Christoph Rosenmüller - Corruption in The Iberian Empires - Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks (2017, University of New Mexico Press)

Corruption in the
Iberian Empires
greed , custom , and colonial ne t works
e di t e d by Christoph Rosenmüller
Corruption in the Iberian Empires
The Americas circa 1700: Viceroyalties and Audiencias.
Corruption in the
Iberian Empires
greed , custom , and colonial net works
e di t e d b y Christoph Rosenmüller
univ ersit y of ne w me x ico press | a l buquerque

© 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press
All rights reserved. Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 6
Names: Rosenmüller, Christoph, 1969– editor of compilation.

Title: Corruption in the Iberian empires : greed, custom,
and colonial networks / edited by Christoph Rosenmüller.
Description: Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039515 (print) | LCCN 2017010053 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780826358257 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780826358264 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Political corruption—Spain—Colonies—History. | Political corruption—
Portugal—Colonies—History. | Corruption—Spain—Colonies—History. | Corruption—
Portugal—Colonies—History. | Spain—Colonies—Administration—History. | Portugal—
Colonies—Administration—History. | Spain—Colonies—Commerce—History. |
Portugal—Colonies—Commerce—History. | Latin America—History—To 1830. |
Philippines—History—1521–1812. | BISAC: HISTORY / Latin America / General.
Classification: LCC JN8386 .C677 2017 (print) | LCC JN8386 (ebook) | DDC
364.1/32309171246—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039515
Cover illustration of coins from Acclaim Images

Designed by Catherine Leonardo
Composed in Minion Pro 10.25/13.5
Display type: Hadriano Std Bold and Univers Lt Std
Contents
acknowledgments v ii
introduction
Corruption, Abuse, and Justice in the Iberian Empires 1
Christoph Rosenmüller
chapter one
Forgery and Tambos: False Documents, Imagined Incas,
and the Making of Andean Space 13
Jeremy Ravi Mumford
chapter two
From Corrupt to Criminal: Reflections on the
Great Potosí Mint Fraud of 1649 33
Kris Lane
chapter three
Clients, Patrons, and Tribute: The Indigenous Aguilar Family
in Mexico Tenochtitlan, 1644–1689 63
William F. Connell
chapter four
Portraits of Bad Officials: Malfeasance in Visita Sentences from
Seventeenth-Century Santo Domingo 87
Marc Eagle
chapter five
“The Execrable Offense of Fraud or Bribery”: Corrupt Judges and Common
People in the Visita of Imperial Mexico (1715–1727) 111
v
vi Contents
chapter six
“Our Delivery Consists in Appointing Good Ministers”:
Corruption and the Dilemmas of Appointing Officials
in Early Eighteenth-Century Spain 133
Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso
chapter seven
Custom, Corruption, and Reform
in Early Eighteenth-Century Mexico: Puebla’s Merchant
Priests versus the Reformist Bureaucrat 151
Frances L. Ramos
chapter eight
Merchant-Bureaucrats, Unwritten
Contracts, and Fraud in the Manila Galleon Trade 171
Catherine Tracy Goode
chapter nine
Addicted to Smuggling: Contraband Trade in
Eighteenth-Century Brazil and Rio de la Plata 197
Fabrício Prado
glossary 215
contributors 221
index 225
Acknowledgments
My gratitude goes to all the contributors to this edited volume. They are all
wonderful colleagues and successful academics with impressive publication
records. Many of them presented early stages of their work at various
conferences, and we subsequently discussed corruption in the Iberian
empires in informal settings. I am fortunate that the scholars agreed to share
their unpublished work in this volume. When Clark Whitehorn, an
acquisitions editor at the University of New Mexico Press, heard about our
project, he assisted us in many ways with his expertise and patience. Professor
Mark Burkholder thoughtfully commented on sections of this book.
Furthermore, two anonymous reviewers gave perceptive criticism, and they
made this book much better and more readable.
During my research on this topic, Susan Deeds, Susan Schroeder, Marc
Eagle, and José Ángel Hernández gave much-needed advice on style and
content. In addition, Horst Pietschmann in Hamburg provided erudite
advice on empires and corruption at all times, while Andrés Lira and
Bernd Hausberger at the Colegio de México in Mexico City insightfully
discussed justice and Atlantic networks with me. I now understand cor-
ruption as a violation of historical values of justice that differed in many
ways from our modern conceptions. Sherry Johnson generously took me
in for weeks at her house in Gainesville while I was studying the family
papers of the Count of Revillagigedo in the Special Collections of the Uni-
versity of Florida Library. The papers shed light on the ties of the viceroy
with popular groups in society and his anger about corruption. Brad
Wright read the entire volume, and my graduate students Brian Odom,
Elizabeth Rivera, and James Derrick made useful suggestions on short sec-
tions of the book.
While writing and editing this book, I was on a Fulbright García-Robles
grant in Mexico City. I am very grateful for this generous opportunity, as the
vii
viii Acknowledgments
fellowship allowed me to wrap up the project more quickly. In addition,

Middle Tennessee State University supported my research in Mexico, Spain,
and Portugal with several summer grants. Finally, I learned a lot from living
among the generous and immensely likable people of Mexico, and they gave
me the chance to exchange ideas, think about corruption in new ways, and
better understand the complexity of the issue.
IN T R ODU C T ION
Corruption, Abuse, and

Justice in the Iberian Empires
k
C orruption today is one of the most important challenges to democracy

and development in Latin America, and it is on the agenda across the
continent. Protests shook Guatemala and Honduras in 2015 after the
embezzlement schemes of senior officials surfaced. In Brazil millions
marched to oust the president when it became known that politicians had
plundered the state-run oil giant Petrobras. In Mexico the government
awarded a contractor with multimillion-dollar projects to build highways
and railroads, and then it was made public that the contractor also financed
the luxurious $7 million residence, or “white house,” of the president’s wife.
In addition, federal authorities charged the mayor of Iguala, police officers,
and drug gang members with colluding to kill forty-three students of a rural
teachers’ college. Many Latin Americans agree that corruption is the root of
all evil. Yet that is not to say that things are stagnant; the outrage over the
scandals is also testimony to an intensifying discussion in a developing civil
society. Under pressure from citizens, both the Brazilian and Mexican
congresses passed new laws toughening sanctions against abuse in
governance, and at least according to the surveys, corruption is incrementally
retreating in Latin America.1
Corruption is obviously not an exclusively Latin American issue. Scandals
have rocked the United States in the past few years. Former mayors of Detroit
and New Orleans are in jail for corruption, and school officials in Atlanta
rigged grades in an effort to boost test scores. An even greater scandal broke
1
2 Christoph Rosenmüller
when the US Justice Department issued arrest warrants for FIFA (Fédération
Internationale de Football Association) soccer officials. Allegations of mas-
sive bribes have embroiled this association for years, but European prosecu-
tors stepped in to apprehend the leadership only when the US warrants
arrived.
What exactly is the crime of corruption? An easy answer is not possible,
because the concept is malleable and multifaceted. It hinges in many ways
on the values of a society, and a single definition would often lead us astray—
especially when applied to the past. Transparency International, a well-
known global watchdog, understands corruption as “the abuse of entrusted
power for private gain” and adds that “it can cost people their freedom,
health, money—and sometimes their lives.”2 This is useful for understanding
our own modern problems with corruption, but Transparency Internation-
al’s idea is more difficult to transfer to imperial times, the period from
approximately 1492 to the 1820s.
w h at s c h o l a r s h av e s a i d
Drawing on a robust definition, historians argued years ago that corruption

pervaded the Spanish Empire and triggered its downward spiral in the sev-
enteenth century.3 During the 1950s historians began to understand that
early modern people saw the royal laws differently than they do today. Con-
traband trade between Spain and its American colonies, or rather kingdoms,
routinely breached the norms. These laws privileged the quasi-monopoly of
the merchant guild of Seville, Spain, which organized the fleet that hauled
products and silver between the Americas and Europe. The dysfunctional
system sought to suppress powerful market forces at the expense of the Span-
ish Americans. On occasion, social groups fighting over their share of trade
accused others of corruption, but this was more of a self-serving maneuver
than an outrage over the lack of legal compliance.4
This interpretation of corruption as social conflict laid the foundation for
the consensus that emerged in the 1970s. Scholars began to view corruption
as multifunctional and as a matter of degree. The widespread disregard for
the royal laws in imperial times allowed the local elites to influence justice
and governance. This created a balance between American and Crown inter-
ests and assuaged the harshness of some laws, although at times such infor-
mal practices riled indigenous groups whose rights and traditions were
Introduction 3
trampled on. Indeed, some scholars have pushed this approach even further.
Tamar Herzog, to illustrate just one case, denies the usefulness of the term
corruption altogether because it neglects the close ties judges forged with
their local societies. Rather than applying the letter of the law, judges sought
to serve their own interests and forge an agreement among the various social
groups.5 These insights on the flexible nature of corruption are important,
but perhaps historians have overstated the issue a bit.
corrup tion in the empire
It is true that people in the Iberian empires—that is, the empires of Spain and
Portugal—lived with a degree of informality that would be unthinkable for
many today. The judges in the provinces of Spanish America, for example,
often helped themselves to cash from the treasury without triggering many
lawsuits. Many of these judges combined rustic backgrounds with minimal
training in law. They obtained their posts as rewards for past services—often
bearing arms for the king—rather than for their legal skills. They frequently
did not distinguish between the private and the public, and even when they
did, the boundaries between the two ideas remained vague. For example, the
Marquis of El Risco, a minister of the appellate court in Lima, Peru, reminded
his fellow magistrates that “we have the obligation to rid ourselves of our own
interest to favor the common and public interest.” 6 The call for service for
the common good was well received but not always heeded, and the question
remained of what these interests meant in detail.
Yet ideas of fairness surely pervaded the Iberian empires, for fairness is a
deeply grounded and even primordial desire. Humans of other times and
cultures have had strong sentiments about fairness, albeit contingent and
distinct from today. Corruption is a form of violating justice, and people liv-
ing in imperial times often censored such offenses. Christian theologians
and lawyers pondered corruption in long treatises, priests castigated moral
trespassing in their sermons, investigative judges prosecuted wayward mag-
istrates, and victims testified about abuses.7
Just as the standards for justice differed from today, so too did the laws.
They were not unequivocal, and there was no single valid law code that
defined corruption. Rather, a multitude of guidelines from various origins
competed with one another. The royal laws, the Roman laws, the Church
norms, and local customs that had developed over centuries were all
important in some way.8 Contemporaries differed in their views on justice,

and they disagreed on the norms that chastised corruption. Some people
believed that ancient customs allowed family members and friends to give
appropriate gifts to judges. Meanwhile, investigative judges appointed by the
Crown usually hewed closer to the laws of the Indies, and they reprimanded
or ousted abusive magistrates.
This insight into the complexity of imperial law allows us to understand
the differing views on the nature of corruption. Many practices that are con-
sidered corrupt today were culturally acceptable then, such as providing rela-
tives and friends with jobs in tax collection, notarial offices, or the court.
Renaissance thinkers even considered nepotism a pious duty, and the social
networks that grew from such transactions in many ways wove together the
fabric of society. There were limits, however. For example, a special investiga-
tive judge tried the Duke of Villalonga, a secretary at the court of King
Philip III (r. 1598–1621), for selling offices to friends and accepting bribes from
foreign princes. The judge convicted Villalonga of treason, mainly because the
duke had not obtained the king’s approval for his actions. It was one thing for
the king to sell offices and exchange gifts with princes, but when a courtier
did so, the opposition at the court orchestrated his downfall.9
Most people in the Spanish empire did not consider nepotism within
reason as offensive, but they did object to abusive judges. Corruption (cor-
ruptela) in the imperial sense typically meant that judges had violated jus-
tice by obtaining their posts inappropriately, accepting bribes, forging
documents, or extorting the public. For example, the famous jurist Juan de
Solórzano deplored the “custom, or better said, corruption” of the provin-
cial judges who forced the miserable Indians to bring them food and drink
without pay.10 While this was a form of extortion, another widely read
lawyer described “offerings, gifts, or money” to a judge as “crime and cor-
ruption.” This was also known as bribery (soborno), as it is today. When
nonjudicial officials tampered with documents, embezzled money, or over-
charged litigants, royal investigators and the public lambasted this as
excess, fraud, and abuse. Although they did not use the word corruption for
these functionaries, these offenses could well result in fines or imprison-
ment.11 Kris Lane notes in chapter 2 of this book that an investigative judge
in Upper Peru (now Bolivia) “had several of Potosí’s most prominent citi-
zens garroted and their corpses publicly displayed.” Despite his stern sen-
tences for abuses, the investigative judge never labeled this corruption
because that term applied only to judges.
Introduction 5
Because of the distinction between corruption and other excesses, the

lower echelon of officials at the Mexican high court went to great lengths in
explaining that they did not have any judicial powers. When an investigative
judge interrogated these subalterns between 1716 and 1724, they knew that a
conviction for corruption would have more serious consequences. Here the
example of a notary working for a land-grant commissioner illustrates the
matter well. The commissioner evaluated the status of unclaimed land
(comisión de tierras baldías) and approved petitions to reassign it. The notary
helped the commissioner by appointing deputies (comisarios) to perform this
work in the provinces. The deputies paid handsome bribes to the notary and
the commissioner to obtain their posts because they expected lavish gifts
later on from local petitioners. The notary admitted to the investigative judge
that these provincial deputies did “in some way have jurisdiction; but not to
sentence, and only to elucidate” the land titles, while his own “office was . . .
bare of any . . . administration of justice.” 12 The notary’s strategy to foil the
charge of corruption was to insist that he only charged some legitimate fees
for his work and that he did not have any judicial powers. Therefore any
potential sentence should be more lenient.
Included in the older imperial idea of corruption were also offenses that
most modern people today would not consider corrupt. Many in the old
regime held that unsuitable judges corrupted justice, but they emphasized
the judges’ lowly social origins rather than their performance or skills. Con-
servative elites to a large degree attributed corruption to inherited blemishes.
The Portuguese jurist Domingo Antunez Portugal, who was widely cited in
the Spanish Empire, maintained in 1673 that it was “indecent and indeco-
rous” for kings and queens to sell offices because that meant the magistracies
were occupied with “men corrupted by ambition and avarice and shamed by
their blood.” These judges often came from aspiring middle-class groups that
had money but lacked a noble pedigree. These groups had the ambition to
advance beyond the social status they were born into, an idea that connoted
excess. They were avaricious, which according to St. Paul had them flirting
dangerously with the root of all evil. In the view of the conservative elites,
these people were “shamed by their blood,” because they belonged to modest
families, which on occasion were of Jewish, Muslim, or (in the case of the
Americas) Indian or African descent.13
In addition, men who worked with their hands were considered disquali-
fied to be judges. For that reason the jurist Antonio Fernández de Otero
rejected all “taverners, mule drivers, shoemakers, innkeepers . . . meat-pie
makers, and those who serve in mechanical offices as well as . . . shepherds”

for judicial and ecclesiastical offices.14 Their work made them vile and unsuit-
able, he stated, not because they were less educated or proficient than other
candidates for office but because they lacked the proper social origins. Nam-
ing candidates of lower social extraction to magistracies was often consid-
ered a form of corruption, in this belief, because the posts should have been
reserved for people of reputable descent. Their select provenance, the think-
ing went, made them less likely to accept bribes. Many in the old regime
emphasized social background over achievements, which—at least ideally—
does not correspond with modern notions of corruption.
These specific semantics of the word corruption began drifting in the eigh-
teenth century. The royal administration grew, and more functionaries who
were not judges collected taxes and enforced rules. Slowly the idea of corrup-
tion expanded beyond the judiciary to all branches of governance. In 1751 the
viceroy of imperial Mexico—or New Spain, as it was then called—lamented
to the chief clerk of the Council of the Indies about not being able “to correct
those things that happen in abuse and corruption,” referring only to tax col-
lectors and not to judges.15 Up to that point, the fraud and excesses of nonju-
dicial officials had been a separate matter from corruption; now they became
part of the same idea.
To do justice to these shifting views on corruption, we take an open and
nuanced approach rather than attempting narrow definitions. In this book
we analyze corruption as the violation of the norms of justice by judges and
officials out of self-interest or group interest. We do not use this definition to
condemn past generations or to discover culprits. Instead we pursue a cul-
tural approach, seeking to understand the historical sentiments about these
offenses. The inhabitants of the Iberian empires criticized and removed func-
tionaries on charges of corruption, and these functionaries defended them-
selves against these accusations. By doing so, they elucidated what people
thought about the boundaries between licit and illicit conduct over the
course of three hundred years. Questions such as the following guide us:
Who was charged and punished for what actions? To what degree did impu-
nity, informality, or the influence of social networks shape the outcome of
prosecutions?
To provide the answers, the scholars contributing to this volume have
provided summaries of the daily practices and experiences of both humble
and elite members of society. Diverse populations—including Indians, Span-
iards, blacks, mestizos, Asians, and others—composed the societies of the
Introduction 7
Americas. These inhabitants often had disparate conceptions of justice and

corruption. By piecing together the mosaic with perspectives from below and
from above, we can read past societies with some balance and gain new
insights on the evolving ideas of corruption.
the contributors and their approaches
In this book we recover the past of black slaves toiling in mints; indigenous
farmworkers killed by their lords; and self-serving magistrates, bishops, and
viceroys. The scholars contributing to this project provide a glimpse into
their ongoing cutting-edge research.
In chapter 1 Jeremy Ravi Mumford traces a self-appointed “inspector of
the inns and tambos [roadside inns] and roads . . . of the Indians” by reading
investigative reports in the archives of Cochabamba and La Paz in Bolivia
(originally known as Upper Peru) and the great Archive of the Indies in
Seville, Spain. This inspector, Pedro de Castro Hinojosa, set out in 1581 to
serve as the administrator of the hospitals in the town of Paria, Upper Peru.
He forged a royal communication from 1583 making him inspector, and by
this means he contributed to a larger imperial design to keep Indians in their
assigned settlements. He was finally banned from office in 1604.
Three scholars then present their work on the seventeenth century, a
period long neglected by historians. In chapter 2 Kris Lane casts light on a
special inquiry that between 1649 and 1660 uncovered the “biggest debase-
ment scam in world history” at the Potosí mint in Upper Peru. To show that
Judge Francisco de Nestares Marín, a former inquisitor with Spain’s Holy
Office of the Inquisition, ruthlessly punished his opponents, Lane draws on
the criminal proceedings located in Bolivian and Spanish archives as well as
the literature on Atlantic currency fluctuations.
In chapter 3 William F. Connell illuminates how members of the Aguilar
family held on to the role of indigenous governor of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
According to the complaints, between 1644 and 1689 the family manipulated
voters and seized the property of Natives. Some indigenous people paid
excessive amounts of tribute and ended up in sweatshops or jails. For this
analysis, Connell delved deep into the litigation records of the Indian Court
stored in the National Archive in Mexico City.
In chapter 4 Marc Eagle describes the inquiries against Santo Domingo
high court ministers, which he unearthed in Seville. According to Eagle,
between 1608 and 1671 dozens of charges emerged against magistrates who
had accepted gifts such as “soap, jam, cacao,” “behaved improperly with
women,” applied torture inappropriately, and in one instance called a local
tailor a “mulatto dog.” The Council of the Indies usually handed down sus-
pensions lasting several years, showing that corruption was a charge to be
reckoned with.
In chapter 5 I trace an itinerant judge and his notary in early eighteenth-
century Mexico. The judge jailed an indigenous nobleman for killing a Native
worker. The nobleman had to bribe the judge and his notary to attain his
release, but he later obtained revenge. A royal inspector threw the judge into
the dungeon of the viceregal palace. The lengthy interrogations in this case
are located in Seville.
In chapter 6 Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso brings in the perspective from
Europe in roughly the same period (1700–1750). Politicians at the court in
Madrid sought to root out the worst abuses in governance by naming ener-
getic officials with a proven track record, whereas most impoverished aristo-
crats continued to enrich themselves in the Americas. Eissa-Barroso draws
on the reports of politicians and viceroys found in the provincial archives of
Catalonia (Spain), Madrid, and Santa Fe de Bogotá (Colombia) and also
includes the published correspondence of the French and English
ambassadors.
In chapter 7 Frances L. Ramos portrays a local society in Puebla, Mexico,
in 1721. In Puebla, second only to Mexico City in the viceroyalty, the bishop,
the archdeacon, and the tax collector feuded over tax-evading merchant-
clerics. As the clergymen bought large haciendas and “raised and sold pigs
in butcher shops” on a grand scale, they neglected their pastoral duties and
owed the king 460,000 pesos in dues. This chapter traces the Pueblan cor-
respondence with the Crown in the local and imperial archives to elucidate
the changing character of abuse.
The final two contributors strengthen the transimperial perspective on
the eighteenth century. In chapter 8 Catherine Tracy Goode sheds light on
the Manila Galleon fleet, which commuted between Manila in the Philip-
pines and Acapulco in Mexico. Although Goode covers a large period, she
hones in on the example of the eighteenth-century Santa Cruz and Gallo
families, who served as treasurers and governors in Veracruz, Acapulco, and
Chihuahua in northern Mexico. As merchants they built on an “unwritten
contract” with the Crown to make a fortune in shady dealings on the gal-
leon—a fact that Goode gleaned from the galleon registries located in the
Introduction 9
Manila archives and the records of investigations against the Gallo family
housed in Seville.
In chapter 9 Fabrício Prado follows the merchants sailing to Brazil, Uru-
guay, and Argentina while eluding the eyes of royal officials. In about 1756
the Portuguese Crown began to pay closer attention to contraband trade,
which for the merchants and the region as a whole was “part and parcel of
the economic and political life.” Prado draws on the correspondence and
notarial testimony of the businesspeople and authorities in Brazilian, Uru-
guayan, Argentine, and Portuguese archives.
These scholars hail from various countries, including the United States,
Brazil, Mexico, England, and Germany. They all bring their own particular
experiences and perspectives to the project. Every scholar has a different
interpretation of corruption in imperial times. We invite students to under-
stand the different views and critically assess the present work. Typically in
works of this kind, the editor synthesizes the key arguments of the contribu-
tors to connect the stories and underline the coherence of the work. Con-
densing the arguments, however, would deprive students of the opportunity
to do so themselves, and I believe that this is a central part of learning his-
tory: to understand arguments and to think critically about the past. This is
our goal, but we also hope that students and professionals will enjoy reading
the book.
notes
1. “Corruption in Latin America: Democracy to the Rescue?” Economist, March 14,
2015. Recent scholarship on corruption in Latin America today includes Steven
David Morris and Charles H. Blake, eds., Corruption and Politics in Latin
America: National and Regional Dynamics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2010);
Irma Eréndira Sandoval, Corrupción y Transparencia: Debatiendo las fronteras
entre Estado, mercado y sociedad (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México, 2009).
2. “What Is Corruption?”, Transparency International, http://www.transparency.
org/what-is-corruption.
3. John Horace Parry, The Sale of Public Office in the Spanish Indies under the
Habsburgs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 51–54, 60–63.
4. Jacob van Klaveren, “Corruption as a Historical Phenomenon,” in Political
Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, 3rd ed., ed. Arnold J. Heidenheimer and
Michael Johnston (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002), 83–94 (originally
published as “Die historische Erscheinung der Korruption, in ihrem

Zusammenhang mit der Staats- und Gesellschaftsstruktur betrachtet,”
Vierteljahresschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 44, no. 4 (1957): 292–94,
306–21); Jacob van Klaveren, “Die historische Erscheinung der Korruption, II:
Die Korruption in den Kapitalgesellschaften, besonders in den Grossen
Handelskompanien, III; Die internationalen Aspekte der Korruption,”
Vierteljahresschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 45, no. 4 (1958): 433–68,
469–504.
5. On corruption as “traditional gift-giving practices,” see James Scott, Comparative
Political Corruption (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 3–4, 7–10, 53. See
also Stuart Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court
of Bahia and Its Judges, 1609–1751 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973),
181, 363. Some microhistorians have rejected the term corruption as a modern
construct ill-suited for premodern societies. See Sharon Kettering, Patrons,
Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 192; and Colin M. MacLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New
World: The Role of Ideas in Institutional and Social Change (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988), 37. See also Kenneth Andrien, “Corruption, Self-
Interest, and the Political Culture of Eighteenth-Century Quito,” in Virtue,
Corruption, and Self-Interest: Political Values in the Eighteenth Century, ed.
Richard K. Mathews (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1994), 270–96. For
a functional analysis, see Anthony McFarlane, “Political Corruption and Reform
in Bourbon Spanish America,” in Political Corruption in Europe and Latin
America, ed. Walter Little and Eduardo Posada-Carbó (London: University of
London Press, 1996), 41–49, 54–63; Horst Pietschmann, “Corrupción en las Indias
Españolas: Revisión de un debate en la historiografía sobre Hispanoamérica
colonial,” Memorias de la Academia Mexicana de la Historia 40 (1997): 40, 46–54;
Horst Pietschmann, “‘Corrupción’ en el virreinato novohispano: Un tercer in-
tento de valoración,” E-Spania 16 (December 2013), http://e-spania.revues.
org/22848; Tamar Herzog, Upholding Justice: Society, State, and the Penal System
in Quito (1650–1750) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 154–60;
and Michel Bertrand, “Viejas preguntas, nuevos enfoques: La corrupción en la
adminstración colonial española,” in El poder del dinero: Ventas de cargo y hon-
ores en el Antiguo Régimen, ed. Francisco Andújar Castillo and María del Mar
Felices de la Fuente (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2011), 46–62. On notaries, see
Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Meanwhile, the following works insist on the
power of early modern corruption discourses: Jean-Claude Waquet, Corruption:
Ethics and Power in Florence, 1600–1770 (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1991), 12; Daniel Bellingradt, “Organizing Public Opinion in a
Resonating Box: The Gülich Rebellion in Early Modern Cologne, 1680–1686,”
Urban History 39, no. 4 (2012): 556–67; and Alfonso W. Quiroz, Corrupt Circles:
Introduction 11
A History of Unbound Graft in Peru (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center

Press, 2008), 2–6, 9, 36–37, 59–81. On corruption as judicial bribery, see Mark
Burkholder, “Honest Judges Leave Destitute Heirs: The Price of Honesty in
Eighteenth-Century Spain,” in Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest: Political
Values in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Richard K. Mathews (Bethlehem, PA:
Lehigh University Press, 1994), 247–69.
6. José de la Puente Brunke, “Codicia y bien público: Los ministros de la Audiencia
en la Lima seiscentista,” Revista de Indias 236, no. 66 (2006): 138; Christoph
Rosenmüller, “‘Corrupted by Ambition:’ Justice and Patronage in Imperial New
Spain and Spain, 1650–1755,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 96, no. 1
(2016): 1–37; Ángel Sanz Tapia, ¿Corrupción o necesidad? La venta de cargos de
gobierno americanos bajo Carlos II (1674–1700) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, 2009).
7. See chapters 2, 4, and 5 in this volume. Thirty-six pages solely on corruption may
be found in Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla, Politica para corregidores, y señores
de vasallos, en tiempo de paz, y de guerra (Barcelona: Gerónymo Margarit, 1616),
1:442–78. A framework for justice that remained highly influential until the eigh-
teenth century is found in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 37, Justice,
ed. Thomas Gilby (Cambridge, UK: Blackfriars, 1975). On Aquinas’s influence in
the Iberian empires, see Xavier Gil, “Spain and Portugal,” in European Political
Thought, 1450–1700: Religion, Law, and Philosophy, ed. Howell A. Lloyd, Glenn
Burgess, and Simon Hodson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 426.
8. António Manuel Hespanha, “Porque é que existe e em que é que consiste um
direito colonial brasileiro,” in Brasil-Portugal: Sociedades, culturas e formas de
governar no mundo português (séculos XVI—XVIII), ed. Eduardo França Paiva
(São Paulo: Annablume, 2006), 23.
9. Antonio Feros, Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598–1621
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129–30, 173–81, 186;
Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt: Eine vergleichende
Verfassungsgeschichte, 3rd ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), 134; Hillard von
Thiessen, “Korruption und Normenkonkurrenz: Zur Funktion und Wirkung
von Korruptionsvorwürfen gegen die Günstling-Minister Lerma und
Buckingham in Spanien und England im frühen 17 Jahrhundert,” in Geld-
Geschenke-Politik: Korruption im neuzeitlichen Europa, ed. Jens Ivo Engels,
Andreas Fahrmeir, and Alexander Nützenadel (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009),
99–111.
10. Juan de Solórzano y Pereyra, Política Indiana (1648; repr., Madrid: Atlas, 1972),
bk. 5, chap. 2, para. 17.
11. Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla, Politica 1: 440. The councilor of the Indies,
Rodrigo de Zepeda, distinguished between corruption and excess, according to
a note attached to Council of the Indies, consultation, Madrid, December 5, 1721,
Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI), México 670A.
12. Pedro Robledo to Francisco de Garzarón, Mexico City, April 15, 1719, AGI,
Escribanía de Cámara 280C, bk. 12, fols. 453v–454; see also AGI, México 670B,
fol. 352v.
13. Domingo Antunez Portugal, Tractatus de donationibus jurium et bonorum regiae
coronae (Lisbon: Ioannis a Costa, 1673), pt. 2, bk. 1, chap. 14, paras. 6–7; St. Paul,
1 Timothy 6:10, citing avarice as one of the seven deadly (or cardinal) sins along
with pride, envy, wrath, sloth, lust, and gluttony; Andrés Lira, “Dimensión
jurídica de la justicia: Pecadores y pecados en tres confesionarios de la Nueva
España, 1545–1732,” Historia Mexicana 220 (2006): 1141.
14. Antonio Fernández de Otero, Tractatus de Officialibus Reipublicae, necnon oppido-
rum utriusque Castellae, tum de eorundem electione, usu, exercitio . . . Editio Tertia,
auctior et accuratior (Geneva: Fratres de Fonties, 1732), pt. 1, chap. 3, para. 37.
15. Count of Revillagigedo to José Banfi, Mexico City, May 12, 1751, Archivo de los
Condes de Revillagigedo, Department of Special and Area Collections, University
of Florida Library, reel no. 404.
C H A P T E R ON E
Forgery and Tambos

false documents , imagined incas , and the making of ande an space
k
Jeremy Ravi Mumford
I n October or November 1581, Pedro de Castro Hinojosa left Lima, Peru,

climbing up over the mountains toward Cuzco.1 From there he traveled
south, past Lake Titicaca and across the altiplano (high plain) to the province
of Paria.2 He carried with him a commission (título e instrucción)—the title
to an office—from the viceroy of Peru entrusting him with two assignments.
The first was to serve as the administrator of the Communities and Hospitals
of Paria, a charitable trust established for indigenous Andeans in that
province. The second assignment was more ambitious. In addition to serving
in his local administrative position, Castro was appointed as a lower-level
judge (juez) and an inspector (visitador) with authority over the infrastructure
for travel and communication throughout Peru—roads, bridges, inns, and
mail service—as well as over the villages of the indigenous population, which
comprised the vast majority of the viceroyalty’s inhabitants. Whereas the
first assignment was a minor posting in a remote province, the second was a
large and open-ended portfolio, and it would have been impossible to do
both at once. The título may, in fact, have been a forgery. The título, and
Castro’s defense of it, place documentary forgery at the nexus between two
forms of cultural creativity: the invention of the self and the invention of the
colonial state.
The subjects of Castro’s inspection (visita) were the key elements of
Andean public space: roads and bridges, roadside inns for travelers (tambos),
mail carriers (chasquis), and indigenous villages throughout “these
13
14 Jeremy Ravi Mumford
kingdoms of Peru”—a vague phrase that potentially referred to the entire

viceroyalty.3 Peruvian governors had never assigned such an ambitious proj-
ect to a relatively low-level official. Castro’s assignment harkened back to the
visita general (special investigation of a region) of 1569–1575, which had been
carried out by dozens of visitadores throughout the central Andes under the
close supervision of the previous viceroy, Francisco de Toledo. The visita
general had taken censuses, assigned tribute requirements, and overseen the
forced resettlement (reducción) of much of the indigenous population into
newly founded centralized villages (called reducciones).4
Given the enormous labor that went into the visita general, it would have
been impossible for any single individual to carry out Castro’s new visita
throughout the “kingdoms of Peru,” let alone do so while also holding down
a full-time position running the Communities and Hospitals of Paria. Fur-
thermore, apart from its sheer implausibility, there were aspects of the título’s
construction that made its authenticity suspect. The título, which was just one
stage in a picaresque career of self-promotion and doubtful documentation,
points to a little-studied aspect of corruption: forged titles and credentials and
the role of forgery and imagination in building an imperial state.
Umberto Eco wrote, “It seems that in terms of natural language every-
body knows what a fake, a forgery, or a false document is, . . . [but] it is evi-
dent that all these definitions can work only once one has duly interpreted
such terms as ‘false,’ ‘deceiving,’ ‘misleading,’ ‘fictitious,’ ‘illusory.’ . . . [In
fact,] such concepts as Truth and Falsity, Authentic and Fake, Identity and
Difference circularly define each other.” 5
To defend his título from those who doubted its authenticity, Castro pro-
duced other, increasingly implausible supporting documents. He was ulti-
mately convicted and banished for forgery. Yet the truth status of his 1581
título, which was the document that launched his career, is surprisingly dif-
ficult to pin down. The evidence suggests that it was neither entirely true nor
entirely false. Its construction was certainly irregular. Viceroy Martín
Enríquez de Almanza had indisputably appointed Castro as the administra-
tor in Paria and had given him a standard título for this office. Subsequently,
as he himself later admitted, Castro removed the document’s inner pages and
substituted new ones—with different paper, ink, and number of lines per
page—containing the additional appointment as judge and visitador.
During his prosecution Castro suggested that this substitution, far from
being evidence of forgery, simply reflected normal administrative practice.
He had changed the original título with the viceroy’s verbal consent. Creative
Forgery and Tambos 15
officials, one might infer, identified new fields of action and collaborated with
their superiors to meet those needs—if necessary (given the fast pace of vice-
regal business), writing out their duties themselves. Documents were not
fixed and unalterable entities but dynamic, living ones.
Castro never carried out a viceroyalty-wide visita, or anything close to it. He

made vigorous use of his power as a judge and a visitador on the road to Paria
and while serving as administrator there, but he was soon stymied by resis-
tance to his projects and to his self-aggrandizement as well as by suspicion
about the documents he carried. He served as the administrator in Paria for
three brief periods, each time being forced out by his enemies but fighting his
way back, using increasingly dubious documents. He spent time in jail and
escaped, but he was ultimately convicted of forgery (falsedad) and exiled
from Peru. His impact on Peru was ultimately minor. But the título, and
Castro’s defense of it, had broad implications for the building of the colonial
state in Peru.
Castro’s papers included several terms of Andean origin that had not been
in the Spanish administrative vocabulary half a century earlier. They make
clear the degree to which Spanish government in Peru had appropriated
Native institutions. Appropriated in part and reinvented in part, these words
did not refer to quite the same practices, functioning in quite the same way,
as they had under the Incas. Yet the Spanish in Peru, while seeking to remake
the conquered land in the image of their own politics and faith, embraced
certain aspects of what they believed to be local tradition.
From the moment of their first encounter with the Inca state, the Spanish
admired the Inca infrastructure of roads (ñan), bridges (chaki), state store-
houses (qollqa), roadside way stations (tamp’u), messengers (chaski), and
knotted string records (khipu). Most of this infrastructure was as good as or
better than its equivalent in Christian Europe. What sustained this infra-
structure, in Inca times, was the mit’a, a system of compulsory rotating labor.
The heart of Inca rule, in Spanish eyes, was the control of space: systems for
ramping up agriculture and craft production and for moving and distribut-
ing information, people, and things. These were perennial challenges for
European states. In a typical assessment, one Spanish official argued in 1561
that the Incas had imposed a social order perfectly adapted to the needs of
the Andean people: “If one thinks much about it, a better way or means than
that which was given [by the Inca kings] will not be found.” 6 By the 1580s the
Incas’ stone structures were largely gone. Yet their institutions survived,
reinvented for Spanish needs, and their names were Hispanicized to tambo,
chasqui, and mita.7
In the mature colonial system in Peru developed in the later decades of
the sixteenth century, these reinvented Inca institutions allowed Spaniards
to dominate Andean space to a degree that rivaled or exceled the tamer,
more regular spaces of Iberia.8 Spaniards could travel in the Andes with
the guarantee of finding lodging and supplies in tambos at the end of each
day’s journey.9 They could send mail quickly by publicly regulated chas-
quis, over good roads and bridges built and maintained by mita laborers,
who also manned the tambos.10 The same practice forced Andean men to
assemble weekly in the plazas of Spanish cities and offer their labor for
construction and other projects at nominal, state-regulated wages.11 It also
sent contingents of Andean families each year over the roads and bridges
to the mines.12 Spaniards instructed Andeans to keep tribute and mita
records on khipu (Hispanicized as quipu). To a remarkable degree, Spanish
colonizers conceived of their project as recuperating the state-building
achievements of the Incas. This was very different from the later situation
in colonial India, for instance, in which British administrators conceived
roads and other infrastructural development as an entirely new project
established by enlightened Europeans on “a tabula rasa to be engraved
upon at will.”13 No colonial administrator ever imagined Peru as a tabula
rasa.
This infrastructure of efficient communication and unfree labor, based
on Inca models as understood by the Spanish conquerors, had a new foun-
dation by 1581: the reducciones, or indigenous resettlement towns, founded
in Viceroy Toledo’s visita general (1569–1575). Unlike roads and bridges,
tambos, and chasquis, the reducciones were not described by Spaniards as
a revived Inca institution. The name derived from reducir, meaning to
defeat, convert, or reduce to an ordered state, and Spaniards hoped to use
the reducciones to control, Christianize, and tax the indigenous population.
Yet the reducciones did have an Inca precedent. According to the Spanish
understanding of Inca history, the Incas had concentrated their subjects
into towns and villages in order to control them and inculcate civilized
values. Perhaps because of the reducciones’ importance for Christian evan-
gelization, colonial authors did not draw explicit parallels between them
and Inca resettlements, let alone describe the reducciones as a revived Inca
institution. But Spanish chronicles, even those closely associated with Vice-
roy Toledo, did discuss Inca resettlement policies in language closely
resembling descriptions of colonial reducciones. Among the chief purposes

of the reducciones was to track and control the rural laborers who would build
the roads, staff the tambos, and dig the mines. Toledo was the chief architect
of the reducción program, and he saw it as a piece of an integrated program of
infrastructural reform. Historians, as well as his own successors, have treated
Toledo’s visita general as a turning point in colonial Andean history, the foun-
dation of the mature colonial system. What scholars have not recognized is the
extent to which his reforms were organized around an integrated system of
infrastructure and communications that was associated with the Incas.14
Castro’s commission as visitador was explicitly connected to Toledo’s pro-
gram, referring to “these kingdoms and provinces of Peru and the reduc-
ciones and villages which were marked out and ordered in the visita general
that was carried out in them.”15 But Toledo’s visita general focused on reduc-
ción, mita, and tribute. It treated roads, bridges, tambos, and chasquis only
in passing.
It was Toledo’s successor Enríquez who made the tambos and chasquis a
special project. He established a regular messenger service between Lima
and Potosí, primarily for official communications but also including private
letters in exchange for a fee.16 The system he established was actually quite
similar to the postal service (correo) in Spain, which was being organized and
expanded in Castile in precisely this period.17 So it is significant, even a bit
surprising, that Enríquez used the term chasqui at all. What it shows is that
the Spanish saw Andean infrastructure generally as a legacy of the Incas.
Enríquez’s first postmaster was his secretary Antonio de Castro, who seems
to have been the cousin of Pedro de Castro.18 Therefore it would not have
been strange for the viceroy to appoint Pedro as an inspector of roads, tam-
bos, chasquis, and reducciones.
The commission, however, was oddly ambiguous about the extent of the
visita that Pedro de Castro was expected to carry out. At one point it
extended his commission throughout the “kingdoms of Peru,” which, as I
have noted, is a vague phrase that could refer either to the whole viceroy-
alty or to a section of it—perhaps the areas of Quito, Lima, and Charcas,
which were directly inherited from the Inca state. But such a visita would
have taken years to carry out, and it would have been completely incompat-
ible with simultaneously holding the office of the administrator of the
Communities and Hospitals of Paria. Another part of the título suggests
that the visita was limited to the road between Lima and Potosí, perhaps
with the idea that Castro would carry out this visita before taking up his
position in Paria.19 In Huarochirí, which was one of the main stages

between Lima and Cuzco, Castro appointed a deputy—don Sebastián
Quispe Ninavilca, the cacique principal (an Indian chief) nobleman of
Huarochirí. Giving Quispe the title of alcalde mayor (provincial adminis-
trator), quipucamayo (quipu-keeper) and contador (accountant) of the
chasquis, Castro authorized him to exercise the power of a royal judge
throughout two provinces in order to monitor the tambos and chasquis.
Quispe was to keep records of his progress both on paper (he was literate
in Spanish) and through quipus, and he could punish the guilty or the
negligent by imprisonment, whipping, or head shaving. His area of respon-
sibility was the essential infrastructure of communications between the
capital and the mountains, on the first stretch of the road to Potosí.20 After
appointing Ninavilca as the alcalde mayor, Pedro de Castro continued
south through the Andes.
Waiting for him in Paria was a significant field of action and remunera-
tion. The Communities and Hospitals of Paria had been created by its enco-
mendero (the Spanish holder of a grant to receive tribute from an indigenous
community), Lorenzo de Aldana (d. 1568), who was among the first genera-
tion of conquistadors in Peru. Like a few of his contemporaries, in his last
years he had been moved by priests who urged him to make restitution to the
Andeans for years of robbery and violence, and he had done so.21 He had no
power to free the subjects of his encomienda (the tribute grant held by an
encomendero) from their tribute burdens or to change the status of their
communities, but he created a new corporate entity superimposed on the
old. The Communities and Hospitals of Paria held his wealth in land, busi-
nesses, and livestock as well as considerable liquid capital lent out at interest
to the entrepreneurial Spanish planters of the nearby Cochabamba valley.
Controlling property, theoretically in the interest of Paria’s Indians, gave
administrators many opportunities to enrich themselves.22
Some administrators concentrated all their attention on their own business
dealings.23 Castro, however, focused as well on another aspect of the job: help-
ing the caciques in the reducciones control and retain their tributary popula-
tion, seeking out those who had moved elsewhere (especially to the
economically growing Cochabamba valley), and forcing them to return to the
highlands of Paria.24 Although Castro’s título extended his authority as judge
and inspector throughout the kingdoms of Peru, he used it primarily, and vig-
orously, in the areas immediately surrounding Paria, focusing on rebuilding
the reducciones, roads, and tambos. In other words, he interpreted his work in
Paria within the context of the larger role of visitador that he claimed had been
given to him.
From an administrator’s point of view, the reducciones urgently needed
attention. Almost from the moment Toledo’s resettlement campaign was
completed, secular and ecclesiastical officials were calling for a new cam-
paign to restore to the reducciones their lost populations. Miguel de Mon-
salve’s 1604 treatise, Reducion Universal de todo el Piru, was only the most
elaborate of these suggestions.25 There were periodic local projects of
re-resettlement: caciques and local Spanish officials made periodic efforts to
bring runaways (huidos) home to their resettlements. The document appoint-
ing a corregidor (Spanish provincial administrator) often specified that one
of his job responsibilities was to keep Indians in their reducciones.26 Judges
and inspectors took it upon themselves to bring people back to their reduc-
ciones: in 1593, one inspector in Cochabamba ordered those living outside
their reducciones in the valley of Cochabamba to return to them within six
days, or he would destroy their houses and sell their lands.27 Audiencias
(appellate courts) regularly gave licenses to collect Indians who had fled from
a given community and return them by force.28
The province of Chucuito, north of Paria, experienced a demographic cri-
sis in the early 1600s. Indians’ flight from unbearable demands created a
snowball effect as each one who fled made things even worse for those who
remained behind. In 1603 the viceroy, Luis de Velasco, took emergency mea-
sures to prevent Chucuito’s reducciones from becoming ghost towns. On the
one hand, he ordered temporary relief from mita demands. On the other
hand, he ordered systematic efforts to force those who had left to return
home.29 He deputized Indian leaders to act aggressively, and he claimed that
one such leader, working for three pesos a day, returned 4,458 tributaries to
their reducciones.30 In a similar case, in 1594 a Spanish official was deputized
to assist caciques in the province of Omasuyo in rounding up more than four
hundred of their subjects who were living in the valley of Larecaja, east of La
Paz, so that the Omasuyo caciques could meet their mita quota, which was
five hundred men short. His commission required him to burn their houses
and return them to their homes, except those named for mita service who
would go directly to Potosí in time for the Christmas mita.31
Pedro de Castro threw himself into the project of shoring up the reducciones.
Two Spanish priests in Paria, Gerónimo de Escobar and Baltasar Alonso,
praised him for his commitment to helping the caciques recover their
subjects—five thousand Indians throughout the Cochabamba valley had

been sent home. A significant part of Paria’s population belonged to the Uru
ethnic group. Urus, according to the priests, had a low level of culture and
intelligence and a natural preference for uncivilized living outside towns. It
required a “special gift” (gracia particular) to deal with them and entice them
home, the priests said, and Castro, in their eyes, seemed to have it.32 On
November 20, 1587, traveling from Lima to Paria, Castro wrote to don Garcia
Llanque, the cacique nobleman of the Urus, to meet him along the way;
meanwhile, Castro secretly gathered information about Indian commoners
who were absent without leave, whom they could then surprise and seize en
route. He told Llanque that “God our Lord and His Majesty have done me
the honor of sending me to your land to favor and help you, as you already
know, my children.”33
A problem with the project of restoring the reducciones’ population was
that it conflicted with the interests of powerful Spaniards. Many of the
Indians whom officials and caciques wanted to bring back were either
yanaconas (Native dependents of Spaniards) or wage laborers for Spanish
employers—some of whom were themselves priests or corregidores.34 The
archbishop of Lima, Gonzalo de Campo, complained to the king on Octo-
ber 15, 1626, that colonists who employed Indians would file legal appeals
alleging reasons not to carry out resettlement; this would result in judicial
orders to investigate the situation and take testimony, “which is the style of
acting here when it is desired that nothing be done.”35 The opponents of
resettlement were willing to say openly—as don Luis de Oznayo, the cor-
regidor of Guamanga, did in April 1620—that resettlement was “a joke and
served no purpose but to rob people [i.e., the Spanish employers of Indian
laborers] of their wealth.”36 The Spanish imperial administration was very
conservative and preferred to postpone decisive action in the face of con-
flicting claims. Seventeenth-century viceroys found their plans for aggres-
sive and systematic resettlement campaigns blocked by intense local
opposition.37
Castro’s tenure in Paria appeared to end abruptly when the viceroy who
had appointed him died in office and the Audiencia of Charcas replaced Cas-
tro as the administrator with a relative of one of its own members. But Castro
pulled a rabbit out of a hat. He was able to present a real cédula (royal order
or communication)—signed in Madrid on December 13, 1583—reinstating
him as administrator in Paria.38 Shortly thereafter, on hearing that the king
had selected the Count of Villar as the new viceroy of Peru, Castro sought to
consolidate his position by employing representatives in Spain to obtain a

further confirmation of his title.
But here something went wrong. On November 15, 1586, an official at court
examined Castro’s copy of the 1583 royal order and became suspicious. He
could not find a copy of the order in the letter books of the Council of the
Indies, and he noted that it had been written “in a different order and style
from that in which royal orders usually go out.” Suspecting forgery, he urged
the council to investigate.39 This accusation initiated a legal process that
played out over fifteen years, in a roller-coaster ride of imprisonment, appeal,
repeated reinstatement, and renewed prosecution. As soon as one document
came under suspicion, the suspicion of forgery began to fall on other docu-
ments that Castro had used to advance his career.
The investigation came to center on Castro’s original commission from
1581. Castro’s own copy of that commission, which he still carried, was dif-
ferent from the version in the record book in Lima that Viceroy Enríquez’s
secretary had left of his appointments. The record book version simply
repeated the standard instructions given to previous administrators, with
detailed advice on how to take care of the various forms of property belong-
ing to the trust, but with no reference whatsoever to investigating roads,
tambos, or resettlements.
The version that Castro had taken with him from Lima started with the
same language as the record book version, but it departed significantly
toward the end. An examination of Castro’s copy showed that the text
changed at exactly the point where one page ended and another began. Cas-
tro had apparently received the same commission as his predecessors, in the
form of two large sheets, each folded once and one placed inside the other.
The commission was in Castro’s handwriting, since (Castro said) he had
written out the final copy for Enríquez’s signature from a rough draft by the
secretary. But after writing out the standard version of his commission, Cas-
tro had apparently removed the inner folded sheet and substituted another
with a different text. It seemed that an authentic viceregal signature had been
yoked to a false, patchwork commission.
Castro responded forcefully to the accusation. He asserted that anyone
who found the composite nature of the text suspicious had not worked in an
office. In the press of business there was nothing unusual about a busy sec-
retary asking an applicant to do the copying himself, he asserted, and offi-
cial documents were routinely assembled in an inelegant collage of old and
new texts. During the period in which Enríquez was arranging Castro’s
appointment, Enríquez had decided to expand its scope.40 If a viceroy made

revisions in the text of a document—adding new powers to a standardized-
text commission at the last minute—why not keep the part of the document
that was unchanged and simply add the revised text as necessary? Further-
more, there was a note in the viceregal record book that said, “This instruc-
tion is incorrect; see the original signed by his Excellency, which the
administrator [i.e., Castro] took.” 41 Castro acknowledged that the final
copy had been written in two stages, but he insisted that the viceroy had
signed at the end and had known what he was signing. Patchwork, by this
account, was not evidence of falsification but a characteristic bureaucratic
practice.
The strongest piece of evidence in Castro’s favor was that he had not kept
the terms of his “revised” commission secret at the time; in fact, they were
the talk of Lima. Castro’s witnesses from 1592 provide a vivid picture of the
impact his brash style had had when he started his career a decade earlier. A
merchant testified that Lima had been abuzz with Castro’s “great honor”
(gran merced), and a rural corregidor testified he was shocked that the vice-
roy had given such powers to a “youth” (mozo) of Castro’s age. Another wit-
ness testified that he had met Castro pursuing his visita on the road to Paria
and concluded that the man was wasting his time trying to reform the tam-
bos and chasquis. Much of the testimony that buttressed Castro’s case was in
fact hostile rather than sympathetic to him. A rural priest, for instance, testi-
fied that he had come to Lima with some Andeans to register a complaint
against Castro’s high-handedness. Castro had made the most of his judge’s
commission to try cases on the road, which resulted in lots of complaints and
at least one imprisoned defendant being sent back to the viceroy. If Viceroy
Enríquez did not intend for Castro to exercise such powers, he would have
had ample opportunity to catch the fraud at the time.42
The strongest piece of evidence against Castro was that he had not just one
doubtful document but many. He repeatedly shored up one document by
presenting another one that was even less plausible. Castro presented the
testimony of a witness who had overheard a conversation between two Lima
judges: one complained of Castro’s overreaching, and the other advised him
not to make waves, since the viceroy had confidence in Castro, which was all
that counted.43
Although the conversation itself sounds plausible, its convenient over-
hearing seems less so. Even less believable is one of the defenses he offered
for his probably forged 1583 real cédula. He introduced the testimony of a
priest who had allegedly met the messenger as he was bringing that docu-
ment to Castro six years ago. The priest had first seen the messenger in a
hospital on the Colombian coast—a man deathly ill from a tropical disease,
who happened to mention some papers he was bringing to a man named
Castro. Later the two crossed paths again by a river in Panama, where the
messenger, now cured, updated the priest on Castro’s documents. They had
gotten wet when his boat capsized, but he was drying them in the sun and
trusted that they would reach their destination safely.44 Like other pieces of
evidence Castro introduced, these two impossibly convenient transatlantic
conversations are so implausible as to seem almost playful, an expression on
Castro’s part of the joy of invention.
The picaresque forger managed to keep the balls he was juggling up in the
air for an astonishing amount of time. He produced another real cédula in
his favor, dated May 4, 1592.45 He even spent a period as a fugitive who had
escaped from a jail in La Plata. (He characteristically negotiated his own
return, writing in apology to the Council of the Indies, “I was able to leave
the prison without breaking out; I found the doors of the jail open and sim-
ply went on my way.” 46)
Along the way he convinced several officials that he was not just innocent
but also a public benefactor, keeping alive the flame of Toledo’s great reforms
and rebuilding the roads and resettlements of Peru. Upon returning to Peru
after spending time in Spain, Castro even showed up in Caracas with a com-
mission as the judge of a residencia (a judicial review of an outgoing office-
holder) against a departed official, and he extorted 192 pesos de oro (pesos of
gold) from the city’s municipal council (cabildo) on his departure.47 Ulti-
mately, however, in 1602 he lost his last-known appeal, then suffered exile
and a permanent ban from office.48 In spite of his exile Castro seems to have
returned to Peru in 1604, but his later life is obscure.49
During the years that his fortunes rose and fell in appeals and condemna-
tions, Pedro de Castro showed himself to be not just a stubborn survivor but
a true believer in the larger project with which he had begun his career:
policing and reforming Peru’s infrastructure and its resettlements. After his
first loss of office he was reinstated not only in the lucrative appointment in
Paria but also in his role as judge and visitador.50 If he had been willing to
settle down to quietly embezzling the income of the Paria community (as
most of its administrators did), without antagonizing provincial officials,
sallying out to the countryside, and holding court as a judge of the resettle-
ments, he probably would have avoided his final downfall.
conclusion
The forging of official papers constitutes a small and distinctive subset of the
practices we might call corruption. There is considerable debate, as the essays
in this volume make clear, about what activities in the early modern His-
panic world correspond to our modern ideas of corruption. Was there a phe-
nomenon, or a set of phenomena, that we can translate as corruption?
“Selling justice” was a serious crime, in theory, but for a magistrate to receive
gifts from parties subject to his authority, or require private fees to fulfill
public duties, was sometimes treated more as a vice than a crime. Indeed,
such practices were inevitable in the Spanish colonies’ system of government,
in which many officials purchased their positions at prices that were impos-
sible to recoup from the positions’ legitimate income. But despite the implicit
acceptance in some contexts of what we today would call influence peddling,
it was also a common subject of accusation, both in ordinary bureaucratic
infighting and in the more serious context of a residencia. Depending on the
level of ambiguity surrounding the offense, it might earn a harsh punish-
ment or none at all.
By contrast, falsedad was a relatively stable concept, with its roots in
Roman law. Unlike influence peddling, forgery was neither implicitly
accepted nor the subject of routine accusation. In Hispanic culture, official
documents could take on the aura of the sacred. When, for instance, Pedro
de Castro brought to Caracas a document purporting to be a real cédula in
the name of the king (dated January 3, 1594), the members of the cabildo fol-
lowed the standard ritual of kissing it and placing it on their heads to show
it honor.51 The punishments for forging or altering royal documents were
historically harsh. According to the medieval fuero real (royal charter), for a
layman to forge or falsify a royal document carried the penalty of death.52
The definition of falsedad in Castilian law was “mudamiento de la verdad”
(changing the truth). In this context some jurists defined truth as “God Him-
self,” citing John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”53 Falsification
would seem to be clear cut: an official document was either true or false,
legitimate or criminal.
Yet documents were blurrier objects than such an analysis suggests. When
a notary wrote that somebody said or did something at a certain time and
place, in the absence of a clear motive for deceit historians have typically
accepted the record as transparent and unproblematic. In fact, as Kathryn
Burns has shown, much of the framing information in notarial records was
notional rather than literal. From property sales to legal testimony, the time,
place, circumstances, and witnesses’ testimony might be a fictional construc-
tion. As long as the gist of a notarized statement was accurate, it was accept-
able to fudge the details.54 This would seem to confirm Castro’s claim about
the casual circumstances under which important official documents were
created.
Although it was common to fudge the details in the production of official
documents, out-and-out fraud was presumably less common. But even that
was not necessarily scandalous. Burns cites the case of the wealthy Cuzco
encomendero Rodrigo de Esquivel, roughly contemporary with Pedro de
Castro, who during the 1580s blatantly falsified the documentation of his
wife’s dowry. Esquivel was engaged in a high-stakes lawsuit. In order to pro-
tect his assets from possible seizure in the event of an adverse decision, he
wanted to inflate the size of his wife’s dowry, which was safe from seizure. In
effect, he was protecting his own property by pretending it was hers. To do
so he paid the notary’s assistant, who had drafted the original dowry agree-
ment, to remove two pages from the relevant notarial volume and substitute
new ones, rather like the substitute pages in Castro’s título. Decades later,
Esquivel confessed to the fraud in his will in order to restore the property to
his own account and bequeath it to his own heirs. It is surprising, but there
were apparently no legal consequences for the confessed fraud.55
The nature of Esquivel’s self-justification was significant: “the greatest
letrados [jurists] and judges of this kingdom, who studied and weighed the
said lawsuit with all possible care,” told him that the lawsuit against him
“was unjust and a notorious wrong.”56 In other words, the fact that Esquivel
had the merits of the case on his side justified the procedural deception. In a
sense, the end justified the means. In an early modern legal culture that often
emphasized substantive over procedural justice, there was room to excuse a
false statement in the service of a larger truth.57
Was the 1581 título a forgery? It is harder than it seems to pin down a
straightforward, commonsense understanding of forgery: “such terms as
‘false,’ ‘deceiving,’ ‘misleading,’ ‘fictitious,’” are easier to use than to define.58
We cannot be absolutely sure of anything about Castro’s career, given his
apparent mythomania and his propensity for documentary play; but whereas
some of his other documents appear to be straightforward forgeries, the 1581
título seems to be a borderline case. The evidence he presented of the public
nature of his mission is extensive enough that it is hard to discount it entirely.
Castro’s commission as visitador appears to be a kind of hybrid forgery, the
original rewritten in a seemingly surreptitious manner, then brazenly dis-

played for all to see.
In the early modern Iberian empires, there were a number of cases of men
who passed themselves off as officials, often while traveling in areas remote
from the center of power, where their imposture was difficult to detect.59
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra relates this kind of imposture to the concept of
self-fashioning, especially when the goal was not just self-enrichment but
also the construction of a new public and private persona with psychological
rewards as well as monetary ones. He presents the example of Lorenzo Bot-
urini, an Italian blacksmith’s son, who successfully reinvented himself as an
aristocrat by manipulating official documents to buttress his case. He moved
to New Spain (Mexico), where he became an important proponent of the
rising cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, gathering and publicizing documen-
tary evidence of her miraculous apparition two centuries earlier.60 Boturini
resembled Castro in combining self-invention with the project of creating
new public institutions through the power of imagination and documentary
manipulation.
Some kinds of forgery were indeed more entrepreneurial than personally
corrupt, motivated by the dream of imperial state building as much as self-
dealing. In Peru, building the state involved an integrated picture of infra-
structure, focused on indigenous populations, and was associated with the
Incas. Systematically designed and efficiently maintained roads and com-
munications were seen as a key aspect of Andean governance, which
depended on the Inca legacy and the collective culture of indigenous Ande-
ans. Toward the end of the colonial period, it was no accident that the inspec-
tion tour that generated the peculiar and picaresque account Lazarillo de
ciegos caminantes (which began in Buenos Aires before retracing Pedro de
Castro’s route between Paria and Lima) included a man who claimed descent
from the Inca kings. Even after that, well into the twentieth century, both
state and nonstate authorities invoked modernized versions of the mita for
road building, because the mita was seen as uniquely capable of mobilizing
uncompensated yet motivated and effective labor.61 In José María Arguedas’s
1941 novel Yawar Fiesta, a mestizo townsman attributes extraordinary feats
of road building to a claimed essential Andean collectivism and dedication
to communal labor.62
The curious case of Castro’s título throws into relief the links among the
invention of the self, the invention of the state, and the invention of the Incas.
It seems clear that his primary motive was not profit but a vision of reform,
rooted in the acts of the previous viceroy, Francisco de Toledo. This reform
agenda cast a diverse group of state functions as a single integrated system of
infrastructure, systematized by Toledo and understood to have been originally
established by the Inca kings. A self-seeker, Castro was also a true believer,
animated by an almost quixotic vision of reform in the viceroyalty of Peru.
notes
1. This chapter is dedicated to Clara Miccinelli and her marvelous documents. The
case of Pedro de Castro Hinojosa is documented in the archives of Seville, Sucre,
and Cochabamba, and especially in four files at the Archivo General de Indias,
Seville (hereafter AGI): Charcas 16 and 43 and Escribanía de Cámara (hereafter
Escribanía) 845B and 501B. Castro’s work as administrator of the Communities
and Hospitals of Paria, but not his forgery or his ambition to inspect Andean
space, has been discussed in María de las Mercedes del Río, Etnicidad, territori-
alidad y colonialismo en los Andes: Tradición y cambio entre los Soras de los siglos
XVI y XVII (Bolivia) (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2005), 274–
79; and Margot Beyersdorff, Historia y drama ritual en los andes bolivianos (siglos
XVI–XX), 2nd ed. (Las Paz: Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, n.d. [2003]), 83–
94. His career before 1581 is uncertain. A Pedro de Castro was appointed procu-
rador (agent of the appellate court) to the Audiencia of Charcas in 1572 (AGI,
Contratación 5792, bk. 2, fols. 18–19), and a Lic. Pedro de Castro (probably the
same one) conducted an inquiry of that Audiencia in 1573 (AGI, Escribanía 862).
But Pedro de Castro Hinojosa, who did not claim the title of licenciado (holder
of a higher university degree) in the records we have, was probably a different
person. He may have come to Peru with the viceroy, Martin Enríquez de
Almanza, and is said to have been a cousin of Enríquez’s secretary.
2. Paria was near the modern city of Oruro, Bolivia.
3. AGI, Escribanía 501B, pt. 1, fol. 65r.
4. Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in
the Colonial Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
5. Umberto Eco, “Fakes and Forgeries,” in The Limits of Interpretation
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 174–75, 201.
6. Polo Ondegardo, “Informe . . . al licenciado Briviesca de Muñatones,” Revista
Histórica (Lima) 13 (1940): 177 (“Si mucho se pensare en ello, no se hallará mejor
camino ni medio que el que está dado”).
7. Mumford, Vertical Empire, 13–26.
8. David Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World in Golden Age Castile:
Mobility and Migration in Everyday Rural Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 42–45. Of course, compared to most other regions in
western Europe, Castile was considered exceptional for its mountainous and
challenging landscape.
9. Luis Miguel Glave, “Tambos y caminos andinos en la formación del mercado
interno colonial,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos (Seville) 45 (1988): 83–138.
10. Teodoro Hampe Martínez, “El servicio de chasquis: Organización y funciona-
miento de los correos indígenas en el Perú colonial,” in Actas del IV Congreso
Internacional de Etnohistoria, (Lima: Pontifical Catholic University of Peru,
1998), 2:238–52.
11. Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, “La mita de Lima: Magnitud y procedencia,”
Histórica (Lima) 12, no. 2 (1988): 193–210.
12. Jeffrey Cole, The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985).
13. Ravi Ahuja, Pathways of Empire: Circulation, Public Works and Social Space in
Colonial Orissa, c. 1780–1914 (Telangana, India: Orient Blackswan, 2009), 101.
14. Mumford, Vertical Empire; Jeremy Ravi Mumford, “Francisco de Toledo, admi-
rador y émulo de la ‘tiranía’ Inca,” Histórica (Lima) 35, no 2 (2011): 45–67.
15. “Título e instrucción a Pedro de Castro Hinojosa,” October 26, 1581, AGI,
Escribanía 501B, pt. 1, fol. 16r (“destos reynos y provincias del Piru y de las reduc-
ciones y poblaciones que en la visita general que se hizo en ellos quedo traçado y
hordenado que tubiesen y acavasen los naturales”).
16. Hampe Martínez, “El servicio de chasquis,” 2:238–52.
17. Jaime Ascandoni Rivero, “El correo durante el reinado de Felipe II,” in Felipe II:
La ciencia y la técnica, ed. Enrique Martinez Ruiz (Madrid, 1999), 253–74; Cristina
Borreguero Beltran, “Philip of Spain: The Spider’s Web of News and Information,”
in The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early
Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Maurice Dooley (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010),
23–50.
18. The Spanish in Peru used the word correo along with chasqui. Hampe Martínez,
“El servicio de chasquis,” 2:241, identifies Enríquez’s first correo mayor (chief post-
master) as Antonio de Castro, one of his secretaries. An opponent of Pedro de
Castro, Juan López de Cepeda, told the king on March 12, 1593, that Castro’s ap-
pointment was a result of his status as the cousin of the viceroy’s secretary.
Roberto Levillier, ed., Audiencia de Charcas: Correspondencia de presidentes y
oidores (Madrid: Biblioteca del Congreso Argentino, 1922), 3:175. Given the shared
surname and connection to the chasqui system, it is likely that this referred to
Antonio de Castro rather than to Enríquez’s primary secretary, Cristóbal de
Miranda.
19. AGI, Escribanía 501B, pt. 1, fol. 16v.
20. “Título de alcalde mayor, quipucamayo y contador de las chasquis de . . .
Huarochiri, Jauja y el Valle de Lima a don Sebastian Quispe Ninavilca,”
Huarochirí, November 12, 1581, AGI, Escribanía 501B, pt. 1, fols. 66v–67v. This
document is given as an example of the title of an indigenous alcalde mayor in
Waldemar Espinoza Soriano, “El alcalde mayor indígena en el virreinato del

