In the first decades of Spanish colonization in the Americas, conquistadors and early settlers were granted official rights and privileges over Indigenous people, with the right to exploit their labor, the so-called encomiendas or repartimientos. The Castilian crown had already tested an early form of this encomienda system in the context of the (re)colonization of the Iberian Peninsula, and on both sides of the Atlantic, the principal purpose of encomiendas was to extend and accelerate Castilian control over conquered lands and people.1 But the encomenderos, the holders of these grants, soon became a thorn in the emperor’s side. They grew increasingly powerful, forming a colonial elite that risked eluding the crown’s control. What is more, they failed in their duty to instruct the Indigenous people under their authority in the Christian faith. As the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas famously protested, the “indios” were held in outright slavery.2 With the New Laws of 1542, Charles V sought to put an end to these developments. In Spanish America—unlike in Brazil—Indigenous peoples were recognized as free vassals of the Crown of Castile, and it became increasingly difficult to legitimize their enslavement outside the contexts of war and rebellion discussed in Chapter Two. Although the monarch’s plans to reform the encomienda were met with fierce local resistance, the formal abolition of Indigenous slavery paved the way toward a new system of labor coercion.3
The rise of forced labor was closely linked to the expansion of silver mining in colonial Peru. In the late 16th century, the Andean highland city of Potosí became “the unrivalled centre of the Spanish Empire in South America”4 and a metropolis of world-historical significance. Silver from the Cerro Rico, the “rich hill”, boosted Europe’s textile production and traveled as far as Mughal India and Ming China. Until the mid-17th century, the “money mountain” at Potosí supplied roughly half of all silver in global circulation.5 But this boom came at a tremendous cost. From a vast region between northern Argentina and the former Inca capital of Cusco, thousands of Indigenous tributaries were forced to leave their homes to work in the depths of the mines. Many never returned. The deadly labor in the Cerro Rico was “the stuff of the Black Legend of Spanish colonialism”.6
Historians have come to describe the shift from encomienda slavery to labor coercion as largely rhetorical.7 Andrés Reséndez argues that colonial authorities simply created “newfangled terms and practices to retain control of Native Americans when formal enslavement was no longer possible”.8 Similarly, Nancy van Deusen speaks of “thinly disguised slavery”.9 And according to Nicholas Robins, the difference between forced labor and slavery was “almost meaningless”.10 What has been overlooked, however, is that the alarmingly close connection between coerced work and enslavement was already a subject of intense debate in the early modern period. On what basis could free subjects be compelled to work in the Andean mines if the Romans had imposed such burdensome labor only on slaves? And how could such services be imposed on Indigenous vassals while Spanish subjects overseas were exempt?
Forcible mining in the Andes thus became a pivotal issue of justice, conscience, and imperial order, engaging colonial officials as much as missionaries and theologians in the Peruvian viceroyalty. Intellectuals in the Indies—much like their counterparts in Iberia—drew upon shared modes of thinking and arguing.11 Among Anglophone scholars, the jurist Juan de Solórzano y Pereira (1575–1655) is perhaps the most familiar figure, famous for reinvigorating the controversy about the justice of the Spanish conquest from overseas, more than a century after its inception in the Iberian lecture halls.12 And as we shall see, Solórzano’s writings also left a deep imprint on the contested discourse surrounding forced Native labor. Importantly, however, a range of equally innovative and influential contributions have yet to receive their due place in the histories of their era. This chapter also includes the works of the theologian Miguel de Agia, a close advisor of the Peruvian viceroy Luis de Velasco (r. 1596–1604); the Franciscan missionary Juan de Silva, who voiced his opinion on the matter of mining in a series of memorials to the king; and the Jesuit Diego de Avendaño (1594–1688), who addressed the problem of forced labor in his academic, moral theological writing. By examining the works of these figures, the present chapter contributes to recent research on the role of colonial intellectuals in the production of social, political, and legal knowledge in Spanish America.13
Among historians of colonial Latin America, it is widely recognized that the Spaniards legitimated the hierarchy between Indigenous vassals and Spanish settlers by dividing the colonial society into a república de indios and a república de españoles.14 It is undoubtedly true that the Spanish developed a distinctive understanding of “Indianness”, whose principal purpose was to legitimate the continued conversion efforts and deferment of the prospect for full integration of Indigenous peoples into the Christian community.15 Yet I will argue that the notion of “two republics or political communities”,16 which dominates the present-day historiographical imagination, does not reflect how historical actors understood colonial society. Their solution to the problem of a deeply uneven political community was not to distinguish a “republic of indios” from a “republic of Spaniards”.17 Rather, I show that Spanish voices overseas articulated the vision of what I call a “composite commonwealth”: a unified political body forged from unequal parts.
In a thought-provoking study, Orlando Bentancor recently suggested that the ideology of forced native mining rested on the notion that “indigenous people are considered an imperfect matter that needs to be modeled by the imposition of superior cultural forms”.18 Bentancor argues that Spanish theorists of empire considered “both nature and humans as malleable material”, tracing the origins of this “instrumentalist” understanding in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and the School of Salamanca.19 His reading echoes Giorgio Agamben’s characterization of the early modern period, as marked by a sharp divide between a purely natural life (zoé) and a properly political life (bios).20 Equally, it mirrors Michel Foucault’s argument that the 16th century saw the birth of new art of government, with princes manipulating their subjects in the same way that craftsmen molded material objects.21 Indeed, Bentancor asserts that Spanish thinkers regarded Indigenous peoples as “raw and defective material” of nature that “had to be dominated from above and directed to a higher end”.22
However, the notion of a stark binary between raw nature and artificially perfected politics is not reflected in early modern writings. As Annabel Brett has shown, Aquinas and his early modern followers in Iberia had a far more sophisticated understanding of the interplay between nature and politics.23 The same holds true, I will contend, of those who shaped the emerging ideology of Indigenous labor coercion in colonial Peru. Spanish imperial thinkers envisioned a deeply hierarchical juxtaposition between politically sophisticated settlers and passion-driven, rustic Andeans. Yet they did not imagine Indigenous individuals as pre-political “matter”. On the contrary, colonial jurists and theologians emphasized their status as vassals and subjects of the Spanish empire in the Americas. It was precisely by assigning the “indios” a place within the political community that it was possible to insist on their duty to perform a set of tasks commensurate with their supposedly inferior condition. Native labor, according to this logic, was an enforceable contribution to the maintenance of a sharply stratified, composite commonwealth of “indios” and Spaniards.
In what follows, I reconstruct debates over the justice of forced Indigenous labor during the rise and heyday of silver mining in the Andes from the mid-16th to the mid-17th centuries. The writings examined here reveal that the scope of political and legal authority over Spain’s vassals in the New World was contested, and that early modern thinkers understood “law as a flexible framework for negotiation and conflict rather than an assemblage of sets of norms or rules”.24 In this sense, exploring the debate over forced Indigenous labor in colonial Peru demonstrates how the study of jurisdictional politics can contribute to “new narratives about historical moments when empires and states moved to assert power over multi-jurisdictional orders and, in the process, transformed regional regimes and global legal order”.25
Potosí serves both as a point of departure and a guiding thread to explore how thinkers legitimized and challenged the variegated realities of forced labor that emerged from the major social and economic transformations in colonial Peru. Beyond mining, this system of forced labor also encompassed domestic services provided in the homes of Spanish settlers or the use of “indios” as human carriers on Andean highland routes impassable to pack animals. These practices raised broader questions about the fraught interface between slavery and political subjection, the boundaries between human and animal bodies, and the ideological foundations of the Spanish empire in the Americas.
1 The Rise of Forced Labor
In 1545, the Spaniards discovered a vast deposit of silver ore in the Andean highland city of Potosí, located over 4,000 meters above sea level in what is today Bolivia. The potential for profit was immediately apparent to Spanish settlers, and many began to send Natives into the newly encountered mines. From the outset, however, this practice was contested. As early as 1550, Domingo de Santo Tomás (1499–1570), head of the Dominicans of Lima, criticized encomenderos for showing little concern for the perilous work forced upon Indigenous people inside the Cerro Rico. In a letter to Emperor Charles V, he famously described the mines of Potosí as a boca del infierno, a “mouth of hell”.26
Yet the deposits soon appeared depleted, and Andean mining entered a period of crisis. Its true resurgence began in the 1570s with the introduction of a new technique for silver extraction using poisonous mercury amalgam.27 “Overnight”, as David Brading puts it, “the entire structure and pace of production of the industry was transformed”.28 This technical innovation coincided with a profound social, political, and economic reorganization in Peru under the reign of viceroy Francisco de Toledo (r. 1569–1581).
A central pillar of the Toledan reform program was the implementation of large-scale resettlement.29 Andean communities had traditionally been organized around kinship rather than territory and governed by members of the nobility, the caciques (or kurakas in Quechua). From the beginning of Spanish colonization in Peru, these communities had come under the authority of the monarch’s representatives overseas, the infamous encomenderos. It was only under Toledo, however, that the previously dispersed kinship groups were driven into small, Spanish-style towns defined by place rather than lineage, which aimed to disrupt Indigenous forms of social organization.30 These so-called reducciones in part facilitated the collection of tributary payments and allowed tighter control over the process of evangelization. But first and foremost, they were intended to supply the workforce for a new socioeconomic system that was built on large-scale coercion of Native labor.
The success of Andean mining depended in large part on Toledo’s revival and expansion of the pre-Hispanic system of rotational forced labor that the Incas had called mit’a (Hispanicized as mita). It is hard to imagine how the Spaniards could have successfully “summoned thousands of peasants to travel long distances for work on imperial projects” without relying on established structures.31 Each year, at least one-seventh of the male adult population from every reducción was compelled to work for the viceroyalty as a form of tributary service. A significant proportion ended up in Potosí, where people labored in the mines or nearby mills, crushing the raw ore and refining it with mercury.32 The liquid metal was itself a product of mining. Deposits at Almadén in Spain had been supplying smaller silver mines in Mexico since the middle of the century.33 In the 1560s, the Spaniards also discovered mercury deposits a four-day hike from Lima. In the Santa Bárbara mines of Huancavelica, up to three thousand Andeans at a time extracted the poisonous quicksilver to be transported to Potosí.34 The death and suffering that followed from exposure to the mercury dust, as we shall see, troubled even the most ardent defenders of mita mining.
1.1 The Revival of Natural Slavery
Juan de Matienzo (1520–1579), one of the first to address the problem of Indigenous labor coercion in a sustained way, studied law at Valladolid and subsequently joined the Castilian royal service as a clerk in the high tribunal in the same city.35 He arrived in the New World in 1561 to assume the position of a judge (oidor) at the newly established Audiencia of Charcas, one of the high courts of the Peruvian viceroyalty, which also exercised important governmental functions and oversaw large parts of the Spanish territories between Cusco and Buenos Aires.36 It was during this period that Matienzo composed the Gobierno del Perú (1567), a treatise on the administration of colonial Peru, described as the intellectual “blueprint” of viceroy Toledo’s social and economic reforms.37
Matienzo was well-aware of the dangers of Andean mining. He pointed to the lack of well-constructed ladders, which made descending into the mountains a dangerous undertaking, with human bodies “breaking into pieces”.38 Yet Matienzo was quick to suggest that this problem could be solved, quite simply by building “good ladders”.39 He maintained that the business of mining was vital to the preservation of the Spanish empire in the Americas, and some danger was therefore acceptable. This was evident in a broader comparative perspective, Matienzo sought to show. Similarly indispensable types of work in his native Spain, he argued, involved much greater risk: “it has been observed more commonly that somebody falls from a roof, a high wall, or a wooden building […] and one does not therefore have to give up on such trades”.40 By likening mining to carpentry, Matienzo effectively downplayed the supposedly exceptional danger of mining and reframed, even normalized, what was otherwise perceived as a distinctly colonial issue.
