TONGUES AFLAME AND SWORDS OF FIRE: THE FOUNDING OF THE JESUIT

REDUCTIONS IN THE RIVER PLATE BASIN AND THE SECURITY OF THE MISSION

FRONTIER UNDER SPANISH HEGEMONIC DECLINE (1607-1639)

by

JUSTIN MICHAEL HEATH

(Under the Direction of BENJAMIN EHLERS)

ABSTRACT

The Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay have long been portrayed as remote intentional communities directed under the exclusive pastoral guidance of the Jesuit missionaries. The early accounts of these missions, however, show that this alleged segregation between these indigenous communities and the surrounding colonial environment belies the actual degree of cooperation between the missionaries and colonial authorities on either side of the Atlantic.

Such distinctions – often embellished decades after the fact - reflect a shift in prevailing attitudes during the founding years of the Jesuit Reductions. This paper examines the dynamics of interdependency and opposition between the Society of Jesus and the nearby Spanish garrison towns, which carried out the joint pacification of the borderlands. The author argues that the armed use of force as a privilege reserved for the King’s faithful vassals - that transcended racial categories in this instance - proved indispensable to the viability of the Jesuit enterprise when local prospects deteriorated precipitously along the borderlands of Brazil and Spanish America.

INDEX WORDS: Jesuits, Society of Jesus, Jesuit Reductions, Guarani, Paraguay, Río de la Plata, Spanish Imperialism, Empire, Encomienda, Laws of the Indies, Evangelization, Spanish Missions, Frontier, Borderlands, Spanish

Colonialism, Spanish Habsburgs, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Spiritual Conquest, Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz, Spiritual Conquest, Religious Conversion, Christianization, Church and State, Bandeirantes, Indigenous Armament.

TONGUES AFLAME AND SWORDS OF FIRE: THE FOUNDING OF THE JESUIT

REDUCTIONS IN THE RIVER PLATE BASIN AND THE SECURITY OF THE MISSION

FRONTIER UNDER SPANISH HEGEMONIC DECLINE (1607-1639)

by

JUSTIN MICHAEL HEATH

B.A., University of Georgia, 2008

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF ARTS

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2013

© 2013

Justin Michael Heath

All Rights Reserved

TONGUES AFLAME AND SWORDS OF FIRE: THE FOUNDING OF THE JESUIT

REDUCTIONS IN THE RIVER PLATE BASIN AND THE SECURITY OF THE MISSION

FRONTIER DURING SPANISH HEGEMONIC DECLINE (1607-1639)

by

JUSTIN MICHAEL HEATH

Major Professor: Benjamin Ehlers

Committee: Jennifer L. Palmer Thomas L. Whigham

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2013

DEDICATION

This is dedicated to my family. Without the love and support of my parents, Lin and

Patricia, and that of my siblings, Sarah and John, I would truly be lost. Thank you for being there for me when I needed you most.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Ehlers, Dr. Palmer, and Dr. Whigham for their feedback and assistance during this project. I hope that someday I will be able to build upon my work and to learn from these first steps as a scholar. To each of them, I am indebted.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v

CHAPTER

1 BACKGROUND ...... 1

Introduction ...... 1

Literature Review...... 15

2 THE POSTURES OF EMPIRE ...... 30

Spain’s Apostolic Commission and the Problem of Administration ...... 30

The King and His Council ...... 32

The Presence of an Absent Ruler: The Presentation of Justice and Authority in

Spanish America ...... 40

A Watershed Moment: The New Laws (1542) and the Limited Reach of Royal

Authority ...... 50

Counterpoint in the Colonies: An Administrator’s Apologia ...... 54

Interests in Equilibrium: The Modus Operandi of the Mission Borderlands ...... 63

3 THE POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS CONVERSION IN THE PLATE

BORDERLANDS ...... 76

Creative (Dis)agreement in the Plate Frontier ...... 76

Only God Can Make Something from Nothing: Colonial Interdependencies and

Limitations for Success in the Mission Frontier ...... 83

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Sheepfolds of a “Lost Arcadia”: the Construction of the Reductions in Colonial

Paraguay ...... 91

The Sanctioned Use of Force in the Borderlands ...... 97

A Conquest without Arms? ...... 104

4 WAGING THE SPIRITUAL CONQUEST ...... 111

A Supplicant’s Tale...... 111

A Worldly Yet Blessed Endeavor ...... 115

The Question of Labor and Tribute Extraction in Spanish Colonial Society ...... 127

Sanctification and Sacred Space in the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay ...... 140

Narratives of Antipathy and Confrontation ...... 148

5 CONCLUSION ...... 155

REFERENCES ...... 164

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CHAPTER 1

BACKGROUND

Introduction

The power struggles that left the New World in disarray for the greater part of the sixteenth century motivated Philip II (r. 1556-1598) to secure his royal patrimony and consolidate his authority over Spain’s possessions in the Western Hemisphere. As heirs to the largest dominion that Latin Christendom had ever witnessed up to its final days, Philip and his

Habsburg descendants sought to redeem the existing imperial order in the wake of the Catholic

World’s renewed sense of spiritual purpose and authority that gradually coalesced toward the final session of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). The Spanish Habsburgs shared the Tridentine

Church's vision of world redemption, and the spiritual charge that they inherited from the

Catholic Kings became central to legitimizing their claims in the New World at a moment when the Iberian title to the Americas was being contested by the Protestant North.

At the limits of the Spanish Empire, where the royal authority of the Habsburgs was nominally recognized but routinely ignored, Philip sought to legitimize his power and curtail the rampant abuses and perceived unruliness of his colonial subjects. Mindful of the problems that plagued colonial society during his father's reign, Philip sought to instill discipline in his vassals by installing greater measures of accountability and transparency in an effort to better organize imperial administration, indigenous pacification, and Christianization along the borderlands of

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his empire.1 Unsurprisingly, Philip relied upon the resourcefulness of an invigorated Post-

Tridentine Catholic Church and its attendant religious orders to accomplish these ends. By the same token, the missionaries who ventured the frontier of the Spanish Empire relied upon the continued support of the Habsburg Monarchs who served as the patrons of the “Spiritual

Conquest” in the Americas. At the same time, the conquistador, the encomendero, or the poblero as he was variously called in the borderlands, was to guarantee the safety of these missionaries and defend the territorial integrity of the Sovereign’s domains.

As the temporal counterpart of the “Spirit of the Catholic Reformation”, the Spanish

Crown sought to fulfill the providential mission imparted to the Catholic Kings by the Papacy that legitimized the Spanish presence in the New World.2 At a time when Spain’s claim to the

Americas was contested by the ascendant Protestant powers of the Atlantic, the projection of this prevailing image of a divinely-appointed apostolic undertaking that would bring light to the benighted reaches of the Empire became a dominant feature in the performance of “just rule” that underlay monarchical power.3

The introduction of the Society of Jesus into the New World during the first decade of

Philip II's reign was part and parcel to the King’s drive to reorganize his patrimony and to sanctify his reach across the Atlantic World. The formation of the reductions, the most famous of which abutted the winding rivers of the Río de la Plata basin, sought to incorporate the semi-

1 Lyman, Tyler S., editor. Spanish Laws Concerning Discoveries, Pacifications, and Settlements among the Indians: with an Introduction and the First English translation of the New Ordinances of Philip II, July 1573, and of Book IV from the Recopilación de Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias relating to these Subjects (Salt Lake City: American West Center, University of Utah, 1980). 2 Evennett, H.O., The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1968). This interesting book is based upon a series of lectures that Evennett held in Oxford. In this book, the author discusses the Spanish character of the Society of Jesus, alluding to the fact that the order’s founder, Inigo de Loyola (b. 1491), emerged in the embers of the Reconquista. 3 The Spanish intellectual world routinely defended the Crown’s presence in the New World well into the 17th century particularly in response to the criticisms of Protestant apologists. This motivated the publication of Juan de Solórzano y Pereyra’s Politica Indiana in 1648.

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nomadic peoples into the Christian fold where they could better integrate these indigenous converts into the existing colonial order.

For the most part, the reductions' early history has often been neglected by historians in preference to the controversies that emerged in the eighteenth century. While the sources from the Bourbon period are indeed more plentiful, a fuller account of the early history of the reductions during the first half of the seventeenth century needs to be written so that historians may better approximate the precise moment in the reductions’ history when the Jesuits first lost confidence in the colonial order. With few exceptions, the story of the reductions’ founding has remained the sole concern of Jesuit biographers who appear more interested in eulogizing the deeds of a select handful of Jesuit missionaries than in elucidating the broader connections between the missionary frontier and the dynamic shifts in the surrounding colonial order.4

Meanwhile, the economic activities of the Jesuits, which promoted growth and relative prosperity for well over a century, have been covered by several prominent historians of the

Spanish-speaking world.5 The evolving landscape these scholars paint is richly detailed: gradually, the economic development of the reductions invoked the envy of local elites and planted seeds of distrust among Bourbon officials who sought to implement reforms of their own design.6 This holds true in the Habsburg period when the reductions experienced a steady

4 The historical narratives available to English-speaking audiences include Clement J. McNaspy’s Conquistador without a Sword: The Life of Roque Gonzalez (1984), Philip Caraman’s The Lost Paradise: The Jesuit Republic in South America (1976), and Frederick J. Reiter’s They Built Utopia: The Jesuit Missions in Paraguay 1610 -1768 (1995). Among English-speaking academic historians, the Jesuit Reductions has been a relatively understudied topic. Apart from Barbara Ganson’s The Guarani under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata (2003), no serious academic research has investigated the Jesuit Reductions – particularly during the formative years of these frontier missions. 5 Great works of a decidedly economic focus include Guillermo Furlong Cardiff’s Misiones y sus pueblos de Guaraníes (1962) and Rafael Carbonell de Masy’s Estrategias De Desarrollo Rural En Los Pueblos Guaraníes, 1609-1767 (1992). 6 This was intensified by the Jesuits’ commitment to the segregationist policies that sought to limit the influences of the nearby colonial order. In the Jesuit accounts, this colonial dualism that they adamantly defended was, for the most part, an aspiration of the Jesuit fathers that they did not hope to achieve in absolute terms. As Magnus M rner

