle that pitted Catholic
heroes against Satan’s minions, the Amerindians, and against Leviathan in
the sea. Although the trope of the satanic epic was quickly adopted all over
Europe, Protestants (especially the Dutch) first organized their epic narra-

27
Chapter 1

tives around battles pitting Protestant heroes against satanic Spaniards.61

In Elizabethan England, the figure of the privateer, a pillaging soldier
of fortune who, like the Spanish conquistador, sought treasure and entry
into the ranks of the grandees, became the equivalent of the Spanish con-
quistador battling Satan. Ruthless, plundering, lowly hidalgos like Francis
Drake appeared in numerous satanic epics as heroes bleeding the Spanish
Antichrist white.62
But by the time of the arrival of the Puritans in the New World, the
English had begun to see Amerindians, not the Spanish, as the main ally
of the Devil in the New World. This shift coincided with the 1622 slaugh-
ter of settlers in Virginia and the Pequot War (1637), which dramatically
changed English perceptions of the Amerindians; thereafter the natives
became Satan’s minions. Scholars like Joyce Chaplin and Karen Ordahl
Kupperman have shown that Elizabethan sources originally tended to be
respectful and even admiring of Native American societies, but later English
views of the Amerindians in North America soured.63 As Alfred A. Cave has
persuasively demonstrated, demonology played a significant role in turn-
ing a petty squabble in the Connecticut River valley among the Dutch,
English, Mohegan, Narragansett, and Pequot over access to pelts, wampum,
and regional hegemony into a Manichean battle pitting the godly Puritans
against Satan’s minions, the Pequot. The view of the Pequot as demonic
moved the Puritans to collect scalps and hands of enemy warriors as trophies
and to regard burning Indian children and women alive as heroic.64 Not sur-
prisingly, the Puritan satanic epic came to resemble those first introduced by
the Iberians. Spaniards, to be sure, did not lose their status as satanic agents.
The narrative of the Spanish conquest as a demonic butchery was paradoxi-
cally kept firmly in mind as Puritans struggled to justify in writing their own
barbarous acts against their newfound demonic enemies. As Jill Lepore has
shown, Puritan narratives of King Philip’s War (1675–76) were aimed at
justifying unusual acts of cruelty by demonizing the Wampanoag and other
Algonquian groups, all the while seeking to clear the Puritans of charges of
Spanish-like demonic savagery.65
Approaching Puritan studies from the perspective of “siege” contributes
to the larger historiography on Puritan views of the devil as an external
enemy who threatened the polity. Richard Godbeer’s and, more recently,
Mary Beth Norton’s studies of the Salem witchcraft outbreak have shown
that the crisis can be explained only if we are willing to enlarge our vision
of whom the Puritans considered their satanic enemies to be. Godbeer has
argued that the Puritan laity brought witches to trial often but without much

28
 Introduction

success. It was only in 1692 that the laity succeeded in having magistrates
and ministers punish and even execute witches on a large scale (there were,
to be sure, other isolated cases before). This unusual behavior of the Puritan
clergy, Godbeer argues, can only be explained in the context of the siege
mentality that began to develop in Essex County in the wake of King Philip’s
War. For two decades, Puritans experienced all sorts of setbacks, including
epidemics, loss of political autonomy vis-à-vis the English Crown, Quaker
encroachment, failed campaigns against the French, and constant frontier
warfare with the natives. Puritan magistrates, for the first time, were willing
to see Satan as an enemy not only working within the soul but also harassing
the community from without. Thus the clergy during the Salem crisis found
themselves willing to punish as demonic anybody deemed to be an outsider
(spinsters with connections to Quakers and to the Amerindian frontier).66
Norton has more recently made a similar argument. According to Norton,
Salem’s witches were deemed by Puritans to be allies of the Amerindians or
the French and thus Satan’s minions in the larger struggle for control of the
northeastern frontier.67
This Puritan siege mentality was part and parcel of who the Puritans
were. It was precisely this siege mentality that rendered the Puritans so
uncompromising in their negotiations with the Pequot, leading to the war
of 1637, which happened in the context of the Antinomian controversy (in
which Anne Hutchinson and her followers were seen as demonic agents)
and in the wake of attempts at court, led by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, to take
the colony’s charter away. The Puritans read these three events as part of
a demonic plot to oust them from America.68 The Puritan version of the
satanic epic demonstrates that from the very beginning, Puritans saw them-
selves threatened by a Satan bent on attacking the polity through the agency
of Spaniards, storms, the wilderness, Amerindians, heretics, witches, and
royal bureaucrats.
The study of the structure and evolving nature of the satanic epic
shows that despite national (Spanish-English) and confessional (Catholic-
Protestant) differences, variances in the genre were only superficial. One
important goal of this book is to demonstrate the common religious world
informing all European colonial discourses, particularly Spanish and English
ones. Like John Bossy, I do not see the Reformation as a radical break with
the medieval past.69 Despite the undeniable impact of the Reformation and
the new dynastic early modern states in creating emerging national differ-
ences, early modern Europeans enjoyed a long history of shared cultural
values, harkening back millennia.

