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21592 results in Regional history after 1500

Page 902 of 1080

  • Part II - The Variety of Life in the Indies

  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 63-64

  • Summary

    There are many farmers and craftsmen here, and many others who make a living by their work and sweat.

    Fray Toribio de Motolinia, Mexico, 1555.

    Here is the core of our interest. Conquest, as conquest, was an episode. True, it divided the history of the Western hemisphere into two sharply distinguished periods, but only because of its aspect as occupation, reorganization, foundation; there it stretched forward without break into the following decades and centuries. Even before the fighting was over, the Spaniards began to fill in the framework, bare but durable, that the conquest created - the system of Spanish cities, estates to tie them to the Indian countryside, and export of precious metals as their economic leverage with Europe. Immigrants poured into the richer areas (nearly all the letters of this section relate to Mexico and Peru). Even in the first moments there had not been an encomienda for literally every Spaniard, and before long encomenderos were a small minority of a Spanish population devoted to every pursuit known in early modern Europe.

    Once a frame of reference is set, these people can speak for themselves. Through their own communications they emphasize the extent and earliness of development, the endless variety of occupations and types. And they express even more directly the humanity, universality and ready intelligibility of themselves and of the whole process. There is hardly a word they say that would not fit equally well in the mouths of immigrants - and non-immigrants - much nearer to our time and place. Even the humblest Spaniards wrote letters, or found someone who could. The numerous black slaves and servants who lived beside them did not have the opportunity; at least we have found no letters from them, though they are often mentioned in the letters of the Spaniards. As to the millions of Indians among whom the whole Spanish population was a minority, and on whom it was having an enormous destructive-creative effect, a certain number of them were already producing correspondence in the European fashion, of which we include three examples.

  • 36 - The Franciscan reply

  • from Part III - officials and Clerics
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 218-247

  • Summary

    Fray Toribio de Motolinia, in Tlaxcala, Mexico, to the emperor, 1555

    … If Las Casas called the Spanish residents of New Spain tyrants, thieves, robbers, murderers and cruel assailants only a hundred times, it might pass …

    Letter 35 is the merest hint of the great campaign, carried on above all by Dominican fray Bartolome de las Casas in thousands of scalding pages, opposing not only the Franciscans, but the encomienda, the conquest, even the very notion of a Spanish civil occupation of the Indies. Renewed again and again in Spain, the debates swirled in one area after another of Spanish America, always after the conquest was well past and a Spanish presence fully established: in the Caribbean in the second decade of the century; in Mexico in the middle decades; and in Peru yet later. The attacking parties were, when not Dominicans, usually lawyers, late-comers, or people still in Spain; the defenders were Franciscans, settlers, sometimes viceroys and governors. Las Casas himself was in Spain far more than in the Indies. In view of this and also considering that former Licentiate Las Casas’ favorite genres were the treatise and the brief, not the letter, we include as representative of this kind of invective a well-known letter by Franciscan fray Toribio de Motolinia, defending views much like those of the ordinary settlers to whom most of this volume is dedicated. Fray Toribio, one of the Franciscan Twelve, changed his earlier name of Benavente to a Nahuatl form meaning ‘one who is poor or afflicted,’ since the Indians are supposed to have uttered the word repeatedly on seeing the Franciscans in their simple habits. Motolinia became one of the principal powers among the Mexican Franciscans, taking his turn in all the more important posts and becoming (as he does not fail to make clear) the best of the first generation of Franciscan writers on Nahua culture and history.

    The letter is the product of a thoroughly exasperated man. Having written page on page and brought the letter to a conclusion, Motolinia got notice of yet further infuriating publications by Las Casas, and returned to write almost as much more. One understands the exasperation. The arguments were necessarily deflected ones.

  • 2 - A standard conqueror's report

  • from Part I - Conquest
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 7-14

  • Summary

    Pedrarias de Avila, governor of Tierra Firme, in Panama, to the emperor, 1525

    We hear news of great wealth.

