Cíbola and the Seven Cities of Gold

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Northwest of the Spanish frontier of New Spain, beyond the deserts that swallowed expeditions whole, there were supposed to be seven cities. Not seven of anything ordinary — seven cities whose walls were dressed in turquoise, whose doorways were studded with emeralds, where whole streets were given over to the workshops of goldsmiths. They had a collective name, Cíbola, and they were the lodestone toward which a generation of Castilian ambition bent itself. Men sold estates to march toward them. A viceroy staked his reputation on them. And when the armored columns finally arrived at the place the rumor pointed to, they found mud-walled towns of the A:shiwi, terraced, well-built, entirely real, and holding no gold at all. Cíbola did not vanish when it was reached. It was reached, and it was empty, and the emptiness only moved the cities one frontier further on.

The legend did not begin in the Americas. It came across the Atlantic already centuries old, packed in the cultural baggage of the men who carried it, and it had a precise origin in the trauma of the Iberian Peninsula itself.

The bishops who sailed west

In 711 an army out of North Africa crossed the strait and broke the Visigothic kingdom of Hispania; the last Visigothic king, Roderic — Don Rodrigo of the later ballads — was destroyed, and within a few years most of the peninsula lay under Muslim rule. Out of that catastrophe Christian memory generated a consoling story. As the conquest swept north, the tale ran, seven bishops gathered their congregations, loaded ships with sacred treasure and as many of the faithful as would come, and sailed out into the western ocean. There they made landfall on an island no one could afterward find, and on it they founded seven cities, and there they kept the faith intact, out of reach of the conquerors, prosperous and hidden, awaiting a return that never came.

The island acquired a name: Antillia, the Isle of the Seven Cities. It became one of the durable phantoms of the medieval Atlantic, and unlike most legends it can be dated, because cartographers drew it. The earliest surviving chart to show it is the portolan made by the Venetian Zuane Pizzigano in 1424, now held in the Biblioteca Palatina at Parma — a large red rectangle far out in the ocean, indented with seven bays, each bay a city, carrying the inscription that this island is called Antillia. Beside it lay companion phantoms with their own dread names, Satanazes the Isle of Devils among them. Once drawn, Antillia would not leave the maps. Battista Beccario copied it in 1435, Andrea Bianco in 1436, Grazioso Benincasa across the 1460s through the 1480s. When Martin Behaim built the Erdapfel in Nuremberg in 1492 — the oldest terrestrial globe that survives — he set Antillia in the western sea and inscribed beside it that in the year 734, when all Spain was overrun, the island called the Isle of the Seven Cities was settled by the Archbishop of Porto with six other bishops and their companions, fled from Spain with their cattle and their goods.

Seven bishops, seven cities. The arithmetic of the legend was fixed, and the cities were rich because the bishops had carried the wealth of a kingdom into exile with them. This was the freight the conquistadors brought ashore. When the Antilles failed to yield the bishops’ cities — keeping only, as a sardonic memorial, the name Antillia worn down into Antilles — the cities did not die. A legend of an unfound island is not refuted by a found one. The island simply receded, and as the Spanish moved up the spine of the Americas the seven cities went with them, waiting now somewhere beyond the next range of mountains, on a continent vast enough to keep a rumor alive indefinitely.

A rumor sharpened into a destination

The motif was still a vague Atlantic memory when four ragged men walked into a Spanish slaving party in Sinaloa in 1536 and turned it into a direction on the map.

They were the only survivors of the Narváez expedition, which had sailed for Florida in 1527 and disintegrated — some six hundred men reduced, after shipwreck on the Gulf coast in 1528 and eight years of captivity, starvation, and wandering, to four: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; Alonso del Castillo Maldonado; Andrés Dorantes de Carranza; and the enslaved North African Dorantes had brought, called Estevanico. They had crossed an unmapped interior on foot, from the Texas coast to the Pacific slope of Mexico, and they came back carrying second- and third-hand reports of populous towns to the north — towns of many-storied houses, of turquoise, of settled wealth. Cabeza de Vaca recorded what he had heard with reasonable restraint. The men who heard him were not restrained. The northern towns and the bishops’ seven cities fused, and the fused thing had a name ready to hand: Cíbola.

