 Good evening everyone. I don't know if you can tell but I have a giant smile on my face because I'm just so happy that you're all here and to see all of you high and for us to be here together. I'm Martha Lucy, deputy director for research and education here at the Barnes. Welcome. I'm gonna be really quick because we have a couple of people that are going to be giving you know remarks before our talk. We love the graduate student symposium. It is our favorite time of year. I want to thank all the students for being here. I want to thank advisors and faculty. I want to thank other people in the audience, people who are at home watching. I would like to thank our speaker by Erin Hammond in advance. Thank you very much. And our co-organizing institutions especially this year the University of Pennsylvania and especially David Kim. Of course I need to thank Alia Palumbo and I'll be doing this a lot tomorrow. She is our amazing manager for academic programs and she just she does everything. She has worked really hard on this whole event. David will be introducing Byron in a minute but before he does we are going to hear from one of his colleagues at Penn. Sarah Guerin is assistant professor of medieval art in the history of art department at Penn. Her research focuses on the socioeconomic circumstances surrounding production and use of medieval art as well as the symbolic potential of materials. She has a book coming out this summer congratulations called French Gothic Ivory's material Theologies and the Sculptor's Craft and tonight she is going to speak to us briefly about the department's efforts in making space for indigenous vibrancy within the arts community at Penn. So welcome and enjoy. Thank you Martha and thank you David and Alia for inviting me to say a couple of words about our project. Philadelphia the University of Pennsylvania and the Barnes Foundation in which we are all gathered in person and virtually all stand on the traditional lands of the Lenae Lenape a name which the Lenape translate as meeting something akin to original peoples. The Lenape who lived in and around what is now Philadelphia spoke the southern Unami dialect. While William Penn and the first Quaker settlers might have conducted good faith relations with Lenape this much vaunted moment of brotherly love was sadly short-lived. The so-called walking purchase of 1737 was a fraudulent transaction whereby James Logan and the Sons of William Penn tricked the Lenape leaders including Mena Wehikin and Weshany Kanikin into signing away their land. The Lenape leaders immediately protested the subterfuge in writing and the Lenape never ceded these lands in a good faith transaction. Fourth is full removals in the wake of the walking purchase and throughout subsequent colonial expansion resulted in the wide diaspora of Lenape or Delaware Indians today including but very much not limited to state recognized communities in Delaware New Jersey Oklahoma Kansas and Wisconsin as well as three First Nations in Ontario. But Philadelphia and Pennsylvania are still home to many families and communities of indigenous descent from across Turtle Island including Lenape communities. It is to be noted that despite considerable political and social organization the state of Pennsylvania does not recognize members of the Lenape nation of Pennsylvania nor any other indigenous people. So I recount this history still too little known among our community at the University of Pennsylvania in any case in the spirit of education and respect. It is also an acknowledgement that the appropriation of land and cultural genocide enacted by the colonial past is embedded in our living institutions today. But beyond education acknowledgement and an acceptance of personal implication in past injustices it is beholden upon settler communities to conceive of ways in which we can decolonize our institutions from within. In particular by urgently making space in our institutions for indigenous histories indigenous cultures indigenous voices indigenous vibrancy and indigenous futures. So to this end a first step towards creating such spaces in the life of the history of art department has been a collaboration with a student and faculty group natives at Penn led by Toys Holmes with the native arts organization we are the seeds of culture led by Taylin Agoyo and in dialogue with the leaders of the native in indigenous studies program at Penn to organize a lecture series on indigenous arts and focus. Generally funded by the SAACS program for arts innovation this series seeks to bring indigenous artists curators and art historians to campus to reflect upon the rich history and contemporary challenges facing a range of practitioners in the visual and performing arts. Begun in fall 2021 it will continue until December 2022. For our community this is a first small step towards what we conceive of as a living land acknowledgement not scripted words but education as a first step second long lasting connections with communities on campus and in Philadelphia. And lastly making a making concrete changes to our programming and priorities and I would like to note that Lucy Fowler willing excuse me Lucy Fowler Williams is teaching a seminar this term in the department that is in connection with the wonderful show that just opened here at the barns on water wind and air and so that's a concrete step. So again I think David Alia and the whole organizing committee of the barns graduate symposium for inviting inviting me as a representative of the living land acknowledgement working group that comprises both faculty and graduate students to share with you a bit of our journey and our hopes for the future. So thank you and David Kim will introduce the speaker. Good evening everyone. Thanks very much Sarah for that description of the department's initiatives. And before introducing our keynote speaker this evening I'd like to thank our colleagues at the barns especially Alia Palumbo for organizing this event and I'd like also to recognize our partnerships with Temple and Bryn Mawr which enable the realization of this very special symposium that celebrates the work of our graduate students or these graduate students and the many many hours that the advisors have spent in office hours I can imagine we should have count the number of office hours in this room. And welcome to all of you physically with us or in the virtual sphere. So I'd like to begin my introduction of our speaker tonight Byron Hammond currently a member at the School of Historical Studies at the IAS by invoking what might be a surprising source namely the new Victorian crime thriller Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. Now a Fingersmith of Fingersmith a sensational tale of Victorian era underground life mistaken identities same sex love and period pornography one reviewer wrote the following. This novel contains so many fiendish evil and wicked twists that ambushed readers flip backwards and forwards as they read trying to locate Terra firma. And the same could be said for much of Byron Hammond's work which also asked the reader to find firm ground and in so doing reconfigures geographies and the roots between them. So yes Byron Hammond's works writing focuses on the Americas in Europe and what he calls their early modern and Mediterranean and Mediterranean world. And yes as Frederick Cooper and Bruno Latua would might appreciate his writing adamantly avoids vague discussions of early modern globalizations offering instead specific connections and routes across land and sea reconstructed at the level of the document or the material material trace. But to my mind Hammond's writing raises two fundamental questions that extend beyond the specific art historical field. The first question might be what is the mode of writing appropriate to historical inquiry. And the second question might be what is the mode of writing appropriate to dramatic narrative. And his three monographs and many journal articles essays and digital digital media projects Hammond demonstrates how the archive and the archival instance can serve as a plot twist. That is to say a radical narrative turn by means of which the reader and spectator experience a combination of reversal and discovery. For example in his first book the translations of Nebrija a language culture and circulation in the early modern world from 2015 Hammond tracks how this tracks how the structure of a Spanish Latin dictionary first published in 1495 unexpectedly provides the word list framework for non Latin dictionaries on a global scale for languages spoken in the Americas and Asia. In his second book bad Christians New Spains Muslims Catholics and Native Americans in a Mediterranean world from 2020. Each chapter confronts two inquisitorial investigations one from Valencia about Muslims and old Christians and the other from about Native Americans and Europeans. This dialogue between inquisitorial reports reveals long distance the remarkably common and shared concerns about the nature of time and cultural techniques that affect social change. His recent article field notes from Solaris in the journal Grey Room where he also serves as an editor mobilizes sources ranging from ship logs to shipwreck archaeology to reveal salt water as an unexpected and surprising protagonist in early modern infrastructure. The archival instance and the the archival instance and the insertion of the archive as plot twist can also be said to be confronted head on in his book now in press the invention of colonial America data architecture and the archive of the Indies 1781 to 1844. In this work of forthcoming from the Getty building layouts and systems of storage are analyzed to set the stage as it were for the unforeseen disclosure of how the fabled archive of the Indies imagined the America separate and separable from the old world. And in his talk tonight the archive as plot twist promises to reconfigure our understanding about uncanny resemblances between two early modern cities and ruins. So please join me in welcoming Byron Hammond. Thank you David for that lovely introduction and indeed if any of you have not read Fingersmith by you urge you to do so as soon as possible. I was under the impression I could take off my mask but maybe that's forbidden. Is this forbidden? It's not forbidden. All right. Thank you. I'll drink a lot of water so that's much appreciated. So good evening and thank you all for coming. It's a great honor to give this Philadelphia Symposium lecture. I'm going to be speaking about a project I've been working on for the past couple of years and it's very much a work in progress. So I look forward to any comments and suggestions. My goal is to give you a panoramic overview of the project as a whole as well as a series of micro historical