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demographic expansion during the last half of the seventeenth century.7 Each of the various historical actors involved, ranging from the governor to the bishop, from the colonial towns and local cabildos to the Jesuit missionaries and their provincials, maintained their own strategic vision of how best to manage these new communities.8

While the Jesuit missionaries did encounter resistance in the borderlands and suffered untold adversities alongside their prospective converts, the Jesuit reductions also enjoyed ample support from the local authorities during the founding years of these new communities. The dependence of the Jesuits on other historical actors on both sides of the Atlantic was not simply a question of material endowments, however. The latent threat posed by the Spanish colonists, who possessed a clear military advantage in terms of weaponry and organization, greatly facilitated the reduction of the indigenous Guarani who actively sought the asylum promised by the Jesuit missionaries. While the Jesuits were outspoken critics of the encomenderos even from the beginning, the Jesuit missionaries remained fully cognizant of the providential partnership between the armed vassals of the Spanish Crown and the missionary enterprise. During the founding years of the Jesuit Reductions, the missionaries remained fully compliant with the

Habsburg vision of pacification along the borderlands of the Spanish Empire, an approach to colonial expansion that prioritized the free interchange between converts and missionaries that simultaneously reserved nearby military relief for the unarmed missionaries in the event that amicable relations broke down. Bloodless in theory, this particular approach to pacification was an undeniably coercive practice.

has argued in his influential book La Corona Espanola y Los Foraneos en Los Pueblos de Indios de America (1970), however, the Jesuits did in fact deal with local colonists throughout the history of the reductions. 7 See Barbara Ganson’s The Guarani under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata (2003). 8 More critical surveys of the Reductions’ early history have been provided by cultural historians and anthropologists such as Alberto Armani (1982), Bartomeu Melià (1986), and Robert Lacombe (1993). An interesting account of the process of acculturation within the reductions has been examined by Gerard Gomez in Entre Las Bellas Palabras y las Palabras Sagradas (2006).

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This auspicious set of circumstances that facilitated the rise to the Jesuit reductions soon deteriorated in the decades that followed. The lack of support, the result of an ongoing power struggle between the bishop and the governor already complicated by the resentment of the nearby townsmen, would render the indigenous converts vulnerable to the ravenous slavers lurking from the nearby Brazilian coastline. This became most apparent to the Jesuit fathers following the incursions of the slave-raiding bandeirantes of São Paulo who exerted tremendous pressure upon the eastern reductions of Guairá and forced the indigenous converts to flee from their homes as displaced refugees. With no support from the local pobleros, who proved unwilling to aid the missionaries against this particular threat, the Jesuit fathers decided to sidestep the conventional guidelines for indigenous pacification and directly obtain the munitions that would help fortify these fledgling communities. To obtain these weapons, the Jesuits had no choice but to turn to the Spanish Crown for assistance.

At some point in the embryonic development of these mission communities, the sheep of the fold learned from the wolves of the forest: the transformation of the indigenous as portrayed by the Jesuit fathers from that of childlike and capricious infidels to faithful and God-fearing vassals of the King was a noteworthy shift in the characterization of the Guarani peoples. The

Jesuits depicted their indigenous converts as faithful vassals who could dependably own and operate firearms along the borderland in an effort to better defend themselves and preserve the

King’s patrimony. The armament of the indigenous signaled a new - and extremely controversial - approach to border security in this particular part of the world.

In the minds of their fiercest critics, the Jesuits prided themselves as a self-motivated and self-reliant order.9 For this reason, the Jesuit Reductions have been grossly mischaracterized,

9 Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) in his Lettres Provinciales once claimed that the Jesuits aspired to be the judge of judges, implying that the Society had the audacity to assert themselves as moral legislators for the sole purpose of

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often by their own chroniclers, as disconnected from the wider political affairs of the Atlantic

World. Though the reductions were isolated to some extent by rather imposing geographical barriers, the assumption that the missionaries remained aloof from policymakers or somehow failed to cultivate patron-client relations and political alliances is misguided. From the start, the

Jesuit Reductions remained dependent upon the King’s representatives for material support and protection at a time when colonial society remained openly hostile to their meddling presence following the promulgation of Francisco de Alfaro’s Ordinances in 1611. This latent hostility compounded by the adversities otherwise facing the Jesuit missionaries in the frontier galvanized the efforts of the Jesuit fathers to better safeguard their cherished autonomy. Facing these mounting external pressures, the Jesuit missionaries made a considerable effort to preserve their privileged position as spiritual overseers along the borderlands of the Río de la Plata region. The highly descriptive accounts that the Jesuit fathers circulated among themselves and the courts of

Madrid served an ulterior purpose that should not be overlooked: like any agency of Empire, the

Spanish Jesuits had no choice but to maintain royal favor and justify their operations along the colonial periphery in terms that complemented the monarchy’s vision of just governance. Their success during the years of Habsburg reign was in part determined by the royal patronage that they worked so diligently to maintain over the years. This relationship, so often neglected by those with a more penetrating but geographically-limited focus, needs to be explored.

The scope of the study will critically examine the place of the frontier mission within the broader panorama of the Atlantic Empire under the Spanish Habsburgs from the arrival of the

Jesuits in 1607 up to the first publication of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's "Spiritual Conquest" in

1639. Neither the purely religious nor the purely political or socio-economic dimensions of

justifying their self-serving course of action. The great affront of the Society of Jesus, according to Pascal and his Jansenist sympathizers, was the sin of pride and hypocritical sanctimony.

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reduction life can be taken in isolation of one another. Instead, the shared interests of religious and secular authorities in the joint "pacification" of the indigenous Guarani and nearby peoples must be interpreted holistically, if the experience of the indigenous is to be more faithfully rendered. The distinction between religious conversion and the creation of faithful vassals is difficult to approximate particularly at a point in modern history when secularist distinctions between private belief and political commitment were not even faintly articulated.10

The first chapter of the thesis will trace the evolution of the Spanish Crown's commitment to its official directive: the evangelization of the indigenous peoples of the

Americas. As we shall see, the administration of Spain's overseas territories in the Americas was complicated by the opportunism of Spanish colonists who felt unabashedly entitled to quasi- feudatory arrangements that yielded permanent access to free indigenous labor. Following years of rampant abuse and failed compromises with the conquistadores and their unruly descendants, the Spanish King's spiritual charge was eventually deemed incompatible with existing arrangements between the encomenderos and their indigenous laborers. In the court of his father, Charles V, the young prince assumed a leading role in humbling this rising upstart class of would-be nobles while at the same time reserving a place for them and their descendants in the colonial hierarchy. From the beginning, Philip discerned the incongruence between the day- to-day goings-on of colonial life and the Monarchy’s professed commitment to the liberty and salvation of the American Indian. Recognizing his limitations at an early age, however, the question that had plagued his father, Charles V, had been devolved to the local authorities in the colonies who essentially relieved the King’s conscience on the matter of tribute exaction and indigenous labor organization. At the same time, all future engagements with the independent

10 The freedom of conscience for religious minorities posed a serious problem for Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. The tension between private belief and observable behavior in public life constitute the focus of Perez Zagorin’s book titled Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (1990).

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indigenous groups along the periphery of the Spanish Empire had to be reconsidered in a manner that prioritized the professed spiritual ends of the Spanish Empire. The reductions emerged in the wake of this generational quandary where contending views of the colonial order sought to assert themselves in determining the course of imperial policy-making.11 The armament of the

Jesuit Reductions, a surprising turn of events in light of the long history of indigenous resistance in the Viceroyalty of Peru, was a critical moment because it rendered the role of the encomendero obsolete in this particular region of Spanish America.

The second chapter of the thesis will cover the ministries of Roque Gonzalez de Santa

Cruz (1576-1628) and the other Jesuit martyrs of the first generation of the reductions’ history.

Curiously enough, these missionaries had been invited by local ecclesiastical authorities to fill the deficit of ordained clerics in the region. Attention will be paid to the Jesuits' understanding of their mission and the manner in which they carried out the formation of these frontier missions during the first two decades of their ministries. Facing adversity that they could not possibly resolve on their own, these religious figures relied upon civil authorities and the armed Spanish colonists to achieve their desired ends. This codependent relationship must figure prominently in any account of the early years of the reductions. We shall see that the “Spiritual Conquest”, often celebrated by contemporary Jesuit historians, did in fact incorporate the more profane elements of colonial society to serve a higher purpose.

Covering the decades that followed the deaths of these missionaries, chapter three will focus upon the activities of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1585-1652), the 'Apostle of Paraguay', who worked diligently toward the end of his life to promote his order's enterprise in the Río de la

Plata region. As Montoya’s narrative will clearly show, the enterprise remained vulnerable to the menacing opportunism of an unruly colonial order that lacked the virtues of a justly ordered

11 See Juan de Matienzo’s Gobierno del Peru (1567).

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society. Montoya’s campaign, which lionized the Jesuit Reductions often at the expense of the nearby colonial towns, helped perpetuate a false dichotomy that would help sustain the illusion that the reductions were, in fact, a sequestered microstate of sorts.12 A close reading of his

'Spiritual Conquest' should be informed by the underlying motive of its composition. Montoya, who had been sent to the royal court in Madrid by his own order, argued for the armament of these indigenous communities at a moment in time when such an idea appeared plainly ludicrous to colonial elites given the protracted political resistance of the Andean peoples throughout the

Viceroyalty of Peru.13 This rhetorical feat should be examined in light of the relative success of his petition which sought to harmonize the Jesuits’ missionary enterprise within the broader ideological framework of the seventeenth century Spanish Empire during its years of self- conscious decline. Montoya composed the “Spiritual Conquest” during his sojourn in the imperial capital of Madrid in the years that immediately followed the first of many raids upon the reductions under the Jesuits’ oversight. A critical reading of this relatively understudied source must focus on the motivations of its composition, keeping in mind that the intended audience of these memoirs had the power and the privilege to influence the impending course of colonial affairs in spite of its debilitating senescence in Europe.