A more fundamental question concerned why mining and other forms of forced labor—including the construction of public buildings and roads, agricultural works on fields and estates, labor in textile workshops, or messenger services—were imposed exclusively on Indigenous subjects. Matienzo argued “there are no Blacks (nor is it suitable that there be any), which could perform the works in cities, sow seeds, or extract silver and gold from the mines”.41 Moreover, he insisted that enslaved Africans would not endure the rough climate of the Andean altiplano, a widespread belief at the time.42 Yet as we know today, enslaved Black Africans in Potosí were notably present in Spanish households or pressing coins in the royal mint.43 And the scarcity of Black slave laborers in the mines had economic reasons, since it was far cheaper to impose this labor on the Native tributaries under the mita system than rely on enslaved Black Africans.44
The very fact that Matienzo compared the mita to slave labor highlights that the tension between freedom, slavery, and political subjection that was at the heart of the debate. His own approach to this puzzle drew on the revival of an infamous idea: natural slavery.45 According to Matienzo, the “indios” were “naturally born and raised to serve, and it is more advantageous for them to serve than to give orders […] nature created them with stronger bodies and gave them less understanding”.46 The central crux, he went on to explain, was that they only
[…] participate in reason in order to feel it, but not to have it or to follow it. In this they are no different from animals, who do not even feel reason, but are governed by their passions. And this is obvious because for them there is no tomorrow, and they concentrate only on what they need to eat and drink this week, and after that they concentrate on the next week.47
For Matienzo, Indigenous people were “natural slaves”, whose perceived lack of reason and foresight rendered them incapable of participating fully and independently in political life. Importantly, however, he did not invoke this concept as an interpolitical justification for conquest, but rather as an intrapolitical argument in support of political hierarchy.48 Matienzo started from the premise that Andeans were already Castilian subjects; thus portraying them as “natural slaves” served to define their subordinate role within the emerging colonial society:
They are enemies of work and friends of idleness unless they are forced to work. […] Out of fear they obey their superiors well, and therefore it is expedient—for whoever orders, rules, and governs them—to make them work, serve, and to keep them busy with something, lest they commit the many excesses that spring from their idleness and drinking.49
For Matienzo, the doctrine of natural slavery provided the justification for coercing Indigenous labor. He was careful to emphasize, however, that the “indios” were neither legally enslaved nor categorically distinct from Spanish subjects in the Old World. There, too, he argued, similar coercion would be necessary if agricultural laborers did not work the fields voluntarily, since they “were born for this” and yet “they are not slaves, but free”.50 This comparison between “indios” and Spanish peasants had already been invoked by Vitoria: “Even among ourselves”, the Salamancan had argued, “we see many peasants (rustici) who are little different from brute animals”.51 For Vitoria, however, this condition was ultimately due to their lack of education.52 Matienzo, by contrast, argued otherwise and took the “natural” in natural slavery quite literally, arguing that farmers and Andeans were born to serve.
At the same time, Matienzo emphasized that labor coercion was a function of political power. If Indigenous people were unfit for political rule, this did not exempt them from their obligations as subjects of the crown of Castile. To illustrate this point, Matienzo again drew a comparison between the position of Spain’s vassals in the New World and the status of subjects in Iberia. “If the Turks moved in on Spain”, he asked, “isn’t it clear that this would force all the Spaniards to go to war, without excusing anybody?” The answer was, of course, affirmative: “insofar as it concerns the common good and the preservation of the kingdom, its citizens and inhabitants can be compelled to serve in war”.53 For Matienzo, the practice of compelling subjects to safeguard the commonwealth was both just and well-established.54 In Europe as well as in the Americas, the demands of the political whole took precedence over those of its parts.55
1.2 A Composite Commonwealth
Ten years after Matienzo completed his Gobierno, another Spaniard in colonial Peru entered the debate: the Jesuit José de Acosta (1539–1600). He is best known for his vernacular Natural and Moral History (1590), which earned him the reputation of a great Renaissance historian.56 But Acosta wore many hats. He also served as provincial of the Jesuit order, played a leading role in the Third Council of Lima (1582–1583), and held the chair of theology at the University of San Marcos in Lima.57 And it was in a text that betrays his theological learning that Acosta confronted the question of Indigenous labor coercion.
In 1577, when the Toledan reform program was already in full swing, Acosta penned a treatise on how to attend to the salvation of the “indios”.58 In what was later published as the De procuranda indorum salute (1588), he noted that the relationship between freedom and coercion remained utterly contested. On the one hand, Indigenous subjects were “absolutely free and sui iuris”.59 But on the other, they were forced to certain tasks to keep the empire up and going. In the eyes of many, he explained, this was untenable: “if a free human is coerced, he is not free, and indeed, whoever forces another to work against his will seems to be committing a grave violation of right, for it is servile to endure force”.60 Yet, Acosta explained, an equally widespread opinion was that “if we are to be lenient with those who are barbarous in nature and will, no works will ever be accomplished, and no job will ever get done”.61 The Spaniards themselves were unwilling or unable to perform “laborious” and “dirty” jobs such as “turning over the soil, carrying out pieces of raw ore, gathering bricks, conducting mules, bearing loads, and other servile tasks which, if absent, quickly lead to the demise of any commonwealth”.62
What was Acosta’s solution to this impasse? He conceded that, in principle, servile jobs such as mining or farming could also be carried out by Spaniards. These tasks, he noted, “are not greatly inconsistent with their birth and education”.63 Yet Acosta offered a long list of arguments in favor of imposing such labor on Indigenous subjects instead. First, the Indigenous population vastly outnumbered the Spanish settlers. Second, abolishing Indigenous labor coercion would be tantamount to “extinguishing the light of religion”, since the Spaniards would abandon these lands if their hopes for material wealth were not fulfilled.64 Under the condition they received fair compensation for their labor, their health was minimally damaged, and the burden was shared equally among them, Acosta maintained that “the multitude of indios should be assigned to these necessary tasks and, if they do not want to obey, forced to it”.65 Moreover, as he pointed out, the mita was “a very ancient custom” that the Incas had introduced many centuries before the name of Christ first reached the Americas.66
Acosta’s most important intervention, however, lay in his new vision of the imperial polity. “Natural law”, he argued, “holds that the necessary parts of the family or city can be ordered to work for the preservation of the whole body. However, one must not order an eye to tread on the ground or a head of household to administer the affairs of the kitchen”.67 Drawing on the traditional metaphor of the political community as a human body, Acosta articulated a highly hierarchical understanding of colonial society in Peru. Yet, he simultaneously argued that “the universal multitude of indios and Spaniards must already be considered as one and the same commonwealth, not as two that are separate from each other”.68 Consequently, the labor demanded of the Indigenous people by the Spaniards was not that owed by strangers, but rather by “fellow citizens”.69
The difficulty of Acosta’s vision was that it centered on unity and difference at the same time. How could these two strands, which so obviously pulled in opposite directions, be brought together? One solution was the strategy of resorting to Aristotle’s notion of natural slavery. This had been Matienzo’s tactic, and Acosta followed in his footsteps. In every commonwealth, he argued, some were naturally fit to work while others had what it takes to rule. This was what the “great architect of the city” had posited in his Politics.70 Acosta was keen to stress that the fundamentally unequal composition of the commonwealth did not amount to faction or division. In his view, the disparate parts of the body politic complemented one another: “they helped each other out, one lending the eyes to see and the other lending the feet to walk”.71
To reinforce this point, Acosta turned to a different image from the Book of Daniel: the statue featured in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.72 Its golden head, arms and chest made of silver, a belly and thighs of brass, iron legs, and feet in part iron and in part of clay made it an apt metaphor for unequal political bodies.73 Acosta was not the first to realize this. In the 1540s, the Salamancan Domingo de Soto had invoked it to caution against the oppression of the poor in his famous defense of mendicancy. By casting beggars as the feet and foundation of the city, he maintained that their destruction would tear down the whole body politic.74 Yet Acosta’s analogy was less concerned with the statue as a whole than with foregrounding the specifically composite character of its feet: “although clay badly adheres to iron”, he wrote, “according to the prophetic prophecy, the two nevertheless compose the very feet of this statue”.75 In the biblical account, these feet symbolized a disjointed kingdom, an uneasy union made up of separate parts. And Acosta’s point was that “indios” and Spaniards were united in the same way: despite their fundamental difference, they constituted one political whole.
The relationship between these parts was hierarchical: iron stood for strength and clay for weakness.76 “One should not be bewildered”, Acosta thus concluded, “if the clay is sometimes oppressed by the iron, but one should rather desire that it will not be entirely shattered and destroyed”.77 This was ultimately the statue’s fate in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Acosta’s warning epitomized that the composite commonwealth of “indios” and Spaniards was fraught with danger.
1.3 The Limits of Forced Labor and the Limits of Political Authority
Proponents of the new regime of labor coercion were careful to distinguish it from legal slavery. Acosta, for instance, emphasized that it had been “introduced by public authority”.78 And Matienzo stressed that encomenderos could no longer claim any authority over Indigenous subjects.79 They were bound to reside outside the newly formed reducciones, in exclusively Spanish towns.80 Under the new regime, as Matienzo made clear, the sole role and right of encomenderos was to oversee the collection of tributary payments and to control Native vassals’ instruction in the Christian faith and political life.81 In so arguing, he backed the official policy of the crown.82
Yet one of Matienzo’s arguments threatened to erode the distinction between labor coercion and encomienda slavery. For in his view, the “indios” could still be forced to work in the households of Spanish settlers as part of the mita.83 This was indeed a routine practice in the viceroyalty of Peru.84 How, then, was this any different from the formally forbidden practice of keeping Indigenous slaves?
Matienzo himself offered no answer, but the theologian José de Acosta addressed this issue in his De procuranda indorum salute. In principle, he argued, those who forced free subjects to work for their own will and benefit “establish a kind of slavery” and “think that it is their right to violate the rights of others”.85 Yet Acosta went on to argue that “one must not find fault with the fact that for special reasons, indios are assigned to domestic services in certain places, such as in hospitals, in the houses of monks, and furthermore in the houses of office holders or noblemen”.86 For Acosta, the inclusion of forced labor in Spanish households under the rubric of mita labor did not contradict the claim that it was a public institution. Just as many contemporary thinkers in Iberia had insisted on the political character of the household, Acosta cast the domestic sphere as more than merely “private”. In his estimation, it was the public offices of imperial administrators and encomenderos that legitimized forced Indigenous labor in Spanish households in colonial Peru.87
If domestic labor stretched the scope of public power to the utmost, another form of forced labor seemed to transgress the limits of political authority altogether: the use of Indigenous carriers as substitutes for pack animals. Juan de Matienzo explained to his readers that this was an ancient practice dating back to the Incas. Alongside the main strategic roads of their empire, the Incas had set up inns, so-called tambos, which supplied travelers not only with food and shelter but also with manpower. The Spaniards revived this institution. As part of the mita, a proportion of Indigenous tributaries was assigned to these inns in order “to carry hay and firewood for travelers, and to carry loads from one tambo to another”.88 This service was especially indispensable in the Sierra, where many Andean roads could only be traveled on foot and were too narrow and steep for pack animals. Yet even where beasts of burden could pass, Matienzo emphasized, the use of “indios” was indispensable. The tambos often lacked provisions and beds, forcing travelers—especially confessors visiting reducciones—to haul all their belongings. Since not even a rich man could find enough horses for this purpose, Matienzo concluded, Spanish settlers resorted to native carriers: so-called indios de carga.89
The substitution of animal with human bodies was contested from the early years of Spanish colonization. Matienzo pointed to a piece of legislation that Cristóbal Vaca de Castro, the first governor of Peru, had promulgated as early as 1543. In his ordinances on the tambos, he had prohibited the use of Andeans as pack animals without demonstrable necessity and the express license of a judge.90 This principle was still in effect when Matienzo was writing, much to his chagrin. He emphasized that in Spain, many casual laborers offered similar services to make a living.91 Matienzo stressed that the precise number of indios de carga needed often depended on unforeseen circumstances. If a horse died on the spot, for instance, this required quick action. The idea that Spanish travelers should previously seek the approval of a judge was therefore “impossible”.92
The explosive nature of this claim was recognized by José de Acosta. The real question, he explained, was whether it was “sometimes licit to force unwilling barbarians to advantageous works by private authority”.93 This was a provocative question because, as Acosta and others viewed it, what distinguished Indigenous labor coercion from slavery was precisely its grounding in public authority. How, then, could it be just to forcibly recruit Indigenous carriers by private authority?