moments in its story. And as you'll see my talk tonight happens to coincide with the start of a series of often tragic 500 year anniversaries. The first was August of last year 2021 which marked the 500th anniversary of the so-called conquest of Mexico City in 1521. Further 500 year anniversaries loom on the horizon in May 2027 and April 2029. So to begin. Around 1560 a Native American author in Central Mexico wrote an epic poem in Nahuatl about a transatlantic journey to Rome. He transformed the Pope into a Mesoamerican noble hunting butterfly souls in the halls of the Vatican with a turquoise mosaic blowgun. Friends willow men behold the Pope who's representing God who speaks for him. The Pope is on God's mat and seat and speaks for him. Who is this reclining on a golden chair? Look it's the Pope. He has his turquoise blowgun and he's shooting in the world. It seems it's true it's it seems he has his cross and golden staff and these are shining in the world. I grieve in Rome and see his flesh and he's Saint Peter, Saint Paul. It seems that from the four directions they've been captured you've made them enter the golden refuge and it's shining. It seems the Pope's home lies painted in golden butterflies. It's beaming. Now this poem is filled with references to Mesoamerican cosmology. The phrase mat and seat was a Nahuatl metaphor for rulership. Nahuatl being the dominant language in Central Mexico, the language of the Aztecs as well as of their enemies that plush colons. Dividing the world in the four directions was a common Mesoamerican cosmological model. Is this on? No. All right. And the idea of butterflies as souls went back at least a thousand years in Central Mexico to classic period Teotihuacan. So this was a vision of Rome very much from a Mesoamerican point of view, a point to which we'll return. Now John Beerhorst, the English translator of this and the other poems collected in a Nahuatl language manuscript known since the 19th century as the Cantares Mexicanos, argued that this poetic journey to Rome was inspired by actual events. In the spring of 1529 a small group of Central Mexican ambassadors, four probably, actually did travel to Rome with a conquistador chaperone Juan de Rada. And we know the names of two of the Central Mexican travelers. Hernando de Tapia was from Mexico City to Noctilón and Benito de Rada Masalcalcani was probably from Tlashcala, one valley to the east of Mexico City. Now direct references to the 1529 Nahuatl visits to Rome were known from three key 16th century sources. Two brief mentions in a set of late 1520s economic records now in Seville's Archive of the Indies, two sentences in Venetian, sorry in Vatican quarter quarter year Paolo Geovios 1551 praise of men illustrious for courage and war, and two paragraphs in Bernal Diaz del Castillo's True History of the Conquest of New Spain. None of these sources was actually written in 1520s Rome and so when I started this project I set out to see if I could locate documents about this trip in Italian archives and I've had a bit of luck with this which I'll be talking about shortly. But mid-April 1529 was a very strange time for this small group of Central Mexicans to visit Rome. The Pope, Clement VII, had only just moved back to Rome six months before in early October 1528 and the reason he'd been living outside of Rome for over a year was because just under two years before the Central Mexicans arrived in other words on May 6th 1527 the city of Rome was invaded by imperial troops loyal to Emperor Charles the Fifth of Spain who at that point for complicated reasons was hostile to the papacy. The city of Rome was actively stacked and looted for a week and a half followed by a year of occupation by those soldiers to February 1528. Now not even the halls of the Vatican were spared from this violence many of Charles the Fifth soldiers of course came from the Germanies which at this point many parts of which were 10 years into the Reformation. And my opening image shows a defacement of Raphael's school of Athens fresco. Iconoclasm probably caused by a long spear which was the choice of was it was the weapon of choice for Charles the Fifth soldiers they were called Lance Knights. And across the very and across the same room in the disputa fresco soldiers carved the plaster with the words Luther and Charles the Fifth Emperor. But of course Rome was not the only holy city imagined as the center of sacred empire to be sacked and looted by soldiers loyal to Charles the Fifth in the 1520s. Less than a decade before the 1529 visit of central Mexicans to Rome so in 1521 the holy city of Tenochtitlán capital of the Aztec Empire had itself been invaded looted and reduced to rubble by the combined forces of Hernán Cortés and his indigenous allies. In other words telling the story of the visit of central Mexicans to Rome in 1529 requires us to tell a connected transatlantic or indeed Mediterranean Atlantic story. What was it like for participants in and witnesses to the destruction of Tenochtitlán to find themselves less than a decade later in the ruins of another sacred city. I'm going to tell this story in four sections. In the first 1521-1527 I'll talk about the horrific but unsurprising parallels between what took place in Rome in Tenochtitlán in 1521 and in Rome in 1527. In part two into the east I'll sketch how from February 1528 to March 1529 a group of about 40 central Mexican nobles traveled across the Atlantic and throughout Iberia with Hernán Cortés who also brought his own entourage of indigenous entertainers probably his slaves. These included a team of 12 ball players and eight or nine log acrobats into these. This brings us to part three I'm sorry in March 1529 the group splits up at which point four of the central Mexicans traveled on to Rome and this brings us to part three at the butterfly house with story of their trip to Rome. And then finally part four going home we'll tell how at least two of the Roman visitors returned to Iberia one then rejoined his fellow travelers in Seville and then went back across the Atlantic Atlantic in late August 1529 carrying four papal bulls in support of indigenous churches in specific towns in central Mexico which is where we will end. Before we start part one I just want to mention two conceptual reference points for me. The first is the cinematic movement of post-World War II Italian neorealism and in particularly trilogy that launched neorealism as a genre Roberto Rossellini's war trilogy so Rome open city 1945 Pisa 1946 and Germany year zero 1948. These are three extraordinary if very disturbing films and if you haven't seen them the spoiler is no happy endings. In all three Rossellini used the bombed post-war urban landscapes of Italy or Germany as the non-fictional background for telling fictional but not fantastical stories about ordinary men and women and children caught up in the horrors of war and its after-effects. So Rome open city is set in 1943 when Rome was occupied by the Nazis. Pisa consists of a series of six separate vignettes set 1943-1944 moving up the peninsula from Sicily to Naples to Rome to Florence to near Venice so for example the Naples vignette involves a black American gi and a thief orphan. The Florence vignette includes a harrowing sequence across the Arno via the Vasari corridor and through the empty halls of the evacuated Uffizi gallery. And finally Germany year zero is set in the ruins of post-war Berlin. So my project here involves similar challenges although we have various episodic references to the travels of the central Mexicans throughout Iberia and in Rome specifically. I haven't found any first-person accounts by those central Mexican travelers and even if they did write anything they would have written in Spanish or Latin since their native language Nahuatl wasn't written alphabetically until the 1540s. So my project is partially about creating a non-fiction background using European sources and then against that background punctuated with micro-historical episodic references to the central Mexicans imagining a more complete narrative history. Hence thinking of this project as a Renaissance neo-realist non-fiction. If Rosolini is one key reference point the other is French historian Fernand Rodel author of the famed Mediterranean in the Mediterranean world in the Age of Philip II as well as the trilogy of capitalism and civilization. Now Rodel famously was not only interested in the foam of historical events things like battles, coronations, weddings but also in the deeper structures of society and nature in which those events unfolded. Hence in my talk tonight you'll be hearing about Iberian road networks early modern travel speeds by land and sea as well as the seasonality of spring vegetables and the timing of Renaissance meals. Part one 1521 1527 and the water break. So in this section of the project I'm going to juxtapose accounts of the conquest of Tenochtitlán in 1521 with those of the sack of Rome in 1527 to underscore how both cities suffered disturbingly parallel horrors of warfare and occupation. And I'll talk about a series of basic atrocities that took place in both cities and illustrate each with two pairs of quotations two from Tenochtitlán and two from Rome. Now I'm not going to read all of these in part because many of them are so gruesome and disturbing so tonight as a sample I'll focus on questions of iconoclasm but basically the shared themes I'm going to compare involve the intentional burning of buildings, the massacre of civilians, streets and buildings filled with the unburied dead, enslavement of war captives, famine, thief and looting, theft and looting, the ripping apart of sacred artworks for their precious metals and grave robbing. So for an example on ripping apart sacred artworks a quote from Tenochtitlán and when the Spaniards were well settled right away they interrogated Moctezuma about all the stored treasure of the city the devices and shields they greatly prodded him they eagerly sought gold as a thing of esteem and when they reached the storehouse the place called Teo Calco then all the shining things were brought out the Ketzal feather headband, the devices, the shields, the golden discs, the necklaces of the gods, the golden nose crescents, the golden leg bands, the golden arm bands, the golden sheets for the forehead. There upon the gold on the shields and all of the devices was taken off and when all the gold had been attached right away they set on fire, set fire to ignited all the different precious things they all burned and the Spaniards made the gold into bricks and here are two parallel quotes from Rome all the vestments and chalices were taken away the silver ornaments of the churches were removed all the tabernacles holding the body of the Lord were taken away and