Perú,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 17 (1960): 183–300. Quispe Ninavilca was
an important figure who deserves closer study. He collaborated in Toledo’s general
resettlement of the Indians on reducciónes and with Jesuit priests who entered
Huarochirí soon afterward; his mother may have been Spanish, since his father
married a Spanish woman in 1550. Karen Spalding, Huarochirí: An Andean Society
under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 211,
222.
21. Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “La restitución por conquistadores y encomende-
ros: Un aspecto de la incidencia lascasiana en el Perú,” Anuario de Estudios
Americanos (Seville) 23 (1966): 21–89; Stuart Stirling, The Last Conquistador:
Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and the Conquest of the Incas (Phoenix Mill, UK:
Sutton, 1999).
22. Mercedes del Río, “Riquezas y poder: Las restituciones a los indios del
Repartimiento de Paria,” in Saberes y memorias en los Andes: In memoriam
Thierry Saignes, ed. Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne (Paris: Institut des Hautes
Études de l’Amérique Latine, 1997), 261–78; Mercedes del Rio, Etnicidad, ter-
ritorialidad y colonialismo en los Andes, chap. 5; Beyersdorff, Historia y drama
ritual. See also Francisco de Toledo, “Instrucción al administrador de los
bienes de comunidad y hospitales de Paria,” in Francisco de Toledo,
Disposiciones gubernativas para el Virreinato del Perú, 1575–1580, ed. María
Justina Sarabia Viejo (Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas,
1989), 39–46. The idea that the reducciónes of Paria were considered “hospitals”
is also significant. The word hospital could mean a professionally run institu-
tion for the care and cure of the sick, but it could also mean a house of asylum
for old people or orphans or a house of charitable lodging for pilgrims. Usually
endowed as a religious institution, a hospital could be all three of these things
at once; linked by the concept of “hospitality,” the different functions were not
sharply distinguished. Many Spaniards saw Native Americans as both physi-
cally weak and spiritually needy and thus deserving of charity. So any reli-
giously motivated institution designed to shelter Indians might be conceived
as a “hospital,” even if its inhabitants were fit and healthy. Sebastián de
Covarrubias Orozco, “Hospital,” in Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española,
ed. Felipe C. R. Maldonado and Manuel Camarero (1611; repr., Madrid:
Editorial Castalia, 1995), 480.
23. Toledo, “Instrucción al administrador”; Beyersdorff, Historia y drama ritual.
24. The Andeans of Paria had traditional ties to the Cochabamba valley and its
warm-climate resources. Both caciques and commoners had an interest in main-
taining these ties and in the right to travel back and forth, but Paria commoners
had a further interest in escaping the caciques’ authority and the demands of
tribute and mita. Castro collaborated with the caciques to force their subjects to
acknowledge their authority and return home to the highlands when required.
25. Miguel de Monsalve, Reducion universal de todo el Piru, y de mas Indias, con
otros muchos auisos, para el bien de los naturales dellas, y en aumento de las reales
rentas (1604). See Mumford, Vertical Empire, 143–56.
26. Título de don Martín de Guzmán, corregidor de indios, Lima, December 9, 1581,
in Roberto Levillier, ed., Gobernantes del Perú, cartas y papeles, siglo XVI:
Documentos del Archivo de Indias (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1925),
9:121–24.
27. Robert H. Jackson, Race, Caste, and Status: Indians in Colonial Spanish America
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 26.
28. “El capitán Gomez Yañez de Amaya, diligencias sobre que los indios de su enco-
mienda sean bueltos a su reducion,” 1603, Archivo Histórico de Cochabamba,
Expedientes Coloniales (Mizque) 9, fols. 383–406.
29. “Provisión del virrey Velasco,” Juli, May 28, 1603, AGI, Escribanía 857A, doc. 1,
fols. 137–42. See Waldemar Espinoza Soriano, “Los Chambillas y mitmas incas y
chinchaysuyos en territorio lupaqa, siglos XV-XX,” Revista del Museo Nacional
(Lima) 46 (1982): 419–506.
30. Ronald Escobedo Mansilla, El tributo indígena en el Perú, siglos XVI y XVII
(Pamplona, Spain: Eunsa, 1979), 85.
31. “Don Hernando Chuquihuanca y don Santos Callisaya . . . sobre los impedimen-
tos que el corregidor y los caciques de Larecaja les oponen a la conducción de los
mitayos a Potosí,” 1594–1595, Archivo Nacional de Bolivia, Minas 122, fol. 94.
32. Nathan Wachtel, Le retour des ancêtres: Les indiens Urus de Bolivie, XXe-XVIe
siècle; Essai d’histoire régressive (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 433.
33. AGI, Escribanía 845B, no. 2, pt. 2, fol. 21r (“Dios nro sr y su mag me an hecho mer-
ced que yo vaia a esta vra tierra para os favorecer y ayudar como ya hijos saveis”).
34. Roberto Choque Canqui, Sociedad y economía colonial en el sur andino (La Paz:
Hisbol, 1993), 51.
35. AGI, Lima 302 (“que es el estilo que aca se tiene quando no se quiere hazer nada”).
36. Heidi V. Scott, Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 72.
37. Peter Gose, Invaders as Ancestors: On the Intercultural Making and Unmaking of
Spanish Colonialism in the Andes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008),
190–91.
38. AGI, Escribanía 501B, pt. 1, fol. 10r.
39. AGI, Charcas 16, 25, no. 136, fol. 2r.
40. “Gaspar Montero, oficial mayor que fue de la secretaria de governacion del virrey
Enríquez,” testimony on behalf of Pedro de Castro, February 1592, AGI,
Escribanía 501B, pt. 1, fol. 49v.
41. Response of Pedro de Castro, Lima, February 28, 1592, AGI, Escribanía 501B, pt. 1,
fol. 47v.
42. Testimony of Juan Flores, priest of Chorrillo and Ziacaya, February 1592, AGI
Escribanía 501B, pt. 1, fol. 51r; testimony of Marcos Cano, merchant, fol. 53r;
testimony of Simon [?] Gutierrez, corregidor de Vilcas, f. 51v; testimony of

Maestro de Campo Rodrigo de Campuzano, former corregidor of Asillo y
Asangaro, fol. 52v.
43. Testimony of Juan de Argueta Vizcaino, February 1592, AGI, Escribanía 501B,
pt. 1, fols. 50v–51r.
44. Testimony presented by Castro before the corregidor de Abancay, Santa Catalina
de Curaguara, Peru, March 30, 1590, AGI, Escribanía 845B, no. 2, pt. 1, fols. 5–9.
45. AGI, Escribanía 501B, pt. 1, fols. 34r–34v.
46. AGI, Escribanía 845B, no. 2, pt. 1, fol. 3r (“Procuré salir de la prission sin hazer
quebrantamiento alguno della hallando aviertas las puertas de la carcel y pro-
siguiendo mi via”).
47. Ismael Silva Montañes, Hombres y mujeres del siglo XVI venezolano (Caracas:
Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1983), 1:354–55. Castro presented to the cabildo
of Caracas his appointment from the Audiencia of Santo Domingo (whether real
or forged) as juez de residencia against Diego de Leguizamón on January 3, 1594.
48. Summary of case with judge’s comments in margin, n.d. but apparently 1602,
AGI, Escribanía 501B, pt. 1, fols. 96–101.
49. “Expediente de información y licencia de pasajero a Indias de Pedro de Castro
Hinojosa, vecino de Lima,” April 1, 1604, AGI, Contratación 5281, no. 63. Castro
petitioned to travel with a son and a nephew.
50. Royal order, Lima, April 26, 1585, AGI, Escribanía 501B, pt. 1, fols. 56v–59r.
51. Actas del Cabildo de Caracas (Caracas: Editorial Elite, 1943), 1:323.
52. Juan Antonio Alejandre García, “Estudio histórico del delito de falsedad docu-
mental,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Espanol 42 (1972): 161, 164.
53. Siete Partidas, pt. 7, tit. 7, law 1; Luis Emilio Rojas Aguirre, “Historia dogmática
de la falsedad documental,” Revista de Derecho de la Pontificia Universidad
Católica de Valparaíso 39 (2012), 551–53.
54. Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
55. Ibid., 95–96. Litigation, however, continued about the status of the property in
question.
56. Ibid., 122.
57. For this very reason, later jurists rejected defining falsification by reference to
“truth,” a definition they considered “metaphysical.” Rojas Aguirre, “Historia
dogmática,” 551–55.
58. Eco, “Fakes and Forgeries,” 174–75, 201.
59. James E. Wadsworth, “Charlatan in the Backlands: Inquisition and Imposture in
Colonial Brazil,” Luso-Brazilian Review 49, no. 1 (2012): 63–95; Javier Villa Flores,
“Wandering Swindlers: Imposture, Style, and the Inquisition’s Pedagogy of Fear
in Colonial Mexico,” Colonial Latin American Review 17 (2008): 251–72; Miriam
Eliav-Feldon, Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012). Much of the scholarship has focused on the Anglophone
sphere. Jennine Hurl-Eamon, “The Westminster Impostors: Impersonating Law

Enforcement in Early Eighteenth-Century London,” Eighteenth-Century
Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 461–83; Thomas Kidd, “Passing as a Pastor: Clerical
Imposture in the Colonial Atlantic World,” Religion and American Culture: A
Journal of Interpretation 14, no. 2 (2004), 149–74; Tobias Hug, Impostures in Early
Modern England: Representations and Perceptions of Fraudulent Identities
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009), chap. 2.
60. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Self-Fashioning: Spanish America,” in Lexikon of the
Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, ed. Evonne Levy
and Kenneth Mills (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 304–6; Jorge
Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories,
Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 135–42. Cañizares-Esguerra also discusses
more straightforwardly mercenary examples of imposture as forms of “self-
fashioning,” including the case discussed in Villa Flores, “Wandering Swindlers.”
See also Laura Bass, “Self-Fashioning: Spain,” in Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque:
Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, ed. Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 301–3.
61. Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the
Andes, 1810–1910 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 118–19.
62. José María Arguedas, Yawar Fiesta (1941; repr., Lima: Editorial Horizonte,
2011), 46.
CHAPTER T WO
From Corrupt to Criminal

reflections on the gre at potosí mint fr aud of 16 49
k
Kris Lane
Toda esta vida es hurtar, All this life is to steal,

no es el ser ladrón afrenta, to be a thief is no affront,
que como este mundo es venta, since this world is but a sale,
en él es propio el robar: in it, to rob is proper:
nadie verás castigar, you won’t see anyone punished,
porque hurta plata, o cobre; for filching silver, or copper;
que al que azotan, es por pobre since one is whipped for being poor
de suerte, favor, y trazas: in luck, favor, and appearances:
Este mundo es juego de bazas, this world is a game of chance,
que sólo el que roba, triunfa, y manda. only he who robs, wins and commands.
—quevedo 1
In August 1650 Pedro Congo, a twenty-three-year-old mint worker in the

Imperial Villa of Potosí in Upper Peru (now Bolivia), testified secretly
before an investigative judge named Dr. Francisco de Nestares Marín.
Though a slave, Congo was both an eyewitness to and a participant in what
was probably the biggest debasement scam in world history up to this time.
Nestares Marín, the investigator, had been named the president of the
regional audiencia (appellate court) in Charcas, with jurisdiction over
Potosí, but his main job was to root out mint fraud and punish the culprits.
The presidency gave him special executive authority.
33
34 Kris Lane
Despite a hard-earned reputation as good money, Potosí’s coins had been

found light and often short of silver since at least the 1630s. By the late 1640s
the frequency and extent of debasement, along with some outright counter-
feiting in secret workshops, had reached intolerable levels. Rumor had it that
the problem was mostly internal, within the mint itself. The great debase-
ment, in other words, was an inside job.
Whoever they were, the Potosí defrauders’ timing was awful. Castile was
reeling from currency-related troubles in the aftermath of the Portuguese
and Catalan rebellions of 1640, as well as ongoing losses in the Netherlands,
war with France, and unrest in Italy. One problem was the peninsula’s own
intentionally debased copper coinage, or vellón, but foreign creditors were
also starting to wonder if even the fabled silver of Potosí was no longer trust-
worthy. Its coins were falling short of face value, with some assaying at over
half copper when they should have contained no more than 7 percent. Spain’s
Council of the Indies sent magistrate-investigators to root out treasury fraud
in Alto Perú beginning in the 1620s, but each of them was bribed, scared off,
or recalled.
Nestares Marín was different. A most serious visitador (investigator), to
judge from the tone of his many letters to the Council of the Indies and to
Peru’s viceroy, the Count of Salvatierra in Lima, Nestares Marín was
Navarrese by birth and held twin doctorates in civil and canon law from the
University of Bologna’s Spanish College of San Clemente. He had served
Spain’s Holy Office of the Inquisition for almost twenty years, first in Galicia
and then in Valladolid. Inquisition records suggest that he had little affinity
for the priesthood, for he appears to have resisted ordination until he could
no longer do so without losing his job.
A member of what one historian has called the “secular leaders” of the
seventeenth-century Holy Office, Nestares Marín rose to the post of chief
inquisitor in Valladolid when someone decided he would make a good
cleanup artist in the Americas.2 Perhaps a highly placed enemy wanted to get
rid of him. In any case, King Philip IV called a special junta to draw up secret
instructions.3 The idea that an inquisitor might be selected as an investigator
of high crimes in the Indies was not new. In his classic study of seventeenth-
century Quito, John Leddy Phelan noted that inquisitors were often trusted
by the king and his councilors because they were beholden to the Crown but
were outside the corps of ordinary bureaucrats or regular religious orders.
They could not marry, which in theory limited their corruptibility on-site.
From Corrupt to Criminal 35
Like certain archbishop-viceroys, they had the Church’s tools at their dis-
posal, yet most inspectors general were given strict guidelines so that their
zeal for reform would not upset the flow of commerce and tribute payment.
That is, they were supposed to be dispassionate judges in the image of the
king, not “secret judgments of God.” 4
Once he was named audiencia president and inspector general of the
royal mint in 1647, Nestares Marín pledged to clean up the rotten, fractious
mess that was Alto Perú. It was time to redraw the line between what was
merely corrupt and what was criminal. Few things fell outside the
ex-inquisitor’s purview, and from the start of his reform program he openly
clashed with the viceroy. As the head of the Audiencia of Charcas, Nestares
Marín had been granted special powers not only to investigate but also to
punish without appeal. Before he died in La Plata in 1660, Nestares Marín
had several of Potosí’s most prominent citizens garroted and their corpses
publicly displayed, hanging from a gallows in the Imperial Villa’s main
plaza. Many others who were sentenced to death fled in terror. Several died
in jail.
s l av e s : t h e r oya l i n s p e c t o r ’ s e y e s
Among Francisco de Nestares Marín’s star witnesses were men like Pedro
Congo. The mint’s slaves had little to lose, and they had witnessed virtually
everything. Congo had first testified in 1648 along with Juan Flores and several
other mint slaves belonging to the cutting-house boss, or capataz, Fabián Sán-
chez Romero. In 1650 Congo ratified his earlier testimony and added new
details. The reason for the new testimony was Nestares Marín’s desire to build
an airtight case against a fugitive Spaniard named Miguel Lizagárate, the
accomplice of another Spaniard, the silver merchant Miguel de Casanova. At
twenty-three, Congo had already worked for six years in Sánchez Romero’s
cutting house, or coin-blank workshop (hornaza), serving as hammerer [mar-
tillador], shaper [moyador], “and currently learning to be a sizer [tallador] and
serving as temporary floor boss [mandador] in lieu of the black man Mateo
Alemán.”5 Alemán, presumably named for the Spanish author of the pica-
resque novel Guzmán de Alfarache, was said to be ill. He would also testify.
Congo continued his testimony with a discussion of the ingots, the
molded masses of silver to be cut into coin blanks:
36 Kris Lane
In the six years’ time until the arrival of his lordship the lord president
and inspector general in this villa, there was worked in the said cutting
house of the said master very bad money, because of the flat ingots
[rieles] they received from the silver merchants of this same mint, who
were Fernán Rodríguez, Francisco Gómez de la Rocha, Miguel de Casa-
nova, don Luis de Vila, and Francisco Ximénez de Cervantes, plus the
scissel [silver trimmings] of treasurer Bartolomé Fernández, plus don
Diego de Ecalada and Miguel Ruiz; the said ingots they brought in were
of very bad silver, appearing to this witness to be half copper and half
silver, because when they worked the said ingots the money they made
fell to pieces, and they melted away in the little furnace where they refire
[i.e., anneal] the said silver so as to be able to work it, for which reason
there were many losses in the batches that were worked, since much of
the copper went up in smoke. And his master Fabián Sánchez Romero,
on learning of the shortfalls that appeared in the said batches, cruelly
whipped this deponent and his companions, blaming them for stealing
that which was lacking, but thus it was that the losses came from the bad
silver brought in by the said silver merchants, and the same could be
said for having seen it, not only this deponent but also his companions,
their names being Mateo Alemán, Juan Bentura, Manuel Bata, Manuel
Canbache, Gerónimo Congo, García Malanba, Bentura Malamba, Pedro
Pérez, Cristóbal Joha, Domingo Álvarez de la Cruz, Mateo Francisco,
Francisco Cacheo, Benito Malenba, and Juan Chuquicindo.6
Pedro Congo then testified that three of these men—Mateo Alemán,

Gerónimo Congo, and García Malanba—had been ordered by their master,
Sánchez Romero, to swap adulterated flat ingots for good ones at midnight
in order to get around the inspections routinely made by the mint’s smeltery
foreman. He was apparently one of the few mint officials not willing to be
bribed or intimidated. The mixed ingots were then brought to the cutting
house to be snipped and hammered into coin blanks, or planchets (cospeles).
Congo said he had seen how Lizagárate and Sánchez Romero kept accounts
of all this on small pieces of paper. Everything was weighed on a large
balance.
There was no mistaking that this was intentional and systematic fraud,
not a onetime occurrence. On the two occasions when he witnessed the
exchanges, Congo claimed that about six hundred pounds of adulterated
ingots had entered the cutting house, and for all this the slaves had been
given a total of twelve or fourteen pesos “to distribute among themselves” in

order to keep quiet and continue their work.
A man described as a thirty-year-old enslaved mulatto named Juan Ben-
tura testified next. Bentura claimed that he had worked in the mint for twelve
years after having been sold to a cutting-house boss by a blacksmith. Sánchez
Romero was his third capataz, but it appears that Bentura had always stayed
with the same core group of enslaved workers, laboring in the same hornaza.
Bentura had worked as a picador [trimmer], ajustador [adjuster], and mira-
dor [examiner], “and at present he works in hammering, trimming, and
adjusting when the need arises.” Most of what Bentura said matched Congo’s
testimony, but he added details. The year of most fraud, according to Ben-
tura, was 1648, at least from what he had personally seen. This was important
in part because an investigation that included slave testimonies was already
under way in 1647, before the arrival of Nestares Marín. Mint fraud was
reaching its peak precisely as the former inquisitor was making his way to
Potosí. His predecessor, an audiencia judge in La Plata named Pedro de
Azaña, would thus have to pay for his failure to intervene.7
A highlight of Bentura’s testimony was his claim that a female slave of
Fabián Sánchez Romero’s named Andrea Teresa had on several occasions
smuggled debased ingots into the cutting house from her master’s quarters.
These were hidden, according to Bentura, in a rawhide chest beneath rolls of
tobacco, part of the slaves’ rations. Female slaves and free women of color
were suspected of moving metals in and out of the Potosí mint on several
occasions, but this was the most significant instance of such traffic. Other
female slaves would be accused of attempting to poison the visitador Nestares
Marín when preparing his meals; these charges sped the execution of the
fraud’s most famous figure, the silver merchant and financier Francisco
Gómez de la Rocha.
Bentura offered more details of how the “bad ingots” brought to the cut-
ting house by Andrea Teresa had been annealed “with all haste,” so as not to
draw the attention of the mint’s guards, and cut into cospeles known as
moneda negra, or “black money.” Many of the tarnished planchets, as Congo
had also said, shattered in the process of hammering, leaving considerable
scizzel, or useless bits of metal in need of refounding. The surviving blanks
were mixed in with a large batch of presumably good ones. Not every coin
was debased, but many were. The worst ones were brittle and pink.
Next to testify was another of Pedro Congo’s companions. The scribe
wrote, “He said he is called Mateo Alemán and that he is of the Congo nation
38 Kris Lane
in Guinea.” Alemán added that he had been in Potosí for about thirty of his
forty-four years. He would have been born about the time that the first copies
of Guzmán de Alfarache reached the Indies. We now know that the novel
circulated in Potosí.8 Initially Alemán had worked as a hatmaker, but like
Bentura he had ended up in one of the mint’s six cutting houses, the same
one leased from the Crown only three or four years earlier by Fabián Sánchez
Romero. Clearly this master had entered the coin-blank business with the
express aim of defrauding the king quickly and thoroughly. Alemán was an
old hand at forty-four, having worked in the same cutting house for about
twenty years. Sánchez Romero was his fourth capataz.
Alemán described himself as a “trained [coin-blank] hammerer, trimmer,
measurer, and adjuster, and also guard and overseer of the said workshop.”
Basically, he did everything. Perhaps because of his many years’ experience
in the mint, Alemán offered few details in his testimony other than to con-
firm the basic claims of his coworkers. He said that he and the others had
seen the midnight ingot exchange because they were up working. Night work
would turn out to be one of Visitador Nestares Marín’s first concerns. He
wanted it stopped immediately. He also must not have trusted Alemán, since
he was one of the few slaves on the visitador’s 1649 list of culpados, or “guilty
ones.” Whether a pícaro (mischievous person), or a simple despicador (one
who removes sharp edges), Mateo Alemán had been too reticent.
Let us pause a moment to clarify a few things. By 1648 Potosí’s mint was
producing more coins than ever, more than 3 million pesos a year, even as
the mines were declining rapidly in output—not only those of the Cerro Rico
but also those of Oruro, the region’s second most important silver district.
There were promising new finds popping up north and south of Potosí, but
none would return the city to its glory days circa 1600. In the high and barren
province of Los Lípes, the silver camp of San Antonio del Nuevo Mundo was
in an uproar, the site of frequent murders. Its mines were flooding.9
Why would the mint be producing substantially more coins when the
mines were producing much less silver? The only answer seems to be that
debasement had become a routine practice, at least among a considerable
number of the city’s silver merchants and mint employees. Documents sug-
gest that by 1640 or earlier, unchecked fraud enabled the mint to expand,
putting high demands on a growing number of slaves (about 150 of them) and
also creating feeder businesses. These included a kind of scrap metal recy-
cling ring that linked pawnshop owners to petty thieves who stole everything
from kettles to pewter plates, which then made their way into the coinage.
Meanwhile, the region’s copper producers could not have been happier, for
their product was displacing more and more silver. Copper prices doubled in
just a few years.
The logic—almost genius—of rising debasement in the midst of a mining
crisis appealed to certain locals, including several powerful but heavily
indebted silver refinery owners, or azogueros, but from the outside all this
looked like sheer insanity. Debasing the coin of the realm was an act of lèse
majesté, which was a capital crime. Private citizens could not simply “adjust”
the coinage to suit their liquidity needs. Seen from this angle, Potosí’s rogue
subjects were robbing the king. At some point they would have to pay him
back; hence the punishing visitation by Nestares Marín.
Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that debasement was almost a natu-
ral response to declining silver output, especially given that the mint was
nearly entirely run by private contractors who also served as Potosí’s most
risk-hungry bankers. Peter Bakewell has noted that earlier admonitions to
produce coinage of full weight and purity “produced no lasting improve-
ment, as would indeed have been expected, since the cause of the fraud lay
as much in the inexorably rising cost of extracting and refining silver, and
the consequent temptation to adulterate the metal with cheaper additives
before it was ‘marketed’ at the mint, as it did in the peculations of individu-
als.” Yet it was “sinful” individuals, Bakewell added, who “were a more obvi-
ous target for governmental action.”10 The king’s inspector general could not
blame everyone, especially if he was expected to keep Potosí from crashing,
so who best to target?
Like the good inquisitor he was—or rather, had been, since he was sent to
the Indies without an inquisitor’s title—Nestares Marín began cleaning up
the mint by exposing the most powerful men involved, knowing they were
capable of subverting his mission or even killing him. Threats of murder
were a feature of his tenure in Potosí from the beginning, but he resisted
intimidation. Nestares Marín tried at first to bargain with the principals, as
he had been instructed, seeking substantial fines, or composiciones, a stan-
dard means of settling “white-collar” crimes in Spain and the Indies. In the
language of present-day financial malfeasance and government regulation,
the Crown considered Potosí “too big to fail,” and several of its richest men
“too big to jail.” Disrupting the business of the Cerro Rico could prove cata-
strophic all around if not handled properly.
But Potosí’s poderosos (powerful elite) soon turned on Nestares Marín, or
so he claimed. The silver merchant Francisco Gómez de la Rocha allegedly
40 Kris Lane
ordered a female slave to poison the visitador’s food. Nestares Marín shot
back, ordering two executions in quick succession. It was an extremely deli-
cate task, but the royal inspector apparently hoped that exemplary punish-
ments of top-level merchants and functionaries, followed by a sequence of
similarly harsh convictions, would end the king’s nightmare. Nestares Marín
would also have to shuffle the deeply corrupted Audiencia of Charcas, send-
ing most of its judges into exile. He would also have to dispose of Potosí’s
rotten corregidor (Spanish provincial administrator), who had been a thorn
in his side since the day Nestares Marín came to town.
Nestares Marín hoped it would not be so, but his investigation and its long
aftermath helped mark the end of Potosí’s dominance as the world’s silver
supplier. The writing had already appeared on the wall, and as we have seen,
the mint fraud was a symptom rather than a cause. Mine output continued
to fall after 1650, and by the late seventeenth century the silver of Mexico
replaced Potosí’s as the global standard. Potosí kept producing at a modest
level, but in the global scheme of things it became a faded legend after 1650,
a cautionary tale of government—or zealous individual—overreach. Such
was the judgment of local historian Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, writ-
ing some seventy-five years later.11 The judge Nestares Marín had been a
scourge after all, a secret judgment of God.
j u d g m e n t d ay i n t h e i m p e r i a l v i l l a
How important were the hundreds of enslaved African men who kept the
Potosí mint running? Clearly they were known to be at the center of the
scandal by the early 1640s, even though they were not the main culprits
sought by Francisco de Nestares Marín. A dispute over their testimonies is
found in the case against royal assayer Felipe Ramírez de Arellano, a fifty-
seven-year-old former silversmith from Seville. Charged with taking bribes
and with allowing his initial (R) to appear on coins he knew to be substan-
dard, Ramirez was sentenced to death by Nestares Marín in late December
1649. Ramírez had almost no time to respond, but a paid advocate did file
papers in his defense.
The assayer Ramírez blamed deceitful silver merchants, a few “capital
enemies,” and most of all, the handful of slaves who had provided the most
damning testimonies: “And the blacks Pedro de Matamba and Gaspar de
Peralta, and the mulatto Juan Bentura, and the blacks Antón Patón and
Antonio de Cumsa, all slaves of the said individuals [i.e., Ramírez’s alleged
capital enemies], aside from being vile persons, drunks, thieves, and of
depraved customs, do not agree on a single thing that implicates my client,
nor do they give reason for their claims, and they testify on vain presump-
tions.”12 Desperation, it seems, amplified prejudice.
Ramírez’s lawyer, Mateo Pérez Osorio, continued, singling out the slaves
of Francisco Gómez de la Rocha, the silver merchant considered to be the
mastermind of the fraud. (Rocha, as he came to be known, was facing exe-
cution at exactly the same time.) These enslaved men were Gonzalo Soto-
mayor, Pedro Largo (“Long Pete”), and Pedro Lobo (“Wolf Pete”). Pérez
Osorio alleged “that the said slaves possess the same defects and vices as
the other slaves mentioned, which is to say they go about ‘marked’ [tacha-
dos] as thieves, drunks, and vile people of evil lives and customs that are
notorious.” Several witnesses testified on Ramírez’s behalf, saying he had
been threatened by Rocha and his slaves. He had been intimidated into
submission.
Ramírez also said that he had been fooled by slaves in the mint’s smeltery
who had been ordered to switch good coin metal ingots for bad ones on several
occasions. “The said slaves were so thoroughly bribed that they took out the
good ingots that were under guard there in order to give them to the assayer so
that he would assay these and not the bad ones.” Finally, even Ramírez’s own
slave, twenty-six-year-old Domingo Ramírez, testified that his master had been
threatened with a dagger by Rocha himself when he questioned a batch of
ingots. He had been told, “Let them pass” and also “Do as you please, because
the lord investigator is coming anyway.” On another occasion Rocha and his
slave Antonio Pavón had ordered Ramírez out of his apartment on the mint
grounds and threatened to kill him if he did not sign off on twenty-one batches
of rieles, debased (flat) ingots that would yield tens of thousands of eight-real
coins—or such was the claim of Ramírez’s faithful slave.
It was no use. Nestares Marín had already decided the case. He trusted the
other slaves’ testimony against the royal assayer, specifically the repeated
claim that he had willingly received bribes, and sentenced him to hang in the
plaza in front of the mint. Ramírez’s head would subsequently be placed on
a pike above the mint door, and if anyone should try to take it down they
would face two hundred lashes and six years’ galley service. This was if the
person was considered “vile.” If the culprit was deemed “noble,” he might
forfeit half his goods and be sent to Chile for six years’ military service.
Nestares Marín was serious, but he chose to show a degree of mercy by
42 Kris Lane
ordering Ramírez throttled inside the mint, “at the grate of the portal where
the money is coined.”
The very next day, Friday, February 25, 1650, at 6:00 p.m., “the sentence of
death was executed.” The errant treasurer whose R had appeared on so many
debased coins “was given the garrote against the grate of the portal where
money is coined until it appeared that he died naturally.” The next day at
5:00 a.m. “they removed from the mint of this villa the body of the said Felipe
Ramírez, by all appearances defunct, and they hung it from a three-posted
gallows in the public square of this Villa of Potosí.” Nestares Marín declared
that the sentence and execution should “serve as an example for this
republic.”
The town crier then offered the following quite technical proclamation:
This is the justice ordered done by the king our lord to this man for hav-
ing ill used the post of assayer of the mint, letting pass in the assays sil-
ver that was supposed to be of the fineness of eleven dineros and four
grains, short by 130 quartillos in each mark, and further in the form that
the [price of] copper went up from forty pesos to eighty [per hundred-
weight] because of the great quantity that in his time was spent in the
smeltings.13
And because he served as judge and witness to the surety of the coin,
he falsified it by the bribes he received from the merchants, in more than
50,000 pesos in coin, sweepings, and bars, and for having consented to
allow them to smelt bars without having been taxed the [king’s] fifth.
And for having failed to assay a great quantity of ingots and
consenting that they be made into money without being assayed.
And for having removed a great quantity of ingots from the mint and
for the pact that he made specially with a merchant, giving him license
to smelt as he wished for three days in exchange for three bars [of silver]
that he was given.
And the last item, a baroque proverb:
“He who does thus, thus shall he pay.” (Quien tal hase que tal pague)
The document ends by noting that these words were both proclaimed and
“published,” and then read before “a great concourse of people.” Later in the
day, Nestares Marín ordered the assayer’s head cut off and his body buried.
There is much more to say about this case, but among its important twists
was the fact that Ramírez, although he was executed for it, did not exactly
hold the office of ensayador (royal assayer) and fundidor mayor (chief smelter)
of Potosí’s royal mint. The position had been purchased at an auction and
held for several years in absentia by a rich man in Lima, Juan de Figueroa,
who enjoyed its substantial rent streams. Figueroa had apparently never been
to Potosí. The hapless subcontractor Ramírez paid a fee to a third party and
made his income from silver sweepings left over from smelting. Despite his
high-profile execution and likely guilt, Ramírez was a small cog in a machine
built and directed by others.
In sum, the increasingly unregulated process of coin manufacturing that
developed in Potosí over the course of the 1630s and 1640s relied on system-
atic bribery, routine intimidation, physical abuse, and scapegoating. Internal
mint records reveal that imprisoned slaves had been blamed for debasement,
theft, and other problems for decades, which helped to mask the fraud.14 For
them to testify against their masters was dangerous, but in the end it was a
kind of payback. It took Nestares Marín’s massive investigation to blow the
lid off the great fraud of the 1640s, which was arguably the greatest challenge
to royal authority in Peru since the rebellion of the conquistador Gonzalo
Pizarro a hundred years earlier.
the big picture
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Potosí in the making of the modern

world, or the capitalist world system. According to tax records, the city’s Cerro
Rico, or “Rich Hill,” produced about 20 percent of the global silver between the
mineral’s discovery in 1545 and Bolivian independence in 1825. Potosí’s share
was much higher during the boom years, between 1575 and 1640, approaching
50 percent of world output.15 In the first century after discovery a large propor-
tion of Potosí’s silver reached the world in the form of standard seventy-pound
bars along with substantial untaxed ingots known as piñas, or “pinecones,”
usually weighing thirty or forty pounds. But by the early seventeenth century
a considerable and growing share of Potosí silver was coined in the city of
Potosí itself. For many, Potosí became synonymous with the peso de a ocho, or
“piece of eight,” a peso of eight reals—also known as a patacón.
The Potosí mint, or Casa Real de la Moneda, was founded in 1574 by order
of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who was best known for forcing Native
44 Kris Lane
Andeans into villages and for formalizing the mine mita (a system of com-
pulsory rotating labor). The city’s silver brokers were slow to embrace Potosí’s
mint, which was largely staffed by enslaved Africans, but soon it produced
several million pesos’ worth of handmade coins per year. At just under an
ounce of 93 percent fine silver, tempered with copper, the rough-hewn
patacón quickly became the standard coin of global trade—and ransom. In
North Africa, the coins were accepted in exchange for Christian captives
with the caveat “Minted by the enemy of religion, the Christian; may God
destroy him.”16
Shipped out by the millions, Potosí’s patacóns were used to purchase
slaves in Angola, cinnamon in Ceylon, pepper in India and Java, and silk in
China.17 They were also used to buy furs in Russia and gems in Persia. Sol-
diers all over Eurasia received wages in this coin or fractions of it. Millions
of coins left the Americas for Asia via the Manila Galleon fleet that sailed
from Acapulco each year, and more still traveled east with Portuguese,
Dutch, English, and French traders.18
Taken together, the royal mints of Seville and Mexico City probably pro-
duced as many or more of these world trade coins as Potosí in the first half
of the seventeenth century, but it was Potosí’s cachet as the world symbol for
wealth in silver that heightened trust in its money.19 Early coins with the
mint mark P were often heavy and overfine and thus subject to culling and
hoarding.
All this changed in the 1620s, when the numerous mines of the Cerro Rico
started to become depleted. New discoveries at Chayanta, Oruro, Chocaya,
and other mining sites in Potosí’s hinterland helped offset the decline, but
the long-range prospects were not good, at least not for the city’s biggest and
most established mining industrialists and merchants. The mita subsidy was
under attack; indigenous populations were declining as a result of disease
epidemics, forced migration, and overwork; and the Crown’s monopoly sup-
ply of mercury, the key reagent in silver refining, was unsteady. Repeated
crises struck the mercury mines of Huancavelica, and things were not much
better at the mines of Almadén in Spain. Dutch corsairs and colonizers in
Brazil and Chile added to the menace.
Rumors of debased Potosí silver bars and coins spread soon after 1600, but
no evidence of systematic fraud has emerged for these years. Occasional
complaints resurfaced in Seville in the 1620s, prompting calls for careful
inspections of the mint and the neighboring royal treasury office by both
regional and outside investigators. Yet it was only in the late 1630s that Crown
and metropolitan merchant howls about debasement provoked a royal reac-

tion. Something was badly amiss in the high Andes. To ignore the problem
was to forfeit control of the global symbol of Habsburg fiscal power, to lose
credit in every sense of the term. King Philip IV’s reputation, the key to his
ability to wage war, was at stake.
It could be that the 1640 rebellions of Portugal and Catalonia diverted the
Crown’s attention from problems with money coming from Potosí, but it was
not long until the matter returned, having metastasized. The Crown’s own
debased and frequently devalued copper currency, or vellón, which was
restricted to peninsular Castile, relied on trust in a steady stream of good
silver—much of it coined—coming from the ostensibly Castilian Indies.20
Again, people tended to cull and hoard Potosí coins in the belief that they
were trustworthy and perhaps superior to other mint issues.
In 1641 merchants in Genoa and Antwerp published broadsides announc-
ing that patacóns with the Potosí mintmark were substandard.21 Many were
debased by 20 percent or more, and these appeared not to be counterfeits
dumped into the Spanish market by the Habsburgs’ many enemies. Clever
Frenchmen and other northern Europeans had been doing this with copper
coins in order to manipulate official exchange rates and suck silver out of
Castile.22
Despite these overlapping concerns with copper coins, the problem of bad
silver coins from Peru was basically new. The Genoese had reason to know
what they were looking at, having served as Spain’s central bankers for most
of Philip III’s and a portion of Philip IV’s reigns. Millions of silver pesos
flowed annually to Genoa, which were then mostly sent on to the Nether-
lands to cover spiraling war costs—hence the simultaneous warnings in Ant-
werp, at the other end of the Spanish Road (a military-supply and trade
route).
Just beyond Spanish Flanders in the financial heart of Holland, Amster-
dam’s bustling Wisselbank was perhaps more accustomed to handling fluc-
tuations in coin fineness, having dealt with debased German coins from the
so-called Wipper and Kipper inflations of 1619–1623.23 But now the concern
was with how to flush bad Peruvian coins into global markets—particularly
in the Far East, where they were most in demand—without straining fragile
commercial ties.
There were many factors to consider. For example, the Dutch won exclu-
sive European access to Japanese silver in 1639, a boon for their trade with
China, but their East India Company still relied heavily on Spanish silver
46 Kris Lane
coins to purchase Asian spices and other luxuries. Bad money would surely
chase out good, as predicted by Gresham’s Law, but it remained unclear
exactly where the chase would lead and who would lose the most when the
news about massive Peruvian debasement was fully out. Money markets
were fickle, more so in an age of general crisis, and by 1650 the Wisselbank
faced a shortage of money in the form of coins.24
Spanish officials in Potosí and La Plata had been ordered to investigate
mint operations in the early 1630s. It appears they did so only halfheartedly.
The Crown’s inspector general, Juan de Carvajal y Sande, was recalled to
Lima in 1635 as a result of infighting he allegedly provoked among Basques
and immigrants from Extremadura, in southwest Spain. Sande, an
Extremaduran, was seen as a friend and partisan of this faction. Fearful of a
return to the ethnic warfare among Spanish immigrants that had rocked
Potosí and threatened to interrupt silver production in the 1620s, the Crown
gave in and called him home.25 A new visitador, Juan de Palacios, was sent to
Potosí in 1642, but he too was quickly recalled, and there is some hint that
Peru’s viceroy, the Marquis of Mancera, was protecting clients. Suspending
the two visitas enabled the mint fraud that was already underway to take root
and grow.
We have seen from the testimonies above that throughout the 1640s
debasement of large batches of coins became a common practice in the Potosí
mint, and before long it was an open secret. The great scam was finally dis-
articulated beginning in 1649, and it is only with the Nestares Marín inves-
tigation that we get a clear picture of the myriad links formed among mine
owners, royal officials, and mint operators some time around 1640. Here was
the nexus of collusion, the first cataract in a cascade of corrupt practices that
made criminality seem increasingly normal. Before we address the matter of
corruption and the quick slide to lèse majesté, it may be worth examining
how the Potosí mint came to be and how it developed over time. What was
special, or potentially malignant, about it?
m i n t i n g t h e k i n g ’s c o i n a g e
The Potosí mint—like the peninsular Castilian mints at Seville, Segovia,

Granada, Cuenca, Valladolid, Burgos, Toledo, and Madrid—was an
enclosed space, rather like a convent or a prison. Encompassing about half
a city block, Potosí’s Casa Real de la Moneda had its own magistrates and
the right to punish employees in all but capital cases. Yet notably, as in
Spain, actual coin production in Potosí was largely subcontracted to
bonded lessees.
There was one major innovation that set the mint of Potosí, and others in
the Spanish Indies, apart. Beginning in Mexico City around 1540, enslaved
Africans were forced to do the hard work of coin-blank cutting, among other
labor-intensive tasks.26 Mechanization was extremely rare before the eigh-
teenth century. The Tyrolean new mint at Segovia, built in 1583 for Philip II
by imported Austrian artisans, was the exception that proved the rule. A
technical marvel that impressed foreign visitors in its early years, the hydrau-
lic machine of Segovia broke down frequently and remained barely operable
through much of the seventeenth century.27
Mint records for early modern Iberia (Spain and Portugal) show virtually
no evidence of slave labor. Hard work was done by bonded artisans and their
apprentices. In Seville the lowest-ranking workers were called obreros francos
(free workers).28 Mint slavery was introduced to Potosí in 1574 by an invited
Mexico City mint official, there to set up shop for Viceroy Francisco de
Toledo. Toledo seems to have approved, perhaps believing that enslaved
workers could be more carefully monitored than indigenous draftees or even
hired Spaniards. Indeed, records show that Potosí’s mint slaves were essen-
tially prisoners, forbidden to leave the premises except on certain feast days.
Their periodic escapes into town fill the Potosí mint’s internal records for the
seventeenth century. Mint records from these years for Seville, Granada, and
Cuenca suggest that no self-respecting Spanish obrero would submit to such
treatment.29 The work of cutting coins was equally hard on both sides of the
Atlantic, but a different set of rules applied in Spain than in the Indies.
Slavery was important in Potosí’s mint for various reasons, but the most
important one was institutional knowledge. As permanent employees trapped
on-site, slaves were both ideal accomplices and ideal witnesses. As seen above,
even before Francisco de Nestares Marín’s arrival in December 1648, several
slaves working in the Potosí mint escaped to La Plata to testify that they had
been ordered to add extra copper at the mint’s smeltery late at night to reduce
coin-metal fineness, sometimes by a substantial margin. The slaves had
escaped after cruel punishments delivered by a master, Juan Hidalgo, who
turned out to be one of the key defrauders. Internal mint records show that he
had been blaming them for silver theft as part of a cover-up.30
48 Kris Lane
According to the slave testimonies, there were variations on the debase-

ment process, but as we have seen, it usually involved tasking enslaved
women to smuggle extra copper onto the mint premises when delivering
food to Spanish officials and tobacco to slaves. Copper was mined in hills not
far from the Cerro Rico, but notary records reveal that a steadier supply
came from Oruro in the years of the great debasement.31 Refiners used cop-
per in the amalgamation process as well, and copper cauldrons and other
utensils were commonly available in merchant shops and in hawkers’ tents
on the street.
In other cases debased coin metal was forged in the mint’s several slave-
staffed annealing furnaces and then added to batches of good coin-metal
ingots in the hope that royal inspectors would not dig too deeply into the
heap but would instead simply judge the whole batch by what was on top (the
assayer Felipe Ramírez de Arellano claimed as much, as seen above). Even so,
slaves testified that some coin blanks turned out to be exceedingly pink and
too brittle to be properly annealed, much less coined.
Slave testimonies suggest that although debasement became increasingly
common, and the volume of bad coins consequently higher, Potosí’s defraud-
ers sought to maintain a modicum of secrecy. They had reason to be discreet.
All over Europe ordinary counterfeiting was punished like treason, swiftly
and mercilessly.32 Yet this was something far more momentous: using a
highly productive royal mint from the inside to defraud the world. The royal
seal that appeared on Potosí coins was intended, along with the bonded royal
assayer’s initial, to guarantee proper weight and purity. Only the slightest
variations were tolerated, and coin blanks and finished coins that were too
heavy or too light were supposed to be withheld and resmelted after inspec-
tion. Mint officials had to keep up appearances even as they grew bolder in
ramping up the scale of their crimes.
Thus, debasing Potosí’s coins in this inside way and on such a grand scale
constituted a threat to royal sovereignty, which was an instance of high trea-
son. Whereas the king could debase and devalue copper coinage in Castile
to cover his debts as needed, usually at the expense of his poorest subjects,
the same could not be done with the silver of the Indies. Debasing royally
approved silver money from Potosí could not yet be seen as part of a clever
accounting scheme or a means of taxing the poor. It was akin to corrupting
the king’s own blood.33
What did Potosí’s mint defrauders think they were doing? Could they
possibly have believed they could get away with this kind of blatant,
physically manifest fraud forever? What, besides naked greed, might have
motivated them?
t h e t i e s t h at b i n d
As far as we know, only two prominent men were executed in Potosí as a

direct result of Francisco de Nestares Marín’s massive investigation that
began in earnest in 1649, although several high-ranking suspects died in jail
and many more fled before being sentenced to death. These included Potosí’s
highest-ranking royal magistrate, Corregidor Francisco Velarde Treviño,
along with mint officials of various ranks.
Most of the other alleged culprits whom Nestares Marín sentenced to
death were prominent precious metals brokers or arbitrageurs like Miguel de
Casanova. These mercaderes de plata (silver merchants) received silver bars
from Potosí’s dozens of mine and refinery owners as repayment for cash
advances. Having experienced little royal oversight since the time of Viceroy
Francisco de Toledo, the silver brokers had become accustomed to using the
mint as a cash machine or, more properly, as a private money factory. That is,
after paying the fee of one-fifth (quinto real) next door, they took their own
raw silver to the mint and had it made into their own money. Account books
explicitly reveal that this is how the brokers’ silver was accounted for from
start to finish. Silver merchants dealt with the mint’s four main cutting-
house subcontractors, who together oversaw about 150 slaves. Three of the
four main subcontractors were directly implicated in the debasement scam,
and the fourth was suspected of collusion.
Potosí coinage was the king’s money in terms of standards and forms
(making it legal tender), and for this the Crown took its cut in seignorage and
other taxes, but in the end it was still the silver brokers’ silver. That is how
they described it, and the merchants were known as “merchants of the mint,”
a privileged, almost monopoly post. This use of the royal mint for private
ends was perfectly legal as long as strict guidelines—basically royal checks
and balances mixed with medieval shop rules—were followed. The threat of
execution, at least theoretically, hung over everyone. The core mint ordi-
nances could be termed late medieval since they dated to 1497, issued in
Granada at the height of Isabella and Ferdinand’s rule.34 In other words, they
were not designed to regulate a slave-staffed money factory producing mil-
lions of coins a year on the far side of the world.
50 Kris Lane
Potosí’s wealthiest silver broker of the 1640s, the Extremaduran Francisco

Gómez de la Rocha, was in fact the first and most important man to be exe-
cuted. He was garroted on January 30, 1650, a few weeks before the execution
of royal assayer Ramírez. A local officeholder on the verge of being named a
Knight of Santiago, Rocha was a fast-rising merchant, purchasing royal favor
and subsidizing troops against Dutch interlopers in Chile in the early 1640s.
Following in the footsteps of others, he used the mint to advance his many
business interests.
Despite a modest start as a long-distance coca trader working in the jun-
gles east of Cuzco, Rocha had won status and a degree of respect in Potosí,
and thus although he was sentenced to be strung up in the main square, he
was in the end discreetly garroted inside the royal mint itself. The assayer
Ramírez, as we have seen, met the same fate. Both men’s corpses were briefly
displayed from a scaffold in the main square before decapitation and burial.
All this came after a near riot in Potosí, sparked by Rocha’s supporters as he
was forcibly removed from the sanctuary in the Franciscan monastery on the
orders of Inspector General Nestares Marín.
One might expect some celebration of this extreme punishment of cor-
rupt and criminal individuals, but the opposite occurred. For his efforts to
clean up the Potosí mint, Nestares Marín was instantly vilified. From the day
he arrived in Potosí, he wrote a stream of letters to the Council of the Indies
stating that he expected to be murdered at any moment. As he watched from
his second-floor apartment overlooking the main square, people burned him
in effigy, posted pasquinades denouncing his alleged excesses, and fired their
guns at his window.
History, in the form of eighteenth-century chronicler Bartolomé Arzáns
de Orsúa y Vela, a Potosí native, was equally unforgiving. Looking back
about seventy-five years later, Arzáns declared the Nestares Marín mint
investigation the third and final scourge sent by God to destroy his beloved
hometown. The first two scourges were the Basque-Vicuña wars of the early
1620s and the great flood of 1626, in which a reservoir built in Viceroy Tole-
do’s day burst and destroyed most of the city’s refineries, killing hundreds.
Was stopping a massive fraud in the royal mint worse punishment for the
city than a bloody vendetta cycle and a flood caused by shoddy maintenance?
For Arzáns the answer was yes.
For our purposes, Nestares Marín’s investigation, which dragged on until
his death in 1660, produced a vast corpus of documents that link dozens of
people to the great fraud. I have yet to finish unraveling the strands that
make up this tangled record, but it seems clear that Nestares Marín, whom
we might imagine to be a typically paranoid seventeenth-century Spanish
inquisitor, was correct in thinking that the huge crime he faced was not sim-
ply the fault of a few criminal masterminds. There had to be widespread
collusion between royal officials and private parties, otherwise the fraud
could not have gone on for so long, nor could it have grown so large.
As the royal investigator hinted in his earliest letters to the Council of the
Indies, the web of collusion undoubtedly led right up to the judges of the
nearby circuit court, the Audiencia de La Plata. Some officials in Lima were
probably also involved, and there was even some doubt about the former
viceroy, the Marquis of Mancera, who had staked his administration’s legacy
on defeating the Dutch in Chile and fortifying Lima, an extremely expensive
operation. By Nestares Marín’s reckoning, well over a hundred people were
implicated in Potosí alone. The suspects spanned a broad spectrum, from
slaves to high officials, and it was difficult to describe their crimes as specifi-
cally public or private. Whereas Rocha, the silver merchant, represented the
most blatantly criminal private side of things, Ramírez, the royal assayer,
represented what we would call the most corrupt. Ramírez was a bribed
Crown official.
t h e k i n g ’s o p p o s i n g d e s i r e s
Even if constant personal threats and the daily hardships of life at over four
thousand meters (two and a half miles) above sea level could be ignored,
Francisco de Nestares Marín’s job at the Potosí mint was doubly difficult. The
king wanted the fraud stopped immediately and the culprits punished, but
he also demanded that Potosí continue to produce silver—including high-
quality coinage—at the same rate as before. Depending on how many people
were involved in the fraud, and to what degree, this second demand would
prove nearly impossible to meet; indeed, it interfered with the first. Who
would replace the guilty parties?
The fact that Potosí soon fell into a long and sustained decline was in part
why the historian Bartolomé Arzáns blamed Crown Inspector General
Nestares Marín and not the merchant Francisco Gómez de la Rocha and his
top accomplice, Felipe Ramírez de Arellano—or Corregidor Francisco
Velarde Treviño, a more serious figure and the likely main culprit. Of course,
we know in hindsight that the fraud itself grew dramatically in the midst of
52 Kris Lane
a mining crisis, not just in a period of lax oversight. This is not to excuse the
crimes of Rocha and others, which testimonies seem sufficient to prove, but
rather to keep the door open for other factors or explanations besides (or in
addition to) unbridled greed.
Properly outlining the several overlapping networks of fraud investigated
by Nestares Marín is beyond the scope of this chapter, but one could easily
assemble a list of behaviors that help illustrate the spectrum of worst prac-
tices. These included bribery, extortion, kickbacks, falsifying records, and
other blatantly corrupt acts even by early modern standards, along with
nepotism, influence peddling, lavish gift giving, extravagant gambling, and
other practices that may be seen as more fitting to a baroque culture of reci-
procity and vertical dependency.
In addition, I believe it is necessary to pay close attention to innovative
Crown practices, or novedades, that seem to have enabled abuses of various
kinds. These include the sale of treasury posts and other royal offices to the
highest bidder—ordered by the Count-Duke of Olivares in 1633—and the
subcontracting of coin making to private parties, who then subcontracted it
further. We saw how Juan de Figueroa rented his office of royal assayer to the
silversmith Ramírez. A key to this latter process of subcontracting was the
widespread employment of slaves, who were ultimately accountable only to
their masters. The medieval shop system relied on the honesty (or fear) of
bonded wageworkers.
The more we examine the ties binding the main players in the great Potosí
mint fraud of 1649, the more it appears that an aspiring faction made up
mostly of men from Extremadura and La Mancha was working to displace
the formerly dominant Basques. The members of this quasi-ethnic faction or
southern Castilian alliance seem to have been willing to ignore the extreme
criminality of their acts in order to advance a group cause. Access to a steady
stream of slaves from west central Africa brought via Buenos Aires and Cór-
doba enabled the fraud to grow in scale while maintaining relative secrecy.
From the perspective of the Potosí faction known as the Vicuñas (mostly
hailing from the regions of Extremadura, Andalusia, and La Mancha), the
Navarrese inspector general, Nestares Marín, was clearly seen as a Basque or
a Basque sympathizer (people liked to call him French, which stung in those
years of war with France; Navarre was considered quasi-French by many
Castilians). These people also alleged that he was corrupt and even that he
sent oxcart loads of contraband silver to Buenos Aires. From what I can
gather, none of this happened; I found no evidence of his profiting from the
investigation, and no particular group of Basques, either merchants or mine

owners, seems to have benefited from his actions.
Only the Galician newcomer Antonio López de Quiroga seems to have
gained by the inspector’s encouragement to fill the gap as silver merchant,
but there is no evidence of collusion or kickbacks, only opportunism.35 Ever
the faithful royal servant, Nestares Marín was promoted to the Council of
the Indies in 1656, only to die four years later while still in La Plata waiting
for his replacement to arrive. Some said he was poisoned, but I have found
no evidence of this, either.
w h at w e m e a n w h e n w e ta l k a b o u t c o r r u p t i o n
Despite decades of debate, scholars remain divided over whether the term
corruption may be properly applied to the early modern era, specifically to
practices or acts done for one’s own benefit while in the service of a prince,
city, diocese, religious order, university, or other official body. For the Span-
ish Habsburgs, and particularly in examining those charged with governing
their overseas dominions, one is confronted with numerous questionable
official acts: deeds that contradicted royal decrees or laws or that even by
Habsburg standards might be grounds for dismissal, if not criminal prosecu-
tion. We are not just talking about practices we find corrupt today. They were
periodically denounced and sometimes prosecuted and punished as mal
gobierno (bad governance), or at least abuses, at the time. Officials were typi-
cally hit with stiff fines. Some were sent home in chains.
Many corruption accusations from the early seventeenth century were
leveled at a new class of university-trained bureaucrats, although officehold-
ing soldiers, clergymen, and some high-ranking noblemen also came under
fire. Philip III’s favorite, the Duke of Lerma, continues to be held up by Span-
ish historians as corruption’s standard-bearer of the day.36 An increasingly
cash-strapped Crown did itself no favors. The king’s ministers, especially
under Philip IV, put almost everything up for sale amid repeated bankrupt-
cies. Venality, or the sale of an office within Spain’s imperial bureaucracy,
became a major source of Crown revenue in the decades after 1600, enabling
infiltration by many more self-interested and often untrained individuals
than had occurred under Philip II.
Kings and ministers could shuffle the deck or clean house when things got
out of hand, but families and factions made rich by commerce, royal
54 Kris Lane
concessions, and tax farming schemes took over whole sectors of government
and amassed enormous wealth. Many held on tenaciously to their gains,
often surviving power shifts at the very top. The rise of the Count-Duke of
Olivares is a case in point; his personal empire grew enormous and rich even
as he championed reform and an end to Duke of Lerma–style corruption.37
Lax oversight abroad, the sale of offices, and careerism seemed natural ene-
mies of imperial best practices, yet Habsburg rule somehow survived. What
accounts for this? Was corruption not so bad, or just part of the game? Was
it a cultural norm?
Given the huge number of denunciations and occasionally draconian
responses to abuses across the seventeenth century, we may be wise to focus
on variations, both among individuals and across time and space. Clearly,
not everyone was equally willing to subvert the law or defy the king for per-
sonal or family gain, and a given individual’s practices could change over
time. Acts tolerated on a military frontier in wartime might be harshly pun-
ished in a capital city in peacetime. Habsburg kingship, though more con-
sensual than divine, was expected to reward loyalty and punish subversion.
A good king might forgive a wayward but contrite subject, but he could not
tolerate treason.
Royal service in the Indies presented special problems, for distances were
huge and family or patronage networks could be stretched thin. Colonial
service also presented special opportunities, since this was where raw wealth
came from, most notably mineral wealth. Wealthy locals could always be
counted on to curry favor. Mining districts were thus particularly attractive
to aspiring civil servants, and they were also frequent targets of official inves-
tigation. As many studies of colonial bureaucrats have shown, certain indi-
vidual royal or church officials were better at bending the rules than others,
and some grew wealthy at the expense of the institutions (or king) they pur-
portedly served—often never to be punished. Others seem to have simply
done their jobs or committed only minor violations. More than a few went
broke without recouping their investment in purchasing a royal office at an
inflated price, especially in poorer districts. In sum, the Habsburg adminis-
tration was not corrupt across the board, despite a relatively weak state appa-
ratus spread out across enormous distances.
The Crown had mechanisms for investigating and punishing an abuse of
office, but historians of colonial Spanish America speak of a “slacker grip” in
the seventeenth century.38 Was corruption, perhaps by some other name,
creeping up as the Crown’s grip slackened? The scale and reach of the 1649
Potosí mint scandal might suggest it was, at least in some parts of Spanish
America. It had been a long time, as we have seen, since a successful visita
(special investigation of a sitting officeholder) was carried out in the high
Andes, where silver was believed to be superabundant.
Fiscal crimes were the key to defining the outer limits of corruption, for
treasury embezzlement amounted to robbing the sovereign of his due. In his
study of early modern Florence, Jean-Claude Waquet defines corruption pre-
cisely in these terms: “to talk about corruption is first and foremost to talk
about money.”39 What was going on in the Potosí mint in the 1640s certainly
fits this definition of corruption.
f i n d i n g m e a n i n g i n t h e g r e at p o t o s í m i n t f r a u d o f 16 4 9
Mexican scholar Claudio Lomnitz has sketched out some thoughtful reflec-
tions on corruption as a general phenomenon.40 Reminding readers of the
huge literature on corruption generated by sociologists and political scien-
tists, as well as the complex etymology of the word itself, Lomnitz offers a
means of approaching corruption subtly and historically, so as not to throw
out the notion altogether when it may be instructive to pursue it.
Lomnitz’s general definition of corruption is worth quoting here: “As a
cultural category, corruption includes all those practices that take advantage
of the contradictions or ambiguities of the normative system for personal
enrichment.” 41 The key words are contradictions and ambiguities. Lomnitz
ends by calling for “careful descriptions of changes in corrupt practices
themselves, as well as their economic implications, how they overlap with the
exercise of power, and with the formation and corrosion of social consensus,
and of the ties that exist between the discourses surrounding corruption and
the social movements aimed as much at reforming the political body as at
[reforming] moral citizenship.” 42
The great Potosí mint fraud of 1649 seems particularly well suited to the
kind of close examination called for by Lomnitz. The debasement scheme
that led to the execution of silver merchant Francisco Gómez de la Rocha and
assayer Felipe Ramírez de Arellano in early 1650 was not simply criminal or
the concerted secret work of a few rogue individuals. It marked the culmina-
tion of patterned, Lomnitz-style corrupt practices, progressively “taking
advantage of the contradictions or ambiguities of the normative system for
personal enrichment.”
56 Kris Lane
In other words, these men’s crimes grew in scale as Potosí’s seventeenth-

century mining crisis combined with years of lax oversight of the mint. This
was greatly enabled, I believe, by the rise of slavery inside the Casa de la
Moneda, which itself had first appeared in Mexico as a means of “taking
advantage of the contradictions or ambiguities of the normative system for
personal enrichment,” essentially turning a subsistence ration into a major rent
stream. By replacing bonded free laborers with bound labor, Spanish Ameri-
can mint officials opened a new space for self-enrichment with minimal
accountability. Slaves had no incentive to be whistle-blowers under the old
rules. Large-scale coin debasement, which from the outside looks suicidal, had
become normalized in Potosí to such an extent by about 1640 that it seemed on
the cusp of forming a new “social consensus.” This seems to be the position
taken by Potosí historian Bartolomé Arzáns, looking back about seventy-five
years later. Francisco de Nestares Marín, far from being the righteous judge
and right hand of the king, served instead as a “secret judgment of God.”
Historian Mary Lindemann, who has examined charges of corruption in
seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Hamburg, urges us to stop saying that
corruption was “there” or “not there,” or just part of the culture of the time,
and search instead for the limits of tolerance as expressed in records of spe-
cific events.43 That is what I have tried to do in my study of the great Potosí
mint fraud of 1649. Judging the criminals or even their judges is pointless
unless we get closer to the visions of these players in the terms of their own
day. What did they think they were doing? What did those who stopped
them think they were doing? Which power brokers survived, which ones fell,
and how did forced labor inside and outside the mint feature in the larger
story of the struggle between local factions and Crown officials? Why did
Inspector General Francisco de Nestares Marín trust men like Pedro Congo
to tell him what was really going on? What incentive did Pedro Congo have
to tell the inspector the truth? What was the meaning and value of civic
righteousness for these very different subjects of a distant Habsburg king?
notes
1. Francisco de Quevedo, El Parnaso español y musas castellanas (Madrid: Pablo de