Antonio de Mendoza, first viceroy of New Spain, wanted those cities, and in 1539 he sent a reconnaissance north to find them. He chose the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza to lead it, with Estevanico — the one survivor who had actually walked that country — sent on ahead as guide and scout. Estevanico ranged days in advance, dispatching crosses back to the friar, their size meant to signal the magnitude of what lay ahead. The crosses grew. And then, in the early summer of 1539, Estevanico reached the first of the cities, a place the Zuni called Hawikuh, and the people of Hawikuh, suspicious of a stranger who claimed to come from white men yet was himself dark, and offended by his demands for turquoise and women, killed him.

Marcos de Niza never entered the city. By his own account he climbed to a height, looked across at Hawikuh from a careful distance, raised a cross, claimed the country for the crown, and turned back — but not before forming, or reporting, the judgment that would launch an army: that the city he had glimpsed was larger than Mexico City itself. He returned to New Spain in 1539 with a report of a wealthy land seen, and not entered, and on the strength of it Mendoza committed to a full entrada into the unknown north.

Coronado at the empty cities

The man given the entrada was Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, the young governor of Nueva Galicia. The army he led out of Compostela on 22 February 1540 was one of the largest the Spanish had yet thrown at the North American interior: on the order of three hundred and thirty-six Spaniards, more than eight hundred Indigenous allies, mostly Tlaxcalan and other central Mexican warriors, six Franciscans, and the herds and baggage of a force expecting to garrison cities of gold. Marcos de Niza rode with them as guide, toward the place he had described.

They reached Hawikuh on 7 July 1540, and the encounter was immediate and violent. The Zuni — the A:shiwi, a settled agricultural people in their own homeland — laid down a line of sacred cornmeal across the approach and warned the strangers not to cross it. The strangers crossed it. In the fight that followed, Zuni arrows and stones knocked Coronado from his horse and nearly killed him, but the steel and the firearms decided it quickly, and the army took the town.

And there the legend met its evidence. Cíbola was Hawikuh, and Hawikuh was one of six Zuni pueblos — the cluster the Spanish had been told were seven cities of gold — and they were towns of stone and adobe, several stories high, skillfully made and full of stored maize, and they contained no gold, no silver, no goldsmiths, no turquoise-dressed walls, nothing of what the rumor had promised. The disillusion in the army was total and bitter, and it fell hardest on Marcos de Niza, who had reported the wealth and was now blamed for inventing it; the friar withdrew from the expedition and went back south in disgrace, into a controversy over his honesty that the historians have argued ever since. The bishops’ cities were not here. They had never been here. What was here was somebody’s home.

The name itself recorded the misreading. Cíbola is usually traced to the Zuni word for their own land and people — Shiwona, the country of the A:shiwi (the derivation is debated) — heard by Spanish ears as a place that ought to be golden. The transfer afterward ran the other way: from the place-name Cíbola the Spanish coined cíbolo, their word for the buffalo of the plains beyond, so that the failed golden kingdom survives, half-disguised, in the ordinary Spanish name for a bison. The cities of gold left no gold behind. They left a word for an animal.

Quivira, and the second mirage

A force that has marched a thousand miles toward riches does not easily accept that the riches are not there. It accepts, instead, that they are somewhere else. Among the Plains people held at the pueblos was a captive the Spanish nicknamed El Turco, the Turk, for a look they associated with the Turks, and the Turk told Coronado what Coronado needed to hear: that far to the east, out on the grasslands, lay a kingdom called Quivira, where the lord was lulled to sleep by golden bells in the trees and ate from dishes of beaten gold.

So the legend regenerated. In the spring and summer of 1541 Coronado followed the Turk east, off the edge of the known world and onto the Great Plains — across the Llano Estacado, into a sea of grass and buffalo so featureless that the Spanish navigated it by the sun and counted their paces. They crossed what is now the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma and came at last, around the end of July 1541, to the river below Quivira, the Arkansas, in present-day Kansas. And Quivira, when they reached it, was the grass-thatched villages and cornfields of the Wichita: a real, settled, agricultural people, living well by their own measure, and possessing no gold whatever. The lord’s golden bells did not exist. The Turk, pressed, admitted that he had led the Spanish into the emptiness deliberately, to lose them in the grass; he was tortured and garroted before the army left Quivira. To the Pueblo peoples his deception reads otherwise — as the act of a captive who turned the conquistadors’ own greed into a weapon and drew them away from the towns, and at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque he is remembered for exactly that.