    It is a shame, in away, that the best-known early official reports from the Indies are Columbus’ hand-waving Italianate pictures of an island paradise, and Cortes’ university prose, elegantly magnifying himself and his conquest. As fine and informative as these writings are, they are not representative of the scores of reports that Spanish leaders sent the crown every year from new areas rich and poor, important and unimportant. There, sobriety and woodenness ruled. Yes, there were bows to the king, and some talk of spreading Christianity, far more than in private letters, and even some mention of marvels of nature and divine intervention, but all in few words, one item after the next, in matter-of-fact, unexcited language corresponding well to the conquerors’ generally Spartan temperament. The message usually went to the basics of whether or not the climate was tolerable for Europeans; whether the Indians were settled and agricultural, capable of sustaining encomiendas and Spanish cities; and whether there was gold, silver or some other product that could subsidize imports from Europe and pay the crown the revenues it desired.

    We have chosen the present letter because it has a little of everything; it illustrates the points above, and more. In the second and third decades of the sixteenth century, Tierra Firme and its capital Panama were the clearing house for exploration and conquest in both directions along the South Sea (the Pacific, with the North Sea in this context being the Caribbean). Thus two major conquests appear underway in this letter, that of Nicaragua led by Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba and others, and that of the ‘east’ or Peru led by Pizarro and Almagro. The relay system of conquest, with each new area conquered by people and resources from the immediately preceding one, is seen very clearly here, as well as the tensions that grew out of it. The governor would aid some important citizens in outfitting expeditions which he sent out in his name to add new territories to his own jurisdiction. But the subordinates, who usually took much of the initiative and bore most of the expense, invariably sought independence, and often attained it.

  • 34 - Franciscans and the Indians

  • from Part III - officials and Clerics
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 211-214

  • Summary

    Fray Pedro de Gante, in Mexico City, to the emperor, 1532

    … There are very good scribes and preachers or speakers of great fervor, and singers who could sing in your majesty's chapel choir …

    Either secular priests or friars could man the ecclesiastical component of the encomienda, taking the chief encomienda town as a headquarters and from there instructing the Indians of the region in Christianity. In the Mexico of the first generation, friars of the mendicant orders were most associated with this function, and of these the Franciscans were preeminent. Arriving in the country ftrst, they evolved methods which the other orders followed by and large, building great monastery churches and cloisters which became the primary public places of the Indian towns and even, since they often contained three or four friars and served a corresponding number of encomienda districts, tended to free the order from too great a local dependence on any individual encomendero. The rural monasteries were satellites of the even larger ones in the cities, above all Mexico City.

    In the larger centers there took place the most famous episode in early Spanish American cultural history: a concerted Franciscan effort ftrst to learn Nahuatl, and then using this tool to teach a selected number of Indians the refmements of European culture, including writing, grammatical and rhetorical principles, all the arts and crafts, sometimes even Latin. It is quite hard to get a proper perspective on the success of the program. The achievements are formidable. The monasteries, if they as works of art are considered part of the effort, dominate the Mexican countryside to this day. Literacy in Nahuatl was another result with lasting signiftcance; the first generation of notaries whom the friars taught taught others in turn, so that a selfsustaining Nahuatl literacy and record-keeping continued to flourish in the Indian towns until the end of the colonial period.

    But if such were the results, one must wonder if the welldeveloped Mesoamerican traditions of glyphic-pictorial writing and prolific monumental building were not the most important causative factors. In discussing the general progress of acculturation in central Mexico, one must remember how few people in how few places were involved in such programs, and that the effort slacked off to almost nothing in a generation or two.

  • 6 - The non-hero

  • from Part I - Conquest
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 39-43

  • Summary

    Maestre Baltasar, on Gallo Island off Ecuador, to his brother in Panama, 1527

    … Two years is long enough to go about begging without servants …

    Readers of Prescott or the Spanish chroniclers get no inkling of what expeditions of discovery and conquest in the Indies were like. Hardships, high mortality, and sometimes fierce fighting were indeed involved. But what the chroniclers took for granted, and Prescott did not know, was that the expeditions were joint economic ventures shot through with capitalism and commercialism. The leaders were the largest investors, in ships and supplies, to which they gave their men access - practically always for a price; but all the men invested something, if only their person and clothing, and the shares the conquerors won were adjusted more than anything else to the size of their investments. Owning a horse doubled one's share. The ships may have left most of the import merchants behind, but commercialism and lively trading continued to be part of the picture. The wealthier expedition members took stocks to be sold to their fellows later, when supplies would be scarcer and higher priced. The expeditions contained blacksmiths, tailors, surgeons, notaries and others who charged for their services. And trading back and forth of horses, weapons, clothing and slaves went on constantly.