the sacred host was thrown on the ground or in the fire or crushed underfoot or roasted in skillets or broken in a hundred pieces all of the relics stripped of the silver in which they were encased and the relics thrown away and this is actually written by an occupying Spanish soldier afterwards when our forces were in power without any opposition the sack began without respect for any class of person or for all the churches and monasteries of friars and monks and st. Peter's dwelling of the pope in no church that remained chalice nor patent nor thing of gold or silver the monstrances with the holy sacrament and holy relics were thrown to the ground to take away their casings the vestments and other ornaments not sparing anything were all stolen without any reverence with such defiance as if they the soldiers were Turks and on the subject of grave robbing an example for Penochtitlán according to Cortez's third third letter to emperor Charles the fifth the Spaniards did as I commanded and a half hour after midday I set out for the city with a 30 horsemen when I arrived I left my companions in the aforementioned houses and I myself climbed the high tower pyramid as I am accustomed to do while I was present some Spaniards opened a grave which contained more than 1500 Castellanos worth of gold ornaments and two grave robbing accounts hello there we go from Rome I don't believe your lordship can even imagine but rather it will seem a thing of dreams and not true and through torture they the soldiers have discovered money and jewels and clothing that were hidden in the fields and have opened the vaults of the burials in search of these and note they are no man can enter in the church nor walk around Rome for the prejudiced stench of the dead soldiers profaned all the temples and slew men above the altar of Saint Peter they broke open the urn or tomb in which the bones of Saint Peter and Paul were resting and profaned the relics themselves they have stolen chalices and ornaments and dedicated to divine service from all the temples chapels and monasteries of the whole city now of course all these quotations are literary representations of what happened in Tenochtitlán and Rome but it's striking that these literary representations some written from the point of view of the conquerors Cortes a Spanish soldier in Rome and others written from the point of view of the victims describe the horrors of urban warfare in such parallel terms and this is something actually that James H. McGregor pointed out in his translation of Luigi Giucardini sorry the sack of Rome in a beef in a in a brief but provocative 1992 Columbus quincean tenor area meditation on comparative early modern violence in both Europe and the Americas quote Spanish and German troops of the emperor Charles the fifth carried out that invasion and sack of Rome Spanish troops of the same emperor also raped murdered and tortured the Aztecs and Incas and pillaged and burned their cities the horrors visited on the new world were not unique to our western hemisphere Spanish troops did not throw away the rule book and run amok when they left Europe behind they brought the common culture and practices of soldiers officers and political leaders with them to this western hemisphere what happened into no state law in 1521 happened again in Rome in 1527 part two into the east so as you've just heard and on Cortes was an inveterate letter writer and document signer he didn't just write letters to the emperor and so thanks to the paperwork he generated we can track his movements month by month from 1528 to 1529 so he signs a document in the port city of Veracruz on February 21st 1528 so he's still in the Americas and then he left from Veracruz to begin a month and a half on average trip across the Atlantic to southwestern Spain now an account of Cortes's trip by Diaz del Castillo says the entourage filled two ships in Veracruz and that the voyage crossed in record time 42 days vexingly we don't know exactly when Cortes arrived in Spain he seems to have landed not in the inland port of Seville but rather in coastal Palos where one of his soldiers was from one of his pilots was from Cortes's entourage then handed over land to Seville a book of economic records in Seville's house of uh of Seville's house in trade a book now in the archive of the indies in Seville seems to suggest Cortes's ships arrived on May 15th 1531 but i'm still working on this so i won't go into the details Diaz del Castillo also says that Cortes and his entourage only spent a couple of days in Seville before continuing on to the Holy Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe located in the mountains of of Estrema Dura where the region Cortes was from and indeed a June 5th 1528 letter uh by Cortes is written from Guadalupe so we know he and his entourage actually did go there now this might seem like a long distance to travel in just a couple of weeks from Palos to Guadalupe but actually it was not and here in promised we get to the fascinating topic of early modern roadway infrastructure and overland travel speeds so two key sources here source one in 1914 Manuel Fronda y Aguilera published a book on the sojourns and voyages of Emperor Charles V so basically he went through all of the decrees that Charles V signed throughout his life degrees that were always dated and always indicated the city the place that they were written in so he was thus able to reconstruct a day by day account of where Charles V was throughout his reign and using this we can calculate how far he traveled day by day when he was traveling i've looked at his movements from 1528 and 1529 and basically Charles V travels at a rate of 25 to 40 kilometers a day depending crucially although Charles V himself traveled on horseback or in a pelanquin the emperor was accompanied by dozens of courtiers who were on foot and the same would have been true for Cortes horses are expensive they require a lot of space and money for upkeep even if you know how to ride a horse you may not have access to one so using Charles V's travel speeds it was totally possible for Cortes's entourage to cover the nearly 400 kilometers from Seville to Guadalupe in two weeks and I won't bore you with the math so source two on early modern road infrastructure is the rather amazing repertory of all the roads of Spain published by Juan Villuga in 1546 so basically this is an inventory of all the major roadways in Spain town by town so there's a chapter on how to get from Barcelona to Seville a chapter on how to get from Valencia to Guadalupe etc so using this book scholars have reconstructed the road networks it describes which is what you see here now these were of course not the only roadways in 16th century Spain but they were the ones important enough to bother writing a book about and these are probably the road networks over which Cortes in his entourage traveled so Cortes from Palos to Seville to Guadalupe now Guadalupe is interesting not only because it is currently Cortes's first auto-documented stop in Spain but also because his visit there seems to have left material traces at the shrine of the Virgin Mary traces which may point to the actions of the central Mexicans traveling with him as well in 1597 a history of the shrine of Guadalupe was published and it mentions a number of gifts supposedly given by Cortes a jewel in the shape of a lizard which was illustrated in a book on the Guadalupe treasury from 1778 also a silver lamp and finally featherwork paintings displayed in 1597 in the Chapel of the Angels quote which the great Fernand Cortes sent to our lady now as you probably know featherwork mosaic images of Catholic divinities are a famous aspect of the art of 16th century our famous aspect of art from 16th century Mexico now unfortunately the Guadalupe featherworks don't seem to have survived I hope to look at 16th and 17th and 18th century inventories of Guadalupe to see if I can find out more but of course I'm tempted to ask who gifted these featherwork paintings was it Cortes or was it his central Mexican fellow travelers gifting was no less a european practice than the Mesoamerican one the central Mexican travelers would as we'll see shortly present featherwork gifts to Charles V in Madrid in August 1528 in April 1529 the central Mexicans offered gifts of gold work to Pope Clement the 7th in Rome and decades later in the 1550s when central Mexicans from Plos Cala were preparing to set another embassy to Spain the Plos Cala in town council records described the creation of featherwork flowers for the voyage so featherwork in Guadalupe fascinating detail Cortes's entourage then heads on to Toledo and then to Madrid and in Madrid on July 15th 1528 Cortes writes a letter to Charles V who is then at meetings in Costa Valencia. Charles V enters Madrid a few weeks later on August 4th 1528 a Tuesday and that Sunday August 9th 1528 there seems to have been a reception for the central Mexicans with Charles V and we know this because of a rather extraordinary letter in German discovered a couple years ago in an archive in Nuremberg and here thanks to Paul Pucker of the Moravian Church archives I have a translation I won't read the whole thing but basically key points the letter says that 40 central Mexicans traveled with Cortes central Mexican nobles traveled with Cortes and that the first Sunday Charles V was in Madrid they presented Charles V with gifts of featherwork weapons shields and helmets as well as gold jewels in the shape of turtles snakes and other animals the central Mexicans wore loincloths as well as feather capes worn over the left shoulder however they had often also been gifted European style clothing by Charles V nevertheless quote they do not like the clothes they cannot walk well in them unquote the letter also describes the facial jewelry of the central Mexicans quote precious stones or gold on both sides of their noses unquote as well as labyrinths and their lips and the letter also describes the central Mexican ball players and log jugglers and the letter ends saying quote when I when I write to you next time I will send you a picture unquote it's an amazing letter last there's no information on the promise picture and I want to highlight three things first the reference to 40 Native American visitors which corroborates the 1520s economic records in Seville that specify 39 central Mexican noble travelers second the reference to European style clothing gifted to the noble gifted to the noble visitors about more soon and third the descriptions of facial jewelry labyrinths and the lips and jewels on either sides of the nose Charles V is in Madrid for a month and then on October 9th 1528 he heads for Toledo a few days before he leaves on October 2nd Charles V writes a letter to the house of