Coronado turned back. He brought his depleted army home to Mexico City in 1542 having found, in two years and across half a continent, no city of gold of any kind — only the Zuni, the Wichita, the Hopi, the Río Grande pueblos, the Grand Canyon that one of his captains became the first European to stand above, and a vastly enlarged and disenchanting knowledge of what the north actually contained. He returned in something near disgrace, his fortune spent, and the failure was so complete that it discouraged Spanish penetration of the region for the better part of forty years. The entrada that set out to seize the Seven Cities of Gold ended as one of the great anticlimaxes of the age of conquest.

The record, the texts, and the long argument

What is known of Cíbola as a sixteenth-century episode rests on a thin and precious set of documents, several of them firsthand. The fullest narrative was written, some two decades after the fact, by Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, a soldier who had ridden the whole entrada; his Relación de la jornada de Cíbola survives not in the original but in a single copy made in 1596, long held at the Lenox Library in New York. Alongside it stand Coronado’s own letters back to the viceroy and the crown, the relación of the captain Juan Jaramillo, and the anonymous Relación del Suceso — the raw materials from which the expedition is reconstructed.

These were brought into English by George Parker Winship, whose The Coronado Expedition, 1540–1542 appeared in 1896 as part of the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, printing Castañeda’s Spanish and a facing translation; as a United States government publication it is in the public domain, and it remains the gateway through which most readers meet the journey. The modern critical edition is the work of Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, whose Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539–1542 (2005) re-edits and re-translates the whole corpus against the archival originals and underpins the current scholarship.

Around one figure the documents have generated a controversy that has run for more than a century: was Marcos de Niza a credible witness or a liar? The defenders came first. Adolphe Bandelier, working in the 1880s and 1890s, argued that the friar had genuinely reached the vicinity of Cíbola and reported in good faith; Herbert Eugene Bolton, whose Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains (1949) is the classic narrative of the entrada, took a broadly sympathetic line. Against them came the skeptics. Carl Sauer, the geographer, examined the route in The Road to Cíbola (1932) and in later articles and concluded that Marcos could not have covered the ground he claimed in the time he claimed, and had likely turned back well short of Cíbola; Cleve Hallenbeck pressed the indictment to its limit in The Journey of Fray Marcos de Niza (1949), where the friar is dismissed, in Hallenbeck’s recurring epithet, as the lying monk. More recent reassessment, notably by William K. Hartmann, has pulled back toward the middle, finding the Relación substantially accurate on the location, the architecture, and the lay of the land even where its rhetoric ran ahead of what its author saw. The argument is, in a sense, the legend persisting in scholarly form: a dispute over exactly how much of the golden city was ever really glimpsed.

One thing the dispute cannot touch is that the A:shiwi were never a legend. The Zuni are a living Pueblo people in western New Mexico, in the homeland on which Hawikuh stood; the towns the Spanish miscounted as the Seven Cities of Gold were inhabited then and the people endure now, with their own account of these events and a long-stated insistence that their ceremonial life is not the property of outsiders to publish. Cíbola is most exactly understood as a European fantasy laid over an Indigenous home — a projection that cost the people it was projected onto a great deal, and revealed, in the end, only the projector’s appetite.

That is the particular shape of this legend. Other phantom realms were unreachable by definition: Antillia and the Fortunate Isles, Hy-Brasil, the Atlantic island that kept its appointment with disappearance, Norumbega dissolving as the coast was charted, the South American gilded king of El Dorado always one valley deeper into the cordillera, Iram of the pillars buried in scripture and sand. Those legends survived by never being arrived at. Cíbola is the rarer case of a wealth-mirage that was arrived at, walked into, taken by storm, and found to be made of mud and maize — and that survived the arrival anyway, because the men who had staked everything on it could not afford to believe the emptiness was final. The Seven Cities could only be entered and, each time, vacated — a richness that existed precisely and only in the moment before the doors were opened. What the doors opened onto was always the same: Hawikuh’s terraced stone, and on the plains the grass-lodges of the Wichita — towns of mud and maize and thatch, full of people who had never sent for the Spanish and held nothing the Spanish had come for, living under a golden name they did not give themselves and could not lift.

The later imagination that reads vanished high civilizations into the deep past — the Atlantology of lost golden ages, the occult continents of Mu — works the same seam in a different direction, projecting splendor backward through time rather than forward across geography. Cíbola did its projecting on the ground, with horses and harquebuses, against a frontier that kept its promise by staying one range ahead. It is the purest specimen of the kind: a city of gold that turned out to be a city, with people in it, and no gold, and that was therefore not refuted but merely relocated, again, into the country no one had yet reached.

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