The sources that will inform this study include a variety of edited documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those documents dated from the sixteenth century include the reales cedulas issued by the Spanish Crown and the Council of the Indies that evidence this vacillating approach of royal authorities to the question of indigenous labor organization and tribute exaction. Administrative treatises that date from Philip II’s reign, such as Matienzo’s Del

12 See, for instance, Philip Caraman’s The Lost Paradise: the Jesuit Republic in South America (1976). 13 There is an extensive literature on indigenous resistance during the colonial period. For a relatively recent study of the figure of Tupac Amaru, see Ward Stavig’s The World of Tupac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru (1999).

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Gobierno en Peru (1570), will offer a glimpse into the opinions popularized by widely-respected civil officials who nevertheless fought with great tenacity on the behalf of the encomenderos.

The Cartas de Indias compiled in a variety of published collections will likewise yield a diverse array of contending perspectives, including those of the encomenderos and the King’s indigenous vassals, across several generations.

Seventeenth century sources will include the anuas cartas of the Society of Jesus, particularly those written by the Jesuit martyrs during the first two decades of the missions’ history. The martyrologies that the Jesuits subsequently composed toward the end of the seventeenth century will also be taken into account. In particular, the work of Dr. Francisco

Jarque, Montoya’s premier biographer, will inform the last chapter of this study. The “Spiritual

Conquest” of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, first published in 1639, has been long overlooked by

English-speaking historians interested in the Christianization of the Americas. The investigation of this important primary source will be supplemented by the supporting letters and documents related to the publication history of Montoya’s narrative. This will undoubtedly provide penetrating insight into the mind of one of the Jesuits’ most industrious members.

A few scholars of early modern Catholicism have interpreted the “monarchical revolution” of the seventeenth century, and the attendant rise of the modern State, as a complement rather than an antithesis to the ambitions of the Counter-Reformation Church.14 For

14 While the theory of “confessionalization” was initially advanced by scholars (such as Wolfgang Reinhardt and Hanz Schilling) who studied Protestant religious communities such as Geneva and Württemberg, several historians of the early modern Catholicism have also advanced this thesis. Jean Delumeau has argued, for example, in his various publications that a campaign had been waged by clerical elites between the late medieval and early modern periods to essentially “Christianize” the European laity, particularly in rural areas and overseas, and to purge these communities of undesirable customs and “superstitions”. In a similar vein, historians such as John Bossy have focused on the emergence of analogous disciplinary structures across various institutional churches (or ‘confessions’). Bossy’s influential publication Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (1985) argues that medieval Christianity differed radically from both Post-Tridentine Catholicism and the various Protestant sects. The Catholic religion as officially expounded by the prelates and theologians during the Council of Trent differed considerably from the popular religion of the medieval parish.

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both prince and prelate alike, there was a shared desire to reign in perceived abuses and excesses on all levels while promoting greater personal accountability within fortified institutional hierarchies that converged on the divine body of the King. Both Church and State equally sought to discipline their subordinates and both relied upon each other’s resources to achieve this end. From the standpoint of both the missionaries and the colonial administrators, the making of a devout Catholic and an upstanding vassal to the Spanish King was difficult to achieve in a world beleaguered by heresy and political dissidence.15 Responding to dissonance at the local levels, ecclesiastical authorities contrived more rigorous and systematic modes of coercion to discipline the Catholic laity and Spanish subjects alike.16 Consequently, the reductions were both a political as well as a religious experiment at a time when both political and religious authority were in contest throughout the Atlantic World. The various methods employed by the

Jesuit missionaries to essentially “reduce” semi-sedentary peoples in the surrounding territories to fixed settlements where these communities became integrated into a wider imperial community will comprise the focus of this study’s historical analysis. This image of genuine conversion on the part of the Guarani, accentuated by the sobering backdrop of an increasingly

15 Several historians have written on the “crisis” of the seventeenth century. The most prominent of these monographs include Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (1967). More recently, a volume of essays edited by Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith titled The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (1997) focuses upon the recent trends in periodization. 16 The impact of Tridentine reform for the Hispanic world has been generally eclipsed by the institutional histories of the Spanish Inquisition. Fortunately, groundbreaking publications such as Henry Kamen’s The Phoenix and the Flame (1978) have compensated for this vast deficit. In this study, Kamen shows that resistance to Catholic reform – as envisioned by Tridentine officials – was considerable in the Catalan-speaking regions. There were, at this time, highly disparate attitudes toward topics such as premarital sex and Eucharistic transubstantiation. Social historians of popular religion, such as Sarah Nalle in her insightful book God in La Mancha (2000), have made similar strides in enhancing our understanding of popular piety in early modern Spain. Nalle portrays two approaches to Catholicism, an official Tridentine brand and a premodern local variety, that often conflicted with one another. Nevertheless, Nalle demonstrates that ecclesiastical elites at times internalized preexisting forms of devotion in order to strengthen its relationship with the laity. While Tridentine authorities did not always succeed in carrying out what they had envisioned in the ecclesiastical council (as both Kamen and Nalle have clearly shown), the success of the post-Tridentine clergy cannot be overlooked: literacy rates climbed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; knowledge of the prayers, creeds, commandments, and basic tenets of the Church became more widely inculcated; church liturgy became more standardized; and routine church attendance became standard practice.

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decadent colonial order as rendered by the Jesuit fathers, was a projection of the Jesuits’ self- imagined efficacy as missionaries. For this reason, all of these sources should be read in the light of their immediate context and the perceived interests of the historical actors themselves. A comparative reading of the letters circulated amongst the Jesuits on the one hand and the memoirs and biographies intended for a general audience on the other will help to approximate how the Jesuits collectively understood their project. A comparative reading of these disparate sources will also help mitigate some of the distortions penned at the hands of Jesuits who tended to cast the experiences of the Guarani converts in a rather self-serving light.

This project will shed light on the complex relationship between the Crown, the Society of Jesus, and Spanish colonial society during the opening decades of the seventeenth century. To achieve this end, these sources must be questioned in depth, if scholars are at all intent on transcending the triumphalist rhetoric that they clearly exude. To do so, the conditions out of which these accounts emerged must be carefully considered, so that the motivations of the historical actors can be more reliably entertained. In the same token, the intended audience of these various sources must also be taken into account if this study will yield any critical insights into the early history of the Jesuits Reductions.

From the standpoint of the missionaries, the spiritual enterprise of the Jesuits pursued the sanctification of the Guaraní converts through the administration of the sacraments, the central importance of which should not be understated. Without the life-giving sacraments, the soul risked eternal separation from God as averred by the ecclesiastical council toward the middle of the sixteenth century. Every activity, from the religious instruction of indigenous children to the urban planning of the reductions, served to facilitate this end. The viability of the Jesuit

Reductions, during this period of pervasive infirmity and insecurity, was often recognized by the

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deliverance of the moribund or the realization of a "good death". The Sacraments served as the exclusive gateway to salvation in this life. There were, therefore, two standards of achievement in the eyes of Catholic missionaries: the quantifiable gains of the converted or the “reduced” in life and the quantifiable gains of those redeemed in death. This particular system of accounting complemented efforts on the part of the Crown to exact tribute from a group of people who had previously evaded civil authorities along the frontier. After all, the individual’s connection to the life-giving sacraments necessitated domesticity or fixed residence. Within the accounts of the missionaries themselves, the practical benefits of the reductions, such as pacification of the nearby waterways, could not be overlooked even by the missionaries themselves. The conversion of potentially hostile groups made their joint enterprise safer and more propitious for continued success. In the eyes of these various historical actors, the Gospel and the life of the

Sacraments were the principal weapons waged in a spiritual struggle against the legions of Satan.

By the 1620s, however, this confidence was clearly insufficient in allaying the more pressing fears of the Jesuits and the indigenous converts.

The compliance of these indigenous communities with the Habsburg vision of border pacification was contingent, however, on the protection guaranteed by the encomenderos of the local colonial towns. The lack of military assistance, apparent following the displacement of the eastern reductions, signaled the corrosion of the colonial order as originally envisioned under the

Spanish Habsburgs. To redress their vulnerability to nefarious marauders and slave-raiders both beyond and within the borders of the province, the Jesuits sought to militarize their reductions and equip the Guarani converts with Western firearms to fend off the mamelucos. Their success signaled a new stage in the history of these communities, a major turning point in the history of these communities that greatly influenced the future course of affairs for the following centuries.

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The "Spiritual Conquest" and its connection with the use of force, and the lingering question of who could own and wield firearms in particular, impacted the peculiar development of colonial society in Spanish America. During the years of Spain’s self-conscious decline under the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV, the image of “just rule”, particularly in the Indies, became integral to the Crown’s self-designation as the preeminent Catholic authority in Europe. This ideological projection of a morally upstanding provider became more and more pronounced as

Spain’s martial power grew increasingly limited relative to the rest of Western Europe. These anxieties on the part of Philip IV were further compounded by the outbreak of seditious revolt on either end of the Iberian Peninsula in 1640 that made the Spanish King skeptical of the loyalty of his vassals during the last days of the Iberian Union.17

The attempt of the Jesuits to modify social space, the communal understanding of time, and the motions of community life around the Church and the Sacraments poses a few questions that need to be answered: how are scholars to deconstruct the Jesuit representation of the indigenous Guarani who so often served as a convenient foil for the progress and success of the missionaries? Having recognized that a distinction exists between the Guarani and their depictions by the Jesuits, how are we to relate the interests of the Jesuit missionaries to those of the Guarani converts within the Habsburg State? How do asymmetries of power in particular, understood in real terms, alter our scholarly understanding of the Spiritual Conquest? This study hopes to provide an answer to these questions while maintaining the guiding assumption that the preoccupation with survival and communal defense resonated within both missionaries and converts alike during the founding years of the reductions.