    Another aspect not much spoken of, and which for lack of sources scholars still know too little about, is the large number of Indian and black helpers the Spaniards always took with them on expeditions, outnumbering themselves at least two to one. Their direct role in the fighting was not great, but they freed the conquerors by carrying the baggage, searching for provisions, bringing wood and water, and helping with other tasks; the women among them were also cooks, mistresses, companions. Blacks, as highly expensive slaves, were the minority. The bulk were Indians, who might either be informal permanent dependents, simply commandeered somewhere, or slaves like the blacks, though much lower priced (Indian slavery, while short-lived in the central regions, was a standard phenomenon of the conquests); in either case, they originated in areas already conquered, usually close to the expedition's point of departure. Rather than operating as a corps, the helpers in most cases belonged to the individual conquerors; each Spaniard normally expected to have two or three, an expectation that did not vanish with the culmination of the conquest.

  • 21 - The woman as settler

  • from Part II - The Variety of Life in the Indies
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 135-138

  • Summary

    Maria de Carranza, wife of a textile-mill owner, in Puebla, to her brother Hernando de Soto in Seville, 1589

    … And buy four cured hams from Ronda …

    We include this letter less for its idiosyncrasies than for its lack of them, that is, to emphasize that there were indeed Spanish women settlers, part and parcel of the general migratory movement, and sharing the general characteristics. They came from the same towns and regions of Spain as the men, because they were their wives, sisters and nieces, and they went to the same parts of the Indies. This means that they were most numerous in Mexico and Peru, like most of the other hallmarks of development in the sixteenth century, whether Spanish artisans, silver mines or black slaves. Without making them into culture goddesses as the Spaniards themselves sometimes did (see Letter 3), we can see the crucial role of women settlers in placing households in the cities under entirely Spanish management. Not every last household, certainly; but by the time of this letter, Spaniards of all social types down to the artisan level were tending to marry Spanish women, whether new from Spain or born in the Indies.

    If we search in the present letter for anything that might be special to a woman, we might say that the list of foods to buy is even more detailed than Sebastian de Pliego's in Letter 18 (though quite similar), or that Maria de Carranza does show a special concern for gathering together all relatives, much as the stereotypes of the time dictated. For the rest, this is a standard recruitment letter, with the usual images, inducements, plans and expressions of annoyance at the reluctance of the stay-athomes. Most of it could have been written by any settler.

    Desired and beloved brother of my heart:

    I have never had a reply to the many letters I have written you, except one, and it gave me great joy to know of the health of yourself and my sister-in-law and my nephews, whom I hope our Lord someday lets me see, as I desire.

  • 17 - The tanner and his wife

  • from Part II - The Variety of Life in the Indies
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 119-123

  • Summary

    Alonso Ortiz, in Mexico City, to his wife Leonor Gonzalez, in Zafra, Extremadura, c. 1574-1575

    . .. I am pressed and hemmed in to earn a living for you and my children …

    The letter of tanner Alonso Ortiz illustrates two common phenomena. The first is one of the basic processes in the formation of Spanish American society. Artisans of all kinds came to settle in the Spanish cities, catering to the needs of a population which could pay in silver coming from the mines and encomiendas. Starting with nothing but their tools, Spanish craftsmen would at first perform most of the productive work themselves. If they had any success at all, they began to train helpers and expand, until they themselves graduated into supervision and marketing, while much of the shop work was done by blacks and Indians. Often, as here, the blacks, though slaves (or indeed because they were slaves and more permanent), were the foremen and most skilled workers, while the apprentices and less skilled were Indian. This sort of shop organization accomplished some things of vast cultural signific∼nce: it greatly increased the productivity of Spanish crafts, fllling the larger cities with Spanish- style artifacts and services, and second, it was a prime factor in hastening the growth of a non-Spanish but Hispanized sector of the urban population. Skilled help was scarce and much in demand, so that Alonso Ortiz could find none at first. But now, after only a year, aided by a partner, he has trained or acquired a force of nine, and is showing a good profit.