29
Chapter 1

The commonalities largely stemmed from a shared Christian culture,

for Christianity from its inception had understood the history of the elect
to be an ongoing spiritual and physical battle against hostile demonic
enemies, including heretics, pagans, Jews, and Muslims, part of a cosmic
confrontation between good and evil. Countless texts in the Old and New
Testaments cast religious life in militaristic terms. Recent scholarship on
the crusades, for example, has shown that they were not an aberrant vari-
ety of religious violence. Tradition has misleadingly reduced the crusades
to five campaigns against Islam that took place between 1095 and 1229,
aimed at recapturing Jerusalem, but we now know that the crusades were a
peculiar form of religious piety, second only to monasticism, and that their
violence was regarded as penitence and charity. War as pilgrimage was con-
sidered to be a form of sacrifice and atonement aimed at sympathetically
re-creating Christ’s suffering. Religious warriors who died in battle were
regarded as martyrs, and their bodies became relics. All crusading warriors,
not only those who belonged to the military-religious orders, took vows (by
taking the Cross) and enjoyed the spiritual and temporal immunities of the
clergy. More often than not, their enemies were pagans, heretics, and other
Christians, not Muslims in the Holy Land. It was crusading Germanic mili-
tary orders who in the thirteen and fourteenth centuries spearheaded the
colonization and settlement of the Baltic region, battling pagan Slavs, allies
of the devil. This peculiar form of organized religious violence slowly went
out of style as the transnational power of the papacy dwindled, although
plenty of “crusades” continued to be launched in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries.70
Yet the biblical interpretations of conversion, salvation, and the history
of the elect as epic spiritual and military confrontations between good
and evil did not go away. From at least the fifteenth century on, holy wars
ceased to be experienced as forms of monastic penitence, a way to earn
clerical immunities. The new religious wars became wars pitting Israelites
against Canaanites. The Hussites, the French, and the Spaniards, among
many others, justified violence against external enemies in providential,
eschatological terms, launching wars of national election to hasten the
arrival of the millennium. As they did so, they imaginatively transformed
their local landscapes into Holy Lands, sacred spaces, New Jerusalems.71
This book contributes to the literature on medieval and early modern
religious violence by demonstrating, through concrete examples, how the
discourses of eschatology, providential-national election, and holy land-
scapes worked together to justify expansion and colonization. The devil, I

30
 Introduction

argue, was the linchpin that in the early modern New World held all these
discourses together.
I seek to highlight resemblances over differences. Even in areas where
strong differences should be expected, we in fact find similarities. Take, for
example, the case of the demonization of the Spaniards in the Protestant epic.
As I have already mentioned, this inversion was in fact an idea first introduced
by the Spaniards themselves. Take also the case of millenarian discourses
of national election underpinning such discourses as the “City on the Hill”
and the “Errand into the Wilderness.” Creole patriots in Spanish America,
for example, interpreted the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the same
epic, providential, and apocalyptic terms that Elizabethans had used decades
before to articulate a notion of national election, or that Puritans would use
to voice their hope of creating the first Church of visible saints modeled solely
on biblical examples. I also argue that given these similarities of the satanic
epic, it would perhaps make sense to study John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)
with an eye to resemblances to the Iberian genre.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans were obsessed with
demons, and they thought that the devil had made the New World his
fiefdom. Chapter 2, “The Satanic Epic,” shows that among both English
Protestants (Anglicans and Puritans) and Iberian Catholics, colonization
was understood to be an ongoing epic struggle to dislodge Satan from
the continent. Both northern Protestant and southern Catholic settlers felt
threatened and surrounded by the devil, who allegedly attacked their polities
by unleashing storms, earthquakes, and epidemics, and by loosing heretics,
tyrannical royal bureaucrats, foreign enemies, and Amerindians on them. I
argue that we need to turn to the rich tradition of the New World Iberian
“satanic epic” to make sense of the Puritan siege mentality that historians
are now using to explain such events as the Pequot War, King Philip’s War,
and the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692. This chapter demonstrates that a
wider pan-American perspective can upset the most cherished national nar-
ratives of the United States, for I maintain that the Puritan colonization of
New England was as much an epic, crusading act of reconquista (against the
devil) as was the Spanish conquest. My emphasis on the pan-Atlantic history
of the satanic epic also sheds light on possible and unacknowledged influ-
ences on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Finally, and so as not to exaggerate
the centrality of Spanish America to any narrative of the Atlantic, I locate
that most typical of colonial Mexican cultural phenomena, the exegesis of
the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, itself part of the narrative of the
satanic epic, within Elizabethan apocalyptic traditions.

31
Chapter 1

Chapter 3, “The Structure of a Shared Demonological Discourse,” refines

our understanding of the demonological in colonization by paying care-
ful attention to the structure of this shared discourse. I argue that only by
turning to Iberian sources can the structure of Puritan demonology be
understood, and vice versa. I build on the expanding historiography on
early modern demonology in both Europe and the New World to explore
the building blocks of this shared discourse: the geographical mobility of
demons; the geopolitical battles pitting God against Satan for full or partial
control of the planet; the understanding of Amerindian ritual cannibalism
as part of a larger theology of hell (i.e., dismemberment of bodies); the des-
potic, enslaving, feudal, and tyrannical rule of Satan; the collective demonic
corruption of Amerindians as a manifestation of collective effeminate degen-
eration; colonization as an act of liberation; the mockery and inversion of
Christian religious institutions introduced by Satan in the New World; the
Amerindians as Satan’s elect; and the use of “typological” readings of the
Bible to structure narratives of colonization.
Chapter 3 also builds bridges linking the historiographies of colonial
British and Spanish America to shed new light on old subjects. I use the
well-developed historiography of Puritan typology (the understanding of
colonization as a fulfillment of events prefigured in the Bible) to under-
stand Iberian typological readings of colonization.72 The Iberian clergy, for
example, assumed that Satan had used typology to organize the history of
the continent. Franciscans in particular maintained that Satan had sought
to mimic the narrative of the Pentateuch in the New World. Thus, accord-
ing to this view, if the Israelites were the chosen people of God, the Aztecs
were Lucifer’s elect. Franciscans like Juan de Torquemada transformed the
history of the Aztecs into an inverted version of the history of the Israelites
in the Old Testament. According to this Franciscan narrative, the Aztecs
had experienced an exodus and had their own ark, tabernacle, and Moses.
Upon arrival in their promised land, the Aztecs also experienced an age of
subordination to “Canaanites,” followed by an age of monarchies (the Aztecs
had Davids and Solomons of their own, who built a temple) and an age of
prophets. Finally, like the Israelites, the Aztecs saw their temple leveled and
their capital destroyed by foreign powers. Even today, this is still the way
historians narrate the history of the Aztecs: migration, settlement, subordi-
nation, monarchy and empire, and foreordained doom and collapse.
Chapter 4, “Demonology and Nature,” explores how the discourse of
demonology and colonization encouraged both demonological and provi-
dential perceptions of the landscape and nature. Again, I argue that to