17 For a standard review of the Portuguese Restoration War, refer to the relevant pages in C.R. Boxer’s The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (1969). For a classic study of the Catalan Revolt, see J.H. Elliott’s The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain (1598-1640) (1964).

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Literature Review

Scholarship covering the political history of the Spanish Empire from the dynastic union of Castile and Aragon (1469) up to the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-1714) is indeed robust. The standard assessment of the moral debate that Spain’s unprecedented territorial claims inspired has been introduced to English-speaking world through the works of Lewis

Hanke. Hanke’s The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949) in particular examines the famous dispute at Valladolid between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan

Ginés de Sepúlveda where Hanke places their adversarial perspectives in the wider-backdrop of the “Spanish Conquest of the Americas”. The competing claims of the conquistadors and missionaries often left the Spanish Monarchy vacillating on the American Indian’s place in the colonial order. Hanke’s analysis of the moral debate waged by university-educated elites may not be representative of Spanish society as a whole. Moreover, his tendency to inscribe a clear- cut Manichean divide throughout the intellectual milieu of the Hispanic world elides the fact that most Spaniards often had mixed feelings about the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Despite this particular shortcoming, his work is still an indispensable read for any scholar interested in the Spanish presence in the Americas. Another work by Hanke titled All Mankind is One

(1974) examines the early years of Spanish colonialism more generally and the problems stemming from the Spanish colonial presence in the Americas. Though Hanke’s work has done a tremendous service to English-speaking historians interested in the “Conquest of the

Americas”, the work of other researchers in the Hispanic scholarly community should not be neglected. Silvio A. Zavala’s La Defensa de Los Derechos Del Hombre en America Latina

(1963) and Filosofia de la Conquista (1949) both provide an excellent account of the intellectual undercurrents stirred by the Columbian Encounter.

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With regard to the study of the imperial ideology of the Catholic Kings and their

Habsburg descendants, the works of Anthony Pagden are indispensable reads for the student of early modern political history. Pagden’s Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination

(1990) examines the peculiarities of the Castilian polity and provides an in-depth treatment of the political thought emerging in the Catholic world in the century following the Protestant

Reformation. Other scholars have participated in the discussion as well. Bernice Hamilton’s

Political Thought in Sixteenth Century Spain (1963) assesses the wide-ranging impact of university-trained scholars, theologians, jurists, and political appointees on the course of Spain’s development as an overseas empire. In particular, Hamilton shows how the complex set of inhibitions and motivating factors that prompted endless discussion of the matter of “dominium” or the Spanish claim to parts of the non-Western world.

The works of other historians have similarly contributed to the scholarly community’s understanding of the political history of the Spanish Empire during the early modern period. The works of Hugh Thomas, such as Golden Age: the Spanish Empire of Charles V (2010) and

Rivers of Gold: the Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan (2004) are enormously insightful with respect to elucidating the sudden expansion of Spain’s authority across the globe. The standard historiographical treatments of the Spanish Empire as a polity are rife with contention as can be discerned from a cross-examination of Henry Kamen and J.H.

Elliott. Kamen offers some thought-provoking analyses that lend an entirely distinct interpretation of early modern Spain that often conflicts Elliot’s more widely-known account of the period as laid out in Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (1963).

Scholarly attention has shifted towards the topic of Spain’s apparent decline during the consecutive reigns of Philip III and Philip IV. In previous years, the Habsburg descendants of

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Philip II have often been routinely branded as incompetent rulers who took second seat to their court “favorites”. Covering the administration of Philip III (r. 1598-1621), Antonio Feros demonstrates in Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598-1621 (2000), that this characterization is mistaken. As Feros argues, the Duke of Lerma, the long-time favorite of

Philip III, was interested in strengthening monarchical rule. Feros depicts an administration less constrained by the formal commitments to traditional governing bodies where the formation of ad hoc committees helped empower the monarchy and centralize the decision-making process.

Mindful of its weakening position in European affairs, the Spanish Crown attempted to refashion its image in the likeness of the Catholic Kings, Isabel and Ferdinand. This nostalgia was prompted, in part, by the Crown’s failure to overtake the Protestant powers in the north. The twelve year truce (1609-1621) impaired the Spanish Crown’s reputation throughout the Hispanic world. With its martial prowess held in check, the Spanish Crown had no choice but to adopt other means to project an image of steadfastness, scrupulosity, and command. Robert A.

Stradling, meanwhile, has provided the English-speaking scholarly community with a more credible depiction of Philip II’s grandson in Philip IV and the Government of Spain, 1621-1665

(1988). Stradling’s coverage of the “King's Apprenticeship” between 1605 and 1643 is especially illuminating. Throughout Stradling’s account, Philip IV proves to be a surprisingly intrepid leader - despite certain ill-fated setbacks during his reign. Philip IV’s overarching desire to bolster Spain's reputation as the preeminent power in the Catholic world unfortunately conflicted with the Spanish Crown's need to conserve its royal patrimony and develop its existing resources. According to this interpretation, Philip IV’s ambition - not his idleness - served as a likely catalyst for Spain’s relative decline in the Atlantic world.

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The complex (and remarkably differentiated) political theories of several Jesuit thinkers have been covered in Harro Höpfl’s Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State,

1540-1630 (2004). While they generally defended monarchical rule and the centralization of political authority, the Jesuits also remained faithful to the medieval concept of a spiritual commonwealth. For the Jesuits, kings received their authority from God; and, for this reason, the princes of Europe were subordinate to His Church. The Jesuits remained deeply immersed in the political affairs of the European world up to their suppression in the late eighteenth century.

This proclivity toward such arrangements reflected a common belief that the structures of law and civil society, as dictated “from the top”, directly impacted the ministries of the Jesuits as well as the daily lives of the faithful. This interest in politics and worldly affairs set them apart, to some extent, from other religious orders. Meanwhile, their flirtation with some very unconventional and morally dubious approaches to moral decision-making and policy-formation scandalized certain outsiders who grew increasingly skeptical of the Jesuits’ sincerity over time.

What Höpfl dismisses is the idea of a consortium between the Spanish Crown, the Jesuits, and the Papacy. He contends that the Jesuits lacked uniformity in their professed political outlooks and that the patron-client networks that involved the various courts of Europe were often too convoluted and incestuous to permit any elaborate or enduring cooperation on a world-wide basis. The topic of the Jesuits’ role in the courts of Catholic Europe has yet to be investigated by serious scholars. Höpfl, meanwhile, provides younger scholars added momentum for new ground.

With respect to the politics of indigenous labor, the work of Robert G. Keith has been highly fruitful. His Conquest and Agrarian Change: the Emergence of the Hacienda System on the Peruvian Coast (1976) examines the structural factors underlying economic development in

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the colonies in the centuries that followed the fall of the Incas. Meanwhile, Jeffrey A. Cole’s

Potosi Mita, 1573-1700 (1984) focuses on the system of organized labor that facilitated the extraction of precious metals in the Potosi silver mines of Peru during the reign of the Spanish

Habsburgs. While the general scholarship on governance is thorough, few scholars have provided adequate analysis of either colonial administration or the legal process from the standpoint of the administrators and licentiates on either side of the Atlantic. Furthermore, a comprehensive examination of the encomienda as a system of labor organization is still lacking in the existing English-language scholarship.

Scholarly interest in the “Spiritual Conquest”, along the borderlands of the Spanish

Empire, has been fairly prolific. Inga Clendinnen’s Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (1980) examines the relatively late penetration of the Spanish into the

Yucatan peninsula. The study takes a critical look at the tenure of Fray Diego de Landa who acted as the Franciscan provincial of Yucatan toward the end of the sixteenth century. Motivated by a desire to extirpate idolatry in the surrounding countryside, the Franciscan provincial instigated a campaign of terror upon the local Maya-speaking peoples of the territory. De

Landa’s campaign resulted not only in the torture and death of many indigenous peasants, but much of the cultural artifacts attesting to the Maya’s own history had been destroyed in the process. Clendinnen speculates that De Landa acted partly in response to pressures exerted upon him by ecclesiastical authorities who endeavored to replace him. Clendinnen’s work shows that the motivations of missionaries could often be just as mundane and self-serving as those of modern bureaucrats. Meanwhile, the perspective of the Maya and their reception of Christianity, according to Clendinnen, remained at odds with the message professed by the Franciscan

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missionaries. Christianity and its symbolism had been appropriated by the Maya and assigned different meanings consistent with the pre-Columbian cosmology of the Maya.

Ramon A. Gutierrez’s highly readable award winning book, When Jesus Came, the Corn

Mothers went Away, 1500-1846 (1991), also covers the missionary efforts of the Franciscans along the borderlands of New Spain. Looking at the impact of “Christianization” among the

Pueblo communities of New Mexico, Gutierrez focuses on the institutionalization of marriage under the yoke of Spanish colonialism. Gutierrez focuses on the broader consequences of this transformation. The author contrasts the indigenous understanding of sexuality with that of their missionaries. Gutierrez interprets the displacement of the Corn Deities, Iatiku and Nautsiti, by

Christ and the Saints as symbolic corollaries for the establishment of Western patriarchy and the subsequent subjugation of female sexuality. Gutierrez also sheds an unflattering light on some of the most repugnant abuses at the hands of the missionaries. Fray Nicolas Hidalgo, a

Franciscan superior in the Pueblo community, is exposed as a sadist and sexual deviant who used sexual abuse as a humiliation tactic to subdue uncooperative converts. More than any other religious scholar of the colonial period, Gutierrez depicts the “Spiritual Conquest” as a harrowing trial, one that could easily rival the viciousness typically reserved for the most incorrigible conquistador. Gutierrez’s book marks a noticeable turn in colonial historiography where scholarly attention has been redirected toward the indigenous experience of the “Spiritual

Conquest”. These social histories of colonial Latin America supplement the intellectual histories of the preceding generations, which have an innate tendency of overestimating the contributions of the university-elect.