Val, 1659), 213.
2. Jaime Contreras, El Santo Oficio de la Inquisición de Galicia (Poder, sociedad y
cultura) (Madrid: Akal Editor, 1982), 204–6. Thanks to Peter Bakewell for this lead.
3. Ernesto Schäfer, El Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias: Su historia, orga-

nización y labor administrativa hasta la terminación de la Casa de Austria, 2nd
ed. (Madrid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2003), 2:134.
4. John Leddy Phelan, The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century:
Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1967), 306–7.
5. For a concise description of the cutting house based on a seventeenth-century
mint document, see Carlos Lazo García, José Torres Bohl, and Luis Arana
Bustamante, La hornaza: Taller colonial de acuñación de macuquinas: Cuadernos
de Historia Numismática II (Lima: Banco Central de Reserva del Perú, 1991).
6. Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI), Charcas 113. Other testimony
quotes are also from this source.
7. The saga of Pedro de Azaña and his extensive clan is currently the subject of a
major study by Masaki Sato of the University of Tokyo.
8. Marcela Inch, “Libros, comerciantes y libreros: La Plata y Potosí en el Siglo de
Oro,” in La construcción de lo urbano en Potosí y La Plata, siglos XVI y XVII, ed.
Andrés Eichmann et al. (Sucre: Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia,
2008), 454–55.
9. Raquel Gil Montero, Ciudades efímeras: El ciclo minero de la plata en Lípez
(Bolivia); Siglos XVI-XIX (La Paz: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2015);
“Mecanismos de reclutamiento indígena en la minería de plata: Lípez (sur de la
actual Bolivia) siglo XVII,” América Latina en la historia Económica 21, no. 1
(April 2014), n.p. Considerable discussion of violence in this region is found in
the Minas document series at the Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia,
catalogued by Gunnar Mendoza.
10. Peter Bakewell, Silver and Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth-Century Potosí: The
Life and Times of Antonio López de Quiroga (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1988), 37. On the great fraud, see the following: Alan K. Craig,
Spanish Colonial Silver Coins in the Florida Collection (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2000), 22–38; Arturo Giráldez, “Falsificación monetaria en el
siglo XVII: Un memorial de 1650,” eHumanista 6 (2006): 153–83; José A Fuertes
López, ed., La falsificación de la moneda and la Villa Imperial de Potosí, siglo
XVII (Potosí: Casa Nacional de la Moneda, 2013), 9; Arnoldo J. Cunietti-Ferrando,
Historia de la Real Casa de la Moneda de Potosí durante la dominación hispánica
(1573–1652) (Buenos Aires: R. J. Pellegrini, 1995); Eduardo Dargent Chamot, La
moneda peruana en el siglo XVII: Reflejo de una crisis; Cuadernos de Historia VII
(Lima: Universidad de Lima, 1988); Olivier Caporossi, “La falsificacion de
moneda en la America Hispana a mediados del siglo XVII: Entre reformacion
administrativa y represion judicial,” Anuario Americanista Europeo, nos. 4–5
(2006–2007): 65–82. For greater Peru and the general crisis of the seventeenth
century, see Luis Miguel Glave, “El virreinato peruano y la llamada ‘crisis gen-
eral’ del siglo XVII,” in Las crisis económicas en la historia del Perú, ed. Heraclio
Bonilla (Lima: Editorial Nuevo Mundo, 1986), 95–137. See also Margarita Suárez,
58 Kris Lane
“La ‘crisis del siglo XVII’ en la región andina,” in Historia de América Andina,
vol. 2, Formación y apogeo del sistema colonial (siglos XVI-XVII), ed. Manuel
Burga (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 1999), 289–317.
11. Bartolomé Arzans de Orsúa y Vela, Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí, ed.
Lewis Hanke and Gunnar Mendoza (Providence, RI: Brown University Press,
1965), 2:123–49.
12. AGI, Charcas 687. Other testimony quotes are also from this source.
13. Silver-coin purity was calculated in terms of fractions: twelve dineros of twenty-
four grains each (12 × 24 = 288 grains total = 100 percent pure). Coins assaying
below eleven dineros, four grains (i.e., 268 grains, or 93 percent silver and 7 per-
cent copper) were considered “short” or “weak” (feeble).
14. Kris Lane, “Slavery and the Casa de la Moneda in Seventeenth-Century Potosí,”
in Territorios de lo cotidiano, siglos XVI-XX: Del antiguo virreinato del Perú a la
Argentina contemporánea, ed. Mónica Ghirardi (Rosario, Argentina: Prohistoria,
2014), 101–14. See also Eugenia Bridikhina, “Desafiando los límites del espacio
colonial: La población negra en Potosí,” Estudios Bolivianos 13 (2007): 169–216.
15. John J. TePaske, A New World of Gold and Silver, ed. Kendall W. Brown (Boston,
MA: Brill, 2010), 144.
16. Sevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 110.
17. For the balance with Japanese silver, see Richard Von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune:
Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996). For the intermediate role of Lima merchants, see
Margarita Suárez, Desafíos transatlánticos: Mercaderes, banqueros y el estado en
el Perú virreinal, 1600–1700 (Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001).
18. Charles Ralph Boxer, “Plata es Sangre: Sidelights on the Drain of Spanish-
American Silver in the Far East, 1550–1700,” Philippine Studies 18, no. 3 (July
1970): 457–78; Arturo Giráldez, The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the
Dawn of the Global Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
19. TePaske and Brown, New World.
20. Thomas J. Sargent and François R. Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Copper twelve- and eight-
maravedí coins were frequently doubled or halved in value by royal fiat.
21. Carlo M. Cipolla, Conquistadores, piratas, mercaderes: La saga de la plata espa-
ñola, trans. Ricardo González (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
1998), 69–72.
22. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, “La falsificación de moneda de plata peruana a medi
ados del siglo XVII,” in Homenaje a don Ramón Carande (Madrid: Sociedad de
Estudios y Publicaciones, 1963), 2:143–55. See also Alberto Marcos Martín, “¿Fue
la fiscalidad regia un factor de crisis en la Castilla del siglo XVII?,” in La crisis de
la monarquía de Felipe IV, ed. Geoffrey Parker (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica,
2006), 173–253.
23. Martha White and John Roger Paas, The Kipper und Wipper Inflation, 1619–23:
An Economic History with Contemporary German Broadsheets, trans. George C.
Schoolfield (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
24. Gresham’s Law states that when a government overvalues one type of money and
undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear
from circulation while the overvalued money will flood into circulation. For a
detailed examination of Dutch financial markets—and white-collar fraud—at
this time, see Lodewijk Petram, The World’s First Stock Exchange, trans. Lynne
Richards (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
25. Alberto Crespo R., La guerra entre Vicuñas y Vascongados: Potosí, 1622–1625, 2nd
ed. (La Paz: José Camarlinghi, 1969); Bernd Hausberger, “La guerra de los vicu-
ñas contra los vascongados en Potosí y la etnicización de los vascos a principios
de la edad moderna,” in Excluir para ser: Procesos identitarios y fronteras sociales
en la America hispánica (xvii-xviii), ed. Christian Büschges and Frederique
Langue (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2005), 23–57; David Dressing, “Social Tensions in
Early Seventeenth-Century Potosí,” PhD dissertation, Tulane University, New
Orleans, LA, 2007.
26. Alberto Francisco Pradeau, ed., Don Antonio de Mendoza y la Casa de Moneda
de Mexico en 1543 (Mexico City: Antigua Libreria Robredo, 1953). For the early
slave trade to Upper Peru from the South Atlantic, see Carlos Sempat
Assadourian, El tráfico de esclavos en Córdoba de Angola a Potosí, siglos XVI-
XVII (Córdoba, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 1966); and Carlos
Sempat Assadourian, El tráfico de esclavos en Córdoba, 1588–1610, según las actas
de protocolos del Archivo Histórico de Córdoba (Córdoba, Argentina: Universidad
Nacional de Córdoba, 1965). See also Liliana Crespi, “La complicidad de los fun-
cionarios reales en el contrabando de esclavos en el puerto de Buenos Aires du-
rante el siglo XVII,” Desmemoria 7 (2000): 115–33; and Charles R. Boxer, Salvador
de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602–1686 (London: Athlone Press,
1952), 99–110. For the later seventeenth century see Zacarias Moutoukias,
Contrabando y control en el siglo XVII: Buenos Aires, el Atlántico y el Espacio
Peruano (Buenos Aires: Bibliotecas Universitarias, 1988); and Zacarias
Moutoukias, “Power, Corruption, and Commerce: The Making of the Local
Administrative Structure in Seventeenth-Century Buenos Aires,” Hispanic
American Historical Review 68, no. 4 (November 1988): 771–801.
27. Glenn Murray et al., El real ingenio de la moneda de Segovia: Maravilla tec-
nológica del siglo XVI (Madrid: Fundación Juanelo Turriano, 2006); Casto María
del Rivero, El Ingenio de la Moneda de Segovia: Monografia Numismática
(Madrid: Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1919). See also Jonathan
Sawday, “The Mint at Segovia: Digby, Hobbes, Charleton, and the Body as a
Machine in the Seventeenth Century,” Prose Studies 6 (1983): 21–35.
28. Francisco de Paula Pérez Sindreu, La Casa de la Moneda de Sevilla, su historia
(Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1992). For Granada, see Manuel Garzón Pareja,
60 Kris Lane
La Real Casa de la Moneda de Granada (Granada: Archivo de la Real Chancillería,

1970). For Mexico, see Felipe Castro Gutiérrez, Historia social de la Real Casa de
la Moneda de Mexico (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
2012); Michel Bertrand, Grandeur et misère de l’office: Les officiers de finances de
Nouvelle-Espagne XVIIe-XVIII siècles (Paris: Sorbonne, 1999), 345–50; Christoph
Rosenmüller, “Silver Merchants and Assayers’ Marks: The Visita of 1729–30 and
the Reform of the Mexican Mint,” American Journal of Numismatics 16–17
(2004–2005): 205–19; and Louisa Schell Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite,
1590–1660: Silver, State, and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991),
83–88.
29. Several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mint visitas are housed in the
Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid (hereafter AHN). See AHN, Consejos de
Castilla, 25504, for a 1626 visita for the Casa de Moneda of Seville; and AHN,
Consejos de Castilla, 35084, for a 1644 visita of Cuenca’s mint.
30. The key testimonies are found in AGI, Escribanía de Cámara 871B; Archivo y
Biblioteca Nacional de Bolivia, Minas 1245; and Archivo Histórico de Potosí,
Casa Real de Moneda 1119.
31. Archivo Judicial de Oruro, Protocolos Notariales, 1646–1648. See especially the
transactions of merchant Francisco de Vila. His man inside the Potosí mint was
his nephew, the silver merchant Luis de Ledesma y Vila.
32. Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Career of the
World’s Greatest Scientist (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2009).
33. For the persistence of the money-as-blood metaphor, see Christine Desan,
Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 422–34.
34. The 1497 ordinances are reproduced in Tomás Dasí, Estudio de los reales de a
ocho, también llamados pesos, dólares, piastras, patacones o duros españoles
(Valencia: Sucesor de Vives Mora, 1950), 1:lv–lxxxix.
35. Bakewell, Silver and Entrepreneurship, 36–44.
36. Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, El duque de Lerma: Corrupción y desmoralización en la
España del siglo XVII (Madrid: Esfera de los libros, 2010).
37. John H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). On the sale of an office, see the
classic study by John Horace Parry, The Sale of Offices in the Spanish Indies under
the Hapsburgs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953). For Peru, see
Kenneth Andrien, “Corruption, Inefficiency, and Imperial Decline in the
Seventeenth-Century Viceroyalty of Peru,” Americas 41, no. 1 (July 1984): 1–20.
38. Peter Bakewell with Jacqueline Holler, A History of Latin America to 1825, 3rd ed.
(New York: Blackwell, 2010), chap. 11.
39. Jean-Claude Waquet, Corruption: Ethics and Power in Florence, 1600–1770, trans.
Linda McCall (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). For
Latin America, see Horst Pietschmann, “‘Corrupción’ en el virreinato
novohispano: Un tercer intento de valoración,” E-Spania 16 (December 2013),

http://e-spania.revues.org/22848; Horst Pietschmann, “Corrupción en las Indias
españolas: Revisión de un debate en la historiografía sobre Hispanoamérica co-
lonial,” in Instituciones y corrupción en la historia, ed. Manuel González Jiménez,
Horst Pietschmann, Francisco Comín, and Joseph Pérez (Valladolid: Universidad
de Valladolid, 1998), 33–52; and Horst Pietschmann, “Burocracia y corrupción en
hispanoamérica colonial: Una aproximación tentativa,” Nova Americana 5 (1982):
11–37. See also Jacob van Klaveren, “Fiscalism, Mercantilism and Corruption,” in
Revisions in Mercantilism, ed. D. C. Coleman (London: Methuen, 1969), 140–61.
40. Claudio Lomnitz, ed., Vicios públicos, virtudes privadas: La corrupción en Mexico
(Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología
Social, 2000).
41. Ibid., 15.
42. Ibid., 30.
43. Mary Lindemann, “Dirty Politics or ‘Harmonie’?: Defining Corruption in Early
Modern Amsterdam and Hamburg,” in The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption,
and States, ed. Renate Bridenthal (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 23–53. See also
Maryvonne Génaux, “Early Modern Corruption in English and French Fields of
Vision,” in Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, ed. Arnold Heidenheimer
and Michael Johnston, 3rd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002), 107–21.
CHAP TER THREE
Clients, Patrons, and Tribute

the indigenous aguilar family in mexico tenochtitlan , 1644–1689
k
William F. Connell
A group of electors (eligible voters) from the four neighborhoods

(parcialidades) of Mexico Tenochtitlan petitioned the appellate court
(audiencia) in Mexico City in November 1685 to ask that Senior Magistrate
Gonzalo Suárez de San Martín supervise the upcoming municipal election.1
By the seventeenth century the traditional four sections of the former Aztec
city of Mexico Tenochtitlan constituted the eastern, western, and southern
edges of colonial Mexico City. Native electors from the parcialidades nearly
always requested a magistrate from the audiencia to monitor elections. The
audiencia was the principal judicial and executive authority in the kingdom
of New Spain (Mexico), presided over by the viceroy and staffed with
numerous magistrates and legal officials. In this case the electors enumerated
a particular set of grievances against the sitting governor. They stated that
the governor, don Bernardino Antonio de la Cruz y Guerrero, and his chief
tax collector, don Felipe de Aguilar, manipulated voters, attempted to secure
reelection against the ordinances, and generally abused and mistreated
Native people.2
The petitioners, all eligible voters in the city, insisted that only with proper
supervision of the election could “the said ordinary people [dicha común] of
the parcialidades . . . hope to receive fair treatment.” Under Aguilar and
Cruz, they argued, fairness was not possible. In other words, Native electors
used allegations of corruption against the governor and his tax collector,
making the case that they used their authority improperly to empower
63
64 William F. Connell
themselves and to intimidate political challengers. Implicitly the petitioners

argued that other Native leaders would offer fairer treatment and good gov-
ernance. Furthermore, the petitioners maintained that Aguilar and Cruz
sought to gain personally at the expense of the common people. For these
reasons the electors asked the audiencia judge to prevent the potential abuse
of authority.3
Apart from the rather vague and general allegations of abuse, at least
according to some residents, the Native governments in Mexico Tenochtitlan
worked against the Native peoples residing in these neighborhoods. Allega-
tions of abuse, of mistreatment, and ultimately of officeholders using the
authority of their positions to enrich themselves all suggest that governors
and their allies may have engaged in what the Native residents of the city (the
Mexica Tenochca, popularly referred to as Aztecs), other Native peoples, and
European law would have regarded as illicit and corrupt activity. Native liti-
gants, however, brought these challenges during a specific period in the
political history of the city, 1640–1730, when contested elections occurred
regularly. The royal coffers persistently lacked sufficient revenue from taxa-
tion. Furthermore, venality in office was regular and overt in New Spain and
other parts of the Americas and was legally recognized by the Crown, which
used the sale of offices to augment revenue shortages.4
In Mexico Tenochtitlan the Native leaders increasingly competed with
political rivals for office, and those who lost an election often complained to
the viceregal government, alleging illegal practices. Modern observers would
call these practices corruption even though the authors of the documents
recording these complaints did not use this term specifically.5 Native leaders
sometimes petitioned the viceregal courts to overturn an election. Such solu-
tions tended to increase political diversity and limit reelection, hallmarks of
a healthy political system. Such tactics, however, tended to increase the num-
ber of allegations of abuse and political corruption. Bureaucrats in the vice-
regal government who had to insure that governors could credibly perform
the job of tribute collection also had interests and weighed in on elections in
response to petitions from electors. Viceregal authorities tended to privilege
candidates who seemed able to gather the proper amount of tribute, even if
that meant favoring governors who used heavy-handed or unsavory tech-
niques or who seemed to lack the proper eligibility to hold the office.
Native peoples continued to control Mexico Tenochtitlan, the remains of
the Mexica (Aztec) altepetl (ethnic state or polity) after the Spanish invasion
of 1519. They employed similar (though variable over time) structures to carry
Clients, Patrons, and Tribute 65
out the day-to-day operations of governance: tribute collection, the regula-

tion of markets, the granting of licenses, the regulation of property transfers,
and the dispensing of first-instance justice. Before 1519 the nobility of the
Mexica Tenochca chose a single ruler (tlatoani) from among those eligible
hereditary candidates in the proper dynastic lineage to rule the altepetl.6 The
hereditary dynasty had governed the ethnic state since its inception around
1325.7 The tlatoque (the plural of tlatoani) controlled the marketplace, distrib-
uted rewards, dispensed justice, and directed the expansion of the tributary
empire.8 The altepetl expanded dramatically after 1440, enriching the city, its
markets, and the Mexica Tenochca.
After Europeans invaded Mexico Tenochtitlan, they largely destroyed the
physical city in 1521. In the following year they enlisted Native allies, from
both Mexico Tenochtitlan and beyond, who helped reconstruct the city.9 The
arrival of Europeans introduced a series of new challenges to residents who
had survived the onslaught. The culture of rivalry among the Europeans, and
the distance from centers of judicial and executive authority, also challenged
the invaders themselves.10 Changes in the distribution of royal largesse cre-
ated instability, particularly when the king lived thousands of miles away
across an ocean. For example, when Hernando Cortés traveled to Europe in
1528, an audiencia replaced his authority; it was staffed by those allied with
the former governor of Cuba, don Diego de Velázquez, whom Cortés had
betrayed in 1519.11
In the first decade after the Spanish invasion, both Europeans and Native
groups (those allied to Europeans and those ostensibly defeated by the com-
bined Native and European forces) needed legitimate rulers who could dis-
pense royal justice, quell disputes, and finalize decisions over resources. The
Natives looked for rulers who possessed independent political authority,
principally those endowed with royal lineage from Tenochtitlan. The Euro-
peans sought an executive authority that could control the distribution of
royal patronage with some certainty and consistency. In the newly rebuilt
city, the Mexica Tenochca had new leadership, but they probably saw those
new leaders as temporary, interim rulers.12
The instability of the reconstituted city, complicated by political infight-
ing among the Europeans, made for a dangerous and contentious environ-
ment. The restoration of the proper Native royal lineage in 1538 provided
stability and security for the Mexica Tenochca who had endured after the
murder of their last independently elected ruler, Quauhtemoc, in 1525, when
a succession of leaders was effectively appointed by Cortés or other European
authorities. Such leaders could not possess the right to rule in a way recog-
nized by the Native peoples in Mexico Tenochtitlan and could serve only
temporarily.13 Spanish-styled indigenous governments, first established in
1538 under the viceregency of don Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy in
New Spain, attempted to stabilize the Native community in Mexico Tenoch-
titlan by restoring rulers who could claim legitimate connection to the
dynastic lineage. Although these leaders were not tlatoque, they approxi-
mated the former rulership and thus had the legitimacy to govern and restore
stability after the invasion.14
For Europeans, the arrival of Viceroy Mendoza and the elevation of the
kingdom to a viceroyalty began the process of stabilizing the channels of
royal patronage. Creating a viceroy, an executive authority, who had legiti-
macy in the eyes of all because he was the “king’s living image” in America
provided the potential for stability and the minimizing of conflict. The
viceroy, like the king, did not have the same interests and attachments to
allies that made the rule of Cortés and the first audiencia problematic.15
Stability came slowly as conquistador conspiracies persisted through the
1560s.16
Corruption, graft, and malfeasance in office have engaged the attention of
historians and social scientists interested in understanding the ways in
which political representation and the patronage associated implicitly with
political authority can corrupt the interests of those who hold the public
trust. In some cases, particularly for Latin America, scholars have sought to
find the antecedents of modern corruption in the colonial experience.17
Indeed, allegations of corruption permeate some discussions of Latin Ameri-
can political culture.18 For political scientists and historians, corruption
presents significant challenges because an overbroad definition can make
even benign acts or routines grounded in culture appear as corruption. In its
most simple form, political corruption consists of profiting directly or indi-
rectly from the power of an elected, appointed, or purchased office. Thus,
Alan Knight argues that “the fact of corruption in Mexico is obvious and
undeniable” when he writes about the twentieth century; yet he acknowl-
edges that his definition of corruption “is deliberately broad.”19 The challenge
in working with corruption is determining when common practices, even
when they seem to enrich the powerful or give an advantage to those in
office, actually cause harm to the operation of government, something that
Knight and others are keenly aware of when they discuss the problems of the
obviously and undeniably corrupt. To understand the nature of the kind of
corruption relevant in Mexico Tenochtitlan, it seems relevant to define this

term, which is often broadly conceived.
Corruption of the variety relevant to Native politics comes in the form of
patronage. In its simplest incarnation, patronage is the relationship of power
between a person who has the authority to distribute the goods of the state
and people who seek those goods in exchange for giving the authority figure
their political support. Political scientist Simona Piattoni defines patronage
as “the trade of votes and other types of partisan support in exchange for
public decisions with divisible benefits,” which are specific “public
resources—jobs, goods, and public decisions.”20 In an electoral system, size
and complexity matter. In smaller systems, such as colonial Mexico Tenoch-
titlan, patronage probably rewarded those allied with a particular politician
(i.e., a constituency). In Mexico Tenochtitlan, the electors and financial back-
ers of a political officeholder probably sought to gain privileges that the
officeholder could bestow: market access, favor in contracts, help with prop-
erty, and favor in legal disputes. Such a spoils system may appear corrupt and
even lead to the perversion of the operation of government. According to
Piattoni, however, in cases where the electorate is small and confined to a
certain class of people, the governed population assumes that those vested
with authority will benefit from the victory of their candidate. Therefore she
demurs and does not consider it corruption.21 And yet, in Mexico Tenochtit-
lan, the political environment is, just as Piattoni described, small and con-
fined to an elite class largely impenetrable to those not born into the proper
lineage.
In colonial Mexico specifically, historians have focused on graft in the
bureaucracy, particularly when the Native communities came into contact
with European officials. John Phelan has argued that because of the small
compensation given to colonial officials, even at the highest level, they had a
clear incentive to seek graft. Even viceroys, who earned a substantial salary,
many times the level of even the highest-level judges, had such incentives.
Viceroys had to pay for the cost of running their households and maintain-
ing elaborate social calendars. The payment for these expenses came mostly
from their personal resources. Although viceroys were generally wealthy
before they came to office, their salaries usually did not cover the expendi-
tures required to hold the office. Lower-level officials suffered under rigid
salary scales that did not change and that offered few possibilities for extra
earnings or the beneficence of the monarch.
Phelan noted that because of their insufficient compensation, officials had
profound incentive to subsidize their earnings illicitly. Throughout the sev-

enteenth century, viceregal oversight often found and pursued legal remedies
against midlevel royal officials involved in graft. Judges (alcaldes) and
regional officials such as the Spanish provincial administrator (corregidores),
who had the ability to overlook malfeasance because the colonial govern-
ment expected them to police corruption, could therefore involve themselves
in contraband trade and enrich themselves by tolerating illicit commerce
and benefiting from its propagation.22
For example, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a native Andean who
claimed to descend from the Inca royal lineage, attacked seventeenth-
century regional officials as abusive.23 Historian Charles Gibson also found
evidence of abuse by regional officials in New Spain, who, he argues, regu-
larly sought “perquisites and opportunities for gain” and used their office to
extract benefits.24 These opportunities could involve the collection of tribute
from Native peoples. Anthony McFarlane has demonstrated that in some
parts of Spanish America, corregidores kept two sets of tribute lists: the offi-
cial list given to the royal treasury, and an unofficial list that enumerated the
actual collection figures. Corrupt corregidores pocketed the difference.25
The judicial review of the conduct of all outgoing officeholders (called a
residencia) in theory provided a legal tool for those seeking redress against
an abuse of power, but this mechanism did not deter corregidores generally.
Frequently the incoming corregidor conducted the hearing for the outgoing
corregidor. The bond of common interest, protecting one’s own, seems to be
a sufficient incentive to make mockery of an unbiased inquiry. The fines were
modest, the review often reduced the fine that was imposed, and the gains a
corregidor could earn through graft far exceeded the amount of any fine. As
Phelan observed, even when the viceregal government focused on the nexus
between judges, corregidores, and the audiencia, actual punishments for
those found responsible for graft were infrequent. In addition, sometimes
“the Council of the Indies absolved the superior magistrates.”26
Corregidores had great authority at the regional level and served as a
poorly checked official in the royal bureaucracy. James Lockhart has made
the assertion that the Native governor in Mexico Tenochtitlan functioned
similarly to the corregidor, but at least initially in the sixteenth century the
indigenous governor did not rotate out of the political system of the town at
regular intervals, so he was not subject to the same kind of review. Indeed,
the first governors served ostensibly for life.27 Because of these similarities,
indigenous governors probably had the same opportunities for graft
available to corregidores. Members of the Aguilar family regularly served as

governor and as the governor’s tribute collector in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries. These leaders offer ample material for making a case for the
corruption of Native government. The Aguilar family, however, constitutes
a peculiar case and thus one not easily generalizable to the broader popula-
tion of Native governors, most of whom had far fewer legal troubles. The
Aguilar family was, however, involved in the government of Mexico Tenoch-
titlan for more than seventy years.28
The elder Juan de Aguilar first appears in the documentary record of 1644
as the governor of Mexico Tenochtitlan. His petition, clearly authored by a
Native scribe because it carries the characteristic Native spelling clues (e.g.,
Çan Juan i San Ipolito) asks the viceregal government for privileges for Native
peoples living in the barrios to conduct business in the markets of San Juan
and San Hipólito. The San Juan market, situated in the Spanish sector of the
city (traza) across the street from the Native government’s municipal council
building, and San Hipólito, situated at the far western edge of the main city
park (alameda) where the current church bearing the same name now stands
in Mexico City, were both large and important.29 The governor asked the
viceroy to grant the residents of his district the right to use these market
spaces so that they might “gather in them in service of both the royal and
divine majesties.”30 He also asked for permission to collect tribute from the
Natives of Mexico Tenochtitlan who resided in the Spanish sector adjacent
to the market, which was especially important because many had been dis-
placed from their homes on the outskirts by flooding. The viceroy, following
the opinion of his attorney, granted Aguilar the privileges he asked for in his
petition.
Juan de Aguilar appears again ten years later in 1654 as a candidate for
governor. He lost the election, but he came to power anyway because the
winner, don Juan Velázquez, could not serve. Petitioners claimed that
Velázquez could not read or write, and the Spanish official who helped gov-
ernors with tribute collection, Martín de San Martín, was not confident he
could finance and deliver the 7,221 pesos that the community owed. The vice-
roy therefore disqualified Velázquez and went with the community’s second
choice, Aguilar, who had experience, having successfully served as a gover-
nor in the past.31 On March 6, 1654, Aguilar officially assumed his duties after
a lengthy dispute following the original election in January.32 He completed
only part of the term, however, because he died in office, on August 17, 1654.
His widow, Teresa Gutiérrez de los Ríos, reported that because of his illness,
the governor had already completed the penultimate round of tribute collec-
tion for the year, and it awaited delivery to the royal officials in the commu-
nity treasury in Mexico Tenochtitlan.33
Don Juan de Aguilar seemed to serve as an effective tribute collector, but
he came to power during a time of transition in Mexico Tenochtitlan, appar-
ently by having the viceregal government intervene to secure his elevation to
office. The electoral system became increasingly political after the flood that
inundated much of the city from 1629 to 1636. Because tribute revenues fell
during this period—largely because of the exodus of the indigenous popula-
tion from the neighborhoods—the viceregal government became more active
in its effort to place governors it thought would be more effective in office and
to insist on proper tribute collection. They did this by asserting their given
authority, which they had formerly eschewed, to place a candidate of their
choosing into the office during the process of certifying the election results.
Viceregal officials began to insist on regular rotation, enforced no-reelection
rules, and insisted on vetted financial backers who guaranteed the collection
of tribute.34
Viceroys and their agents did not intervene in elections directly except in
rare circumstances, although technically they appointed all governors to
serve and approved all elections. Their right of approval implied the ability
to say no to a candidate who had secured sufficient support to hold office.
Viceroys usually did not intervene because Native governors needed electors
and broad support among the community. Tribute payers, though usually
not able to vote for governor themselves, could show their displeasure by
withholding tribute payments.
For example, don Bartolomé Cortés y Mendoza Axayacatzin served as
governor, imposed by the viceroy in 1638. Cortés had not participated in the
1638 election, and he had received no votes from the community. The viceroy
rejected two candidates who had received votes in the election to serve. Cor-
tés lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the Native population that had begun to
return after the flood.35 That lack of legitimacy made him a terribly ineffec-
tive tribute collector. Subsequent viceroys looked back to this example and
stopped the practice of imposing their choice over those who had support by
the Native community.36 The viceregal authorities might refuse to appoint
the leader who received the most votes, but they generally chose another
candidate who had support in the community.
The Aguilar family, beginning with Juan, who died in 1654, had a reputa-
tion among the Spanish bureaucracy for effective tribute collection. Spanish
official San Martín had related this by choosing Aguilar over Velázquez in
1654.37 Aguilar’s sons, don Juan and don Felipe, served regularly as governors
from 1667 to 1674, and don Felipe served as an administrator under Governor
don Bernardino Antonio de la Cruz y Guerrero in the 1680s.38 The electors
of San Juan chose don Felipe to serve as governor in 1667 under a cloud of
suspicion and contentious debate.
The sitting governor, don Lorenzo de Santiago, challenged don Felipe,
alleging that he was a mestizo and thus not legally able to serve as a Native
governor. Don Felipe countered that don Lorenzo could not serve because he
owed thousands of pesos in back tribute and had therefore failed to execute
the most important part of his job. Don Lorenzo had served as governor
repeatedly from 1662 to 1667, although it is unclear whether he served con-
secutive multiple terms or the arrears in tribute came from the most recent
term as governor. Don Lorenzo made further challenges, stating that don
Felipe had numerous criminal allegations pending against him in the vice-
regal courts. The judge who supervised the election, don Andrés Sánchez de
Ocampo, responded tersely to these petitions. He dismissed the allegations
against don Felipe after establishing that he was the legitimate son of don
Juan de Aguilar, the former governor. He did this without a serious investiga-
tion, which suggests that for Spanish officials, the ability to collect tribute
mattered most. Sánchez then recommended to the viceroy that he declare
don Felipe governor.39
Indeed, despite the allegations of abuse and reelection violations, pending
criminal proceedings, and allegations that Felipe (and his younger brother,
Juan) were mestizos, the Spanish official in charge of collecting tribute and
overseeing its delivery to the viceregal government regularly recommended
the Aguilar brothers to serve as governor when he weighed in on the elec-
tions in the 1660s and 1670s. The viceregal government chose to allow Native
peoples to settle their own disputes and affairs provided they could satisfac-
torily collect tribute and deliver it to the royal coffers.40
In this environment the Aguilar brothers learned how to navigate the
rules imposed by the audiencia. They got around the problem of reelection
by alternating the governorship. They cowed their opponents with threats of
violence. Their opponents also alleged that the brothers “tampered with the
election [of 1674] for obvious political advantage” and “directed the voters.” 41
They supposedly met with voters secretly. Those opposed to the Aguilar
brothers, including don Joseph de la Cruz, who served as a Native official and
later as the governor, alleged that the audiencia scribe, Joseph Romero, filed
false reports on behalf of the Aguilar brothers and assisted them in their
dealings with the audiencia.42
Even more overtly, on the day of the election in 1674, don Felipe violently
removed a Native official and voter, don Mateo Salvador, from the indige-
nous government chambers, where the election was taking place. According
to the report, don Felipe “violently carried him to the jail” and thrashed him
with the staff of royal justice, the symbol of royal authority carried by the
governor and other Native officials. Removing an elector with such violent
display created a climate of fear and intimidation. Furthermore, Native elec-
tors voted by roll call. This meant that the governor and everyone present
knew how each individual voted.43
The critics of the Aguilar brothers believed that despite their ability to
collect tribute, they bred discord in the city, but it is not clear how they might
have enriched themselves with their office. The brothers relied on fear, intim-
idation, and violence to win elections. They met with voters improperly and
colluded with viceregal officials to secure their election and smooth over any
problems with the courts. Such behaviors constituted corruption. The Agui-
lar brothers thus manipulated the electoral process to secure positions of
authority. The problem is that it is not obvious where any significant financial
gain might have come from that would make a clear case for corruption. The
governor of Mexico Tenochtitlan officially earned a salary of 100 pesos a
year.44 The salary probably meant little to wealthy Native nobles. To serve as
the governor a candidate had to demonstrate the capacity to guarantee with
his own fortune or the backing of financial agents the whole sum of the trib-
ute that he had to collect from the community. Financial backers probably
did not provide such guarantees without some personal risk, but they had
legal recourse to collect from the property of the governor.
In the absence of monetary incentive for candidates, something must have
made the governorship worth the effort, beyond a passion for community ser-
vice. Native leaders fought bitterly at times over elections, disputing almost
annually the election results in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Sometimes these disputes required expending resources for lawyers, scribes,
and court fees. In some cases the complexity of suits required more than the
summary hearings of the General Indian Court, so they made their way to the
regular civil court of the audiencia. Competition, particularly from 1650 to
1730, illustrates that some prize existed, and it seems highly unlikely that pres-
tige or pure civic duty motivated Native leaders to spend substantial resources
on legal infighting, risking sanction by the viceregal government.
In the absence of direct evidence to the contrary, asserting that governors

sought patronage and graft for their personal benefit just because it seems
logical is not an adequate explanation. Fortunately, the extant evidence does
provide some clues. The governor had to collect significant tribute, and he
had a team of assistants to help in that endeavor. He also controlled the
accounting of tribute collection, and his agents kept books and distributed
receipts (cartas de pago) that tribute payers could show to officials of the
Native government to prove they had paid. Tribute payers often referred to
the receipts in testimony given in court documents.45 None of the civil pro-
ceedings uncovered in this research provide a physical example of a receipt;
tribute payers only mentioned them.
Enterprising Natives who could write might have had the ability to coun-
terfeit such documents, but this research has not uncovered any such claim.
Paper receipts were probably fragile and unlikely to survive in the documen-
tary record. Receipts were so common that submitting one as evidence was
probably unnecessary unless it was to demonstrate its inauthenticity. The
governor also kept a logbook of tribute payments independently. Therefore,
having a counterfeit receipt not corroborated in the official log was worthless
to a tribute payer.
Two major lawsuits in the 1670s, however, provide some clues to what
constituted corruption. These suits are notable for their complexity; both are
full legal suits, not simple oral cases decided and noted in annotated form.
Both required significant legal investment from all parties and significant
attention from the courts. The litigants hired lawyers, paid for paper, and
paid all fees associated with such legal proceedings.46 The first lawsuit, which
began in 1674, challenged the governor-elect, don Juan de Aguilar the
younger, on the grounds that he could not hold office because he was a mes-
tizo, but it added numerous other allegations of abuse. It began with a docu-
ment authored by Joseph de Predia Cortés, who presented a baptismal record
for a don Juan [de Aguilar] asserting that he was baptized on April 24, 1648,
and that his parents were Juan Francisco and María Jerónima. Although the
record does not give the ethnicity of the parents, it does say that the god
father (padrino) was don Andrés Fernández Navarro, a Spaniard.47 The sec-
ond lawsuit began on February 15, 1675, with a petition authored by Native
officials and former officials who had served in the government of Mexico
Tenochtitlan.48 Both cases provided testimony from specific individuals who
swore under oath that the Aguilar brothers had abused their authority and
treated them poorly. Furthermore, the document from 1674 alleges that the
brothers manipulated the electorate to ensure consistent electoral victory

year after year.
On December 12, 1673, while don Felipe finished his term of office and don
Juan prepared to run in January 1674, Native electors who opposed the broth-
ers alleged that they could not serve as governor because they were not of
noble birth, nor were they pure Natives. The petition stated that their father
was not don Juan de Aguilar, the former governor who had died in 1654, but
rather a Juan Francisco. Having a fairly common name but without the hon-
orific don, Juan Francisco, the petition implied, was a Spaniard. The god
father listed was also a Spaniard. Don Juan Montaño, who would receive two
votes in the election of 1674 and finish third of the three candidates who
received any votes, delivered the baptismal record to the court. The copy was
certified by a royal scribe and by Agustín de Betancurt, a monk who served
the chapel of San Francisco in Mexico City.49
In addition to petitioning that don Juan and don Felipe could not receive
votes because they were not pure Natives, Montaño added that they had cases
pending against them at the audiencia. This apparent hedge provided another
significant rationale by which the viceregal government could disqualify a
governor-elect. Governors had to uphold high moral and ethical standards
as leaders—by ordinance, they had to be “moral, law-abiding, and sober.”50
The audiencia received Montaño’s petition, acknowledged its legitimacy
without ruling on its validity, and noted that the election supervisor, the
judge who was to attend the election ceremony, would receive a copy of the
petition and would rule on its implications. Because the election took place
on January 12, 1674, and elected don Juan, it seems fair to deduce that the
judge, don Juan Miguel de Agüero y Alzedo, did nothing with the data that
Montaño provided regarding don Juan’s ethnicity.51
After the election forty-three Native electors filed a second petition
against the Aguilar brothers alleging serious corruption. Some of these elec-
tors were current officeholders, and others were former officeholders; Mon-
taño was not among them. They included some fairly potent rivals of the
Aguilars, such as don Juan de la Cruz: the first judge of the Native municipal
council (cabildo), its highest-ranking officer below the governor, and a future
governor. The petition stated that “don Juan and don Felipe de Aguilar held
meetings in their homes” in which they solicited votes and manipulated the
election. They ordered the electors, the petition alleged, not to vote for Mon-
taño. Since all these individuals had held office previously or held office cur-
rently, they were electors, so they could have had firsthand knowledge of the
meetings. Based on the tabulated results, few of them did vote for Montaño,
since he received only two votes.
The other issue, detailed in the report produced after the election, was that
the supervising judge had instructed the electors not to vote for Montaño
because he had a criminal complaint pending against him, according to
audiencia scribe Antonio de Olmos Dávila.52 The petition against the Aguilar
brothers by the forty-three electors alleged that the Aguilars had somehow
informed the supervising judge of the criminal complaint (which does not
appear to have existed) in order to manipulate the vote. They compounded
this by meeting before the election with other voters. The forty-three also
collectively proclaimed in their petition that Montaño was not “notorious”
but was rather an “affable and noble person of good reputation and cus-
toms.”53 Furthermore, a subsequent petition maintained that the audiencia
should nullify the election because the Aguilar brothers had succeeded in
disqualifying Montaño through false allegations and ostensibly (though not
directly stated) through the use of their connections to the audiencia. This
final petition noted that “don Juan and don Felipe de Aguilar, brothers,
schemed to alternate the governorship between them, one serving one year
and the other the other.”54
Although none of the petitions filed against the Aguilar brothers in Janu-
ary 1674 motivated the viceregal government to act, they did serve to inform.
The electors identified subtle irregularities but ultimately lost their case. The
allegations that the Aguilar brothers were mestizos, that they manipulated
the election, and that their reputations prohibited them from serving were
all based on ordinances that prohibited these things and were reiterated in
the appointment documents for governors. Governors had to be Native peo-
ples who demonstrated their nobility and indigenous heritage. They had to
have impeccable character and be law-abiding. Furthermore, the forty-three
petitioners argued that the viceregal government disqualified the brothers on
these legal grounds.
The electorate in Mexico Tenochtitlan, in this example, included 130 indi-
viduals who voted for don Juan de Aguilar, 2 who voted for Montaño, and 48
who voted for the second-place candidate, don Martín González. In other
words, 180 voters participated in the election. Of these, 43 alleged corruption
in order to alter the outcome of the vote to force the viceregal government to
intervene. Yet they did not have sufficient support to tip the balance in favor
of Montaño. There is little in the civil suit, apart from what appears to be
interested political maneuvering, that clearly shows corruption.
What does exist, however, is the alleged connection to the audiencia,

which probably eliminated a viable candidate, don Juan Montaño, from con-
sideration. (Montaño did win an election in 1675.55) The petitioners alleged
that the Aguilar brothers had a conduit to the supervising judge, who helped
them to eliminate Montaño as a candidate in 1674. Even though the allega-
tion had no substance, Olmos, the audiencia scribe, reported to the judge
that Montaño had a criminal complaint pending against him in court. This
constituted a serious ethical violation, and the information provided by the
judge probably helped to elect don Juan de Aguilar by effectively disqualify-
ing Montaño as a candidate.56 The Aguilar brothers, according to other com-
plaints, had friends in the audiencia, including Joseph Romero, another
scribe, who helped them by providing a channel of communication to the
Spaniards in the high court who made procedural decisions that could influ-
ence the outcome of the vote.57
The evidence against the Aguilar brothers continued to mount in the
1670s. After the election of 1675, which brought to office don Juan Montaño,
the noble Native peoples and electors of the parcialidad of San Juan filed a
petition against don Felipe and don Juan de Aguilar. The petition claimed to
originate from all the electors, but the signers were don Joseph de la Cruz,
don Agustín de Sandoval, don Mateo Salvador, and don Tomás de San
Miguel. All four of these petitioners were alcaldes, the most important
elected office on the council, and two of them, Cruz and San Miguel, had
been the first alcalde, which was the second-highest Native office, after gov-
ernor. All four had served as elected officials on the municipal council and
had complained about the Aguilar family the year before.58
The petitioners alleged that don Juan and don Felipe de Aguilar, along
with their assistants in collecting tribute, were continuing to gather tribute
into February 1675 even though they no longer possessed the governorship.
The petition also alleged that the brothers continued to use their ally inside
the audiencia, Joseph Romero, to assist them and form part of a conspiracy
to keep the Aguilar brothers in the office of governor in Mexico Tenochtitlan.
Because of the accusation and the intimation that Romero had compromised
his integrity by illegally assisting the Aguilar brothers, the supervising judge
asked Romero to recuse himself from participation in the lawsuit. The peti-
tioners further claimed that the Aguilar brothers had paid Romero to help.59
In order to ground these allegations, the plaintiffs asked for witnesses who
had endured the abuse of the Aguilar brothers to come forward to testify to
their experiences. A number of Natives with quotidian professions generally
testified on behalf of the plaintiffs. The Native witnesses were Juan Tomas;
Joseph Hernández, a shoemaker; Diego Maldonado, a shoemaker; María
Jerónima, the widow of don Francisco Juárez; Antonia Verónica, the wife of
a hatmaker; and Gaspar Francisco, a weaver. Two mestizos also testified:
Juan de Monroy, a lay religious official in the convent of Señor San Juan; and
Felipe Toslarios, a hatmaker. They ranged in age from twenty-five to seventy,
none could sign their names, and all but the two mestizos required an
interpreter.
The eight witnesses all recounted abuses they had experienced, heard
about, or observed during the periods of the year when Native officials col-
lected the tribute. They documented rough treatment, imprisonment under
false pretenses, and officials who charged tribute from a person who had
already paid or from residents who did not owe tribute. The brothers, through
their collectors, confiscated property from those who had no cash, either to
sell it to cover the tribute payments or to hold it to force the residents to pay.
Even when the tribute collectors said they would return the property after
the residents had paid, witnesses alleged, they usually sold it anyway and
presumably kept the difference. The tribute collectors sometimes accused
people of not paying who claimed to have paid and put them in a textile
workshop (obraje) so that they could work for a wage that would go to the
governor.60 These strategies, though undoubtedly effective in collecting trib-
ute, caused significant harm to the residents of the city.
The first witness, Juan Tomás, recounted that the tribute collectors
charged him twice. When he showed them a receipt issued by the governor,
the collectors ripped it up and took him to jail, where they held him until he
paid again. He also testified that the governor’s agents violently dragged a
sick neighbor out of his bed to throw him in jail. The agents seized his red
wool blanket, worth four pesos, and sold it. Such mistreatment (mal trata-
miento), he argued, he had never before experienced in his seventy years in
Mexico Tenochtitlan.61
Others who testified related similar abuses. Maria Jerónima stated that
adolescent girls (doncellas) and adolescent boys (muchachos) had been forced
to pay even though they did not owe tribute at their age. She further noted
that the governor and his agents “mistreated with words and actions the said
Native peoples of the neighborhoods.”62 She stated that she had seen the
elderly, who owed no tribute, forced to pay and mistreated and abused. María
Jerónima testified that when the collectors visited her, they took her huipil
(Native embroidered blouse or shift), even though she had already paid, and
they sold it for two pesos. María continued that all these abuses were com-
mon knowledge (público y notorio). Juan de Monroy, one of the mestizos,
stated that he had observed women in the streets having their clothing
stripped off by tribute collectors, leaving them to return home naked and
shamed. Monroy and the other witness identified as a mestizo, Felipe Toslar-
ios, testified only to what they had witnessed. They made no allegation that
the governors had victimized them specifically.63
After those who had experienced abuse gave their testimony, the electors
filed another petition in which they stated that the governor had learned of
a number of couples who lived together without being married, an arrange-
ment known at the time as amancebamiento. The Church generally handled
such cases, and though potentially embarrassing, cohabitation was quite
common in Mexico City in the seventeenth century.64 In this case, however,
the Aguilar brothers, without the approval of any judge, imprisoned these
couples in the jail of the Native government and then sent them to work in a
textile workshop operated by Simón de Castro. The viceregal court investi-
gated this allegation with some care and sought to find those who had been
so imprisoned and to learn if the governor had resorted regularly to this
practice.
One of the victims, Melchora de los Reyes, who lived outside the jurisdic-
tion of Mexico Tenochtitlan, was put into the textile workshop for two
months by the governor and then held there an additional two months by
Castro. She made atole (a sweetened corn gruel) for the workers and thus
probably provided a valuable service. The Aguilar brothers also picked up
Juan Diego, first imprisoning him and then sending him off to the textile
workshop. In his testimony he stated that he had no idea why he had been
imprisoned. No one informed him of any charge against him, and he never
had to answer any allegation, he stated. Rather, he claimed that the officials
of the Native government snatched him up and shipped him off to the jail
and then the textile workshop. He said that he served two and half months
and that he did not receive any wages. He assumed that his compensation
went to the Native governor.65
At the conclusion of the process, the Crown attorney for the high court gave
a legal opinion in which he sided with the plaintiffs against the Aguilar broth-
ers. He concluded that don Juan and don Felipe de Aguilar had charged extra
tribute from those who had already paid, taken the property of tribute payers
without cause, charged those who did not owe tribute, and generally mis-
treated the people whom they governed. The Crown attorney recommended
that the Aguilar brothers never again involve themselves in the collection of
tribute. The viceregal government clearly did not enforce this ban, because don
Felipe assisted his brother-in-law, don Bernardino Antonio de la Cruz y Guer-
rero, in the 1680s as his principal aide in the collection of tribute. The fiscal
(Crown attorney) also recommended that the brothers repay those from whom
they had taken goods; however, if this included only the complaints in the
lawsuit, it was a very small amount of money.66
conclusion
Some of the actions of which don Felipe and don Juan de Aguilar and other
governors were accused clearly constituted corruption. Don Felipe obviously
benefited when he colluded with an audiencia scribe to influence and report
gossip to the supervising judge. It is also evident that charging one person
multiple times, demanding excessive tribute, and selling a resident’s labor
and property to collect the tribute made it possible for an indigenous gover-
nor, like a corrupt corregidor, to augment a meager salary with excess tax
revenue meant for the Crown. Although the evidence stops short of verifying
that the governors pocketed any excess tribute—they may have simply been
focused on collecting the required amount—forcing someone who was able
to pay to contribute multiple times seems to have been practiced, and the
repeated similar stories of abuse from multiple victims appear to document
well the heavy-handed tactics of the governor and his agents. Sending the
vulnerable to forced labor in a textile workshop and then garnishing their
wages to pay the tribute also suggests an abuse of power and may have ben-
efited the governors directly. Governors in the late seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries were regularly forced to pay tribute arrears out of their
personal reserves.67 Some were even held in jail until they could pay, although
no governor appears to have gone to a textile workshop to work off a debt.
The real potential for corruption came with the office of the governor itself
and the kinds of patronage that a governor might distribute to his clients.
Allegations that the governor was a mestizo, that he was illiterate, or that he
had criminal charges pending against him seem to have been a feature of
politics in Native government rather than direct forms of corruption.
Although the subtle forms of clientelism are difficult to document, the
elected governors won significant authority over markets and courts and
powerful connections to Native communities with tangible value.
Above all, however, the viceregal government’s interest in the collection of

tribute gave individual officials the incentive to collude with the Aguilar family
by ignoring easily accessible information and tolerating the alleged abuse of
the Native community. Friendly judges did not seek out the baptismal records
to confirm the parentage of the Aguilar brothers, and the scribe Romero
appears to have facilitated malfeasance through collusion with the Aguilars.
For the Aguilars, and for the office of governor, however, patronage-clientelist
connections had much greater value than the few hundred extra pesos in trib-
ute that a governor might collect by forcing those with the ability to pay more
than once. Nevertheless, the Aguilar brothers represent a particularly inglori-
ous moment for the indigenous government in Mexico Tenochtitlan; they were
apparently particularly self-interested actors who served for the benefits of the
office. The complaints leveled against them also indicate that their actions
made conditions worse for some Native residents of the city.
notes
1. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), Indios, vol. 29,
exp. 33, fols. 43–43v. An oidor of the audiencia. John Leddy Phelan, The Kingdom
of Quito in the Seventeenth Century: Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish Empire
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 128–29; Clarence Henry
Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1947), 120.
2. For the election process, see William F. Connell, After Moctezuma: Indigenous
Politics and Self-Government in Mexico City, 1524–1730 (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2011), 118–19. For the appointment of don Felipe de Aguilar to
the office of tax collector (the actual title was cobrador de reales tributos), see
AGN, Indios, vol. 29, exp. 6. Felipe is spelled Phelipe in the document. Note that
the cobrador (collector) was not the contador (accountant). The former was usu-
ally a Native person, and the latter was normally a Spaniard. Their jurisdictions
were significantly different: the cobrador served a locality, in this case Mexico
Tenochtitlan and its subject communities, whereas the contador supervised trib-
ute collection for the whole viceroyalty. The Aztecs, more correctly called the
Mexica Tenochca, called their city an altepetl (ethnic state or polity), and its four
neighborhoods existed together in a particular ranked affiliation.
3. AGN, Indios, vol. 29, exp. 33. For the connections between Aguilar and Cruz,
see Connell, After Moctezuma, 168–69. Since the publication of After
Moctezuma, additional documents have been made available by the AGN.
These documents reveal more about don Juan de Aguilar (d. 1654), the
patriarch of the political family, who was elected in Mexico Tenochtitlan in

1644 and served multiple terms from 1644 to 1654. (The data are fragmentary
for the 1640s, so it is unclear how many terms.) AGN, Indiferente Virreinal,
leg. 6651, no. 41, fols. 1–2.
4. Phelan, Kingdom of Quito, 144–46; Haring, Spanish Empire, 270–71.
5. Connell, After Moctezuma, 22–54. A civil lawsuit came to the audiencia in 1564,
but efforts to unseat governors date back to the early 1550s. The Codex Osuna was
created by the Native government as an evidentiary exhibit to make the case
against the Native petitioners and is infinitely more familiar and accessible than
AGN, Civil, vol. 644, exp. 1.
6. Colin M. MacLachlan, Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 57–68. This provides an excel-
lent synthesis of Aztec rulership before the arrival of Europeans, based largely on
sixteenth-century accounts of both European and Native authorship and mod-
ern scholarly interpretations. For the terminology and specific processes, see
James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of
the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 14–58, especially 30–39 for information on
Mexico Tenochtitlan specifically.
7. Pedro Carrasco, The Tenochca Empire of Ancient Mexico: The Triple Alliance of
Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and Tlacopan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1999), 41–49; Connell, After Moctezuma, 32–34.
8. Lockhart, Nahuas, 18, describes the association with markets in the nucleated
urban structure of Nahua towns. MacLachlan, Imperialism, 57–64, follows two
cases, the rule of fray Diego de Durán and don Alonzo de Zorita, to illustrate
some of the more dynamic mythologies around the tlatoque, such as the fact
that they could be vain and vindictive in the manner of Roman emperors
executing servants or that no one could look upon Emperor Moteucçoma II
(Moctezuma).
9. William F. Connell, “Alliance Building and the Restoration of Native Government
in the Altepetl of Mexico Tenochtitlan, 1521–1565,” in City Indians in Spain’s
American Empire: Urban Indigenous Society in Colonial Mesoamerica and
Andean South America, 1530–1810, ed. Dana Velasco Murillo, Mark Lentz, and
Margarita Ochoa (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 8–19. See also
George Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1948), 70–72.
10. Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 20–26, 38–39. Restall discusses the fragmentation of the European
invaders and their penchant to break away from patrons as a standard paradigm
of conquest. In the absence of the king, the executive authority (the viceroy)
could make a final decision and provide a definitive unambiguous response. The
Europeans generally sought to maximize their position, betraying their trusted
patrons in the effort.
11. For the trip to Spain, see Howard F. Cline, “Hernando Cortés and the Aztec
Indians in Spain,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 26 (1969), 70–90.
For the audiencia and the conflict over authority, see MacLachlan, Imperialism,
200–205.
12. Connell, After Moctezuma, 14–16, 36. See Haring, Spanish Empire, 72–75, for a
thorough discussion of this illegitimacy and infighting. Arguably, such infight-
ing continued through the 1560s among the Europeans. The experience of the
first audiencia in New Spain underscored the kind of instability that troubled the
Europeans when factions fought over the possession of finite resources.
13. Connell, “Alliance Building,” 30n70; Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón
Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin, Las ocho relaciones y el memorial de
Colhuacan, ed. Rafael Tena (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las
Artes, 1998), 2:169; Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin
Cuauhtlehuanitzin, Annals of His Time, ed. Susan Schroeder, Doris Namala, and
James Lockhart (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 135.
Chimalpahin uses the term tlatocatlacamecayotl for proper royal lineage.
Chimalpahin also noted that don Pablo Xochiquentzin (r. 1532–1536) was
appointed by Nuño de Guzmán, the president of the first audiencia.
14. Connell, After Moctezuma, 10–21.
15. On the nature of the viceroy, see Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image:
The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 19–50.
16. Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of
Mexico, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 196–98, 207;
Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the
Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 62;
Chimalpahin, Annals, 139; Connell, After Moctezuma, 36, 215n56.
17. See, e.g., Walter Little and Eduardo Posada-Carbó, eds., Political Corruption in
Europe and Latin America (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1996),
8–11. Dependency theory–inspired works also suggest the colonial past as a pre-
cursor to modern experience. Barbara H. Stein and Stanley J. Stein, The Colonial
Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 67–80.
18. Gibson, Aztecs, 93; Anthony McFarlane, “Political Corruption and Reform in
Bourbon Spanish America,” in Political Corruption, ed. Little and Posada-Carbó,
41–63; Jeremy Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the
Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–
1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2–5. Baskes offers a compel-
ling interpretation of colonial markets to suggest that what on the surface may have
seemed like coercion—Natives allegedly being forced to sell their goods under the
threat of violence under terms that were not favorable to their interests—was prob-
ably more like an elaborate credit system demanded by Native peoples to get their
goods to market in areas of the kingdom far from the regular trade routes.
19. Alan Knight, “Corruption in Twentieth Century Mexico,” in Political Corruption,

ed. Little and Posada-Carbó, 219–20.
20. Simona Piattoni, ed., “Clientelism in Historical and Comparative Perspective,”
in Clientelism, Interests and Democratic Representation: The European Experience
in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 4–5.
21. Ibid., 6–7.
22. Phelan, Kingdom of Quito, 147–66.
23. Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, 2nd ed.
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 3–10, 106–9.
24. Gibson, Aztecs, 93.
25. McFarlane, “Political Corruption,” 41–45.
27. Lockhart, Nahuas, 30–33; Connell, After Moctezuma, 24–26.
28. Connell, After Moctezuma, 168–69.
29. Ibid., 96–77, 251nn34–36. This discusses with much firmer evidence the phenom-
enon of Native escribanos (scribes) and their spelling conventions during the mid-
seventh century. For the places in the city, see Barbara Mundy, “Place-Names in
Mexico-Tenochtitlan,” Ethnohistory 61, no. 2 (2014), 343–45. The Tecpan (the seat
of Native government) sat on the edge of San Juan Moyotlan, where it bordered
the traza. Currently the Eje Central, or Eje Lázaro Cárdenas, divides these spaces.
The Colegio Vizcaínas de San Ignacio de Loyola currently occupies the space. In
1733 the governor, don Juan Manuel Hernández, filed suit against the city to stop
the corregidor from granting a license to the Jesuit order to build the Colegio
Vizcaínas, arguing that “following the ancient traditions from the foundation of
this city, the government of the neighborhood of San Juan has always peacefully
and purposefully enjoyed the plaza that was called San Juan, a tianguiz (market)
in our Mexican language (Nahuatl).” Enrique de Olavarría y Ferrari, ed.,
“Contienda y Pleito que se siguio con los indios de la Parcialidad de San Juan de
esta Ciudad, sobre si tenia jurisdicción o no la novillissima ciudad de esta corte
para seder y endonar el sitio que ya expressado en las fojas antecedents para la
fabrica de esta sumuosa obra,” in El real colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola, vulgar-
mente, Colegio de Vizcaínas en la actualidad Colegio de la Paz (México: Imprenta
de Francisco Diaz de Leon, 1889), 12.
30. AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, 6551, no. 41, fols. 1–2.
31. AGN, Indios, vol. 17, exp. 56, fols. 77v–82v.
32. Ibid., fols. 82–82v.
33. AGN, Indios, vol. 17, exp. 211, fol. 204.
34. For example, the case that involved overturning the election of don Juan de
Velázquez in favor of don Juan de Aguilar highlights that the contador preferred
the latter because Aguilar seemed more able to collect tribute. AGN, Indios,
vol.17, exp. 56. For the transformation in Native government, see Connell, After
Moctezuma, 107–49.
35. AGN, Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, vol. 1430, file 52, fols. 733–733v.
36. AGN, Indios, vol. 17, exp. 56. This refers to the Cortés appointment just as the
fiscal (Crown attorney) warned of the potential consequences of going around
Native electoral choice. This appears to have thwarted the contador’s plan to
simply appoint a competent Native governor in lieu of the election that produced
don Juan de Velázquez.
37. AGN, Indios, vol. 17, exp. 56.
38. That the two Aguilars were brothers and served multiple times in office is con-
firmed in AGN, Civil, vol. 1688, exp. 1, fols. 5, 20, 22. AGN, Indios, vol. 29, exp. 62,
states that don Felipe de Aguilar served as governor on four separate occasions.
See also AGN, Indios, vol. 24, exp. 127, which provides the genealogical link to
show that don Felipe was the legitimate son of don Juan the elder, the former
governor; and AGN, Civil, vol. 740, exp. 10. Since Felipe and Juan the younger are
brothers, we can deduce that this Juan is also the son of the former governor in
1654. For the connection to Cruz, see Connell, After Moctezuma, 168–69, which
discusses the similar lawsuits against Cruz and don Felipe.
39. AGN, Indios, vol. 24, exp. 127, fols. 79v–81v.
40. AGN, Indios, vol. 24, exp. 442, fols. 314–314v. This provides a representative sam-
ple in which don Francisco Benítez de Inga challenges Juan the younger on the
grounds that Juan has cases pending against him in court and that he was a mes-
tizo. Benitez did this in 1672, five years after the courts had cleared Juan (by vir-
tue of his brother).
41. Connell, After Moctezuma, 170; AGN, Civil, vol. 740, exp. 10, fol. 23–23v.
42. Connell, After Moctezuma, 170, 281n81; AGN, Civil, vol. 1688, exp. 1, fols. 4–4v. It
is possible that there were two men who served in Native government named don
Joseph de la Cruz, but it seems more likely that they are the same person.
43. Connell, After Moctezuma, 173–74; AGN, Civil, vol. 1688, exp. 1, fols. 18–18v.
44. Connell, After Moctezuma, 218n75.
45. Dozens of references throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century
exist that talk about the carta de pago; see, e.g., AGN, Indios, vol. 29, exp. 266,
which is from 1687.
46. On the functioning of the court system (although this is focused more on the
criminal system in Mexico City), see Michael Scardaville, “Justice by Paperwork:
A Day in the Life of a Court Scribe in Bourbon Mexico City,” Journal of Social
History 36, no. 4 (2003), 981–87. See also, in the realm of criminal law, José María
Fernandez de la Hoz, Codigo de Procedimientos Criminales, redactado con arre-
glo a la legislacion vigente (Madrid: D. Eusebio Aguado, 1843), sec. 2na, art. 8,
pp. 5–6. This discusses the juicio verbal (oral judicial hearing) as the simplest
opening of a criminal proceeding in the first-instance review. The decision to
move beyond the juicio verbal is determined by the first-instance judge.
47. AGN, Civil, vol. 740, exp. 10, fol. 7.
48. AGN, Civil, vol. 1688, exp. 1, fol. 1.
49. This was probably the same Agustín de Betancurt who authored Teatro Mexicana
at the end of the century. David Brading, The First America: The Spanish
Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 366–73. See also AGN, Civil, vol. 740, exp. 10, fols. 7–17v.
50. Connell, After Moctezuma, 99.
51. AGN, Civil, vol. 740, exp. 10, fols. 8–8v.
52. Ibid., fols. 20–21v; Connell, After Moctezuma, 170–71. Olmos’s duties included
keeping track of cases pending before the high court. Joaquín Escriche,
Diccionario razonado de legislación civil, penal, commercial, y forense con citas
del derecho, notas y adiciones por el licenciado Juan Rodríguez de San Miguel, ed.
María del Refugio González (1837; repr., México: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1996), 598.
53. AGN, Civil, vol. 740, exp. 10, fol. 23v.
54. Ibid., fols. 24v–25.
55. AGN, Tributos, vol. 10, exp. 6.
56. AGN, Civil, vol. 740, exp. 10, fol. 20v.
57. Connell, After Moctezuma, 170; AGN, Civil, vol. 1688, exp. 1, fols. 1–4v.
58. For don Juan Montaño as governor, see AGN, Tributos, vol. 10, exp. 6. For the
petition, see AGN, Civil, vol. 1688, exp. 1, fols. 1–3v. For the neighborhoods of the
petitioners, see AGN, Civil, vol. 740, exp. 6, fols. 12–15v, 23.
59. AGN, Civil, vol. 1688, exp. 1, fols. 4–4v.
60. Ibid., fols. 5–14.
61. Ibid., fols. 5–5v.
62. Ibid., fols. 6v–7.
63. Ibid., fols. 8–11v.
64. R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial
Mexico, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 69–71; Patricia
Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage
Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 27.
65. AGN, Civil, vol. 1688, exp. 1, fols. 12–14.
66. Ibid., fols. 22–23v.
67. Connell, After Moctezuma, 178.
CHAP TER FOUR
Portraits of Bad Officials

mal fe asance in visita sentences from
se venteenth - century santo domingo
k
Marc Eagle
A s part of a general investigation of the audiencia (appellate court) of