Trayden Seville listing the names of 36 of the Native American visitors and also describing the clothing that should be provided for them when they get to Seville however October is very late in the year for a transatlantic journey across the Atlantic so the central Mexicans at this point don't leave for Seville instead they in Cortez follow the emperor to Toledo where they all spend the winter so let's pause at this point for another microhistorical anecdote about the new clothes that were to be provided for the central Mexicans when they got to Seville and we can call this anecdote Charles V fashion designer so Charles V's October 2nd 1528 letter describes two sets of outfits that to be provided for the visitors one set for the highest level nobles including the sons of Moctezuma and another set for lower level courtiers the highest level nobles were to have white shirts yellow damask doublets blue velvet skirted vests cochineal red capes and hose and blue velvet caps the courtiers were to have white shirts white doublets yellow skirted vests purple capes and cochineal red caps now it was actually quite common for the emperor to provide to provide clothing as gifts especially to his representatives broadly speaking who are about to cross the Atlantic there's lots of information on these gifts in house of trade economic registers jumping ahead in our story when the central Mexicans returned to Seville in April 1529 the clothes are actually made as specified we have detailed records of who the cloth was bought from and who the tailors and seamstresses were and if we compare the costs of these outfits with those provided for the costs of the outfits provided for franciscan friars or for non cloistered religious women bayatas we see that a lot of money was actually spent on the central mexican clothes now just because Charles the Fifth signs the october 2nd 1528 later about the clothes that doesn't necessarily mean he actually decided the color schemes for the outfits however we do know that Charles the Fifth was very conscious of self-fashioning through fashion most famously two years later in 1530 when he received his second and third crowns as Holy Roman Emperor in Bologna Charles the Fifth totally changes his look for his triumphal entry into that Italian city he got rid of his clean shaven page boy haircut burgundian noble look and instead grew a beard and got a short haircut in the style of roman emperors so basically remakes himself to look for example like the emperor Hadrian so given this fashion consciousness it's totally possible that Charles the Fifth did personally plan the color schemes for the central mexican outfits in 1528 now i'm not sure how to fully think through all of these out through all this the outfits Charles the Fifth fashion designer etc so if anybody has thoughts do let me know so again the the outfit designs are written up october 2nd 1528 a few days later the royal household transfers to Toledo and spends the winter there now when in Toledo probably early in 1529 an artist from the germany's arrives who wants an audience with his emperor and this artist is Christophe Vititz from Augsburg now during his travels across Europe Vititz makes sketches of a number of different costume ccs most famously including sketches of Cortes and several of the central Mexicans here you see the log jugglers and here are two of the ball players now i don't have time today to go talk about the hundred sketches in this costume book which are pretty amazing but i will point out that the one group most represented are the Basques with 19 images followed by Muslims and Native Americans with 13 images each and so if we go by numbers the people Vititz encountered who were most strange for him were other Europeans the Basques and these images really tell a story in which difference is not easily reduced to hierarchy a Spanish woman from Santander going to church is just as covered up with clothing as is a Muslim woman from Granada and both of their outfits echo the encompassing cloth draperies of a Castilian peasant today i just want to pause on the facial jewelry worn by the Native American entertainers and this has caused a lot of debate the cheek piercings are not actually Mesoamerican but rather Brazilian Brazilian nobles war lip labyrinths as well the forehead jewels and next slide yes the forehead jewels are probably totally total fantasy however thinking back to that letter in German from Madrid August 5028 note that Vititz's men were labyrinths as well as those nose jewels the German visitor described now nose ornaments weren't important at form of Mesoamerican jewelry although in the 15th and 16th centuries they seem to have been used only by the highest level elites in contrast those painted entertainers as i mentioned are probably slaves of Cortes in other words the facial jewelry here is a weird mix of elite Mesoamerican jewelry applied to the faces of slaves mashed up with fantasy and with the jewelry of Brazilian elites as well so back to our timeline the court widows in Toledo and in the spring on march 8th 1529 Charles the fifth in his retinue leave Toledo traveling east to Saragossa and then to Barcelona from which the travel from which the court travels by sea to Italy ending up in Bologna for as i mentioned the imperial coronation early in 1530 Cortes stays behind in Toledo and later in March he travels west to Bejar for his second wedding most of the central Mexicans travel south to Seville where they arrive April 9th 1529 four of the central Mexicans however seem to travel with Cortes to i'm sorry with Charles the fifth to Saragossa and then continue on separately to Rome where they probably arrive on Monday April 12th 1529 and this brings us at last to part three at the butterfly house so Rome is a very well documented city in the 16th century above all because it was a city with a practice of having permanent foreign embassies was first established Italy this time was of course divided into a number of small states so Venice had a resident ambassador in Rome as did Siena Bologna Mantua as well as Spain France etc these ambassadors were constantly writing letters back home many of these survive and so one can often track events in Rome day by day by comparing the letters written by different ambassadors that said vexingly the Spanish ambassador in Rome doesn't write any letters from early April 1529 to early May 1529 which is extremely vexing obviously and I haven't located any ambassadorial reports that actually first to the central Mexican visit I still have some archives to check so fingers crossed nevertheless at least three of these ambassadors one Venetian and two Mantuan describe the arrival of a shipment of letters from Spain via Genoa on Monday April 12th 1529 so this is probably when the central Mexicans arrived so what did they encounter in post-conquest Rome I'm imagining telling the story on two different levels first talking about Rome what Rome was like physically in general and second tracking the basic route that the central Mexicans must have traveled when in the city and what particular traces of the sack they would have encountered on that route now in terms of generalities remember that the occupation of Rome had ended just over a year before the central Mexicans arrived the occupying troops left in late February 1528 and the Pope himself only came back in early October 1528 and then winter set in one of the key sources for what Rome was like post-sac are of course letters of ambassadors especially the first letters that ambassadors write when they return to the post-conquest city in terms of general statistics the spring 1528 diary of Cornelius de Fien says that two-thirds of the city's houses were destroyed and october 7th 1528 letter by the Mantuan ambassador says that four fifths of the houses in Rome were uninhabitable and these are roughly comparable statistics of devastation two-thirds being 66 percent and four-fifths being 80 percent additionally and this is hard for me to believe when the French writer Rabla visits Rome in 1535 he says that the eastern part of the city that is what is now the center of Rome east from the Vatican across the Tiber was still quote desperate from the sack of the Lansnites so these are some big picture images of Rome and ruins from 1528 to 1535 in micro material terms the destruction of Rome architecturally seems to have resulted not only for the burnings at the time of the invasion but also for the months of occupation of the city basic supply chains had broken down of course homage to Brodell and over and over again writers describe how the occupying troops supplied themselves with firewood by tearing out the wooden frames of house doors and of windows and floor planks and ceiling beams and burning them so in May 1527 Spanish envoy Antonio Perez wrote this to Charles the fifth occupied Rome was quote being gradually destroyed so that in a very short time it will be a heap of ruins as most of the wealthy citizens desert their homes for fear of having soldiers quartered upon them it naturally follows that the moment the owners are gone the houses are gutted and pulled down for the sake of the timber which is sold in markets in public spaces as firewood as cheap as if they were a large forest in the neighborhood of Rome at the same time spring 1527 Roman citizen and public notary Theodoro Valerino wrote in his diary that quote they the soldiers have burned innumerable houses and all the windows and doors of the houses where they did not live and burned innumerable floors and roofs and the nails and other ironwork that they pulled out and sold to sailors at the Rippa port on the Tiber a year later spring 151528 Cornelius de Thien who we met earlier writes quote the troops had destroyed and burnt down the city and two-thirds of the houses were swept away doors windows and every bit of woodwork even to the roof beams was consumed by fire and that fall on October 20th 1528 the returning C&E's ambassador John O'Calvore wrote quote here one awaits the repair of doors and windows and the cleaning of houses and each one prepares and organizes and orders as best they can but to tell the truth on seeing this Rome it appears a shell or a creative wood compared to what Rome was before the sack now this micro devastation may have even affected the Vatican in an amazing book of Vatican economic records that for from the late 1520s that for complicated reasons ended up in the state archive of Florence there were a pair of entries for 1529 the first undated the second dated August to December which involved payments for keys and locks on the doors in the Vatican palace quite possibly the keys and locks were being replaced because the original doors and their metalwork had all been burned and melted during the sack