Ever since their inception, the Jesuit Reductions of the Río de la Plata region have been romanticized by the missionaries and their hagiographers, by Catholic apologists and by some of

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the fiercest critics of the Catholic Church. Serious scholarly investigation into mission history – devoid of any overt ideological commitments - only began to emerge in the twentieth century. In his groundbreaking work focusing on the Ibero-American frontier, Herbert E. Bolton (1870-

1953) was one of the first modern historians to envision the frontier missions of the Spanish

Empire as serving the interests of colonial authorities, which projected its power along the unruly borderlands of the Spanish Empire. In spite of this fruitful flight from the typically one- dimensional assessment of the missionary’s religious experience, Bolton never considered the indigenous as active participants and partners in the formation of new rural communities.

For Bolton as well as other historians of his time, including the Jesuit historians John

Bannon and Peter M. Dunne, the missionaries were agents of progress and modernity whose eminent dedication as Christians and resourcefulness as Europeans tamed the unsparing wilderness of Spanish America by settling the dispersed non-sedentary peoples into fixed domestic arrangements. According to this generation of historians, the establishment of the repartimientos, doctrinas, or reducciones, as the missions were variously called (depending on the degree of acculturation) freed the various semi-sedentary peoples throughout the Spanish

Empire from a perpetually itinerant life of desperate subsistence and lifelong penury. In exchange for their cooperation with the missionaries, the native converts realized greater material gains and an elevated quality of life in terms of relative economic abundance, political security, and gradual expansion of cultural horizons that typically accompany settlement.

Though the Boltonian take on mission history advanced the field enormously from that of uncritical flights of utopian fantasy or zealous praise, the darker aspects of the missionary enterprise were effectively swept under the rug, so to speak, by the prevailing theories of modernization and the teleology of liberal progress.

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A decidedly more skeptical and discerning account of Jesuit political and economic activities in the Río de la Plata region emerged in the publication of Magnus M rner’s groundbreaking doctoral thesis, The Political and Economic Activities of the Jesuits in the La

Plata Region: the Hapsburg Era (1954). Confining the reader for the first time to an examination of the broader relationships between the Society, the Crown, and colonial ecclesiastical politics, M rner’s focus provides a useful overview of the Jesuits’ more worldly endeavors in the region. His study sheds light on this relatively neglected period of the reductions’ history. Nevertheless, most of his attention is divided between the devastating raids of the slave-raiding bandeirantes during the 1630s and the ongoing ecclesiastical disputes between the Society and a particularly antagonistic Franciscan bishop during the late seventeenth century.

Despite these pioneering advancements in the field, only in the 1970s and 1980s did social historians begin to focus on the experiences of native peoples during the “Spiritual

Conquest”. Historians have only recently aspired to critique the self-portraitures of the missionaries in their reading of the primary sources. In the introduction to a series of essays covering the field of “New Mission History” during the early-to-mid 1990s, Robert A. Jackson discussed the relative paucity of historiography covering the frontier missions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries relative to the attention given to the “core areas” of sixteenth century

Iberian conquest (namely Mesoamerica and the Andes). In Jackson’s opinion, the major distinction between these two waves of evangelization rests in the divergent social arrangements established by the native peoples well before the arrival of the Europeans. After all, the

Mesoamerican and Andean peoples – the primary focus of mission activity in the sixteenth century – were sedentary peoples inured to the social complexities of urban life and political

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subjugation by external authorities. These peoples also had previous experience in establishing complex inter-regional trade networks that spanned great expanses of the Americas. By comparison, the semi-nomadic native peoples of the Spanish American frontier who served as the primary focus of seventeenth century evangelization efforts were broadly dispersed and relatively isolated from external political influences; as a result, the experience of life in the reductions vastly differed from any previous colonial enterprise with respect to the religious conversion of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Jackson suggests that scholars studying seventeenth and eighteenth century missionary activity should remain sensitive to these distinctions in terms of the particular historical experiences of various indigenous communities and ethnic groups. Within the same volume of New Mission History, David Sweet suggests that future historical research should be careful to distinguish between the high ideals and aspirations of the missionaries at work in the frontier and the realities they likely encountered and in turn helped generate.

Patricia Seed, an outspoken scholar of Latin American colonial history, suspects that the attempt on the part of twentieth century historians to brush up the “Black Legend” in rosy layers has greatly distorted the indigenous experience of New World conquest and dispossession. Seed and like-minded historians believe that the discourses of knowledge and authority informing the world-views of secular and religious elites have not been subjected to enough scrutiny especially with respect to the complex ideological performances of conquest and colonial assertion which served to rationalize the allocations of material goods and social privileges. Her book

Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World (1996), in particular, tries to uncover the set of cultural assumptions that underlay European spatial representations and the semiotics of territorial possession during the Age of Discovery. In this way, the process of New

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World evangelization can no longer be genuinely divorced from the nascent imperial imagination on either side of the Atlantic in light of the codependency of secular and religious authorities in the Catholic world.

With regard to the frontier territory of Paraguay and the Río de la Plata region in the seventeenth century specifically, modern historiography has been rather irregular especially in the English-speaking academic world. As late as the 1990s, impressionistic historical narratives of a decidedly apologetic leaning surfaced in the form of Philip Caraman’s The Lost Paradise:

The Jesuit Republic in South America (1976) and Frederick J. Reiter’s They Built Utopia: The

Jesuit Missions in Paraguay 1610 -1768 (1995). Although sufficiently documented and well- written, these narratives rarely turn a critical gaze toward the paternalistic ethnocentrism underlying the privileged missionary perspective.

Similar accounts which tend to take the words of the missionaries at face value abound within Brazilian, Argentine, Uruguayan, and Paraguayan historiography of the Colonial Río de la

Plata region. Guillermo Furlong Cardiff’s Missiones y Sus Pueblos de Guaraníes (1962) is a noticeable exception. This foundational classic in the historiography of the Guaraní reductions has redirected the trajectory of research from a cyclical, self-perpetuating triumphalist pattern to a new direction in humanities scholarship. Building upon Furlong’s momentum, historians, such as Ernesto J.A. Maeder, Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Celia Lopez, and Rafael Carbonell de Massy, have all made significant contributions to the field in the past few decades. Focusing on economic, political, and cultural structures which lent distinctive shape to the historical formation of these frontier societies, historians now have a better grasp on the separate histories of the Guaraníes, the Guaycurus, and other adjacent peoples particularly with regard to their encounter with the Jesuit missionaries during the colonial period.

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In Los Bienes de Los Jesuitas: Destino y Administracion de Sus Temporalidades en el Río de la Plata, 1767-1813 (2001), for example, Ernesto J.A. Maeder focuses on later developments following the collapse of the Jesuit enterprise in the years leading up to and following their expulsion from Latin America. Maeder investigates the economic consequences of Jesuit expulsion on the regional economy and the local communities of the Río de la Plata basin.

Maeder recognizes that the changes in administrative practices of the former Jesuit-owned estates had an adverse impact on regional development when delivered into the covetous hands of short-sighted secular authorities. Most illuminating and relevant for the purposes of this paper, however, is Rafael Carbonell de Masy’s Estrategias de Desarollo Rural en los Pueblos

Guaraníes (1609-1767) (1992). In this study, Carbonell focuses on the gradual transformation of indigenous agricultural practices throughout the Río de la Plata region, in conjunction with key institutional developments accompanying the expansion of local production capacities.

Understanding the reductions as a highly interactive joint venture between the Jesuits and the

Guaraníes, Carbonell believes that the dissemination of practical knowledge and skills, the proliferation of agrarian technology, the growth of natural resource exploitation, and the expansion of local markets and trade routes were all fundamental to regional development. In this way, the reductions laid the foundations for a new society along the frontier – one surprisingly independent of the oversight of civil authorities and one culturally differentiated from both provincial towns of the colonies and from nearby semi-sedentary tribes.

Throughout the English-speaking academic world, the historiography of Jesuit missionary activity in colonial Latin America has undergone recent revitalization. With the publication of Nicholas Cushner’s work, for example, much attention has been directed towards

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unraveling the Jesuits position within the colonial economy and the indigenous ethnoscape.18 As

Cushner elaborates in several of these regional studies, the Jesuits’ “temporalities”, or earthly charges, were primarily undertaken to help maintain the Jesuit colleges and to help finance Jesuit missionary ventures along the periphery. In Why Have You Come Here? (2006), Cushner provides a very informative comparative study of Jesuit evangelization in the Americas.

Throughout his study, Cushner points out that the Jesuits tended to thrive in those parts of the

New World where they enjoyed royal patronage. His analysis of the Jesuits’ activities in colonial Maryland as compared with other parts of the Catholic World under Spanish and French hegemony make a particularly convincing case for the importance of the State for the advancement of the Society’s missiological enterprise in the Americas. Cushner also makes the case that Jesuit exceptionality in reaching out to the American Indian rested in the “mystical theology” of the Jesuits as discussed by John O’Malley in the First Jesuits (1995). Both scholars assert that the Jesuits’ sensitivity to the indigenous “Other” stems both from the Jesuits’ intense humanistic learning and linguistic training on the one hand and the imperative found in Loyola’s

Spiritual Exercises that commands the devout to “find God in all things.” While there may be some truth to this estimation, there are clear limits to the Jesuits’ empathy as Pablo Joseph de

Arriago clearly shows in his rather combative “La Extirpacion de la Idolatria en el Piru” (1621).