Santo Domingo (in today’s Dominican Republic) in 1630, the Council
of the Indies in Madrid reviewed and passed sentence in January 1635 on a
set of eight charges against Alonso de Cereceda, an oidor (senior magistrate).1
A special investigative judge, Alonso Hurtado, had previously traveled to
Hispaniola and drawn up this list of accusations, most of which were for
acting abusively toward residents of the city. For example, Cereceda allegedly
called a local tailor a “mulatto dog” and hit him on the head, claimed publicly
and in writing that the archbishop’s legal representative was of low-born
parents, and threatened aloud that he would find and beat another man who
had given him furniture rather than cash in exchange for a female slave.2 In
their sentence, the councilors found Cereceda guilty of only five of the eight
charges, including more job-related issues like failing to attend numerous
audiencia sessions. However, the records of this decision, which briefly
describe all the accusations against the oidor, paint a clear picture of an
arrogant royal official who regularly insulted those around him.
In the view of the councilors of the Indies, Cereceda’s behavior was
improper, but apart from their suggestion that he invoked his office to get
what he wanted in commercial transactions, it is doubtful that they consid-
ered him corrupt. Generations of scholars have spilled a great deal of ink on
the topic of corruption in colonial Latin America, much of it related to venal
87
88 Marc Eagle
sales of royal positions and how they affected the power of the Spanish
Crown.3 Yet defining what corruption is and how seventeenth-century views
on the systematic abuse of an office differ from modern perspectives remains
a source of active debate among academics.4 A few authors have gone as far
as claiming that applying the concept of corruption to the colonial adminis-
trative system fundamentally misunderstands contemporary social norms
and expectations for officeholding, which permitted and even encouraged
self-interested and partisan behavior. This does not mean that there were no
abuses, since in many cases Crown authorities severely punished overseas
bureaucrats for such transgressions as taking bribes to ignore contraband
trade, but usually only when they had exceeded generally accepted limits for
the era.5 Nevertheless, other historians have emphasized that colonial offi-
cials did behave in ways that they took pains to conceal and that the Crown
disapproved of. In this view, there was a sense of common, widespread prob-
lems within the royal bureaucracy that correspond to corruption, whether or
not the people of that time used that label.6
In my opinion, the debate over corruption is complicated by the term cor-
ruption itself, since it is so elastic and often evokes an emotional response.
Different scholars of colonial Latin America have used corruption in narrow
and broad senses, have decried it as pernicious and argued that it allowed a
necessary flexibility in overseas administration, and have tied it to present-
day governmental evils and claimed that it is impossible to understand from
a modern perspective.7 Certainly an emphasis on corruption frequently leads
scholars to pose big questions that are worth considering, but a lack of agree-
ment about what constitutes corruption or how to measure it means that the
term corruption tends to obscure rather than clarify contemporary attitudes
on the practice of government.
In this study I use documents like the sentence of the Council of the
Indies against Oidor Cereceda to focus more narrowly on the idea of malfea-
sance—that is, improper conduct by royal officials—to explore the limits of
acceptable and unacceptable behavior for royal officials in seventeenth-
century Santo Domingo. By using documents from three kinds of investiga-
tive processes and leaving aside the broader question of whether the colonial
administrative system can usefully be labeled corrupt, I hope to clarify the
related issue of what both metropolitan authorities and overseas residents
wanted the king’s representatives not to do.
Many scholars have described these three types of investigation, but a
short review may be useful. The first type, a residencia, was a judicial review
Portraits of Bad Officials 89
of an outgoing officeholder. Taken at the end of the official’s tenure, it was a

standard inquiry meant to verify whether an individual had served faithfully
and merited promotion. The official could usually be promoted to a new
position only upon receiving a positive assessment in the residencia. Accord-
ing to the law, all royal ministers underwent a residencia, even those who had
died in office.
The second type, a visita, was a special investigation of one or more sitting
officeholders, which was meant to be kept secret. The Council of the Indies
ordered a visita for one officeholder (a visita particular) or for a region or an
institution like an audiencia (a visita general) after receiving credible reports
of serious abuses. The investigator who carried out a visita was called a vis-
itador; he was normally higher in status than the official he was investigat-
ing, and he usually had the authority to suspend the official and give out
preliminary sanctions or punishments.
The third type of investigation, a pesquisa, was similar to a visita but was
more limited: it was an investigation of a specific instance of misconduct by
an officeholder. Here too the judge often had the power to suspend the indi-
vidual being investigated.8
In all three processes, an investigating magistrate drew up a formal list of
charges and sent them, along with supporting documentation, to the Coun-
cil of the Indies, which eventually pronounced a final sentence. No matter
what the councilors actually decided, these investigations also regularly pro-
duced a kind of caricatured version of the bad royal servant, who might be
participating in illicit trade, taking bribes for favorable votes in lawsuits, or
simply acting in a disreputable or outrageous manner. In contrast to abstract
political treatises, and especially to royal legislation, both of which give a
poor sense of overseas officials’ own views of their rights and responsibilities,
the portrayals that these investigative mechanisms generated provide a more
functional understanding of how royal ministers were supposed to behave.9
Using records from residencias, visitas, and pesquisas requires some care.
Tamar Herzog has observed that historians cannot expect to evaluate the
accuracy of charges made in these investigations or determine the reasons
for subsequent judicial decisions by the Council of the Indies.10 The distinc-
tion between the verdicts of “absolved” and “absolved as not proven” in many
of these decisions also demonstrates that the councilors in Madrid knew that
a lack of evidence was not the same as innocence.11 Furthermore, although
the council frequently acquitted officials of a number of charges resulting
from these processes and often reduced any preliminary or suggested
90 Marc Eagle
penalties made by the investigating magistrate, the documentary evidence

cannot prove whether personal influence played a role in their sentencing.12
For example, the council absolved Oidor Miguel de Berástegui y Otalora, the
grandson of a former councilor of the Indies, of most charges in the 1630
visita general of Santo Domingo and promoted him to the audiencia of Pan-
ama despite a verdict of “serious guilt” (culpa grave) on several other counts.13
The same councilors suspended other oidores over similar accusations in the
same visita, which strongly suggests that personal connections worked in
Otalora’s favor, even if his sentence gives no indication at all of extrajudicial
considerations.
If these investigations cannot show with any certainty whether individual
ministers were guilty, they can illustrate the kinds of malfeasance that their
contemporaries were most concerned about. Certainly the investigating
magistrate normally left the strongest imprint, because he created the final
list of charges and sometimes gave a provisional verdict and penalty, subject
to approval by the Council of the Indies. Since these judges were often mem-
bers of the audiencia of Santo Domingo or were individuals en route to
assume a position in another audiencia—such as the outgoing fiscal (Crown
attorney) of Manila, who finished up parts of the visita general in 1637—their
sentences reflect colonial bureaucrats’ conceptions of their own responsibili-
ties. However, these charges also at least partly represented the opinions of
local residents and other royal ministers, since the investigating judges had
encouraged them to provide testimony about the misconduct of the officials
under review.14
In the case of Oidor Andrés Martínez de Amileta, for instance, accusa-
tions that he had requested small gifts, such as soap, jam, cacao, or a ham-
mock, from litigants in the city and region suggest local resentment of a
minister described as “fond of his comforts.”15 Likewise, in all of these pro-
cesses the investigating magistrate emphasized illicit behaviors that he
thought the Council of the Indies in Madrid would also find unacceptable.
In some cases the council rejected many of the provisional charges, indicat-
ing that metropolitan authorities had a different view of the most serious
abuses.
Visita sentences for some of the oidores of the Audiencia of Santo
Domingo during the seventeenth century most clearly illustrate how these
investigations produced an image of malfeasance, centered on a particular
set of problems to be assessed in the metropolis.16 These sentences summa-
rize the final charges submitted by the visitador, together with the verdicts
of the councilors reviewing the case.17 The accusations against Oidores Gon-
zalo Mejía de Villalobos in 1608, Juan Parra de Meneses in 1635, and Andrés
de Caballero in 1671 demonstrate a range of contrasting types of bad official.
Although the councilors of the Indies acquitted each of these men of many
individual charges, they found that all had committed substantial offenses
and thus levied considerable fines against all three magistrates and suspend-
ing Parra and Caballero for several years. In general, their sentences capture
the notion that overseas officials could find several different ways to disap-
point the king’s expectations.
President-Governor Antonio Osorio carried out the 1608 visita of Mejía.
Osorio was already upset with Mejía for opposing the depopulation of five
outlying settlements in 1605 in alliance with his fellow oidor, Francisco
Manso de Contreras, whom Osorio despised.18 He made several charges of
this nature in Mejía’s visita, such as delaying reinforcements that Osorio
ordered while in the field, failing to punish those who publicly criticized the
depopulations, or eating with Manso and associating with him at night. Oso-
rio viewed these activities as open demonstrations of factionalism.19
However, in sixteen of the thirty-eight charges, Osorio maintained that
Mejía had behaved improperly with women, which was the dominant theme
in the portrait created by this sentence. A few of these charges were general
accusations that the oidor behaved indecently by going out at night, some-
times in disguise, in order to harass women. Even in the cathedral he “pro-
ceeded in worrisome and disturbing ways, looking, talking, and making
gestures at women, and the same in the streets in looking in windows and
talking with women,” scandalizing the residents of the city.
A greater number of these charges, however, depicted specific cases of
illicit relationships with individual women, many of whom were litigants or
relatives of litigants. These included a married woman whose husband had a
pending lawsuit, the mother of a man accused of sodomy, a single woman
who had come from Havana to pursue legal claims, a woman in Puerto Rico
(during a visita of that island’s governor), two different women in cases
involving deceitful or nonconsensual sex (estrupo), and even a nun from the
convent of Santa Clara, whom Mejía was said to have made threats and
promises to in order to persuade her to have “friendship and devotion” with
him. The idea of sexual misconduct is clear, even if the Council of the Indies
phrased the summaries of these charges ambiguously, which was common
for the time. For some charges, the councilors described Mejía as merely
having “dealt with” (trató con) women, but in others they added “indecently”
92 Marc Eagle
or “carnally” as a qualifier. One accusation even said that he had gone to a

female litigant’s house and “kissed and embraced her,” then shouted to her
servants to be quiet about what they might have seen.20
Osorio included a few other kinds of accusations against Mejía, largely
related to accepting or demanding gifts and services in exchange for favor-
able verdicts or being excessively familiar with local elites while they had
pending suits.21 These were only nuances, however, in the overall portrait of
a judge who used his office to induce women to have sex with him. After
reviewing the charges, the Council of the Indies absolved him of all but two
of those related to sexual misconduct, either for lack of proof or because they
were too general. The councilors found him guilty of having two children
with a servant woman he brought along with his mother and daughters from
Spain. They also found him guilty of carrying on a public relationship with
a married woman he installed in a neighboring house, whose husband was a
litigant who “lived and held office” in the jail.22
In comparison, the authorities in Madrid seem to have been more con-
cerned with five other charges related to Mejía’s commercial involvement
with locals, where he used his position to buy goods at steep discounts or to
avoid paying merchants. In the end, the council sentenced the oidor to a fine
of 1,000 ducados (1,375 pesos; his yearly salary was 1,600 ducados, or
2,200 pesos) and a stern reprimand in front of his colleagues, which suggests
that they believed his transgressions were substantial but not serious enough
to warrant his removal from office.23
As a whole, the list of charges probably reflected contemporary percep-
tions of Mejía in Santo Domingo and shaped the council’s impression of him,
even if most of the charges could not be proved. Local residents provided the
testimony about Mejía’s misdeeds, creating the composite image of a magis-
trate who regularly committed sexual extortion. It is tempting to speculate
about the agency of the women described in these accusations, but the docu-
ments offer no real evidence on this. In several instances the oidor was said
to have cajoled and threatened them into relationships, but rather than pre-
suming that all these women were passive victims, I would suggest that some
may have known that sex with Mejía was a potential route to a favorable
verdict. In any case, the list of charges that Osorio created was also an expres-
sion of local grievances against an abusive magistrate. Even if the councilors
did not base their final sentence exclusively on sexual misconduct, they
surely understood that these complaints corresponded with his reputation in
Santo Domingo.
In contrast, the charges against Oidor Juan Parra de Meneses, drawn up

by Visitador Alonso Hurtado during the turbulent visita general of the audi-
encia from 1630 to 1633, created a caricature of an official who placed his
family’s material gain before the interests of justice. Of sixty-eight separate
accusations, the most common ones describe the oidor and his wife actively
requesting and receiving loans or valuable gifts and discounts—for pearls,
slaves, a horse, fabric, clothing, and food, among other things—in exchange
for a favorable vote in suits in the audiencia, and sometimes the couple
employed threats of punishment. As with Mejía, other kinds of malfeasance
were represented for Parra, including a few charges of scandalous behavior
and illicit affairs (after Parra had sent his wife to Spain), as well as procedural
failings like approving unfit candidates, not following protocol for sentenc-
ing, and making judicial decisions without a majority to favor his own
allies.24 However, two general charges best capture the overall tone of Hurta-
do’s list of accusations against Parra: that he and wife had accepted and solic-
ited gifts since arriving, and that “it is public knowledge that he casts his vote
for the one who gives him the most, and he sometimes receives from both
parties.”25
Although Parra’s sentence portrayed behavior that his contemporaries on
both sides of the Atlantic understood as corrupt in the sense of a perversion
of justice, it also offers a clear image of a radicado, an outsider who had
become deeply connected with the locals during his time on the island.26 His
wife played the role of influence broker, such as by becoming the godmother
of the son of a local attorney, for which the Council of the Indies found Parra
guilty.27 Another general charge that resulted in a guilty verdict, of “having
had very great familiarity with litigants and the officials of the audiencia
against ordinances,” reflected the visitador’s own understanding of royal
legislation.28
Parra’s relationships created enemies as well as allies; some of those he had
extracted gifts from or failed to pay sought redress with the visitador, which
suggests that the magistrate had overestimated the value of his patronage.29
At least some residents also saw Parra as arrogant and abusive. One accusa-
tion said he had given tailor Isidro Rivilla “many blows in the face with some
scissors and mistreated him, and his wife doña Mariana Orduña had given
him many whacks with a measuring stick,” for which the council fined him
50 ducados.30
Although the councilors acquitted Parra of most charges, his willingness
to sell justice earned him the substantial punishment of three years’
94 Marc Eagle
suspension and fines of about 500 ducados.31 In general, the image of a bad
official created by the charges in this sentence was that of a judge who made
little pretense of the impartiality that his office was supposed to represent
and openly solicited favors. Although some of these characterizations came
from his colleagues, most were based on the complaints of locals, some of
whom had even benefited from his patronage. Certainly this list of accusa-
tions describes a kind of malfeasance that fits easily under the heading of
corruption. More specifically, though, it presents a contemporary portrait of
an official who viewed his position as a privilege to employ for his family’s
benefit, and it suggests that at least some of the city’s residents used such
attitudes to their own advantage.
The Council of the Indies set in motion the extended visita process of the
third of these oidores, Andrés de Caballero, in 1661, but did not sentence him
until 1671.32 In contrast to the charges against the other two senior magis-
trates, Caballero’s principal transgression was enriching himself through
trade, summed up neatly by one charge that wherever he had gone, “having
arrived poor, he has gotten out of debt and is very rich.”33 Caballero’s visita-
dor also accused him of accepting bribes for favorable verdicts, but Caballero
aimed higher than Parra, taking gifts and hospitality mainly from regional
governors rather than local litigants.
For example, after finishing a positive (and profitable) residencia of the
governor of Puerto Rico, Caballero reportedly received provisions and trans-
portation to the island of Margarita, where he was to take the residencia of
the governor. During this second residencia, the visitador claimed, Caballero
accepted gifts of food, clothing, jewelry, and even an eight-year-old slave. He
also became close friends with the ex-governor and his son-in-law, the new
governor, visiting their house “every afternoon to drink lemonade and choc-
olate, [and] going out to stroll with them.”34 Although it is not specified,
regional informants and royal officials who wrote to complain to the Council
of the Indies, rather than residents in Santo Domingo, appear to have made
these accusations about Caballero’s behavior.
According to the list of charges, the alliances Caballero made outside His-
paniola also allowed him to participate in contraband trade in Santo
Domingo. One accusation claimed that while investigating slave smuggling
in Cumaná in the province of Venezuela, he not only accepted various bribes
(including a civet cat) but also bought a load of salted fish and sold it back in
Santo Domingo, along with some sugar the governor had given him, at a
healthy profit.35 Later on, several Dutch ships stopped in Santo Domingo,
carrying falsified papers as well as letters from Cumaná for Caballero, so that
he might arrange their entry; presumably, access to the port involved bribes
for both regional contacts and the oidor. Another charge said Caballero used
his close relationship with the volatile president-governor, Félix de Zúñiga,
in treasury meetings (juntas de hacienda) to grant docking permits to these
ships. Afterward he had his son, a city guard, open a side gate to unload
contraband goods, arranged housing and storage for ship owners, and even
sold goods from his own house.36
For twenty-one of the forty-five charges against him, the Council of the
Indies found Caballero guilty. This was perhaps unsurprising, since the oidor
had already been suspended and recalled to Spain nine years earlier after a
stream of reports about the misconduct of both Zúñiga and Caballero; the
councilors had found the information credible enough to order this visita.37
The final charge even claimed that Caballero had continued to trade through
third parties after the Council of the Indies granted him the post of juez de
Indias (a judge supervising overseas trade) in the Canary Islands. Although
the councilors found this assertion unproven, it helped to complete the over-
all picture of a minister with a long history of self-enrichment.38 In the end,
the authorities in Madrid gave him an even heavier penalty than either of the
oidores previously discussed: a year of suspension, in addition to the eight
years he had effectively been deprived of office, with no salary for any of this
time.39
The three distinct variations of caricatures of bad officials in the visita
charges of Gonzalo Mejía de Villalobos, Juan Parra de Meneses, and Andrés
de Caballero are based on different foundations. Most of the accusations
against Caballero came from colleagues, opponents of regional governors, or
the visitador and therefore do not really represent local hostility toward a
corrupt official. Since Santo Domingo received very limited maritime traffic,
most local residents would have applauded his role in bringing more goods,
even if other audiencia officials envied the riches he had acquired through
his commercial connections. An unnamed minister charged Caballero with
insulting the honor of his colleagues by remarking that “his majesty gave
positions to ridiculous people,” which was clearly intended to shock the
council but probably amused the local residents.40
In the case of Parra, most of the charges against him came from locals
who had been on the wrong side of his partiality or who had favors extorted
from them. In contrast to Caballero, whom the visitador accused of taking
bribes from officials outside Hispaniola, Parra enriched himself on a smaller
96 Marc Eagle
scale at the expense of city residents. Perhaps because he did not cultivate the
kind of regional contacts Caballero did, his actions created more resentment
within Santo Domingo.
Local influence weighed heavier still in the visita charges against Mejía,
since the repeated allegations of gross sexual misconduct originated in the
testimony of residents and frequently included the names of the women
involved.41 For the visitador and the Council of the Indies, the oidor’s behav-
ior was clearly unethical, but their concerns were primarily about the issue
of openly giving out favorable verdicts. For the residents of Santo Domingo,
it is not hard to imagine anger against a magistrate who was believed to have
used his position to prey upon women, whether or not it was framed as cor-
ruption in the sense of judicial partiality.
There are several other examples of visita and residencia sentences for
oidores of Santo Domingo that create a composite image of an undesirable
official. Many seem to emphasize one or two particular themes, as in the
examples above.42 Another visitador charged Oidor Andrés Martínez de
Amileta, mentioned earlier, with receiving small loans and a variety of gifts
and allowing his wife and his mother-in-law to do the same during the late
1650s. However, the most serious accusations against him dealt with what
was considered the misuse of torture. According to the sentence, he had not
used torture in cases where he should have, in order to establish guilt, yet he
had overused it in other instances. In the eyes of the councilors this consti-
tuted inexcusably poor judgment for a royal magistrate, and they gave him
three years’ suspension. This image of immaturity was reinforced by another
accusation, that the president-governor had scolded him for disrespectful
behavior—“the childish actions of a Creole”—during audiencia meetings. At
the same time, the stories summarized in this sentence offered the councilors
a glimpse of Martínez’s reputation in Santo Domingo as a cruel and arbitrary
official, who supposedly even tortured a local notary until his hands were
permanently crippled.43
As noted above, each of these sets of accusations presents a slightly differ-
ent viewpoint on what constituted undesirable behavior. The decision of the
Council of the Indies in 1601 in the visita of Oidor Simón de Meneses
describes only the seventeen charges for which he was found guilty and sim-
ply gives numbers for the twenty-four remaining charges.44 As a result, Men-
eses’s final sentence illustrates the Council of the Indies’s perspective on
abuses committed by overseas officials but lacks the local insights provided
by the cases of Mejía and Martínez. The summaries of those seventeen
charges paint Meneses as a harsh and vindictive magistrate who overstepped

the bounds of his authority. According to the sentence, he ignored recusals
(declarations of partiality rendering him ineligible to vote) in several cases,
threw a fellow oidor in jail, caused the death of a local “honorable man” by
incarcerating him while he was sick, and had another prisoner forcibly
shipped off the island out of jealousy over a woman.45
In comparison, the 1604 visita sentence of Pedro Sáenz de Morquecho
does describe each charge, thus offering a stronger sense of his visitador’s
opinions. The list of accusations against him included insubordination
toward the president of the audiencia, failure to properly punish public sins
and crimes, arrogance toward local residents and other audiencia officials,
procedural mistakes such as the improper use of torture and the threat of
torture, and a lack of effort to suppress contraband trade. However, the
Council of the Indies decided that his visitador, Archbishop Agustín Dávila
y Padilla, had been overzealous. The councilors absolved Sáenz of all but
three minor charges out of a total of sixty-one and declared him a worthy
minister, while ordering the archbishop himself to pay the oidor’s salary for
the time he had been suspended from office.46
Images of malfeasance are somewhat less vivid for other kinds of royal
officials, such as the president-governors or the ministers of the royal trea-
sury, partly because the sample size is smaller and partly because the kinds
of opportunities for misbehavior varied. The president-governors of the
island had the broadest authority, and consequently the most expansive
scope of abuses, of any individual on the island. As a result, the extensive
charges against many of them in residencias, visitas, and pesquisas do not
provide easily generalizable portraits of a few varieties of misconduct. Sev-
eral of these investigations involved the additional complication of conflict
between current and former president-governors. For example, the residen-
cia of Juan de Balboa Mogrovejo started in 1661 but ended up lasting nearly
ten years, thanks to a new set of charges sent by his successor, Pedro de
Carvajal y Cobos.47 Likewise, the council declared in 1704 that another
president-governor, Severino de Manzaneda, had mishandled the pesquisa
against his predecessor, Ignacio Pérez Caro, and ordered Manzaneda to
restore all fines and salaries out of his own funds.48
Nonetheless, as a group these sentences suggest that audiencia ministers
and investigating judges made the principal complaints against president-
governors more often than local residents did. These officials accused
president-governors of insulting, imprisoning, or physically abusing oidores
98 Marc Eagle
and fiscales and of making decisions without proper regard for judicial pro-
cess.49 Giving military positions to relatives and servants seems to have been
less upsetting to locals than to royal magistrates, and forcibly taking money
from the royal treasury to repay loans or permitting contraband trade usu-
ally met with popular approval. However, residencia judges viewed all of
these as unacceptable and regularly made charges to this effect.50
There are a few hints in these sentences that some president-governors had
the ability to cause widespread outrage among the city’s population, notably
in the accusation that Balboa Mogrovejo had forced soldiers to buy clothes
with their unpaid salaries and then had summarily hanged the two leaders
of the resulting riot, so that “the city was on the point of being lost.”51 Cer-
tainly there were some individual complaints by locals or shipowners who
believed that these men had harmed them personally, but the overall por-
trayal of many of the president-governors of the seventeenth century sug-
gests bureaucratic resentment of these men. Judging from these residencia
sentences, the president-governors enjoyed more respect from city residents
(especially elites) than their letrado (university-educated) colleagues, had
more kinds of patronage to dispense and were often quick to favor local
needs—as well as their own—over the letter of royal law.52 Although the dif-
ferences between the portrayals of oidores and president-governors in these
sentences was partly a result of the greater authority of the latter, it also
reflected tension between letrado and capa y espada (military) officials;
charges against some of the president-governors claimed they had encour-
aged public mockery of the oidores.53
In contrast, the briefer visita and residencia charges against fiscales—the
royal attorneys of the audiencia whose special duty it was to defend the inter-
ests of the royal treasury and the king’s judicial authority—tended to empha-
size the theme of failure to defend the king’s interests, especially in financial
matters. The residencia sentence of Fiscal Bernardo Trigo de Figueroa in 1663
included such accusations as not preventing other audiencia ministers from
giving offices to their servants, not disputing payments made from treasury
accounts, and not inspecting or reporting on recently arrived ships properly
in order to stop illicit trade.54
The short set of nine fairly minor charges was partly the result of Trigo de
Figueroa’s limited tenure—he served for only two years—but it also reflected
the fiscal’s more limited authority and lower status than other audiencia offi-
cials. In general, fiscales in Santo Domingo tended to play the role of zealous
reformers, perhaps because opportunities for self-interest were more limited,
but also because this was the most practical strategy to earn promotion off
the island. Although they could influence the outcome of judicial cases, the
fiscales had less effective power in this regard than their colleagues. Conse-
quently, malfeasance for these Crown attorneys frequently involved collud-
ing with presidents or oidores, since local residents were much more likely to
approach them first for help with pending litigation.55
Similarly, visita accusations against local residents who held even lower-
status positions—including treasury officials, lawyers who acted as interim
fiscales, notaries in various positions, and guards—also focused more nar-
rowly on the duties of their offices and said little about personal relations or
scandalous behavior. In the case of the treasury, the fact that accounts were
reviewed very infrequently—for instance, the council’s sentences in the visita
of 1672 covered the entire period from 1632 to 1666—may also have motivated
exemplary punishments, at least for individuals who had not died before the
time of the investigation. A few treasury officials were fined and permanently
deprived of their positions during the seventeenth century, but the charges
in their sentences centered on not collecting or recording taxes properly or
not controlling payments from treasury accounts.56
Some were also accused of accepting bribes for allowing or ignoring con-
traband shipments. However, the general characterization in the charges
against them was that they had failed to pay close attention to royal orders,
compared to the sustained misbehavior attributed to higher officials.57 The
accusations against Interim Fiscal Fulgencio Martínez de Ugarte in 1635 con-
vey this same sense of carelessness: acting as if he were the permanent fiscal
and failing to defend the Crown’s interests in several lawsuits and against the
president-governor.58 The same visitador charged attorney Alonso de Cisne-
ros Laudín with disrespectfully and publicly accusing the previous fiscal of
lying, for which the council suspended him from practice for a year and fined
him 100 ducados.59
Although the differences in the more limited kinds of charges for these
inferior functionaries might suggest contrasting sets of expectations for pen-
insulars and Creoles—or, more specifically, local residents holding royal
office—the kind of office held mattered more than the birthplace of the offi-
cial. Individuals such as the comptroller and the royal treasurer, the lawyers
and bailiffs who were part of the audiencia, and the guards of the river and
port were nearly always from Hispaniola itself, yet visitadores did not men-
tion their origins in the charges against them. Instead, the accusations
focused on the specific duties of their offices. The investigative process for
100 Marc Eagle
such lower-status officials was considerably less thorough than it was for
oidores or presidents and mainly represents what visitadores learned from
reviewing written records and questioning other officials, rather than public
complaints.60
These could still lead to substantial punishments, such as in 1672, when
the Council of the Indies permanently barred both the comptroller and the
treasurer from any treasury position.61 However, the more cursory portraits
of malfeasance in these kinds of sentences primarily reflect the different con-
ceptions that visitadores and metropolitan authorities had of the responsi-
bilities of superior and inferior officials, not a distinction between Native
sons and outsiders. They also demonstrate a greater level of concern in
Madrid over the kinds of abuses that higher officials like the president and
oidores might commit, since they had a greater ability to cause lasting fac-
tionalism or local unrest. Tamar Herzog argues that locally born functionar-
ies, especially notaries, could in fact substantially influence an audiencia’s
decisions, but visita sentences for these kinds of officials in Santo Domingo
do not demonstrate significant royal fears about this possibility.62
Although these charges and sentences represent, in most cases, a serious
and thorough effort to expose and punish abuses committed by royal office-
holders, the Council of the Indies’s eventual guilty verdicts and penalties do
not by themselves show which offenses were most serious, or even which
ministers were most corrupt.63 Certainly a number of these overseas func-
tionaries suffered major penalties, from heavy fines to suspension of salaries
to permanent removal from office. However, authorities in Madrid absolved
others of most charges and gave them relatively light punishments for seem-
ingly serious accusations, such as in the previously noted case of Oidor
Miguel de Otalora. President-Governor Juan Bitrián de Biamonte y Navarra,
who reportedly claimed to have paid more than 30,000 ducados for a favor-
able residencia in his previous post as governor of Havana, received a light
sentence and was recommended for promotion in the residencia his succes-
sor took of him.64
In contrast, Santo Domingo’s Oidor Cereceda, who a few years after his
1635 visita sentence had received news of an impressive promotion to oidor
in Mexico, instead received a fine of about forty-six hundred ducados and
five years’ suspension as a result of his residencia, about which he complained
bitterly to the Council of the Indies.65 When the council sent a pesquisa judge
to Hispaniola after President-Governor Francisco de Segura Sandoval y Cas-
tilla allowed a Dutch pirate (who later sacked Veracruz) to leave Santo
Domingo, the judge condemned the president-general to death and man-

dated the forfeiture of all his goods.66 Even so, the Crown authorities eventu-
ally rehabilitated many of those punished. After some deliberation, the
Council of the Indies reduced Cereceda’s suspension by one year and named
him fiscal of the Audiencia of Lima. The council also ordered Segura freed
from the presidio of Santo Domingo after receiving initial reports about his
sentence, and it finally pardoned him, albeit posthumously.67
Even if they were ineffective at stopping malfeasance, review mechanisms
like residencias, visitas, and pesquisas still performed a critical function for
colonial administration in reinforcing the centrality of the king and the
metropolis.68 Each investigation, no matter how long it took, conveyed the
message that the king and the Council of the Indies ultimately had the power
to punish and to reverse or reduce penalties. Even individuals who were able
to avoid sanctions through personal connections or bribery had to recognize
and confront the apparatus of superior authority in Spain.69 Most of these
investigations functioned as occasions when residents, officials, and penin-
sular authorities all had some opportunity to express their expectations for
overseas ministers. Treating the lists of charges generated by these investiga-
tions as composite portraits of bad officials illuminates what seventeenth-
century judges and councilors in Madrid considered a violation of the king’s
trust, and it offers some clues about what local residents wanted royal offi-
cials not to do. Since for Santo Domingo these visitadores were often outgo-
ing ministers of other audiencias, the charges they compiled captured
behaviors that they themselves also needed to avoid.70
The images of malfeasance in the sentences discussed here apply to most
other colonial audiencias, allowing for local variations in opportunities for
malfeasance, such as in New Spain (Mexico) or the Andean region, where
silver production or indigenous labor offered different paths to self-
enrichment.71 Nevertheless, investigating officials in each setting drew up
charges that they expected the Council of the Indies to find at least worthy of
reprimand and in many cases deeply shocking.72 It is plausible that the low
status and general poverty of Hispaniola gave royal ministers in Santo
Domingo an incentive to serve as honestly as possible in the hope of receiving
a promotion to another city, where the opportunities for illicit gain or rewards
for good service were greater. However, the accusations seen in visita and resi-
dencia sentences for oidores and president-governors strongly suggest that the
island saw levels of official misbehavior that were comparable to most other
regions.73
102 Marc Eagle
Even if these sentences cannot be taken as proof of the actual behavior of

most overseas ministers, the caricatures of untrustworthy officials that they
present reinforces metropolitan perceptions about the abuses committed by
royal representatives. Nearly all the governors, oidores, and fiscales of the
seventeenth-century Audiencia of Santo Domingo arrived as outsiders, and
these investigations gave local residents a royally sanctioned way to express
their grievances against them to an agent of the king. The city’s inhabitants,
who were less concerned about corruption than visitadores or residencia
judges were, showed a practical understanding of malfeasance that empha-
sized personal offenses, such as the sexual depredations attributed to Gon-
zalo Mejía de Villalobos or the nakedly commercial approach to favoritism
reported for Juan Parra de Meneses. The sentence of Andrés de Caballero, in
contrast, strongly suggests that locals viewed his alleged involvement in
illicit trade as acceptable and possibly even as beneficial to Santo Domingo.
In each case, the sentences offer a less theoretical perspective on misbehavior
than royal laws or political treatises do.74
I am left with the question of how to fit these portraits of misbehaving
officials into the general framework of corruption in the colonial administra-
tion system. Simply avoiding the term corruption does not seem entirely
helpful, since it can be, and has been, used for valid ends. For example,
would-be reformers of the Bourbon era certainly conveyed a sense of perva-
sive, system-wide abuses in their discussions of colonial administration,
whether or not they used words like corruptela (corruption).75 Yet it does
seem useful to be as clear as possible about what we specifically mean by cor-
ruption and whose viewpoint we are discussing. Here I am most concerned
with understanding seventeenth-century expectations for good governance.
These sentences offer the most insight on specific instances or kinds of mal-
feasance, rather than providing commentary on whether the entire system
was flawed and in need of reform. They offer less direct evidence on whether,
for instance, people considered venal sales of offices and appointments to be
a form of corruption, yet the charges against a few president-governors for
giving military positions to servants certainly suggest that these men
believed they had the right to dispense patronage, as their counterparts did
in many other places in Spanish America.76 The malfeasance portrayed in
these charges may demonstrate, however, that abusive behavior was not
unique to overseas officials who purchased their positions. None of the
oidores and only one president-governor of Santo Domingo clearly bought
their offices during the seventeenth century.77 Nevertheless, the accusations
of misbehavior against them are much like those for purchasers elsewhere,
who are usually thought to have had more incentive for profit seeking to
recoup their costs.78
Overall, I tend to agree with what Zacarias Moutoukias argues about con-
traband: that labeling colonial administrations in the seventeenth century as
corrupt, or focusing on official malfeasance as a deviation from a consistent
set of royal ideals, is to misunderstand the expectations of the time, or how
governance functioned in practice.79 The kinds of malfeasance discussed
here suggest that many overseas officials viewed their time in office as some-
thing to exploit for their own and their family’s benefit. At the same time,
there were regular and repeated instances of abuses that both authorities in
Spain and local residents found intolerable. There is even a general sense that
openly selling judicial votes went beyond the limits of acceptable behavior,
not only for investigating magistrates and metropolitan officials but also for
local residents, who might both suffer and benefit from unrestrained partial-
ity. It is important to keep in mind that residencias, visitas, and pesquisas
were part of the Spanish system of colonial governance; they acted as a con-
stant reminder to officials that they would have to find some way to justify
their actions while in office, and they gave residents a chance to air their
grievances against functionaries who had offended them. If these investiga-
tions did not permanently end abuses, they did offer regular opportunities
to reflect on the expectations for royal ministers, and they provided instances
of punishment that demonstrated and reinforced the ultimate authority of
the monarch.
notes
1. The Council of the Indies usually heard appeals from the decisions of an
audiencia.
2. Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI), Escribanía de Cámara (here-
after Escribanía) 1181 (visita [special investigation] sentence of Cereceda, Madrid,
January 9, 1635).
3. See, e.g., Michel Bertrand, “Viejas preguntas, nuevos enfoques: La corrupción en
la administración colonial española,” in El poder del dinero: Ventas de cargos y
honores en el Antiguo Régimen, ed. Francisco Andújar Castillo and María del
Mar Felices de la Fuente (Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 2011), 46–62.
4. In three articles spanning thirty-one years, Horst Pietschmann has offered a
thoughtful discussion of his changing perspectives on the topic: “Burocracia y
104 Marc Eagle
corrupción en hispanoamérica colonial: Una aproximación tentativa,” Nova

Americana 5 (1982): 11–37; “Corrupción en las Indias Españolas: Revisión de un
debate en la historiografía sobre Hispanoamérica colonial,” Memorias de la
Academia Mexicana de la Historia 40 (1997): 39–54; and “‘Corrupción’ en el vir-
reinato novohispano: Un tercer intento de valoración,” E-Spania: (December
2013), http://e-spania.revues.org/22848.
5. Two prominent examples are Tamar Herzog, Upholding Justice: Society, State,
and the Penal System in Quito (1650–1750) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2004), 153–60; and Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The
Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico (New York: Routledge,
2004), 176–83.
6. Francisco Andújar Castillo, “Los contratos de venta de empleos en la España del
Antiguo Régimen,” in El poder del dinero, ed. Andújar Castillo and Felices de la
Fuente, 67; Mark Burkholder, “Honest Judges Leave Destitute Heirs: The Price of
Integrity in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” in Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest:
Political Values in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Richard K. Matthews (Bethlehem,
PA: Lehigh University Press, 1994), 247–69; Christoph Rosenmüller, “‘Corrupted
by Ambition’: Justice and Patronage in Imperial New Spain and Spain, 1650–
1755,” Hispanic American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (2016): 1–37.
7. Eduardo Saguier, “La corrupción administrativa como mecanismo de accumu-
lación y engendrador de una burguesía comercial local,” Anuario de Estudios
Americanos 46 (1989): 269–76; Alfonso W. Quiroz, Corrupt Circles: A History of
Unbound Graft in Peru (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press: 2008),
2–7, 13–14.
8. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias (Madrid: Julián de Paredes, 1681),
bk. 2, tit. 34 (on visitas), bk. 5, tit. 15 (on residencias), and bk. 7, tit. 1 (on pesqui-
sas); Guillermo Céspedes del Castillo, “La visita como institución indiana,”
Anuario de Estudios Americanos 3 (1946): 986–93; Ismael Sánchez Bella, “Visitas
a Indias (Siglos XVI-XVII),” Memoria del segundo congreso Venezolano de
Historia (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1975), 3:163–208; Tamar
Herzog, Ritos de control, prácticas de negociación: Pesquisas, visitas y residencias
y las relaciones entre Quito y Madrid (1650–1750), in Nuevas Aportaciones a la
historia jurídica de Iberoamérica, ed. José Andrés Gallego (Madrid: Fundación
Hernando de Larramendi-Mapfre, 2000), 1–198.
9. Herzog, Upholding Justice, 153.
10. Ibid., 157; see also Cañeque, King’s Living Image, 177.
11. Pilar Arregui Zamorano, La Audiencia de México según los visitadores (Siglos
XVI y XVII) (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1985), 63.
12. For the process of sentencing in residencias, see Ulises Rojas, “Los Jueces de
Residencia,” in Memoria del segundo congreso Venezolano de Historia (Caracas:
Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1975), 3:65.
13. AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sentence of Otalora, Madrid, January 9, 1635).
14. Céspedes del Castillo, “La visita,” 1006–8.

15. The Council of the Indies absolved him for insufficient evidence for most of
these; AGI, Escribanía 1182 (visita sentence of Martínez de Amileta, Madrid,
June 9, 1668).
16. For an overview of the entire visita process, from the arrival of the judge to sentenc-
ing, see Arregui Zamorano, La Audiencia, 56–64. The documentation for both
residencias and visitas is often incomplete; see Herzog, Ritos de control, 32, 66.
17. For similar documents for ministers in Quito, see John Leddy Phelan, The
Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century: Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish
Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 216–17.
18. AGI, Santo Domingo 52, 5, no. 44/1 (Santo Domingo, October 20, 1605); Juana
Gil-Bermejo García, La Española: Anotaciones históricas (1600–1650) (Seville:
Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1983), 232. Like all presidents of the
Audiencia of Santo Domingo in the seventeenth century, Osorio also held the
posts of governor and captain-general of the island.
19. Mejía was acquitted of all of these kinds of charges. AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita
sentence of Mejía de Villalobos, Madrid, May 16, 1608).
20. Ibid. Although witness testimony sometimes provides more direct descriptions
of sexual acts, the summaries of charges in the council’s sentences typically use
this kind of vague language.
21. For example, Mejía was accused of visiting litigant Pedro Caballero Bazán and
his family “at irregular hours” and taking food to their house. Ibid.
22. Ibid. Mejías left his wife in Spain at her request; see AGI, Santo Domingo 1, 1,
no. 109 (Madrid, May 13, 1612). For a discussion of a pesquisa from the 1680s
against an oidor of Quito that focused on his affair with a married woman and
the subsequent death of her husband, see Herzog, Ritos de control, 80–81.
23. AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sentence of Mejía de Villalobos, Madrid, May 16,
1608).
24. AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sentence of Parra de Meneses, Madrid, January 9,
1635). The visitador also accused other oidores of similar procedural problems.
The charge that Parra fell asleep in chambers probably came from the testimony
of another oidor, Diego Gil de la Sierpe, who claimed that his colleague was gen-
erally incompetent. AGI, Escribanía 33A, pt. 1, no. 3, fol. 80v; AGI, Santo
Domingo 55, 5, no. 25/1 (Santo Domingo, February 13, 1625), no. 26/1 (Santo
Domingo, February 13, 1625), and no. 29/1 (Santo Domingo, May 16, 1625).
1635).
26. Mark Burkholder, Spaniards in the Colonial Empire: Creoles vs. Peninsulares?
(Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), xiii.
27. AGI, Santo Domingo 55, 11, no. 66/1 (Santo Domingo, February 11, 1631). For the
prohibition of oidores’ wives being involved in their husbands’ affairs, see
Recopilación, bk. 2, tit. 16, law 67; and Phelan, Kingdom of Quito, 151.
106 Marc Eagle
1635). For the prohibition of audiencia officials having “close familiarity” or “close
friendships and correspondence” with residents, see Recopilación, bk. 2, tit. 16,
laws 69, 70.
29. Herzog, Upholding Justice, 133, observes that “judicial decisions were always in-
terpreted as expressions of social obligations,” which also seems to apply to the
sale of such decisions.
30. AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sentence of Parra de Meneses, Madrid, January 9, 1635).
31. The council denied Parra’s request to lift his suspension. AGI, Santo Domingo 1,
3, no. 243B (Santo Domingo, March 27, 1635).
32. AGI, Santo Domingo 2, 2, no. 168 (Madrid, July 14, 1671).
33. AGI, Escribanía 1182 (visita sentence of Caballero, Madrid, August 8, 1671). For
the prohibitions of ministers and their families participating in commerce and
of charging residencia judges and visitadores to take particular care in uncover-
ing these “excesses,” see Recopilación, bk. 2, tit. 16, laws 64, 66.
34. AGI, Escribanía 1182 (visita sentence of Caballero, Madrid, August 8, 1671). Other
sources for the residencia on Margarita are listed in Departamento de
Investigaciones de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, “Investigación sobre los
juicios de residencia en Venezuela,” in Memoria del segundo congreso Venezolano
(Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1975), 1:243.
35. The council absolved him for lack of proof; AGI, Escribanía 1182 (visita sentence
of Caballero, Madrid, August 8, 1671).
36. Ibid.
37. AGI, Santo Domingo 2, 2, no. 168 (Madrid, July 14, 1671). On the accusations
against Zúñiga, see AGI, Santo Domingo 2, 1, no. 70 (Madrid, August 28, 1658).
38. For similar accusations against the president of the Audiencia of Quito, see
Phelan, Kingdom of Quito, 162–63.
39. In response to Caballero’s pleas of hardship, the year of suspension was lifted,
and he returned to Santo Domingo. AGI, Santo Domingo 2, 2, no. 169 (Madrid,
October 14, 1671) and 170 (Madrid, November 4, 1671).
40. AGI, Escribanía 1182 (visita sentence of Caballero, Madrid, August 8, 1671).
41. One accusation involved “a woman whose name, since she was of honorable par-
ents, is not said.” AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sentence of Mejía de Villalobos,
Madrid, May 16, 1608).
42. On visita sentences against oidores in Quito, see Phelan, Kingdom of Quito,
298–301.
43. AGI, Escribanía 1182 (visita sentence of Martínez de Amileta, Madrid, June 9,
1668).
44. AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sentence of Meneses, Valladolid, February 21, 1601); see
also AGI, Escribanía 32 (querella [complaint] of Antonio Franco de Ayala against
Simón de Meneses, 1597). The council fully absolved Meneses of three charges and
marked the remaining twenty-one charges as “absolved as not proven.”
45. The councilors fined Meneses 1,000 ducados and permanently deprived him of
office. AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sentence of Meneses, Valladolid, February 21,
1601). On recusations, see Santos M. Coronas González, “La recusación judicial
en el derecho histórico español,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 52
(1982): 511–615; and Herzog, Upholding Justice, 233–35.
46. AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sentence of Sáenz de Morquecho, Valladolid, July 9,
1604).
47. AGI, Escribanía 12A–12C; AGI, Santo Domingo 2, 2, no. 93 (Madrid, November 22,
1669).
48. AGI, Escribanía 964 (pesquisa sentence of vista for Ignacio Pérez Caro, Madrid,
July 21, 1704, and sentence of revista (review), Madrid, September 15, 1704).
49. The residencia proceedings of Gabriel de Chávez y Osorio, Balboa Mogrovejo,
and Andres Pérez Franco are typical in this regard. AGI, Escribanía 33A, pt. 1,
fols. 21r–22v; AGI, Escribanía 12A, bk. 2, pt. 2, fols. 217r–238v; AGI, Escribanía
1182 (residencia sentence of Pérez Franco, Madrid, June 26, 1663). See also
Cañeque, King’s Living Image, 60–62.
50. AGI, Escribanía 13A, no. 3, pt. 1, fols. 402r–412r, 619r–621v. See also Recopilación,
bk. 2, tit. 15, law 175; and Cañeque, King’s Living Image, 163–65.
51. AGI, Santo Domingo 2, 2, no. 90C (Madrid, October 4, 1662). Balboa Mogrovejo
had unusually difficult relations with local elites, which was one reason his resi-
dencia took so long. AGI, Santo Domingo 2, 2, no. 95A (September 19, 1669).
Gabriel de Chávez y Osorio was said to have publicly mocked the city’s nobles.
AGI, Escribanía 33A, pt. 1, fol. 21r.
52. Close connections with local elites was a dominant theme in the visita of Andrés
Pérez Franco. AGI, Escribanía 1182 (residencia sentence of Pérez Franco, Madrid,
June 26, 1663). See also Phelan, Kingdom of Quito, 297–98; and Cañeque, King’s
Living Image, 53–54. Certainly some local residents had strong complaints about
president-governors, such as the woman who accused Gabriel de Chávez y Osorio
of demolishing five storage cellars (bodegas) she owned. AGI, Escribanía 33B,
pt. 11, fols. 18r–20v.
53. Both Félix de Zúñiga and Balboa Mogrovejo allegedly belittled the dress and
status pretensions of the letrados on the tribunal. AGI, Santo Domingo 58, 3,
no. 45/1 (Santo Domingo, July 28, 1656); AGI, Escribanía 12A, no. 5, pt. 2, fols.
235v–236r.
54. AGI, Escribanía 1182 (residencia sentence of Trigo de Figueroa, Madrid,
December 22, 1663). Upon review, the council revoked several of the fines
imposed by the visitador, choosing instead to send Trigo de Figueroa an aperc-
ibimiento (a formal warning issued to royal officials in the name of the king) for
these matters.
55. Trigo de Figueroa was also charged with allying with the oidores to discredit
President-Governor Félix de Zúñiga. AGI, Escribanía 1182 (residencia sentence
of Trigo de Figueroa, Madrid, December 22, 1663).
108 Marc Eagle
56. For a similar observation for notaries in Quito, see Phelan, Kingdom of Quito,
301.
57. The sustained misbehavior attributed to higher officials included failing to stop
president-governors from misusing royal funds. AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sen-
tence of Treasurer Francisco de Tajagrano and Comptroller Diego Núñez de
Peralta, Madrid, January 9, 1635); AGI, Escribanía 1182 (visita sentences of royal
treasury, Madrid, February 3, 1672).
58. Only one of the twenty charges against him was for an illicit affair, although this
was not upheld for lack of proof; AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sentence of Martínez
de Ugarte, Madrid, January 9, 1635).
59. AGI, Escribanía 1181 (visita sentences of lower officials of the Audiencia of Santo
Domingo, Madrid, May 12, 1635). Some of these sentences call into question the
assertion that lower officials committed little graft, however; see Phelan, Kingdom
of Quito, 165.
60. Céspedes del Castillo, “La visita,” 997; Herzog, Ritos de control, 18–19, 64.
61. AGI, Escribanía 1182 (visita sentences of royal treasury, Madrid, February 3, 1672).
62. Herzog, Upholding Justice, 47–48.
63. Céspedes del Castillo, “La visita,” 1009–10.
64. Bitrián’s residencia generated serious unrest among the other audiencia mem-
bers, but he still became the president-governor of Panama. AGI, Santo
Domingo 56, 2, no. 10/1 (Santo Domingo, July 15, 1642); AGI, Santo Domingo 56,
6, no. 52/1 (Santo Domingo, November 2, 1646). See also Carlos Esteban Deive,
La esclavitud del negro en Santo Domingo (1492–1844) (Santo Domingo: Museo
del Hombre Dominicano, 1980), 298–301; and Gil-Bermejo García, La Española,
224–29.
65. AGI, Santo Domingo 1, 3, no. 281 (Madrid, August 14, 1640); AGI, Santo Domingo 55,
18, no. 91/1 (n.p., n.d.). On suspensions, see Herzog, Ritos de control, 154–55.
66. AGI, Santo Domingo 64, 6, no. 162/1 (Santo Domingo, December 1, 1684).
67. AGI, Santo Domingo 1, 3, nos. 281 (Madrid, Aug 14, 1640) and 930 (royal com-
munication freeing Segura Sandoval from prison, Aranjuez, May 10, 1685); AGI,
Santo Domingo 91, 1 (letter from Segura Sandoval, Santo Domingo, October 28,
1685); AGI, Escribanía 964 (pesquisa sentence of Segura Sandoval, Madrid,
October 9, 1696). Even Oidor Simón de Meneses, barred from office in 1601, was
eventually reinstated. AGI, Santo Domingo 1, 1, no. 66 (Valladolid, October 7,
1605). For similar examples from Quito, see Herzog, Ritos de control, 68–69.
69. On the role of the king as a father figure who held the power of both punishment
and absolution, see Herzog, Ritos de control, 144. This author also argues that the
residencia process reinforced an ideal image of colonial administration. Herzog,
Upholding Justice, 253–54.
70. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the oidores and presidents of Santo
Domingo often served as visitadores, but by the 1620s they were usually officials
passing through on the way to take up a position elsewhere. The Council of the
Indies even occasionally sent higher-status officials from Spain, such as in 1666,
when the council’s relator (the official responsible for making summary reports
to the councilors) finished up some outstanding investigations. AGI, Santo
Domingo 2, 2, no. 132A (Madrid, March 31, 1666).
71. By the seventeenth century, Hispaniola had almost no inhabitants categorized as
indios (Indians). AGI, Santo Domingo 54, 1, no. 31/1 (Santo Domingo,
September 30, 1610). Abuses were commonly committed against indigenous peo-
ple within the audiencia’s district, which is shown by the visita of the encomen-
deros (Spanish holders of a grant conferring the privilege of receiving tribute
from an indigenous community) of Cumaná taken by Oidor Fernando de la Riva
Agüero. AGI, Escribanía 1182 (visita sentence of encomenderos of Cumaná,
Madrid, April 5, 1696). See also Herzog, Upholding Justice, 249–50.
72. Phelan, Kingdom of Quito, 249–50, 254–55.
73. For the charges in the 1691–1692 visita general of Quito, see Herzog, Ritos de con-
trol, 55–56, 58–61. On the possibility that earning encomienda income helped
keep president-governors of the Audiencia of Guatemala relatively honest, see
Miles Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 34. No comparable reward existed for
Santo Domingo.
74. See, e.g., Recopilación; and Juan de Solórzano Pereyra, Política Indiana (1648;
repr., Madrid: Atlas, 1972).
75. See, e.g., Anthony McFarlane, “Political Corruption and Reform in Bourbon
Spanish America,” in Political Corruption in Europe and Latin America, ed.
Walter Little and Eduardo Posada-Carbó (London: Macmillan, 1996), 41–43,
48–49.
76. The accusation against Balboa Mogrovejo, of naming his secretary as the alférez
(standard bearer) of a military company, was fairly typical. AGI, Santo
Domingo 2, 2, no. 89 (Santo Domingo, December 11, 1661).
77. Marc Eagle, “The Audiencia of Santo Domingo in the Seventeenth Century,” PhD
dissertation, Tulane University, New Orleans, 2005, 166–67.
78. Herzog, Upholding Justice, 89–91.
79. Zacarias Moutoukias, “Power, Corruption, and Commerce: The Making of the
Local Administrative Structure in Seventeenth-Century Buenos Aires,” Hispanic
American Historical Review 68, no. 4 (November 1988): 771.
CHAPTER FIVE
“The Execrable Offense of Fraud or Bribery”

corrup t judges and common people in the
visita of imperial me xico (1715 –1727)
k
W hen Inquisitor Francisco Garzarón Vidarte arrived in Mexico City

in 1708, the Holy Office of the Inquisition had lost much of its
sixteenth-century religious fervor.1 Nonetheless, Garzarón and his two
fellow inquisitors tried a recalcitrant Bethlehemite for heresy in 1715. The
friar refused to recant his criticism of the official creed; not even years spent
in a monastic cell, the Inquisition’s secret dungeons, or regular whippings
cowed him. At one flogging he cursed the Church and demanded that the
clergy “hang me . . . right away.” Ultimately the tribunal acceded, ordering
the friar’s death. On June 16, 1715, the Inquisition staged an auto-da-fé in
front of the Dominican monastery in downtown Mexico City. The friar
begged for forgiveness and professed his faith while walking to the pyre,
“much consoling the inquisitors who were with him until the last minute.”
The provincial administrator (alcalde mayor) then burned the Bethlehemite
at the stake. The friar was the last person to suffer such a gruesome death in
imperial Mexico, and the auto-da-fé once more underlined Garzarón’s
reputation for unbending rigor.2
Madrid took note. King Philip V of Spain called on Garzarón in 1715 to
scrutinize abusive officials and judges of the audiencia (appellate court). The
Audiencia of Mexico City served mostly as a tribunal for appeals of civil and
criminal cases.3 Garzarón heard the suspects, and he concluded the investi-
gation by suspending 13 judges and 154 lower officials. Measured by the
111
112 Christoph Rosenmüller
number of people removed from a single institution, this visita general (spe-
cial investigation of an institution or a region) was one of the most radical in
the history of imperial Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then known. Although
scholars of Mexico have largely ignored this process, its uniquely stringent
outcome makes it particularly important.4
The ample suspensions enjoyed broad support, because many inhabitants
of New Spain and the inspector shared common notions of corruption. Most
locals and Garzarón agreed that a judge who accepted a sizable gift from a
litigant to alter a court ruling was corrupt. A judge who forced others to pay
money to avoid questionable charges, who forged papers, or who falsified
signatures also committed an offense. In addition, the people deplored the
abusive actions of officials, but they called this conduct forgery or abuse,
whereas the word corruption was reserved for judges breaching judicial
norms. In practice, the boundaries between justice and corruption often
depended on the perspective. For instance, locals discussed when exactly a
legitimate present for a judge turned into a criminal offense. Vendettas
against personal enemies mattered too, but they could be successfully articu-
lated only within the sounding board of some basic shared values about
corruption.
Scandals sometimes crystallized in trial records. These documents offer a
good glimpse into the breaches of justice and the punishment of culprits. The
ministers under investigation stressed the importance of established local
customs and theological guidelines in defending their actions, whereas the
investigating judge hewed close to the royal laws. These accusations, confes-
sions, testimonies, and defenses show how novohispanos, the inhabitants of
New Spain, drew the line between corruption and justice. Garzarón inter-
viewed about seven hundred witnesses, an enormous number by imperial—
and even modern—standards. The inspector’s notary assembled these
proceedings in thirty-six volumes of about two thousand pages each. Ini-
tially located in the Inquisition Palace, the volumes eventually ended up in
Spain, where they were placed in the Archive of the Indies in Seville and
mostly forgotten.5
Before Francisco Garzarón started the investigation (visita), he had lived
as a relatively ascetic clergyman from Navarre, a small kingdom in the north
of the Iberian Peninsula. His birth on the periphery separated him from the
powerful Castilian aristocratic and municipal elites, who often locked horns
with the king over their privileges. Probably because of his social origins,
Garzarón joined a reform-minded clique at the court in Madrid that favored
“The Execrable Offense of Fraud or Bribery” 113
curtailing elite privileges and intensifying royal power. That choice proved
to be a means of advancement as he progressed from modest nobility in
Navarre to a respected and often hated investigative judge (visitador) of New
Spain. Ultimately, King Philip V honored his efforts with the wealthy bish-
opric of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Garzarón, however, never served in that
post because he died on June 19, 1727, while in Mexico City prosecuting way-
ward officials.6
In late 1715, before the visita general began, the viceroy of New Spain
appointed Pedro Sánchez Morcillo, an alcalde de crimen (a criminal judge of
the audiencia), to “destroy the thieves, highwaymen, and delinquents . . . that
infest the roads between Puebla and Veracruz.”7 These roads formed the
artery connecting Mexico City, the city of Puebla, and the Atlantic port of
Veracruz (see map 1). The judge obtained an extraordinary commission
(acordada) to sentence criminals without appeals to the audiencia.8
After arriving in the region to execute his commission, Sánchez heard of the
violent death of an Indian in Huejotzingo, a largely indigenous town located
north of Puebla on the eastern slope of the great Iztaccihuatl volcano. The
mother of the deceased Indian lamented that “she had not been awarded jus-
tice.”9 She alleged that her son, José Miguel Nieto, had stolen corn from a haci-
enda in early 1714. The landowner, José García de Guesca; his brother, Diego;
and their servants caught the Indian and whipped and beat him until he died.
The alcalde mayor, Juan Antonio de Cos y Cevallos, appeared shortly after and
ruled that the García brothers had acted in self-defense. José had to pay for the
Indian’s burial, and Cos exiled Diego from Huejotzingo Province for a year
while allowing him to go about his business anywhere else in New Spain.10
Judge Sánchez traveled to Huejotzingo after hearing about this case. There
he jailed the García brothers and fined them 412.5 silver pesos. José García
also paid 300 pesos for his legal defense, and he made a 100 peso deposit to
the judge’s notary (escribano receptor). Sánchez then released the suspects.
According to him, he kept 100 pesos as a commission fee and gave the mother
of the deceased 100 pesos as compensation. The remainder went to hospitals
for the poor and to the priest who said Mass. The notary had pocketed the
deposit and never returned it to García.11
While investigating the killing, Sánchez concluded that García had acted
as the “accomplice” of Miguel Pérez, the governor of Huejotzingo.12 The gov-
ernors of indigenous towns traditionally had the authority to punish their
people for minor offenses, but they could not execute them. Sánchez arrested
Pérez and confiscated his estate, as was common in criminal trials. Governor
Map 1. Province of Huejotzingo, Mexico.
Pérez’s son visited him in the jail of Tlaxcala, an indigenous city near Hue-
jotzingo, during Lent in 1716. Soon afterward, the son delivered 400 silver
pesos and one hundred chickens to the judge and about 200 pesos to his
notary. While journeying back to Mexico City, Sánchez released Pérez in the
neighboring town of San Martín Texmelucan. The governor demanded a
written verdict, but the judge merely admonished him and departed. Subse-
quently, complaints about Sánchez’s “extortions and cheating” reached Mex-
ico City. Hearing of the possible corruption, the viceroy ended the
commission in the Puebla region.13
Francisco Garzarón obtained his royal appointment as the visitador on
October 13, 1716, after Sánchez’s tour had ended.14 Garzarón summoned all
residents of New Spain to register complaints against the audiencia judges,
prosecutors, and lower officials.15 Consequently, Pérez and José García
reported their cases to Garzarón. Several witnesses corroborated the account,
among them Alcalde Mayor Cos and his deputy.16
When charged by Garzarón, Sánchez shifted the blame to García and