and there are also lots of references to carpentry in this book of economic records that i still need to work through now as it happens Mesoamerican houses also had doors with wooden wooden lintels painted red here and central Mexican historian James Lockhart points out that later in the 16th century at least Nawal wills often included specific bequests of wooden door lintels and columns implying these were carefully worked expensive parts of homes and Matthew Rustal has found the same door lintel inheritance patterns among the Maya of Yucatan in other words central Mexican visitors to Rome will probably have noticed all the missing woodwork based on their own architectural traditions so that's a very quick sketch of some of the ways i'm thinking about imagining the physical fabric of post conquest Rome generally and now a sketch out the basics of where the central mexicans must have gone in Rome using the 1555 pinar map as a basic framework and north is more or less to your left so the central mexicans would have sailed from Barcelona and then made a stop in Genoa and then down to Ostia Rome's coastal port there they would have traveled up the Tiber to Rippa Rome's inland port which also had a customs house and just as general illustrations here's an image from the 15th century of the port and another one from the mid 16th century and we've just been in Rippa a couple of minutes ago this is where quote nails and other ironwork from doors were pulled out and sold to sailors on the Rippa port they would have then moved to the Chancellery Palace a key neoclassical building constructed in the late 15th century and as it happens part of this palace was home of the resident spanish ambassador so arguably this was the building where the central mexicans stayed when they were in Rome it was very near it is very near the Piazza Navona with the site of the church of Santiago or St. James of the Spaniards the national spanish church in Rome which has a great archive I need to consult then across the Ponte Sant'Angelo there we go and most importantly they would have then gone to St. Peter's and the Vatican and this is the part of the story I've had the most archival success with it's been known since the 19th century that on April 16th 1529 Hernán Cortés was granted a series of bulls by the Pope because copies of these bulls were found in the archive of the Hospital of Jesus in Mexico City which is a hospital Cortés founded now as we saw above we know from his letters that Cortés didn't go to Rome but papal bulls could be granted by proxy so when I started working on this project in August 2019 I wrote to the Vatican archives and asked if there happened to be any other bulls issued from Mexican themes in from August 1529 the archivist kindly checked the registers and said yes there were some for Cortés and also some others from Mexico so I ordered copies and added additional pages before and after the official page rage just in case and when those copies arrived they can include not only the bulls for Cortés but also four bulls for specific named Native Americans in support of specific churches in central Mexico and even in the extra pages I ordered just in case a bull about the knighthood of the conquistador chaperone of the central Mexicans Juan de Rada who Bernal Diaz says was sent to Rome as Cortés's representative and probably requested the bulls for Cortés in Cortés's name however since the bulls for Cortés were granted by proxy it was also possible that the bulls for the central Mexicans were also granted by proxy fortunately almost a year later in Florence going through that book of 1520's Vatican economic records I mentioned I came across four entries for Vatican payments for gifts for the central Mexicans two payments to Goldsmith Pompeo de Capitaneis for making a gold necklace and he also happens to be alas the Goldsmith famously murdered by Ben Venuto Cellini and two payments to a tailor for clothes which include a key detail the closer for Cuatro Indiani for Indians and that's what's in the final line of text here all of which is amazing in Rome documentation that the central Mexicans really were there now I spent a lot of time in my fenombro del mode learning about the paper excuse me the paperwork process of actually getting a papal bull granted in 1520's Rome so a media archaeology of the papal bureaucracy now I'm sure I'll disappoint it I can't go into all the details today but basically step one is an audience with the pope where the bull is granted and the day of the audience of the day of the audience is the day the bull is valid from then after the audience there follows a week or longer process of actually physically getting an official copy of the bull drafted up first the granted bull its contents are entered into into the supplication registry books which were housed in the Vatican office building next to the apostolic palace the office building no longer exists but basically it was on the northern side of the patio in front of old st. Peter's which is highlighted in red here I'm sure you're all happy I spent a lot of effort to find out where the Vatican office building was and now I can actually show you wonderfully next supplicants travel across town to the chancery palace which again is where the central Mexicans were probably staying and there in a series of ground floor rooms filled with desks the parchment copy of the bull and with official phrasing and tons of validating signatures was written up and lots of notaries get paid for different steps in physically preparing the parchment bull and finally part three is the portraits are taken back across the Tiber back to the Vatican office building with the ribbons and authenticating lead seals are applied the word bull of course comes from latin bull out referring to these lead seals but the first step was an audience with the pope so where on friday april 16th 1529 did this actually take place so in a famous essay which I'm sure most of you have read from 1972 by john shearman he talks about the constantly changing uses of rooms in the Vatican apartments during the first three decades of the 16th century clement the seven seems to have favored the third floor solid a cure of scuri for most of his business and it's here highlighted in yellow this was a room right outside his private apartments and chapel which are here in red and blue he held concert stories there public receptions and his body was even laid out in the yellow room after his death so this room was very conveniently located for public access as well basically how do you get there you enter the north northern mars no northern most door in the vaticans public facade and here's a famous drawing by martin van heemskirk from the mid 1530s and the arrow is where you go in and here's a version of ground ground plan the palace ground plan again you head up a flight of monumental stairs here you are on the first floor and then up on the second floor come on you enter the door which is basically right where the stairs come out you pass through the swiss guards room which is here in purple and then on to the salad a chiaroscuri which is here in yellow which is right next to the famous saladi costantino here in orange here is the salad a chiaroscuri as seen when you first enter it to your left is the wall with the doors that lead to the papal apartments and the chapel door is to the very far left so this room is originally frescoed by rafael around 1517 to 1519 it's less famous today than the other rafael stands a room rooms around the corner and note the green room here is where the school of athens fresco and disputa frescoes are that we looked at earlier the room is less famous because in the 1540s rafael's frescoes were mostly redone by another artist and then a few decades later another fresco campaign tried to restore rafael's original design that original design was more or less as you see it here today there were a series of chiaroscuro saints and apostles and architectural niches on top of the niches were set of animals painted by rafael's assistant Giovanni da urine there was the famous hanu the elephant a civet cat parrots tristan vettigan who studied this room in detail points out that most of these animals were originally given as diplomatic gifts to pope leo the 10th so the menagerie was symbol symbolically appropriate for reception chamber unfortunately none of the fresco animals survived today which is a huge disappointment obviously but a few watercolors of animals by Giovanni da urine do survive which are charming and i'm just throwing them in here as illustrations because they are so charming and this is the world's greatest renaissance chameleon portrait as i'm sure you all agree what does survive of the original 15 teens frescoes is part of the puti frieze on the upper wall and the bodies of some of the saints and apostles in the niches so no animals but puti and apostles and as i said tristan vettigan has done an amazing study of these frescoes and one way we can date the different frescoed surfaces in the room is because visitors to the room sometimes scratch the date of their visits onto the plaster surface now rather extraordinarily on the plastered surface of saint luke who is with his cow in the corner surrounding the door entering to the private papal chapel is apparently the date 16 april 1529 now i haven't seen any photos of this graffito so to be continued but at the very least the in size date suggests that the room was open to visitors on april 16th 1529 adding to support the idea that this is the very room where clementa 7th met the four central mexicans and perhaps was even entertained by the log jugglers vernaldias del castillo describes them specifically and may or may not describe them as human gifts from cortez to the pope cortez quote sentus his ambassador anidalgo named huan de rada who with him he brought a rich president of precious stones and gold jewels and two indian experts at juggling logs with their feet the two other central mexican visitors as i mentioned at the start were nobles bonito de rada masato caini who is granted a bull for a church in plush koa and ananda de tapia son of the indigenous governor of mexico city who is granted a bull in the name of his father andres for a church in mexico city and i'll get to these churches in a second but i want to end part three with two final points first some details some final details on april 16th 1529 now thanks to one of the mantoin ambassadors we know that clementa 7th was holding public audiences during these spring weeks from two to six in the afternoon furthermore from this in another of a number of other ambassadorial letters we know the timing of the central mexican visit was lucky because on april 16th 1529 it's a really important date for my story