While fairly progressive for their time, the Jesuits maintained racialist attitudes as did any

Spanish colonist during the time. José de Acosta’s work is saturated with bigoted speculations concerning the relative strengths and weaknesses intrinsic to non-Western peoples. The self-

18 Cushner’s detailed accounts of the Jesuit “temporalities” include Lords of the Land: Sugar, Wine and Jesuit Estates of Coastal Peru, 1600-1767 (1980), Jesuit Ranches and the Agrarian Development of Colonial Argentina (1984), and Farm and Factory: The Jesuits and the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Colonial Quito, 1600- 1767 (1982). These three works have demonstrate that indigenous communities under the guidance of the Jesuits experienced considerable rural development from the latter half of the seventeenth century up to the expulsion. In contrast to the works of Clovis Lugon (1949) and Louis Baudin (1962), which possibly overstate the communitarian ethic and apostolic primitivism shared by the Jesuits and the Guaraní, Cushner characterizes the Reductions as proto-capitalistic regimes that promoted private property, plantation cash-crop agronomies, and inter-regional trade.

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congratulatory tone assumed by many historians must be equipoised by a more critical analysis of the primary sources. Though these Jesuit scholars have made significant contributions to our understanding of these communities, they have their blind spots. Cushner also notices a particular trend with respect to the perceived success of the missionaries’ efforts: Indians were more or less willing to become Catholics and adopt new ceremonial practices provided doing so did not severely threaten their public standing in their communities.

Tackling the question of how the war-like Guaycurus were gradually “pacified” during the seventeenth century, James Schofield Saeger examines the involved process by which the

Jesuit missionaries eventually persuaded these tribes to abandon their semi-nomadic ways in The

Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience (2000). The Chaco frontier was an undesirable place to settle for most Spanish colonists in light of its poor natural resources. For this reason, the Guaycurus did not experience the pressure that faced so many other native groups in the Americas during the course of the sixteenth-century. After years of entreaties, the

Jesuits eventually convinced their prospective converts to settle down in the reductions. Saeger cites the depopulation of native wildlife by overhunting and the rising tensions between these tribes and the Spanish colonists as proximate causes for this change of heart. Saeger strongly suggests that the decision to convert was often a concession made for the sake of survival, and that indigenous groups were rarely, if ever, motivated by purely spiritual pursuits - despite the wishful thinking of their priests. What the Jesuits offered to these “New Christians” was a life of greater security, both in terms of a more reliable mode of sustenance via agriculture in addition to political asylum from the predatory Spanish colonists.

Other scholars, similarly committed to making the indigenous peoples the center piece of mission historiography, have likewise made substantial contributions in the past decade. In The

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Guarani under Spanish Rule in the Rio de La Plata (2003), Barbara Ganson examines the consequences of Spanish rule for the indigenous Guaraní of the region. Ganson argues that the

Guaraní dwelling along the periphery of Spanish authority maintained many of their pre-Contact cultural practices often despite the wishes of the Jesuit fathers. By emphasizing cultural continuity of the Guaraní following their reduction, Ganson amply demonstrates how preexisting indigenous systems of social organization enabled the reductions to prosper in relative independence from secular colonial authorities. As the historiography clearly suggests, the Jesuit reductions were a collaborative venture. By the end of Ganson’s study, in fact, the reader begins to question their own understanding of the missionary enterprise and the professed accomplishments of the Jesuit fathers. Toward the last years of the Jesuit Reductions, many of the reductions fiercely rejected the Jesuits’ entreaties to comply with the Treaty of Madrid

(1750). This act of defiance toward the colonial authorities ultimately resulted in open conflict between the dissenters and imperial authorities. Up to the final decades of the Guarani reductions, Ganson paints a portrait of indigenous agency. In light of this resistance, the case she makes is very convincing. At this point, one has to wander: how much control did the Jesuits actually have over their converts during this century of peace and relative prosperity? Any successful advancement in the scholarly field will have to reconcile the ubiquitous self- presentation of the missionaries in the primary sources with the unpropitious realities that they likely faced.

The composition of these memoirs, martyrologies, and histories took into account the intended readership of these Jesuit sources. At a time when Spain’s power diminished considerably over the course of the seventeenth century, the apparent valor of these missionaries and the metaphysical battles that they waged along the remote fringes of the known world

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brought much needed consolation to the Crown and its subordinate functionaries during this period of disillusionment. For this reason, these texts should not be treated as mere descriptions of the more notable events that transpired in the Guarani reductions. This corpus of literature had a therapeutic value for both missionaries and laity alike. For this reason, these non- informative functions of these texts must be taken into serious consideration.

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CHAPTER 2

THE POSTURES OF EMPIRE

Spain’s Apostolic Commission and the Problem of Administration

The empire that Spain acquired over the course of the sixteenth century was not so much the intended result of a concerted, premeditated effort at self-aggrandizement as an agonizing adaptation to the unforeseen contingencies of the Columbian encounter itself. The uncertainty of how to govern an overseas empire, meanwhile, of unprecedented geographical magnitude that no Western European had, or could have, anticipated at the time is a point of distinction that must be acknowledged by scholars of modern history who should refrain from projecting contemporary notions of direct-rule onto premodern political systems of the past. Unique unto itself for lacking true historical precedents as a transatlantic polity, the Spanish Empire under the

Habsburgs faced steep administrative obstacles in light of its institutional and technological limitations. Nowhere is the hesitance that often accompanies political inexperience more apparent than in the Crown’s involved dealings with the conquistadores and the recognized heirs of these armed adventurers over the first century of colonial rule. The gradual deterioration of the Spanish Crown’s relationship with these men of fortune accounts for the predisposition of the

Habsburg Monarchs to alternative forms of labor organization throughout their American holdings at later stages of Spanish colonial history.

While scholars of the past have tackled the topic of indigenous servitude, they have primarily done so through an exhaustive examination of the heated moralistic debates that the

Conquest inspired within the ecclesiastical and scholarly circles of the Spanish-speaking world.

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For this reason, religious figures such as Fray Antonio de Montesinos (d. 1545) and Bartolomé de Las Casas (ca. 1474-1566) have received ample attention as have their intellectual opponents such as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (ca. 1490-1573).19 Consequently, the study of labor organization from the standpoint of colonial administrators on both sides of the Atlantic has been relatively understudied.20 An approach to the study of indigenous servitude along the “road less traveled” must focus on this complex interdependent relationship between the encomenderos and royal authorities to better approximate its evolutionary course over time. While the works of Las

Casas and Sepúlveda are indispensable to understanding the contending arguments on the perceived humanity of the American Indian, scholarship that prioritizes the perspectives of a handful of theologians and scholars will characteristically fail to provide a much desired anatomical gaze into the complex viscera of transatlantic colonial politics. Without taking into consideration the inter-reliant perspectives of the empire’s administrative structures, all knowledge of the political life of the colonial era will remain inadequate and potentially misleading.

Understandably, this makeshift arrangement between the Spanish Crown and this upstart social class of encomenderos deteriorated in many places across the Americas; such an outcome comes to no surprise whenever a partnership is forged by expediency alone. The resultant strain placed on this relationship over the course of the sixteenth century motivated the expansion of the Crown’s own political agenda in the Americas that sought to consolidate the real patronazgo of the Castilian monarchs both in ecclesiastical and civil domains.21 As the Crown grew less

19 See for example Lewis Hanke’s The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949), All Mankind is One (1974), and Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race and Prejudice in the Modern World (1970). 20 See D. Ramos’ El Consejo de las Indias en el siglo XVI (1970). 21 Philip II’s reign was characterized by a desire to consolidate the claims traditionally reserved for the Catholic Kings in the American colonies. To name one prominent historical example, the Ordenanzas of Patronazgo (1574) consisted of twenty-three articles that attempted to overhaul the church hierarchy in New Spain. In these ordinances, Philip aimed to indirectly secure his hold over the colonial church by centralizing ecclesiastical

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confident in the capacities of its colonial overseers, the Spanish Habsburgs secured for themselves the moral prerogative to refashion colonial society while tightening their sovereign hold over Spanish America. Beneath the assertion of sovereign authority, the actual capacity of the Crown to exert its will unilaterally was, of course, considerably frustrated by the inertia of colonial actors who often felt compelled and, therefore, justified to act otherwise. The story of the Spanish Crown’s tortuous dealings with the encomenderos and their handling of the indigenous peoples of the colonies reveal the nascent beginnings of a legal order largely rooted in custom that both mirrored and reflexively shaped everyday life in the generations that followed.22 By the turn of the seventeenth century, these formative experiences of the preceding century informed the expectations of the Spanish Crown which remained - without a doubt - the

Society of Jesus’ main patron throughout Spanish America from the arrival of the Jesuits into the

Americas to their eventual suppression.

The King and His Council

Following the death of his maternal grandfather Ferdinand of Aragon in 1516, Charles of

Ghent inherited a unique set of problems that accompanied the vast territorial expanse that the title to Castile then encompassed. Ever since the settlement of La Isla Hispaniola at the close of the 15th century, the liberties enjoyed by the Spanish colonists in the New World had always proven a constant source of worry for the Catholic Kings. For the duration of Charles’ reign in authority under royally-endorsed bishops. Such trends in this particular region reflect the broader post-Tridentine commitment that made the bishop the undisputed overseer of all religious activities in the local bishopric. Two influential essays on this topic by John Frederick Schwaller (1986) and Robert C. Padden (1956) delve into the politics of institutional reform and the ultimate impact of these ordinances on the mendicant orders in New Spain. 22 Las Siete Partidas first promulgated under the reign of Alfonso X (1221-1284) set the course for Castilian territorial expansion during the Reconquista. This corpus aspired to regulate every facet of communal life in a setting of contested jurisdictional claims and shifting boundaries. In an interesting article by Viktor Frankl titled “Hernan Cortes y la Tradicion de las Siete Partidas” (1963), Viktor Frankl argues that this body of laws had become deeply entrenched in the Spanish mentality in conducting military expansion along the frontier. In many ways, the series of laws in Spanish Imperial History would adapt these legal statutes to new circumstances abroad.