By the time Acosta was writing, the institution of indios de carga had been temporarily outlawed, making it even more difficult to legitimize.94 One way around this problem was to emphasize that the practice of carrying goods on one’s shoulders was a long-standing Inca tradition. Laws that prohibited a customary social reality could therefore be violated, in Acosta’s view. As long as the Indigenous carriers were fairly paid and not overburdened, no one needed to fear for their conscience.95 In so arguing, Acosta approached the issue from a new perspective, suggesting that the Spaniards and indios de carga could enter into voluntary agreements.
Yet what if this option failed as well? Acosta explained that if a Spaniard in need was unable to reach an agreement with his or her Andean counterpart, they should consult a local magistrate “who may coerce with public authority”.96 However, Acosta went on,
[…] if this fails too, for magistrates are absent very often, and if the weight of the matter is urgent, one can teach nothing other, neither shorter nor plainer, than to follow the laws of necessity; that you should strive for what is necessary for you, with minimal detriment to your neighbor.97
The upshot of Acosta’s argument was that necessity legitimized the idea that Spaniards could coerce Indigenous people to labor for their very own benefit and by their own right. When faced with urgent need, he concluded, “one can certainly use some morally right force and compulsion, and some indication of terror, just as it is done to the child that disregards what is just and suitable”.98
Here Acosta drew on a classic locus of Catholic moral theology, importing the argument of necessity into the colonial context. His intellectual predecessors in Iberia had also argued that a threat to one’s life pushed the boundaries of what was morally right and legally permissible: in a state of necessity, an individual could take another’s property, which would otherwise be theft. Acosta’s vision, however, set in motion a very different mechanism. For him, necessity did not reintroduce a state of common property under natural law. Instead, it actualized the full implications of the natural hierarchy between Spanish and Indigenous subjects, which lay at the heart of his understanding of the imperial order.
The institution of indios de carga remained a controversial issue well into the 17th century. The jurist Juan de Solórzano later observed that among the many royal decrees on the subject, some strongly condemned it while others tolerated and re-legalized the use of native carriers as a necessary evil.99 Without discrediting the institution tout court, Solórzano conceded that the idea of using humans for “offices of beasts” was and remained deeply problematic.100 Like the university theologians in Iberia, he insisted that even slaves could not be owned in the same way as animals.101 Solórzano’s concern, however, was not simply the boundary between humans and animals. His principal worry was that, because of their “continuous peregrinations”, Indigenous carriers “could neither be well-instructed in the faith, nor were they left to live with their wives so that they were not there to procreate and raise their children, and underwent a great reduction and diminution”.102 In this sense, he sought to protect the reproduction of those who were destined to work under the yoke of the mita.
2 Colonial Law and Colonial Clamor
Around 1600, Potosí was one of the largest cities in the world. The population had more than doubled since the Toledan reforms and now numbered over 100,000.103 In the burgeoning metropolis, roughly one in ten people were mita workers.104 The harsh conditions in the depths of the Andean mines sparked public outcry in the Peruvian viceroyalty, especially among ecclesiastical men of letters. In 1596, the Jesuit Antonio de Ayanz wrote to the Spanish monarch that “in provinces between Potosí and close to Cusco, the Native population has declined to such an extent that the villages are empty and the tambos without people or service”.105 Three years later, university theologians of the Society of Jesus from Lima, Cusco, and Quito wrote a joint statement to the viceroy. They urged him to stop assigning more and more Indigenous tributaries for mining, in order to mitigate the increasingly alarming decline of their population.106
This situation was the result of several interrelated phenomena. Many Andeans perished in the mines, while others fled the reducciones to escape the mita. Still others chose to stay in Potosí after completing their draft term, working for mine owners in exchange for a better salary.107 By 1600, more than half the Andeans at Potosí—as well as in Huancavelica—were skilled voluntary workers who bypassed the system in this way. The effect, however, was not the decline of forcible mining tout court. Juan de Solórzano would later claim that the cost of indios voluntarios exceeded the benefit they brought.108 And indeed, those who ran the industry successfully lobbied for the centrality of coerced labor into the early 19th century.109 Yet the fact that fewer Indigenous people could be drawn from the reducciones meant that the conditions for those who did remain under the yoke of the mita worsened. They were compelled to perform the most dangerous tasks, and many endured much longer turns than the system had originally envisaged.110
These developments prompted the intervention of the Council of the Indies. In 1601, it issued a landmark royal decree that became famous under the heading of Servicio personal, which sought to impose significant limits on the “personal service”—a synonym for mita labor—of Indigenous vassals. Presumably in response to local petitioners, the decree mandated that the existing system of coerced labor be abolished in favor of an alternative arrangement, where Natives offered their services voluntarily.111 The practical purchase of this policy was limited, and it amounted to little more than a “mere declaration of intentions”.112 Under pressure from strong resistance overseas, another royal decree issued just eight years later re-legalized forced Indigenous labor as it had been previously practiced, and indeed, had continued all along.113
2.1 Writing for the Viceroy
For Spanish intellectuals, however, the 1601 decree Servicio personal marked a watershed moment in the debate over forced Indigenous labor. The first influential respondent to the royal edict was Miguel de Agia. Born in Valencia, he served as a professor of theology in the Franciscan convent of Guatemala from the 1560s. But like his fellow university theologians in the Old World, Agia had close ties to the governing elites.114 He rose to fame when the Peruvian viceroy Luis de Velasco commissioned Agia to write a rhetorical rebuttal of the decree from Spain. The result was the Tratado que contiene tres pareceres graves en derecho (1604), which earned Agia the reputation as the most ardent defender of forced native mining.
Against the demands of the royal decree, he portrayed the mita as a corollary of “political or civil subjection”.115 Whereas Matienzo had made a similar point by comparing the duties of Castilian subjects on both sides of the Atlantic, Agia stayed true to his profession. He justified “personal services” with recourse to the scope of political power, pointing to the authoritative accounts of fellow university theologians like Vitoria, Soto, and Molina.116 What is more, he followed in Acosta’s footsteps and argued that “the indios, Spaniards, and other nations that reside in the Indies form one single body of a whole and perfect commonwealth, composed by true vassals of your Majesty that can and should justly be compelled and forced […] to serve and work in attendance of that body”.117
At the heart of his argument was the defense of mita mining. Indigenous labor “in the Cerro of Potosí”, he argued, was indispensable “for waging war against the enemies of the faith” as well as “to accumulate the riches, with which to support the public necessities of the entire kingdom, and all the other things of public and common utility”.118 For Agia, mining was the quintessential business that sustained the viceroyalty of Peru. Without it, he insisted, “the preservation of the commonwealth would fail”.119 And it was for this reason that the “indios” could be compelled to work in the mines without a violation of right.
Agia and his allies successfully argued their case. In 1609, the Council of the Indies abandoned its strict prohibition of mita mining, while maintaining its call for a transformation of the colonial economy.120 The decree was received with enthusiasm in Peru, and plans for reform were quickly abandoned.
2.2 Appealing to the King’s Conscience
Another Spaniard in the New World forcefully pushed back against such negligence. In a series of memorials in the 1610s, Juan de Silva—a former soldier turned Franciscan, who in his second career as religioso served as royal confessor and as a missionary in New Spain and Florida—petitioned the king for renewed intervention.121 For Silva, the treatment of Indigenous vassals was “the most cruel end exorbitant tyranny that no nation in the world, as bad as they were, has imposed to this day”.122 The king’s conscience, he insisted, would only be safe if he took steps to remedy the situation.123
In the Peruvian mines, Silva wrote, Andean tributaries were exposed to mortal danger and treated “as if they were fugitive slaves”.124 They were beaten to work, not properly paid, and neither given sufficient rest.125 Most of the “thirteen thousand indios” inside the Cerro Rico never made it back home, Silva maintained, “and the few who return are so mistreated, limping, with broken legs, and all of them so exhausted and ill that they pass from this life in very short time”.126 He painted an even gloomier picture of the Santa Bárbara mines at Huancavelica, to which “more than two thousand indios are assigned with the same force and harm”.127 Early moderns like Silva were well aware that the toxic mercury led to severe health issues like anemia, the loss of teeth, tremors—and death.128 The relatives of those bound for Huancavelica, he wrote with a dramatic flourish, “farewelled them under much tears and regrets to never ever see them again, so that there is no tiger’s heart that will not ache of such great misery”.129
For Silva, the problem of mining was twofold. For one, it damaged Spain’s reputation on an international level and was grist to the mill of those who portrayed the Spanish overseas ventures as cruel and inhumane. More importantly still, he argued, the destruction of the Native population effectively undermined the entire Spanish mission overseas.130 “The empire of this New World” Silva wrote, was “a great grant of heaven, an encomienda of the eternal Father”.131 By casting the king as God’s encomendero, he implied that the monarch was little different from his infamous representatives overseas, who had similarly neglected the divine mission and abused the Andeans in their strife for riches. Silva called on the king to clear his conscience and to save the souls of those under his authority.132 To that end, he proposed a revival of the central dictum of the infamous royal decree Servicio personal: Indigenous labor should be voluntary rather than coerced.
A mining system “without force and violence”, Silva explained, was already in place in New Spain.133 The same approach, he argued, could equally be implemented “in all the mines of Peru, and in the great hill of Potosí”.134 Silva’s point was that “the indio animated by good gain and by good treatment and liberty will work willingly, and with the greed of earning much for himself he shall also earn much for the miner, without any need for inflicting beating and lashes upon him”.135 If there were not enough voluntary workers, Silva added, “Your Majesty could mandate that the miners be given a quantity of Black slaves, whom the miners should pay out of their own pocket and by their estimation, little by little”.136 This latter point epitomizes the upshot of Silva’s argument: being coerced to work in the mines was indeed a form of slavery. Even if a mining industry without the mita proved less economically fruitful, he stressed, “it is worth more to have little with a good conscience than to have a lot with a bad one”.137
But in fact, the decree Servicio personal had not ruled out coercion altogether, and Silva knew this all too well. The royal edict had established that, due to great necessity, the “indios” could be obliged to offer their workforce voluntarily—also for mining.138 While Silva remained firm on the matter of mining, he did concede that other forms of forced labor were subject to precisely that logic. This also included all the services of Indigenous vassals in the households of Spanish settlers.139 “Well, the thing is”, Silva wrote, “Spaniards and indios already form one commonwealth, as Father Acosta says […] and Christian charity demands that we help each other out and that we encourage each other in our necessities”.140 Silva shared the view that within the colonial body politic, Native vassals had the status of “natural slaves”: they needed the guidance and governance of wiser men and were obliged to contribute to the commonwealth with their workforce.141 In Silva’s estimation, those in charge of the reducciones could therefore command all their Indigenous tributaries “with a certain Christian rigor and force […] to rent themselves out voluntarily to the Spaniards who are present there” once a week—even for the individual benefit of encomenderos.142
Measured against the reality of forced labor at the time, Silva’s proposal was indeed aimed at counteracting and moderating the abuses against Andeans. But by casting Indigenous subjects as “natural slaves”, he tapped plainly into the argumentative logic of his intellectual predecessors. If historians today view Silva as a champion of the “liberty of the indios”, they may be misled by his rhetorical redescription of what it meant “to participate freely and voluntarily in the viceregal economy”.143
3 The Persistence of a Paradox
The decades that followed were tempestuous for Potosí. After a feud between Basque and Castilian miners had thrown the city into turmoil in the early 1620s, a devastating flood in 1626 washed away many of Potosí’s mills and refineries, leaving hundreds dead.144 Around the same time, a new wave of Indigenous migration further intensified the mining industry’s problems. Increasing numbers of tributaries managed to escape from their reducciones and joined other Indigenous settlements as “foreigners” (forasteros). Far away from their kinship group, they were required to pay taxes to the community’s caciques but were no longer subject to tribute in the form of forced labor.145
The culmination of Potosí’s mining crisis came in the mid-century. For years, those managing the Andean mints had tried to conceal the imbalance between rising demands for silver and declining supplies of ore by making coins lighter and by mixing the ostensibly pure silver with copper.146 “The house of cards”, as Kris Lane vividly puts it, “collapsed by the end of the year 1649”, under the scrutiny of princes and merchants from around the world who had become aware of the fraudulent practices in Potosí.147
Even as the silver city’s heyday was coming to an end, forced labor in the Cerro Rico remained an integral part of the Peruvian economy. Throughout the reign of Philp IV, “the mita continued to depopulate the Andes, reducing the number of Spain’s subjects and burdening the royal conscience”.148 And it also remained at the forefront of debates among the viceroyalty’s intellectuals.