    Ortiz mentions the possible export of some cured hides to Spain. Let it be clear that his most important market is local, Mexico City itself. All Ortiz envisions is sending a hundred or so of the best hides from among the thousands he cures. His first attempt to do so came to nothing, and his plan for the future is most hypothetical. The export of hides to Europe was a quite marginal, unprofitable business until lower freight costs and higher demand finally made it really viable.

    The second phenomenon is related to the fact that a certain number of immigrants to the Indies were married men unaccompanied by their wives.

  • 27 - Indian high society

  • from Part II - The Variety of Life in the Indies
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 160-162

  • Summary

    Don Pedro Enrique Moctezuma, in Mexico City, to his relatives dona Magdalena Axayaca, dona Petronila Pimentel, and dona Bar-bola de la Concepcion, in nearby Iztapalapa, 1587

    … Ma yehuatzin Spu Sancto ytlan moyetztie yn cenca mahuiztic amotlaJoanimantzin tlas;ocihuapipiltine …

    May the Holy Spirit dwell in your very honored precious souls, dear ladies …

    If all Indian rulers were ‘caciques,’ still there were some distinctions recognized by the Spaniards. Encomiendas, pensions and honorific titles went to a few direct descendants of Moctezuma in Mexico, and of Atahuallpa and Huascar in Peru. And aside from the question of Spanish recognition, a corps of high nobility maintained itself in and around each of the former imperial centers, Mexico City and Cuzco, even after decimation in the conquest. For a century or more these groups continued to exist in important Spanish cities, quite well received by the Spaniards, sometimes marrying into Spanish society at a high level, yet long retaining a self-awareness and distinct life style. In Peru, since Quechua was rarely written down, the nobles tended to do their writing in Spanish. But the nobles of Mexico, where after the conquest literacy in Nahuatl was widespread, have left us chronicles and correspondence in their own tongue.

    Our main purpose here is to give the reader some rough notion of the refined, elegant, hyperflorid tone of these people's discourse, still very much that of the preconquest Aztec nobility despite the integration of Spanish terms and concepts - a rough notion, we say, because the English is a pale reflection of the parallelisms, circumlocutions and multiple reverentials which the richness of the Nahuatl allows without artificiality or coyness.

    Some dynastic background will be necessary for understanding. The only son of Emperor Moctezuma to live on into the Spanish period, at least the only one enjoying recognition, was don Pedro Moctezuma. He received the encomienda of Tultengo in the Tula district and owned considerable property, including a large house on the square of San Sebastian, the northeastern district of Mexico City. A series of royal decrees conHrmed his rights and gave him a large pension besides. On his death, his legitimate son don Martin Moctezuma succeeded. As this letter is written, don Martin has also died, and there is great controversy over the succession.

  • 29 - How a governor operates

  • from Part III - officials and Clerics
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 174-185

  • Summary

    Licenciate Cristobal Vaca de Castro, governor of Peru, to his wife dona Maria de Quinones in Valladolid, Old Castile, 1542

    … In everything seek the aid of the president of the Royal Council, because since I have given his brother a very good encomienda of Indians here …

    So I have made this small profit from the goods I brought with me …

    Already in other sections (Letters 9 and 12) we have seen how, through necessity and inclination, governors tended to treat their offices and jurisdictions as a private, familial domain. However upright a governor was or meant to be, if he was to be effective he must have support at home in Spain, faithful followers in the Indies, and economic sinews beyond meager salaries. Thus certain procedures were almost universal for Spanish American viceroys and governors. Owing their initial appointment and continued term in office to court figures high in the king's favor or on the Council of the Indies, they showed gratitude and curried favor by sending letters and gifts, giving plums of patronage to the courtiers’ relatives, etc. Any governor setting out for America would have to go into debt to outfit himself for the trip; his prospective position, however, gave him abundant credit, which he would generally use not only for his immediate needs, but also for investment, direct or indirect, in goods destined to be sold in his district. He took with him an entourage of relatives and compatriots that made up an embryo government, including people who could be trusted to perform tasks for him at all levels, as executives, secretaries, constables and henchmen; in the district of his authority he would find yet other compatriots, and he would use them too, trading favors for the extra loyalty assured by the regional tie. Success as governor might lead to yet higher posts in Spain, noble titles and distinctions, the founding or augmentation of a family entail, splendid marriages for the governor's children, and related advantages. Such possibilities were of course in the governor's mind from the beginning, and he steered things accordingly.