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Castile (1516-1556), the legitimacy of the Spanish Crown’s presence in the Western Hemisphere continued to rest on the apostolic charge delegated to the Iberian kingdoms of Portugal and Spain through the papal donation of the West Indies by Alexander VI.23 In Charles’ case, the ideological commitment inaugurated by papal decree that eventually informed the codification of the Laws of Burgos in 1513 and the Clarification of those laws in 1514 at the behest of his maternal grandfather assumed a decidedly clear and unambiguous expression by the 1537 pronouncement of Sublimus Dei by Paul III. By the second decade of the Emperor’s reign, the status of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas had been decided by papal decree:

The said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.24

Charles of Habsburg, inheritor of a vast dynastic estate, clearly found himself pressed by similar concerns regarding the conditions of his patrimony and the responsibilities that his various territories demanded of him. Ever interested in the goings-on of the Indies, but often distracted by his protracted struggles with the papacy and the French king on the European continent,

Charles formally instituted the Council of the Indies in 1524 to assist him in administration of his

American holdings. Staffed by Castilian-born attorneys trained in civil law and by prominent canonists and theologians of the Spanish Church, the Council became the recognized authority in the administration of the Spanish Empire’s legal, social, economic, and religious affairs across

23 “The Requirement” is available in English translation. See Arthur Helps, The Spanish Conquest in America, vol. 1 (London: John Lane, 1900), 264. In the reading of “The Requirement”, conquistadores made explicit mention of the Roman pontiff, Alexander VI, who “succeeded that Saint Peter as lord of the world, in the dignity and seat which I have before mentioned, made donation of these isles and Terra-firme [mainland] to the aforesaid king and queen and to their successors, our lords along with all that there is in these territories, as is contained in certain writings issued on the subject….which you can see if you wish.” The papal bull Inter Caetera (1493) was undoubtedly the document that the legal scholar Juan Lopez de Palacios Rubios had in mind when he composed these lines of “The Requirement”. 24 In 1537, Paul III issued Sublimus Dei, a papal bull that univocally affirmed the humanity of the American Indian while denouncing at the same time the enslavement of the indigenous in the Americas.

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the Atlantic.25 In the decades following its institutional formation, the Council’s personnel remained rather restricted in terms size – consisting only of a president, four to five councilors, a fiscal or crown attorney, a reporter, a clerk of accounts, and an usher. Limited in size but dedicated in its official directive, the Council proved to be attentive in administering to the colonies even when the efficacy of its official capacities often proved inadequate to the task at hand. 26 Nevertheless, the Council set diligently to work over the course of Charles’ reign and typically met almost every day for three to five hours to discuss civil and ecclesiastical matters pertaining to the overseas colonies.27

The itinerary of the Council encompassed a variety of tasks ranging from the demarcation of colonial jurisdictions to the appointment of colonial officials and the distribution of church benefices. From time to time, the Council sent out inspectors-general or visitadores to inspect the administration in the colonies and to report its findings back to the Council. Having control over the nomination of public officials and endowed with the means to evaluate their performance over time arguably helped to ensure the quality of civil service demanded by the

Council.

To those confined to a cursory reading of its official script, the authorized capacities of the Council appear unbounded. C.H. Haring, a prominent twentieth-century historian of Spain’s political institutions, once noted that “no important scheme of government or of colonial

25 C.H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 94. Prior to the formation of the Council during the reign of Charles of Habsburg, the administration of the New World had been handled by Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, the archdeacon of Seville and the personal chaplain of Isabel the Catholic. Fonseca held this position from his appointment in 1493 to his death in 1524. 26 C.H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, 95. During the reign of Philip II and that of his successors, the Council of the Indies would grow in size and complexity. Over time, this council would expand in retinue to better account for the financial burdens of the Empire and to provide a clearer understanding of the American holdings themselves. Eventually, the Council would staff a royally-appointed historian and cosmographer to provide the Council with a better sense for the territories under its dominion. Throughout the reign of Charles of Habsburg, however, the Council retained more intimate proportions. 27 C.H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, 99.

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expenditure [could] be put into operation by American officials unless first submitted to the council for consideration and approval.”28 Despite this all-encompassing oversight over the administration of the Americas, the royal authority that backed the Council’s decisions in no way guaranteed the intended results that the Council often envisioned. This acknowledgement of the

Council’s authority was often a perfunctory matter of convention that left only a faint impression on the day-to-day decisions made in the Americas. Nevertheless, the insights that the Crown gained over time and its capacities as the highest court of appeals did influence the course of social development in the colonies. Over the decades of Charles’ reign, individual self-interest of historical actors facing highly specific circumstances had to be filtered across the broadly articulated ideological commitments voiced by the Sovereign and the Church. If anything, the administrative history of the Spanish colonies under the Habsburgs was one brokered by compromise and mediated through the ethos of medieval kingship and vassalage in a rather imposing geopolitical setting.

Despite the painstaking efforts of the Council and its King to oversee Castile’s overseas colonies, the actual reach of royal authority remained perceptibly deficient. From the controversial reception of the young Fleming to the Spanish court in the early 1520s to his voluntary abdication in 1556, the societies of the Americas had suffered a series of dramatic shocks accompanying the violent dissolution of two dominant pre-Columbian empires in the

Mesoamerican and Andean worlds. The collapse of these polities was attended by the massive depopulation of the Americas by plague, disease, civil war, and endless inter-cultural strife between the colonial occupiers and the colonized. Life in the Spanish American colonies was disconcertingly chaotic and the turmoil continued well after the abdication of the first Habsburg

28 C.H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, 98.

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Monarch.29 For the course of its history, the political life of Spanish America would be defined in large part by a long protracted struggle between the surviving pre-Columbian indigenous peoples and the recent arrival of opportunistic adventurers in search of quick material gains, titles of honor, and the carefree lifestyle of the settled gentry.30 Amid the tumult of the Conquest

– the denouement of which proved excruciatingly interminable and debilitating for the colonies – the question posed by the “naturals”, as the Spanish labeled the native peoples of the Americas, continued to divide ecclesiastical and civil authorities on both sides of the Atlantic over the course of several generations. The ever-present reality of coerced Indian labor plagued the consciences of students and professors, friars and prelates, subjects and sovereigns alike. While most acknowledged the obligations of the Catholic Kings of Spain to spread the Gospel to the far-fledged reaches of the Americas, few went as far as to question the title of the Spanish King to the Americas. Only a handful of thinkers in fact recognized that this temporal authority of both the Crown and the Papacy to hold dominion over the American Indians was an arbitrary claim of authority that asserted an illusory jurisdictional claim over the territories, resources, and the labor of the American Indians.31 Despite certain fine-pointed qualified objections to the

29 For an informed study on the course of colonial-indigenous relations during the colonial period see Luis Millones’ Peru Colonial: de Pizarro a Tupac Amaru II (1995). 30 John Lockhardt and Enrique Otte, eds., Letters and People of the Spanish Indies: Sixteenth Century (London: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 45-46. In a letter composed in 1536 to his mother Marina de Olivares then residing in Spain, the conquistador Melchor Verdugo recounts his recent triumphs in the Indies: “I am still in the town where I have always been. I live in a place called Trujillo and have my house there and a very good encomienda of Indians, with about eight or ten thousand vassals; I think there’s never a year that they don’t give me 5,000 or 6,000 pesos in income. I write you all this so you’ll be glad and know that I live without necessity, praise our Lord…With the bearer of the present letter I am sending to ask certain favors of his majesty, among which I’m sending to request a perpetual grant of my Indians for me and my heirs. I’m also sending to request a commission as royal captain and a perpetual seat on the council here; I have one from the governor, and it’s necessary to have his majesty confirm it. I’m also chief constable, but I’m not sending to request that because there’s no need, since the governor likes me so well that he always tries to favor me, and as long as that’s his pleasure he’s not going to take the office away from me….I would also like to send to request a habit of the order of Santiago from his majesty. They tell me that I have to be present, or at least send very convincing evidence of who I am. You try to take testimony, and let it be so complete and convincing that there will be no lack, but rather too much, and take very convincing witnesses, even though you have to go to the end of the earth to get them…” 31 Scholarly works such as Lourdes Redondo’s Utopia Vitoriana y Realidad Indiana (1992) and Jaime Brufau Prats’ La Escuela de Salamanca ante el Descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo (1989) will acquaint the reader with some of

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Conquest of the Americas, the Indies continued to be perceived as a territorial extension of the

Crown of Castile. The laws and institutions emerging in the Americas were, for this very reason, patterned in close accordance with those of Castile.32

Meanwhile, the uncertainties of how to go about managing an empire of unprecedented geographical scope proved difficult to overlook for those placed in charge of its day-to-day maintenance. While the Catholic Kings often encouraged debate over the lawfulness of the

Conquest, Ferdinand and Isabel never gave any serious thought to divesting the concessions made to the conquistadores of the Antilles. The feudatory rights to the encomienda served as a reward, in the minds of sovereigns and their vassals alike, for the faithful military service carried out by the conquistadors. In this respect, the first generation of conquistadors continued to see themselves in continuity with the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula. Taken in this light, the legal perceptions of the encomenderos’ feudal rights over their encomiendas in the Americas is simply an echo of a previous struggle and attests to the military tradition that emerged from the cinders of late-medieval Iberian society. The apparent tenacity of the encomienda as a system of labor in the New World, however, is far more than simply a product of cultural continuity. In the minds of many early modern Spaniards, the feudatory arrangements were of the highest necessity and the suspension of the encomienda would directly lead to the impoverishment of the

Spanish colonists many of whom lacked the skills and the resources to cultivate the lands and provide sustenance for themselves and their families in an unfamiliar natural environment.33 In the minds of the Catholic Kings and their descendants, however, the encomenderos were a tool

the most progressive theologians of early modern Spain such as Francisco Vitorio, O.P. and Domingo Soto, O.P. both of whom studied and later taught at the School of Salamanca. 32 C.H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, 95. 33 Ysabel de Guevara, “Hardships in the Rio de la Plata Region”, in Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, ed. Jon Cowans (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 84. In her petition to a local official, Ysabel mentions the difficulties that faced the families of the encomenderos in times of crisis. These hardships were especially trying for those who weren’t accustomed to working the fields with their own hands.