3.1 Mining by Prudent Reason of State
One of them was Juan de Solórzano y Pereira. Educated at the University of Salamanca, Solórzano had been on track for an academic career before accepting a position as a judge in the Audiencia in Lima in 1609.149 He had previously held a professorship in law at Salamanca and was later offered (but declined) the Prime Chair in that subject at the University of San Marcos in Lima. This background might explain why he first penned a major Latin treatise on the government and law of the Indies, the two-volume De indiarum iure (1629–1639).150 When he later reworked it into a vernacular version under the title Política indiana (1648), Solórzano became one of the most widely read Spanish authors of his time.
By the time that Solórzano was writing, there was a growing awareness among Spanish settlers in Peru that the existing system of forced labor would be unsustainable in the long run. The dangers that it posed to the political fabric were not just metaphorical: the constant oppression of the Natives threatened to bring about their demise. The most contentious issue remained mining, as Solórzano was acutely aware. Public debates and the crown’s conflicting legal policy had persisted well into the 17th century. A final resolution, he explained, was still pending and would ultimately “proceed from superior and more appropriate judgment”151 than his own. Yet, despite this rhetorical recognition of monarchical authority, Solórzano did not leave it at that. Celebrations of mita mining were no longer tenable in his estimation. Even the royal decrees that permitted its practice, he noted, “admit the doubtfulness of the matter”.152 Much like Juan de Silva, he stressed that reforming the mining industry would free the Spaniards from moral scruples. And, in opposition to Acosta, he argued that “neither commerce with Spain, nor the propagation of the faith, nor the relief for wars would cease on account of this”.153 “True and prudent reason of state”, Solórzano proclaimed, “is to lean and aspire only to what is licit, and no way that puts divine precepts and considerations behind human interests has ever proved beneficial”.154
Solórzano did not call for the abolition of mining as such. Like all natural resources, he argued, the ores deep in the Andes were created by God “so that humans make use of them and help themselves, especially in times of such urgent necessities”.155 Prudent reason of state, in his understanding, was to combine the merely advantageous with the morally right: the key to making mining legal was to go beyond the existing practice of forcing free vassals to do the work.156
One option was to switch to a system of “voluntary” mining, as envisioned by Juan de Silva. Solórzano noted that, to some extent, the major mines in the Peruvian viceroyalty relied on voluntary labor already.157 But his attention was focused on different ways to reform the system.
An obvious alternative was the use of slaves. A century earlier, Juan de Matienzo had vehemently denied this option, as we know, and Solórzano was fully aware that harsh climatic conditions and high costs were contemporary arguments against the use of enslaved Black Africans instead of Andeans.158 Yet as he stressed at various points in his Política indiana, mining was a quintessential form of slave labor. Abundant examples, from Roman times to the royal decree Servicio personal, proved this point.159 “The right that we have over slaves”, Solórzano argued,
[…] is much more extensive than the right we can claim over indios; and according to the law they are considered our very own property, and likened to the dead or to animals, and we may use them to our advantage and benefits with a little injustice, even if we expose them to some danger. There are even those who say that we can kill them, and that they are bound to obey to such an extent that they must put their own life and health behind that of their master.160
In so arguing, Solórzano forcefully justified the call from Spain to employ enslaved persons in the Peruvian mines.161 Yet the by-product of this juxtaposition of Indigenous vassals and slaves was an astonishing celebration of ancient chattel slavery—explosive even by the standards of his own time.162
Solórzano also proposed another way to reorganize the mining industry. If it was licit to send to the mines those who were “likened to the dead”, mining could also be considered the equivalent of capital punishment, and therefore a form of civil punishment.163 Solórzano highlighted the positive effects this would have: “it would act as a brake, so that fewer crimes would be committed here […] and those who do commit them would pay for their sins in the mines, which is considered a clement punishment if they deserve the death penalty”.164 Solórzano supported this claim by pointing to several cities where this form of penal servitude had been used, from ancient Rome to Ming China.165 He could have added that the same was true in his native Spain, where convicts worked alongside slaves in the mercury mines of Almadén.166
3.2 The Feet of the Commonwealth
For Solórzano, the problem with forced mining was not the coercion of Indigenous vassals per se, but the mounting death toll in the Andean mines that was undermining the very foundation of Spain’s imperial economy. Indeed, he insisted that the “indios” were urgently needed for a number of other tasks that were equally essential for the commonwealth. These included the construction of public buildings, bridges, and roads; agricultural work on fields and estates; work in textile workshops; or messenger services.167 Unlike mining, these forms of forced labor remained unchallenged by Solórzano. They did not jeopardize the existence of the Indigenous population and ensured its “procreation and preservation”.168
Solórzano justified the coercion of Andeans with reference to their position within the colonial society. He agreed with his intellectual predecessors that Spanish and Indigenous subjects “are now united and form one body in these provinces, both in spiritual and temporal terms”.169 Within this “one mixed commonwealth”,170 as he put it, some were naturally suited to work while others—“in whom there is more reason”171—should rule. The idea of natural slavery thus remained central to the ideology of forced labor in colonial Peru.
At the same time, Solórzano did not fully concur with the writings of his peers. The kingdom made of clay and iron from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, he noted, was an inappropriate metaphor for the social body, since—pace Acosta—that entire statue “collapsed and turned into dust”.172 Instead, Solórzano recovered another biblical image to illustrate his own vision of the colonial commonwealth: the idea of a corporate communion of Christians comprising “many members, yet but one body”, as the apostle Paul had put it in his Epistle to the Corinthians.173 Unlike Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, this was an organic unity in which laborers, craftsmen, and pastors corresponded to the feet, arms, and fingers of the political body. These individual members did not oppress but rather “help one another and carry each other’s burden […] for they are all inevitable and necessary, everyone in their office”.174
And yet, harmony did not mean equality. Closer inspection reveals that Solórzano, too, perpetuated a fundamental duality between laboring Natives and governing settlers. This becomes more apparent in his account of agriculture, the type of mita labor that preserved the commonwealth by nourishing it. Solórzano argued that “forcing the indios to a task that appears so properly theirs, and that is so much in accordance with their nature, cannot be considered hard or unjust”.175 As laborers on the ground, he maintained, the “indios” were “the feet […] that sustain the whole weight of the commonwealth”.176 Ultimately, Solórzano’s organic social body was as oppressive as Acosta’s composite commonwealth.
3.3 The Treasure from the Indies
This was duly noted by Diego de Avendaño, who had once embarked on the long journey to Peru with his compatriot Solórzano and then became professor of theology at the prestigious Jesuit College of San Pablo in Lima.177 Almost unknown today, Avendaño is one of the most intriguing contributors to the debate on forced labor and—as we shall see in the final chapter of this book—he also intervened in the discussion about the legitimacy of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. With his Thesaurus indicus of 1688, Avendaño brought together two different strands of contemporary literature: the tradition of commentary on theological questions originating with Aquinas, and the literature on the colonial administration of the New World. Avendaño himself noted that this was “another genre of writing”.178 Quite immodestly, he claimed that his “Indian treasure” was the intellectual counterpart to the material treasures that the Spaniards were unearthing in the Indies.179
Drawing on debates that had originated in the Iberian lecture halls, Avendaño was above all concerned with the realities he encountered overseas. This brought him into a close dialogue with contemporary colonial intellectuals like Solórzano. To make sense of the politics of the Spanish empire in the Americas, as one historian has remarked, Avendaño relied on the Política indiana rather than Aristotle.180 As it happens, the opening book of Avendaño’s treatise bore the very same title that Solórzano had given to his Latin treatise on the law and government of the Indies.181 Unlike the theological treatises penned in Iberia, then, the Thesaurus thus began with an intervention in a distinctly colonial discourse.
Avendaño justified forced Indigenous labor in the same terms as his intellectual predecessors. Pointing to Acosta, Silva, and Solórzano, he argued that “it is licit to force the indios to certain works for the commonwealth, especially those that are necessary, with Christian moderation”.182 Avendaño insisted, however, that those who had written before him had been troubled by the problem of forcing free vassals to toil in the deadly Andean mines. “It seems that nothing can trouble the conscience of kings more”, he wrote, “for it seems that to be compelled to work in the mines is a kind of slavery, and surely a harsh one”.183
The disastrous effects of mercury mining in Huancavelica had indeed troubled both critics and defenders of mita mining. Solórzano, who had personally witnessed the terrible effects of mercury on the health of the miners, explained that locals spoke of “el mal de la mina”, the illness of the mine.184 And even Miguel de Agia, the foremost advocate of forced Indigenous mining, acknowledged the inhumane conditions in the Santa Bárbara mines, which he had also visited. In the final pages of his Tratado, Agia stressed that the situation in Huancavelica was intolerable: there was “the malice and filth of the ores”, the constant “danger of death”, and most of all, “the many thousand indios that were killed and buried by the mines, without mentioning the many others that are about to die, and all the other damages that we could list on top of this”.185 Because of these mortal conditions, he advocated the closure of the Huancavelica mines.186 In the face of Agia’s overarching defense of forcible mining, this was a striking note on which to end his treatise.
Diego de Avendaño drew attention to this critical point. “Although the working conditions of the indios in that mountain cannot be said to be as terrible as they were when Father Agia inspected its depth”, he said with an ironical tone, “the suffering continues with little difference”.187 In Avendaño’s view, the Andeans under Spanish rule were in a situation comparable to that of the Hebrews under the yoke of Egypt: they were subjected to “intolerable labor” and thus “driven into the abyss of idolatry”.188 The Indigenous tributaries were so frightened, he argued, that they resorted to “pagan” rites to protect themselves from the deadly consequences of the mines.189
Avendaño urged the Spanish monarch to act and “hasten to remove the oppression of this utterly harsh labor”, warning that the advance of apostasy would put an end to the Spanish course of victories overseas.190 In this way, he turned Miguel de Agia’s argument against itself: rather than providing the necessities for the preservation of the commonwealth, the continued acceptance of forcible mining threatened to undermine the Spanish empire in the Americas.