32
 Introduction

understand British America, one needs to turn to Spanish America, and

vice versa. Despite all their differences, intellectuals in both the British and
Iberian Atlantics saw Satan as enjoying control over the weather, plants,
animals, and landscapes in the New World. Iberian demonological views of
nature, therefore, should inform any interpretation of William Shakespeare’s
The Tempest (first performed in 1611, printed in 1623) as a colonial text.
Finally, I argue that demonological views of nature and colonization encour-
aged a particular perception of the American landscape among Europeans:
the New World often came to be seen as a false paradise that to be saved
needed to be destroyed by Christian heroes. This epic and domineering atti-
tude toward Nature informed early modern European forms of knowledge-
gathering more generally.
Chapter 5, “Colonization as Spiritual Gardening,” shows how the trope
of gardening allowed both Puritan and Spanish clergies to imaginatively
transform America from satanic continent to holy land. Both groups tapped
into an age-old tradition of interpreting sanctification as an amorous liaison
with God in a sealed garden. The Song of Songs informed the way both
Puritans and Spaniards understood the growth of both the individual soul
and the corporate Church. Both groups understood God to be a gardener
and the soul and the Church to be a garden. The struggle of individuals and
communities was to keep weeds out of the soul and the Church. Puritans
and Spaniards were obsessed with keeping their gardens “hedged,” safe
from satanic attacks. Satan could attack the soul through sinful tempta-
tion or outright possession. But Satan was also an enemy who could strike
from outside, battering and destroying the Church itself. Satan laid siege to
both Spanish and Puritan colonies by unleashing tempests, earthquakes,
epidemics, encroaching Crown bureaucrats, heretics, foreign enemies, and
Amerindians. This chapter discusses how saints in Spanish America and
New England strove to be flowers in the garden of the new Church. Both
Catholics and Calvinists in the New World thought themselves ideally posi-
tioned to produce more and better flowers and gardens than their European
brethren. Both groups sought to establish a New Jerusalem in the Indies
by multiplying blossoming gardens: individual souls of outstanding piety
and well-tended collective spiritual vineyards. Colonial saints in Spanish
America took the names of flowers (St. Rose of Lima and St. Mariana, the
Lily of Quito, to cite just two examples). Relics and the bodies of saints were
thought to give off flowery smells. Spanish American colonial churches were
designed as vineyards. Working within the tradition of biblical typology,
the colonial Church itself was thought to be the antitype of the Garden of

33
Chapter 1

Eden. Puritans had no relics, no cult of saints, and no holy spaces, yet they
also used the trope of gardening promiscuously. This chapter thus suggests
that although the Reformation and the rise of dynastic centralizing states
introduced significant national and confessional differences, centuries of
a shared medieval culture conferred uniformity onto most early modern
European colonial experiences.
Chapter 6, “Toward a ‘Pan-American’ Atlantic,” is historiographical. It
seeks to explain why the literatures of the British and Spanish Atlantics
have gone their separate ways. It puts the blame squarely on an ideologi-
cal and scholarly tradition that has sought to present the United States
and Latin America as two ontologically different spaces. The narrative of
“Western” civilization has contributed to highlighting the differences rather
than the resemblances. The political stakes in this exercise are huge. Puritan
Conquistadors should be read as a reply to Samuel Huntington’s influential
Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004). A profes-
sor of political science at Harvard, Huntington is best known for his contro-
versial The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996),
in which he argues that the civilizational chasm that had long separated
the Christian West from the Muslim East became so deep in the wake of
the Cold War that conflict was inevitable. Huntington’s blatant essentialism
contributed to heightening the Western rhetoric of war, particularly in the
wake of September 11, and his prophecies became self-fulfilling. Writing as
a self-confessed patriot, Huntington has found a new enemy in Who Are
We?: Hispanics belong culturally and linguistically to a radically different
civilization, one that threatens America’s unity and identity and undermines
the Anglo-Protestant values and institutions upon which the United States
has prospered. Views such as Huntington’s are fueling the current politi-
cal debate over Mexican illegal immigration. Hispanics in our midst are
increasingly being portrayed as a threat to the integrity of the nation, a peril
second only to “Arab terrorists.” By showing the common roots of Spanish
and British American discourses of colonization, I seek to cut Huntington’s
much vaunted culture of Anglo-Protestant exceptionalism down to size.

34
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St. Clara’s dawn, the rainbow-hued sun-dogs,
Wet seasons, times of drought and frost and plenty.
Full oft, in pleasant years, a-ploughing went he,
With six fair, handsome beasts. And, verily,
Myself have seen, and it was good to see,

The soil part silently before the share,

And its dark bosom to the sun lay bare:
The comely mules, ne’er from the furrow breaking,
Toiled on as though they care and thought were taking
For what they did. With muzzles low they went,
And arching necks like bows when these are bent,

And hasted not, nor lagged. Followed along—

Eye on the mules, and on his lips a song—
The ploughman, with one handle only guiding.
So, in the realm where we have seen presiding
Our old friend Ramoun, flourished every thing,
And he bare sceptre like a very king.