    These then were the core mechanisms of government, its anatomy and system of reward, the nature of which shaped governmental action decisively. Where the governor had strong backers at court, a large regional following, and wealth and patronage at his command, he could assert himself mightily.

  • 35 - The Dominican attack

  • from Part III - officials and Clerics
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 215-217

  • Summary

    Fray Andres de Moguer, in Mexico City, to the Council of the Indies, 1554

    … Consider what sort of indoctrination they can give them! …

    In Spanish American secular society there were conflicts between the first conquerors with their large encomiendas, and later arrivals attempting to get some share for themselves. This was just as true in the ecclesiastical world, and first-comers had just as great an initial advantage. Myths formed around the Twelve, the first party of Franciscans to arrive in Mexico, and the order quickly established itself in the largest towns of the central part of the country. The later-coming Dominicans and Augustinians were forced into relatively peripheral or secondary situations. They resented it, protested, and carried on various kinds of skirmishes until finally, again as in the secular world, some accommodations were made, though overall Franciscan predominance was retained.

    The Dominicans were the greatest scourge of the Franciscans, not only because they were second in seniority and strength, but because of the propensities of the two orders. The Franciscans were pragmatic builders, converters and baptizers; the Dominicans, the Order of Preachers, were intellectuals inclined to higher education, thorough preparation, and doctrinaire positions. Thus power politics and conviction coincided in their constant complaint that Franciscan ambition and compromise were leading to the dilution of Christianity through haste; time should be taken to instruct both ecclesiastics and Indians before general application of the sacraments, the ratio of ecclesiastic personnel to Indians should be reduced, etc. All of this both suited the Dominicans’ taste, and would hamstring their rivals until they could catch up with them. Very basic human attributes often surface in these debates. Note the portrait of fray Pedro de Gante, so different from his elaborate humility in Letter 34. A childlike Franciscan pride in numbers, and a responding childlike Dominican jealousy, are prime factors in the continuing debates. of course these things varied from region to region; in Peru it was the Dominicans who were first and strongest. The characteristics of the orders, however, are relatively universal, and thus the whole Dominican-dominated body in Peru was more doctrinaire, less energetic in building and teaching.

  • 33 - A bishop's affairs

  • from Part III - officials and Clerics
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 207-210

  • Summary

    Fray Juan de Zumarraga, first bishop of Mexico City, to his nephew Francisco de Urquiaga, in Durango, Biscay, 1548

    … My concern is to carry out my old desire for that hostelry …

    Bishops shared with all Spanish settlers the attribute of coming from a certain region in Spain. Like governors, they surrounded themselves with a retinue of trusted people, often their compatriots or relatives, to whom they gave posts of special responsibility and whom they helped in various ways. Our present example is all the more indicative of the trend because Bishop Zumcirraga had the reputation of not favoring relatives, which he doubtless did not, unduly, but only within the universally accepted framework of preferring relatives when they were qualified.

    An interesting case seen in the letter is that of Sancho Garcia. Zumcirraga, at the instance of his nephew (always the nephew) in his home town of Durango, brought Garcia to Mexico, and it was through his favor, he implies, that Garcia became wealthy. With the wealth he returned to Durango and married a relative of Zumcirraga's. Now he has become uppity, and the crusty bishop resents it. Zumcirraga also mentions a relative now in Mexico, Martin de Urquiaga, apparently a younger brother of the Francisco to whom the letter is addressed, and therefore also the bishop's nephew. Martin is a recently ordained priest. Zumcirraga has not given him any great plum in the curacy of the remote mining camp of Sultepec; on the other hand, not every beginning priest already has a chaplaincy in addition to a curacy. Zumcirraga is watching Martin, and would be prepared to favor him further, but only, apparently, if he fulftils his promise: ‘we will see what can be done.’ A grand-nephew, son of the recipient of the letter, was also on his way to Mexico, but died in a shipwreck - something so much in the ordinary run of events that it fails to get prominent mention, and a sentence later when the bishop speaks of consolation, he is no longer thinking of the death of Francisco's son, but of the bad marriage of their relative to Sancho Garcia.