3.4 Encomienda Labor, Justice, and Conscience
Another form of forced labor that remained controversial well into the 17th century was domestic mita service—the type of forced labor most closely resembling the formally abolished encomienda slavery.191 According to Juan de Solórzano, it was permissible to employ Indigenous tributaries to build the homes of Spanish settlers because such work contributed to “human sustenance” and was analogous to how agricultural labor kept the commonwealth alive.192 However, personal services of “indios” within these houses “were always forbidden and ordered to be abandoned”.193 Solórzano sidestepped Acosta’s argument that forced labor in the homes of encomenderos could be justified by reference to settlers’ public office. Instead, he argued that the encomenderos ignored all laws and abused Andean vassals with “haughtiness, cruelty, and greed”.194 Spanish nobles in possession of an encomienda—a select few, including Solórzano himself195—should therefore only be entitled to demand tributary payments, not tributary labor, from Indigenous subjects.196
An even more assertive stance was proposed by his friend and follower Diego de Avendaño. He set out to redefine the very meaning of “personal service”, which had thus far been understood as a synonym for labor coercion.197 For Avendaño, however,
Personal service (servitium personale) specifically speaking, in the way we treat it now, is a certain kind of coerced service, according to the will of those, who think that they are entitled to this right, either because they are encomenderos or because of other titles, by which they exercise a certain domination of the indios. And so they force them either to serve always against their will—having preserved the title of liberty—or on certain days, for a very meagre living allowance, so that on the other days they may work for their own benefit.198
The very definition of personal service Avendaño here provided already implied its injustice. In his understanding, it denoted the kind of labor that exclusively served the benefit of individuals and therefore—pace Acosta—lacked any grounding in the power structure of the commonwealth. “It is most certain”, Avendaño insisted, “that this cannot be upheld without grave sin and the burden of restitution”.199 He concluded that forcing the “indios” to work for the personal benefit of encomenderos was not a public service, but a form of slavery.200
Yet this was not the end of the story. If domestic labor coercion was unjust, Avendaño asked, what implications did this have for confessors conducting pastoral visitations in places “where this personal service perseveres” and “where people say that they cannot otherwise get hold of the things that are necessary for their sustenance, such as the fruits of the earth or the breeding of cattle?”201 To answer that question, Avendaño distinguished between two scenarios. In the first, a penitent confessed to having compelled Indigenous people to perform domestic labor in bad faith, a situation, he argued, which required the intervention of confessors.202 The same applied to anyone expressing doubts about the morality of their actions.203 Following the judgment of his Iberian intellectual predecessors, Avendaño argued that absolution could not be granted to those who had violated justice and whose salvation was at risk.204
But there was also a second scenario that depended on another key idea of Catholic moral theology: invincible ignorance. If someone did not know about a law or doctrine and did not willfully or negligently ignore it, then the person was free of any guilt.205 Avendaño explained that
[…] if the penitent is in good faith, and the revelation [of the wrongdoing] makes it very likely that a grave sin is to be feared in the maintenance of the [personal] service, the confessor may conceal it according to the widely received doctrine.206
Avendaño here followed the opinion of the Spanish Jesuit Fernando de Castropalao (1583–1633).207 The latter had argued in his Opus morale that priests should admonish invincibly ignorant penitents only if it was for their own benefit. However, if the confessor’s warning risked leading a person safe in conscience into damnation, this would betray the purpose of confession—for it would contravene the principle that the admonition should promote the penitent’s well-being.208 This had already been suggested by Francisco Suárez. Comparing the role of the confessor to that of the physician, Suárez argued that it was harmful to administer medicine when there was a risk that it might do more harm than good to the patient. In certain cases, therefore, confessors were obliged not to reveal what was just and lawful.209
Yet Avendaño’s approach went far beyond the position of the Spanish Jesuits he cited. The issue in legitimizing forced labor, he argued, was not simply the penitent’s good and conscience. The critical point was that it came at the expense of violating another person’s right and liberty. For this reason, Avendaño ultimately needed a different authority to justify his position.
He found it in Éloi de la Bassée (1590/91–1670), a Capuchin theologian from the then Habsburg-controlled city of La Bassée near Lille. Bassée, a casuist who closely aligned himself with the laxist strand of Catholic theology, advocated “excessive leniency in moral theory”.210 That was precisely the kind of support Avendaño had been seeking. Quoting from Bassée’s Flores totius theologiae practicae, he underlined that a confessor was bound to remain quiet
[…] even though the penitent’s ignorance about his sin was to the detriment of his neighbor. The reason is that we must not set any traps for anyone. And in this case, to admonish would be nothing but to set a trap […] since the penitent, in his state of good faith, would fall into a bad and dangerous state because of the confessor’s warning.211
In so arguing, Avendaño provided a remarkable loophole for the continuation of encomienda slavery. Wherever personal service—as he defined the term—was “received” and contributed to the subsistence of Spanish settlers, confessors and preachers were required to “abstain from admonition”.212
Despite his initial criticism of domestic mita service, Avendaño eventually offered an elaborate apology for the subjugation of Indigenous vassals by their encomenderos. To be sure, he was not the only one. But whereas Acosta had justified this form of forced labor by referring to the public offices held by Spanish settlers, Avendaño sanctioned an institution that, by his own standards, should have been illegal.213 In this light, recent attempts to present Avendaño as “socially progressive” and as a champion of the “freedom” and “human rights” of Indigenous peoples seem misplaced.214 Quite the contrary, the Jesuit theologian carved out a powerful justification for keeping encomienda slavery alive.
4 Subjection and Protection
The debates surrounding forced labor in colonial Peru reveal the fraught boundaries between freedom and slavery, as well as between legitimate political authority and illicit subjugation for personal gain. While no one claimed that Indigenous vassals were “matter” to be manipulated by the Spaniards—pace Bentancor—the political status of Native tributaries was contested.215 At a time when there were no clearly demarcated boundaries of belonging in the sense that modern nation-states proclaim them, questions of inclusion and exclusion were always subject to debate, both on the level of the city and of empires.216 To be sure, all the theologians, missionaries, and jurists discussed in this work emphasized that the “indios” were part of the newly formed colonial society. At the same time, contemporaries also insisted that the status of Indigenous subjects differed from that of Spanish settlers: Andeans alone were bound by the mita.
The idea of natural slavery provided a powerful justification for the fundamentally unequal configuration of the Spanish empire in the Americas. But in the original Aristotelian sense, “natural slaves” were placed outside the polity—they did not belong to the body of citizens. The early modern Iberian understanding of natural slavery seemed to echo this logic. Juan de Matienzo and Francisco de Vitoria, as we saw, likened that status of “indios” to that of Spanish peasants, who were seen as “brute animals”.217 This identification of peasants as “natural slaves” dates back to Thomas Aquinas’s late-13th-century commentary on Aristotle’s Politics. Despite the inherently political nature of human beings, and the Aristotelian dictum that only beast and gods could live outside society, Aquinas posited that some people did not live politically due to their “misfortune”.218 According to Aquinas, this was especially evident among peasants, “because poverty forces them to cultivate the fields or tend animals”.219 None of the Iberian thinkers, however, suggested that Indigenous tributaries in colonial Peru or peasants in Spain were outside the political community. In their view, natural slavery denoted the status of subjects who were governed but not governing themselves—and who were included in the polity on the premise that they contributed to the common good through their labor.
If Indigenous people were imagined as slavish by nature, they were also categorized as personas miserables, or “wretched persons”. This colonial label, however, held the potential for Indigenous agency. As personas miserables, Indigenous vassals could claim special legal and judicial privileges derived from Roman and medieval canon law. What had originally been the prerogative of widows and orphans, as well as the poor and the sick, gradually emerged as a central category of imperial protection in Spanish America.220 As personas miserables, Indigenous people had the right to appeal directly to the Audiencias, the highest courts, and were granted a variety of canonical privileges that ranged from baptism to marriage and beyond.221 Recent scholarship shows that Andeans often successfully tapped into this language of guardianship so as to navigate the colonial juridical system to their advantage. Those who fashioned themselves as personas miserables were often far from socially or economically powerless agents.222
At first glance, the Spanish understanding of Indigenous vassals as “natural slaves” and personas miserables may appear contradictory, yet both ideas, in fact, had a common core. “Protection and legal privileges”, as the historian Luigi Nuzzo writes, went hand in hand with “infinite tutelage”.223 Indeed, this was how contemporary intellectuals understood the matter. Consider Diego de Avendaño, who argued that the “indios” were “wretched persons” because of their “extremely downcast condition, their recent conversion, their poverty, their rural life, their poor discourse, like that of children”.224 And Juan de Solórzano similarly claimed that personas miserables were “all those who cannot govern themselves and need others who direct, rule, and assist them”.225 In this sense, the ideas of natural slavery and native wretchedness overlapped in crucial ways. Put more pointedly, the rationale underpinning native agency and protection also justified the subjection of Indigenous vassals to forced labor in the silver mines of Potosí.
The best recent study of the encomienda and its significance for the political economy of conquest is Huber, Beute und Conquista. See also Puente Brunke, Encomienda y encomenderos en el Perú, 14–25 and passim; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 40; and Brading, The First America, 68.
See Birr, “Recht als Argument in Bartolomé de Las Casas’ Tratado sobre los indios”; and Pennington, “Bartolomé de Las Casas”.
Spanish authorities also policed Indigenous slavery in Castile. In 1543, the jurist Gregorio López—the later commentator of the Siete partidas who was a councilor of the Indies at the time—was personally responsible for overseeing an inspection in Seville that led to the liberation of more than one hundered enslaved “indios” (who were subsequently still obliged to work for their former master). See Van Deusen, Global Indios, 99–102; and Birr, “Tradition and Innovation in Knowledge Production”, 80.
Gil Montero, “Free and Unfree Labour in the Colonial Andes”, 309.
Lane, Potosí, xiv–xv and 8. The locution “money mountain” is from Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, 19.
Mahoney, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development, 70.
A different perspective is offered by José Antonio Piqueras, who, by reconstructing and following the logic of contemporary legal norms, insists on a categorical distinction between slavery and other forms of coerced labor. See Piqueras, Derecho antiguo y esclavitud moderna, 234.
Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 10.
Van Deusen, Global Indios, 6–7.
Robins, Santa Bárbara’s Legacy, 85.
See Tau Anzoátegui, El jurista en el Nuevo Mundo, 8–12; Duve, “Salamanca in Amerika”; and Egío García, “La consolidación del estatuto teológico-político del pagano amerindio”, 38–39.
See e.g., Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property, and Empire, 73–79; Muldoon, The Americas, passim; and Pagden, Lords of all the World, 89–90. For my own perspective, see Allemann, “After Vitoria”.
For a recent example, see Duve and Danwerth (eds.), Knowledge of the Pragmatici.
See e.g., Puente Luna, Andean Cosmopolitans, 15 and 159–160; Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 5–6 and ch. 4; Herzog, Defining Nations, 45–48 and 157; and Levaggi, “República de indios y república de españoles”, 419–428.
Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad, 97–98.
Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico, 3 and 146.
For a related critique of the two-republics concept based on 16th-century colonial decrees and petitions, see Masters, “The Two, the One the Many, the None”.
Bentancor, The Matter of Empire, 346–347.
Bentancor, The Matter of Empire, 2 and passim.
Agamben, Homo sacer, introduction and passim. It is astonishing that Bentancor does not cite Agamben’s work.
Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, leçon du 22 février, 168; and Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, leçon du 8 mars, passim. See also Bentancor, The Matter of Empire, 277–281.
Bentancor, The Matter of Empire, 1 and passim.
See especially Brett, Changes of State.
Benton and Clulow, “Interpolity Law and Jurisdictional Politics”, 199.
Benton and Clulow, “Interpolity Law and Jurisdictional Politics”, 201.
An excerpt of Santo Tomás’s letter is available in English translation in Lane, Potosí, 198–199.
González Casanovas, Las dudas de la corona, 35. For a detailed technical explanation of the process, see Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire, 3–4.
Brading, The First America, 136.
This paragraph draws on Mumford, Veritcal Empire, 28–29 and 119–121; Brading, The First America, 133–134; and Mahoney, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development, 69–71.
On the complex relationship between repartimiento and reducción, see Mumford, Vertical Empire, 119–121; and Puente Brunke, Encomienda y encomenderos en el Perú, 174–176.
Mumford, Vertical Empire, 138. On the Toledan revival of Inca institutions, see also Mumford, Vertical Empire, ch. 7.
Lane, Potosí, 69–71. In some parts of colonial Peru, however, the reducciones were completely exploited, and the idea of “only” assigning one seventh of the tributary population to mita mining disregarded. See e.g., Zamora, who makes this point with regard to San Miguel de Tucumán in northern Argentina (Casa poblada y buen gobierno, 54).
Pike, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain, 27.
Lane, Potosí, 71–72.
Biographical information on Mationzo is from Tau Anzoátegui, El jurista en el nuevo mundo, 47–48.
The Audiencia of Charcas was one of six jurisdictional and governmental units that were established in the Peruvian viceroyalty over the course of the 16th century. See Muldoon, The Americas, 8; and Brading, The First America, 215–216.
Brading, The First America, 139. The Gobierno was not published in the early modern period but, much like Vitoria’s relections, circulated widely in manuscript form.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 40, 135: “Decir que caen en las minas abaxo ochenta o cien estados y se hacen pedazos”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 40, 135: “ésto es tan pocas veces que no se ha de traer en consecuencia, mayormente que esto […] se puede dar remedio haciendo buenas escaleras”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 40, 135: “Si esto se hubiese de considerar para impedir lo en que va tanto para se poder conservar el Reino, también se había de vedar en España […] Otras cosas hay en que hay más peligro, como es el trastexar, el hacer tapias altas, la carpintería, porque se ha visto más ordinariamente caer de un texado, de tapias altas, de algún edificio de carpintería […] mas por eso no se han de dexar de usar semexantes oficios”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 9, 32: “como los españoles no trabaxan en esta tierra por sus personas, ni hay negros (ni convenga que los haya), que puedan hacer las obras en las ciudades, ni las sementeras, ni que saquen plata u oro de las minas, se suele en este Reino mandar que en cada ciudad y en cada asiento de minas vengan indios de los repartimientos”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 40, 132.