Governor Pérez. Sánchez insisted that he had rejected García’s attempt to
give him “a bribe of over 600 pesos.”17 The judge also noted that Pérez was
not a cacique, an ethnic lord, as he claimed, but rather a mestizo, a person
of mixed descent who spoke Spanish. When a mestizo abused and killed
an Indian, he violated not only the usual laws but also the special protec-
tions of the indigenous and indigent.18 In addition, the accession of a mes-
tizo to the Indian governorship smacked of illegitimacy. By this time,
many descendants of the Indian nobility in the region spoke Spanish and
had adopted Spanish customs.19 For that reason, Judge Sánchez could
doubt Pérez’s status, although the locals generally accepted the preemi-
nence of these families.
Furthermore, Sánchez pointed out the failings of Alcalde Mayor Cos.
Governor Pérez was the godson of Cos, who had committed an “offense in
office” by failing to prosecute the governor.20 As the commission took an
unfavorable turn for Pérez, Cos—like Pérez’s son earlier—sought “to cor-
rupt” the judge through the “crime of attempted bribery” with 400 pesos and
one hundred chickens, noted Sánchez.21
Judge Sánchez explained to Visitador Garzarón that he accepted the
intended bribe only as a punishment. In February 1716 he sent his constable
to distribute half of the chickens to the “sick house of the religious . . . of San
Francisco” in Tlaxcala and the remainder to another monastery. The record
further showed that Josefa Nicolasa, the widow of the slain Indian, came to
Tlaxcala to receive 200 pesos from the judge for the shroud, the interment,
and the Mass. Three witnesses confirmed this account. An additional
100 pesos went to a clergyman to say 100 Masses for the deceased, and the
judge assigned another 100 pesos to feed the poor prisoners incarcerated in
Tlaxcala. In addition, Sánchez ordered Cos to be placed under house arrest.
The viceroy had to approve the detention, since Cos had also served as the
captain of the local militia. The judge sent a servant on horseback to Mexico
City to seek permission, but the viceroy never responded to this request or
two subsequent requests. As a result, Sánchez suspended the inquiry against
Cos and left the region, lamenting that both the provincial administrator and
the governor walked free.22
To probe deeper, the Visitador Garzarón retrieved the court record and
studied it carefully. He found that some documents with page numbers were
missing. Others appeared to have been added later, because the paper and the
ink had a fresher look. He also noted that Sánchez had stored the record with
the audiencia only on January 25, 1717, after the investigation against him had
started.23
In addition, the record stated that Cos had sent both fowl and funds in the
governor’s name. Garzarón thought that this was “a silly assumption” that
unveiled the “falseness” of the record. The alcalde mayor would not be such
a spendthrift that he would “run the risk that his pesos and chicken be
applied to the purpose of don Miguel Pérez,” the governor of Huejotzingo.24
Garzarón concluded that Sánchez had tampered with the papers to make it
appear that he had taken action against the alcalde mayor. This would dispel
the charge of the governor’s bribe and discredit Cos as a credible witness,
who had become a defendant in the trial.
Visitador Garzarón also pointed to a remarkable tale within Judge Sán-
chez’s record. On February 23 the judge’s notary dispatched papers in Tlax-
cala. On the same day the notary was allegedly at work in Huejotzingo, about
twenty miles away. Although he must have spent at least six hours journeying
over hilly terrain, he returned to Tlaxcala the next day to draft documents
for the judge. The record indicated that the notary then again traveled to
Huejotzingo to take the widow’s testimony and confiscate the alcalde mayor’s
estate. Garzarón doubted that the notary kept traveling between the two
towns when a single trip would have sufficed.25
Garzarón noted further problems with the receipts. Cos would surely
have resisted house arrest with the claim that only the viceroy, as the senior
officer, had the jurisdiction (fuero) to hear the case. The notary had scribbled
some notes indicating that the judge had attempted to communicate with the
viceroy about this issue, but the notary could not provide any confirmation
from the viceroy. Similarly, the widow had never signed off on receiving any
compensation; the judge or his notary had drafted all the evidence. In short,
something was very awry in the record.26
Although the investigation took a bad turn for Judge Sánchez, the docu-
ments reveal that Alcalde Mayor Cos and Governor Pérez were not innocent,
either. A brief snapshot of Huejotzingo society shows that the close ties
among the elite explain the first-instance verdict. The alcalde mayor origi-
nally hailed from northern Spain. He crossed the Atlantic in 1708 or 1709 and
administered another province before coming to Huejotzingo. In less than a
decade, he had become fully immersed in local society and had married a
wealthy merchant’s daughter. An audiencia judge who witnessed the mar-
riage had been a friend of Cos’s for years on the basis of their shared regional
origin in Spain.27
Alcalde Mayor Cos and Governor Pérez became close allies. They had
worked together in the municipal council (cabildo) of Huejotzingo, the head
town of the namesake province. The alcalde mayor then became the gover-
nor’s godfather, ritually joining each other’s families in a practice that per-
vaded New Spain and Europe. When José Nieto, the Indian who stole the
corn from José García’s hacienda, was killed, Cos had handed down the sen-
tences for the García brothers. Diego García had served as Cos’s deputy in
the village of San Martín Texmelucan, which probably played a role in the
favorable rulings that Cos gave the García brothers and the governor.28 The
close collaboration between the governor and the alcalde mayor demon-
strates that by no means did indigenous people as a whole oppose Cos or José
García. Instead, the local elite—including the indigenous governor, Pérez—
conflicted in this case with a more popular section of society.
The verdicts also reflected the prevailing ideas of justice. According to
these norms, a crime against a person of lesser social standing typically
received a lighter punishment than a crime against a person of social preemi-
nence.29 This form of awarding justice was widely accepted, although it is at
odds with the modern idea that all people should receive equal treatment
before the law.
When Sánchez jailed the García brothers and the governor, he gave some
relief to the mother and the wife of Nieto, the deceased corn thief. The judge
recorded that he awarded the widow the equivalent of thirty to sixty monthly
wages of Indian agricultural workers at this time. In a similar case, the judge
claimed to have given a widow 300 pesos, probably because she belonged to
a better-off family. Her brother-in-law was a priest who had studied theol-
ogy.30 We do not know how much the judge actually gave the widows. The
fact that he sketched this arrangement in his defense indicates that such
compensation to the aggrieved party was a plausible resolution to a crime,
even a violent one. At least part of the community acquiesced to or supported
him in his prosecution, and the judge saw the opportunity to collect money
for himself from the elite group.
Several witnesses in other cases confirmed that it was common and
“canonical” to negotiate gifts before and after sentencing.31 The litigating par-
ties frequently left gifts in the houses of the magistrates, because it was “the
way and practice of this land to give for all things.”32 The ministers then kept
or returned the gifts as they saw fit. On one occasion a judge returned “six
chickens from some Indians.”33 An attorney, meanwhile, had a servant fre-
quent the homes of the litigating parties, and he “bartered over the pay . . . as
though he was selling them fine cloth from Brittany [France].” If a party
would not yield, the servant left the documents at his home, and the case
slumbered.34 During Easter the magistrates regularly received presents. In
several instances, a person handed over “a dozen loads of flour” with a com-
bined worth of 100 to 150 silver pesos to “conserve the friendship“ with a
minister of the bench. In most cases money or precious metal changed
hands, often in the form of large silver plates or bowls.35
Judges such as Sánchez sometimes maintained that they were not corrupt
because they had accepted only moderate gifts. A colleague of Sánchez’s, for
example, contended that the prudent magistrate had used his good judgment
(arbitrio) to discern between gifts and graft. These gifts were necessary, the
colleague continued, because the ministers on the bench received only low
salaries while facing the high cost of living in imperial Mexico. The custom
of gift giving was firmly established and even nullified the written royal laws
prohibiting such favors, argued the judge, provided there was no “promise, a
pact, or other equivalent dishonesty” to alter a ruling. For the judge, a gift
had to correspond roughly to the social status of the recipient or be given a
long time after the sentence. When these requirements were met, gifts were
not corruption.36 An attorney at the high court concurred. In his view the
litigating parties could compensate their lawyers for their “generosity” or in
an attempt to speed up the process. The audiencia and the king knew of the
meager salaries and therefore tacitly approved of such practices.37 Both the
judge and the attorney held that this local custom had become a law justify-
ing their conduct.
The judges could defend the legitimacy of gifts, because people in imperial
times did not know the relatively unequivocal laws of modernity. Instead,
judges drew from a panoply of norms such as the laws of the Indies, the
exhaustive Roman legal collection, Church norms, and local custom. Histo-
rians describe this abundance of sources as judicial pluralism. Imperial law-
yers and judges tailored the norms to specific cases, and some of the rules
allowed judges to discern between gifts and graft.38
Local traditions often endorsed the pervasive informality in the justice
system. Judges customarily seized fees and fines to compensate themselves
for work and traveling expenses. Shoddy record keeping marred the audien-
cia and other tribunals. Most ministers had always lived by this system, and
they saw no need to alter the rules.39
Nevertheless, Francisco Garzarón did not adhere to the full breadth of
judicial pluralism. He read the laws more narrowly, and his main aim was to
punish those who accepted favors to alter sentences. Garzarón understood

the laws of Castile and of the Indies as guidelines for judicial conduct. These
collections prohibited all gifts for magistrates and prosecutors. Yet accepting
a gift did not spell immediate doom. The visitador forgave small favors when
there was proof that an audiencia minister had voted against the giver or
when significant time had passed between the sentence and the gift.40 Yet
when Garzarón showed that a litigating party had given a sizable gift shortly
before or after the sentence, and the accepting judge or the court as a whole
had voted for the party, that proved corruption, or “vice,” as a magistrate put
it.41 For this reason, Judge Sánchez’s colleague downplayed the “doctrine” of
good judgment to discern between graft and gift. Admitting to accepting
favors would have placed him in a precarious situation with the visitador
from the very beginning.42
Although there was disagreement in the early eighteenth century on what
exactly constituted corruption, Garzarón’s view overlapped with that of
many locals. Garzarón took steps to uproot some of the informality and
impose a stricter compliance with the laws of the Indies and Castile. Many
locals aided him in this process. Roughly seven hundred witnesses gave tes-
timonies on abusive judges and officials. This proved to be the key to the
visitador’s progress. Garzarón’s idea of corruption was not an outside view
imposed by Madrid. Instead, his fight against corrupt judges and informality
found ample local support.
Novohispanos provided the information to build the case against Sán-
chez, whom Garzarón eventually released from his duties. Before July 5, 1717,
the judge had the opportunity to rebut more than one hundred charges.43 As
the visitador weighed the evidence, six colleagues on the bench confirmed
that Sánchez had the “bad fame” of accepting donations and gifts.44 In late
September or early October 1719, Garzarón suspended the judge along with
twelve other ministers. They lost their salaries and had to pay their share of
the visita costs, which amounted to several thousand pesos per minister.
Garzarón ordered Sánchez to leave Mexico City within fifteen days and to
stay away until the authorities in Madrid reviewed the sentence.45
Two years later the Council of the Indies, the appeals court for Spanish
America located in Madrid, confirmed the verdict. The council removed
Sánchez from the bench, declared him unable to serve in a post of justice
again, and fined him 8,000 silver pesos.46 The king deplored the “poor
administration of justice” and ordered the “exact compliance with the laws,”
so that the high court ministers “leave behind all abuses that have been
introduced and practiced under the name of process, which are in reality
corruption.” In particular, the king chastised the “disorder and abuses” cre-
ated by Sánchez Morcillo’s commission in Puebla and ordered to end such
tours.47
When reading about these stern sentences, we should reconsider the argu-
ment that most imperial corruption cases ended with a “slap on the hand.”
The visita general and the Council of the Indies removed roughly two-thirds
of the audiencia judges. The Crown had never before pummeled an institu-
tion so thoroughly, nor was this to happen again in imperial history.48
Because of the drastic outcome of the visita, Sánchez lamented with his
fellow ministers the “defamation” and “great dishonor” they suffered, besides
losing their posts.49 An audiencia attorney bemoaned the “injury to honor
and fame” from being charged with “the execrable offense of fraud or brib-
ery.”50 Novohispanos performed their social prominence on a daily basis,
and falling in the “disgrace” of the king for abuses significantly damaged
anyone’s reputation, particularly that of a minister of justice.51
Deposed judges complained about the irregular and excessive conduct of
the visitador. According to their petitions, Garzarón ignored the laws and
shut the door on appeals. The dismissed ministers also criticized his “pas-
sion.”52 In today’s language, passion refers to something commanding one’s
attention; people are passionate about their partners, pastimes, and even
work they may not really enjoy. In the eighteenth century, passion did not
have a positive connotation. Passionate people were consumed by pain and
excessive desire, or they surrendered to fickle emotions such as hate, envy,
and malice. Passion was a vice; reasonable humans sought moderation, one
of the seven cardinal virtues.53
As the reproaches between the dismissed ministers and the visitador grew
increasingly bitter, Garzarón endeavored to protect the secrecy of his wit-
nesses. He kept all the files locked up, including the names that appeared in
the testimony. Nonetheless, in 1724 an attorney managed to copy a section of
the trial records. He then passed the paper to an indicted colleague, who
published the names of the witnesses in his case. The prints crossed the
Atlantic Ocean and appeared in Madrid. In Mexico City one copy wandered
from “desk to desk” at the Tribunal of Accounting. When the viceroy’s legal
advisor (asesor) obtained a print, Garzarón threatened to fine him 500 pesos
unless he surrendered the document. The advisor balked at the order because
he had a royal mandate exempting him from the visita general. Garzarón
then raised the possible penalty to 1,000 pesos in addition to the cost of
extracting the document. The advisor finally buckled, but not without pro-
test.54 As a result, in almost all cases Garzarón successfully upheld the con-
fidentiality of the testimony.
The episode with the advisor exacerbated the tensions between Garzarón
and the viceroy, the Marquis of Valero. Viceroys enjoyed great prestige and
the power to interfere with most matters in Mexico. They zealously guarded
these prerogatives and did not look kindly upon visitadores meddling in
their affairs. Valero’s secretary proclaimed publicly that the investigation
remained “subject to the judgment of the marquis, who could dispose of and
direct it as he sees fit.”55 In previous visitas, suspects had courted the viceroy
for leniency, hampering the investigation. By law, however, the viceroy had
no say. In fact, he himself was subject to inquiry, because he presided over
the audiencia in all but legal matters.56 Experience with the earlier visitado-
res had convinced the king to reaffirm Garzarón’s “total independence” from
the viceroy.57
Consequently, Valero favored ending the investigation, and he “encour-
aged and animated” the accused ministers.58 Garzarón reported that Valero
turned into a “declared enemy” of the inspection, because he had not acted
as “frugality and necessity” warranted. The Council of the Indies rejected
Garzarón’s comment as “injurious libel.”59 With the situation becoming
untenable, the Marquis of Valero relinquished the helm in 1722 and returned
to Spain. In 1724 the Crown promoted him to governor of the Council of the
Indies, and Valero sought to undo the inspection. Garzarón stepped down
when he heard of the promotion. The king, however, did not accept his dis-
missal, and things began to move. On February 4, 1726, the King Philip V
began reviewing all correspondence on the matter, effectively curbing the
influence of the Council of the Indies and of Valero. Then on December 26,
1726, Valero died, and the suspended ministers lost a powerful voice in
Madrid.60
Before Valero’s death and after Garzarón had suspended the audiencia
ministers, the visitador turned his attention to lower-level officials. He
charged Judge Sánchez’s notary, Juan García de Xismeros, with eighty counts
of malfeasance. García served the audiencia as both a notary and a procura-
dor proprietario (an agent who carried and collected papers). The notary had
been in trouble before. In 1718 the court convicted him for “swindling and
exactions” and suspended him for two years. When García resurfaced, he
paid 300 pesos in fines and restitution.61
Garzarón again suspended the notary in 1724 for more serious offenses.
Three years later, the Council of the Indies reviewed the case and sentenced
García to a fine of 200 pesos for minor offenses. In addition, the Crown pros-
ecutor in Madrid charged García with pocketing between 50 and 300 pesos in
eighty cases. He had overcharged litigants and withheld money from the audi-
encia treasury. In one case, a judge had sentenced a party to 900 pesos in fines,
which García had collected. When the judge lowered the penalty to 150 pesos,
García did not return the difference. Furthermore, García could not provide
any receipts for delivering the chickens and money to the monasteries in
Tlaxcala during the infamous Huejotzingo trial.62
Overcharging solicitors and pocketing fees was insignificant at the audi-
encia of Mexico. Even bribes were not the worst violations, because a notary
had no judicial power and could not tweak sentences for money. Yet the
council found García guilty of “falseness, replacing [court record] folios”—a
different matter altogether. Fidelity to the documents underpinned the office
that the king had graced him with, and the Council of the Indies dismissed
the notary for fraud.63
The story of the notary’s protector, Judge Sánchez, took an even more
colorful turn. In 1718, while Garzarón investigated his conduct, the judge got
into a fistfight with a clergyman. The viceroy restored calm and then praised
the judge’s “zeal, integrity, and impartiality.” 64 Later, when the verdict con-
firming the removal arrived from Spain, Sánchez refused to pay the fine of
8,000 pesos—roughly the equivalent of three annual salaries.65 He had not
received any wages in years, and his wife resisted squandering her dowry. By
this time the judge claimed that “his whole family would have perished of
hunger” if the archbishop had not provided financial support.66
Despite the lamentations, the Crown ordered the judge to pay or go to jail.
Garzarón promptly detained Sánchez, initially in the municipal council
building. Then Garzarón sent him to the grueling prison in the viceregal
palace. Sánchez’s health declined while he served seven months in the very
place to which he had previously sent criminals. He convinced Garzarón to
let him retire to his home, and he provided bondsmen willing to underwrite
his release. When the former judge began walking about the streets of Mex-
ico City, however, the visitador ordered the bondsmen to return him to jail
in three days or be fined. Garzarón ruled that to remain free, Sánchez would
have to pay 2,000 pesos immediately, in addition to a 480-peso shipping fee
to send the money to Spain. The remaining 6,000 pesos of the original fine
were due in installments when the next two fleets left Veracruz, New Spain,
for Spain.
The culprit rejected the offer and remained in jail for another month.
During this time he convinced a jailer to let him spend nights at home and
return to jail early each morning. After the night of February 7, however,
Sánchez did not return to the prison. Instead he went to the Hospital of the
Holy Trinity and requested church asylum. This complicated things for Gar-
zarón, because priests typically resisted the secular authorities’ attempts to
retrieve suspects. Along with the former judge fled the jailer who had granted
the nightly reprieve, because he had done so without the warden’s
consent.67
Such arrangements to alleviate the prisoners’ lot were common before and
even during a visita general, usually helped along by a gift to the jailers. The
prison warden stated that the dungeons were for “inmates of lower station
and serious offenses.” These prisoners were squeezed with others into narrow
quarters, and many wore shackles. Meanwhile, “renowned Spaniards” who
served time for “minor civil and criminal lawsuits” could spend their nights
at home. They had to be back at “the jail at six o’clock in the morning and be
visible there all day.” According to the warden, no one ever complained about
the temporary releases. The alternative was to sleep on a mattress upstairs
next to the prison chapel. The price for such relief fluctuated between 10 and
12 pesos per week. Some brought in their own beds. Others bought clothes,
food, or liquor. There were complaints that the poor people starved, but the
warden emphasized his provision of “beef, atole [a corn-flour drink], and
tortillas” to the needy. In addition, the fraternity (archicofradía) of the Vera
Cruz Church in Mexico City assisted the paupers. Meanwhile, the jailers
catered to the wealthier inmates by selling them illegal playing cards and
operating a “tavern” serving alcohol.68
One official allegedly let women enter and spend the night with male
inmates. This official was even himself “lewd and lascivious with the women
of the prisoners.” 69 Garzarón heard testimony against an offender by the
name of María Romero. The jailer “agreed to her communicating illicitly
with Andrés de la Cruz, alias the Eyelash, and she became pregnant. She gave
birth twice in jail, once from a pregnancy that she brought from the street
and another time [one that she] acquired in jail . . . and having entered poor
she left decent and well clothed at the expense of the prisoner.”70 In the midst
of such informality, it was easy for Sánchez to escape.
When the judge absconded, Garzarón confiscated his estate—a total of
100 pesos—and that of the jailer. Because the jailer lacked a formal appoint-
ment, Garzarón held the warden liable for the fugitive judge and put him
under house arrest. He also confiscated the warden’s estate and the proceeds
of his office.71 In early 1724 the king ordered that Sánchez be released from
jail and confined to the “city and neighborhoods” of Mexico City.72 When
Garzarón received the royal order, he obeyed in general terms but insisted
that Sánchez first present himself at the jail for the order to take effect. The
former judge refused. He appealed to a senior magistrate of the audiencia to
hear his case, but Garzarón threatened to punish the magistrate for “disturb-
ing or usurping” the visita’s jurisdiction.73
At this point Sánchez secretly slipped out of the hospital and journeyed to
Veracruz, where he embarked on a ship to Spain. In May 1727 he was at the
court in Madrid, lobbying the Council of the Indies to lower his fine. He also
sought approval for sailing to Europe without a license.74 Finally he suc-
ceeded. Despite his conviction for corruption, he obtained a prebendary, or
paid position, with the cathedral chapter of Guadalajara in 1730. His law
degree served as his formal qualification, since it was considered comparable
to a theology degree.75 Pedro Sánchez Morcillo had returned to a position of
dignity.
conclusion
When a hacienda owner in Huejotzingo killed an Indian for stealing corn,

not much happened to him initially. The indigenous governor of the town
supported the hacienda owner, and since the governor’s godfather served as
the alcalde mayor of the province, nothing else was done. The verdict for the
death was light and unjust in the eyes of the mother of the deceased. When
Judge Pedro Sánchez Morcillo came to the region, he prosecuted this elite
circle. The judge arrested the hacienda owner, his brother, and the governor,
and they paid hefty bribes for their release from jail. The mother and the wife
of the slain Native probably approved of these steps.
When the visitador, Francisco Garzarón, began hearing complaints
against the judge and his audiencia ministers, the Huejotzingo elite group
found an opportunity to settle the score. Francisco Garzarón reviewed the
evidence, and he suspended the judge for accepting money in exchange for
altering the ruling, for extorting money, and for tampering with the record.
The visitador agreed with many novohispanos that judges who breached
norms of justice were corrupt and deserved punishment. The visitador then
charged the subordinate officials with abuse or excess, but he never called
their misdeeds corruption, because this idea was reserved for judges. Gar-
zarón suspended Juan García de Xismeros, Sánchez’s notary, for the serious
offense of forgery. In total Garzarón found guilty 13 judges and 154 lower
officials of the audiencia, a singularly stringent outcome in novohispano his-
tory. This verdict could only be so severe, because many locals supported the
visitador. They shared his values about corruption.
Neither the commission of Sánchez in the Puebla region nor Garzarón’s
visita general complied with modern Anglo-Saxon standards of litigation.
Garzarón served as both judge and prosecutor, there was no jury to decide
the verdict, and there was no right of the accused to confront the witnesses.
Even the laws were not unequivocal. Where the boundary lay between justice
and corruption often depended on the perspective. Nonetheless, standards
existed. The visitador interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and he scrutinized
receipts, bills, and papers. The suspects had a chance to refute the charges,
and the Council of the Indies reviewed and ruled on all sentences. Unlike his
behavior in the Inquisition trial of the Bethlemite friar, the visitador did not
use torture or corporal punishment, and he never issued a death sentence. In
fact, although Judge Sánchez lost his post on the bench for corruption and
served time in jail for his inability to pay a fine, the king later restored him
to grace. Sánchez obtained an attractive prebendary position at the cathedral
of Guadalajara. Ultimately, this episode shows that corruption charges in
imperial Mexico could bring down judges. The rigorous consequences of the
visita general were possible because many locals rallied to Garzarón’s cause
of dislodging abusive judges and officials.
notes
1. Francisco Garzarón to bishop of Pamplona, Mexico City, August 12, 1724, Archivo
General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), Inquisición, vol. 792, exp. 13,
fol. 294.
2. Gabriel Torres Puga, “Fragmentos del proceso contra fray José de San Ignacio,”
unpublished manuscript, 17, 20; (this manuscript abridges the Inquisition record
in AGN, Inquisición 727, exp. 26 and 27). See also exp. 26, 27, fols. 17, 20; AGN,
Inquisición 745, exp. 9; and Jaime Contreras, Historia de la Inquisición Española
(1478–1834): Herejías, delitos, y representación (Madrid: Arco, 1997), 45–49.
3. Francisco Garzarón to King Philip V, Mexico City, December 21, 1716, Archivo
General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI), México 670A; king’s resolution,
February 4, 1726, AGI, México 670A. Garzarón’s assignment was part of a general
investigation of the institutions of power in Mexico. Michel Bertrand, Grandeur
et misères de l’office: Les officiers de finances de Nouvelle-Espagne XVIIe-XVIIIe
siècles (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 280–322. See also Alan Kuethe,
“La política colonial de Felipe V y el proyecto de 1720,” in Orbis Incognitus: Avisos
y legajos del Nuevo Mundo; Homenaje al Profesor Luis Navarro García, ed.
Fernando Navarro Antolín (Huelva, Spain: Universidad de Huelva, 2007), 1:233.
4. For the view that the large number of Creole or Mexican purchasers on the audi-
encia was the root of corruption, see María Luz Alonso, ed., “La visita de Garzarón
a la Audiencia de México,” in Estudios jurídicos en homenaje al maestro Guillermo
Floris Margadant (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1988),
11–27; and Mark A. Burkholder and Dewitt Samuel Chandler, From Impotence to
Authority: The Spanish Crown and the American Audiencias, 1687–1808 (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1977), 6n10, 15, 17–21, 32–40. For a synthesis of this
view, see Mark A. Burkholder, Spaniards in the Colonial Empire: Creoles vs.
Spaniards? (Chichester, UK: Wiley & Blackwell, 2013), 97. For a summary of the
charges against the judges, see Horst Pietschmann, “Alcaldes Mayores,
Corregidores und Subdelegados: Zum Problem der Distriktsbeamtenschaft im
Vizekönigreich Neuspanien,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 9 (1972): 190–91. On the visita general’s salutary effect,
see Jaime del Arenal Fenochio, ed., “La Justicia civil ordinaria en la ciudad de
México durante el primer tercio del siglo xviii,” in Memoria del X Congreso del
Instituto Internacional de Historia del Derecho Indiano (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México,1995), 1: 56–59. On visitas (special investigations of
a sitting officeholder), see Bertrand, Grandeur, 34–40, 288; and Amalia Gómez, Las
visitas de la Real Hacienda novohispana en el reinado de Felipe V (1710–1733)
(Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1979), 215–17. On visitas as ritu-
als creating new realities, see Armando Guevara-Gil and Frank Solomon, “A
‘Personal Visit’: Colonial Political Ritual and the Making of Indians in the Andes,”
Colonial Latin American Review 3, nos. 1–2 (1994), 3–36. On visitas as expiatory acts
showing the king’s good care, see Tamar Herzog, ed., “Ritos de control, prácticas
de negociación: Pesquisas, visitas y residencias y las relaciones entre Quito y
Madrid (1650–1750)” in Nuevas Aportaciones a la historia jurídica de Iberoamérica
(Madrid: Fundación Histórica Tavera, 2000). For background information, see
Alan Kuethe, “Cardinal Alberoni and Reform in the American Empire,” in Early
Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era, ed. Ainara
Vázquez Varela and Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso (Boston, MA: Brill, 2013), 23–39.
5. Council of the Indies, consultation, Madrid, November 13, 1721, AGI, México
670A. The summaries are in AGI, México 670A and 670B, and the detailed inter-
rogations are in AGI, Escribanía de Cámara (hereafter Escribanía) 278A–289B.
6. King Philip V to Marquis of Castelfuerte, signed by the Duke of Ripperdá, Buen
Retiro, March 25, 1726, AGN, Reales Cédulas Originales (hereafter RCO) 45,
exp. 61, fols. 191–92; relationship merits, Madrid, March 12, 1706, AGI, Indiferente
General 214, no. 90, fols. 427–429v; Castelfuerte to king, Mexico City, June 20,
1727, AGI, México 670A; on the Castilian elites, Jean-Pierre Dedieu, “La haute
administration espagnole au xviiie siècle: Un projet,” in Les figures de
l’administrateur: Institutions, réseaux, pouvoirs en Espagne, en France et au
Portugal 16e-19e siècle, ed. Robert Descimon, Jean-Frédéric Schaub, and Bernard
Vincent (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1997), 170.
7. Pedro Sánchez Morcillo, decree, Puebla, May 30, 1716, AGI, Escribanía 281D,
fol. 983v. The full name of the judge was Pedro Sánchez Manuel Alcaraz Morcillo,
but he often just went by Pedro Sánchez Morcillo. He was born in Michoacan in
western Mexico, and he married María Teresa de Aramburu y Vilches from
Mexico. In 1704 he served as an attorney at the audiencia, and on December 6, 1711,
he took the post of alcalde de crimen, an appointment for which he paid 9,000
silver pesos. In the following year, the viceroy, the Duke of Linares, praised him
for helping to levy 18,500 pesos from contraband traders of the Philippine galleon;
certification, Juan de Oribay, Mexico City, December 18, 1710, AGI, México 658,
fol. 336v; Duke of Linares to King Philip V, Mexico City, December 15, 1712, AGI,
México 557; account by order of the Marquis of la Ensenada to Fernando Triviño,
Madrid, March 31, 1746, AGI, Indiferente General 1847, fol. 122v.
8. The audiencia then reversed itself and insisted on the possibility of appeals. “Real
Probicion de la comicion acorda . . . a M. S.r Liz.do D.n P. Sánchez . . . Morcillo
1716,” Mexico City, December 31, 1715, AGI, Escribanía 281D, fols. 1014–1015v. The
laws frowned upon and regimented such commissions; see Recopilación de leyes
de los reynos de Indias (1741; repr., Madrid: Consejo de la Hispanidad, 1953), bk. 7,
tit. 1, laws 1–6.
9. “Relación de los autos de visita general . . . por el Ynquisidor D.n Francisco de
Garzaron” [hereafter “Relación”], AGI, México 670B, fol. 731.
10. Sánchez, decree, Puebla.
11. Charge 36 against Pedro Sánchez Morcillo, containing evidence (prueba) and
defense (descargo), “Relación,”AGI, México 670B, fols. 728v–737v.
12. Sánchez decree, Puebla.
13. Evidence, “Relación,” AGI, México 670B, fol. 610v. On governors’ rights, see
Dorothy Tanck de Estrada and Carlos Marichal, “¿Reino o colonia?: Nueva
España, 1750–1804,” in Nueva Historia General de México, ed. Erik Velásquez
García et al. (Mexico City: ColMex, 2010), 333.
14. The royal order was dated December 21, 1715. Garzarón to king, December 21, 1716.
15. Francisco Garzarón, edict, Mexico City, October 17, 1716, AGI, Escribanía 278A,
file 8.
16. Proof, “Relación,”AGI, México 670B, fols. 664v–665v. The deputy provincial
administrator of Tlaxcala, Francisco de Ortega, also appeared as a witness.
17. Defense, “Relación,” AGI, México 670B, fol. 731v.
18. The tension between the special laws for the “miserables” of society and the privi-
leges of the indigenous nobility gave way in the eighteenth century to a more
systematic application of legal principles. Thomas Duve, Sonderrecht in der
Frühen Neuzeit: Studien zum ius singulare und den privilegia miserabilium per-
sonarum, senum und indorum in Alter und Neuer Welt (Frankfurt: Vittorio
Klostermann, 2008), 197–98, 202–3, 273–75.
19. See, e.g., Peter B. Villella, “Indian Lords, Hispanic Gentlemen: The Salazars of
Colonial Tlaxcala,” Americas 69, no. 1 (2012): 27–28.
20. Defense, “Relación,”AGI, México 670B, fol. 672. Sánchez described the governor
as the ahijado (godson) or paniaguado (client) of the provincial administrator.
Ibid., fols. 666, 668v.
21. Pedro Sánchez Morcillo, decree, Tlaxcala, February 24, 1716, AGI, Escribanía 281,
fol. 981v. “Crime of attempted bribery” presentation, Mexico City, July 24, 1719,
AGI, Escribanía 287, pt. 33, fol. 298.
22. Pedro Sánchez Morcillo decrees, Tlaxcala, February 23–24, March 16, 1716; dili-
gence inquiry, Tlaxcala, February 24, March 8, 1716; Pedro Sánchez Morcillo
decrees, Puebla, April 20, May 30, 1716; receipt for saying Mass, Puebla, May 30.
1716—all found in the court record “De la causa . . . Cos y Cevallos,” Mexico City,
May 12, 1719, AGI, Escribanía 281, fols. 979–979v, 981–983v. See also charge 10
against Pedro Sánchez Morcillo, “Relación,” AGI, México 670B, fol. 674v;
Garzarón to king, Mexico City, August 3, 1720, AGI, México 670A; presentation,
Mexico City, July 24, 1719, AGI, Escribanía 287, pt. 33, fols. 290v–298v.
23. Luis de Ortega, audiencia decree, Mexico City, January 25, 1717, AGI, Escribanía
281D, fol. 984.
24. Evidence, “Relación,” AGI, México 670B, fol. 667.
25. Ibid., fols. 670–671v.
26. Ibid., fols. 610v, 664–75.
27. Juan Antonio de Cos y Cevallos was a montañés (a highlander from the moun-
tainous region north of the city of Burgos in Spain). He served as provincial
administrator of Pánuco in the Huasteca region. In 1719 Cos married Augustina
de la Canal y Baeza, the daughter of silver merchant Domingo de la Canal and
his wife, Augustina de Baeza. The montañés don Alonzo de Arze y Velarde,
who ran a “public store” in San Martín Texmelucan, witnessed the wedding,
and so did Judge Félix González de Agüero. In 1724 Cos served as a municipal
councilman of Mexico City. Session, July 19, 1724, Archivo Histórico del
Distrito Federal, Ayuntamiento, Actas del Cabildo 50A, fol. 65v; Juan Antonio
de Cos y Zevallos, petition, n.d.; presentation, Mexico City, January 22, 1719;
information, Mexico City, January 20, 1719—all found in AGN, Matrimonios
189, exp. 27. See also Duke of Alburquerque (II) to King Philip V, February 16,
1709, AGI, México 482. On Domingo de la Canal’s wealth, king to Alburquerque,
Madrid, February 25, 1709, AGI, México 403; and Ricardo Magdaleno Redondo,
ed., Títulos de Indias: Catálogo XX del AGS (Valladolid: Archivo General de
Simancas, 1954), 158, 199.
28. Evidence, “Relación,” AGI, México 670B, fols. 673v–674. San Martín Texmelucan
belonged to the province of Huejotzingo. Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical
Geography of New Spain, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993),
141–42.
29. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 37, Justice, ed. Thomas Gilby (1274;
repr., Cambridge, UK: Blackfriars, 1975), II IIae, 61, art. 2, reply 3.
30. Charge 9 against Sánchez, “Relación,” AGI, México 670B, fols. 675–677v.
31. José Joaquín de Uribe, deposition, “Relación,” AGI, México 670B, fols. 5–5v.
32. Lucas de Careaga, deposition, charges against Díaz de Bracamonte, “Relación,”
AGI, México 670B, fols. 135v, 138–139v.
33. Judge Juan Francisco de la Peña y Flores, reputation according to his defense,
“Relación,” AGI, México 670B, fol. 496.
34. Miguel Truxillo, AGI, México 670A, fol. 15.
35. Judge Peña y Flores, Reputation according to his defense, “Relación,” AGI,
México 670B, fols. 3v–8v, 13–14.
36. Juan Díaz de Bracamonte, defense, Mexico City, n.d., “Relación,”AGI, México
670B, fols. 142v–143. On the arbitrio, see Michael C. Scardaville, “Justice by
Paperwork: A Day in the Life of a Court Scribe in Bourbon Mexico City,” Journal
of Social History 36, no. 4 (2003), 979–1007; and Duve, Sonderrecht, 273–74.
37. Truxillo, fols. 4, 16v–17v.
38. António Manuel Hespanha, “Porque é existe e em que é que consiste um direito
colonial Brasileiro?” in Brasil-Portugal: Sociedades, culturas e formas de governar
no mundo portugés (séculos XVI–XVIII), ed. Eduardo França Paiva (São Paulo:
Annablume, 2006), 23.
39. See, e.g., King Philip V to the president and senior magistrates of the Mexican
audiencia, Lerma, December 13, 1721, AGN, Historia 102, fols. 82–90; and the
charges against and defense of Sánchez Morcillo, “Relación,” AGI, México 670B,
fols. 661, 667–668v.
40. “Relación,” AGI, México 670B, fol. 110; Recopilación, bk. 2, tit. 16, law 68;
Recopilación de las leyes destos reynos hecha por mandado de la Magestad
Catholica del Rey don Philipe Segundo nuestro señor: Contienese en este libro las
leyes hechas hasta fin del año de mil y quinientos y ochenta y uno (Alcalá de
Henares, Spain: Juan Iñiguez de Liquerica, 1581), bk. 2, tit. 5, law 56 and bk. 3,
tit. 9, law 5.
41. Díaz defense, fol. 142v.
42. Ibid., fol. 143.
43. Miguel Fernández Durán to Marquis of Valero, Madrid, December 26, 1717,
AGN, RCO 38, exp. 61, fol. 164.
44. Reputation in the secret investigation of misconduct, “Relación,” AGI, México
670B, fol. 778.
45. The viceroy, the Marquis of Valero, reported the suspensions on October 12, 1719,
Mexico City, AGI, México 487.
46. Council of the Indies, consultation, Madrid, September 2, 1721, AGI, México 380;
sentence, Madrid, September 23, 1721, AGI, Escribanía 1183.
47. King to audiencia president and senior magistrates, fols. 82–82v.

48. For a comparison with the important José de Gálvez visita, see David Brading,
Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
49. Summary of Agustín Robles, Pedro Sánchez Morcillo, and others to King
Philip V, n.d., attached to parecer (opinion) of the fiscal (Crown attorney) of the
Council of the Indies, Madrid, November 11, 1721, AGI, México 670A; King Philip
V to Marquis of Valero, March 13, 1724, AGI, Escribanía 287B, pt. 36, fol. 19.
50. Truxillo, fol. 4; see also Council of the Indies consultation, November 13, 1721.
51. Charles Cutter, “The Legal System as a Touchstone of Identity in Colonial New
Mexico,” in The Collective and the Public in Latin America: Cultural Identities
and Political Order, ed. Tamar Herzog and Luis Roniger (Brighton, UK: Sussex
Academic Press, 2000), 58–63.
52. Council of the Indies consultation, November 13, 1721; summary of Robles et al.
to king.
53. Fiscal opinion, attached to Council of the Indies consultation, November 13, 1721;
Truxillo, fol. 3. On passion, see Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua
castellana (Madrid: Joachín Ibarra, 1780), 695; on passion as rebelliousness, see
Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Joachín
Ibarra, 1737), 5:507.
54. Garzarón to king, Mexico City, August 7, 1724, AGI, México 670A; Council of the
Indies, consultation, Madrid, January 18, 1726, AGI, México 670A. Juan Pacheco
Picado served as the Marquis of Valero’s advisor, and in 1727 he became a judge
of the Mexican audiencia himself. Council of the Indies, consultation, Madrid,
January 14, 1727, AGI, México 381.
55. Garzarón to king, December 21, 1716.
56. Garzarón’s predecessor complained about viceregal interference. Francisco
Pagave to King Philip V, Atlixco, October 12, 1712, AGI, México 557; Recopilación
(de Indias), bk. 2, tit. 34, law 11; Francisco Garzarón, edict, Mexico City,
October 17, 1716, AGI, Escribanía 278A, file 8.
57. The royal order of December 13, 1722, confirmed Garzarón’s independence;
Council of the Indies consultation, January 18, 1726.
58. In particular, Viceroy Valero praised ministers Francisco Venegas Valenzuela,
Francisco Oyanguren, Juan Díaz de Bracamonte, and Félix Suárez de Figueroa;
Marquis of Valero to King Philip V, Mexico City, August 29–30, October 12,
October 15, 1719, AGI, México 670A; fiscal opinion, Council of the Indies, Madrid,
September 22, 1720; Council of the Indies consultation, Madrid, May 10, 1724,
AGI, México 670A.
59. Council of the Indies consultation, January 18, 1726.
60. Draft of a royal order to Garzarón, Madrid, n.d.; Council of the Indies consulta-
tion, January 18, 1726; king’s resolution, February 1726, AGI, México 670A; María
del Mar Felices de la Fuente, Condes, marqueses y duques: Biografías de nobles
titulados durante el reinado de Felipe V, Madrid (Madrid: Ediciónes Doce Calles,
2013), 51.
61. García previously served as an oficial de autos, comparable to a secretary. In 1714

he became an agent. Charges against Juan Garcia de Xismeros, AGI, Escribanía
289B, fols. 1596–97; charges against Pedro Sánchez Morcillo, “Relación,” AGI,
México 670B, fols. 615–616v.
62. Antonio de los Ríos, notary’s certification of the Garzarón audit, Mexico City,
April 6, 1724, AGI, Escribanía 287B, pt. 55, fol. 1.
63. Council of the Indies, sentence, Madrid, March 18, 1727, “1721–1730 Francisco
Garzarón, a la Audiencia de México, 21 Sentencias,” AGI, Escribanía 1183.
Reflecting the nature of the old regime, García stayed on as an agent, because he
had committed only minor offenses in that role.
64. Viceroy Valero to King Philip V, Mexico City, July 6, 1718, AGI, México 486A;
Valero to king, Mexico City, March 30, 1719, AGI, México 487.
65. A criminal judge earned 2,941 pesos per year, plus emoluments, the same as a
judge. Tribunal of Accounts, report, Mexico City, after 1776, Biblioteca Nacional
de México, Fondo Reservado 439 (1376), vol. 4, fol. 333v.
66. Attorney José de Guibelondo to King Philip V, n.d., “Testimonio de los autos . . .
sobre la prission de . . . Sánchez Manuel de Alcaras y Morzillo,” AGI, Escribanía
287B, pt. 40, fol. 75.
67. Garzarón to king, Mexico City, May 1, 1724, AGI, Escribanía 287B, pt. 45, fols. 1–4;
Garzarón to king, Mexico City, October 8, 1726, AGI, Escribanía 287B, pt. 14,
fols. 14–16v.
68. Francisco de Fonseca Enríquez, defense, n.d., “Relacion . . . de los ministros
inferiores,” AGI, Escribanía 288A, fols. 9v–10v, 50–93.
69. Council of the Indies, sentence against Juan Martín Moreno, Madrid, March 2,
1724, “1721–1730 Francisco Garzarón, a la Audiencia de México, 21 Sentencias,”
AGI, Escribanía 1183.
70. Fonseca Enríquez, defense, n.d., AGI, Escribanía 288A, fol. 55v. La Pestaña, the
Eyelash, could also be translated as the Observer or the Starer.
71. Garzarón to king, May 1, 1724.
72. Fiscal opinion, Madrid, December 10, 1723, AGI, Escribanía 287B, pt. 40, fol. 75v;
Council of the Indies, consultation, Madrid, January 15, 1724, AGI, Escribanía
287B, pt. 40, fol. 77; King Luis to Franciso Garzarón, Madrid, February 3, 1724,
“Testimonio de autos,” AGI, Escribanía 287B, pt. 41, fol. 1–1v.
73. Francisco Garzarón, Mexico City, June 26, 1724, “Testimonio de autos,” AGI,
Escribanía 287B, pt. 41. fol. 4; opinion of the fiscal, n. d. “Testimonio de autos,”
AGI, Escribanía 287B, pt. 41, fols. 12v–13; Francisco Garzarón, Mexico City,
July 18, 1724, “Testimonio de autos,” AGI, Escribanía 287B, pt. 41, fols. 14v–15.
74. Fiscal opinion, Madrid, May 31, 1727, AGI, Escribanía 287B, pt. 14, fol. 17–17v.
75. Pedro Sánchez Morcillo, Madrid, May 21, 1728; Council of the Indies, consulta-
tion, n.p. March 30, 1730, AGI, Indiferente 144, no. 151. The appointment is con-
firmed in Catalog 20, June 7, 1930, Archivo General de Simancas, Títulos de
Indias, 122. (I owe the last reference to Mark Burkholder.)
C H A P T E R SI X
“Our Delivery Consists in

Appointing Good Ministers”
corrup tion and the dilemmas of appointing
official s in e arly eighteenth - century spain
k
Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso
K ing Charles II of Spain passed away without children in November

1700. In his will, Charles named as heir his distant nephew Philip of
Anjou, the grandson of King Louis XIV of France who became King Philip V
of Spain. The Spanish ambassador to Versailles, the Marquis of Castelldosrius,
communicated this momentous decision to the French court. Louis XIV
granted Castelldosrius a present of 3,000 louis d’or (gold coins) for delivering
the news.1 The king also urged the Spanish Crown to promote Castelldosrius
to a grandee—the highest rank in the Spanish nobility—and to appoint him
viceroy of Peru.2 By securing these favors for Castelldosrius, Louis XIV
hoped to cement the nobleman’s loyalty to the new dynasty. The French king
also expected Castelldosrius to rein in the rampant corruption in Peru,
which in his eyes characterized the government of Spain’s American
kingdoms. Both Louis XIV and his grandson hoped that ending the abuses
committed by viceroys and provincial governors would allow them to reap
the benefits of Charles’s inheritance.
Castelldosrius delayed his departure for Peru because of the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–1713), eventually arriving in Lima in 1707. Soon there-
after complaints against him reached Europe. Peruvians accused the viceroy
of not appropriately celebrating the birth of Philip’s son and heir to the Spanish
133
134 Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso
throne, of paying little attention to the government, of “attending concerts and

feasts in nunneries . . . until very inappropriate hours,” of selling appointments
without considering the candidates’ merits, of “frequently and publicly” trad-
ing with foreign merchants, and of using public money to pay private debts.3
The authorities in Spain took these accusations seriously. They found the vice-
roy’s behavior scandalous and removed him from office in 1710. But before the
news reached him in Lima, Castelldosrius passed away.
The case of Viceroy Castelldosrius clearly illustrates the dilemmas Span-
ish authorities faced when appointing viceroys and governors across the
empire. The Crown considered appointment to these high-ranking offices a
worthy reward and a high honor for valuable services rendered. A viceroy
served as the physical representative of the king.4 The Crown expected the
viceroys to look after royal interests and keep the local populations peaceful
and tranquil. At the same time, appointment to an American viceroyalty
presented the viceroy, his family, and his associates with opportunities for
enriching themselves. The Spanish Crown and its French advisors sought
mechanisms to balance the royal expectations of performance with the vice-
roys’ thirst for wealth. This chapter explores the principles that determined
the appointment of viceroys and provincial governors in the early eighteenth
century. The Spanish Crown tried to find the elusive equilibrium that would
allow viceroys to expand their fortunes without negatively affecting royal
interests. The Spanish authorities hoped that limiting the officials’ “corrupt
practices” would prevent other viceroys from attracting the kind of negative
attention that Castelldosrius had.
louis xiv and the contr adic tions of

a p p o i n t i n g t h e p e r u v i a n v i c e r oy
In July 1701 Louis XIV provided detailed instructions to the Count of Mar-
cin, his new ambassador to Madrid. Marcin served both as Louis’s emissary
and Philip’s close advisor. Like many observers at the time, Louis XIV
believed that Spain had undergone a prolonged decline under the last
Habsburg kings. Spain had gone from being the wealthiest country in
Europe, capable of displaying its victorious armies from the North Sea to the
Mediterranean, to an impoverished, second-rate power. From the French
king’s perspective, Spain was in decline because of poor government. Many
others—Spaniards and foreigners alike—shared this view.5
“Our Delivery Consists in Appointing Good Ministers” 135
For a solution, Louis XIV targeted the Spanish viceroys in Italy, on the
Iberian Peninsula, and in the Americas. In Louis’s view, Charles II had
appointed his favorites or the highest bidders for these posts instead of nam-
ing the most meritorious candidates. The Habsburg officials had often disre-
garded their duties to the king, taking their private interest as the principal
guide. In Spanish America, avaricious viceroys and governors had ruined
royal finances and had allowed English and Dutch interlopers to capture
local resources.6
To rectify this situation, the French king expected his ambassador to help
the young Spanish monarch “choose for the viceroyalties of Peru and Mexico
disinterested individuals, more concerned with eradicating age-old abuses
and upholding the Crown’s powers . . . than with enriching themselves or
providing sizable fortunes for their associates.” In Louis XIV’s opinion,
Philip needed men who were personally attached to him and who were self-
less and zealous about royal service. Only they could “conduct themselves
appropriately.” Louis had a clear idea of who these people were. Marcin
should encourage Philip to reward Spaniards of proven loyalty to the new
dynasty, such as the Count of Fernán Núñez, who was the former com-
mander of the Spanish Navy, and the Marquis of Castelldosrius.7
The marquis, whose name was Manuel de Oms y de Santa Pau, was the
heir in an old and impoverished family of Catalan nobility.8 He had served
as governor of two different Catalonian towns in the late 1670s before being
appointed the viceroy of the island of Mallorca. He then served as ambas-
sador to Portugal during the 1690s and was subsequently posted in France.9
There he probably played a significant role in attaining the Spanish Crown
for the French Prince Philip.10 The Marquis of Castelldosrius was appointed
viceroy of Peru in 1702 through the intercession of King Louis XIV, the king’s
ambassador to Madrid, and the king’s secretary of state.11
While urging his grandson to appoint a new viceroy of Peru, Louis XIV
sharply attacked the Count of La Monclova, who held that office in 1701. The
French king instructed Marcin to seek the immediate removal of La Mon-
clova.12 After all, it was no secret that the viceroy had gathered an exorbitant
personal fortune during his successive tenures as viceroy of New Spain
(1686–1688) and Peru (1689–1705).13 Ironically, despite Louis XIV’s criticism
of La Monclova, many understood that the king rewarded Castelldosrius
with the Peruvian viceroyalty to provide the aristocrat with an opportunity
to “enrich himself.”14
Castelldosrius believed that he obtained this appointment to increase his
family’s resources, to repay the debts he had incurred during his time as
ambassador, and to gather the funds to live with the dignity expected of a
Spanish grandee. In fact, in April 1720 he openly expressed his idea of found-
ing an estate from his Peruvian proceeds.15 Both the French and Spanish
Crowns expected him to make money as soon as he arrived in Peru. Yet how
was this compatible with Louis XIV’s concern to improve the government by
appointing loyal viceroys?
g e t t i n g r i c h w h i l e s e r v i n g t h e k i n g i n t h e s pa n i s h w o r l d
Viceregal corruption was a long-standing concern of Spanish authorities,

and, as Alejandro Cañeque has argued, it had become increasingly promi-
nent in the seventeenth century.16 Denunciations of viceroys participating in
illicit trade and defrauding the royal treasury were common by the early
1700s.17 At the same time, there is no shortage of documents indicating the
legitimacy of these practices. For example, an anonymous author writing on
December 28, 1709, indicated in detail how viceroys supplemented their sala-
ries while in office. According to this source, Castelldosrius’s predecessors
actively traded with the fleets that transported goods between Seville and
Panama. They used official ships that were transporting quicksilver from
Peru to New Spain to import luxury goods to Lima and to export cacao from
Guayaquil (Ecuador) to Spain or Mexico. They also profited from the sale of
appointments, particularly to local magistracies (corregimientos) and eccle-
siastical benefices. In addition, they received bribes from the royal treasury’s
creditors, who wanted to accelerate the debt payments.18
The anonymous author did not argue that Castelldosrius had refrained
from these or other abuses. Instead, he explained why the viceroy had been
unable to benefit from them to the same extent as his predecessors. Moreover,
the author did not indicate that the viceroys were in any way considered “cor-
rupt.” Quite the contrary: he suggested that viceregal involvement in trade was
not only accepted but expected, since it benefited many beyond the viceroy and
his closest associates. Among these beneficiaries were cacao producers in
Guayaquil, merchants from Lima, and consumers in Peru and farther afield.19
Indeed, what constituted viceregal abuse in the early modern Spanish
world differed starkly from modern standards. A body of legislation prohib-
iting viceroys and other officials from engaging in various activities had
existed since the sixteenth century. Actions such as accepting presents,
selling judicial decisions, and even selling certain offices became associated
with theft and sin.20 But in practice these dispositions often remained little
more than admonitions or ideals largely out of reach. Only in extreme cases
did violations result in exemplary punishment.
Implementing these laws was not a straightforward matter—not even
from the king’s point of view. Punishing officials implied that the king had
failed to select the appropriate people in the first place. For this reason,
princes and their advisors often preferred to tolerate certain abuses over rec-
ognizing that their judgment had been poor.21 At the same time, jurists, mor-
alists, and officials could not agree on what constituted abusive practices.
Jurists on occasion questioned the prohibitions of gift giving, extortion, and
embezzlement because they ran counter to old customs, which were laws in
themselves. Similarly, officials often claimed that they were not corrupt when
seeking means to “obtain the remuneration that was their due and for which
their salaries were insufficient.”22
The case of Castelldosrius illustrates that viceroys and other royal officials
frequently supplemented their income through other sources. The Marquis
of Castelldosrius openly admitted that he intended to profit from his appoint-
ment, despite Louis XIV’s complaints about inept viceroys. Meanwhile, the
Duke of Saint-Simon and other commentators took for granted that Castell-
dosrius had been made a viceroy to increase his fortune. Indeed, Colin
MacLachlan has argued, “Public office functioned as a personal asset from
which the incumbent expected some advantage, whether in fees, influence,
status, or salary.” Both monarchs and society largely accepted this state of
affairs. In practice, the expectation was “that an officeholder would pursue
his own interests as well as those of the monarchy.”23 In other words, there
was no real expectation that officials should not augment their income
through sources other than their salaries.24 Yet if all that La Monclova and
Castelldosrius had done was to personally benefit from their appointments,
why did Louis XIV so strongly criticize the former? And why would the
Spanish authorities decide to remove the Marquis of Castelldosrius from
office upon hearing of his “corrupt” practices?
personal immor alit y and public corrup tion
When the Marquis of Castelldosrius arrived in Peru in the spring of 1707, he

was a deeply indebted nobleman. Indeed, his financial situation had
worsened in the years since Philip’s accession to the Spanish throne. The
income derived from his possessions in Catalonia had never been great.25 He
incurred significant debt while serving as ambassador, because the Crown
only sporadically paid his salary and expenses.26 The years he spent in Cadiz
waiting to travel to the Indies further increased his debt.27 To make matters
worse, Philip V’s enemies in Catalonia confiscated all of Castelldosrius’s
estates during the War of the Spanish Succession.28 The marquis thus wasted
no time in profiting from his office after arriving in Peru.
Peruvians registered accusations against Castelldosrius within a year of
his arrival in Lima, and by early 1709 Versailles and Madrid knew of the
complaints.29 The viceroy’s detractors made several claims. They suggested
that the viceroy was disloyal to the new dynasty, for he had failed to celebrate
the birth of a male heir. They also argued that he paid little attention to the
government of Peru. He neglected attending the sessions of the “acuerdo
[governing council composed of the viceroy and senior judges], official cel-
ebrations, and other functions at which, according to the law, he ought to be
present.” Instead, he spent his time in “comedies, soirées, and other func-
tions of leisure . . . causing people to gossip and raising a hue [because he]
committed these excesses in private houses as well as in country estates, and
[because he] attended concerts and feasts in nunneries . . . [staying there]
until very inappropriate hours.” In addition, Castelldosrius’s critics pointed
out that he sold appointments of local magistracies without regard for the
merit and services of the candidates. He also prevented magistrates appointed
by the king from taking office unless they paid him a fee. Finally, the marquis
had “frequently and publicly” engaged in trade with foreign merchants.30
The accusations against Castelldosrius, as against most “corrupt” officials,
questioned his morality and his conduct in office, and they followed a delib-
erate order. Since deriving economic and social benefits from office was not
intrinsically wrong, these charges appeared only in the last part of the list.
Charges of a very different nature preceded them, painting Castelldosrius as
unfit to be a viceroy.
These claims indicated that the viceroy had a corrupted soul, that he was
prone to immoral and inappropriate public behavior. Accusations of this
kind were particularly common in cases in which royal officials were over-
thrown or removed from office for “corruption.” The viceroy’s detractors in
Peru complained that the viceregal “palace had been transformed into a
brothel.”31 Among the critics was the archbishop of Lima, who asserted that
the viceroy’s conduct had eroded “the purity of [Lima’s] customs to such an
extent that [the archbishop] would rather die than live to see them reach the
utmost relaxation.”32 Another enemy suggested that the viceroy had frequent
affairs with married women, who, “to prevent their husbands and relatives
from falling out of the viceroy’s good graces, gave in [to his advances],
attended his parties, and engaged [with him] in torpid unrestraint.”33
According to his detractors, the viceroy engaged publicly in sinful behav-
ior because he possessed a corrupt soul. Therefore, he was incapable of self-
restraint while in government. Castelldosrius’s opponents argued that the
viceroy took acceptable practices to intolerable levels because of his public
immorality. In other words, his enemies did not indicate that selling appoint-
ments or charging fees from royal appointees were intrinsically reprehensi-
ble. Instead, they demonstrated that these practices had become illegitimate
because of Castelldosrius’s questionable loyalty to the Bourbons, his sinful
behavior, and his disrespect for the office he served.34
These charges tarnished the viceroy’s reputation even though they did not
necessarily speak about his actual behavior. They simply showed that his
actions in office were indeed “corrupt.” For instance, although we cannot
know whether Castelldosrius habitually seduced married women, we do
know that in September 1709 he organized lavish celebrations to commemo-
rate the birth of the future Spanish king, Louis I. These included the per-
formance of a play written by the viceroy himself. Castelldosrius later
complained he had spent more than 20,000 pesos—four-fifths of a viceroy’s
yearly salary—of his own money on the event.35
In corruption cases, allegations against an officer’s morality were often
formulaic and lacked substance.36 For example, in 1715 the senior magistrates
(oidores) of the appellate court (audiencia) of Santa Fe de Bogota in New
Granada ousted the court’s president, Francisco de Meneses. They justified
their actions by accusing the president of engaging in illicit trade, of taking
bribes to speed up the cases pending in court, and of selling local offices. The
magistrates prefaced these charges with a long list of examples of the presi-
dent’s public debauchery: he drank excessively, gambled, and—as a couple of
his nephews had done—lived publicly with married women.37
In another case from 1716, the treasury officials of Panama sought to
remove the province’s governor. To this end, they accused the governor of
abusing his powers. Again, the officials initially referred to the governor’s sin-
ful behavior and its negative impact on the “decent” people of Panama City.38
Of course, all these men may have had affairs with married women and
perverted public morals. They all participated in illicit foreign trade
networks, interfered in the appointment of provincial or local magistrates,

and charged fees for speeding up payments from the royal treasuries.39 More
important, perhaps, all three men alienated important sectors of the local
society while amassing small fortunes. Castelldosrius, for instance, con-
fronted the Lima merchants who did business with the 1708 fleet arriving in
Panama. He also appointed his Catalan friends and relatives to government
posts while excluding the majority of the Peruvian elite. To make matters
worse, many of his retainers—particularly the French, with their overblown
expectations of life in Lima—became disenchanted soon after their arrival
in Peru.40 Therefore, his appropriations of public money and his participa-
tion in illicit trade per se did not trigger the accusations against him. Instead,
important local actors saw themselves excluded from the benefits, and only
then did they complain about Castelldosrius.
The same applies to President Meneses in Santa Fe de Bogota. Early in his
tenure he committed a series of political blunders that mattered more than
his efforts to rapidly enrich himself.41 He should have enriched himself dis-
creetly and moderately without creating a scandal. According to Colin
MacLachlan, “Society accepted the use of positions for private gain provided
it did not become so excessive as to damage the economic survival of others.”
Officials simply had to find the right balance and not cross “the line between
private entrepreneurship and exploitive greed.” 42 The lack of a clearly defined
line separating appropriate behavior from abusive practices created innu-
merable opportunities for accusing officials of “corruption.”
d r aw i n g t h e l i n e : r e i n i n g i n v i c e r e g a l a b u s e
Castelldosrius profited from his office, but not any more than his predecessors
did. The Count of La Monclova’s poverty “had been notorious in Spain” when
he departed for the Americas. After his death in Lima in 1705, his fortune
“would not be believed, because it exceeds all speculation,” leaving little doubt
that he had profited handsomely.43 According to these reports, La Monclova’s
estate exceeded 14 million pesos after fifteen years in New Spain and Peru.44
He had accumulated nearly 1 million pesos for every year he served as viceroy.
In contrast, Núria Sala estimates, Castelldosrius gained just under 1.3 million
pesos during his three years in office. This was not a despicable amount—and
certainly much more than his official salary of about 25,000 pesos a year—but
it was less than what his predecessor had gathered.45
The authorities in Spain and in France reacted to the accusations against