probably at dinner which would have been eaten at sunset which would have been around 8 p.m on april 16th chal i'm sorry clementa 7th ate a dish of fresh fava beans fave fresque according to mantoin ambassador fabrizio peligrino clementa 7th then fell ill and was unable to pub hold public audiences for almost a week perhaps as david kim suggested to me suffering from favismo which is an allergic reaction to fava beans and note this charming image search result for the word favismo on april 18th the modanese ambassador antonio romeo writes that clement had been sick for two days so since april 18th minus two is the 16th on april 19th mantoin ambassador fabrizio peligrino writes that clement had been sick for three days and blames the fresh fava beans and on april 20th mantoin ambassador francesco gonzaga writes that clement had been sick for four days now in italy the first fava beans of this season are usually ready in april or may and april 16th 1529 was before the gregorian calendar reforms of 1580 so effectively seasonally april 16th 1529 was more like today's april 27th so perhaps clement the 7th was very excited to have the year's first fresh fava beans and then something went wrong the other point i want to end this section on also happens to deal with vegetables so let's look briefly at the church of st peters which the central mexicans surely visited in 1529 and here appropriately we return to the themes in that now-walled poem about rome with which we began how did rome look through mesoamerican eyes now famously and controversially early in the 16th century the late antique basilica of st peters began to be demolished in order to make way for the massive dome church that exists today you would enter the courtyard in front of st peters via another door in the vaticans jumbled façade and here's the heimkirk hemskirk image again and the arrow shows the door and here's an aerial view of a map from later in the 16th century basically the patio is in red and beyond you can see the domed the cylinder for the dome of st peters which is under construction on the new st peters took most of the 16th century and so for much of the 16th century it was a strangely ruined place and here's another hemskirk image from the 1530s the ceiling of the old basilica had been removed and you see the old walls here left and right and at center there was a small temporary structure with a roof which had to be built to shelter the priests during mass looming over the walls of the old church were for decades the half finished walls of the of the new st peters so sacred buildings inside sacred buildings inside sacred buildings this would have been very familiar to the central mexicans because central mexican pyramids too were enlarged by building new shells around an older core and here is a classic example from the great temple at the center of tenor shilan where you can see the various layers of older and newer staircases one outside the other but perhaps the most amazing example of the strangely familiar for central mexicans in 1520s rome would have been what they encountered in the large patio in front of the facade of old st peters there in the middle was a small structure housing what had once been an antique fountain at the center of the fountain was a giant bronze pinecone originally gilded but at this point green with age and on the roof were a series of antique bronze peacocks all of these bronze components survived today now although there were of course pine cones in the americas surely to central mexican visitors this would have looked like nothing so much as a giant cob of maize echoing the thousand-year-old greenstone seltz effigy maize cobs we know the aztecs collected the weathered bronze peacocks with their green color and long tails would surely have echoed mesoamerican ketzel birds whose long green tail feathers were highly valued for central mexican headresses and were indeed compared to the leaves of maize stalks a vivid green monument to maize at the heart of the vatican what did the central mexicans think of this or did it just seem so obvious they didn't give it much thought part four going home on july 27th 1529 bonito mussel calcani arrived in civill rejoining his companions after his rome trip and this again according to those 1520s house of trade economic record records i keep talking about the documents also relieved that ananda de tapia decided to stay behind in madrador toledo and what happened to the two log jugglers who went to rome i'm not sure again to be continued pending more archival work the central mexicans stay in civill until august 17th 1529 they then traveled down the war alquilla water alquilla river to san lucar on the atlantic coast and then late august they set sail to return to mexico now i'm almost out of time but i want to think briefly about the churches that the april 1529 papal bulls were issued to support the language of the bulls follows standard papal boilerplate some of the phrasings had been used since at least the 15th century and basically the bulls name a specific central mexican man as a parishioner at a specific church at a specific town and the bulls authorize the establishment of a once-a-year holy day in each of the churches specific date not indicated and those who visited the church on that holy day would receive quote the full forgiveness and remission of their sins now none of the buildings for any of these churches survives today this is all happening very early a decade after catholicism first arrives in mesoamerica but some of the name churches as institutions do still survive today to keep things short only talk about my favorite example out of the four and this is the bull granted to in the name of andres de tapia for mexico city and here to illustrate i'm using the 1550s santa cruz map now in uppsala and north is to your right now tapia's bull is not granted for mexico city's centrally located cathedral which was built next to the ascetic great temple which we just saw an image of rather the bull is granted for the church of st paul which was the local neighborhood church of the parishes of st paul which was one of the four native american divisions of the city and it was the part of mexico city that roman pilgrim ananda de tapia came from so even though ananda's father andres was governor of the city of mexico overall his son win in rome petitions have built a bull to support their home neighborhood church not the city's central cathedral coda i want to end with a very brief coda on two points the first is to how this project relates generally to the writing of connected histories linking europe and the americas there's of course a long history of debating the importance and impact of the americas on the history of early modern europe economic impacts above all in contrast when i've been writing what i've been thinking about the so what of my own project i've been struck by the writing of history itself when i started this research i assume that rome being a very important and very famous city already had its history fully written so that in order to tell my narrative of a central mexican visit i would just have to find documents on the central mexicans and then add them to a history of rome in the late 1520s that was already thoroughly written but actually this wasn't the case very little has been written on rome in the years after the sack the years i'm interested in most histories of renaissance rome focus on the history of the city up to 1527 so up to the sack and then pick up again in the mid 1530s with the urban reforms of pope paul III the history of a devastated city in recovery is not the sort of triumphant history that past historians of rome have been interested in in other words to tell one untold story that of central mexicans in rome in 1529 i actually have to research and write another untold story that of the urban recovery of rome itself thus writing a new history of native americans in europe requires me simultaneously to write a new history of europe itself focus on one of its most important cities so catalytic role in thinking about how history gets rewritten to end i want to comment on the music you heard at the beginning this was a motet by vatican composer constanso fester and it's a motet rediscovered in a manuscript in a roman library in the late 1940s in other words we can rediscovered in the roman ruins of italian neorealism the guy who first reported on the manuscript edward lawinsky argued that this motet setting of psalm 79 was a musical meditation by fester on the sack of rome the psalm describes the sacking of jerusalem oh god the heathen are coming to thine inheritance thy holy temple have they defiled they have laid jerusalem on heaps the dead bodies of their servants have they given to be meet under the fowls of the heavens the flesh of thy saints under the beasts of the earth their blood have they shed like water round about jerusalem and there was none to bury them so final comment on euro-american historical relations in the late 1520s the heathens defining rome were not central mexican converts to catholicism but rather former catholic german soldiers who had converted to protestantism thank you very much i could take a quick question sure oh i'm all set i uh thank you very much though thanks byron that was fantastic uh such a um such an incredible landscape that you've sketched out for us of an amazing event but i guess i want to ask um a question about um your role in focusing the lens as it were and how do you go about in this really broad project choosing areas to zoom in on so i was particularly struck by um your reading not of the vicheli although i'm tempted to ask a question about that but about the pinecone the pinecone fountain at st peter's how did you in your kind of survey of the rome that would have been experienced by these visitors choose that monument as one to sort of unpack and consider vis-a-vis formal likenesses with the visual culture of your your visitors because it seems to me that there of course you've shown this moment of destruction that three what did you say four fifths of the city is in ruins um so that's going to limit the amount that you are looking at but um it just seemed kind of curious to me to zoom in on one thing in particular and have it open up an interpretation for you um and i was wondering about how you do that how as a historian and reading through the documents and sort of imagining yourself walking through the city do you pick something and how does that how do you feel certain that that's a a historically responsible thing to do so um again we one of the challenges of the project is that we don't have actual accounts written by the central mexicas themselves so part of what the project hopes to do is kind of think of a about a