This important corrective to scholarship has been offered by Lane, Potosí, 103–105 and 128.
Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 101.
Matienzo also drew on classical temperament theory to justify the subjection of the Natives with reference to their “nature”. See Morong Reyes, “Saberes hegemónicos y proyecto de dominio colonial”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 4, 17: “naturalmente fueron nacidos y criados para servir, y les es más provechoso el servir que el mandar […] según dice Aristóteles a estos tales la Naturaleza les creó más fuertes cuerpos y dió menos entendimiento”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 4, 17–18: “Son partícipes de razón para sentilla, e no para tenella o seguilla. En esto no difieren de los animales, que ni aun sienten la razón antes se rigen por sus pasiones, y vése esto claro pues no hay para ellos mañana, antes se contentan con lo que han menester para comer y beber aquella semana, y acabado aquello, buscan para otra”.
On the invocation of “natural slavery” as a possible justification for the Spanish conquest, see Chapter 1 Section 1 above. Matienzo justified Spain’s imperial venture by arguing that the Spaniards had liberated the Andeans from Inca tyranny. This claim drew on the established notion that protecting the innocent warranted war against foreign rulers. See Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 1–2.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 4, 18: “Son enemigos del trabaxo y amigos de la ociosidad, si por fuerza no se les hace trabaxar. Son amigos de beber y emborracharse y idolatrar, y borrachos cometen graves delitos […] Por temor obedcen muy bien a sus mayores, y ansí es menester quien les mande, rija y gobierne, para que les haga trabaxar e servir e ocuparles en algo, para que no hagan tantos excesos como de la ociosidad y borracheras nacen”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 40, 136: “También por la mesma razón, si los labradores de Castilla, o de otro reino, no quisiesen trabaxar ni sembrar ni coxer pan, sino darse a otras cosas, claro está que le compelerían a arar y cavar, pues nacieron para aquello […] Pues los labradores de España no son esclavos, sino libres”.
Vitoria, De indis, in Political Writings, trans. Pagden and Lawrance, q. 1, a. 6, 250.
This becomes clear from the sentence that immediately preceds the one quoted above: “Thus if they seem to us insensate and slow-witted, I put it down mainly to their evil and barbarous education” (Vitoria, De indis, in Political Writings, trans. Pagden and Lawrance, q. 1, a. 6, 250).
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 40, 136: “Si el turco viniese sobre España, ¿no está claro que compelerían a todos los españoles a ir a la guerra, y nenguno se escusaría?”
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte 1, cap. 40, 136: “no es cosa nueva compeler a algunos que trabaxen, antes es cosa lícita y justa cuando hay necesidad de su trabaxo para conservación de la república”.
I therefore do not agree with Orlando Bentancor that “the central axiom of Spanish imperial idology” can be reduced to the notion that “everything must be subordinated to the common good, whose measure is money” (The Matter of Empire, 243).
Grafton, “José de Acosta”, 170 and passim.
Biographical information on Acosta is from Grafton, “José de Acosta”; Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 147–148; Brading, The First America, 184–185; and from the entry on Acosta on Scholasticon.
Grafton, “José de Acosta”, 178.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 1, 506: “Atque in primis indos non esse servitute mulctatos sed liberos prorsus et sui iuris”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 5, 512: “Movet enim non parum hinc quod liber homo si cogitur, liber non est atque adeo qui ad opus invitum trahit, non levem facere videtur iniuriam, servile enim est pati vim”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 5, 512: “Inde vero non parum quoque urget quod si barbarum ingenio et voluntati indulgendum est, nihil operis unquam fiet, nihil negotii conficietur”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 5, 512–514: “sint multa quae nullo modo hispani in his locis per se faciant praeterea quod vel laboriosa vel sordida ducunt et ut quam maxime velint, non possunt tamen tanta perficere, quale est humum effodere, rudera egerere, lateres cogere, onera baiulare, iumenta agere, caeteraque servilia quae si desint, brevi omnis civitatis deleatur”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 6, 514: “Nam ut demus ex hispanis non paucos posse servilia ista tractare, propterea quod natalis educatioque non admodum abhorrent”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 6, 514: “lucri spes potest fortassis excitare; tamen quota ista portio est hominum prae multitudine necessaria? Iubere autem vel ista cessare vel nostrates ad sua remeare, quis no videt quam sit fidei et religionis lumen extinguere?”
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 6, 514: “Quamobrem non est improbandum quod civitates omnes institutum tenent et servant, ut indorum ad ista necessaria multitudo deputetur parereque si nolit, cogatur, dummodo et conveniens, ut dixi supra, merces labori retribuatur et cum minimo salutis fortunarumque suarum incommodo ab indis ista exigantur, tum etiam inter ipsos iusta oneris vicissitudo servetur”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 6, 514: “Deinde ipsorum barbarorum consuetudo perantiqua ab ipsis ingarum regum exordiis ante christianum nomen auditum multis saeculis conservata”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 6, 514: “Postremo ius naturae hoc habet, ut ad totius corporis, familiae civitatisve conservationem necessariae partes laborare iubeantur. Neque enim oculus calcare terram iubendus est vel culinariam paterfamilias exercere”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 7, 516: “Universa porro indorum atque hispanorum multitudo una eademque respublica habenda iam est, non duae quaedam inter se disiunctae […].”
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 7, 516: “siquidem et rege et lege utuntur iisdem utrique et utrisque tribunal et ius non aliud atque aliud sed idem certe. Quare quae ab indis nostris hominibus operae impenduntur, non exteris et alienis collocari putandae sunt, quod fortassis fallit nonnullos, sed suis potius civibus”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 7, 516.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 7, 516: “dummodo alii aliis adiumento sint oculosque alter ad videndum, pedes alter ad ambulandum mutuet”.
Pace Bentancor, who mistakenly argues that “Acosta is clearly employing here Aristotle’s metaphor of the social body as a statue” (The Matter of Empire, 171).
Daniel 2:31–33.
Soto, In causa pauperum deliberatio, cap. 12, 76 [mislabeled as 71]. See also the discussion in Schwartz, The Political Morality of the Late Scholastics, 73.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 7, 516: “Quoniam etsi testa ferro male cohaeret iuxta propheticum vaticinium, tamen eosdem statuae huius pedes ambo componunt”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 7, 516.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 7, 516: “Itaque mirandum non est, si testa ferro prematur interdum, illud potius optandum, ne penitus comminuatur ac dissipetur”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 9, 518: “At personalia servitia quae diximus, publica auctoritate inducta sunt”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte I, cap. 31, 106: “Que a ningún cacique se le quite el dominio de sus tierras e indios vasallos que tienen”. See also cap. 30, 101; and cap. 31, 104.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte I, cap. 33, 113.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte I, cap. 29, 98.
On this point, see also Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 40–41.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte I, cap. 10, 35: “los indios de los repartimientos […] otros para servir a españoles en sus casas […] y otros, venir a servir a sus encomenderos en sus casas”.
Zamora, Casa poblada y buen gobierno, 52–54.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 16, no. 2, 502: “alii inhumana atrocique contentione servitutis genus educunt, ut tamdiu laborare cogantur quoad ipsorum arbitrio sit satisfactum […] ius suum iniuriam aliorum putent”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 8, 518: “Neque illud vituperandum quod peculiares ob causas ad domestica ministeria quibusdam locis attribuuntur, ut in xenodochiis, in religiosis domibus, tum etiam publicorum nobiliumve hominum”.
On the encomenderos as public office-holders, see also Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 11, no. 5, 468: “sunt alia etiam publicae utilitatis officia quibus cum addicuntur nobiles homines, iure renumerandi sunt”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte I, cap. 10, 35: “Mitayos de tambos son los que se dan para traer yerba e leña a los pasaxeros e para llevar cargas de un tambo a otro. […] conforme a las del Inga, que hasta hoy se guardan, en que repartió los pueblos que habían de servir en cada tambo en los caminos reales”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte I, cap. 10, 36: “aunque están abiertos los caminos y pueden pasar bestias de cargas, mas hay otra mayor dificultad para no poderse escusar las cargas, y es que como no hay en los más tambos comida para que el pasaxero la pueda comprar, ni camas en qué dormir […] no puede escusarse de llevar todo consigo […] y aunque sea rico, si pasa toda su casa de una ciudad a otra, no podrá hallar tantos caballos para que la lleve toda en ellos, hasta que se vaya puniendo la tierra en más orden. Mayormente esto es inpusible a los clérigos y frailes que andan en las dotrinas”. For the locution indios de carga, see Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte I, cap. 10, 37.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte I, cap. 10, 36. A transcription of the original manuscript at the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid is available in Vaca de Castro, “Ordenanzas de tambos”.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte I, cap. 10., 37. This practice was already reflected in the late medieval Siete Partidas, as Solórzano later explained. See Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 13, no. 13, 243; and Las Siete Partidas, l. 8, tit. 8, partida 5.
Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Lohmann Villena, parte I, cap. 10, 37: “Haber de preceder licencia de juez, con conocimiento de causa, para las cargas, si es para los caminantes, es inpusible, porque no hay jueces en el camino que la puedan dar, y menos al salir de las ciudades, porque acaece en el camino morírseles un caballo y haber menester más indios de carga que al principio”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III., cap. 17, no. 9, 518, emphasis mine: “At personalia servitia quae diximus, publica auctoritate inducta sunt. Privata vero an fas sit aliquando barbaros nolentes ad opera opportuna compellere”.
On the legal situation in the later 16th century, see Burciaga Campos, “Corona española, política económica e indígenas”, 970–971.
See Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 11, 524: “Lex vero quatenus obliget consuetudine contra obtinente, nihil habet hic propriae difficultatis sed commune est cum aliis plerisque. […] Itaque gentes indorum apud nos baiulandis oneribus perassuetae si aequo plus non urgeantur, neque iniuriae neque incommodi quidquam subeunt”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 9, 520–522: “Primum, si potest pactione transigi, id multo prius ac melius. Ubi non potest, si commode conveniri potest magistratus aliquis qui publica auctoritate cogat, adeundus est”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 9, 522: “Hic quoque si desit, ut deest persaepe ac negotii gravitas urget, nihil aliud praecipi potest neque brevius neque planius quam ut leges necessitatis observes, quae tibi necessaria sunt quaerens cum quam minimo proximi detrimento”.
Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 17, no. 9, 522: “Honesta certe aliqua vis et compulsio afferri potest et terroris quaedam significatio tanquam puero alicui iusta et commoda contemnenti”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 13, no. 15 and 22–27, 243–247.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 13, no. 20, 245: “Pareciendo que no era justo, que ombres que son libres, y mandados tratar como tales, hiciesen oficios de bestias”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 13, no. 20, 245. Solórzano did not, however, make this claim with reference to his colleagues in Iberia; rather he pointed to Augustine’s The Lord’s Sermon, trans. Campbell and ed. Ramsey, lib. I, cap. 19, no. 59, 57.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 13, no. 19, 244: “y que por traerles en estos tragines, y continuas peregrinaciones, ni podian ser bien instruídos en la Fé, ni aún les dexaban hacer vida con sus mugeres, con que faltaban á la procreacion, y crianza de sus hijos, é iban en gran menoscabo, y diminucion”.
Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 94; and Lane, Potosí, 37 and 95.
Lane, Potosí, 72.
Ayanz, “Breve relación de los agravios que reciben los indios”, ed. Aldea Vaquero, 234.
“Parecer de los Padres de la Compañía de Jesús”, ed. Aldea Vaquero.
Mumford, Vertical Empire, 152–153.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 6, no. 35, 177: “Indios voluntarios como se hallan en Potosí […] se conducen á mucha costa, de manera que excede al provecho que rinden”.
Lane, Potosí, 72; Robins, Santa Bárbara’s Legacy, 91.
González Casanovas, Las dudas de la corona, 60–68; Robins, Santa Bárbra’s Legacy, 77.