Castelldosrius because of the magnitude of the scandal and the risk to Peru
rather than because of the fortune he had amassed. The French ambassador
to Peru, Michel-Jean Amelot, wrote to Louis XIV in February 1709, deploring
“the enormous abuses of . . . viceroys.” Amelot feared that Spain might lose
its American kingdoms altogether, because “avarice and pillage are unpun-
ished, fortresses and garrisons are neglected; all things seem to portend a
fatal revolution.” As a result, “resolutions ha[d] been made [in Madrid] to
recall the two [American] viceroys, and to fix some precise boundaries to the
profits of their successors, so as to give them the means of enriching them-
selves without departing from their duty.” Amelot admitted that completely
preventing viceroys from deriving economic benefits was impossible, “even
if the choice is directed on people most distinguished for firmness and pro-
bity.” 46 This suggests that the ambassador considered cupidity to be intrinsic
to human nature, or at least to the nature of Spanish noblemen.
In the aftermath of the Castelldosrius debacle, the Spanish Crown contin-
ued to abide by Louis XIV’s recommendation that Philip appoint Spanish
subjects of proven loyalty and merit to the viceroy posts. But the Spanish
king and his ministers also sought to ensure that new viceroys knew exactly
how much they could profit while in office. In this way the Crown hoped to
increase the viceroys’ zeal for royal service and reduce complaints against
them. Philip chose noblemen of unquestionable loyalty to serve as viceroys
of Peru and New Spain in 1710 and 1711. He also specified how much each
viceroy could gain during his tenure.
Following these considerations, the Crown named the second Duke of
Linares viceroy of New Spain in 1710. His brother had announced the acces-
sion of Philip V to the Spanish court, and Linares enjoyed Louis XIV’s favor,
since both Versailles and Madrid considered his loyalty to the Bourbons
unshakable.47 As had been the case with Castelldosrius, the French ambas-
sador to Madrid urged Linares’s appointment. The Spanish Crown agreed
and negotiated terms in the early months of 1710. Linares received a number
of titles of nobility, honorary appointments, and military promotions, with
the name of the beneficiaries left blank. He could “distribute, give, or sell”
these documents upon his arrival in New Spain. Formally, the Spanish
Crown issued them as rewards for “those who, with their people, their
money, and their zeal shall concur and contribute to the remedy of the mon-
archy’s urgency” and gave Linares leeway to distribute them in the royal
interest. The viceroy had to send two-thirds of the money back to Spain while
keeping the remainder as the compensation for his services. The profits from
this enterprise began arriving in Madrid shortly after Linares took office in
Mexico City.48
The following year, the Spanish Crown chose the Prince of Santo Buono—
a descendant of an old Neapolitan family—to be the viceroy of Peru. Santo
Buono had abandoned his estates when Naples fell to Philip V’s enemies in
1707.49 The king granted him an annual pension as compensation, drawing
on resources confiscated from Habsburg sympathizers, and he made Santo
Buono a grandee of Spain.50 Between September 1712 and January 1713, the
king and the new viceroy came to an agreement. During his first three years
in government, the viceroy would remit 2 million pesos to Spain every year.
In exchange, he could withdraw 600,000 pesos from the Lima treasury in
addition to his annual salary. As with Linares, the Crown and the new vice-
roy consented that “the prince shall profit, beyond the expense of the voyages
to and from [the Indies] and the three years of his government” and “the
means through which [he] shall obtain [said] profit.”51
In both cases the Crown rewarded faithful servants with appointments as
viceroys while seeking to prevent the scandals caused by Santo Buono’s pre-
decessors. Moreover, Philip and his ministers secured fixed annual remit-
tances. Unfortunately, very little is known of how Linares and Santo Buono
performed in office, making it difficult to judge whether the plan was suc-
cessful. We know that neither became the target of accusations as serious as
those raised against Castelldosrius and La Monclova. As a result, both Lin-
ares and Santo Buono finished their time in office as planned, even though
some observers suggested that Santo Buono had been actively involved in
illicit trade throughout his viceregency.52
e xperience, ze al , and selflessness
Not everyone thought this approach was the best way of restraining viceregal
abuses. In 1712, the president of the Council of the Indies reviewed an anony-
mous document that resonated strongly with the views of Louis XIV. The
document attributed the critical situation of the American kingdoms to
“greed for gold and silver . . . a passion that, enthroned in command and
accompanied by power, transforms viceroys, judges and governors . . . [until
they] have no movement other than their own interest.” The unknown author
argued that the royal treasuries remained empty because of the officials’
abuses. This observer rejected the idea that these were inveterate practices of
a viceregal government. In his view, the “diabolic arrangements used only by
the latest viceroys as the most convenient means to amass immense sums in
a short time” had deteriorated the situation. For the author of this text, put-
ting an end to the seemingly complex problem of viceregal abuses was rela-
tively easy. The key was to appoint viceroys who “do not need to make a
fortune or found estates and grandeeships with what they steal.” Instead, the
king needed a viceroy who was “a warrior, a strong man, a champion of jus-
tice, free from greed, and full of fear of God.” Significantly, this commentator
listed being a warrior and a strong man before the moral characteristics—
freedom from greed and fear of God. The qualities of their actions and their
professions weighed more for this author than the nature of their souls.53
Another anonymous document, “Report to Philip V on the Current Situ-
ation of the Monarchy,” written in the early 1720s, shared many of these
views. This commentator suggested that instead of the king striking more or
less covert deals with viceroys, the solution “consist[ed] of appointing good
ministers. The first, and almost the only, thing that sh[ould] be done [wa]s to
attend to the purity of interests, if [the king and his advisors] were to find
viceroys who had this quality, by applying themselves moderately they would
do miracles.” In addition, this observer recommended that those appointed
to the Indies “should be men of proven integrity and purity . . . men of righ-
teous character . . . [while the Crown should ensure that] they have certain
hope of being appropriately employed upon their return to Spain, if they have
acted well.”54 Thus a new formula emerged. To prevent viceregal abuses, the
Crown should make sure that the viceroys did not see their tenures in the
Indies as a onetime opportunity for securing their futures. Philip decided to
put this idea to the test when he appointed the viceroys of both Spanish
American viceroyalties in the early 1720s.
Until then most viceroys had come from families of long-standing titled
nobility. From the second quarter of the eighteenth century onward, the
Spanish Crown showed a clear preference for members of the gentry with
long careers in the Spanish armies. This combination of a lower social rank
and a professional military background had important repercussions. Men
with this background still saw their appointment to a governorship or vice-
royalty as a reward for their services. But they less frequently received associ-
ated promotions in the field of honor, and none of them were made grandees
while serving as viceroys.55 Therefore, these men did not have the need to
amass large fortunes to support their newly acquired social status. As
members of the nobility they expected to live comfortably, but they hoped
that future employment and rewards earned through service would enable
them to do so. Of course, viceroys still had retainers and provided for them
at least with the opportunity to make a living. The size of their entourages,
however, diminished dramatically. In the late seventeenth and early eigh-
teenth centuries, viceroys often traveled to the Americas with retinues that
exceeded one hundred people. Such large entourages had become exceed-
ingly rare by the 1750s, and viceroys usually traveled with fewer than thirty
people. This development alone reduced the number of pockets demanding
to be filled and lessened the demands on the incoming viceroys. In addition,
because the military viceroys appointed under Philip V and his son, Ferdi-
nand VI, continued to be officers in the royal armies, they could expect to
continue to serve in salaried military appointments after returning to Spain.
Reining in abuses and preventing “corruption” scandals only partly
explain why the Spanish Crown began preferring military officers for the
governorships and viceregencies. The new Bourbon dynasty favored men
with a military background because they governed in an effective and execu-
tive manner. Moreover, a series of reforms introduced early in the eighteenth
century made the entire career and social progression of military officers
directly dependent on royal favor—unlike the high nobility, who often had
semi-independent bases of political and economic power. For this reason, the
Crown believed that military men were more loyal to the king and his inter-
ests. Furthermore, the Crown could more easily provide military men with
promotions and appointments after they had served as viceroys, creating
incentives for these men to moderate their behavior in office.56
Although later viceroys did not receive contracts comparable to those of
the Duke of Linares and the Prince of Santo Buono, from the mid-eighteenth
century onward, they received high honors and offices after returning to
Spain. These officials served in the top ranks of the monarchy’s central
administration, army, or provincial government within the Iberian Penin-
sula. For example, the first Marquis of Castelfuerte, who succeeded the
Prince of Santo Buono as viceroy of Peru, received a promotion to the highest
rank in the Spanish army after his first four years as viceroy in recognition
of his merits. When he returned to Spain he was given command of the royal
guards protecting Philip V’s palaces, and he received the highest decoration
awarded by the Spanish Crown: the order of the Golden Fleece.57 Some years
later, Sebastián de Eslava, the viceroy of New Granada from 1740 to 1749, also
received significant promotions after his time in Spanish America. These
included appointments as captain general of Andalusia in 1749 and as secre-

tary of war in 1754.58 Provincial governors could also expect promotions and
continual appointments if their services warranted them.
Nonetheless, these governmental officials still did not apply the same
standards of bureaucratic honesty that we expect today. The Marquis of
Castelfuerte, for instance, gained and hid his profits rather skillfully.59
Alfredo Moreno Cebrián has shown that Castelfuerte managed to amass
considerable funds in Peru, and he later invested them in properties attached
to the inheritances of his brother and his nephew.60 Similarly, Manuel de
Salcedo y Sierralta, the governor of the Yucatan from 1736 to 1743, built up a
substantial fortune in office. He later used those resources to have a son
admitted to Madrid’s college for the nobility, to secure the promotion of
another son to the rank of colonel by the age of eighteen, and to secure for
himself an appointment in the Council of the Indies.61 When the Crown
granted these social promotions, it hardly could have ignored the origins of
the funds. The fortunes of these men, however, pale in comparison with the
wealth of their predecessors.62 The proportion of viceroys or provincial gov-
ernors with this background whom the Crown ousted for any reason—
including corruption—is also much smaller. Philip V succeeded in curbing
the scandalous abuses of viceroys and provincial governors even as those
officials continued to use public office for private benefit.
conclusion
The Bourbon dynasty strove to limit the cupidity of viceroys and other royal
officials during the first half of the eighteenth century. For the king and his
advisors, the excesses of self-interest caused a scourge of bad government in
the seventeenth century. Commentators highlighted greedy viceroys, gover-
nors, and their entourages to explain why Spain did not benefit sufficiently
from its empire. Yet we would be mistaken to interpret this as a criticism of
the use of public office for personal gain. The Crown explicitly appointed
governors and viceroys with the aim of rewarding loyal subjects and improv-
ing their financial situations. This became a problem when viceroys and
other officials pursued their own interests at the expense of the king’s. Exces-
sive greed could cause a viceroy to concentrate resources in his own hands
without sending sufficient money back to Spain. Politically inept viceroys or
governors could fail to balance local interests, especially when they explicitly
favored a particular faction or alienated important parts of the local elite. In

such cases, American subjects accused royal officials of corruption and even
orchestrated the official’s overthrow. The Crown did usually not welcome the
political instability and the expenses of dealing with the matter.
In their complaints to Spain, Americans linked the sinful public behavior
of viceroys and governors to their financial excesses. Gaining private finan-
cial and social benefits from office was not necessarily wrong. When an indi-
vidual with a corrupt soul who was incapable of self-restraint did so, however,
these actions became scandalous and unacceptable.
The Spanish Crown tested various ways of selecting government officials
while allowing viceroys and governors to benefit from their appointments.
The king steered away from appointing favorites or selling appointments to
the highest bidder, preferring instead to choose men of merit and loyalty. He
agreed with the viceroys on contracts that outlined how much they could
profit from office while the Crown received a guaranteed share. Finally, the
Crown chose as viceroys individuals whose loyalty and dependence on royal
favor were more likely to guarantee moderation in office. Professional mili-
tary officers became the stereotypical provincial or viceregal governors in the
empire by the mid-eighteenth century. The Crown saw these men as efficient
and loyal agents. The promise of continued employment and promotions
upon their return to Spain tempered their avarice. Governors and viceroys
continued to profit from office, sometimes very handsomely, but they caused
fewer scandals than their predecessors had. In short, public office and private
benefit were still compatible by the mid-eighteenth century, as long as offi-
cials refrained from excess and avoided scandals by showing moderation and
political skill.
notes
1. This was a substantial amount of money, roughly equivalent to the salary a

Spanish viceroy earned in a whole year.
2. Núria Sala i Vila, “Una corona bien vale un virreinato: El marqués de Castelldosrius,
primer virrey borbónico del Perú (1707–1710),” in El “premio” de ser virrey: Los
intereses públicos y privados del gobierno virreinal en el Perú de Felipe V, ed. Alfredo
Moreno Cebrián and Núria Sala i Vila (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, 2004), 20–21.
3. Alfredo Sáenz-Rico Urbina, “Las acusaciones contra el virrey del Perú, Marqués
de Castelldosrius, y sus ‘Noticias reservadas’ (Febrero 1709),” Boletín Americanista
20, no. 28 (1978): 121–22.
4. Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal
Power in Colonial Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2004).
5. Commission des Archives Diplomatiques, ed., “Instruction du Roi au Sieur
Comte de Marsin . . . ,” in Espagne (II), vol. 12 of Recueil des Instructions don-
nées aux Ambassadeurs et Ministres de France despuis les Traités de Westphalie
jusq’à la Révolution Française (Paris: Ancienne Libraire Germer Billière, 1899),
4–45.
6. Commission, “Instruction du Roi,” 6–7.
7. Ibid., 42, 51.
8. Amèlia Castan i Ranch, “Nobleza y poder en la Cataluña de la época moderna:
Una aproximación biográfica al primer marqués de Castelldosrius (1651–1710),”
Pedralbes 13, no. 2 (1993): 265–66.
9. Ibid., 267–69; Sala i Vila, “Una corona,” 20–21.
10. Carla Rahn Phillips, The Treasure of the San José: Death at Sea in the War of the
Spanish Succession (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007),
107–8.
11. Commission, “Instruction du Roi,” 51; Sala i Vila, “Una corona,” 21–22.
12. Commission, “Instruction du Roi,” 42.
13. Sala i Vila, “Una corona,” 18; Sáenz-Rico Urbina, “Las acusaciones,” 125.
14. Louis de Rouvroy, Mémoires complets et authentiques du Duc de Saint-Simon sur
le siècle de Louis XIV et la Régence, ed. M. Chéruel and M. Sainte-Beuve (Paris:
Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie., 1856), 3:51.
15. Sala i Vila, “Una corona,” 22–23.
16. Cañeque, King’s Living Image, 158, 166–67, 172–73.
17. For extensive lists of the many manifestations of this practice, see Anthony
McFarlane, “Political Corruption and Reform in Bourbon Spanish America,” in
Political Corruption in Europe and Latin America, ed. Walter Little and Eduardo
Posada-Carbó (London: Macmillan, 1996), 42–43; and Francisco Andújar
Castillo, Necesidad y venalidad: España e Indias, 1704–1711 (Madrid: Centro de
Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2008), 297.
19. Ibid.
20. Jean-Claude Waquet, “Some Considerations on Corruption, Politics, and Society
in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Italy,” in Political Corruption in Europe
and Latin America, ed. Walter Little and Eduardo Posada-Carbó (London:
Macmillan, 1996), 26–29.
21. Juan Luis Castellano, “El rey, la corona y los ministros,” in La pluma, la mitra y
la espada: Estudios de historia institucional en la edad moderna, ed. Juan Luis
Castellano, Jean Pierre Dedieu, and Victoria López-Cordón (Madrid: Marcial
Pons, 2000), 32–33, 36–37; Waquet, “Some Considerations,” 34.
22. Waquet, “Some Considerations,” 29–32.
23. Colin M. MacLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World: The Role of Ideas in
Institutional and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),
35; see also Phillips, Treasure, 117–18. For Italy, particularly Spanish Naples and
Sicily, see Waquet, “Some Considerations,” 33.
24. Cañeque, King’s Living Image, 179.
25. Castan i Ranch, “Nobleza y poder,” 266, estimates the yearly income derived
from Castelldosrius’s estates in Catalonia as 2,000 Catalan libras (roughly about
37,500 reales or 4,700 pesos), a sum considered absolutely insufficient to support
a noble household.
26. Phillips, Treasure, 104.
27. Sala i Vila, “Una corona,” 28–32; Núria Sala i Vila, “La escenificación del poder:
El marqués de Castelldosrius, primer virrey Borbón del Perú (1707–1710),”
Anuario de Estudios Americanos (Seville) 61, no. 1 (2004): 37.
28. Sala i Vila, “Una corona,” 29.
29. Phillips, Treasure, 191–94; Sala i Vila, “Una corona,” 50–78.
30. Sáenz-Rico Urbina, “Las acusaciones,” 121–22.
32. Sáenz-Rico Urbina, “Las acusaciones,” 123.
34. On the link between complaints over misgovernment and attacks against offi-
cials’ morality, see Tamar Herzog, Upholding Justice: Society, State, and the Penal
System in Quito (1650–1750) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004),
155–59.
35. Sala i Vila, “La escenificación,” 53–55. It is not entirely clear whether plans for
these celebrations were already underway when the first accusations against
Castelldosrius were made.
36. Herzog, Upholding Justice, 208–9, 211–14.
37. Synnove Ones, “The Politics of Government in the Audiencia of New Granada,
1681–1719,” PhD dissertation, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, 2000, 272.
38. Ibid., 302.
39. Sala i Vila, “Una corona”; Ones, “Politics,” 266–79, 301–3.
41. Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso, “La Nueva Granada en el Sistema de Utrecht:
Condiciones locales, contexto internacional, y reforma institucional,” in
Resonancias imperiales: América y el Tratado de Utrecht de 1713, ed. Iván
Escamilla González, Matilde Soto Mantecón, and Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos
(Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2015), 47–79.
42. MacLachlan, Spain’s Empire, 36.
44. Phillips, Treasure, 207; Sáenz-Rico Urbina, “Las acusaciones,” 123.
46. William Coxe, Memoirs of the Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon, from the
Accession of Philip V to the Death of Charles III, 1700 to 1788 (London: Longman,
Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), 1:440. One of the viceroys was Castelldosrius,
and the other was the Duke of Alburquerque, the viceroy of New Spain. On
Alburquerque, see Christoph Rosenmüller, Patrons, Partisans, and Palace
Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710 (Calgary, AB: University
of Calgary Press, 2008).
47. Henry Kamen, Philip V of Spain: The King who Reigned Twice (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2001), 3–4; Amalia Gómez Gómez, Las visitas de la Real
Hacienda novohispana en el reinado de Felipe V (1710–1733) (Seville: Escuela de
Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1979), 12, 14.
48. Andújar Castillo, Necesidad y venalidad, 286–93.
49. Cayetano Alcázar Molina, Los virreinatos en el siglo XVIII, vol. 13 of Historia de
América y de los pueblos americanos, ed. Antonio Ballesteros y Beretta (Barcelona:
Salvat Editores, 1959), 379–80.
50. Kamen, Philip V, 330.
51. Andújar Castillo, Necesidad y venalidad, 296–98.
52. Jorge de Villalonga to King Philip V, Santa Fe, n.d., Archivo General de Indias,
Seville, Santa Fe, 374.
54. “Representación a Felipe V sobre la monarquía,” n.p., n.d., Biblioteca Nacional
de España, Manuscripts 10.695, fols. 103v–104v.
55. Several of them had gained a title of nobility before the appointment or would
get the title afterward thanks to their service or their money, but all of them re-
mained in the lower ranks of the titled nobility.
56. Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso, “‘Of Experience, Zeal, and Selflessness’: Military
Officers as Viceroys in Early Eighteenth Century Spanish America,” Americas
68, no. 3 (2012), 328–34.
57. Ibid., 342.
58. Ainara Vázquez Varela, “De la primera sangre de este reino”: Las elites dirigentes
de Santa Fe (1700–1750) (Bogotá: Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2010), 30.
59. Alfredo Moreno Cebrián, “Acumulación y blanqueo de capitales del Marqués de
Castelfuerte (1723–1763),” in El “premio” de ser virrey: Los intereses públicos y
privados del gobierno virreinal en el Perú de Felipe V, ed. Alfredo Moreno Cebrián
and Núria Sala i Vila (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas,
2004), 151–276.
60. Ibid.; Alfredo Moreno Cebrián, El virreinato del marqués de Castelfuerte, 1724–
1736: El primer intento borbónico por reformar el Perú (Madrid: Editorial Catriel,
2000), 48–57.
61. Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso, “‘Having Served in the Troops’: The Appointment of
Military Officers as Provincial Governors in Early Eighteenth-Century Spanish
America, 1700–1746,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 1, no. 4 (2013): 350.
62. Eissa-Barroso, “‘Of Experience,’” 342–43.
CHAPTER SE VEN
Custom, Corruption, and Reform in

Early Eighteenth-Century Mexico
puebl a’s merchant priests versus the reformist bure aucr at
k
Frances L. Ramos
I n 1721 the bishop of Puebla, Pedro Nogales Dávila, informed the Council
of the Indies of the “grave inconveniences” caused by various members
of his cathedral chapter who engaged in commerce. The late seventeenth-
century compilation of Spanish-American law expressly prohibited priests
from acting like merchants, yet the bishop reported a problem so endemic
and so pervasive that in the city of Puebla merchant priests had become the
norm.1 According to the bishop, the cathedral’s last dean, Francisco López
de Humara, owned two haciendas (large estates) and an ingenio (sugar
refinery) that he purchased in the name of some of his dependents but that
he continued to run and profit from. This proved to be rather typical. Priests
commonly utilized proxies to amass property and carry out business, but
some priests openly owned property, thumbing their noses at royal
proscriptions and hiding behind the fuero eclesiástico, the privilege that
shielded priests from being tried in secular courts. Cathedral prelate Pedro
de la Hedesa, for example, inherited a hacienda from his parents and paid his
censo (a mortgage that paid a fixed annuity to a religious institution) on time,
as well as the annual church tithe; he profited openly from his business
dealings.2
According to Puebla’s bishop, all landowning priests posed a problem
because business distracted them from their responsibilities to the diocese.
151
152 Frances L. Ramos
During his tenure (1708–1721), Nogales consistently admonished chapter

members for not attending the Divine Offices, the set of fixed daily prayers,
in the cathedral.3 So in writing to the Council of the Indies, Nogales clearly
wanted the priests admonished, but little did he know that the complaint
would unleash an investigation that would uncover more egregious impro-
prieties. Unfortunately for the merchant priests, some would be accused of
tax evasion, which in 1721 was a serious offense.
Nogales made no mention of taxes in his letter, but it seems that he knew
that the Crown would soon be informed about the issue and did not want to
be accused of covering up the fact that priests were engaging in commerce.
Just three days after the bishop signed his letter, Juan Joseph de Veytia y
Linaje, Puebla’s alcalde mayor (the chief judge who presided over the munici-
pal council) and superintendent of the alcabala (the royal tax on purchases
and sales), also wrote to the Council of the Indies. He reminded the council
that he had first complained about the mercantile priests after his first year
of working as the superintendent of the tax collection (1698). He specifically
stated that he did not take issue with priests who inherited property, but only
those who bought or sold ranches, haciendas, refineries, slaughterhouses,
and shops and did not pay the tax on purchases and sales.
Apparently many high-ranking priests traded seeds and raised and sold
pigs in butcher shops known as tocinerías. In addition to selling pork, many
sold soap and lard, by-products of the slaughtered pigs. Yet Veytia did not
give an opinion on whether priests should engage in commerce; instead he
focused on their refusal to pay taxes. According to his calculations, ecclesi-
astics in Puebla traded in goods that totaled around 350,000 pesos and
defrauded the Crown out of at least 20,000 pesos a year. In twenty-three
years of service in Puebla, Veytia believed that merchant priests had
defrauded the Crown out of a total of 460,000 pesos. He stated that there was
hardly a religious community, cathedral canon, or priest in the city (or even
in the bishopric) that had not purchased or rented a hacienda directly or
indirectly through proxies. He claimed that because of the fuero eclesiástico,
there was little he could do.4
This chapter examines the phenomenon of Puebla’s mercantile priests in
order to understand how, in a specific locality and at a specific time, the very
definition of what constituted corruption changed. For most of the colonial
period, custom trumped law. When deciding on civil cases, the audiencia
(appellate court) or the Council of the Indies frequently inquired about pre-
vious practices and quite often ordered an adherence to custom. As has been
Custom, Corruption, and Reform 153
well established, the Spanish Habsburgs mistrusted novelty, believing that

by preserving the status quo, colonial administrators lessened the possibility
of political instability.5 However, in their penchant to modernize and codify,
the late eighteenth-century Bourbon reformers no longer trusted custom to
the same extent as their Habsburg predecessors, so they promoted sweeping
reforms intent on creating fixed rules and uniformity.6
Nevertheless, as the case of Puebla illustrates, the desire for reform began
much earlier. In fact, Puebla acted like a testing ground for various late
eighteenth-century reform schemes. Foreshadowing later attempts by Bour-
bon bureaucrats to make the colonies more lucrative, Veytia increased rev-
enues by 350 percent in his first year as superintendent of the tax collection
(1697–1698).7 Among many other innovations he made, he started charging
sales tax on basic foodstuffs and surrounded the city with garitas (inspection
stations). Although scholars have pointed to the implementation of interim
councilmen in cities as an attempt by the late eighteenth-century Crown to
crush entrenched local oligarchies, Veytia did this in 1714, decades before the
Bourbon administrators.8
Yet while Puebla’s leading families, bureaucrats, and prelates endured
these tightening reforms, they tried to fight back. By unraveling the mis-
deeds and power struggles wrapped up in this dispute over Puebla’s mercan-
tile prelates, we can see the degree to which behavior on the ground did not
correspond with codified ideals of comportment, thereby illustrating the
pervasive culture of what some might call corruption in early eighteenth-
century Puebla. Furthermore, as this chapter argues, the dramatic power
struggle unleashed by the alcalde mayor illustrates the importance of custom
in determining what did and did not constitute corruption and underscores
the difficulty of implementing reform in the early modern Spanish world. To
be clear, I presuppose that the city’s mercantile priests formed part of the
viceroyalty’s political bureaucracy. They enjoyed their appointments by vir-
tue of the approval of the king.
Indeed, the 1574 Ordenanza del Patronazago codified papal bulls into one
statement regarding the king’s patronage over the church. In exchange for
undertaking the enormous task of converting the New World’s Native popu-
lation, the papacy ceded a great deal of control to the Spanish Crown. While
the pope remained the head of the Church in all spiritual and doctrinal mat-
ters, in Spanish America the king controlled all ecclesiastical appointments,
collected a share of the ecclesiastical tithe (the obligatory tenth on all agri-
cultural production), and collected donations every two years, as allowed by
the Bull of the Holy Crusade. In exchange for reduced time in purgatory,
people donated money to fund the Crown’s continuous wars against infi-
dels.9 Although the Church was semiautonomous, there is no doubt that it
often functioned as an arm of the Crown.
Yet the position of Puebla’s priests proved tricky; they straddled between
secular authority and ecclesiastic jurisdiction, albeit more toward the latter.
Because the fuero eclesiástico granted them the ability to avoid being pros-
ecuted by secular authorities, it was the role of the cathedral chapter’s judge,
or provisor, to discipline the priests. In the diocese of Puebla, however, the
provisor proved unwilling to do anything to stop them. Some of Puebla’s
high-ranking priests also had strong familial ties to secular elites with simi-
lar interests in subverting Veytia’s authority. Before Veytia’s arrival, the
municipal council, or cabildo, of Puebla collected the alcabala with the
promise to pay the Crown a certain amount every year. Councilmen abused
this privilege; it had become customary to allow friends, family, and business
associates to avoid paying the tax. Although this was tolerated for decades,
once custom clashed violently with reform in Puebla, institutionalized tax
evasion became defined as corruption. Patronage, the sale of offices, and even
the exchange of favors were not considered political corruption, yet there was
a line, and once the mercantile priests were reminded of the law repeatedly,
their behavior crossed it.
c o r r u p t i o n at t h e d aw n o f b o u r b o n r u l e
In discussing what constituted political corruption in the early modern

period, historians of the Spanish Empire confront shifting definitions. As
John Leddy Phelan argued long ago, Spain’s colonial bureaucrats depended
on “flexibility,” the ability to ignore certain mandates from above and to
engage in ongoing negotiations with different jurisdictions within the Span-
ish Crown regarding what would be best in particular instances. Because of
the vast distance separating Spain from America and because of the inability
to engage in constant oversight, flexibility proved crucial to the maintenance
of relative peace. Although the system caused long delays in resolving dis-
putes, Phelan claimed, these lengthy negotiations actually benefited the
Crown, allowing tempers to cool and things to resolve slowly on their own.10
Furthermore, because local practice often trumped law, subjects in localities
throughout the empire customarily ignored royal mandates that did not suit
their needs, especially if they did not believe that there would be serious
repercussions. The trick lay in figuring out how far to cross over the line or
even to identify where the line was. There was, after all, a limit to what was
considered acceptable (mis)behavior.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, elite poblanos (as the people of
Puebla were called) learned that the definition of what was and was not
acceptable had changed. Approximately eighty miles southeast of Mexico
City, Puebla, the viceroyalty of New Spain’s second-most important city in
prestige and importance, served as an intermediate point between the port
of Veracruz and Mexico City, and it was an ideal spot for European travelers
to recuperate after the long transatlantic journey. The fertile valley of Puebla
also served as the breadbasket for much of the viceroyalty, which was com-
posed of what is now Mexico, the southwest United States, most of Central
America, Florida, and much of the Caribbean. For most of the seventeenth
century, with its “flexible” taxation, Puebla also became the preferred spot
for merchants selling goods imported from Spain and the Philippines.11
However, the turn of the eighteenth century brought rapid change to the
political economy of Puebla, and one can argue that this shift largely resulted
from the rise of a new ruling dynasty. On November 1, 1700, Charles II, the
last Habsburg king of Spain, died heirless, and he designated his nephew, a
French Bourbon duke, as his successor. When the nephew, renamed Philip V,
assumed the Spanish throne, he put an end to almost two centuries of
Habsburg rule. Yet even though this is an easily identifiable and perhaps a
convenient starting point, maneuvers toward reform seemed to have started
long before this. In the 1620s, the prime minister of Castile, the Count-Duke
of Olivares, introduced an ambitious series of reforms intent on bringing the
atomized monarchies that composed the Spanish Empire together, and to
create, among other things, a more justly distributed system of taxation.12
Although Olivares fell from grace, as did his reform programs, recent schol-
arship has suggested that astute administrators continued to push through
fiscally beneficial reforms during the last two decades of Habsburg rule.
These findings, moreover, contradict the traditional historiography that has
characterized the reign of the last Habsburg king as one of stagnation and
mismanagement. Starting in the 1680s, high-level administrators worked on
fighting corruption and rationalizing expenditures. In 1686 the Council of
Castile stated that if the king could prevent corruption, revenues would cover
his needs and free the Crown from debt. In this spirit, the Council of Castile
established various bodies specifically designed to combat fraud, such as the
Junta de Fraudes (Fraud Committee) in 1682 and the Junta de Resguardo de

las Rentas (Committee for the Protection of Revenues) in 1692.13
Significantly, Juan Joseph de Veytia y Linaje began working as a reformer
during the reign of Charles II. When he assumed his position as super
intendent of the alcabala in Puebla in 1697, he had already served as the
head of tax collection in Mexico City for more than ten years. In Mexico
City, tax collection had been in the hands of the city’s consulado (the mer-
chants’ guild that monopolized commerce), but because of mismanage-
ment the Crown gave control exclusively to Veytia. In Puebla, the tax had
been collected by the municipal council, which was headed by a powerful
elite. By the early seventeenth century, the chronically indebted Crown had
put all cabildo positions up for sale. This led to a handful of interconnected
families dominating municipal politics throughout the seventeenth cen-
tury, since individual men customarily left their positions in inheritance to
sons, sons-in-law, or other close male relatives. Many had family members
who also served on the diocese’s governing council of prelates, the cathe-
dral chapter. Together, these interlocked families created an influential
oligarchy.14
During the seventeenth century, many of Puebla’s councilmen had used
their positions to help their allies and themselves avoid paying the alcabala.
First brought to New Spain in 1575, the alcabala served as a tax on the
exchange of merchandise. Initially set at 2 percent, it rose to 6 percent in 1636
and to 8 percent at the end of 1744. Because the Crown had difficulty collect-
ing the tax, it farmed it out to corporations like the merchants’ guild in Mex-
ico City and the municipal council of Puebla.15 While Puebla’s councilmen
and their allies grew wealthy through trade and from supplying merchant
ships with food, the corporation’s overtly corrupt practices translated into
insurmountable debt. By 1697 the council finally found itself unable to make
payments on the alcabala, and the Crown installed Veytia as the overseer of
collection.16
During his first year as the superintendent, Puebla’s oligarchy spread a
rumor that Veytia would be assassinated if he persisted in his attempts to
reform the alcabala. One night a man even appeared outside his home and,
under the cover of darkness, gave a verbal threat to one of the superinten-
dent’s servants: Veytia should leave, or he would die. Although Veytia was
unable to appeal to the municipal council for protection, two wealthy broth-
ers who had befriended him offered their own men to guard his house.17
When the Crown named him alcalde mayor in 1699, most councilmen
resigned or stopped attending meetings, since fears that Veytia would

obstruct their business practices had proved well founded. In fact, four
months after taking office Veytia informed the councilmen that he expected
things to change radically, stating that the collection of the alcabala remained
his principal concern.18
Veytia’s authority grew over time, probably enhanced by the economic
needs occasioned by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713), which
pitted Spain and France against the Austrian Habsburgs, England, the Neth-
erlands, and Portugal. In 1703, Veytia became the overseer of trade with the
Philippines, with a mandate to curb contraband. The cost of war required
tight control over imperial finances, and in 1704, after a series of devastating
attacks by British soldiers and Appalachian Indians on sites within Spanish
Florida, the Crown put Veytia in charge of financing Florida’s presidios with
alcabala revenue.19 In 1705 the Crown awarded him the official title of juez de
arribadas (judge of illegally arriving ships) for the port of Acapulco, and in
1709 the Crown gave him exclusive jurisdiction over the sale of mercury in
the colonies.20
All these positions came with extraordinary power, which in turn threat-
ened the preeminence of the local oligarchy. Furthermore, the stringent col-
lection of the alcabala drove merchants from the city. Someone even
presented Bishop Nogales with an anonymous satire blaming Veytia for
destroying the local economy. In this piece, Puebla, a beautiful bejeweled
woman, explained the effect of the alcalde mayor’s economic reforms to her
son, a merchant who decided to leave her for greater opportunities. Signifi-
cantly, the author seemed irked not only by Veytia’s fiscal policies but also by
the fact that he sat on a “throne” inside “God’s church.”21 In 1712 the Council
of the Indies named Veytia one of its advisors, and with this honorary
appointment came the right to sit in a chair decorated with a tapestry and to
use a cushion during public church ceremonies. Previously, all alcalde may-
ores had sat with the city’s councilmen on specially designed benches during
church ceremonies. The new privilege bothered various members of the
cathedral chapter, who were used to sitting in their own ornately decorated
chairs in the cathedral choir during ceremonies.22 Many of these prelates
also refused to pay the alcabala.
Throughout his long tenure in Puebla, Veytia remained focused on tax
collection.23 Originally the Crown intended to leave him in control of the
collection for five years, but seeing the impressive returns and realizing that
the cabildo had been committing fraud, it left him in the position.24 During
the last two years of his life, Puebla’s tax-evading priests occupied much of
his time, since the initial investigation seemed to reveal scandal upon scan-
dal. To complicate matters, the provisor used his control over the liturgy and
sacraments to avenge himself on the reformist alcalde mayor.
custom versus reform
Of all the priests who avoided paying taxes, Pedro Rodríguez de Ledesma, the
racionero (the cathedral prebendary who helped allocate funds) proved the
worst. In 1720 Alcalde Mayor Veytia reported that from the profits that he made
from the slaughter of pigs, Rodríguez purchased or rented at least five haci-
endas.25 Over time, Veytia was able to gather more specific information on
Rodríguez’s business dealings. On July 14, 1722, he reported that Rodríguez
engaged in business quite openly with the help of three nephews. Together
they purchased pigs and feed and housed the pigs in one of Rodríguez’s seven
haciendas in the nearby province of Tepeaca. Later the men delivered the
fattened pigs to one of several butcher shops owned by Rodríguez in the city
of Puebla. Eventually the alcalde mayor ordered Rodríguez to pay 280 pesos
a year for four years to make up for defrauding the Crown of the taxes owed
for his butcher shop. Nevertheless, the canon refused to pay, and since the
priest made 4,000 pesos a year from his ecclesiastical position, the alcalde
mayor referred to him as an “ingrate” in a report to the Crown.26
But the superintendent of the tax collection provided many more egre-
gious examples of priests who broke the law. Francisco López de Humara,
who at one time served as the acting dean of the cathedral, not only refused
to pay taxes but also failed to pay his ecclesiastical mortgage. Another priest,
Tomás Díaz de Córdoba, inherited haciendas and ranches, ran a slaughter-
house and a butcher shop, and refused to pay taxes on any of it.27 Then there
was the case of Mateo de León, a cleric of minor orders (i.e., not an ordained,
tonsured priest), who sold an expensive hacienda to a fellow priest and did
not pay the alcabala. The Castilian law code stated that priests of minor
orders could avoid paying the alcabala on inherited property only if they had
a benefice—a position, such as rector or vicar, that provided income—and
León did not have a benefice. According to Veytia’s calculations, León owed
936 pesos.28
All these cases may seem cut and dried, but because of the fuero ecle-
siástico, clergymen proved fairly untouchable. Some, moreover, had
connections to other individuals with political and economic reasons for

subverting Veytia’s authority. Foremost among these was the cathedral chap-
ter’s provisor, who at the time was Antonio de Jáuregui y Barcena. His father,
Nicolás de Jáuregui y Barcena, had held the prestigious position of alcalde
ordinario (annually elected judge) of the municipal council and presumably
helped to collect (or decided not to collect) the alcabala.29 Later Pedro de
Jáuregui, Antonio’s brother, served as a councilman.
Because of the potential to accept bribes, councilmen coveted the oppor-
tunity to supervise the collection and alternated doing so. Before the Crown
appointed Veytia as superintendent, Pedro de Jáuregui had been waiting his
turn as next in line and, according to Veytia, obstructed his attempts to
reform the collection. When in 1699 Veytia also became alcalde mayor, Pedro
protested by resigning his seat on the council.30
To complicate matters further, Provisor Antonio de Jáuregui may have
been angry with Veytia for the grave disappointment suffered by another one
of his brothers, Juan de Jáuregui, who served as the archdeacon of the church
and the vicar during a long period in which Puebla was a vacant see (i.e.,
without a bishop). The Crown appointed Juan to the Bishopric of Caracas in
1709, but in 1711 he had yet to embark for South America. During these two
years someone anonymously accused the bishop-elect of making disloyal
comments about the Bourbon king, Philip V, the heir of the childless
Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain. Supposedly Juan de Jáuregui
refused to travel to Caracas, stating that given the disputed succession he
could not risk losing his position as the archdeacon in Puebla if Archduke
Charles of Austria won the war.31 The reneging of the appointment in 1711
(which required papal bulls) occasioned a long defense on the part of Juan de
Jáuregui. He presented the testimony of numerous witnesses to defend his
honor, claiming that he had been set to depart with the Armada de Barlo-
vento (the fleet that provisioned presidios in the Caribbean and protected the
region from pirates) in May 1710, but he became seriously ill and even lost his
sight.32 Although it is unclear exactly who made the accusation, Veytia
referred to the cleric’s hesitation to accept the bishopric after the scandals
related to the tax-evading priests. He claimed that Antonio de Jáuregui had
been obstructing his efforts to collect the tax, adding that “the disloyalty and
immortal hate of this family to the things of the king is nothing new.”33
After 1721 and the initial letters by Bishop Pedro Nogales Dávila and the
alcalde mayor to the Crown, the relationship between the cathedral chapter
and the customs officer quickly deteriorated. In this same year, the king sent
a cédula (decree) to Veytia ordering that the diocese’s merchant priests be

compelled to pay the tax. But even the king could only do so much. Philip V
informed Veytia that he would “implore” the bishop to instruct the priests to
pay the alcabala and warned that if they still did not, he would embargo their
goods and haciendas. In another cédula addressed directly to the bishop, the
king ordered that all ecclesiastics be forbidden from owning or renting haci-
endas and stated that all the priests who cause “disorder” should be prose-
cuted by the bishop.34
The Crown proved hesitant in admonishing Puebla’s cathedral chapter,
despite the parameters of the fuero eclesiástico; ambiguity and contradiction
marred the entire case. As the lieutenant and nephew of Veytia argued in
documentation submitted at a later date, the fuero technically prevented
priests from being tried by secular courts, but it did not shield them from
paying taxes. In addition, Castilian law stated that if priests engaged in com-
merce, they had to pay the alcabala.35
Shortly thereafter, Veytia tried to compel priests to pay the alcabala, and
some did. In early 1722, two clerics paid the alcabala on the sale of herds of
pigs.36 Unfortunately, however, by the time the cédulas arrived in Puebla,
Bishop Nogales had died (July 9, 1721), and Antonio de Jáuregui, now in
charge as both the vicario general (vicar general) and the provisor, attempted
to obstruct the alcalde mayor at every turn. Significantly, Veytia and his
nephew believed that he intended to avenge his brothers, especially Juan.
In July 1722 the alcalde mayor tried to get Pedro Rodríguez, the most
notorious of all of Puebla’s tax-evading cathedral canons, to pay the alcabala,
and this led to a series of shocking events. Veytia had calculated that for one
of his butcher shops for four years, Rodríguez owed 280 pesos. Veytia claimed
that Rodríguez was using by-products from the pigs to make lard and soap
and that he was selling these products as far away as Oaxaca. So as Rodríguez
approached the city with his pigs (presumably from Tepeaca), Veytia sent
customs guards to stop him and not let him pass until he paid the amount.
Immediately afterward the priest went to see Provisor Jáuregui. Although
the chronology is far from clear, at some point shortly thereafter the provisor
received another complaint by a priest named Diego de Medrano. Appar-
ently Veytia’s men had confiscated around twenty hunks of cheese from the
priest’s goat farm as payment toward his alcabala debt.37
Provisor Jáuregui gave Veytia two days to return the money to Rodríguez.
When the alcalde mayor failed to do so, the provisor publicly excommuni-
cated him, which means that he banned him from church and denied him
the sacraments. Not only did this greatly embarrass the alcalde mayor, it also
threatened his soul. If mortally ill, Veytia would be unable to go to confession
(a sacrament of the Church) and receive the last rites, which included special
prayers and the application of blessed oil on the hands, lips, nostrils, eyes,
ears, loins, and feet. Without these last rites, early modern Catholics could
not secure what they believed was a “good death,” the type of end that would
facilitate a smooth transition into purgatory, where almost all pious Catho-
lics spent at least some time before ascending into heaven.
So serious was the matter that on that very evening three men went to the
house of the provisor in the name of the alcalde mayor, and when they could
not get into his house to speak with him, they went to the home of the cathe-
dral chapter’s scribe with a message for Provisor Jáuregui. Although the
scribe was not at home, his son reported that the men walked around threat-
eningly and searched the house. It is possible that the alcalde mayor found
himself ill at the time, since Jáuregui accused Veytia’s nephew and lieutenant
of sending the men. Both Veytia and his nephew recounted the events to the
Council of the Indies and reminded the Crown of the Jáuregui brothers’
previous demonstrations of disloyalty, occasioning another lengthy defense
by the dishonored archdeacon, Juan de Jáuregui.38
On July 14, 1722, while possibly ailing, Veytia vigorously defended himself
in a letter to the king. He explained that the cédulas to the priests to pay the
alcabala had arrived after the bishop’s death and that Antonio de Jáuregui
had insisted on acting as a judge in the matter. Veytia also recounted a long
history of obstruction. In an earlier complaint he explained that Juan de
Jáuregui had forbidden priests from providing the alcalde mayor with sworn
statements about their property. Veytia also singled out a canon, Juan Fran-
cisco de Vergalla, who provided a legal opinion that Pedro Rodríguez’s activ-
ities were perfectly legal. According to Veytia, Vergalla earned an annual
salary of 8,000 pesos, but with his other official duties in the church (such as
being a commissioner for the Bull of the Holy Crusade), his income usually
exceeded this amount. This made Vergalla, like Rodríguez, “ungrateful” to
royal authority in the eyes of the reformist alcalde mayor.39 Therefore, Veytia
described a long history of entrenched behavior that proved difficult to
reform.
Significantly, the alcalde mayor had the excommunication lifted not by
the Church but by the audiencia. The fact that a secular tribunal could lift
the excommunication illustrates the overlap between ecclesiastical and
secular authority that was built into the Spanish imperial system.40 Local
leaders sometimes had to defend policies that conflicted with the interests
of ecclesiastics. However, the power of the audiencia to reintegrate indi-
viduals expelled from the Church also illustrates the degree to which the
Spanish Church functioned as an arm of the state; ecclesiastical decisions
could be overruled by the Crown in certain instances. Yet when the audi-
encia reincorporated excommunicated people back into the Church, it
lifted the ban for only sixty days.41 When Veytia got word of the audiencia’s
decision, he sent an alcalde ordinario to the provisor’s house. Not only did
Antonio Jáuregui refuse to hear the decision, he reportedly slammed the
door in the judge’s face. In his complaint, Veytia characterized the incident
as emblematic of the bigger problem of ecclesiastical immunity. He claimed
that it could not be regarded as something peculiar in New Spain “because
the reverend bishops and their cathedral chapter judges and vicars have
usurped and defrauded your royal jurisdiction” throughout the entire
viceroyalty.42
According to Veytia’s nephew, the stress of having to appeal to the audi-
encia for absolution proved too much for the elderly reformer and contrib-
uted to his decline. By August 14, 1722, the alcalde mayor had died. The
absolution seems to have been issued before his death, although it is unclear
whether he received the last rites. This provided a pretext for some members
of the cathedral chapter to try to deny him a Christian burial. According to
a close group of Veytia’s associates, four clergymen—the cathedral chapter’s
dean, a canon who was a relative of Pedro Rodríguez, canon Juan Vergalla,
and the provisor—tried to prevent Veytia from being buried at the Convent
of San Francisco, as he had previously planned. On August 17, at 11:00 a.m.,
Provisor Jáuregui reportedly sent an order to the guardian of the convent to
refuse Veytia an “ecclesiastic burial,” claiming that the alcalde mayor had
died in a state of excommunication. Under the advisement of other members
of the Franciscan order, the guardian determined that Veytia had been
absolved in time and sent word to the provisor that the convent planned to
move forward with the funeral. Jáuregui reportedly then informed the
guardian that after the original excommunication the alcalde mayor had
once again tried to collect the alcabala and had incurred another excommu-
nication.43 It is clear, however, that the guardian disregarded the provisor’s
order and carried on with Veytia’s burial.
It is possible that the provisor reissued the excommunication after Veytia
tried to collect from the goat farmer Medrano or the minor-order cleric
León. Nevertheless, the audiencia’s decision should have absolved him for at
least sixty days, although it is somewhat unclear whether the absolution had
been issued before or immediately after his death. Nevertheless, the alcalde
mayor had been allowed to go to confession before dying, indicating that he
had been absolved. The funerary sermon specified that the only reason he did
not make a confession before dying is that he passed away with no warning,
and this corresponded with his nephew’s characterization of his death as
“unexpected,” except that the nephew also blamed the cathedral chapter for
hastening it. Similarly, the sermon referred repeatedly to Veytia’s passing as
an “accelerated” death.44
In subtle ways, the Franciscan who gave Veytia’s funerary sermon alluded
to the struggle over the tax collection. Ever since a terrible earthquake had
damaged the convent significantly in 1711, Veytia had donated generously to
the order, giving 50 pesos to the Franciscans every Saturday until his death.
Despite the order’s debt to the bureaucrat, the Franciscans could not risk
antagonizing the cathedral chapter and so avoided making direct references
to the controversy. Instead, the orator began the sermon by describing Veytia
as a man of two different centuries, perhaps to underscore his position as an
emissary of a “new age” of governance. This meaning seems likely, given that
the orator quickly went on to state that in life Veytia made people respect the
king. The orator noted all Veytia’s administrative positions and specified that
as the superintendent of the alcabala he had grossed around 2 million pesos
for the Crown. In the end, however, the orator described death as the alcabala
revenue that must eventually be paid by all.45
Associates and relatives of Veytia wanted to have prayers for his soul said
in the alcalde mayor’s private chapel. Apparently Puebla’s cathedral chapter
reserved the privilege of having prayers of this kind said in private residences
for members of New Spain’s political elite; this had been done previously for
audiencia judges who died in Puebla. However, when the cohort approached
the provisor for a license, he denied the request.46 The provisor’s actions after
the death of the alcalde mayor proved to be too much for the usually flexible
Council of the Indies. The overlap between ecclesiastical and royal jurisdic-
tion and the provisor’s flagrant obstructionism and disrespect for a bureau-
crat of Veytia’s stature gave the Crown no choice but to admonish the aging
provisor. Therefore, after reviewing letters written by Veytia before his death,
by his nephew, and by the viceroy, the archbishop of Mexico, the dean of the
Cathedral of Puebla, and the fiscal (Crown attorney) of the Council of the
Indies gave a formal opinion: the decision by Provisor Jáuregui to try to
refuse Veytia a Christian burial had been based on an “unjust and frivolous
pretext.” The Crown ordered the frail but obstinate Jáuregui to appear before
the viceroy for a serious reprimand.47
conclusion
Because reputation and honor (the public recognition of one’s lineage and vir-
tues) mattered so significantly in colonial New Spain, Antonio Jáuregui’s pun-
ishment can only be characterized as severe. Indeed, the punishment
humiliated the aging cleric, who claimed that he approved of everything
related to his “enemy” Veytia’s funeral and grieved over receiving a public defa-
mation of his character as a result of a false declaration. He asked that the
alcalde mayor’s nephew be charged for this “malicious” act of “vengeance.” 48
Although the confrontation between the superintendent and the mer-
chant priests caused a great deal of drama, it is unclear whether the dispute
over the alcabala had a long-term impact on the priests’ commercial activi-
ties. Nevertheless, we at least know that it led to greater oversight in the years
immediately after the superintendent’s death. Under pressure from the
Crown to discipline Puebla’s cathedral chapter, the new provisor punished
cathedral canon Felipe Rodríguez de Ledesma (the probable brother of
Pedro). In 1709 the priest had been reprimanded for having a long-term rela-
tionship with a woman named doña Sebastiana de Céspedes, with whom he
also had a son. Mother and child had lived in the house immediately next
door to Rodríguez, but after the relationship was uncovered she promised to
move with her son to Mexico City. Yet in 1719 the priest still remained in the
relationship, and the Crown ordered that he be charged criminally for break-
ing his vow of celibacy. To make matters worse, in 1722 officials discovered
that the priest had been using the house where his lover and son had previ-
ously lived to make and sell aguardiente, an illegal beverage on which he
presumably paid no taxes. Under pressure from the Crown, in 1726 the cathe-
dral chapter’s new provisor ordered Rodríguez to spend ten years under
house arrest in a convent. In order to cover the priest’s many “civil debts,” the
provisor ordered the embargo of all of his goods.49
Felipe Rodríguez met his harshest punishment precisely during years of
intense royal scrutiny. The Crown demanded that the bishop of Puebla respond
to a series of questions about the commercial activities of its priests in 1725,
1726, and 1730.50 In 1725 the bishop explained that when he assumed his posi-
tion he discovered that many secular shop owners purported to being priests
in order to avoid paying the alcabala, even going so far as to dress in religious
garments. He claimed that some priests sold the fruits of their particular haci-
endas, but he saw no need to punish them for maintaining their family’s prop-
erty. Furthermore, he explained that he enjoyed a good relationship with the
alcalde mayor, who stated that he would make an example of those priests who
sold more than the goods produced on their haciendas.51
In the long run, priests returned to (or remained in) commerce, and not
all their commercial dealings were legal. In 1755 the king wrote to the bishop
of Puebla stating that he had been informed by a large number of credible
people that the bishop had ordained far too many priests and that because
the region did not have sufficient benefices to employ them, numerous cler-
gymen had turned to commerce. Many, moreover, relied on the fabrication
and sale of banned alcoholic beverages to make their livings, whereas others
ran gambling houses. According to the king, because of the fuero eclesiástico
they could not be punished.52
Did Veytia actually reform corrupt practices in Puebla? The answer is that
without a doubt he did. The fact that commerce actually declined in the city
is an unintended consequence of his policies.53 He worked, moreover, to
define commercial activities by Puebla’s merchant priests—something that
had been a customary and accepted practice—as corruption. He considered
their use of the fuero eclesiástico as a way of defrauding the Crown. Their
dealings were, in his eyes, tantamount to disloyalty and evidence of a pro-
found ingratitude. Nevertheless, because of the peculiarities of ecclesiastical
jurisdiction, oversight and recourse depended on a willing provisor, and that
official formed part of an insulated and protected corporation. Custom could
be hard to reform, especially with jurisdictional obstacles. Yet the case of
Puebla’s merchant priests versus the reformist bureaucrat illustrates the
changing definition of corruption in the early eighteenth century, a period
of heightened, if overlooked, reform, and the inherent difficulties of reform-
ing a system built on ecclesiastical immunity and judicial flexibility.
notes
1. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias (Madrid: Julián de Paredes, 1681),
bk. 1, tit. 12, law 2.
2. “El Obispo de la Puebla de los Ángeles da cuenta a V. M. de la introducción que
ha habido y hay de tener los prebendados de esta Santa Iglesia haciendas de labor
y de los graves perjuicios que de ello se sigue,” August 5, 1720, Archivo General
de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI), México 835, fols. 1–8v.
3. Irma Patricia Cayeros Díaz, Ornamentación y ceremonia: Cuerpo, jardín y mis-
terio en el coro de la catedral de Puebla (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 2012).
4. “Don Juan Joseph de Veytia y Linaje del Orden de Santiago de V. M. en el de
Indias juez privativo de alcabalas de la ciudad de la Puebla de los Ángeles en
Nueva España da cuenta a V. M. en su Consejo con testimonio de los perjuicios
considerables que causan los eclesiásticos de aquel obispado a la adminis-
tración de alcabalas de su cargo,” Puebla, August 8, 1720, AGI, México 835,
fols. 9r–13r.
5. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure,
trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 129;
Irving A. Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1959), 223.
6. The literature on this is vast. See, e.g., Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, Propriety and
Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico, trans. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Sergio Rivera
Ayala (Wilmington, DE: SR [Scholarly Resources] Books, 1999), 27–42; Charles F.
Walker, Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its
Long Aftermath (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Pamela Voekel,
Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2002).
7. Gustavo Rafael Alfaro Ramírez, “La lucha por el control del gobierno urbano en
la época colonial: El cabildo de la Puebla de los Ángeles, 1670–1723,” master’s
thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, 1998, 171. For
more on Veytia’s role as tax collector, see Michel de Bertrand, Grandeza y miseria
del oficio: Los oficiales de la Real Hacienda de la Nueva España, trans. Mario
Zamudio (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011), 422–37.
8. John Fisher, “The Intendant System and the Cabildos of Peru, 1784–1810,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no. 3 (1969): 430–53; Jaime Rodriguez,
“We Are Now the True Spaniards”: Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the
Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808–1824 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2012); “Actas,” March 24, 1714, Archivo Histórico Municipal de
Puebla (hereafter AHMP), Actas de Cabildo 37, fols. 298v–302r.
9. John Frederick Schwaller, “The Ordenanza del Patronazgo in New Spain, 1574–
1600,” Americas 42, no. 3 (January 1, 1986): 253–74.
10. John Leddy Phelan, “Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial
Bureaucracy,” Administrative Science Quarterly 5, no. 1 (June 1960): 49–60.
11. For a succinct discussion of Puebla’s importance, see Frances L. Ramos, Identity,
Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012),
1–12.
12. J. H. Elliott, Spain, Europe, and the Wider World, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2009), 16–17.
13. Christopher Storrs, The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy, 1665–1700 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 119.
14. Gustavo Alfaro Ramírez, “El reclutamiento oligárquico en el cabildo de la Puebla
de los Ángeles, 1665–1765,” bachelor’s thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla,
1994. For a comparison of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century oligarchies of
Mexico City and Puebla, see José F. de la Peña, Oligarquía y propiedad en Nueva
España, 1550–1624 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983).
15. Rodolfo Pastor, “La alcabala como fuente para la historia económica y social de
la Nueva España,” Historia Mexicana 26, no. 3 (July–September 1977): 1–16.
16. Bertrand, Grandeza y miseria, 435.
17. Ibid., 430n42.
18. “Actas,” November 26, 1699, AHMP, Actas de Cabildo 34, fol. 459r. The Biblioteca
Nacional de Antropología e Historia holds microfilmed volumes of these munici-
pal council minutes, but the pagination on these images and the hard copies
found in the AHMP do not correspond.
19. King Philip V to Duke of Alburquerque, Madrid, July 31, 1704, Archivo General
de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), Reales Cédulas Originales 32, exp. 45,
fols. 93r–95r.
20. Christoph Rosenmüller, Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court
Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710 (Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press,
2008), 132–35.
21. “La violencia de un poder ejecutada con tiranía y sentida con suspiros del Dolor,”
AGI, México 844, n.p.
22. For a detailed discussion of the ceremonial disputes that derived from the larger
struggles between Veytia and members of the cathedral chapter, see Ramos,
Identity, 132–52.
23. Gustavo Rafael Alfaro Ramírez, “La crisis política de la Puebla de los Ángeles:
Autoritarismo y oligarquía en el gobierno de Juan José de Veytia y Linaje, 1697–
1722,” Relaciones 25, no. 99 (2004): 213–56. For examples of Veytia’s impact on
viceregal power, see Rosenmüller, Patrons, 27–135.
24. “Don Joseph Fernández Veytia y Linaje Juez Privativo, Administrador de
Alcabalas . . . da cuenta a V. M. en su Consejo de Indias,” Puebla, March 27, 1723,
AGI, México 835, fol. 875.
25. “Don Juan Joseph de Veytia y Linaje del Orden de Santiago de V. M. en el de
Indias juez privativo de Alcabalas de la ciudad de la Puebla de los Ángeles en
Nueva España da cuenta,” Puebla, August 8, 1720, AGI, México 835, fols. 9r–13r.
26. “Testimonio de autos hecho sobre justificar y comprobar que el Licenciado Don
Pedro Suarez de Ledesma, prebendado de esta Santa Iglesia Catedral y tres sobri-
nos suyos compran partidos de cerdos,” Puebla, July 14, 1722, AGI, México 835,
fols. 295–369r; “Don Juan Joseph de Veytia Linaje del Orden de Santiago del
Consejo de V. M. . . . da cuenta a V. M. en su consejo de lo acaecido con el Dr. Don
Antonio de Jauregui y Barcena Provisor y Vicario General,” Puebla, July 14, 1722,
AGI, México 836, fols. 286r–290r.
27. “Don Juan Joseph de Veytia y Linaje,” August 8, 1720.