Now says he grace, and lifts his eyes above,

And signs the holy cross. The labourers move
Away to make the bonfire ready. These
Bring kindling; those, the boughs of dark pine-trees;
And the old men alone at table staying,
A silence fell. But Ambroi brake it, saying,—

“For counsel, Ramoun, am I come to thee;

For I am in a great perplexity
Thou only canst resolve. Cure see I none.
Thou knowest, Master, that I have a son
Who has been passing good until this day,—
It were ingratitude aught else to say;

“But there are flaws even in precious stones,

And tender lambs will have convulsions,
And the still waters are perfidious ever:
So my mad boy,—thou wilt believe it never,—
H l h d h f i h f h ld
He loves the daughter of a rich freeholder,
And swears he will in his embrace enfold her!

“Ay, swears he will, the maniac! And his love

And his despair my soul to terror move.
I showed him all his folly, be thou sure,
And how wealth gains, and poverty grows poor
In this hard world. In vain! He would but call,
‘Cost what it may, tell thou her parents all,—

“ ‘Tell them to look for virtue, not for gain!

Tell them that I can plough a stony plain,
Or harrow, or prune vines with any man!
Tell them their six yoke, with my guiding, can
Plough double! Tell them I revere the old;
And, if they part us for the sake of gold,

“ ‘We shall both die, and need but burial.’

Now, Master Ramoun, I have told thee all.
Shall I, clad in my rags, for this maid sue,
Or leave my son to die of sorrow?”—“Whew!”
The other. “To such wind spread thou no sail!
Nor he, nor she, will perish of this ail.

“So much, good friend, I say in utmost faith.

Nor would I, Ambroi, fret myself to death
If I were thou; but, seeing him so mad,
I would say plainly, ‘Calm your mind, my lad!
For if you raise a tempest by your passions,
I’ll teach you with a cudgel better fashions!’

“If an ass, Ambroi, for more fodder bray,

Throw him none down, but let thy bludgeon play.
Provençal families in days bygone
Were healthy, brave, and evermore at one,
And strong as plane-trees when a storm befell.
They had their strifes, indeed,—we know it well;

“But when returned the holy Christmas eve

 But, when returned the holy Christmas eve,
The grandsire all his children would receive
At his own board, under a star-sown tent;
And ceased the voice of strife and all dissent,
When, lifting hands that wrinkled were and trembled,
He blessed the generations there assembled.

“Moreover, he who is a father truly

Will have his child yield him obedience duly:
The flock that drives the shepherd, soon or late,
Will meet a wolf and a disastrous fate.
When we were young, had any son withstood
His father, he, belike, had shed his blood!”

“Thou wilt kill me then, father! It is I

Whom Vincen worships thus despairingly;
And before God and our most holy Mother,
I give my soul to him, and to no other!”
A deathlike hush followed Mirèio’s word.
The wife of Ramoun was the first who stirred.

Upspringing with clasped hands and utterance wild,

“Your speech is an atrocious insult, child!
Your love’s a thorn that long hath stung us deep.
Alari, the owner of a thousand sheep,
You sent away; and keeper Veran too,
Disgusted with your scorn, his suit withdrew;

“Also the wealthy herdsman, Ourrias,

You treated as a dog and a scapegrace!
Tramp through the country with your beggar, then!
Herd with strange women and with outcast men!
And cook your pot with fortune-telling crones
Under a bridge mayhap, upon three stones.

“Go, gypsy, you are free!” the mother said;

Nor stayed Ramoun her pitiless tirade,
Though his eye like a taper burned. But now
The lightning flashed under his shaggy brow,
 g g ggy ,
And his wrath brake, all barriers overbearing,
Like swollen torrent down a mountain tearing.

“Your mother’s right!” he said. “Go! travel yonder,

And take the tempest with you where you wander!
Nay, but you shall not! Here you shall remain,
Though I should bind you with an iron chain,
Or hold like a rebellious jumart, look!
Dragged by the nostrils with an iron hook!

“Yea, though you pine with sickly melancholy,

Till from your cheeks the roses perish wholly,
Or fade as snow fades when the sun is hot
On the hill-sides in spring, go shall you not!
And mark, Mirèio! Sure as the hearth’s ashes
Rest on that brick, and sure as the Rhone dashes

“Above its banks when it is overfull,

And sure as that’s a lamp, and here I rule,
You’ll see him never more!” The table leapt
Beneath his fist. Mirèio only wept.
Her heavy tears like dew on smallage rain,
Or grapes o’er ripe before a hurricane.

“And who,” resumed the old man, blind with rage,—

“Curse it!—I say, who, Ambroi, will engage
Thou didst not with the younger ruffian plot
This vile abduction, yonder in thy cot?”
Then Ambroi also sprang infuriate,—
“Good God!” he cried, “we are of low estate;

“But let me tell you that our hearts are high!

No shame, no stain, is honest poverty!
I’ve served my country forty years or more
On shipboard, and I know the cannon’s roar,
So young that I could scarce a boat-hook swing
When on my first cruise I went wandering.
“I’ve seen Melinda’s empire far away,
And with Suffren have haunted India,
And done my duty over all the world
In the great wars, where’er our flag unfurled
That southern chief who passed his conquering hand
With one red sweep from Spain to Russian land,

“And at whose drum-beat every clime was quaking

Like aspen-tree before the tempest shaking;
Horrors of boarding, shipwreck’s agonies,—
These have I known, and darker things than these,
Days than the sea more bitter. Being poor,
No bit of motherland might I secure.