As Adrian Master has recently shown, “virtually all royal decrees” originated in petitions made by vassals of the Spanish empire and he calls the process of decree-making a “petition-and-response system”. See Masters, We, the King, 6 and 21.
González Casanovas, Las dudas de la corona, 68: “La reforma no superó la condición de una mera declaración de intenciones”.
The two decrees were sent separately to the viceroys of Peru and New Spain. See “Real instrucción sobre el trabajo de los indios: Valladolid, 24 de noviembre de 1601”, ed. in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 71–85; and as “Real cédula sobre los servicios personales y repartimientos de indios: Aranjuez, 26 de mayo de 1609”, ed. in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 154–168.
Chamberlain, “Review of Miguel de Agia,” 301.
Agia, Tratado, segundo parecer, 56: “La subiection politica, o civil, en virtud de la qual son compelidos y forçados los indios a trabajar en servicio de la Republica”.
Agia, Tratado, segundo parecer, 56: “Esta conclusion se prueva efficazmente porque la potestad politica o civil, que corresponde a la dicha subiection [i.e. of Indigenous peoples], es de ley natural como enseña Victoria […] Soto […] O alomenos tiene su origen y principio dela ley natural […] sigue Luys de Molina”.
Agia, Tratado, segundo parecer, 59: “asi hazeindo los indios, y Españoles, y demas naciones que residen en las Indias un cuerpo solo de Republica entero, y perfecto compuesto de hombres verdaderos vasallos de su Magestad pueden y deven licitamente ser compelidos y forçados (siempre que convenga y sea necessario) a que sirvan y trabajen en servicio deste cuerpo”. Agia did not, however, refer to Acosta and instead cited Cicero’s speech in defense of Sextus Roscius to make this point.
Agia, Tratado, segundo parecer, 60 [incorrectly labeled as 68]: “Licitamente, et citra iniuriam puede su Mastad [sic] compeler los indios a que trabajen en la lavor de las Minas del cerro de Potosi […] para hazer guerra a los enemigos de la fe […] para hazer thesoros, y con ellos acudir a las necessidades publicas de todos sus reynos, y para las demas cosas de publica y comun utilidad”.
Agia, Tratado, segundo parecer, 66: “la tierra del Piru para su conservacion no tiene otro comercio sino el de la plata, y oro, que se saca de las minas: el qual si faltasse faltaria la conservacion de la Republica”.
“Real cédula sobre los servicios personales y repartimientos de indios: Aranjuez, 26 de mayo de 1609”, ed. in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 154–156.
Silva sent three memorials to Spain between 1613 and 1618, all of which were published together under the title Advertencias importantes. I will be citing from the edition by Paulino Castañeda Delgado. Biographical information on Silva is drawn from the opening section of Silva’s third memorial (Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 291–293); and from Kelly, “The Franciscan Missionary Plan”, 280.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 317: “Es también el dicho repartimiento y ley […] la más cruel y exorbitante tiranía que hasta hoy con nación ninguna del mundo, por mala que fuese, se ha usado”.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 293.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 322: “los tratan tan mal como si fueran esclavos fugitivos”.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 322–332.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 321: “Primeramente para el cerro de Potosí se reparten trece mil indios, los cuales van de diversas partes del Perú […] y estos pocos que vuelven, tan maltratados, cojos, perniquebrados y todos tan cansados y enfermos, que en muy breve tiempo pasan desta vida”.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 321: “A las minas de Guancabelica, que son las del azogue, también se reparten dos mil y tantos indios con la misma fuerza y agravios”.
On what early moderns did and did not know about mercury poisoning, see Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire, 8.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 321: “con qué lágrimas y con qué sentimiento se despiden para nunca jamas tornarlos a ver; de manera que no hay corazón de tigre que no se duela de tan gran miseria”.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 326–328.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 355: “Vuestra Majestad goza del imperio deste nuevo mundo […] por elección y donación divina; es una encomienda mayor del cielo, una encomienda del Padre eterno y inmenso Dios”.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 354: “no le va menos a Vuestra Majestad que asegurar su conciencia y la de sus consejeros y ministros con la de tantas almas que en este peligroso golfo se anegan”.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 345: “Esta manera de servicio de minas sin fuerza, ni violencia, se ha usado y usa tambien en todas las minas de Zacatecas, y en las mas de la Nueva Galicia, y Nueva Vizcaya, que es la gruesa de las minas de Nueva España”. Mexican mining was indeed reliant on voluntary Native workers—alongside free and enslaved Africans as well as people of mixed descent—but was insignificant to the large-scale Peruvian industry of the time, and only really took off in the 18th century. See Lane, Potosí, 7; and Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 99–101.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 345: “podráse hacer acá lo mismo; y aún en todas las minas del Perú y del gran cerro de Potosí”.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 345.: “el indio convidado de la ganancia y del buen tratamiento y libertad trabaje de buena gana y con codicia de ganar mucho para sí, ganará también mucho para el minero, sin que sean menster palos ni azotes que ande sobre él”.
Siva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 346: “Mas para facilitar este inconveniente podría Vuestra Majestad mandar que se les diese a los mineros alguna cantidad de negros que por su cuenta y razón los vayan pagando poco a poco”.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 347; “Melius est parum iustitia, quam multi fructus cum iniquitate: que mas vale poco con buena conciencia, que mucho con mala. Y esto basta cuanto a las minas”.
See the “Real instrucción sobre el trabajo de los indios: Valladolid, 24 de noviembre de 1601”, ed. in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 77–78.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 347.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 347.: “Y es que, pues indios y españoles hacen ya una República, como el Padre Acosta dice […] y la caridad cristiana obliga que nos ayudemos y favorezcamos unos a otros en nuestras necesidades”.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 347–348.
Silva, “Memorial tercero”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 347–348: “Para las demás granjerías de los españoles, servicio de casa y obrajes, y de personas particulares podrá ordenarse lo siguiente. […] Lo cual se podrá hacer en esta forma: mandando los dichos caciques y governadores con algún rigor y fuerza cristiana, que todos los indios de servicio que en sus distritos hubiere […] estén obligados a juntarse todos en el patio que está fuera del convento o iglesia, o en otra parte más acomodada, un día de la semana; y allí, delante de sus caciques y del sobredicho prelado, se alquilen voluntariamente a los españoles que allí estuvieren”.
Zorrilla, “La doctrina misiológica”, 311: “la idea que atraviesa la obra de Silva sobre cuestiones políticas y económicas es la libertad de los indios: libertad para abrazar la fe, para someterse políticamente a la corona española y para participar libre y voluntariamente en la economía virreinal”.
See Lane, Potosí, 110–116 and 123–124.
González Casanovas, Las dudas de la corona, 74 and 102; Robins, Santa Bárbara’s Legacy, 74–75.
Lane, Potosí, 127–133.
Lane, Potosí, 132.
Lane, Potosí, 145.
Biographical information on Solórzano is from García Hernán, Consejero de ambos mundos, 60–66 and 105–107.
Solórzano, De indiarum iure; Solórzano, Tomum alterum de indiarum iure.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 17, no. 1, 290: “en la question de que vamos tratando del sercivio personal forzado de los indios para las minas […] su última, y afinada resolucion pende, y procederá de juicio superior, y más acertado”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 17, no. 1, 290: “supuesto que algunas cédulas Reales han mandado, ó permitido que por aora se continúe, y eso es lo que se vá practicando, ellas mismas confiesan la duda del caso, y muestran desear el alivio de los Indios”. On this point, See e.g., the “Real cédula sobre los servicios personales y repartimientos de indios: Aranjuez, 26 de mayo de 1609”, ed. in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 156.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 17, no. 3, 290: “no por eso cesarán los comercios con España, ni la propagación de la Fé, y socorros para las guerras, como lo advierte el Padre Josef de Acósta”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 17, no. 14, 291: “De qualquier manera que sea, la verdadera y prudente razon de estado es mirar, y aspirar á sólo aquello que es licito, y ninguna ha salido jamás provechosa que pospone los preceptos, y respectos divinos á los intereses humanos”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 17, no. 21, 292: “Pero no por esto es mi intento decir, que dexen de buscarse, y labrarse las minas y sus metales que bien sé […] que los crió Dios, para que de ellos se valiesen, y ayudasen los hombres, y más en tiempo de tan urgentes necesidades”.
I therefore do not agree that Solórzano simply sought to “Christianize” mining while advocating its continuation under the mita system, as argued in Bentancor, The Matter of Empire, 317 and 319.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 17, no. 25–26, 293–294.
See Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 6, no. 36, 177.
See especially Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 15, no. 21–28, 265–267.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 17, no. 23, 293: “Todavia es mucho más lleno el derecho que tenemos en los esclavos que el que podemos pretender en los Indios; y segun las disposiciones legales se juzgan por hacienda propria nuestra, y son comparados á los muertos, ó á los animales, y con menor injuria podemos servirnos de ellos para nuestros aprovechamientos, y comodidades, aunque se expongan á algun peligro; pues aún hay quien diga, que podemos matarlos, y que de tal suerte están necesitados á obedecer que deben posponer su salud y vida á la de sus amos”.
See the “Real instrucción sobre el trabajo de los indios: Valladolid, 24 de noviembre de 1601”, ed. in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 78; and as “Real cédula sobre los servicios personales y repartimientos de indios: Aranjuez, 26 de mayo de 1609”, ed. in Konetzke, Colección de documentos, vol. 2, 155–156.
Solórzano made the above-quoted argument drawing on a range of loci from Roman law, especially D.9.2.2 and D.50.17.32. He also referred to Mager von Schönberg, De advocatia armata, cap. 13, no. 69. In this passage, the Austrian court lawyer argued that slaves were bound to protect their masters, even at the cost of sacrificing their own lives, and did so in commentary on D.29.5.1.28. On the context of that treatise, which primarily called on the Holy Roman Emperor to protect the Catholic church in the context of the Thirty Years War, see Weber, “Von der normativen Herrschaftspflicht zum interessenpolitischen Instrument”, 42–45.
This was a point that José de Acosta had already pondered in the preceding century, although without proposing a transformation of mita mining. See Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. III, cap. 18, no. 1 and 4–5, 526 and 532–536.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 17, no. 32, 294: “Lo qual, si se introduxe en las Indias, serviria de freno, para que en ellas no se cometiesen tantos delitos, con reformacion general de costumbre, y los que los cometiesen pagarian allí su pecado, teniendo por clemente esta pena, si la merecieron de muerte”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 17, no. 33–37, 295.
See Pike, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain, ch. 2; and Martín Casares, “Maghrebian Slaves in Spain”, 99.
For an extensive discussion of these forms of forced labor, see Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 8–14, 199–259.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 7, no. 30, 189: “importará este descanso, y el que se muden por veces en el trabajo para la procreacion, y conservacion de los mismos Indios”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 6, no. 1, 170: “las dos Repúblicas de los Españoles, é Indios, asi en lo espiritual, como en lo temporal, se hallan oy unidas, y hacen un cuerpo en estas Provincias”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 6, no. 15, 173: “los Españoles (que como se ha dicho, hacen yá una mezclada República con los indios)”. Pace Levaggi, “Républica de indios”, 425.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 6, no. 5, 171: “segun la disposicion de su estado, y naturaleza, unos sirvan, que son más aptos para el trabajo, y otros goviernen, y manden en quienes se halle más razon, y capacidad para ello”.
Solórzano made this point in a different context: see his Política indiana, lib. II, cap. 16, no. 57: “todo vino abaxo, y se convirtió en polvo, como el mismo Daniél lo dice”. Juan de Silva, too, had previously made this argument against Acosta. See Silva, “Memorial segundo”, in Los Memoriales, ed. Castañeda Delgado, 43.
1 Corinthians 12:20.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 6, no. 6, 171: “hace la Republica un cuerpo, compuesto de muchos hombres, como de muchos miembros, entre los quales, a los pastores, labradores, y otros oficiales mecánicos, unos llaman pies, y otros brazos, otros dedos de la República, siendo tódos en ella forzosos, y necesarios, cada uno en su ministerio, como grave, y santamente nos lo da á entender el Apóstol San Pablo”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 9, no. 5, 204: “Y no puede tenerse por duro, ni injusto, forzar á los Indios á ministerio, que parece tan proprio suyo, y se conforma tanto con su naturaleza”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 9, no. 11, 205: “y que los labradores son el higado ó los pies, como dijo Plutarcho, escribiendo à Trajano, que sustentan tódo el peso de la República”. On this passage, see also Herrera Ángel, “Los pies de la república cristiana”, 102–103.