28. “Autos hecho sobre el cobre y recaudación de Reales Alcabalas causada en la
venta de una hacienda de labor por el Br. Mateo de León,” Puebla, July 23, 1722,
AGI, México 836, fols. 424r–470r.
29. “Información dada por parte del Señor Don Juan de Jáuregui y Barcena,” Puebla,
July 23, 1722, AGI, México 836, fol. 784.
30. “Don Joseph Fernández Veytia y Linaje,” fols. 931r–931v.
31. “Don Juan Joseph de Veytia Linaje,” July 14, 1722, fol. 288r.
32. “Información dada por parte,” fols. 780r–860v.
33. “Cuaderno perteneciente y mandado por S. M. en sus Reales Cédulas en el inci-
erto,” 1722, AGI, México 835, fol. 504r (“no es nuevo este desafecto y odio inmor-
tal de esta familia a las cosas del Rey”).
34. King Philip V to Juan Joseph de Veytia y Linaje, Aranjuez, May 30, 1721; King
Philip V to bishop of Puebla, Aranjuez, May 30, 1721—both in “Cuaderno
perteneciente,” fols. 489r–510.
35. “Joseph de Veytia da cuenta con testimonio de autos formados sobre el cobro de
cierta alcabala,” Puebla, July 23, 1722, AGI, México 836, fols. 420r–423v.
36. “Cuaderno perteneciente,” fols. 499v–500r.
37. “Averiguación hecho por el Señor Provisor del Obispado de la Puebla del exceso
cometido por el teniente general de dicha ciudad en haberle enviado ministro de
justicia a su casa,” Puebla, 1722, AGI, México 835, fols. 447–510v.
38. Ibid.
39. “Don Juan Joseph de Veytia Linaje,” July 14, 1722, fols. 289v–290r.
40. Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal
Power in Colonial Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2004), 199–200.
41. According to the documents on this specific excommunication, the period of
absolution lasted sixty days. For a view that it should have lasted eighty days, see
Jerónimo de Castillo de Bobadilla, Política para corregidores (Madrid: n.p., 1759),
1:763.
42. “Don Juan Joseph de Veytia Linaje,” July 14, 1722, fol. 287v (“porque los
Reverendos Obispos, y sus Provisores, y Vicarios tienen usurpada, y defraudada
Vuestra Real Jurisdicción”).
43. “Testimonio sobre la muerte de Veytia y Linaje por el escribano de la alcabala,
los azogues, y la aduana,” Puebla, August 17, 1722, AGI, México 836, fols. 867r–
868v. The excommunication and the dispute over Veytia’s burial is also men-
tioned in Bertrand, Grandeza y miseria, 434.
44. Mariano del Río Idelfonso, Sermón fúnebre predicado en las honras del Señor Don
Juan José de Veytia y Linaje, en el Convento de las Llagas de San Francisco de la
ciudad de Puebla (n.p: n.p., 1723).
45. Ibid.
46. “Testimonio sobre la muerte,” fol. 868r.
47. “Don Joseph de Uribe y Castejón, Caballero de la Orden de Santiago, oidor

decano de la Real Audiencia de México responde a V. M. a la real cédula en que
se participa el orden que V. M. se sirve de dar al virrey, para que haga
luego parecer ante si al Provisor,” Mexico City, November 6, 1723, AGI, México
835, fols. 953r–954v.
48. “Memorial de Don Antonio de Jáuregui y Barcena . . . en que expresa difusa-
mente lo acaesido sobre habérsele imputado haber negado sepultura eclesiástica
al cadáver del Señor Don Juan Joseph de Veytia,” Puebla, 1723, AGI 846, n.p.
49. “Testimonio de la sentencia pronunciada en los autos y causas criminals que se
han seguido contra el Señor Canónigo don Felipe Rodriguez de Ledesma,”
Puebla, May 8, 1726, AGI, México 844, n.p.
50. “El Obispo de la Puebla de los Ángeles en respuesta de la real cédula de 2 de febrero
de 1730, tocante a comercio de eclesiásticos: Se remite a lo que dice tener respon-
dido con decha de 15 de mayo del año de 25, y 1 de diciembre del año de 27,” Puebla,
August 1, 1730, AGI, México 844, n.p.
51. “El Obispo en satisfacción de lo que se previno en cédula de 15 de octubre de 1724
sobre que celase y contuviese a los eclesiásticos para que no se defraudase ña Real
Hacienda,” Puebla, May 1725, AGI, México 844, n.p.
52. King Philip V to bishop of Puebla, Buen Retiro, August 4, 1755, AGI, México 844,
n.p.
53. Ramos, Identity, 6–12.
C H A P T E R E IGH T
Merchant-Bureaucrats,
Unwritten Contracts, and
Fraud in the Manila Galleon Trade
k
Catherine Tracy Goode
F rancisco and Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz, brothers from the Basque
Country in the north of Spain, came to the New World to make their
fortune—and did they ever make a fortune. Francisco, the older brother,
arrived first, probably in the late 1680s, and Manuel followed in the 1690s.
Commerce was an obvious route to wealth, but the brothers were young men
from a middle-class family with few connections. Instead they found their
way into the global economy of the early eighteenth century through the
bureaucracy of the colonial state in New Spain as military officers and
government officials. Both began their military careers in the Caribbean but
rose to fame in the Philippine city of Manila, where Spaniards always
maintained a large armed presence because they were far outnumbered by
the Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese communities residing in the city.
In Manila the brothers began to cultivate associates that would make up
part of their commercial network for many years to come, including the
influential Gallo de Pardiñas family that controlled the city of Acapulco on
the other side of the Pacific. In 1709 Francisco took the post of a royal trea-
surer in Veracruz. Manuel and his wife, Claudia Gallo de Pardiñas from
Acapulco, made their way north to the city of Parral in Nueva Vizcaya in
1714 (today in the state of Chihuahua), where he took up the position of
governor and captain-general of the province. Despite the fact that it was
illegal for an official of the colonial state to act as a merchant, the San Juan
171
172 Catherine Tracy Goode
brothers maintained and expanded their commercial interests as merchant-

bureaucrats through the 1740s.
The merchant-bureaucrat is one of the defining features of the Spanish
colonial economy. By the mid-seventeenth century, about one-third of active
merchants in Mexico City (without doubt the highest concentration of mer-
chants in New Spain) also held bureaucratic posts.1 Just as important, those
merchants who did not hold office personally cultivated relationships with
bureaucrats as a necessary part of conducting business. The colonial bureau-
cracy of the early eighteenth century was the result of more than 150 years of
institutionalization. The political structure that grew from the early days of
the conquest to the mature colony of the 1700s was by design closely tied to
the economy, a practice typical of all European powers that colonized the
New World.
Mercantilism was the economic model in the age of Spanish colonization
that demanded tight control of the extraction of raw materials, the manufac-
ture of finished goods, and the import and export networks solely for the
benefit of the crown. By controlling supply and demand, the mercantile sys-
tem presumed that the colonies existed, first, for the extraction of raw mate-
rials for the good of the mother country. Second, the colony was to be a
market for the goods produced in Europe from those raw materials. Any
production or trade in goods produced beyond these limitations was to be
restricted. Although this system never functioned as planned—industry and
extensive trade routes developed throughout the Americas beyond the direct
control of the Crown—the colonial bureaucracy and the Crown acted as a
single entity in trying to maintain strict power over the economy.
Spanish trade did not fit the itinerant pattern of the traveling salesmen
(and tax men) of the Persians and Chinese in the Indian Ocean, the company
system of the Dutch or the British, or the trading-post empire of the Portu-
guese in Asia. The Spaniards were colonizers first and merchants second. As
merchants they lived within the realm of the empire, not traveling to markets
but waiting for the goods to be delivered to their ports in Manila, Acapulco,
Veracruz, and Callao (Peru). Rather than organize as a company, many
Spanish merchants relied on the colonial bureaucracy that was designed to
control the economy as the mechanism through which to participate in both
external and domestic trading.2 Although the mercantilist ideal was rarely
achieved, the illusion of control of the economy created a space within the
bureaucracy for merchant-bureaucrats, men who served their own interests
by serving those of the state.
Merchant-Bureaucrats, Unwritten Contracts, and Fraud 173
In order to establish a colonial state in the Americas, the Crown allowed

and relied on elite Spaniards to take up the role of bureaucrats to carry out
the tasks of the administration. Quite simply, the Crown was incapable of
governing well in newly acquired and marginal regions because it did not
have the resources or an established infrastructure. Yet given the sheer size
of its new colonial possessions and the number of indigenous peoples along
with newly arrived colonial subjects and African slaves, the Crown did not
have the resources to provide adequate pay to the new bureaucrats for the job
of ensuring Spanish dominance. Exploitation of bureaucratic positions that
were routinely offered for sale by the Crown to elites was widespread across
the Spanish Empire. In fact, the sale of an office created the opportunity for
many to buy access to the bureaucracy, even as the relatively paltry salaries
forced them to seek alternate forms of compensation. This relationship was
not accidental, and those who exploited it were not beyond the bounds of
proper governance. The incentives were immense, the access readily given,
and the laws to stop the corruption rarely enforced.
Instead, the Crown relied on elites to carry out the functions of govern-
ment in the colonies where the great distance that separated Spain from its
holdings did not allow for the Crown to supervise directly. Because their
salaries were not commensurate with their positions, the bureaucrats were
often compensated for their services by receiving the right to exploit the
peoples and resources under their jurisdiction for their own profit, as part of
an unwritten contract. In other words, bureaucrats accepted a lower salary
in order to participate in the exploitation of labor and the trade in goods
from and through the region they controlled. Technically this was against
the law that prohibited government officials from participating in commer-
cial endeavors. Yet in return for their loyalty to the Crown and their support
of “the state in its task of maintaining social control over potentially hostile
groups,” the Crown ignored the very laws designed to stop bureaucrats from
acting as merchants.3
The disparity between rhetoric and action on the part of the Spanish
Crown helps to explain that what were considered abuses of power were not
simply transgressions on the part of fraudulent individuals but elaborate
complexes of unwritten contracts. When we describe these practices as cor-
ruption, we suppose that evildoers acted beyond the bounds of sound gover-
nance. Instead, bureaucrats relied on such exploitative practices to increase
their wealth, power, and prestige while the Crown, in turn, relied on them to
maintain control over its colonies.
the manil a galleon, the chinese

d e m a n d f o r s i lv e r , a n d s pa n i s h r e g u l at i o n
In 1701 Juan Isidro de Pardiñas Villar de Francos, the acting castellan (gov-
ernor of a castle) and alcalde mayor (provincial administrator) of Aca-
pulco, authorized the registro (inventory or registry) of that year’s shipment
of goods to Manila. This was an ordinary act for the chief bureaucratic
official in this Pacific port city. Residents of mainland New Spain shipped
wine, chocolate, guns, axes, and, most important, silver to the Spanish
population in the Philippines.4 When the galleon returned to Acapulco
later that year, it was laden with a variety of goods from China, Japan, and
the Philippines: raw silk, vast quantities of clothing and handkerchiefs,
spices like cinnamon and pepper, thousands of porcelain cups for choco-
late, fans, and furniture. The total value easily came to more than 1 million
pesos, and the goods were destined for sale at the yearly fair in Acapulco.5
Pardiñas was the brother-in-law of Miguel Gallo, the permanent castellan
and alcalde mayor of Acapulco on the other side of the Pacific. After arriv-
ing in New Spain in the early 1690s, Gallo took up the post that gave him
and his family direct access to the Chinese trade. To further ensure his
personal financial benefit, he installed two of his three sons in important
posts in the local government of Acapulco.6 Beyond his coastal home,
Gallo also had family representatives in Manila and Mexico City, and his
future son-in-law, Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz, eventually carried his
business interests as far north as Chihuahua.
The Gallo family and the San Juan brothers were the local face of global
trade in eighteenth-century New Spain. They used bureaucratic positions,
unwritten contracts, and connections to the thriving Pacific trade to create
a family business that extended from Asia through mainland New Spain to
the Caribbean, South America, and Europe. From their vantage point in the
Americas, they had access to the key commodity of the early modern world:
silver. A series of policy changes by the Chinese Ming dynasty of the four-
teenth century had a profound effect on the development of the colonial
economy of the Spanish Empire two centuries later. The shift to collecting
tribute in silver rather than goods like rice revolutionized the world econ-
omy.7 Japan was initially the major source of silver before Spanish colonizers
in the sixteenth century discovered massive silver mines in the Americas.
After 1550 the world’s silver cycles were governed by the capacity of American
mines, the exploitation of indigenous and African labor by Spaniards, and
the strategies of merchant-bureaucrats who brought this silver to the world’s

markets.8
When the Spaniards entered this well-established trading network among
South, East, and Southeast Asia, they brought the crucial commodity of sil-
ver directly from the source in mainland New Spain. Spanish coinage
became the currency of trade throughout the region, but silver functioned
both as money and as a commodity prized by the Chinese above all else.9
China was the main consumer of silver throughout the period and thus is
known in the scholarship as the Chinese “sink,” since most of the world’s
silver ended up in the imperial treasuries of the Ming and later the Qing
dynasties.10 Studies of silver flows focus on its movement to Europe and see
the possibility of silver remaining in the colonies or moving to Asia through
the Pacific as an anomaly or as colonial corruption.11 Thus, when silver pro-
duction increased in the eighteenth century, surpassing the total output of
previous cycles, merchant-bureaucrats in New Spain were in an especially
strong position to supply the ever present Chinese demand directly from
Acapulco to Manila.
From the first years of the Spanish presence in the Americas, the Crown
intended to find a direct route to the rich Asian economy in order to sidestep
the long-established middlemen of the Middle East across the overland trade
routes of Eurasia. Despite running into the American continents as they
sought a route to Asia, the Spanish never diminished in their desire for Chi-
nese silk and porcelain and Southeast Asian spices. While Hernando Córtes
was making his way from the Gulf of Mexico to Tenochtitlan in 1519, the Span-
ish Crown was charging Ferdinand Magellan with crossing the then unknown
Pacific Ocean. Traveling from Europe, Magellan sailed around the tip of South
America to cross into the Pacific and eventually reached the Philippines (not
yet named as such) in 1521.12
Although Magellan died in battle, two of his three ships returned to
Europe by rounding the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. With no firm foot-
hold yet established in Asia by the 1540s, the new viceroy (literally, “vice
king”) commissioned Ruy López de Villalobos to yet again cross the Pacific
in the name of the Spanish Crown. Upon his arrival in 1543 he named the
archipelago Las Islas Filipinas after Prince Philip of Asturias (later to be King
Philip II), and with this the Spanish followed the Dutch and the Portuguese
in establishing a permanent presence in Asia. But like other expeditions
before them, the López de Villalobos expedition did not make the return
voyage via the Pacific.13 Thus, the return to Europe still required passage
through the Indian Ocean, crossing either the Strait of Hormuz into the
Mediterranean Sea or following Magellan’s path around Africa.
It was not until the 1560s that Miguel López de Legazpi and Friar Andrés
de Urdaneta found a viable direct route to Acapulco from Manila. They led
four ships that left from the Pacific coast of Mexico in November 1564 and
arrived in the Philippines about ninety days later, in 1565. Despite the fact
that no one had made the journey to mainland New Spain from the Philip-
pines, since the prevailing winds and currents on the most obvious route
made the eastbound journey impossible, they had not given up on the idea.
Not long after he and his crew arrived in the region, Legazpi commanded
Urdaneta to sail back to New Spain for supplies and support for the fledgling
Asian outpost of the Spanish Empire. In 1565 Urdaneta found the route east
by taking a longer, more northerly course that would establish the template
for the yearly voyage of the Manila Galleon.14 Legazpi and many of his men
remained in the Philippines, living in remote areas of the archipelago and
establishing several settlements in the name of the Spanish Crown, until
1570, when they decided to approach a large city known as Maynila, the Place
of the Water Lilies.15 Legazpi, his remaining soldiers, and hundreds of local
allies made their way to Luzon and the Bay of Manila and eventually over-
powered the local residents through battle and negotiation. By claiming
Manila for the Spanish, Legazpi established the capital of the archipelago of
more than seven thousand islands that became an official jurisdiction of the
viceroyalty of New Spain about nine thousand miles on the other side of the
Pacific Ocean.
The Spanish wasted no time in taking advantage of the link they forged
between the west coast of mainland New Spain and the newly conquered city
of Manila. The Manila Galleon served as the mode through which the inter-
related jurisdictions maintained regular contact. Known as the Nao de China
by the Spanish, it was a fleet of up to four ships and a program of trade and
commerce connecting the Philippines with mainland New Spain in an
annual voyage.16 This link across the Pacific provided a livelihood for the
Spanish population of Manila and an outlet for American silver coming into
Asia from New Spain, thereby connecting the biggest producer of silver
(more than 85 percent of the world’s total) to the massive Asian export
economy.17
Ships left Cavite, the port city that served Manila, each year in the late
summer for the five- to six-month journey. Usually arriving in Acapulco in
late December or early January, the vessels were not simply full of luxury
goods for sale in New Spain and Europe; they also brought people. Clergy,
bureaucrats, sailors, laborers, merchants, and even diplomats traveled on the
ships, making the treacherous months-long journey between mainland New
Spain and the Philippines for work, and many free migrants also came this
way to settle in the Spanish colonies.18 Not all the travelers came freely, how-
ever. Up until 1700, approximately eight thousand slaves were imported from
Asia to the Americas, brought to work in mainland New Spain.19
The quantities of goods and people on the yearly trip required impressive
ships that were well built, carefully provisioned, and regularly maintained.20
The size and capacity of the ships that sailed as part of the Manila Galleon
determined the amount of goods that could be moved across the Pacific,
making the fleet an important target of Spanish regulations. The mercantilist
plan aimed to control all the exports and imports to limit trade within the
colonies. The idea was that if people in the colonies sold raw materials to and
purchased goods from Spain, this would benefit the Crown and Iberian
industry above all others. Through most of the seventeenth century, the per-
miso (the total amount of goods and coins permitted) was 250,000 pesos
from Manila to Acapulco and 500,000 pesos on the return voyage. The
Crown mandated major reforms in the eighteenth century that expanded the
permiso to 1.5 million pesos from Manila to Acapulco and 750,000 pesos on
the return voyage. The Crown put further restrictions in place on the total
tonnage and number of piezas (lading spaces) made available to merchants.
In 1726 a limit of four thousand piezas was instituted, despite the fact that a
ship of 1,710 tons had space for more than eighteen thousand piezas.21
The discrepancy in the amount allowed by law and the actual space avail-
able for goods suggests that the true quantities of commodities and coins
were much greater than that estimated by the law. The gap between the legal
limit and the actual space available was the gray area in which merchant-
bureaucrats took advantage of their unwritten contracts with the Crown to
maintain the regular and profitable yearly voyages of the galleon while tak-
ing some of the profits for themselves. The unwritten contract between
merchant-bureaucrats and the Crown required strict regulations to keep the
economy under the control of the state. Both sides then largely ignored the
rules in order to reap their rewards. Regulations on colonial trade tended to
focus on protecting Iberian-based industry, maintaining domestic and
worldwide political alliances, and collecting taxes. The Spanish attempted to
impose protectionist policies to support the manufacture of certain goods
throughout the colonial period, especially the production of wool textiles in
peninsular Spain. Official decrees bemoaned the demise of the Spanish tex-
tile industry, particularly wool but also silk, calling these industries the “life-
blood” of Spain. Spanish representatives of the Crown explained that the
cheap fabrics making their way to the colonies from places such as India and
China were draining the industry of this lifeblood, leaving nothing but a
cadaver where once there was a thriving business.22
Spanish officials in Seville and Mexico City complained incessantly about
the cost of trade with Manila. The treasury of the Philippines reportedly
existed in a constant state of near bankruptcy. The local bureaucracy in the
Philippines depended on financial support from the Crown for the cost of
running local royal institutions, first from the Council of the Indies (the
primary bureaucratic institution governing the colonies from Spain) and
then from the viceroy in Mexico City after 1720. As a result, while a great
amount of money flowed through the city, little of it served to benefit the
local colonial government, even as residents in Manila and mainland New
Spain were enjoying great profits from trade.
Although many historians have taken these complaints at face value,
recent studies suggest that the lucrative nature of the trade made this invest-
ment on the part of the Crown through the viceroyalty of New Spain more
than worth the expense.23 Aside from providing the economic benefit of hav-
ing a trading post of sorts in the Asian context, the financial dependency of
geographically isolated Manila was a mechanism for maintaining connec-
tions to the rest of the empire.24 Rather than presume that these complaints
on the part of the Spanish were legitimate, it is possible to see the money
spent to fund the bureaucratic apparatus in Manila as an investment that
served the larger viceroyalty well.
t h e pa c i f i c p o r t c i t i e s a n d t h e l o c a l m e a n s o f g l o b a l t r a d e
Manila and Acapulco functioned as the anchors for the oceanic links that
kept the Philippines and mainland New Spain connected across the Pacific.
Manila was a well-known settlement and node in a trade network established
long before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century. The reports from
Intramuros—the section of Manila where the Spanish enclosed themselves
inside eight-foot-thick walls along the coast—were often dire, since the Span-
ish community lived and died with the arrival of the galleon each year. This
community relied heavily on relationships within local merchant networks.
In essence Spaniards were a tolerated minority because they had access to

silver, the most sought-after commodity in this economy.
Acapulco, meanwhile, was different. For this coastal city far removed
from the comforts of the colonial capital of Mexico City, Spaniards were
more likely to hear reports of disease and piracy than boasts of wealth and
prestige. Acapulco lived and died on its connections to the outside world,
especially to the Philippines but also to the viceroyalty of Peru. The city came
to life during the annual trade fairs held shortly after the arrival of the
Manila Galleon, generally in February or March of each year. Merchants
from all corners of the viceroyalty came to Acapulco to buy Asian products—
from textiles and spices to slaves and porcelain—or, as we shall see, to collect
the goods they had illegally imported.
Manila was the most far-flung outpost of the Spanish Empire, a vibrant
trading center in the Asian context. Trade between barangays (local com-
munities) of the archipelago and regions of East and Southeast Asia existed
as early as the tenth century. In the years before the arrival of Europeans in
the sixteenth century, an increasing Arab and Persian presence made the
commercial life of this region rich and varied. Europeans were latecomers to
this multiethnic and diverse region, which in Manila included communities
of Arab, Indian, Chinese, Malaysian, and Japanese traders.25 Spanish colo-
nizers simply joined these long-standing trading enclaves.26
When the Spanish first encountered Manila, an estimated two thousand
residents lived in the town, with a total population of about seven hundred
thousand on the islands. To set themselves apart from other foreigners in
Manila, Spaniards built the walled neighborhood of Intramuros, which cre-
ated a physical barrier between themselves and the Asian merchants who
brought the goods desired by Spaniards and Europeans around the world. By
1650 approximately seven thousand Spaniards lived in Manila, almost exclu-
sively in Intramuros, while fifteen thousand Chinese inhabited the Parían
and Tondo quarters and twenty thousand Filipinos lived on the outskirts of
the city, particularly in a sector called Malate.27 The Laguio district was
reserved for the Japanese merchants who formed a significant part of the
commercial life of the city, although they were never as numerous as their
Chinese counterparts, whose population would increase to forty thousand
by 1750.28
Despite their attempts to assert control over these diverse populations
through bureaucratic institutions, religious conversion, and military might,
the Spaniards relied on the “foreign” populations for a great deal. A
high-ranking Spanish official claimed, “It is true that the city could not be
maintained or preserved without these Chinese; for they are the mechanics
in all trades and are excellent workmen and work for suitable wages.”29 The
Spanish community depended on commerce with the Chinese as its primary
source of wealth. From twenty to sixty junks (ships originally of Chinese
design) arrived in the port each year laden with Chinese products; this does
not include the many junks from other regions like India, Japan, and the
Spice Islands. The Chinese knew their importance to the Spanish, and labor-
ers and merchants alike regularly rebelled, with no fewer than fourteen
insurrections occurring between 1570 and 1800. But in the end, trading com-
modities for silver was in the best interest of just about everyone involved.
Manila was always alive and bustling, celebrating the annual arrival of the
galleon and the many junks that came year-round. The diverse population of
Manila made negotiations for the prices of goods especially interesting. Chi-
nese demand could cause prices to double on goods in the city of Manila
when a shipment of American silver arrived in the fall.30 The Spanish ini-
tially attempted to control prices on trade goods with a wholesale bargaining
practice called the pancada.31 This method eventually gave way to yearly
fairs, which were officially decreed in 1696 but unofficially practiced long
before that, with authorities monitoring (though never strictly controlling)
negotiations over value and price. This led to a constant stream of complaints
about trampas de China (fraud in the trade with China) on the part of the
Spanish colonial government, both in the Philippines and at the viceregal
level. For instance, a discrepancy in prices was often a subterfuge on the part
of the Spaniards to defraud the Crown. They used the local merchants, espe-
cially the Chinese, as scapegoats for their own corruption, which was embed-
ded in the bureaucracy and their inability to effectively control their
commercial rivals.
On the other side of the Pacific, Acapulco served as the main port of entry
in the Americas where Spaniards exchanged silver for Asian textiles, porce-
lain, spices, furniture, and foodstuffs. Acapulco first functioned as a port in
1528, and the Spanish did not establish a permanent settlement here until
1550.32 As part of the mercantilist plan for the economy of the Spanish
Empire, the Crown designated official port cities as the only locations for
legal trade. Acapulco became the sole legal port for trade with Manila and
other Pacific locations like the viceroyalty of Peru. Acapulco presented a
harsh environment for Spaniards, typical of coastal locations, where tropical
diseases were especially virulent. For this reason the city never attracted
much of a permanent Spanish population, and a Manila official once called

Acapulco a “sepulcher of Mexicans and Filipinos.”33 Surrounded by moun-
tains that trapped the heat, the city was sweltering, according to all contem-
porary European accounts. Nonetheless, the large ships coming from the
Philippines and Peru found the physical characteristics of the harbor ideal.
Acapulco boasted 250 houses by 1598, along with the basic public structures
of a treasury, a church, a Franciscan convent, and the Hospital de San Juan
de Díos as well as the San Diego castle fortifications to the northeast of the
city, which functioned as an important defensive position for Spain. To deal
with threats from Europeans, both imperial rivalries and piracy, Spain cre-
ated this fortified port city on the Pacific coast.34
When ships reached Acapulco, lookouts assured that they arrived unac-
companied until they docked in the harbor, in order to avoid the possibility
of unloading contraband goods. Local officials greeted the ships with a cer-
emony, including a “formal salute exchanged with guns,” and prescribed
inspections by the castellan and treasury officials.35 Then the castellan col-
lected the manifest and registered the ship in preparation for officials in
Mexico City to verify the duties and taxes. As required by law, local officials
in Manila and Acapulco took a detailed inventory upon disembarkation to
determine the taxes due.
But this was also the moment for men like Miguel Gallo and his family to
exercise their unwritten contracts. The registration of the ship upon entering
the port documented the collection of taxes in a variety of forms and was
essential for maintaining royal revenues.36 While this bureaucratic proce-
dure unfolded, the resulting delay gave officials time to organize the fair,
which was held each spring from four to six weeks after the arrival of the
ships. The fair ran for one month and attracted merchants from all over New
Spain. “The port of Acapulco acquired a totally new appearance from the
lonely and abandoned city of the majority of the year to become the premier
commercial center,” one scholar notes.37 The annual fair constituted the only
legal space to sell goods received directly from the Nao, and circumventing
this regulation would prove a challenge for the San Juan brothers.
Acapulco thrived on the yearly arrival of the Manila Galleon. Based on
reports from the early nineteenth century, the population swelled from four
thousand to nine thousand in time for the fairs, where the commodities from
the Asian markets could be traded for American silver. The galleon usually
arrived early in the year, and the fairs attracted merchants from all over New
Spain and Peru who were looking to transport the recently arrived goods to
the farthest corners of the viceroyalties and beyond to Seville and through-
out Europe. Local authorities made concerted efforts to control the sale of
goods in the fair by requiring that each transaction be recorded with certifi-
cates of sale and that all silver be licensed to enter and leave Acapulco. When
merchants strayed beyond these regulations, which happened frequently,
Spaniards could still employ the convenient excuse of the trampas de China.
After the termination of the fair each year, merchants of mainland New
Spain made their way back to Mexico City in mule trains along a treacherous
280-mile road. The China road, as it was called, accounted for a significant
amount of commercial traffic in mainland New Spain and was the first part
of the journey to supply the rest of the colony and the mother country with
the sought-after silk, spices, porcelain, cotton, and slaves arriving from Asia.
Every Spanish resident of Manila was eligible to participate in the Chinese
trade. But the layers of bureaucratic red tape often restricted access to a small
wealthy merchant population, and other limiting factors, like access to credit
and competition among merchants in Manila, also took a toll. Only Spanish
residents of Manila could participate in this commerce, based on a 1694 reg-
ulation that excluded the residents of mainland New Spain.38 Largely unen-
forceable in the lucrative Chinese trade, the rule drove merchants in
mainland New Spain to employ a variety of methods to gain access.39
Employing local representatives in Manila to act as their agents was the most
common way to accomplish their goal. Spaniards with at least eight years of
residence in the city contracted with merchants in mainland New Spain,
providing them with space on the ships as well as contacts with local mer-
chants bringing goods from India, China, Japan, and other regions of South-
east Asia. Tickets were distributed to Manila residents allocating piezas on
the ship and allowing them to load cargo for sale in Acapulco.40 With more
than four thousand piezas on each ship, there were theoretically many more
than there were eligible residents of the city, especially since each lading
space could be broken down into smaller sections. This presented an oppor-
tunity to encourage the participation of nonresidents who had the good for-
tune of access to silver.
Sailors on the ships also had the right to purchase tickets for lading spaces.
They also sold their positions to ineligible residents of mainland New Spain,
a practice that the Gallo family put to good use. Contracting with a Spanish
resident of Manila as one’s representative was not the only way to access the
trade, as the case of the San Juan brothers so clearly illustrates. They discov-
ered that utilizing an extended family network in mainland New Spain could
be just as profitable, if it included the Gallo clan. As the leading family in

control of Acapulco politics, the Gallos directly managed the arrival and
departure of the Manila Galleon, which made them an important asset for
the San Juan brothers.
registering gif ts
In March 1712 more than 50,000 pesos disappeared when the ship Nuestra
Señora de la Begoña departed from Acapulco after a three-month stay.41 The
Crown held the castellan and alcaldo mayor of the city, Miguel Gallo,
accountable for the lost taxes. Gallo failed to register the ship completely—
that is, taking account of the goods and the investors for the purpose of col-
lecting the royal share and to prevent illegal merchant activities. When the
ship had arrived in Acapulco three months earlier, in late 1711, the holds were
full of goods from all over Asia, including silk from China, spices from the
Southeast Asian islands, and furniture from Japan.42 More than seventy men
and women, including Manuel San Juan, had officially invested in the goods
on this ship.
An earlier shipment from 1709 listed as investors not only Manuel but also
Miguel Gallo (Manuel’s father-in-law) and Miguel’s oldest son, Juan Eusebio
Gallo de Pardiñas.43 Because these men were residents of cities in mainland
New Spain, we have noted, it was technically illegal for them to participate
as merchants in Asian commerce. Once the goods arrived in Acapulco, local
merchants could purchase items at the fair that usually took place in January
for resale in other parts of the viceroyalty and beyond. Like many merchants
in New Spain, Manuel, along with his father-in-law and brother-in-law,
evaded the middlemen of Manila and imported goods directly. Thus, his
father-in-law’s actions in the false registration of the imported and exported
goods in 1712 helped to conceal their fraudulent participation in the lucrative
Pacific trade.
When Manuel San Juan and his brother Francisco spent time in Manila
in the 1690s, they more than likely cultivated agents in that Asian city who
acted on their behalf. Evidence from the 1712 case of the Nuestra Señora de
la Begoña reveals another channel for illicit trade. The documents indicate
that Gallo and other officials in Acapulco liberally used the notion of gift
giving to bypass the restrictions on local residents importing Asian goods.
Rather than using a representative in Manila, the merchants hired an agent
who served as an official on the ship. The registry from the arrival of the
ship in 1709 and 1712 (the 1709 registry is included as evidence for the later
case) provided many names of officials and employees of the Manila Gal-
leon who sent massive amounts of goods to Acapulco and then gave them
as gifts to residents of mainland New Spain. Both the viceroy of New Spain
and the governor of the Philippines selected personnel for the ships and
often sold these appointments to relatives or friends in the same way that
many bureaucratic posts throughout the colonies were assigned. Employees
of the galleon imported goods legally in space allotted on each ship for just
this purpose.44
These sailors, along with military officials and bureaucrats, then cut deals
with merchants in mainland New Spain, providing an important loophole to
get around the proscriptions on the participation of specific groups. In 1709
Juan Eusebio Gallo acted as the exporter for himself, Manuel, and two other
Spaniards. Juan Eusebio, a resident of Acapulco, was listed as an official on
the galleon that year.45 In 1712 Captain Simón de Amechesurra was Manuel’s
chosen importer—along with twelve others, including the Bishop of Nueva
Segovia.46 Neither registry lists the actual goods imported by each individ-
ual, only the space each contracted on the ship. In 1712 Manuel had one chest
and one bundle. A chest could hold as much as 250 pounds of Chinese silk,
or 1,140 pairs of stockings weighing approximately 230 pounds.47
Sending “gifts” to mainland New Spain from the Philippines was quite
common. The castellan often marked items like porcelain and furniture as
gifts from Spaniards living in Manila to residents of mainland New Spain
when he registered the galleon in Acapulco. “The porcelain was packed in
crates and the marquetry in large boxes,” one author explains. “It is impor-
tant to note that the majority of these articles appear registered as gifts and
that they only rarely were registered as objects of commerce.” 48 Rather than
presume that the Spanish were simply such generous people that they freely
gave away large quantities of expensive products, we should read the use of
gift giving as a strategy to hide fraudulent activities. In the 1709 and 1712
cases involving the Gallo and San Juan families, the register listed the major-
ity of the goods that arrived those years as “gifts” to a mainland New Spain
importer, with no reference to the Manila contact. In both years the mani-
fests of goods were separate documents from the lists of exporters and
importers, and their piezas made it difficult to correlate the actual goods that
each merchant imported. Yet, the manifest of goods listed thousands of cups
for chocolate (tazas para chocolate) and more than two hundred Japanese
painted desks. Even if the only “gifts” in these two cases were porcelain items
and furniture, the number of importers indicates that these are especially
large quantities that were imported with no expectation of sale in New Spain.
Instead, exporters and importers used the practice of listing goods as gifts
on the register to avoid regulations that excluded residents of mainland New
Spain from participating as importers of Asian goods. Merchant-bureaucrats
like the Gallo and San Juan families manipulated the system as part of their
local strategy to use the restrictions to their own advantage.
Here we may turn to correspondence between the San Juan brothers to
show that registering commercial imports as gifts was a strategy employed
by this family network of merchant-bureaucrats. Manuel returned to main-
land New Spain in January 1709 after several years of service in the military
in Manila. He first spent five months in Acapulco, presumably socializing
with his associates and future in-laws, the Gallos, before moving to Mexico
City. Upon his arrival in Acapulco, he began an intense correspondence with
his brother Francisco, who had been in Veracruz for two years, about their
mutual business interests. Manuel acted as a conduit between Francisco and
“El Amigo,” an unnamed associate of some power in Acapulco. This partner
was most likely one of the men in the Gallo clan, Miguel or Juan Eusebio,
because opaque references suggest that he occupied a position in the govern-
ment; however, no name is provided. The use of an alias, even in private
correspondence between siblings, speaks to the fact that this enterprise was
beyond the legal bounds of the colonial bureaucracy.
When Manuel returned to mainland New Spain from Manila, he brought
with him a load of goods imported from various Asian markets. It is impor-
tant to note that he is not listed as the official importer on the registry com-
piled by Miguel Gallo; instead, these goods appear as “gifts” to Manuel.
Upon Manuel’s arrival to the port city of Acapulco, the San Juan brothers
and their business partner, Julián de Osorio, began a four-month process to
sell the goods in New Spain. On January 21, 1709, Osorio estimated the value
of the goods to be between 43,000 and 44,000 pesos.49 He warned Francisco
that he doubted they would be able to sell the goods in Acapulco, although
he did not explain just what might be holding up such a possibility.50 Two
days later Manuel wrote to Francisco about these issues, suggesting that
recent occurrences in Acapulco were in fact the cause of an increase in the
charges on the goods.51 According to friends who kept him informed while
he was in Manila, these “problems” in Acapulco had been plaguing them for
two years. Manuel did not write to his brother again for almost a month, then
on February 24 he announced his intention to take their géneros de China

(Asian commodities) to Mexico City to sell, because the situation in Aca-
pulco had become untenable.52 Another unnamed “friend” had suggested
that it would be impossible to sell 24,000 pesos worth of merchandise outside
the fair and other limited legitimate venues.
At the end of March, Manuel wrote to Francisco concerning another set
of business issues.53 He began the letter by notifying his brother of the Manila
Galleon’s departure from Acapulco, consisting of two ships. This discussion
was a prelude to a request for 16,000 pesos and two months free from his
obligations to his brother, because he wanted to go to Mexico City to pur-
chase goods to export to the Philippines. By April 14, two weeks later, Man-
uel was planning to go to the capital city in about ten days, but since he had
not heard from Francisco about the money, he reiterated his request. He then
turned his attention to the Asian merchandise that had been the main focus
of their business interests for almost four months. He had not sold the goods
yet, and he planned on transferring them to a representative in Puebla by the
name of Antonio de Vargas.54
The next day Manuel produced a more detailed receipt for two crates
delivered to yet another associate, Lorenzo de León, “so they can be sold in
this city [Acapulco].”55 The estimated value of the goods, made up entirely of
textiles, was 2,340 pesos. This receipt made the first mention of specific prod-
ucts: the majority of items were unfinished fabrics, from a variety of cotton
goods and different grades of silk to satin, damask, and wool flannel. Hand-
kerchiefs, robes from Bengal, and stockings from Canton rounded out the
inventory of the two crates. Of the more than 40,000 pesos worth of goods
that Manuel brought with him from Asia, a mere 6 percent were sold in Aca-
pulco under the name of a local merchant. The remaining goods were sent
on to Puebla, where Vargas found buyers by the end of May.56
In late May a problem arose with the sale of the San Juan brothers’
imported items. In their correspondence Manuel and Francisco bemoaned
the issue but also revealed that there was still hope that Vargas could finish
the deal.57 Rather than waiting for a successful resolution, however, Vargas
sought to sell the goods through itinerant merchants from Peru (peruleros)
in Mexico City. This attempt suggests a level of desperation on his part, since
the scheme involved moving these goods to a fourth location.
The search for a solution continued through June, with no result reported
in the letters. However, a subsequent letter from Manuel sent from Puebla
suggested that he had made a personal visit to correct the problem. He also
reported that El Amigo had contacted him for the purpose of assuring Fran-
cisco that 40,000 of their original 60,000 pesos from the Philippines were
still available for trade.58 Despite the lengthy endeavor to sell their Asian
merchandise in New Spain, the San Juan brothers were undeterred from
participating in the Pacific trade.
By the end of September they were back to business. Manuel implied in a
letter to Francisco that they could ship their goods at a better price if they
routed them through El Amigo in Acapulco. Furthermore, El Amigo told
Manuel that newly appointed government officials “hold the future of the
Philippines.”59 In order to take advantage of the change, they needed to cul-
tivate fresh relationships so that the government could assist them in their
merchant activities. This clear call for the forging of links between merchants
and bureaucrats was at the center of the network created between the Gallo
and San Juan families, who excelled as merchant-bureaucrats in the Pacific
trade.
The 1712 fraud case against Miguel Gallo caused little reaction in Mexico
City, although fraud in the Asian trade created enough concern in the capital
that year that the viceroy ordered Juan Díaz de Bracamonte, a high-ranking
judge, to carry out an investigation. The viceroy directed Díaz to study the
Manila Galleon trade, citing irregularities in it for most of the last ten years
“because the commerce of the Philippines is not regulated according to the
law.” The impetus for the case was not the shortage in taxes paid by Gallo,
although this case was folded into the larger investigation that covered ships
registered by him in 1704, 1707, 1708, and 1710. In fact, the inquiry was already
under way before the arrival of the galleon in 1712.
Consequently, Gallo continued with his illegal activities with the full
knowledge of those conducting the investigation. In a summary of the case,
officials in Mexico City suggested that the cause of the problems largely
resided in Manila. Although the judge mentioned the possibility of poor
control of the sale of Asian goods in Acapulco, he was much more concerned
with English attacks on the ships and the tendency of those in Manila to
accept the high prices of the Chinese merchants of Manila, often “paying
them double” the value of goods. The report did note that local representa-
tives made excess profits at the fair in Acapulco: “They allowed the embarka-
tion of bigger quantities above the permiso, paying, as they say publicly, 10
to 12 percent; 4 percent for an embarkation tax, 6 percent for sales taxes, as
stated by the witnesses.” The report suggested that although the local officials
allowed the entrance of surplus goods, they nevertheless did their job as
prescribed by collecting taxes on the whole lot. The report instead assigned
the fraud charges to the merchants of Manila, who were implicated because
of their willingness to trade with the Chinese.60
This investigation demonstrates how colonial bureaucrats invested a great
deal of effort in pretending to be concerned about illegal merchant activities
without actually enforcing the laws. In particular, the judge liberally inter-
preted the testimonies included in the report to blame the residents of Manila
for the preponderance of fraud. The investigation included a series of inter-
views in which witnesses were asked to comment on the state of commerce
between Acapulco and Manila. Those who participated were all from Mexico
City, and many had never even been to Acapulco. Díaz posed broad ques-
tions, asking about the general terms of this trade rather than the specific
case of missing money in 1712.
Similarly, most witnesses answered in generalizations, speaking about
what “they had heard [people] say publicly.” Based on these responses, many
in the merchant community knew that the galleon always carried more than
the 300,000 pesos the permiso allowed at that time. Moreover, merchants
from cities across New Spain “sell their goods [belonging to those in Manila]
as if their own, risking the money that the subjects of Manila have sent here.”
On the return voyage, Manila merchants could legally import up to 600,000
pesos from the sale of goods at the yearly fair in Acapulco. Many witnesses—
most of whom had never attended the Acapulco fair—answered that the per-
miso was always exceeded with money coming from Mexico City and Puebla.
The merchants throughout mainland New Spain were “the same subjects
that receive the clothes, and the money goes into their accounts so they can
employ representatives in the Philippines.” 61
One witness stood out from the others for his knowledge of the Acapulco
trade. At the time of the investigation, Pedro de los Ríos Valdivieso, a traveling
merchant residing in Mexico City, had come to mainland New Spain on the
Manila Galleon two years earlier. As he answered the questions, he presented
a picture of disgruntled residents of Manila who were tired of being exploited
by mainland merchants. He repeated that it was common knowledge that the
galleon merchants often exceeded the 300,000-peso limit in the export of items
from Manila. But he noted that this damaged the residents of Manila.
“The clamoring of the Spaniards in the Philippines is continuous and
grave,” Valdivieso said, because they have no recourse against the mainland
merchants. He argued that these mainland merchants pushed the Manila
residents out of the commerce so that the merchants could take advantage of
the full amount of the permiso through their representatives in Manila. He

further stated that the cost of merchandise in Manila “now amounts to 15 to
20 percent more because enormous amounts of silver have flooded the mar-
kets, making it virtually useless.” Finally, Valdivieso ended his statements
with an eyewitness account of the disembarkation of the ship in 1712 in
which he defended the ship’s crew. He remarked that their crates and boxes—
one of the privileges they enjoyed as the staff of the galleon—were legiti-
mately shipped and registered. He carefully noted that their goods were
unloaded and the taxes documented and paid, suggesting but not stating
outright that the crew of the ship was not at fault.62
The outcome of the case against Gallo himself is still unknown. It is not
clear when or even if the 50,000 pesos were accounted for or whether the
Crown collected the taxes. When Gallo allowed the ship to leave again in
March 1712, he claimed it was returning with 257,100 pesos for goods pur-
chased at the fair by residents throughout mainland New Spain—a small
sum compared to the figures for other shipments, which ranged from
500,000 to 1 million pesos.63 The sole reference to the case in late 1712 men-
tions the appointment of a temporary castellan because Gallo was in prison,
presumably because of these charges.64
We should take care, however, not to overestimate the significance of a
prison term as proof that the Crown was enforcing the laws against merchant-
bureaucrats and controlling the fraud in Asian commerce. In a system predi-
cated on unwritten contracts, the Crown enacted laws but largely ignored them
while the merchant-bureaucrats made fortunes. Even if the authorities pun-
ished Gallo, his sentence was a mockery given the scale of the fraud he com-
mitted in terms of the quantities of commodities that passed through his port
city. In addition, his relatives continued to trade even after he was sidelined.
Therefore, we should be careful not to look solely at one individual but to
remember that the networks of merchants, bureaucrats, and those holding
both positions could withstand minor punishments as the cost of doing busi-
ness in order to reap larger rewards as part of their unwritten contracts.
c o n c l u s i o n : c o r r u p t i o n a s a b u r e a u c r at i c s t r at e gy
Spanish attempts to cross the Pacific began as early as the 1530s and ended
with claiming the Philippines in 1570. Through the trade network established
across this vast ocean, Spaniards brought silver in quantities that invigorated
the long-established trading networks in East, South, and Southeast Asia,

while they gained unfettered access to the luxury goods so coveted in Euro-
pean markets. Regular traffic between Manila and Acapulco began in 1571
with the yearly trip of the Manila Galleon, connecting the Spanish Empire
to an interregional trade network that was central to the economic, political,
and cultural development of Southeast Asia long before the arrival of Euro-
peans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.65 Newly arrived Europeans
formed their own foreign enclaves of merchants alongside those that had
been there for centuries. Spaniards, feeding the Chinese desire for silver,
played a significant role in the early modern development of this Asian econ-
omy while the Crown struggled with how best to manage, control, and profit
from these associations.
The Spanish colonial project began as an economic venture, and Spaniards
built the goal of gaining profit into the bureaucratic institutions that formed
the colonial government. Spain established the House of Trade (Casa de
Contratación) in 1503, one of the first bureaucratic institutions established in
Seville to govern the extraction of resources from the newly acquired colonies.
The intersection of the interests of the economy and the bureaucracy in the
colonial project has led many to analyze colonial governance as rampantly
corrupt. The Habsburg bureaucracy was a well-oiled machine that worked
remarkably well, but in large part it ran on graft and corruption. Although the
law theoretically prohibited bureaucrats from participating in the colonial
economy, in practice their participation was ubiquitous and necessary. Trade
was strictly controlled by law and restricted to merchants approved by the
Crown, yet contraband trade well beyond those restrictions was common.66
By elevating the role of the merchants to a central location in an interdepen-
dent colonial government and economy—that of merchant-bureaucrats—the
question of what constituted graft changed. The interdependence of the econ-
omy and the bureaucracy created a space for commercial development, and in
fact the strength of the colonial economy came to depend on men who could
function in both realms.67 Rather than practicing simple corruption, a concept
that defines the practices as extragovernmental, the colonial bureaucracy func-
tioned through unwritten contracts that connected bureaucrats at local and
regional levels of the government to the global economy. Fraud, illegal trade,
and contraband are a part of unwritten contracts: bureaucrats defy the letter
of the law for personal gain while maintaining the overall stability of the colo-
nial bureaucracy for the benefit of the Crown. There is a tendency, both in an
earlier Latin American historiography and in much of the current world
history literature, to reduce the Spanish colonial system to one in which a cor-
rupt government was overbearing in its control of the economy.68 The pre-
sumption that intervention is inherently detrimental to an economy does not
bear out; the global economy in general and the colonies of the Spanish Empire
in particular expanded in the early modern period.
The procedures and functions of the colonial government were important
means of creating, constructing, and legitimizing a kind of institutionalized
corruption. “While to eighteenth-century reformers (not to mention
twentieth-century historians) the Habsburg system looked inefficient and
confusing,” one historian notes, “in seventeenth-century terms it was one of
the more rational, well-articulated elements in colonial society.” 69 Modern
conceptions of good governance would hardly allow for such an integration
of corruption into the practice of government.
Yet this is, in many ways, how it could be so effective. The interdepen-
dence of administrative power and institutionalized corruption allowed for
the acceptable form to mask what was outwardly regarded as illegitimate.
Much of the economy of New Spain existed beyond the real and imagined
restrictions of the Crown and the bureaucracies that emanated from Spain
and Mexico City. Though difficult to document, extralegal activities are rec-
ognized by scholars as highly significant to the functioning of early modern
Spanish commerce. Thus, despite the societal and legal prohibitions on com-
mercial fraud, its occurrence was widespread. Much of this corruption trans-
pired within the bounds of the very bureaucracy meant to oversee such
actions. Corruption as a concept denotes actions taken outside the system
and constitute an attack on it. In fact, this concept presupposes a well-
functioning organization beset by rogues who take advantage for their own
benefit at the expense of the system. Yet corruption, in this sense, was often
part and parcel of the way the Spanish bureaucratic apparatus functioned.
The actions that are usually defined as outside or as an attack were integral
to the ability to govern.
notes
1. Louisa Schell Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite, 1550–1660: Silver, State, and
Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 147–82.
2. Ibid. Although some companies were given permission to trade in the Spanish
realm, particularly after 1740, they were the exception and not the rule. María
Lourdes Díaz-Trechuelo, La Real Compañía de Filipinas (Seville: Escuela de

Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1965).
3. Murdo J. MacLeod, “The Primitive Nation State, Delegation of Functions, and
Results: Some Examples from Early Colonial Central America,” in Essays in the
Political, Economic and Social History of Colonial Latin America, ed. Karen
Spalding (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Latin American Studies Program,
1982), 56–57. The above discussion is based on MacLeod’s concept of the “unwrit-
ten contract” as a strategy on the part of the Spanish to establish governing struc-
tures in the colonies.
4. “Registro de la Nao Nuestra Señora del Rosario,” Acapulco, 1701, National
Archive of the Philippines (hereafter NAP), Acapulco 1701–1712, bk 1.
5. Ibid., bk 2.
6. Retirement of Juan Eusebio Gallo de Pardiñas, Acapulco, April 1, 1760, Archivo
General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), Filipinas, vol. 6, folio 112.
The Gallo family dominated Acapulco politics for more than seven decades; Juan
Eusebio became the castellan and alcalde mayor in the 1720s and did not retire
until 1760.
7. By the early sixteenth century, the Ming dynasty of China had instituted a silver-
based economy, with the Japanese being the most important source of silver before
the incorporation of the Americas into the world economy in the sixteenth cen-
tury. William S. Atwell, “International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy
Circa 1530–1650,” Past and Present 95 (May 1982): 68–72; Dennis O. Flynn and
Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-
Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 399–400.
8. Carlos Marichal, “The Spanish-American Silver Peso: Export Commodity and
Global Money of the Ancien Regime, 1550–1800,” in From Silver to Cocaine: Latin
American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000,
ed. Stephen Topik et. al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 25–52.
9. Anthony Reid, Expansion and Crisis, vol. 2 of Southeast Asia in the Age of
Commerce, 1450–1680 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 106.
10. Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver,” 393. The Chinese and European economies
depended on this American commodity, and the gap between cycles, in which
less American silver entered the world economy, represents periods of depression
in both regions. The sixteenth-century Potosí-Japanese cycle and the eighteenth-
century Mexican cycle defined the world’s consumption of silver. The first, in
which the mines of Potosí in the new viceroyalty of Peru quickly outstripped
Japanese production, dates from 1540–1640, whereas the Mexican cycle rises at
the outset of the 1700s.
11. Ward Barrett, “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800,” in The Rise of Merchant
Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, ed. James D.
Tracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 235–37.
12. An expedition in 1525 led by García Jofre de Loaísa followed Magellan’s route.
13. After the death of Ruy López de Villalobos, the surviving crew members accepted
passage from Portuguese ships to Europe and did not return to their point of
departure in New Spain.
14. Although the westbound trip was more or less direct between Acapulco and
Manila, following the northeast trade winds, the return trip east required that
ships go north (between thirty-two and thirty-seven degrees latitude) to find the
prevailing winds and currents, known as the westerlies, to cross the Pacific. The
ships would first make landfall along the coast of California, then head south to
Acapulco. Mariano Ardash Bonialian, El Pacífico hispanoamericano: Política y
comercio asiático en el Imperio Español (1680–1784) (Mexico City: El Colegio de
México, 2012), 55–59.
15. Arturo Giráldez, The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the
Global Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
16. William Shurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939), 193.
17. Barrett, “World Bullion Flows,” 224.
18. W. Michael Mathes, “A Quarter Century of Trans-Pacific Diplomacy: New Spain
and Japan, 1592–1617,” Journal of Asian History 24, no. 1 (1990): 1–29; Matthew J.
Furlong, “Peasants, Servants and Sojourners: Itinerant Asians in Colonial New
Spain, 1571–1720,” PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, 2014.
19. Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indios (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014).
20. Eugene Lyon, “Track of the Manila Galleons,” National Geographic, September
1990.
21. Bonialian, El Pacífico, 65–67.
22. “Respondese a los argumentos y reparos puestos por los diputados de la ciudad
de Manila,” 1735, AGI, Consulados, file 61a.
23. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born Again: Globalization’s Sixteenth-
Century Origins,” Pacific Economic Review 13, no. 3 (2008): 359–87; Flynn and
Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver,” 393–418.
24. Katharine Bjork, “The Link That Kept the Philippines Spanish: Mexican
Merchant Interests and the Manila Trade, 1571–1815,” Journal of World History 9,
no. 1 (Spring 1998): 33.
25. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 80.
26. Reid, Expansion and Crisis, 316–17.
27. Manuel A. Caoili, The Origins of Metropolitan Manila: A Political and Social
Analysis (Manila: New Day, 1988), 24–34. Only ten thousand Filipinos were
legally licensed to live in the city, and another five thousand evaded Spanish
authorities.
28. Shurz, Manila Galleon, 99–128. The Japanese established an embassy in Manila
in 1631, but official trade remained erratic between the two. Illicit trade, with both
Japanese and Dutch middlemen, was always part of the equation.
29. Ibid., 92.