“Scorned of the rich, I might not dress the sward,

But suffer forty years without reward.
We ate dog’s food, on the hoar-frost we lay:
Weary of life, we rushed into the fray,
And so upbore the glorious name of France.
But no one holds it in remembrance!”

His caddis-cloak upon the ground he threw,

And spake no more. “What great thing wilt thou do?”
Asked Ramoun, and his tone was full of scorn.
“I, too, have heard the cannon-thunder borne
Along the valley of Toulon, have seen
The bridge of Arcole stormed, and I have been

“In Egypt when her sands were red with gore;

But we, like men, when those great wars were o’er,
Returning, fiercely fell upon the soil,
And dried our very marrow up with toil
The day began long ere the eastern glow,
The rising moon surprised us at the hoe.

“They say the Earth is generous. It is true!

But, like a nut-tree, naught she gives to you
Unless well-beaten. And if all were known,
Each clod of landed ease th s hardl on
Each clod of landed ease thus hardly won,
He who should number them would also know
The sweat-drops that have fallen from my brow.

“And must I, by Ste. Anne of Apt, be still?

Like satyr toil, of siftings eat my fill,
That all the homestead may grow wealthy, and
Myself before the world with honour stand,
Yet go and give my daughter to a tramp,
A vagabond, a straw-loft-sleeping scamp?

“God’s thunder strike you and your dog! Begone!

But I,” the master said, “will keep my swan.”
These were his last rough words; and steadily
Ambroi arose, and his cloak lifted he,
And only rested on his staff to say,
“Adieu! Mayst thou not regret this day!

“And may the good God and his angels guide

The orange-laden bark across the tide!”
Then, as he passed into the falling night,
From the branch-heap arose a ruddy light,
And one long tongue of flame the wanderer sees,
Curled like a horn by the careering breeze;

And round it reapers dancing blithesomely,

With pulsing feet, and haughty heads and free
Thrown back, and faces by the bonfire lit,
Loud crackling as the night-wind fanneth it.
The sound of coals that to the brazier fall
Blends with the fife-notes fine but musical,

And merry as the song of the hedge-sparrow.

Ah, but it thrills the old Earth to her marrow
When thou dost visit her, beloved St. John!
The sparks went whirling upward, and hummed on
The tabor gravely and incessantly,
Like the low surging of a tranquil sea.
Then did the dusky troop their sickle wave,
And three great leaps athwart the flame they gave,
And cloves of odorous garlic from a string
Upon the glowing embers they did fling,
And holy herb and John’s-wort bare anigh;
And these were purified and blessed thereby.

Then “Hail, St. John!” thrice rose a deafening shout;

And hills and plain, illumined round about,
Sparkled as though the dark were showering stars.
And sure the Saint, above the heaven’s blue bars,
The breath of all this incense doth inhale,
Wafted aloft by the unconscious gale.
CANTO VIII.

La Crau.
 T HE rage of the mighty lioness
Who shall restrain?
She came to her den, and she found it bare:
A Moorish huntsman had entered there.
The huntsman came, and the whelp is gone.
Away through the canebrake they have flown,
Galloping far at a headlong pace.
To follow—vain!
She roars awhile in her deep despite,
Then rises and courses, lank and light,
Over the hills of Barbary.
As a maid bereft of her love is she.

Mirèio lay upon her little bed,

Clasping in both her hands her burning head.
Dim was the chamber; for the stars alone
Saw the maid weep, and heard her piteous moan,—
“Help, Mother Mary, in my sore distress!
Oh, cruel fate! Oh, father pitiless,

“Who tread me underfoot! Could you but see

My heart’s mad tumult, you would pity me!
You used to call me darling long ago,
And now you bend me to the yoke as though
I were a vicious colt that you were fain
To break. Why does the sea not flood this plain?

“I would the wealthy lands that make me weep

Were hid for evermore in the great deep!
Ah, had I in a serpent’s hole been born,
Of some poor vagrant, I were less forlorn!
For then if any lad, my Vincen even,
Had asked my hand, mayhap it had been given.

“O Vincen, who so handsome are and true!

If only they would let me go to you,
I’d cling as clings the tender ivy-vine
U h k I ld i
Unto the oak: I would not ever pine
For food, but life in your caresses find,
And drink at wayside pools with happy mind.”

So on her pallet the sweet maid lay sobbing,

Fire in her heart and every vein a-throbbing,
And all the happy time remembering—
Oh, calm and happy!—of her love’s fair spring,
Until a word in Vincen’s very tone
Comes to her memory. “ ’Twas you, my own,—

“ ’Twas you,” she cried, “came one day to the farm,

And said, ‘If ever thou dost come to harm,—
If any lizard, wolf, or poisonous snake,
Ever should wound thee with its fang,—betake
Thyself forthwith to the most holy Saints,
Who cure all ills and hearken all complaints.’

“And sure I am in trouble now,” she said:

“Therefore we’ll go, and come back comforted.”
Then lightly from her white cot glided she,
And straightway opened, with a shining key,
The wardrobe where her own possessions lay:
It was of walnut wood, and carven gay.

Here were her childhood’s little treasures all:

Here sacredly she kept the coronal
Worn at her first communion; and thereby
A faded sprig of lavender and dry,
And a wax taper almost burned, as well,
Once blessed, the distant thunder to dispel.