comparative mediterranean mesoamerican urbanism um in the 80s uh James Lockhart who i mentioned a very important scholar at UCLA wrote a couple very interesting essays about what he called double mistaken identity which he argues that it's very cute i mean both the spaniards and the Aztecs were these expansionist military societies they both had elaborate priestly hierarchies they both depended on tributary extraction from peasants so there are lots of ways in which these are two weirdly parallel societies to be coming in contact with one another through this kind of i mean one military society is destroying other military societies there's lots of commonalities the idea of double mistaken identity is what are the limits to that so spaniards think they're doing one thing that looks on the surface very similar the mesoamerican avas are doing another thing on the surface looks very similar because of surface similarities they're able to have a kind of dialogue but in fact they're doubly mistaken because actually if we look deeper both sides are have very different premises behind this seemingly surface interaction which nevertheless allows them to carry on both sides not really understand any other but managing to have a common ground of superficial surface identity so again this idea of comparative mesoamerican Mediterranean urbanism one of the methods was trying to think about well what sorts of things in broadly mesoamerican society mesoamerican urbanism would have been parallel to what's going on in rome so the the examples i gave today the idea of layering sacred buildings inside sacred buildings the Nawas were totally interested in archaeology previous societies the ruined ruin site surrounding them so that would have been another residence with i mean mexico city 45 minutes to the north is the city called teotihuacán which is abandoned like 500 years before mesoamerican before John sheet lawns founded we know the asex traveled there they bought objects and ceramics there they built teotihuacán revival buildings in to know sheet lawn itself so antiquarianism it'd be one potential field to thinking about mesoamerican urbanism brought to the Mediterranean how they would have thought about that another culture of bathhouses and apparently bathing is revived in rome there's a claim of this anyway basically reviving ancient you know classical roman bathing bath cultures so there's an amazing dialogue called i think it's called play la losana and elusa which is about a spanish working woman working in rome and it's filled with references to the bathhouse culture in rome steam bathing was also something that mesoamericans did so that's potentially if any of the bathhouses survived post conquest post conquest rome that would be another point of comparison so based so the examples you got here are part of kind of a larger palette of trying to think about again mesoamerican Mediterranean urbanism and the pinecone example first again it doesn't exist and i actually i saw the pinecone when i was first in roman i was like wow it looks like a maize cobbin and i read more about it and i was uh and it would have the fountain fountain was still in place when this is all going on it hasn't been moved and assembled yet so it just seemed like again one of these things that's still there that hasn't been destroyed by the sack at this particular moment and it would soon be removed so kind of a very temporally spite site-specific object that you know it could be a total fantasy an irresponsible thing on my part but again if we don't have accounts by the native americans how can we at least try to approach the ways they would have seen and again this bigger framework of trying to teach these two kinds of urbanism together so um yeah does that sort of so i guess the the narrow you asked why choose that monument well i guess hopefully it's going to be one of a series of things where i try to try to think through this kind of way of seeing did that answer your question sort of or okay great thanks thanks i have the next question great um you know i we talked a little bit before your presentation about how i work on south asia and one of the things i was struck by was that uh both the culture and the culture of gifting and the culture of violence have um attracted uh so much attention over almost um i don't know a couple of centuries of historiography on the subject and that uh the codes convention systems that govern the gift or that govern war loot trophy and so on are so distinct and i think you answered in part the question through that i might have had earlier about uh well how do you um reconcile two very different kinds of understandings with the answer that you gave sarah but i guess i'm going to ask a question nonetheless about your method because when you said you're doing comparative work and i'm thinking now about a lot of um work around connected histories in the notion world and elsewhere um and um it seems to me that you're focusing on resonance and connection or similarity but not on difference estrangement uh divergence what would have come as a shock perhaps to the central americans so i'm thinking back to your use of bradel and it seems like the bradel that you're going to is you know it most referring to as structures of everyday life but the two concepts that i think of is most influential for thinking about say indian ocean world histories and cosmopolitanisms are long johé and montalite and the montalite or long johé ideas are both deep structure ideas so the kind of superficial resemblance you're talking about like they can do business right i mean that's the kind of obisque race solans model um or nicholas thomas model thinking about exchange in the pacific but if you're going to use bradel even the structures of everyday life these are deep structures right and they're not about oh there's a passing resemblance between a pine cone and a maize cob or whatever but it's like what do these things do socially spatially and over time so it seems to me that there is uh potential here for thinking about difference as a mode of thinking comparison yeah so i think the reason i stress again resonance connection similarity is because it seems weird to me that these two stories haven't really been brought together together and they haven't brought together i mean that that these two sacred cities are being destroyed at the same moment why i mean why haven't they been talked together this has to do with europe is one place area studies has described the america is another place and i mean even in latin americans studies today you know you can often study europe up until 1492 and then after that it becomes irrelevant for the rest of the story so how do i want to so i well um how do i want to respond to this so i guess superficially i'm the emphasis on connection is just because the citizens haven't been made for these parts of the world and obviously uh what why is that so that i think drives why i'm so interested in connection similarity um in terms of um what they would have found that would have shocked them um i mean again if i'm trying to again if only we had a kind of montane dialogue uh with to be number that would allow us to get more at how what i want to say how do i describe what would have shocked them without i just think i'm not articulating well it just seemed easier for me to think about possible comparison then i mean there are so many differences right between what native americans would have been used to in their cities and what they would have encountered uh in rome rome was probably totally filthy right although at this point to no sheet law is also destroyed um so just going for similarity and possible possibility seems to me i mean differences so if i were to try to describe all the ways in which meso americans would have been shocked at what they found in rome that i don't know i guess i don't know how to approach that um because the differences are so manifold right um i don't think i'm i don't think i'm articulating myself very well here um longer do you want to follow up on this i'm i'm not no no these are great questions so my 1520s and i think it's 1523 1525 chronicle of domingo paez to the city of vigenagar he comes through goa um and travels to vigenagar uh portuguese horse merchant and the account is full i mean there's a there's a few other portuguese accounts from the period of visiting the kingdom of christina de rio but what this what this traveler sees is this is like lisbon this is like rome this is not like our horses this is like our you know gold exchange the king is a great man i mean the guy is cultivating a relationship with the king but it's also like they do things very differently and yet i can see these are um trees that are very different from the trees that we know this is of course we have lots of this for europeans traveling to say mexico so they talk about tigers all these kinds of resemblances the issue is though trying to given this is a very common model about what europeans miss see also kind of think about well what would happen just as a thought experiment how would that similar kind of miss seeing or thinking about analogs happen the other way so again um taking this kind of europeans go to the americas we're used to that story they see things they misidentify things sometimes because of their archaeological interest they were interested in kinds of things they had interlocutors that might surprise us um but just kind of reversing that uh reversing that kind of very common strategy um i'd love to have a reference to this 1520s document you talk about um oh well i think oh i i mean i i i think that's probably totally totally the case absolutely but um again these are kind of how do we and then in the text i mean when i actually write this up and maybe that wasn't clear tonight this is very much how do we think about this how did mesmer how did realm look through mesmerican eyes i would not yeah i'm certainly don't claim this is what they actually thought um but these are possibilities and at the very least even if this isn't what they actually thought it at least forces europeanists who might not be interested in latin america to think about what mesmer american cities were like and kind of the reverse so if nothing else it forces us now to think about these comparisons again in a world driven by area studies where those where you know uh latin americanists cannot necessarily want to know anything about europe right which seems kind of weird for the oman period but that's how the structures of disciplines and how uh history departments are often divided into latin americanists who are not europeanists um so i don't know if i have a long doing mentality um i guess the the brodel i'm mostly interested in is this kind of connection the