Biographical information on Avendaño is from Muñoz García, “Introducción”, 14–15; Fernández G., “Avendaño, Diego de”, 303; and Losada, “El jesuita segoviano Diego de Avendaño”, 424–427.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, Ingenuo lectori, without pagination: “Sacratoris theologiae partus iam pridem meditatus, ex quibus aliqui publicam iam lucem conspexerunt […] aliud nunc scriptionis genus aggredior”. Among Avendaño’s other treatises were an extensive commentary on Psalm 44 entitled Epithalamium Christi et sacrae sponsae, as well as more straightforwardly moral theological works such as the Problemata theologica and the Cursus consummatus.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, Ingenuo lectori, without pagination: “Tum etiam cum quod ex Indiis magnae in Europam transmittantur divitiae, quas Thesauri nomine usu frequentissimus indicat […] divitiae sapientiae ex magnorum Auctorum scriptis […] eductae, et in opus pro Indiis, et in Indiis elucubratum sollerter aptatae, indeque in Europam traiectae, ut ad plures etiam utilitas thesauri huius derivetur”.
See Hofmeister Pich, “The Aristotelian Background of Diego de Avendaño’s Moral and Legal Thought”, 83.
See Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, 1: “De indiarum iure, et Catholicorum Regum obligationibus circa illarum administrationem”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 14, § 1, no. 128, 29: “Dico Primo. Licite possunt Indi ad labores aliquos reipublicae inprimis necessarios Christiana moderatione compelli, iuxta dicta superius. Sic Acosta […] Solorzanus […] Ioannes de Silva”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 12, no. 109, 24: “Reges Catholici […] nihil videtur ita posse eorum solicitas conscientias agere, ut it, de quo quaestio et controversia praesens agitatur. Videtur enim haec ad mineras compulsio quoddam servitutis, et durae satis, genus”.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 16, no. 21, 277. Solórzano visited the Santa Bárbara mines during his time as a short-term governor of Huancavelica from 1616–1619 (see García Hernán, Consejero de ambos mundos, 140–149).
Agia, Tratado, tercero parecer, 83–84: “la malicia y vascosidad de los metales […] el peligro de despeñarse […] y finalmente los muchos millares de indios que tienen muertos y sepultados sin otros muchos que estan para morir y todos los demas daños que a los dichos podria acumular”.
Agia indeed proposed this on the very final page of his treatise. See Agia, Tratado, tercero parecer, 84.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 12, no. 115, 26: “Et licet modo Indorum labor in monte illo non ita dicatur esse terribilis, uti erat quando a praedicto Patre [i.e., Agia] profunditas est illa lustrata; semper tamen damna parvo discrimine perseverant”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 12, no. 117, 26: “Dum Hebraei in Aegypto intolerandis laboribus affliguntur, periclitatur fides, et in idolatriae barathrum eorum plurimi deturbantur”. Bartolomé de Las Casas also compared the situation of Indigenous peoples to the Hebrews under Egyptian domination, although his aim was to criticize the Spanish domination of the New World more broadly, not just forced mining specifically. See Las Casas, “Memorial de Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas al Consejo de Indias (1565)”, in De regia potestate, ed. by Pereña et al., 280. See also the discussion in Brading, First America, 71–72.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 12, no. 116, 26.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 12, no. 118, 27: “Ergo singularis protector fidei Rex Catholicus illam in suis indis radicandam accurret, durissimi laboris oppressione submota: sic victorias sibi de infestissimis poterit hostibus praeclaras et frequentes polliceri. Timeo enim ne idolatria in regionibus istis non penitus extirpata, cursum victoriarum impediat”.
Puente Brunke, Encomienda y encomenderos en el Perú, 180–181 and 186–187.
Solórzano, Política, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 8, no. 14, 202: “pues si se concede á la labranza, y crianza, y á otras cosas, que luego diremos, por decir que de ellas pende el sustento humano: tambien las casas, y habitaciones entran en esta cuenta”.
Solórzano, Política, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 3, no. 3, 148: “Todavia siempre se han prohibido, y mandando quitar […] Y asi, fuera de las muchas Cédulas, que dexo citadas en los capitulos pasados, que tanto encargan, que los Indios sean tratados como vasallos libres”. Solórzano cited a range of laws and decrees in support of this argument, including the decree Servicio personal.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 2, no. 22, 146: “considerando […] la sobervia, dureza, y codicia de los Encomenderos, por muy justos, y moderados que sean los servicios, y obras, en que se los tasen, y adjudiquen, y las leyes, y formas, que para que no excedan de esto, se establecieren, las han de violentar, y traspasar tódas”.
Solórzano obtained an encomienda in Guatemala in 1636, as a reward for his intellectual and administrative services for the crown. By that time, he was already back in Spain and it was a sign of unusual appreciation for the king to grant and encomineda to somebody who was not resident in the Indies. See García Hernán, Consejero de ambos mundos, 223–236.
Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 2, no. 22, 146.
See e.g., Solórzano, Política indiana, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 2, no. 1, 141: “servicios, de los que en las Indias llaman personales. Debaxo de cuyo nombre (como lo advierte bien el Padre Josef de Acosta) se compreenden generalmente qualesquiera aprovechamientos, que pretendemos sacar del trabajo, obras, y servicio de ellos […] públicos, o domésticos”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 13, no. 119, 27: “Servitium personale specialiter dictum, ut modo de illo disserimus, quoddam est serviendi genus coactum, ad voluntatem eorum, qui eam sibi licere existimant facultatem, sive quia Commendatarii, sive aliis titulis: ratione quorum aliquem erga Indos exercent dominatum. Itaque aut cogunt servire semper invitos, libertatis titulo conservato, aut certis diebus, tenuissimi victus stipendio, ut possint diebus aliis suo commodo laborare”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 13, no. 120, 27: “Dico, uti, certissimum, sine gravi peccato, et restitutionis onere, id non posse constare”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 13, no. 120, 27: “Ratio est, quia hoc est genus quoddam servitutis, a quo Indi sunt prorsus eximii”. See also Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 13, no. 121, 28: “Sufficiat ergo Indis quod semper cum metu vivant, hoc enim genus servitutis est”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 13, no. 122, 28: “Sed quid Confessarii facient ubi personale servitium perseverat, obnitentibus quibusdam urbibus aut etiam Provinciis, eo quod dicant non posse aliter ea, quae ad victum necessaria sunt, ex terrae fructibus, aut re pecuaria comparari?” On the notion that domestic forced labor was still in place despite the fact that it was prohibited, see also Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 14, § 3, no. 134–135, 31.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 13, no. 122, 28: “Respondeo tales, si in mala fide sint, nequaquam absolvendos, ut est copertum, cuius erit indicium, si de servitii talis coactione in Confessione se accusent”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 13, no. 123, 28.
Amongst others, Avendaño here referred to Sánchez, DSMS, vol. 1, lib. II, disp. 38, no. 8, 356.
See Toste, “Invincible Ignorance and the Americas”, 284.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 13, no. 124, 28: “Si autem poenitens in bona fide sit, et ex manifestatione peccatum grave in retentione servitii verosimiliter timeatur, poterit dissimulare confessarius, juxta valde receptam doctrinam”.
See Schmutz’s brief entry on Hernando de Castropalao on Scholasticon.
Avendaño pointed to Castropalao, Opus morale, tr. XXIII, punctum 19, § 2, no. 7, 166: “Verum, si ignorantia praesumatur invincibilis […] potius times monitione facta in eodem statu poenitentem perseveraturum, nullo modo debes monere; sed absolutionem utpote recte dispositio impendere: quia, cum haec monitio in bonum poenitentis dirigatur, eo bono cessante, cessare debet”.
Suárez, Commentariorum ac disputationum, vol. 4, disp. 32, sect. 4, no. 4, 446: “quando confessor non sperat fructum, vel quia probabiliter, et prudenter timet poenitentem non effecturum, vel certe non posse sine gravi incommodo id efficere, de quo admonendus est, potest et debet tacere, ac poenitentem in sua bona fide relinquere. […] Et explicatur, et confirmatur, quia medicus non debet adhibere medicinam, si timeat maius damnum allaturam, quam fructum”.
This definition of laxism is from Fleming, Defending Probabilism, 6. On the importance of Bassée’s thought and its relation to the work of contemporary theologians, see Schmutz, “Éloi de Bassée”, 437–438.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 13, no. 124, 28: “sic loquitur Eligius Basseus […] Quod scilicet cum nulla ex monitione speratur utilitas, et ignorantia invincibilis est […] non tenetur confessarius docere, vel monere immo tenteur in hoc casu tacere propter inconvenientia, quae inde sequeruntur. Et hoc verum, quamvis per ignorantiam peccatum illud sit in detrimentum proximi. Ratio est, quia nulli laqueum debemus iniicere: sed admonere in hoc eventu nihil aliud esset quam laqueum […] nam constitutus in statu bonae fidei, confessarii monitione in malo et periculoso versabitur”. For the original passage, see Bassée, Flores totius theologiae practicae, verb. confessarius, sect. 4, no. 18, 67.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. I, cap. 13, no. 124, 28: “Et quod de Confessario dictum est, de Praedicatore pariter afferendum. Si enim in aliquod veniat oppidum, in quo tale aliquid receptum usu perspiciat, et ex admonitione id timeat, quod diximus, debet ab admonitione temperare; cum praesertim monitiones huiusmodi gravia soleant incommoda suscitare”.
Avendaño also employed this strategy in other contexts. For instance, with regard to a royal decree mandating that Spaniards who mistreated indios were to be punished more severely than indios who committed similar crimes against Spaniards. See Cuena Boy, “El castigo de las injurias causadas a los indios”.
See Hernández Aparicio, “La doctrina de Avendaño sobre los repartimientos de indios”, 419: “Avendaño se preocupó de los problemas laborales […] y estableció unas normas a tener en cuenta […] Normas que, si tenemos en cuenta que el Thesaurus lo escribió entre 1622–1678, son sin duda, socialmente avanzadas”. See also Losada, “El jesuita segoviano Diego de Avendaño”, 428: “Es sin duda una de las primeras voces, equilibrada y libre de exageraciones, que se alza contra la esclavitud perpetua del indio y en defensa de su liberación física y moral”. See also Yubero Galindo, “El ‘Thesaurus indicus’ de Diego de Avendaño”, 399: “Realmente esta gran Obra del Avendaño es la Carta Magna de la defensa de los derechos del hombre, especialmente los ‘marginados’ para el Avendaño allí en América: los indios”.
Bentancor, The Matter of Empire, 15.
This point is emphasized in Brett, Changes of State, 3 and passim; and in Benton and Clulow, “Introduction”, 2.
Vitoria, De indis, in Political Writings, trans. Pagden and Lawrance, q. 1, a. 6, 250.
Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, ed. and trans. Regan, ad. I.1, 20, 16.
Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, ed. and trans. Regan, ad. I.1, 20, 16. The other kind of people who fell into this category were those banned from the commonwealth.
See Duve, Sonderrecht in der Frühen Neuzeit. On the nexus of empire and protection more broadly, see Benton and Clulow, “Introduction”; and Haug, Weber, and Windler, “Einleitung”.
See Duve, Sonderrecht in der Frühen Neuzeit, 167–180.
See especially Puente Luna, Andean Cosmopolitans, 148–154.
Nuzzo, “A Dark Side of the Western Legal Modernity”, 207.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, Additiones ad Tit. XI, § 1, no. 141, 32: “Indos variis ex titulis miserabiles esse personas […] abiectissima scilicet eorum conditio, novitas conversionis, paupertas, rusticatio, discursus inopia, puerorum adinstar”. Note that this section appears at the very end of the volume, but with Avendaño’s additions to his Thesaurus the pagination begins anew from 1.
Solórzano, Política, ed. Ochoa Brun, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 28, no. 46, 427: “personas miserables […] todas aquellas que no se pueden gobernar por sí y necesitan de que otros los dirijan, gobiernen y asistan”.