A smart red petticoat she first prepares,

Which she herself had quilted into squares,—
Of needlework a very masterpiece;
And round her slender waist she fastens this;
And over it another, finer one
She draws; and next doth a black bodice don,
And fasten firmly with a pin of gold.
On her white shoulders, her long hair unrolled,
Curling, and loose like a dark garment, lay,
Which, gathering up, she swiftly coils away
Under a cap of fine, transparent lace;
Then decks the veilèd tresses with all grace,

Thrice with a ribbon blue encircling them,—

The fair young brow’s Arlesian diadem.
Lastly, she adds an apron to the rest,
And folds a muslin kerchief o’er her breast.
In her dire haste, alone, the child forgat
The shallow-crowned, broad-brimmed Provençal hat,

That might have screened her from the mortal heat.

But, so arrayed, crept forth on soundless feet
Adown the wooden staircase, in her hand
Her shoes, undid the heavy door-bar, and
Her soul unto the watchful saints commended,
As away like a wind of night she wended.

It was the hour when constellations keep

Their friendly watch o’er followers of the deep.
The eye of St. John’s eagle flashed afar,
As it alighted on a burning star,
One of the three where the evangelist
Hath his alternate dwelling. Cloud nor mist

Defaced the dark serene of star-lit sky;

But the great chariot of souls went by
On wingèd wheels along the heavenly road,
Bearing away from earth its blessed load.
Far up the shining steeps of Paradise,
The circling hills behold it as it flies.

Mirèio hasted no less anxiously

Than Magalouno in the days gone by,
Who searched the wood with sad, inquiring glance
W o sea c ed t e wood w t sad, qu g g a ce
For her lost lover, Pèire of Provence,
When cruel waves divorced him from her side,
And left her lone and wretched. Soon espied

The maid, upon the boundary of the lea,

Folds where her sire’s own shepherds could she see
Already milking. Some the sheep compelled,
Against the pen-side by the muzzle held,
To suckle quietly their tawny lambs.
Always arose the bleat of certain dams;

While other childless ones the shepherds guide

Toward the milker. On a stone astride,
Mute as the very night, sits he, and dim;
While, pressed from swollen udders, a long stream
Of warm fine milk into the pail goes leaping,
The white froth high about its border creeping.

The sheep-dogs all in tranquil slumber lay.

The fine, large dogs—as white as lilies they—
Stretched round the enclosure, muzzles deep in thyme.
And peace was everywhere, and summer clime;
And o’er the balmy country, far and near,
Brooded a heaven full of stars, and clear.

So in the stillness doth Mirèio dash

Along the hurdles, like a lightning flash,
Lifting a wailing cry that never varies,—
“Will none go with me to the holy Maries,
Of all the shepherds?” They and the sheep hear it,
And see the maiden flitting like a spirit,

And huddle up, and bow their heads, as though

Smit by a sudden gale. The farm-dogs know
Her voice, but never stir her flight to stay.
And now is she already far away,
Threads the dwarf-oaks, and like a partridge rushes
Over the holly and the camphyre bushes,
Her feet scarce touching earth. And now she passes
Curlews in flocks asleep amid the grasses
Under the oaks, who, roused from slumber soft,
Arise in haste, and wing their flight aloft
Over the sad and barren plain; and all
Together “Cour’li! cour’li! cour’li!” call,

Until the Dawn, with her dew-glittering tresses,

From mountain-top to level slow progresses,
Sweetly saluted by the tufted lark,
Soaring and singing o’er the caverns dark
In the great hills, whose pinnacles each one
Appear to sway before the rising sun.

Then was revealed La Crau, the bare, the waste,

The rough with stones, the ancient, and the vast,
Whose proud old giants, if the tale be true,
Once dreamed, poor fools, the Almighty to subdue
With but a ladder and their shoulders brave;
But He them ’whelmed in a destroying wave.

Already had the rebels dispossest

The Mount of Victory of his tall crest,
Lifted with lever from its place; and sure
They would have helped it high upon Ventour,
As they had piled the rugged escarpment
They from the Alpine range had earlier rent.

But God his hand extended o’er the plain:

The north-west wind, thunder, and hurricane
He loosed; and these arose like eagles three
From mountain clefts and caverns and the sea,
Wrapped in thick fog, with fury terrible,
And on the marble pile together fell.

Then were the rude Colossi overthrown;

And a dense covering of pudding-stone
S d ’ L C th d l t th t
Spread o’er La Crau, the desolate, the vast,
The mute, the bare to every stormy blast;
Who wears the hideous garment to this day.
Meanwhile Mirèio farther speeds away

From the home-lands, while the sun’s ardent glare

Makes visible all round the shimmering air;
And shrill cicalas, grilling in the grass,
Beat madly evermore their tiny brass.
Nor tree for shade was there, nor any beast:
The many flocks, that in the winter feast.

On the short, savoury grasses of the moor,

Had climbed the Alps, where airs are cool and pure,
And pastures fadeless. Yet the maid doth fly
Under the pouring fire of a June sky,—
Fly, fly, like lightning. Lizards large and gray
Peep from their holes, and to each other say,

“She must be mad who thus the shingle clears,

Under a heat that sets the junipers
A-dancing on the hills; on Crau, the sands.”
The praying mantes lift beseeching hands,
“Return, return, O pilgrim!” murmuring,
“For God hath opened many a crystal spring;

“And shady trees hath planted, so the rose

To save upon your cheeks. Why, then, expose
Your brow to the unpitying summer heat?
Vainly as well the butterflies entreat.
For her the wings of love, the wind of faith,
Bear on together, as the tempest’s breath

White gulls astray over the briny plains

Of Agui-Morto. Utter sadness reigns
In scattered sheep-cots of their tenants left,
And overrun with salicorne. Bereft
In the hot desert, seemed the maid to wake,
And see nor spring nor pool her thirst to slake
And see nor spring nor pool her thirst to slake,

And slightly shuddered. “Great St. Gent!” she cried,

“O hermit of the Bausset mountain-side!
O fair young labourer, who to thy plough
Didst harness the fierce mountain-wolf ere now,
And in the flinty rock, recluse divine,
Didst open springs of water and of wine,

“And so revive thy mother, perishing

Of heat! like me, when they were slumbering,
Thou didst forsake thy household, and didst fare
Alone with God through mountain-passes, where
Thy mother found thee! For me, too, dear Saint,
Open a spring; for I am very faint,

“And my feet by the hot stones blisterèd!”