the infrastructural brodel i um long dry and mental well i think mentality is partially coming up here at least my sort of claims of what's going on there what am i thinking about long diray um yeah i will uh i'll have to think more about um uh the deep structure thing yeah i'm thinking like the amazing stuff in civilization capitalism about you know how does water get circulated excuse me no he told oh no i'm sorry in the Mediterranean he's totally history of episodes that's how he puts together the Mediterranean book right it's all these fragments he describes i'm not going to treat uh i'm going to treat mountains i'm going to treat deserts uh it's filled with uh micro historical moments that he puts together to build up a larger framework so i do think at least in the Mediterranean it's totally so and so said this about getting the snow trade in 1672 and then in 1741 we can say this about the snow trade the first example is from Seville the second example is from uh israel for example so oh all right thank you i have the magic thank you for those questions giant dice um microphone um i wanted to first just thank you for the really amazing place-based work that you have done to recover indigenous presence in so many different places in uh in the 1520s it's it's it's remarkable and it was really enjoyable to follow uh to follow you through overland routes through Spain through Rome and back again um i wanted to pick up on the term if i'm remembering this correctly that you introduced at the very beginning the Mediterranean Atlantic world which i love and i simply wanted to ask whether part of your project will also involve the oceanic world um you know your your attention to material culture really got me interested in in how how one gets uh from Tenochtitla in a Mexico city overland to the Atlantic uh you know 40 indigenous people presumably on a small ship what are those conditions like where are the ships going are they stopping in Cuba are they stopping in San Juan are they stopping um in islands off the west coast of Spain so i'm thinking about the blue humanities here and the really important considerations of of time and travel in oceanic spaces as well and whether there's an whether there's any material to even try and recover indigenous presence on on those ocean worlds as well well i i assume you know jace weaver's wonderful the red Atlantic which looks at that specific uh indigenous Atlantic world question um and actually yes the oceanic world totally fascinating as david mentioned i have a little essay called field notes from salars which is looking at shipwrecks which is precisely about you know a critique of oceanic studies in which the ocean is sort of irrelevant so how do you actually deal with the process of crossing salt water in the early modern period and i i use ships logs which are generated day by day over time and shipwrecks which are when that day by day process of staying afloat collapses so basically ships logs are kind of vertical horizon and shipwrecks are kind of horizontal horizon one about a series of moments and the other about a catastrophe so broadly how do we think about the ocean yes absolutely i'm super interested in that and in fact one of the things that uh i was uh looking at mr brodel for is a shipping speeds and how so how long would it actually take on average to sail from Barcelona to get to genoa what are the normal tracks uh one uh what what are the normal ports one would stay at again to try to figure out this timeline of we can track the overland pretty clearly but then when would they have had to leave Barcelona in order to arrive in Rome at that time and brodel is very frustrating on this because he says well it all depends so and then he gives a whole series of here's this shipping route from this place to this place in 1526 here's kind of the same basic thing in 1745 but it's totally different so basically i was doing a lot of the work on the the the um the Barcelona to genoa to austia part of uh part of the story trying to fill that in and i didn't make it very far yet but that's definitely to be continued um and the atlantic part this is that there's actually a debate as to whether the ship strails say normally one would sail from Veracruz to Cuba to Havana and then along the atlantic but then there's like a debate among historic among 16th century writers um basically one writer says oh this guy talking about the trip uh claims that they stopped on this island that's totally not true they did not stop on the island they went directly from Veracruz uh to Seville so there's so thinking about how the thinking about adding some texture to the atlantic part of the crossing that's also a debate that exists uh in uh in the 16th century already and again uh they're not Diaz del Castillo says they crossed in record time 42 days so um the short answer is yes absolutely but i'm still wrestling with how to include the uh the oceanic part into uh into the more the infrastructure of what we know about roadway crossings so thanks for that question i think we have time for one more just briefly thank you so much for your presentation and if you can comment on i think the amount of information you found or record and testimony regarding the presence of Mesoamericans in Europe i don't know if um it has some connection with the historical debate at the time of considering the other in this case indigenous population as not human and also that conversation so i don't know if that had to do with the way you was perceived and described and before you answer uh the comments of the other colleagues made me think of the impressions through the eyes of the Mesoamericans now was there is one um anecdote that they had already decades of having first impressions about the europeans and their worldviews and there is a description of how they describe as monkeys the europeans with their reaction of the encounter of gold thank you yes absolutely and again there's a wonderful article by james lockhart called sightings which you probably know which uh looks at uh how now was uh interpret european things so uh sheep no sorry horses is a deer or uh or sheep as as cotton deer because the wool is cotton like uh so that is uh has also in the back of my mind for thinking about how do we imagine how Rome might have looked through mesoamerican eyes the point about um debates over uh the status of native americans as human or not is actually something that i've spent a lot of time on um basically um so the common story is that in 1537 paul the third issued a series of three papal bulls about americans which uh said that native americans were humans and then that this allowed them access to um to the the sacraments so it turns out that this is mostly a myth invented in the 18th century um during the sort of second wave of spanish black legend critiques there's a something called a dispute of the new world where enlightenment authors say the americas are all cold and they're all inferior and everything small and in the in the context of this this critique the bulls get published in latin with a uh a title that says bulls about how the pope decreed that native americans are human and allowed them access to the sacraments actually if we look at the bulls um all the debates about sacraments are about indigenous sacramental acts are about dominicans and franciscans misperforming the sacraments for the native americans so native americans sacramental sacramental access is not being debated at all it's what it's how the europeans are actually performing the sacraments and they're they're being sloppy they're performing baptisms too quickly so it is sacraments but native american access is totally totally assumed the bit about the humans uh humanity is also very key because how the bull begins is basically saying some slave merchants in their lust for gold have started a rumor saying native americans are not really humans in fact they're doing this they're inspired by the devil and this is totally false so the bull doesn't present this native americans as human debate as like a broad error it says it's a new strategy by slavers for their own profit uh so again the story is much more fuzzy and complex than what often gets talked about in debate in in historiography that said of course there's a very long history in europe of denigrating others and globally right as animals so peasants are constantly talked about as animals in early modern europe there's an amazing play i think it's 1516 in which a peasant enters in the it's taking place in europe right in in spain peasant enters and he's described as an animal in human form there's an amazing essay by a spanish scholar whose name i'm not going to remember right now but basically about all these bestialization terms for muslims in 16th and 17th century spain so the idea that the slavers would say oh native americans animals they're not being original at all here they're taking standard troops from europe and applying it to a new context uh there's a mention to solans before and i'm a huge fan of solans uh and of course we know generally that in in situations of cultural contact often widely taken for granted assumptions get put to challenge in practice so i think this is a case where even though denigration through bestialization was well established in europe in this new context the pope finds that oh well no this is something this is a standard accusation but actually in this new context i need to intervene in this new lie being created by slavers uh because of the the the context in which this very standard critique gets uh is being replayed so thank you for the question because it's something uh it comes up a lot actually talking about this project and it's something i've been obsessed with and note that the the the the gifts to the native americans or at least to the um that are described by Bernal Diaz like giving gold necklaces is totally a sign of honor and prestige like there's a great Titian portrait of aratino with the famous gold necklace they also get weapons and again in many parts of really modern europe peasantry doesn't have access to weapons so and again the clothing they're given is also extremely high status so at least in how the nobles seem to be treated um they're uh i mean the there's nothing in the record that i see that sees them being treated uh in a lower status lower than the lower than say someone from Toledo it seems to be a very interesting treatment of them at least again the nobles right because they're also these people who are probably slaves at least that treatment um is pretty high level which is again not so surprising in terms of class hierarchies often trump other sorts of other forms of difference right so i think that answered your questions yeah thanks for the question thank you