    The closest thing to Zumcirraga's heart, as his career reaches its end, is an endowment in Durango, a sort of symbolic coming home and perpetuation of his name, much like an entail for non-ecclesiastics.

  • Part III - officials and Clerics

  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 173-174

  • Summary

    Oh sacred majesty, how just and good are the royal orders you send to this province, and how officials mold them here and do what they wish!

    Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Guatemala, 1552

    Letters from governors and prominent ecclesiastics fill the great Archive of the Indies. They were, for reasons not unrelated to the relative legibility of their script, among the first documents to interest Spanish American historians; consequently they dominate the documentary collections of the nineteenth century, and are second only to the chronicles of the conquest in familiarity.

    Despite this popularity, the governors’ letters, directed usually to the king and royal council, are among the least informative writings of man. They magnify small problems and hide large ones; they denigrate the actions of predecessors and represent routine procedures as important policy innovations; they give the weight of official truth to uninformed gossip, malicious stereotypes, and superficial observations. Letters from judges, treasury officials, bishops and friars share many of the same characteristics, with the addition of constant highly colored criticism of the governor and of each other, as almost institutionalized rivals.

    We include some examples of this type of public official correspondence because it was a part of the cultural life of the time. If one gets a notion of the conventions of such writing and the types of motivation underlying it, one can gain from it considerable knowledge concerning the correspondents’ mentality and stance, and learn at least something about general conditions. However, in these letters one learns very little indeed about officials and clerics’ manner of operation, a phenomenon of an altogether different level. Affected very strongly by considerations of region, family, social position, economic necessity and group rivalry, officials in real situations perforce acted differently than might seem to be dictated by royal decrees or their own public pronouncements. To give some sense of this, we also include several private letters from the holders of various types of office. When talking to relatives and friends rather than to the king, they touch a different subject matter, are much franker, and reveal profound similarities to other settlers. The institutions use the same methods as the society in which they are immersed, and they reflect it perhaps more than they shape it.

  • 19 - The nephew

  • from Part II - The Variety of Life in the Indies
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 128-131

  • Summary

    Martin Fernandez Cubero, cloth trader, in Puebla, to his nephew Pedro Fernandez Cubero in Fuentelencina, New Castile, 1572

    … I could have arranged a marriage for you worth at least 15,000 pesos …

    By God my only desire is to see people of mine in this land …

    The Spanish settlers were from every region in Spain and from every walk of life. One thing that a great many of them had in common was the quality of being nephews, nephews of someone already in the Indies. It is not hard to imagine some of the elements of the pattern. The original settler would probably be a second son, leaving his older brother in Spain to inherit the family fortune. Young and unmarried at the time of his departure, he would stay unmarried in the Indies until he had made a good beginning (longer than that, in the case of Fernandez Cubero). Having affairs to manage, needing aid and company, and with no grown sons of his own, he would turn to the sons of his older brother back home, who would be just coming of age. However it may have worked in detail, the nephew was a key ftgure. Nor was the importation of nephews an ephemeral phenomenon; David Brading has established its importance in maintaining the continuity of Spanish-Mexican merchant houses as late as the latter eighteenth century.

    In this volume we have already seen two appeals for nephews, and there will be more. To underline the importance of the topic we include here this maximum appeal, which wheedles and threatens, praises and taunts, using all the reasoning we have seen before, plus the new factor that Fernandez Cubero wants to have someone to whom he can leave his considerable wealth.

    Nephew:

    Many times I've written you telling of my life and the way in which, since coming to this country, I have managed this business and commerce and earned a living. Really, as this is a rich land and food is quite cheap, and I have continually lived alone, I have earned a great deal, as those gentlemen who have left here can very well tell you, having seen it with their own eyes, especially Mr Alonso Hernandez and Mr Alonso de Rivas, the one from Brihuega.