Then, in high heaven, heard what Mirèio said
The good St. Gent: and soon she doth discover
A well far off, with a bright stone laid over;
And, like a marten through a shower of rain,
Speeds through the flaming sun-rays, this to gain.

The well was old, with ivy overrun—

A watering-place for flocks; and from the sun
Scarce by it sheltered sat a little boy,
With basket-full of small white snails for toy.
With his brown hands, he one by one withdrew them,
The tiny harvest-snails; and then sang to them,—

“Snaily, snaily, little nun,

Come out of the cell, come into the sun!
Show me your horns without delay,
Or I’ll tear your convent-walls away.”

Then the fair maid of Crau, when she had dipped

Her burning lips into the pail, and sipped,
Quickly upraised a lovely, rosy face,
And, “Little one! what dost thou here?” she says.
 , y
A pause. “Pick snailies from the stones and grass?”
“Thou hast guessed right!” the urchin’s answer was.

“Here in my basket have I—see, how many!

Nuns, harvest-snails, and these, as good as any!”
“And thou dost eat them”—“Nay, not I,” replied he;
“But mother carries them to Arles on Friday,
And sells them; and brings back nice, tender bread.
Thou wilt have been to Arles?”—“Never!” she said.

“What, never been to Arles! But I’ve been there!

Ah, poor young lady! Couldst thou see how fair
And large a city that same Arles is grown!
She covers all the seven mouths of the Rhone.
Upon the islands of the great salt-mere
Her cattle graze: wild horses doth she rear.

“And in one summer, corn enough doth grow,

To feed her seven full years, if need were so.
She’s fishermen who fish on every sea,—
Seamen who front the storms right valiantly
Of distant waters.” Thus with pretty pride
The boy his sunny country glorified,

In golden speech;—her blue and heaving ocean;

Her Mont Majour, that keeps the mills in motion,—
These with soft olives ever feeding fully;
Her bitterns in the marshes booming dully.
One thing alone, thou lovely, dusky town,
The child forgat,—of all thy charms the crown;

He said not, fruitful Arles, that thy fine air

Gives to thy daughters beauty rich and rare,
As grapes to autumn, or as wings to bird,
Or fragrance to the hill-sides. Him had heard
The country maiden, sadly, absently.
But now, “Bright boy, wilt thou not go with me?”

Sh id “f h f ki h ill
She said; “for, ere the frogs croak in the willow,
My foot must planted be beyond the billow.
Come with me! I must o’er the Rhone be rowed,
And left there in the keeping of my God!”
“Now, then,” the urchin cried, “thou poor, dear lady,
Thou art in luck! for we are fishers,” said he;

“And thou shalt sleep under our tent this night,

Pitched in the shadow of the poplars white,
So keeping all thy pretty clothing on;
And father, with the earliest ray of dawn,
In our own little boat will put thee o’er!”
But she, “Do not detain me, I implore:

“I am yet strong enough this night to wander.”

“Now God forbid!” was the lad’s prompt rejoinder:
“Wouldst thou see, then, the crowd of sorry shapes
From the Trau-de-la-Capo that escapes?
For if they meet thee, be thou sure of this,—
They’ll drag thee with them into the abyss!”

“Trau-de-la-Capo! What may that be, pray?”

“I’ll tell thee, lady, as we pick our way
Over the stones.” And forthwith he began:
“Once was a treading-floor that overran
With wealth of sheaves. To-morrow, on thy ways,
Thou’lt pass, upon the riverside, the place.

“Trod by a circle of Camargan steeds,

The tall sheaves have been yielding up their seeds
To the incessant hoofs, a month or more.
No pause, no rest; and, on the treading-floor,
Dusty and winding, still the eye perceives
A very mountain of untrodden sheaves.

“Also, the weather was so fiercely hot,

The floor would burn like fire; and rested not
The wooden forks that more sheaves yet supplied
While at the horses’ muzzles there were shied
While at the horses muzzles there were shied
Clusters of bearded ears unceasingly,—
They flew as arrows from the cross-bow fly.

“And on St. Peter’s day and on St. Charles’

Rang, and rang vainly, all the bells of Arles:
There was no Sunday and no holiday
For the unhappy horses: but alway
The heavy tramp around the weary road,
Alway the pricking of the keeper’s goad,

“Alway the orders issued huskily,

As in the fiery whirlwind still stood he.
The greedy master of the treaders white
Had even muzzled them, in his despite.
And, when Our Lady’s day in August came,
The coupled beasts were treading, all the same,

“The pilèd sheaves, foam-drenched. Their livers clung

Fast to their ribs, and their jaws drivelling hung,
When suddenly an icy, northern gale
Smit, swept the floor,—and God’s blasphemers pale.
It quakes! It parts! On a black caldron’s brink
Now stand they, and their eyes with horror sink.

“Then the sheaves whirl with fury terrible.

Pitch-forkers, keepers, keepers-aids as well,
Struggle to save them; but they naught can do:
The van, the van-goats, and the mill-stones too,
Horses and drivers, treading-floor, and master
Are swallowed up in one immense disaster!”