30. Ibid., 363.
31. Bonialian, El Pacífico, 62.
32. Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 40.
33. Shurz, Manila Galleon, 375.
34. Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos, Acciones y reacciones en los puertos del Mar del Sur:
Desarrollo portuario del Pacífico novohispano a partir de sus políticas defensivas
(1713–1789) (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2011).
36. Yuste López, El comercio de la nueva España con filipinas, 1590-1785 (Mexico City:
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1984), 16–19.
37. Ibid., 24.
38. Council of the Indies, Extracto historial . . . a instancia de la ciudad de Manila . . .
sobre la forma que se ha de hacer y continuar el comercio y contratación de los
tejidos de China en Nueva España (Madrid: Consejo de Indias, 1736), 29. Despite
the more common usage of the term naturales to refer to indigenous populations
of the Americas, in this document the term is used to refer to Spaniards who are
residents of Manila and the surrounding towns.
39. Bonialian, El Pacífico, 198–207.
41. Case against Miguel Gallo, Acapulco, 1712, Archivo General de Indias, Seville
(hereafter AGI), Escribanía de Cámara (hereafter Escribanía) 264A, fol. 222.
42. Ibid., Escribanía 264B.
43. Ibid., Escribanía 264A, fols. 154–155v.
45. Case against Miguel Gallo, Escribanía 264A, fols. 535–44.
46. Ibid., fols. 492–505. In both registros, the imported goods themselves were not
listed, only the space on the ship that the goods occupied. For more information
on the allotment of space on the ships, see Shurz, Manila Galleon, 158.
47. Shurz, Manila Galleon, 182. The efficient packing of the ships was quite an art,
which translated into higher profits through cost-effectiveness. Lyon, “Track of
the Manila Galleons.”
48. López, El comercio, 26.
49. Julián de Osorio to Francisco San Juan de Santa Cruz, Puebla, January 21, 1709,
AGI, México 2769.
50. Ibid. The inability to sell the goods in Acapulco could well have been caused by
the legal restrictions on selling only legitimately delivered goods at the fair, but
Osorio did not explain the reasons.
51. Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz to Francisco San Juan de Santa Cruz, Mexico
City, January 23, 1709, AGI, México 2769. Manuel did not elaborate on these “oc-
currences,” so it is not clear to what events he was referring.
City, February 24, 1709, AGI, México 2769. Manuel reported to his brother about
collecting debts, but as a result of the actions of Osorio, an expected payment of

10,000 pesos had been reduced by 2,000 pesos, so that Osorio had remitted only
8,000 pesos. Manuel wrote that he also collected 6,000 pesos (apparently for
military service) for a total of 14,000 pesos which he planned to forward to his
brother.
53. Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz to Francisco San Juan de Santa Cruz, Acapulco,
March 30, 1709, AGI, México 2769.
54. Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz to Francisco San Juan de Santa Cruz, Acapulco,
April 14, 1709, AGI, México 2769. This letter was followed by a receipt written by
Manuel to mark the transfer of twelve crates, four large bundles, and one small
bundle to Vargas. Receipt for goods delivered to Antonio de Vargas, Acapulco,
April 15, 1709, AGI, México 2769.
55. Receipt for goods delivered to Lorenzo de León, Acapulco, April 16, 1709, AGI,
México 2769.
City, May 22, 1709, AGI, México 2769.
City, May 25, 1709, AGI, México 2769.
58. Manuel San Juan de Santa Cruz to Francisco San Juan de Santa Cruz, Puebla,
June 10, 1709, AGI, México 2769.
City, September 30, 1709, AGI, México 2769.
60. Juan Díaz de Bracamonte, report to the viceroy, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A,
fols. 667–89.
61. Interrogatories, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A, fols. 640–648v.
62. Interrogatory of Pedro de los Ríos Valdivieso, 1712, AGI, Escribanía 264A,
fols. 648v–650v.
63. Case against Miguel Gallo, Escribanía 264A; Shurz, Manila Galleon, 234.
64. Appointment of castellan, Acapulco, 1712, AGN, Tierras, vol. 2987, exp. 4.
65. Reid, Expansion and Crisis, 1–61.
66. Murdo J. MacLeod, “Spain and America: The Atlantic Trade, 1492–1720,” in The
Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (New York: Cambridge
67. Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite, 33–70.
68. Furthermore, the exclusion of the Spanish from the narrative of the period in favor
of the British and Dutch state-sponsored companies implies the failure of the
Spanish system. These companies are often imagined as the predecessors of mod-
ern stock companies, with the Dutch and the British being seen in contrast to the
corruption of the Spanish, when in fact the seemingly disparate systems all func-
tioned as part of a mercantilist structure and were dependent on bureaucratic con-
trol of the economy.
69. Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite, 149.
C H A P T E R NIN E
Addicted to Smuggling
contr aband tr ade in eighteenth - century
br a zil and rio de l a pl ata
k
Fabrício Prado
I n the eighteenth century, Brazil became the economic center of the

Portuguese Empire and a commercial powerhouse of the Atlantic world.
After the discovery of gold mines in the interior of the territory in 1693,
Portuguese (or Luso) America experienced unprecedented demographic,
economic, and territorial expansion. The development of a thriving mining
sector—which gained even more significance when diamond mines opened
in 1729—led to the construction of settlements and roads connecting different
interior regions. By the mid-eighteenth century, complex and dynamic
networks of trade thrived in Brazil. As a result, foreign merchants sought to
tap into the vibrant commerce and purchase diamonds and gold.
The Portuguese Crown outlawed foreign trade in Brazil, but it never fully
succeeded in imposing the rule. In fact, smuggling became commonplace in
eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian ports such as Rio de Janeiro, Santos,
Recife, and Salvador da Bahia. Contraband trade was rampant though dif-
ficult to measure. Contemporary and modern observers have agreed that
significant illicit commerce flourished in Brazilian ports. Regarded by many
as a corrupting element in the imperial system, contraband trade has gener-
ally been viewed as a weakness of Portuguese colonial authority in Brazil.
According to historian José Jobson Arruda, illicit trade in late colonial
Brazil allowed merchants to become less dependent on the official Portu-
guese commerce. Portuguese historian Jorge Pedreira, however, suggests that
197
198 Fabrício Prado
legal and illegal trade between Portugal and Brazil grew in the last decades
of the eighteenth century, strengthening mutual commercial ties.1 Dutch his-
torian Ernst Pijning has argued for an even more pronounced role of contra-
band trade as a fiscal, social, and economic process integrated into the daily
life of the colonial society. He maintains that contraband trade comprised
“all illegal commercial activities, including trading with foreigners, trade in
forbidden goods, and underpayment of taxes on goods.”2 Such an expansive
definition is rooted in the varied and pervasive practices of illegal trade in
the Atlantic world, especially in Portuguese America.
Smuggling constituted a crucial segment of the Brazilian economy that
affected almost all social groups. Illicit trade demanded skilled labor and
involved port workers, paralegals, low- and high-end merchants, fishermen,
artisans, bakers, innkeepers, and a myriad of authorities. Contraband also
increased the demand for export commodities, thus enhancing other indus-
tries in the port’s hinterland. At the same time, the import of cheaper goods
allowed larger segments of Luso-Brazilian society to gain access to alcoholic
beverages, textiles, and manufactured goods that the legal commercial sys-
tem supplied at prohibitive costs. As a result, contraband trade was an inte-
gral aspect of the Luso-Brazilian economy, with elites and plebeians alike
participating as both consumers and agents.
Colonial authorities did not prosecute all types of contraband trade the
same way, despite the strict royal prohibitions. With renewed interest in
obstructing transimperial trade in eighteenth-century Brazilian ports, the
Crown targeted mostly illegal exports of gold, diamonds, and sugar. Crown
officials discouraged smuggling in Brazilian precious metals and gems, yet
they took a permissive stance on trade with Spanish America that shaped
the geopolitical strategy of the Portuguese Crown. The 1680 foundation of
ColÔnia do Sacramento, a Portuguese commercial entrepôt on Rio de la
Plata (see map 2), epitomized this double standard toward contraband
trade.
Through ColÔnia do Sacramento’s trade with Spanish America, Portu-
guese and British merchants tapped into copious quantities of silver and
hides while introducing textiles, sugar, tobacco, cachaça (Brazilian rum),
and slaves. Illegal trade was part and parcel of the economic and political life
in the eighteenth-century South Atlantic.
The volume, methods, and commodities of contraband trade varied, and
so did the royal measures against it. The scale of illicit trade fluctuated sub-
stantially in tune with political and economic transformations. Changing
Addicted to Smuggling 199
70
Map 2. Rio de la Plata and Banda Oriental, late eighteenth century.
imperial alliances, warfare, and commercial treaties among Atlantic empires

shaped the volume of contraband trade. Changes in the volume of smuggling
also reflected the balance of power between the Portuguese Crown and the
commercial communities in colonial ports. Imperial authorities did not
prosecute all smugglers in the same manner. Social status, race, and political
connections determined the outcome of legal processes. Accordingly, con-
traband trade was not static but rather a dynamic process that involved mul-
tiple agents with different and shifting interests. The goods, the routes, and
the agents involved in contraband trade varied throughout the eighteenth
200 Fabrício Prado
century, making the very definition of contraband trade even more nuanced
and circumstantial.
In order to examine the multiple facets of contraband trade in Brazil, this
chapter is divided into two sections. The first part pays special attention to
the smuggling of gold and diamonds and the Portuguese Crown’s attempts
to tax trade within the colony. The second section focuses on the commercial
activities of the Portuguese merchants in ColÔnia do Sacramento (1680–
1777) and the trade routes connecting Rio de Janeiro and Spanish America.
Far from being an anomaly, contraband trade was an important part of Por-
tuguese imperial strategy in the South Atlantic.
c o n t r o l l i n g c o n t r a b a n d t r a d e i n t h e go l d e n a g e o f b r a z i l
Contraband trade had been a common phenomenon since the early years
of Portuguese Brazil. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Brit-
ish and Dutch interlopers were a common presence in Brazilian ports, and
French traders carried on an illicit trade along the coast, lined with natural
harbors, islands, and isolated beaches. Foreign traders acquired sugar,
indigo, brazilwood, drugs, and tobacco, and they found avid buyers for
manufactured goods. A royal order of 1591 outlawed trade with foreigners,
but the Portuguese Crown began to systematically curtail contraband
trade only in the eighteenth century. After the discovery of gold and dia-
monds in the interior of Brazil (1693), the Crown further restricted the
export of gold to prevent its flow to foreign powers and the other Portu-
guese dominions.3 Such a measure sought to reinforce the centrality of
Lisbon in the commercial system and restrain the direct movement of
goods among Portuguese colonies. Brazilian merchants continued to
export untaxed Brazilian commodities—such as manioc, tobacco, and
gold—to Africa in exchange for slaves.4 Furthermore, despite the Crown’s
efforts, foreigners continued to visit Portuguese American ports, especially
Rio de Janeiro.
The thriving contraband trade in colonial Brazil must be understood in
light of the severe tariffs that the Portuguese Crown imposed on the Lisbon-
Brazil route. When departing Portugal, Luso-Brazilian merchants paid
26 percent in taxes and fees on the value of the export goods, and they paid
an additional 10 percent upon arriving in Brazil. Foreigners exporting legally
to Brazil paid roughly 68 percent in taxes.5 As a result, British and French
merchants commonly gave bribes and gifts to poorly paid port officers and
colonial authorities to avoid paying high tariffs.
Although contraband trade was part of the daily life of port cities, success
in illegal operations was not always guaranteed. The local authorities infor-
mally controlled these trading activities, and they made the operations
dependent on the payment of bribes, business alliances, and political favors.
As a result, local merchants who cultivated relations with the authorities
improved their success rate. On the other hand, if merchants disregarded
these informal arrangements, royal authorities could impose tough sanc-
tions. Legal and financial consequences also varied according to the social
status of the smugglers and the type of goods seized.
When foreign merchants disregarded the informal arrangements with
local port authorities, smuggling operations often failed. British traders
repeatedly complained about their harsh treatment at the hands of local
authorities. Captains who attempted to bypass port authorities invariably
suffered detailed inspections of their ships and delays in the processing of
documents. Often they were not allowed to disembark on land.
Such was the case of the famous Captain James Cook, who steered his ship
into Rio de Janeiro’s harbor in 1768. Cook disobeyed the authorities’ instruc-
tions for docking his vessel, and the port officers considered such suspicious
behavior indicative of his intentions to trade illegally. Cook’s crew did not
receive permission to disembark, and the captain himself had to walk in the
city under the surveillance of Portuguese officers. In addition, the authorities
restricted Cook to purchasing supplies from one store.6 For Cook and his
crew, smuggling did not seem so easy in Rio de Janeiro. Regardless of whether
Rio de Janeiro authorities had real reasons to suspect Captain Cook’s inten-
tions, many foreign merchants shared similar experiences because they
lacked the information and connections to manipulate the informal rules of
contraband trade.
For admission into the Rio de Janeiro harbor, a ship had to display the
proper flags and signs and fire appropriate cannon shots to salute the author-
ities. Initially a foreign vessel had to anchor outside the port and remain
under the surveillance of the Santa Cruz fort until it received authorization
to proceed into the bay. Once in Guanabara Bay, the ship came within view
of the Ilha das Cobras fort. At this time the authorities assigned a docking
location. A number of patrol rowboats circled the vessel to prevent any illegal
disembarkation. The authorities interpreted the failure to follow these
instructions as an attempt to trade illicitly.7 The official inspection took up
202 Fabrício Prado
to two days to determine whether a ship could remain in port. During such
visits, the quantity of bribes and the strength of social connections influ-
enced the officials.
Another method for illegally introducing goods relied on fishermen.
Small fishing boats frequently sailed in and out of Guanabara Bay and usu-
ally slipped by the inspectors. For this reason, Rio de Janeiro’s fishermen
frequently traded directly with the vessels anchored outside the bay. Soldiers,
sailors, and low-ranking officers also enhanced their income by engaging in
contraband trade. Despite making frequent denunciations, royal authorities
turned a blind eye to such activities.8 Port authorities informally controlled
smuggling among fishermen, and they ensured that this type of illegal trade
subsidized the colonial administration by providing additional income to
soldiers and port workers.
The determination of royal authorities to curb contraband trade varied
according to the political context in the Atlantic world. In some periods the
authorities enforced fiscal regulations more harshly. Political change or eco-
nomic and social crises in Portugal often corresponded to periods of
increased confiscations in Luso-Brazilian ports. One such period unfolded
after the 1750 accession of King Dom José I. Sebastião José de Carvalho e
Melo—the future Marquis of Pombal—became secretary of state (1750–1777),
and the Crown enacted a series of regulations to increase metropolitan
authority over smuggling. According to Ernst Pijning, these measures in fact
strengthened the power of local authorities over contraband trade.9 By
asserting control, local officers ensured that contraband trade remained at
tolerable levels. The officials also imposed more rigorous measures when the
political and economic necessities called for it.
In 1755 an earthquake shook Lisbon and was followed by a tsunami (mare-
moto) that raged through the city. A fire then broke out that destroyed the
remainder of the capital. Metropolitan authorities subsequently pressured
the colonial officers to increase tax revenue by curbing the illegal exports of
gold and diamonds and trade with foreigners. In 1756 Rio de Janeiro authori-
ties cracked down on contraband trade. They dismantled a diamond-
smuggling ring that included goldsmiths and important merchants such as
Felisberto Caldeira Brandt, the owner of a diamond monopoly in Brazil.10
The smugglers attempted to ship untaxed gold and diamonds to Lisbon.
Later that year the Overseas Council (Conselho Ultramarino), which gov-
erned the Portuguese colonial territories, urged the Brazilian viceroy to
monitor closely the illegal gold exports on English ships. This measure
attested to the royal awareness of contraband trade and the potential for
increasing revenue by asserting imperial authority over Brazilian ports. In
Bahia, another busy Brazilian port, local authorities eradicated a complex
smuggling ring that was running gold from Minas Gerais to Bahia and ulti-
mately to West Africa to finance the slave trade.11
During the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the Overseas Council repeatedly
ordered local authorities to increase revenue by curbing gold smuggling. In
February 1761 the Count of Bobadela, the captain-general of the southern
captaincies (Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Rio Grande, and Mato
Grosso), informed Lisbon that he was curbing the descaminhos (diversions)
of gold on the commercial routes within Brazil.12 The Crown regulated gold-
smiths to limit the sale of gold dust and its illegal exports. By restricting the
number of officials allowed to handle gold to fewer than a dozen, the Portu-
guese government also sought to control the commodity flow at its source.
Despite the small number of official goldsmiths in Rio de Janeiro (between 3
and 5), the authorities reported that more than 440 unlicensed goldsmiths
worked large quantities of untaxed gold and silver at the central Ouvidor
Street.13
In 1762 the Crown transferred the Luso-Brazilian capital from Bahia to
Rio de Janeiro, where it set up the Tribunal da Relação (Court of Appeals).
Government control over contraband trade grew, marking a period of
increased confiscations.14 Once again, the main target of Lisbon’s measures
was the gold and diamond contraband trade—either smuggled from Brazil
to Lisbon or traded with foreign merchants (especially the British). In 1763
port authorities confiscated large quantities of gold dust and diamonds
aboard the ship Nossa Senhora da Ajuda. Uncharacteristically, the vessel’s
merchants and sailors were imprisoned and transferred to Lisbon. Metro-
politan pressure held up, and in January 1764 the Overseas Council threat-
ened a derrama (coercive collection of taxes), if the revenue of gold taxes did
not reach 100 arrobas (1,500 kilograms).15 Despite the diminishing mining
output, the Crown regarded the low tax collection as a result of the rampant
contraband. The success of these repressive policies against contraband mer-
chants should not be exaggerated. On many occasions, traders charged with
smuggling were freed even before the magistrates reached the verdicts. The
case of Pedro Rodrigo da Costa can serve as an example. He was arrested for
smuggling diamonds and trading slaves without paying duties, but the court
ultimately acquitted him.16 Even more illustrative of the unequal application
of the law is the case of the large-scale merchant Manoel Barbosa dos Santos.
204 Fabrício Prado
Royal authorities charged him with smuggling, tax evasion, and dealing in
forbidden goods. Later they dropped the accusations and set him free even
before the judges heard the complaint.17
In this way local elites and metropolitan authorities renegotiated the
informal and “acceptable levels” of contraband trade. The relationship
among merchants, colonial authorities, and the Crown remained dynamic.18
Social status, political influence, and family networks continued to affect the
legal outcomes of contraband trade trials.
c o n t r a b a n d t r a d e a n d i m p e r i a l p o l i t i c s i n r i o d e l a p l ata
Although the Crown discouraged contraband trade from Brazil—namely, in

gold and diamonds—royal authorities in Brazil and in Lisbon often stimu-
lated direct trade with the Spanish American territories along Rio de la Plata.
This was especially true for silver and hides. ColÔnia do Sacramento, the
Portuguese commercial exchange in Rio de la Plata, allowed the Portuguese
to enhance contraband trade with Spanish America. The 1680 foundation of
ColÔnia do Sacramento on the northern bank of Rio de la Plata—also
known as the River Plate—marked the southernmost expansion of the Por-
tuguese Empire in the Americas. The aim was to reestablish the profitable
commercial routes between the River Plate and Luso-America that had flour-
ished during the union of the Iberian Crowns (1580–1640). Although the
Catholic Church supported the Portuguese claim to the region, the two Ibe-
rian empires squared off over ColÔnia do Sacramento during its nearly one
hundred years of existence.19
ColÔnia do Sacramento was administratively and economically con-
nected to Rio de Janeiro and its mercantile community. In the eighteenth
century, ColÔnia do Sacramento had a population of about three thousand
people connected to Rio de Janeiro’s elites. By trading with Buenos Aires,
ColÔnia do Sacramento’s merchants assured Portuguese access to silver and
hides while selling manufactured goods, sugar, Brazilian tobacco, cachaça,
and African slaves.
ColÔnia do Sacramento’s trade attracted a large number of prominent Rio
de Janeiro merchants, attesting to the economic appeal of Rio de la Plata. The
historian Antonio Jucá de Sampaio has examined the bonds posted for vessels
sailing out of Rio de Janeiro between 1724 and 1730. He shows that large-scale
merchants frequented the Rio de Janeiro–ColÔnia do Sacramento route more
than any other way out of Rio de Janeiro. Large-scale merchants guaranteed
the bonds posted for 64 percent of the ships sailing to the River Plate, 51 percent
of the ships bound for Angola, and 50 percent of those headed to Lisbon or
Costa da Mina.20 The high participation of merchants in the Rio de la Plata
trade suggests the significance of the trade in silver and hides, and it reveals
the deep connections of the Rio de Janeiro merchants and authorities with
their counterparts in ColÔnia do Sacramento. Although the Portuguese
Crown made repeated efforts to curb gold and diamond smuggling, it secretly
encouraged contraband trade with Spanish America.
Rio de Janeiro, which became the capital of Brazil in 1763, gained political
and economic importance in Portuguese America because its merchants
controlled the commerce with the River Plate region. The flow of silver from
Spanish America was critical for the Rio de Janeiro mint, Casa da Moeda.
The silver pesos passed through the mint to be stamped in Portuguese cur-
rency. Restamping silver also allowed the Crown to produce revenue, since
Spanish silver pesos were quoted at 760 réis when entering the mint and left
with a stamp value of 940 réis.21 Moreover, Rio de la Plata was connected
with the markets of Upper Peru. These peripheral regions in the Spanish
commercial system always demanded goods such as textiles, paper, sugar,
cachaça, and even slaves.
Although Spanish law forbade direct trade between ColÔnia do Sacramento
and Buenos Aires, commercial and social networks endured. Historian Zacar-
ias Moutoukias has emphasized the significance of the commercial networks
between Buenos Aires and ColÔnia do Sacramento, showing that the towns
played complementary roles in the regional market.22 Furthermore, Fernando
Jumar considered both towns as parts of the Rio de la Plata port complex.23
During the first half of the 1700s, commercial networks linked the mercantile
communities of Buenos Aires with ColÔnia do Sacramento. They relied on the
support of authorities on both sides of the River Plate.24
These networks did not stop the inhabitants of Buenos Aires from consider-
ing the Luso-Brazilians of ColÔnia do Sacramento as the enemy. Troops from
Buenos Aires attacked Sacramento in 1680, 1705, 1735–1737, 1762, and 1777. In
addition, Buenos Aires maintained a permanent garrison in the Banda Orien-
tal (present-day Uruguay) to prevent the Luso-Brazilians from exploiting the
countryside. As a result, Portuguese licenses (called passports) for acquiring
foodstuffs in Buenos Aires were crucial in enabling contraband trade.
Smuggling activities in ColÔnia do Sacramento often required Luso-
Brazilian traders to import merchandise clandestinely into Buenos Aires or
206 Fabrício Prado
to an island or cove in the River Plate. Portuguese sailors frequently entered

Buenos Aires carrying a passport for acquiring foodstuffs. Since the Treaty of
Utrecht (1713–1715) stipulated that ColÔnia do Sacramento’s population could
not settle or cultivate the land in the adjacent countryside, Portuguese sub-
jects were allowed to purchase the necessary food provisions from Buenos
Aires. ColÔnia do Sacramento’s merchants commonly used this clause as a
pretext for trading directly with Buenos Aires. In ColÔnia do Sacramento,
local authorities used the passports in strategic ways, charging fees (not
always officially) and benefiting their commercial partners. This semiofficial
commerce between ColÔnia do Sacramento and Buenos Aires flourished in
the eighteenth century.
In 1740 the governor of Buenos Aires reported the arrival of six vessels
from ColÔnia do Sacramento looking for provisions. Later the governor
arrested four Portuguese smugglers and sent them back to ColÔnia do
Sacramento. He enclosed a letter complaining about the many vessels from
the city entering Buenos Aires. These ships introduced illegal goods and
transported Portuguese petty traders, dealers, and merchants disguised as
sailors. The frequent arrival of Portuguese smugglers in Buenos Aires under
false pretenses caused outrage among the Buenos Aires commercial elites.
Spanish authorities complained that numerous Portuguese sailors jumped
ship at the entrance of the harbor with bags of goods. Similar scenes were
commonplace throughout the eighteenth century.
Smugglers also exchanged goods on the islands and isolated beaches on
the River Plate’s northern bank. The confession of an arrested smuggler pro-
vides some details of this illegal operation. In 1742 Spanish royal officers
seized four packages containing rugs, paper, gloves, and other manufactured
items in Las Barracas at the entrance to Buenos Aires’s harbor. The royal
officers arrested Nicolas Carense, a Genoese resident in Buenos Aires, and
Francisco Valentín, a Spaniard. Carense confessed to having purchased tex-
tiles, sugar, and tobacco worth 1,500 pesos from a Portuguese merchant in
ColÔnia do Sacramento.25 More than a dozen merchants provided confes-
sions and testimonies during the investigation, providing a rich description
of a relatively modest smuggling circuit.
Carense reported that he sailed with a crew to the northern bank of Rio
de la Plata to produce firewood at Las Hermanas beach, located a few miles
north of ColÔnia do Sacramento. Once on the north shore, Carense left his
partners and traveled by road to ColÔnia do Sacramento, where he bought
goods from a Portuguese merchant known as don Cristóbal.26 Carense hid
the smuggled goods on the island of Martín García for a few days, then used
a small boat to transport the merchandise to Buenos Aires. It was precisely
in this last phase that the Spanish authorities caught the smuggler. They con-
fiscated his goods and sent the boat to the almoneda pública (public auction).
The Crown banned Nicolas Carense and his associate, Francisco Valentin,
from Spanish America for life.27
Cases like this commonly occurred in the Rio de la Plata estuary in the
eighteenth century. The sources provide countless examples of illegal goods
and small boats seized on the beaches near Buenos Aires. Authorities from
ColÔnia do Sacramento repeatedly petitioned Spanish officials to return con-
fiscated canoes, sloops, smacks, and rowboats that were supposed to go into
almonedas públicas in Buenos Aires. By the mid-eighteenth century, direct
trade between ColÔnia do Sacramento and Buenos Aires was so widespread
that according to a Spanish authority, “all vassals in these lands are addicted
to smuggling.”28
The geography of Rio de la Plata made smuggling easy. The abundance of
isolated beaches, natural ports, coves, and islands thwarted Spanish attempts
to end illegal trade. Navigation within the estuary, especially between the
Spanish cities of Montevideo and Buenos Aires, facilitated contact between
Portuguese and Spanish subjects. Because of the currents and the moving
sandbanks that make navigation in Rio de la Plata treacherous, the most
favorable route to cross from Montevideo to Buenos Aires was to go
upstream, follow the north bank to ColÔnia do Sacramento, and then steer
west toward Buenos Aires. ColÔnia do Sacramento was often used as port of
call, and Spanish seafarers repaired their ships in the Portuguese harbor. In
addition, the Portuguese controlled the many small islands near ColÔnia do
Sacramento that served as privileged spots for transimperial transactions.
Portuguese ColÔnia do Sacramento allowed smuggling to become part and
parcel of the region’s trade, society, and politics.
ColÔnia do Sacramento evolved into an important Atlantic trade hub for
exchanging European textiles, sugar, aguardiente (brandy), and tobacco, but it
was also the base of a thriving slave trade between Rio de Janeiro and Rio de
la Plata. Although this trade was illegal, ColÔnia do Sacramento surfaced as a
slave port in 1736, during the tenure of Governor José da Silva Paes. As an
outside official from Rio de Janeiro governing ColÔnia do Sacramento during
a time of distress, he created a tax of 10 pesos per slave sold from ColÔnia do
Sacramento to Buenos Aires. The move caused an uproar among ColÔnia do
Sacramento’s merchants.29 A few years later, ColÔnia do Sacramento’s
208 Fabrício Prado
long-standing governor, Antonio Pedro de Vasconcelos, returned to his post.

The Overseas Council canceled the tax, officially endorsing the untaxed slave
trade between the Spanish and Portuguese dominions.
Further evidence of the extent of Colonia’s slave trade is provided by
ColÔnia do Sacramento’s last Portuguese governor, Francisco José da Rocha.
According to him, Spanish guards frequently attacked Portuguese vessels in
Rio de la Plata on the pretext that they were smuggling. According to the
governor, between 1760 and 1775 the Spaniards confiscated more than a thou-
sand slaves from the ships that belonged to ColÔnia do Sacramento’s inhab-
itants. These confiscations normally happened while Portuguese ships were
supposedly fishing in the River Plate. Each of these ships carried between six
and fifteen slaves and between one and three free sailors.30 Most of the con-
fiscated ships and slaves belonged to merchants and officers from ColÔnia do
Sacramento.
c o n t r a b a n d t r a d e a n d go v e r n a n c e i n c o l ô n i a d o s a c r a m e n t o
Despite official regulations preventing trade between Spanish and Portu-

guese subjects, contraband commerce maintained ColÔnia do Sacramento.
Evidence from a legal case brought against the principal authorities of ColÔ-
nia do Sacramento reveals the deep connections among political power, the
financing of local bureaucracy, and contraband trade.
In the early 1730s Governor Antonio Pedro de Vasconcellos (in office
1722–1749) clashed with the merchant Joseph Meira da Rocha, the agent of the
powerful Lisbon merchant Francisco Pinheiro. According to Meira, ColÔnia
do Sacramento’s governor and his high-ranking officers charged up to
4,000 pesos to let English ships into ColÔnia do Sacramento’s harbor. Meira
also denounced the “great scandal of the numerous dinners and banquets,”
at which the merchants and authorities of ColÔnia do Sacramento mingled
with Buenos Aires and British merchants. Meira’s charges against Vasconce-
los did not stop there. The merchant blamed the governor for the hardships
of his business. According to Meira, his store was one of the few that the
governor did not coerce into paying bribes for obtaining passports to con-
duct business with the Spaniards.31 He further lamented that the governor
even sent thugs to terrorize him by unleashing hounds in his store and by
coercing him to sell goods on credit.
Meira enumerated the charges against the governor and his allies in
various letters to different authorities in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. As a

result, Gomes Freire de Andrade, the governor of the southern provinces,
ordered a secret investigation of ColÔnia do Sacramento’s governor. The
inquiry concluded that “the royal treasury has suffered from great diversions
carried out by the field marshal [Manuel Botelho de Lacerda] and the gover-
nor.” The officials revealed that the governor and his allies collected bribes
from illegal trade, and they sent “great amounts” of money to Europe with
the help of the Jesuits in ColÔnia do Sacramento and Rio de Janeiro.32
Nevertheless, Freire decided not to take any action against Governor
Vasconcellos, since his absence from ColÔnia do Sacramento could have
generated more drawbacks than benefits for Portugal. Freire considered
Vasconcelos the only administrator able to maintain authority and com-
merce because of his privileged connections with the local factions. Freire
eventually became the Count of Bobadela and the first viceroy to serve in
the new capital, Rio de Janeiro. This episode illustrates the strong links
between merchants and authorities and their implication in legal and ille-
gal enterprises in ColÔnia do Sacramento. Even at the highest levels of the
royal administration, authorities supported contraband traders in advanc-
ing imperial goals—namely, the expansion of commerce and territorial
claims.
The connections between the royal administration and local mercantile
elites maintained ColÔnia do Sacramento as a Portuguese entrepôt. ColÔnia
do Sacramento’s administration relied on local merchants for cash advances
to pay salaries, soldiers, and other operational expenses. ColÔnia do Sacra-
mento’s merchants received letters of credit that they could redeem at the
royal treasury in Rio de Janeiro.33 The commercial associates in Rio de
Janeiro usually collected those funds. In the 1720s ColÔnia do Sacramento’s
governor issued the significant amount of 26,695 pesos in letters of credit to
local merchants.34
Merchants who financed the local government often held military and civil
offices. Such was the case of Manuel Botelho de Lacerda, the most notable
member of a powerful family in ColÔnia do Sacramento.35 As sergeant-mayor,
Botelho was the official liaison between the government of ColÔnia do Sacra-
mento and Buenos Aires. In the 1720s he negotiated the restitution of the silver
that Spanish officials confiscated when the Portuguese vessel Caravela ship-
wrecked in Rio de la Plata. Even though trade—especially transimperial trade
in silver— was forbidden between the Spanish and the Portuguese, official
contacts ensured the return of a portion of the silver to the Portuguese.
210 Fabrício Prado
Botelho’s position allowed him to develop business and political networks

in commercial centers that were essential to transimperial trade. In 1729
Botelho took office as ColÔnia do Sacramento’s customs judge. By occupying
key positions, he often decided the lawfulness of cargo by charging fees and
taxes while maintaining contacts with the Buenos Aires authorities. Botelho
effectively controlled access to contraband markets in Rio de la Plata. His
career continued into the 1730s and 1740s, when he twice served as interim
governor of ColÔnia do Sacramento. Ultimately, he obtained the prestigious
rank of field marshal in ColÔnia do Sacramento’s terço (infantry unit).
The wealth and reputation accumulated by the Botelho family allowed for
their successful integration into the Portuguese American elite. In 1753
Botelho’s son, Constantino Lobo Botelho, was in Rio de Janeiro, where he
married the daughter of a rich local merchant who had served as the super-
intendent of the royal treasury.36 Four other relatives and siblings of Con-
stantino moved to Rio de Janeiro and married into elite families.37
The local influence of the Botelho family in ColÔnia do Sacramento con-
tinued after the change of governors. The Botelhos remained close to power
after the arrival of the new governor, Luis García de Bivar (1749–1759). The
trajectory of Manuel Botelho’s brother, Captain Pedro Lobo Botelho, shows
the family’s central role in connecting ColÔnia do Sacramento and Buenos
Aires. The governor of Buenos Aires wrote to his Portuguese counterpart
that Lobo was “an honorable person who deserved the most distinguished
respect,” whereas Gomes Freire, the Portuguese governor of the southern
captaincies, referred to him as the “captain ambassador” of ColÔnia do Sac-
ramento in Buenos Aires.38
It did not take long until Governor Bivar became the target of local
denunciations, which claimed that he smuggled merchandise on royal ves-
sels into Buenos Aires. Allegedly, he charged bribes of up to 4,605 pesos for
merchants to obtain passports and royal vessels to ship their goods.39 In
October 1753, the chancellor of Rio de Janeiro’s Court of Appeals ordered a
full investigation into Governor Bivar’s activities. To no surprise, royal
authorities concluded that Bivar received bribes to facilitate contraband
trade. Nevertheless, Rio’s tribunal suggested ending the prosecution so as not
to endanger ColÔnia do Sacramento’s commerce.40 Historian Fabio Kuhn
has shown that Governor Bivar was an active member of a commercial enter-
prise that imported textiles, manufactured goods, sugar, cachaça, tobacco,
and slaves into Rio de la Plata.41 Nevertheless, the Crown rewarded him in
1755 for his services as governor.42
The Portuguese strategy in Rio de la Plata faced a crucial challenge in the

late 1770s. Although the Portuguese authorities and ColÔnia do Sacramento
profited from contraband trade, the Spanish Crown had always opposed the
Portuguese presence in the estuary. After the creation of the Spanish vice-
royalty of Rio de la Plata, Spanish forces invaded ColÔnia do Sacramento.
Led by the newly appointed Viceroy Pedro de Cevallos, more than ten thou-
sand soldiers besieged and conquered the Portuguese citadel in 1777. This
episode was the most visible effort of the Spanish Empire’s Bourbon reforms
to curtail contraband trade. The fall of ColÔnia do Sacramento marked the
end of almost a century of Portuguese presence in Rio de la Plata and the end
of an era in which contraband trade was an integral part of Portuguese geo-
political strategy in the South Atlantic.
conclusion
Contraband trade was a widespread phenomenon in colonial Brazil. Though

formally outlawed, trade with French, British, Dutch, and Spanish merchants
grew from the sixteenth century. After the discovery of gold and diamonds
in Brazil’s interior, the Portuguese Crown sought to clamp down on smug-
gling. This trend expanded during the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, Por-
tuguese authorities did not prohibit all contraband trade in the same way.
Officials curbed gold and diamond exports and sought to contain British and
French access to Brazilian markets, but they encouraged exports to the Span-
ish Rio de la Plata.
During the eighteenth century, colonial authorities increasingly controlled
the legal and illegal trade in Brazilian ports. Metropolitan regulations rein-
forced the power of local authorities. This did not mean the end of smuggling.
Instead, port officials often demanded bribes and gifts from illegally arriving
ships while ensuring that contraband trade did not appear excessive to the
king’s eyes. The local authorities also prevented foreign interlopers from direct
access to trade networks. The authorities understood contraband trade as an
additional source of income for both lower- and higher-ranking officials.
Enforcing the anticontraband laws depended on the political and eco-
nomic context of the Atlantic world. During military and fiscal distress, the
Portuguese Crown pressured Brazilian authorities to cut back on illegal
trade and to boost tax revenue. Gold dust and diamonds received the most
attention.
212 Fabrício Prado
The foundation of ColÔnia do Sacramento in Rio de la Plata in 1680 sym-

bolizes the Portuguese strategy to gain access to Spanish markets and silver.
During the eighteenth century, ColÔnia do Sacramento became a hub for
transimperial commerce in Rio de la Plata. Portuguese merchants introduced
European manufactured goods, paper, sugar, cachaça, tobacco, and African
slaves to Spanish territories. There they acquired substantial quantities of silver
and hides in return. During this period, the silver acquired illegally in Rio de
la Plata supplied the Rio de Janeiro mint. The Crown encouraged the close
connections between merchants and authorities, ensuring that local business-
men advanced money to the local administration to pay salaries, soldiers, and
operational expenses. In practice, the Portuguese Crown allowed contraband
merchants to finance the imperial bureaucracy. On more than one occasion
the Crown investigated ColÔnia do Sacramento authorities for illegal trade.
Yet authorities in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon considered it more advantageous
to maintain these illegal arrangements than to hamper the flow of trade with
Rio de la Plata. Although measures against gold dust and diamond smuggling
remained in force in Brazil during the eighteenth century, Portuguese authori-
ties stimulated transimperial trade to Rio de la Plata.
notes
1. José Jobson de Andrade Arruda, “Decadence or Crisis in the Luso-Brazilian

Empire: A New Model of Colonization in the Eighteenth Century,” Hispanic
American Historical Review (hereafter HAHR) 81, nos. 3–4 (2000): 839–64;
Jorge Miguel Viana Pedreira, “From Growth to Collapse: Portugal, Brazil, and
the Breakdown of the Old Colonial System, 1750–1830,” HAHR 81, nos. 3–4
(2000): 865–78.
2. Ernst Pijning, “A New Interpretation of Contraband Trade,” HAHR 81, nos. 3–4
(2001): 733.
3. Dauril Alden, Royal Government in Colonial Brazil (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968), 404. New laws of 1711 broadened the checks on contra-
band trade. Additional regulations followed, such as the 1751 royal order forbid-
ding the Brazilian slave trade with foreign countries.
4. Chris Ebert, “From Gold to Manioc: Contraband Trade in Brazil during the
Golden Age (1700–1750),” Colonial Latin American Review 20, no. 1 (2010), 110–12.
5. Alden, Royal Government, 388–89.
6. Ibid., 409–10.
7. Ernst Pijning, Contraband and Mentality in Rio de Janeiro, PhD dissertation,
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 1996, 195–96.
8. Ibid., 195.
9. Ibid., 101.
10. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (hereafter AHU), Rio de Janeiro (hereafter RJ),
Gomes Freire de Andrada to Diogo de Mendonça Corte Real, June 1 and July 9,
1756. Costa was found innocent of all charges in 1766.
11. Charles Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial
Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 306.
12. AHU, RJ, February 10, 1761.
13. AHU, RJ, April 12, 1766; Boxer, Golden Age.
14. Pijning, Contraband and Mentality, 100–102.
15. AHU, RJ, April 12, 1766.
16. AHU, RJ, September 11, 1766.
18. Ebert, “From Gold to Manioc,” 110.
19. The Catholic Church designated the northern bank of the River Plate as the
southern limit of the Rio de Janeiro bishopric in the seventeenth century.
20. Antonio Jucá de Sampaio, “Os homens de negócio do Rio de Janeiro e sua atu-
ação nos quadros do Império português (1701-1750),” in O Antigo Regime nos
Trópicos, ed. João Fragoso et al. (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001),
72.
21. The Portuguese currency was the real, of which the plural was réis. A. J. R. Russell-
Wood, Fidalgos and Philantropists (Berkley: University of California Press. 1968),
372; Rhode Island Historical Society, 9001-T, Trader’s Book (1810) 122.
22. Zacarias Moutoukias, Contrabando y Control Colonial (Buenos Aires: Centro
Editor de América Latina, 1988), 200–209.
23. Fernando Jumar, “Le commerce atlantique au Rio de la Plata,” PhD dissertation,
École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales, Paris, 2000, 185–235.
24. Fabrício Prado, A Colônia do Sacramento: O Extremo Sul da América Portuguesa
(Porto Alegre, Brazil: Fumproarte, 2002), 42–78.
25. Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Buenos Aires, Sala IX 11.1.5,
July 18, 1720; AGN, Buenos Aires, Sala IX 3.4.1, November 15, 1742.
26. AGN, Buenos Aires, Sala IX 11.1.5, August 1, 1720.
27. AGN, Buenos Aires, Sala IX 11.1.5, August 3, 1720.
28. AGN, Buenos Aires, Sala IX 24.10.11, May 14, 1747 (“lo viciado que estan esos vas-
salos en executar y abrigar el trato ylicito”).
29. AHU, ColÔnia do Sacramento, June 18, 1746.
30. Biblioteca Nacional Lisboa, Manuscritos Pombalinos, bk. 10855, February 8, 1776.
31. Luis Lisanti Filho, Negocios Coloniais (Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Moeda, 1973), 385.
32. AHU, RJ, February 25, 1737.
33. The advance of money for ColÔnia do Sacramento’s governmental expenses by
the local merchants had been normal since 1719. AHU, ColÔnia do Sacramento,
October 18, 1719.
34. AHU, ColÔnia do Sacramento, October 18, 1722.
214 Fabrício Prado
35. Manuel Botelho wrote many letters of recommendation for his subordinates
when they tried to obtain higher positions in the Portuguese bureaucracy. His
letters normally appeared cited together with letter of other governors. AHU,
Colônia do Sacramento, June 19, 1760.
36. João Luis Fragoso, “A formação da economia colonial no Rio de Janeiro e de sua
primeira elite senhorial—séculos XVI e XVII,” in O Antigo Regime nos Trópicos,
ed. João Fragoso et al. (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001), 23–60.
37. I thank Professor João Fragoso for this information.
38. AGN, Buenos Aires, Sala IX 3.8.2, March 12, 1749, July 27, 1753.
40. AHU, RJ, October 15, 1753.
41. Fabio Kuhn, “Clandestino e Ilegal” in Escravidão e Liberdade, ed. Regina Xavier
(São Paulo: Alameda, 2012), 72.
42. AHU, RJ, November 11, 1755.
Glossary
acordada: An extraordinary commission, such as for sentencing a criminal

without an appeal.
acuerdo: A governing council composed of the viceroy and senior judges.
aguardiente: Brandy; an illegal beverage.
ahijado: A godson.
ajustador: An adjuster in metalwork.
alameda: The main city park.
alcabala: A royal tax on purchases and sales.
alcalde: A judge.
alcalde de crimen: A criminal judge of the appellate court.
alcalde mayor: A provincial administrator; the chief judge who presided
over the municipal council.
alcalde ordinario: An annually elected judge.
alférez: A standard bearer.
almoneda pública: A public auction.
altepetl: An ethnic state or polity.
altiplano: A high plain.
amancebamiento: Living together as a couple without being married.
apercibimiento: A formal warning issued to royal officials in the name of
the king.
arbitrio: Good judgment.
asesor: A legal advisor.
atole: Sweetened corn gruel.
audiencia: An appellate court.
azoguero: A silver refinery owner.
barangay: A local community in the Philippines.

bodega: A storage cellar.
215
216 Glossary
cabildo: A municipal council.

cachaça: Brazilian rum.
caciqué: An ethnic lord.
capataz: A cutting-house boss.
capa y espada: The military; literally, “cloak and sword.” Refers to court
and council functionaries who were not lawyers by trade.
carta de pago: A receipt.
cédula: A decree.
censo: A mortgage that paid a fixed annuity to a religious institution.
chaki: A bridge (Inca).
chasqui: A mail carrier or other messenger (chaski in Inca).
cobrador: A collector (of debts or taxes).
comisario: A deputy.
comisión de tierras: A commission to evaluate the status of unclaimed
land.
composicione: A monetary fine.
consulado: A merchants’ guild.
contador: An accountant.
corregidor: A Spanish provincial administrator; virtually the same as an
alcalde mayor by 1600.
corregimiento: A local magistracy.
correo: The postal service.
correo mayor: A chief postmaster.
corruptela: Corruption.
cospel: A coin blank, or planchet.
culpado: A guilty person.
culpa grave: Serious guilt; gross negligence.
descaminho: Diversion.
descargo: Defense.
despicador: One who removes sharp edges in metalwork.
dicha común: Ordinary people.
doncella: An adolescent girl.
encomendero: The Spanish holder of a grant to receive tribute from

indigenous communities.
encomienda: A grant to receive tribute from indigenous communities.
ensayador: A royal assayer.
escribano: A scribe.
Glossary 217
escribano receptor: A notary.

estrupo: Nonconsensual sex; includes sex with an adolescent as well as
rape.
falsedad: Forgery.
fiscal: The Crown attorney; usually part of the audiencia, but also part of
the Council of the Indies and the House of Trade (Casa de la
Contratación).
fuero: Jurisdiction.
fuero eclesiástico: A privilege that shielded priests from being tried in
secular courts.
fuero real: A royal charter.
fundidor mayor: A chief smelter.
garita: An inspection station.

género de China: An Asian commodity.
gracia particular: A special gift.
gran merced: A great honor.
hornaza: A cutting house; a coin-blank workshop.
huido: A runaway.
huipil: A Native embroidered blouse or shift.
indios: Indians.
ingenio: A sugar refinery.
juez: A judge.
juez de arribadas: A judge of illegally arriving ships.
juez de Indias: A judge who supervises overseas trade.
juicio verbal: An oral judicial hearing.
junta de hacienda: A meeting to resolve matters of the treasury.
letrado: University-educated; the only kind of people eligible to hold

certain kinds of positions, such as judgeships.
licenciado: The holder of a higher university degree.
mal gobierno: Bad governance.

mal tratamiento: Mistreatment.
mandador: A floor boss in a workshop.
maremoto: A tsunami.
martillador: A hammerer in metalwork.
mercader de plata: A silver merchant.
218 Glossary
mirador: An examiner in metalwork.

mita: A system of compulsory Indian rotational labor; it drew a fixed
number of families from each community every year and assigned them
as laborers to Spanish employers for a low fixed wage (mit’a in Inca).
moneda negra: Black money.
montañés: A resident of the mountainous region north of the city of
Burgos in Spain.
moyador: A shaper in metalwork.
mozo: A youth.
muchacho: An adolescent boy.
ñan: A road (Inca).

novedad: An innovative practice.
novohispano: An inhabitant of New Spain.
obraje: A workshop.
obrero franco: A free worker.
oficial de autos: A chief clerk.
oidor: A senior magistrate; handled both civil and criminal suits, except in
Mexico and Lima, where he dealt only with civil matters.
padrino: A godfather.
pancada: A wholesale bargaining practice to establish prices.
paniaguado: A client.
parcialidad: A neighborhood.
parecer: An opinion.
patacón: A peso of eight reals; also known as peso de a ocho, “piece of
eight.”
permiso: The total amount of permitted goods.
perulero: An itinerant merchant from Peru.
peso de oro: A peso of gold.
pesquisa: An investigation of a specific instance of misconduct by an
official; similar to a visita but more limited.
picador: A trimmer in metalwork.
pícaro: A mischievous person.
pieza: Lading space.
piña: Literally, “pinecone”; an untaxed ingot weighing thirty or forty
pounds.
poblanos: The people of Puebla.
Glossary 219
poderosos: A powerful elite.

procurador: An agent of the appellate court.
procurador proprietario: An agent of the appellate court who carried and
collected papers.
provisor: A cathedral chapter judge.
prueba: Evidence.
público y notorio: Common knowledge.
qollqa: A state storehouse (Inca).

querella: A complaint.
quinto real: A fee of one-fifth.
quipu: Knotted string records; multiple cotton or wool strings hung from a
primary string with knots that conveyed quantitative information such
as population figures and inventories of goods (khipu in Inca).
quipucamayo: A quipu-keeper.
racionero: A cathedral prebendary.

radicado: An outsider who became deeply connected with the locals.
real cédula: A royal order or communication.
reducción: An Indian village or town founded by Spanish authorities; the
act of resettlement itself. The term was used in the Andes; in Mexico and
Central America the equivalent was congregación.
reducir: To reduce.
registro: An inventory.
relator: A lawyer for an appellate court or the Council of the Indies who
produced summaries of documents and legal cases for the magistrates.
residencia: A judicial review of an outgoing officeholder (even one who had
died in office); a standard inquiry meant to verify whether a royal
minister had served faithfully and merited promotion, which was
dependent on a positive assessment.
revista: A review.
rieles: Flat ingots.
soborno: Bribery.
tachados: Marked.
tallador: A sizer in metalwork.
tambo: A roadside inn for travelers (tamp’u in Inca).
taza para chocolate: A cup for chocolate.
220 Glossary
terço: An infantry unit.

tianguiz: A market.
título e instrucción: A commission; the title to an administrative office
accompanied by instructions on how to carry out that office.
tlatoani: A hereditary dynastic ruler; pl., tlatoque.
tlatocatlacamecayotl: Proper royal lineage.
tocinería: A butcher shop that sells pigs and pork products.
trampas de China: Fraud in the trade with China.
traza: The Spanish sector of a city.
vellón: Debased copper coinage.

vicario general: A vicar general.
visita: The special investigation (or inspection) of one or more sitting
officeholders, as well as the report produced from that investigation. It
was usually motivated by reports of wrongdoing sent to Spain and could
be the investigation of a specific royal official, an entire institution, or
even a kingdom. The Crown sent investigators, or inspectors, to
dioceses, courts, and councils to investigate charges of corruption, audit
fiscal accounts, and compile reports. In Peru there were frequent visitas
to Indian communities to compile a census, judge disputes, recommend
tribute levels, and often resettle populations into new villages.
visita general: The special investigation of an institution or a region.
visita particular: The special investigation of one officeholder.
visitador: An investigator or inspector. He was normally higher in status
than the official he was investigating, and he usually had the authority
to suspend the official and give out preliminary sanctions or
punishments.
yanacona: A Native dependent of a Spaniard.

Contributors
William F. Connell is an associate professor and the chairman of the Depart-

ment of History at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Vir-
ginia. He is the author of numerous articles on colonial Mexico, among them
“‘Because I Was Drunk and the Devil Had Tricked Me’: Pulque, Pulquerías
and Violence in the Mexico City Uprising of 1692,” which appeared in the
Colonial Latin American Historical Review in 2005. The University of Okla-
homa Press published his book After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and
Self-Government in Mexico City, 1554–1730. Connell received a grant from the
J. William Fulbright Program to conduct research in Mexico. He can be
reached at wconnell@cnu.edu.
Marc Eagle is an associate professor of history and a codirector of the Latin

American Studies program at Western Kentucky University in Bowling
Green. His main research interest is the intersection of colonial society and
administration in the Caribbean from 1600 to 1640. His most recent articles
are “Chasing the Avença: An Investigation of Illicit Slave Trading in Santo
Domingo at the End of the Portuguese Asiento Period” in Slavery and Aboli-
tion (2014) and “Restoring Spanish Hispaniola, the First of the Indies: Local
Advocacy and Transatlantic Arbitrismo in the Late Seventeenth Century” in
the Colonial Latin American Review (2014). Eagle is currently working on a
comprehensive overview of the early slave trade to Spanish America, between
1500 and 1640, in collaboration with David Wheat. He can be reached at
marc.eagle@wku.edu.
Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso teaches Latin American history in the Depart-

ment of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies at the University
of Manchester in England. He is interested in the reforms of the early
eighteenth-century Spanish empire, and in particular the court politics; local
governance; social, familial, and patron-client networks; and the various
221
222 Contributors
roles played by military officers in defending the Spanish Empire and bind-
ing it together. With Enrique Florescano, Eissa-Barroso coauthored the Atlas
Histórico de México (2008), and with Ainara Vázquez Varela he coauthored
Early Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era (1700–
1759) (2013). He can be reached at francisco.eissabarroso@manchester.ac.uk.
Catherine Tracy Goode is an independent research advisor residing in Mex-

ico City. She graduated from the University of Arizona with a dissertation
entitled “Power in the Peripheries: Family Business and the Global Reach of
the 18th-Century Spanish Empire” (2012), in which she investigated the cen-
tral role of New Spain (Mexico) in the world economy of the early modern
period. She has presented academic papers at the American Historical Asso-
ciation, the Conference on Latin American History, and the Rocky Moun-
tain Council on Latin American Studies, among others. Her article “The
Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire” will be published by Oxford Uni-
versity Press as part of the volume Borderlands of the Iberian World: Environ-
ments, Histories, Cultures, a collaborative project with the Mexico Research
Network, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and UAM (Uni-
versidad Autónoma Metropolitana) Azcapotzalco. Goode has experience
working in archives in Spain, the United States, the Philippines, and Mexico,
specializing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century palaeography. She can
be reached at researchinthedf@gmail.com.
Kris Lane holds the France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American
History at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he directs the graduate
program. Lane’s books include Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition
(2002), Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires
(2010), and (with Matthew Restall) Latin America in Colonial Times (2011).
Lane also edits the journal Colonial Latin American Review. His current
project, based in Bolivia, traces the history of the great Potosí mint fraud of
1649 and its global consequences. He can be reached at klane1@tulane.edu.
Jeremy Ravi Mumford is a lecturer in history at Brown University in Provi-

dence, Rhode Island, and is the author of Vertical Empire: The General Reset-
tlement of the Indians in the Colonial Andes (2012). His current research is on
incest and monarchy in Spain and Peru. He can be reached at jeremy_
mumford@brown.edu.
Contributors 223
Fabrício Prado is an assistant professor of history at the College of William

and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he teaches classes on colonial
Latin America and the Atlantic world. He is the author of ColÔnia do Sacra-
mento: O extremo sul da América portuguesa (2002) and Edge of Empire:
Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Rio de la Plata (2015). Prado’s
research interests focus on cross-border dynamics, social networks, com-
merce, contraband trade, corruption, and the social and economic history of
the Southern Cone of Latin America. He can be reached at fpprado@wm.edu.
Frances L. Ramos received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin
in 2005 and is an associate professor of history at the University of South
Florida, Tampa, where she has worked since 2007. In her awarding-winning
book Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla (2012), she explored the
variegated ways in which elaborate public rituals served to shape identity and
forge political relations in New Spain’s “second city” in the eighteenth cen-
tury. She has published in the journals Relaciones: Estudios de historia y
sociedad, Historia Mexicana, and the Americas, as well as in numerous com-
pilations in both Spanish and English. Her work has been funded by the
Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Ramos is currently working on a
cultural history of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713) in New
Spain. She can be reached at framos@usf.edu.
Christoph Rosenmüller is a professor of Latin American history at Middle

Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. His publications include the
books Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial
Mexico (2008) and (with Stephan Ruderer) “Dádivas, dones, dineros”: La
nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el imperio español a
la modernidad (2016). He has published in the Hispanic American Historical
Review, the Latin American Research Review, and the Estudios de Historia
Novohispana. In 2014–2015 a Fulbright García-Robles Fellowship supported
his research at the Colegio de México in Mexico City. Rosenmüller is cur-
rently a fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History in Frankfurt,
Germany. He can be reached at rosenmul@mtsu.edu.
Index
Page numbers in italic text indicate illustrations.
Acapulco, 171–88 Castro Hinojosa, Pedro de, 13–27

administration and the construction of Cereceda, Alonso de, 87, 100–101
statehood in the colonies, 15–17, 26, Charles II, 133, 135, 155, 156
54, 63–80, 173; distance as a problem Church-Crown relationship, 34–35, 151,
for, 54, 65, 154, 173 153–54, 160, 162, 163–64, 165
Aguilar: family, 69, 70, 75, 78–79, 80; clergy, illicit activities of the, 151–65
Felipe de, 63–64, 71, 74, 78, 79; Juan coinage, 33–56, 205
de, Jr., 71, 73, 74, 76, 78; Juan de, Sr., Colônia do Sacramento, 198–212
69, 74 colonial institutions: alcaldes, 76, 111,
Alemán, Mateo, 37–38 152–65, 174; audiencia, 33, 40, 51, 63,
appointment of colonial officials, 4, 18, 65, 71–72, 76, 87, 96, 97, 100, 111, 120,
63, 69–70, 75, 114, 133–35, 141–46 152, 161; cabildo, 74; Casa Real de la
Moneda, 43, 46–47; corregidores, 68;
Bahia, 203 fiscales, 90, 99; General Indian
Bentura, Juan, 37 Court, 72; governors, 63–80; mail
Botelho de Lacerda, Manuel, 209–10 system, 17; oidores, 90–97; residen-
Bourbon dynasty, 145, 153, 155 cia, 23, 68, 88–89, 98, 103; Tribunal
Brazil, 197–212 da Relação, 203, 210; visita, 13, 34–56,
bribery, 40, 41, 67, 93, 94, 96, 114–16, 87–103, 111–25
118–19, 200, 208–11 complaints about and accusations of
British activities in the Americas, 135, illicit activities, 44, 53, 63–64,
157, 208, 211 71, 73–76, 95, 97, 98, 114, 134,
Buenos Aires, 206, 207, 210 138, 140, 146, 151, 152, 208, 209,
bureaucracy, commercial activities of 210
the, 68, 92, 94–95, 136, 171–91, 200, Congo, Pedro, 33, 35–36
209–11 connections, personal: influence traf-
ficking, 80, 90, 93, 94–95, 117, 124,
Caballero, Andrés de, 94 158, 181–87, 210; nepotism, 4, 98, 115,
Castelfuerte, Marquis of, 144, 145 116, 124, 156. See also appointment of
Castelldosrius, Marquis of, 133–41 colonial officials
225
226 Index
corruption: contemporary perception of, García de Guesca, Diego, 113, 117

2–5, 25, 56, 64, 87–88, 90, 98, 101–3, 111, García de Guesca, José, 113, 114
119, 135, 137, 142–43, 153, 155, 190; defini- Garzarón Vidarte, Francisco, 111–12,
tion of, 1–2, 6, 52, 53, 55, 66–67, 102; 114–16, 118–25
modern, 1–2, 66, 88; metropolitan tol- gift giving, 117–19, 183, 200
erance for, 136, 137, 143–45, 173, 204, 212 Gómez de la Rocha, Francisco, 37, 39,
Cortés, Hernando, 65, 66 41, 50, 51
Cos y Cevallos, Juan Antonio de, 113–17,
128n27 Habsburg dynasty, 153, 155, 190
Cruz y Guerrero, Bernardino Antonio Herzog, Tamar, 3, 89, 100
de la, 63–64 Huarochirí, 18
Huejotzingo, 113, 116–17, 124; map of the
debasement, 33–56 province of, 114
demography, 19 Hurtado, Alonso, 93
documents, official, 13–14, 21, 24–25, 50,
73, 88, 112, 115, 120 indigenous communities: Andean,
Dutch activities in the Americas, 94, 15–17, 18–20, 26, 44; Mesoamerican,
100, 135, 211 63–80
infrastructure, 13, 15; markets, 69; ports,
economy: colonial, 38–43, 56, 172, 174– 95, 176, 181, 200; roads, 13, 15, 113, 182,
75, 177, 182, 197–98, 204; copper, 39, 197
45, 48; gold, 203; silver, 38–40, 43, 48,
49, 51, 174–75, 176, 179, 189, 209; Jáuregui y Barcena, Antonio de, 159,
Spanish, 34, 45, 134, 177–78; world, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164
43–44, 45–46, 174–76, 179, 190 Jáuregui y Barcena, Juan de, 159, 161
election fraud, 63, 71–72, 74 Jáuregui y Barcena, Nicolás de, 159
Enríquez de Almanza, Martín, 14, 17, Jáuregui y Barcena, Pedro de, 159
21–22 justice administration, 122–23
excommunication, 160, 162 justice, criminal, 113, 124
extortion, 23, 72, 77, 79, 93, 98, 114; sex-
ual, 91, 92, 96, 117–18, 122, 139, 208 law enforcement, selective, 24, 54, 100,
117, 118, 154, 173, 177, 188, 198, 199,
Ferdinand VI, 144 203–4, 205, 209, 210, 211, 212
forced labor, 77, 78, 79 La Monclova, Count of, 135, 137, 140
forgery, 13–27, 95, 115–16, 122 laws and legal codes, 3–4, 24, 49, 53, 112,
fraud, 33–56, 180, 183, 184–85, 187 115, 118–19, 125, 136–37, 151, 160
fuero eclesiático, 151, 152, 154, 158, 160, lawsuits and trials, 22–23, 25, 35–38,
162, 165 40–41, 72, 73, 76, 112, 115, 119; wit-
nesses, 120–21
Gallo de Pardiñas: family, 171, 183, 185, legitimacy of elected officials, 70
187; Juan Eusebio, 183, 184; Miguel, Lerma, Duke of, 53, 54
174, 181, 183, 187, 189 Lima, 17, 21, 22, 138–39, 140
Index 227
Linares, Duke of, 141 Osorio, Antonio, 91–92

Lobo Botelho, Constantino, 210
Lobo Botelho, Pedro, 210 Pardiñas Villar de Francos, Juan Isidro
local interests and customs, 20, 39, de, 174
50–51, 56, 98, 102, 121, 140, 153, 154, Paria, province and city of, 13, 18–23
156, 157, 158, 165, 188, 209 Parra de Meneses, Juan, 93, 95
López de Humara, Francisco, 151, 158 patronage, 67, 79, 93, 102
López de Legazpi, Miguel, 176 Pérez, Miguel, 113–17
Louis XIV, 133–37, 141, 142 Peru, 13–27, 33–56, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, 142
Phelan, John, 67
Manila, 171, 174–84, 188 Philip III, 4, 45, 53
Marcin, Count of, 134–35 Philip IV, 34, 45, 53
Martínez de Amileta, Andrés, 96 Philip V, 111, 112, 121, 133, 141–45, 155, 159,
Mejía de Villalobos, Gonzalo, 91–92, 96 160
Mendoza, Antonio de, 66 political economy, 23, 26, 54, 133–46,
Meneses, Simón de, 96–97 190–91, 204; socioeconomic function
mercantilism, 177, 180, 182, 183, 197, 200, of illegal activities, 54, 55–56, 67, 198,
205, 206, 209 202, 206
metropolitan control of prosecution, 34, Portuguese activities in the Americas,
45, 51, 101, 103, 119–20, 121, 124, 141, 197–212
157, 160, 200, 202, 203, 211 Potosí, 33–56
metropolitan institutions: Archive of pre-Hispanic institutions: continuity in
the Indies, 112; Council of Castile, the colonial administration, 15–17,
155; Council of the Indies, 50, 53, 64–66; mita, 15–16, 19, 26, 29n24, 44
68, 87–101 passim, 119–25 passim, prosecution, 21–24, 33, 35–43, 46, 54, 68,
142, 145, 151, 152, 157, 178; House of 78, 87–89, 90–101, 112, 113, 115–16, 119,
Trade, 190; Junta de Fraudes, 155; 123–25, 187, 199, 200, 203, 206, 209;
Junta de Resguardo de las Rentas, and resulting punishment, 15, 23, 25,
155; Overseas Council, 202, 203, 39–42, 48, 49, 50, 53, 68, 79, 91–101,
208 107n45, 111, 113, 117, 119, 121, 122, 158,
Mexico City, 63–80, 111–25, 156, 186 189, 206. See also lawsuits and trials
mining, 38–39, 44, 54, 197 Puebla, city and province of, 151–65
Montaño, Juan, 74–76
Quispe Ninavilca, Sebastián, 18,
Nestares Marín, Francisco de, 33–56 28–29n20
New Spain, 63–80, 111–25, 135, 141, 178,
183, 188 Ramírez de Arrellano, Felipe, 40–43, 51,
Nogales Dávila, Pedro, 151, 152, 159, 160 52
reforms, administrative, 16–17, 27, 35,
Olivares, Count-Duke of, 52, 54, 155 141–46, 153, 155–56, 165
Oms y de Santa Pau, Manuel de. See regional origin of colonial elites, 46, 52,
Castelldosrius, Marquis of 116, 140
228 Index
remuneration of colonial officials, 68, social background of colonial officials,

72, 92, 118, 137, 139, 142, 173 5–6, 34, 53, 74, 75, 98, 99, 100, 112, 116,
reputation and conduct, 74, 91–96, 120, 135, 137–38, 143, 171
134, 138–39, 146, 164 social position in legal proceedings,
resettlement, forced, 14, 16, 18–20, 91 40–41, 99, 100
Rio de Janeiro, 200, 204, 207, 209 subcontracting of state functions, 43,
Rio de la Plata, 197–212; regional map of 52, 70
the, 199
Rodríguez de Ledesma: Felipe, 164; taxation and tax evasion, 16, 49, 63–64,
Pedro, 158, 160, 161 68, 69–70, 72, 76, 77, 152–58, 160, 181,
Romero, Joseph, 71, 76, 80 183, 187, 189, 198, 200, 202, 203, 207;
alcabala, 152, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163,
Sáenz de Morquecho, Pedro, 97 164
Salvatierra, Count of, 34 threats against law enforcement agents
Sánchez Morcillo, Pedro, 113–20, 122–25 and officials, 39, 50, 156
Sánchez Romero, Fabián, 36, 37 Tlaxcala, 114, 116, 122
San Juan de Santa Cruz: family, 181, 185, Toledo, Francisco de, 14, 16, 17, 43, 47, 49
187; Francisco, 171, 183, 186; Manuel, torture, 96, 97
171, 174, 183, 184, 186 trade, 44, 174–77, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184,
Santo Buono, Prince of, 142 188, 190, 197–98, 200, 204–5, 206,
Santo Domingo, 87–103 207, 212
simony, 4, 24, 43, 52, 53, 64, 135, 137, 138,
141, 173 Valero, Marquis of, 121
slavery, 35–38, 40, 47, 52, 56, 177, 200, Veytia y Linaje, Juan Joseph de, 152–65
203, 207, 208
smuggling, 94–95, 97, 103, 138, 157, 177, war: of the Spanish Succession, 133, 138,
181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 197–212 157, 159; Spanish-Portuguese, 205, 211

Christoph Rosenmüller - Corruption in The Iberian Empires - Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks (2017, University of New Mexico Press)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Christoph Rosenmüller - Corruption in The Iberian Empires - Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks (2017, University of New Mexico Press)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Corruption in the

univ ersit y of ne w me x ico press | a l buquerque

Names: Rosenmüller, Christoph, 1969– editor of compilation.

Cover illustration of coins from Acclaim Images

fellowship allowed me to wrap up the project more quickly. In addition,

Corruption, Abuse, and

C orruption today is one of the most important challenges to democracy

Drawing on a robust definition, historians argued years ago that corruption

corrup tion in the empire

important in some way.8 Contemporaries differed in their views on justice,

Because of the distinction between corruption and other excesses, the

makers, and those who serve in mechanical offices as well as . . . shepherds”

Americas. These inhabitants often had disparate conceptions of justice and

the contributors and their approaches

published as “Die historische Erscheinung der Korruption, in ihrem

A History of Unbound Graft in Peru (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center

Forgery and Tambos

I n October or November 1581, Pedro de Castro Hinojosa left Lima, Peru,

kingdoms of Peru”—a vague phrase that potentially referred to the entire

Castro never carried out a viceroyalty-wide visita, or anything close to it. He

resembling descriptions of colonial reducciones. Among the chief purposes

position in Paria.19 In Huarochirí, which was one of the main stages

subjects—five thousand Indians throughout the Cochabamba valley had

consolidate his position by employing representatives in Spain to obtain a

appointment, Enríquez had decided to expand its scope.40 If a viceroy made

original rewritten in a seemingly surreptitious manner, then brazenly dis-

Waldemar Espinoza Soriano, “El alcalde mayor indígena en el virreinato del

testimony of Simon [?] Gutierrez, corregidor de Vilcas, f. 51v; testimony of

sphere. Jennine Hurl-Eamon, “The Westminster Impostors: Impersonating Law

From Corrupt to Criminal

Toda esta vida es hurtar, All this life is to steal,

In August 1650 Pedro Congo, a twenty-three-year-old mint worker in the

Despite a hard-earned reputation as good money, Potosí’s coins had been

Pedro Congo then testified that three of these men—Mateo Alemán,

given a total of twelve or fourteen pesos “to distribute among themselves” in

And the last item, a baroque proverb:

the big picture

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Potosí in the making of the modern

and metropolitan merchant howls about debasement provoked a royal reac-

The Potosí mint—like the peninsular Castilian mints at Seville, Segovia,

According to the slave testimonies, there were variations on the debase-

As far as we know, only two prominent men were executed in Potosí as a

Potosí’s wealthiest silver broker of the 1640s, the Extremaduran Francisco

investigation, and no particular group of Basques, either merchants or mine

In other words, these men’s crimes grew in scale as Potosí’s seventeenth-

1. Francisco de Quevedo, El Parnaso español y musas castellanas (Madrid: Pablo de

3. Ernesto Schäfer, El Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias: Su historia, orga-

La Real Casa de la Moneda de Granada (Granada: Archivo de la Real Chancillería,

novohispano: Un tercer intento de valoración,” E-Spania 16 (December 2013),

Clients, Patrons, and Tribute

A group of electors (eligible voters) from the four neighborhoods

themselves and to intimidate political challengers. Implicitly the petitioners

out the day-to-day operations of governance: tribute collection, the regula-

corruption relevant in Mexico Tenochtitlan, it seems relevant to define this

profound incentive to subsidize their earnings illicitly. Throughout the sev-

available to corregidores. Members of the Aguilar family regularly served as

In the absence of direct evidence to the contrary, asserting that governors

brothers manipulated the electorate to ensure consistent electoral victory

What does exist, however, is the alleged connection to the audiencia,

Above all, however, the viceregal government’s interest in the collection of

patriarch of the political family, who was elected in Mexico Tenochtitlan in

19. Alan Knight, “Corruption in Twentieth Century Mexico,” in Political Corruption,

Portraits of Bad Officials

brothers maintained and expanded their commercial interests as merchant-