Letters and People of the Spanish Indies

  • 5 - The merchant and the conquest of Mexico

  • from Part I - Conquest
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 24-38

  • Summary

    Hernando de Castro, in Santiago, Cuba, to his senior partner Alonso de Nebreda in Seville, 1520

    … This Cortes is in that city, some sixty or seventy leagues from the sea …

    Until all are at peace, it is clearly no time to do business …

    Having been introduced to some aspects of mercantile organization and correspondence in Letter 4, the reader will perhaps be prepared for this letter, written earlier but longer and more complex. Here, in addition to the characteristics seen before, we glimpse the operation of a large-scale commercial network with branches and representatives in several places at once. In the letter, names fly by bewilderingly. Without trying to be exhaustive, let us detail some of the most important figures. All were from Burgos, Old Castile, the town whose merchants, in the period before the discovery of America, long shared dominance of Spanish international trade with the Genoese.

  • (1)Alonso de Nebreda, recipient of the present letter, based in Seville, the head of interests trading towards both Flanders and the Caribbean.

  • (2)Juan de Rios, Nebreda's brother-in-law as well as longstanding factor and partner, based in Santo Domingo.

  • (3)Hernando de Castro, writer of the present letter, from a prominent Burgos family, important investor along with Nebreda and Rios in a new venture to sell goods in Cuba and ‘Yucatan'; yet acting as factor and junior partner, based in Santiago, Cuba.

  • (4)The Herrera brothers: (a) Francisco; referred to here sometimes as ‘Herrera’ and ‘young Francisco,’ Castro's chief aide, who despite intentions to leave eventually succeeded Castro as the company's factor in Santiago. (b) Juan, working for Juan de Rios, the Santo Domingo representative; in Rios’ name, he took merchandise to Mexico, selling it to:

  • (5)Pedro de Maluenda, Hernando de Castro's cousin, not part of the Nebreda-Castro enterprise at the moment, but in Mexico as a representative of Cuban governor Diego velazquez.

  • (6)Fernando de Santa Cruz, nephew of Castro, killed in a shipwreck on his way to Mexico, taking merchandise for his father,

  • (7)Juan Fernandez, in Seville, who was Castro's cousin, as well as his associate in selling black slaves.

  • 23 - The petty dealer

  • from Part II - The Variety of Life in the Indies
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 143-146

  • Summary

    Andres Garcia, in Mexico City, to his nephew Pedro Guinan in Colmenar Viejo, New Castile, 1571

    … I deal in Campeche wood and cotton blankets and wax, and I also have a certain business in cacao …

    The petty trader was first cousin of the petty agriculturalist. The activities of both were attractive to penniless newcomers because they could be undertaken without great capital or connections. Often called tratante or dealer, as distinct from the mercader, who was usually an import merchant, the small trader was rather lower on the scale than the small farmer. Ex-seamen, the lowest of the low, often became tratantes on land. Immigrants of foreign origin (especially Italians, for some reason) tended to gravitate to local small trade, whereas among the farmers the only non-Spaniards, in any numbers, were the nearly Spanish Portuguese. The tratantes dealt in anything that could be bought cheaply in the local economy and resold for silver. They were taverners, peddlers, traders of nags and used clothing. Their most characteristic operation was selling to the Indian population of the cities and mines, people who, if not as rich as the Spaniards, were able to pay money for the rapa de la tierra ('native cloth’), and other products of the traditional Indian economy which they still desired and which the dealers gladly supplied them at a profit.

    Andres Garda is the very epitome of a tratante. We can surmise this good industrious man's social status among Spaniards by the fact that he is great friends with a mulatto woman, and married to an Indian. His trade is exclusively in Indian products, sold at the ticmguiz of San Juan in the southwest district of Mexico City, the most important Indian market in the city proper. (Tianquiztli, Nahuatl for ‘market,’ was picked up by the Spaniards and applied to Indian markets specifically; in this sense the word was even carried to other parts of the Indies.) The products Garcia sells are Indian, but not from the region of the capital. They come a long distance, from the southern lowlands of Yucatan, Chiapas and the Guatemalan coast of Soconusco. (When Garcia says he has a cacao business ‘in Soconusco,' he means he is involved in production or buying there; the cacao would be sold in Mexico City.) Trade in these products between highland and lowland long antedates the conquest, of course.