“You make me shudder!” poor Mirèio said.

“Ah, but that is not all, my pretty maid!
Thou thinkest me a little mad, may be:
But on the morrow thou the spot wilt see;
And carp and tench in the blue water playing,
And, in the reeds, marsh-blackbirds roundelaying.
“But on Our Lady’s day, when mounts again
The fire-crowned sun to the meridian,
Lay thee down softly, ear to earth,” said he,
“And eye a-watch, and presently thou’lt see
The gulf, at first so limpid, will begin
To darken with the shadow of the sin;

“And slowly up from the unquiet deep

A murmuring sound, like buzzing flies, will creep;
And then a tinkling, as of tiny bells,
That soon into an awful uproar swells
Among the water-weeds! Like human voices
Inside an amphora the fearsome noise is!

“And then it is the trot of wasted horses

Painfully tramping round their weary courses
Upon a hard, dry surface, evermore
Echoing like a summer threshing-floor,
Whom drives a brutal keeper, nothing loth,
And hurries them with insult and with oath.

“But, when the holy sun is sinking low,

The blasphemies turn hoarse and fainter grow,
The tinkling dies among the weeds. Far off,
The limping, sorry steed is heard to cough;
And, on the top of the tall reeds a-swinging,
Once more the blackbirds begin sweetly singing.”

So, full of chat, and with his basket laden,

Travelled the little man before the maiden;
While the descending sun with rose invests
The great blue ramparts and the golden crests
Of the hill-range, peaceful and pure and high,
Blending its outline with the evening sky.

Seemed the great orb, as he withdrew in splendour,

God’s peace unto the marshes to surrender,
And to the great lake, and the olives gray
Of the Vaulungo, and the Rhone away
There in the distance, and the reapers weary,
Who now unbend, and quaff the sea-air, cheery.

Till the boy cries that far away he sees

The home-tent’s canvas fluttering in the breeze.
“And the white poplar, dear maid, seest thou?
And brother Not, who climbs it even now?
He’s there after cicalas, be thou sure;
Or to spy me returning o’er the moor.

“Ah, now he sees us! And my sister Zeto,

Who helped him with her shoulder, turns this way too;
And seems to tell my mother that she may
Put on the bouillabaise without delay.
And mother also, I can see her leaning
Over the boat, and the fresh fish a-gleaning.”

Then, as the two made haste with one accord

To mount the dike, the lusty fisher roared,
“Now this is charming! Look this way, my wife!
Our little Andreloun, upon my life,
Will be the prince of fishers one day,” said he;
“For he has caught the queen of eels already!”
CANTO IX.

The Muster.
A LL sorrowfully droop the lotus-trees;
And heart-sick to their hives withdraw the bees,
Forgetful of the heath with savoury sweet,
And with milk-thistle. Water-lilies greet
Kingfishers blue that to the vivary hie,
And “Have you seen Mirèio?” is their cry.

While Ramoun and his wife by the fireside

Are sitting, lost in grief, and swollen-eyed,
And at their hearts the bitterness of death.
“Doubtless,” they said, “her reason wandereth.
Oh, what a mad and wretched maid it is!
Oh, what a heavy, cruel downfall this!

“Oh, dire disgrace! Our beauty and our hope

So with the last of trampers to elope!
Fled with a gypsy! And who shall discover
The secret hole of this kidnapping lover,
Where he the shameless one concealèd hath?”
And, as they spake, they knit their brows in wrath.

Now came the cupbearer with ass and pannier,

And from the threshold, in his wonted manner,
“Good-morrow,” Jane. “I’m come,” he said, “to seek
The labourer’s lunch.” And Ramoun could but wreak
His anguish on him. “Go, you cursèd churl!
I’m as a cork-tree barked, without my girl!”

“Yet hark ye, cupbearer, upon your track

Across the fields like lightning go you back,
And bid the ploughmen and the mowers all
Quit ploughs and scythes, the harvesters let fall
Their sickles, and their shepherds too,” said he,
“Forsake their flocks, and instant come to me!”

Then, fleeter than a goat, the faithful man

O’er stony fallow and red clover ran,
Th d d h l k l d li iti
Threaded holm-oaks on long declivities,
Leaped o’er the roads along the base of these,
And now already scents the sweet perfume
Of new-mown hay, and the blue-tufted bloom

Of tall lucerne descries; and presently

The measured sweep of the long scythes hears he,
And lusty mowers bending in a row
Beholds, and grass by the keen steel laid low
In verdant swaths,—ever a pleasant sight,—
And children, and young maidens, with delight

Raking the hay and in cocks piling it;

While crickets, that before the mowers flit,
Hark to their singing. Also, farther on,
An ash-wood cart, by two white oxen drawn,
Where a deft cartman, piles the well-cured grass
By armfuls high and higher, till the mass

Rises about his loins, and so conceals

The rails, the cart-beam, and the very wheels;
And, when the cart moves on, with the hay trailing,
It seems like some unwieldy vessel sailing.
But now the cartman rises, and descries
The runner, and “Hold, men! there’s trouble!” cries;

And all his aids, who in great forkfuls carry

To him the hay, do for a moment tarry,
And wipe their streaming brows; and mowers rest
The scythe-back carefully upon the breast,
And whet the edge, as they the plain explore
That Phœbus wings his burning arrows o’er.

Began the rustic messenger straightway,

“Hear men, what our good master bade me say:
“ ‘Cupbearer,’ was his word, ‘upon your track
Across the fields like lightning go you back,
And bid the ploughmen and the mowers all
Quit ploughs and scythes the harvesters let fall
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