  • 22 - The farmer

  • from Part II - The Variety of Life in the Indies
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 138-143

  • Summary

    Antonio Mateos, in Puebla, to his wife Maria Perez in Spain, 1558

    … the valley of Atlixco, where they grow two crops of wheat a year …

    The main areas of sixteenth-century Spanish settlement were the scene of an extraordinarily productive Indian agriculture, which would seem to have left little scope for Spanish farming. However, the Indians grew maize and other things that Spaniards would eat only from necessity. The conquerors in asking for rewards would sometimes list the eating of Indian foods among their great hardships. So from the earliest time there was a demand for meat from European livestock, as well as cereals, fruits, and vegetables of the European varieties.

    At first most of this was procured through the encomienda, in a way of which we have seen an example in Letter 11. The encomendero would have one of his Spanish tribute collectors do the agricultural management, or he might hire someone especially for that purpose, usually a Spaniard on the humble side, newly arrived in the country, without many other possibilities. There would be a maintenance crew of a few blacks and permanent Indian employees, with the heavy labor of planting and harvesting done by Indians coming seasonally in fulfilment of their labor obligation to the encomendero. In the case of livestock, very little labor was required, and the small permanent crew was sufficient.

    Since the Spanish cities in the central areas expanded so rapidly, in terms of both population and wealth, this system came under pressure almost immediately. Government officials, local entrepreneurs, younger relatives of encomenderos, and others who had some capital but no encomienda began to build up complexes just like those associated with the encomiendas, except for lack of rights to Indian tribute and labor. After a time of hiring seasonal labor fr∼m the encomenderos, they eventually succeeded in attaining an arrangement whereby Indian tribute labor was spread more evenly among the Spaniards and on a short-term basis, rather than being granted for a lifetime to one person in a whole area.

    Even earlier and more pervasive than the large estate builders were the small fry, for food production was something susceptible of being carried out on a small scale and with little capital, and the market was increasingly good.

  • 12 - An encomendero's opinions

  • from Part II - The Variety of Life in the Indies
  • Edited by James Lockhart, Enrique Otte
  • Book:
    Letters and People of the Spanish Indies
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    26 March 1976, pp 70-82

  • Summary

    Bernal Diaz del Castillo, encomendero, councilman and conqueror of Santiago de Guatemala, to the crown, 1552 and 1558

    … And we don't know when another boatload of Cerratos might arrive, to be given Indians …

    What encomenderos wrote to their relatives was one thing. What they wrote to governors and the crown was another. The encomenderos of the middle and later sixteenth century, many still conquerors or their direct descendants, had a well-defined public position, varying little from place to place. They were poor; their tributes had diminished to nothing; they were being displaced by undeserving newcomers to whom the governors were giving the whole land. Hidden in such words was their desire to maintain the monopoly and total dominance they had in the conquest period, and measured against that unreasonable hope, they indeed fell short and were deprived. Immigration to the central areas was strong, as we have said, and it included well-born and well-connected people who could not be denied their place. Others built up fortunes and connections on the spot, in mining or commerce, and then knocked insistently at the door. Incoming governors needed rewards for their entourage and close allies, to whom they could not give significant salaries. They cemented their base by awarding vacant encomiendas to ·relatives, employees and other followers, as indeed everyone expected them to do. Everywhere the governors acted the same, and everywhere the encomenderos protested. Actually, very few first conquerors or their sons had encomiendas taken away from them. Rather, between civil strife and Indian rebellions in the early time, and diseases in the later, many encomenderos died without direct heirs; it was mainly their grants that the governors gave away. The conquerors, within twenty or thirty years, had come to be a tightly knit group with innumerable nephews, nieces, or humble old friends under their wing, and it is to these that they would have had vacant encomiendas go. When this failed to happen, their response was not to fade into insignificance, but to marry their children into the new favored families, something which the newcomers desired just as greatly for the prestige and local acceptance it brought, so that from the second generation the encomenderos were an inextricable mixture of the new and the old, a situation that continued among leading families even in times and areas where the encomienda had lost its primary importance.

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