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of political expediency at a time when no other options seemed feasible. Over the course of

Spanish America’s colonial history, the usefulness of this arrangement in the eyes of the Council of the Indies would eventually fall out of the King’s favor during the reign of Charles V.

In trying to make sense of an emerging colonial order, of a society subject to the rule of law and not merely to the whims of self-seeking men, the anticipation of resistance is to be expected. The inertia that naturally sets in over the course of time whenever the constituent elements of a society find a manageable equilibrium cannot be directly assayed however. Such a balance can only be appraised during those exceptional moments when external stress is applied upon social systems, when the sudden twists and turns provoked by the conscious actions of historical agents sheds light on the prevailing backdrop of norms then in place within a given society. In other words, it is only through an acquaintance with the extremes that one can better pinpoint normalcy at any given period. In the case of Charles of Habsburg, the direct imposition of the New Laws in 1542-3 that placed a shelf life on the perpetuity of the encomienda placed into jeopardy the livelihood of an implanted rent-seeking elite. These proactive measures of the

Spanish monarchy provoked open rebellion in the colonies that ultimately left one viceroy dead and another in a state of trepidation.34 To better understand the cultural dynamics at work during this pivotal century in colonial Latin America, the moment of disclosure is assuredly that time when the system itself was placed into jeopardy.

Though the aspirations of the first Habsburg ruler of the Spanish Empire to put a limit on the duration of the encomienda ultimately came to no lasting fruition, the effort is certainly telling of the Monarchy’s growing frustration with the encomenderos and the latent desire of the

34 Luis de Velasco, Viceroy of New Spain, “Letter to King Charles”, in Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, ed. Jon Cowans, 74-78. Even as late as 1553, colonists in New Spain still showed hostility to the ordinances of Charles V as can be discerned from the letter sent by the King’s Viceroy stationed in Mexico City.

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Spanish Crown to uproot the feudatory arrangements germinating in the Americas.35 In many ways, this aversion to delegate authority and defuse power to unsupervised intermediaries in the colonies resonated throughout the reigns of Charles’ immediate line of successors and served as a key reagent in the formation of the Spanish ideology of Empire under Habsburg rule.

During the first few decades of his reign, Charles V assumed a presiding role in the day- to-day disputes among his Spanish and Amerindian vassals in the colonies. The authoritative voice of the King figures prominently in the official correspondence circulating across the

Atlantic, but the frequency by which these promulgations had been issued suggests that they were very limited in terms of their effectiveness in practice. Nevertheless, these Reales Cedulas that encompassed the provisions, orders, decrees, ordinances, and instructions authorized both directly by the Crown and by proxy of the Council proliferated on a characteristically ad hoc basis across the Atlantic. The Crown and Council addressed particular individuals with regard to specific grievances and voiced concerns. In this way, the monarch’s self-fashioned image as chaperon to his subjects involved the King in the everyday decision making of the colonists in the Americas where the Monarch served as the ultimate arbitrator in dispute settlement.

Under Charles V’s reign, a comprehensive body of legal provisions that asserted real constraints on the encomenderos was not issued until November 1542.36 Prior to the promulgation of the New Laws, the justice of the King was dispensed in a rather piecemeal fashion that tailored itself around specific circumstances facing individual appellants. A review of this corpus of official documents reveals that the concerns of the Crown generally fell into three broad categories: that of safeguarding the rights of the indigenous, maintaining public

35 John Lockhardt and Enrique Otte, eds., Letters and People of the Spanish Indies: Sixteenth Century, 52. The Crown’s attitudes towards the conquistadores were complex. Pizarro was put in place as governor simply because he commanded the respect of the locals. The crown favored those who ensured order. 36 C.H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, 98.

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morality, and ensuring upstanding civil service in the Crown’s functionaries. These symbolic gestures of authority intended to preserve the Monarchy’s privileged position as the supreme arbiter of justice and to conserve its theoretical powers that entitled Charles V to a certain material concessions.

The Presence of an Absent Ruler: The Presentation of Justice and Authority in Spanish America

From the time of Ferdinand and Isabella through the reign of the Bourbon Monarchs, the

“Laws of the Indies” chiefly served to regulate Spanish-Amerindian relations. In conjunction with these statutory laws that had been promulgated and recompiled at various points over the dynastic reign of the Habsburg monarchs, the Council routinely advised its colonial dependencies on how to apply and administer these laws pertaining to the treatment of indigenous peoples who often served as the exclusive labor supply for resource extraction in the colonies. While their ultimate bearing on the actions of colonial actors was often limited in practice, these edicts sought to dispel the looming ambiguities in the minds of local administrators with regard to the precise course of action that was to be followed. The King assumed a conciliatory role that negotiated on its own ideological commitments in an effort to preserve the perceived legitimacy of its own authority.

The material condition of the indigenous was the chief concern professed by the Council of the Indies and the Spanish Crown during the reign of Charles V. In August 1530, the King issued a royal proclamation to all of the Audiencias and Royal Chancelleries of the Spanish colonies that universally proscribed the enslavement of the indigenous inhabiting the periphery of the colonies. In the first few decades following the arrival of the Spanish into the Americas, the Catholic Kings nevertheless had allowed for certain exceptions in the event of an outbreak of

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armed conflict carried out on “just” premises.37 Though this 1530 decree made a similar distinction between those Indians who threatened the lives of the friars and those who did not, the Crown also conceded the fact that the “Requirement” itself was often liable to routine abuse.38 The letter reminded the Spanish-born officials in the New World, many of whom were former conquistadores themselves, that they could not enslave those Indians taken as prisoners of war.39 The phrasing of the edict is explicit and avows material consequences that are to be assigned to its violation: the property of those who failed to adhere to the decree was to be remanded to the “Camara y Fisco” and a punitive fine would likewise be imposed on subsequent offenders.40 On February 20, 1534, Charles I followed up on this particular letter by issuing another provision that enjoined the “governors, captains, and [the Crown’s] Spanish subjects” to conform to the ordinances and instructions that pertain to the conduct of “just war”. This provision also placed the captives of war under the authority of the Crown and made concessions to the women and children of indigenous combatants.41 The edict placed constraints on the encomenderos as it barred the conquistadores and their descendants from buying and holding

37 Richard Konetzke, ed., Cole i n de o umentos p r l istori de l orm i n o i l de isp no m ri 1493-1810, vol. 1 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cient ficas, 1953), 134. The language of continuity is maintained in Charles I’s letter: “Sepades que como quiera que al principio que las dichas Indias, islas y tierra firme del mar Oceano se descubrieron por nuestro mandado y comenzaron a poblar, y después hasta agora fue permitido por los Reyes Católicos, nuestros abuelos, por Justas causas y Buena consideración que algunos de los dichos indios, por no querer admitir a los predicadores las predicación de nuestra santa fe católica, antes resistir con mano armada a los tales predicadores della, se les hiciese Guerra, y los presos fuesen esclavos de nuestros subditos que los prendían y hacían la dicha Guerra, y esto mismo fue por nos después tolerado como cosa que, por derecho y leyes de nuestros Reinos, se podría sin cargo de nuestra conciencia hacer permitir, y asimismo habemos dado licencia para que los cristianos españoles que han ido a poblar en las dichas islas e Indias, pudiesen rescatar y haber de poder de los indios naturales dellas los esclavos que ellos tenían así tomados en guerras que entre si tenían, como hechos por sus leyes y costumbres…” 38 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 134. 39 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 135. 40 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 136. 41 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 155.

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Indian slaves in a town that had been already been placed under the charge of an encomendero.42

Neither could towns be broken up nor their inhabitants dispersed in bondage.

The ideological commitment that the Habsburg monarchs inherited from the Catholic

Kings should not be interpreted as absolutely binding. Rather, local circumstances would continue to guide the precise course of action that the King’s vassals were authorized to take.

Near the borderlands of the Spanish Empire, the Sovereign’s reach was clearly contested by native peoples who either resisted the entry of Catholic missionaries into their lands or failed to recognize their tributary obligations as vassals to the Castilian monarch. Responding to a petition made by Gabriel de Cabrera who apprised the Council of these persisting problems in the province of Guatemala, the Crown issued a proclamation in March 1533 that granted the inhabitants of Santiago de Guatemala permission to enthrall the prisoners of war in the province.43 In the minds of Charles V and the Council of the Indies, this course of action was warranted by the unlawful refusal on the part of the indigenous to honor the terms outlined in the

Requirement.44 As a counterbalance to this concession, the material gains made by the encomenderos often entailed a set of obligations specified by the Crown. To ensure that these obligations were met, the Crown placed restrictions on the activities of the encomenderos especially with respect to their freedom of movement and their relationship to the indigenous communities under the encomenderos’ charge.

42 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 156. 43 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 143. 44 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 144. This 1533 pronouncement imposed limitations on the activities of the encomenderos: “…lo declaréis ansi, y ansi declarado por vosotros, por la presente damos licencia a qualesquier personas de esa dicha tierra que puedan hacer la dicha Guerra y a los que en ellas prendieren tomarlos por sus esclavos y como a tales venderlos sin embargo de cualesquier nuestras cartas y provisiones en que por ellas hayamos prohibido la dicha guerra y cautiverio, que en cuanto a esto las derogamos y anulamos y damos por ningunas, con tanto que no se puedan sacar ni saquen desa dicha provincial de Guatemala, y los unos ni los otros no fagades ni fagan ende al por alguna maner so pena de la nuestra merced y de diez mil maravedis para la nuestra Camara.”

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In a Real Cedula issued from Toledo on April 18, 1534, Charles formally denounced absenteeism of the encomenderos from their home districts and banned the encomenderos from leaving their assignments without royal permission.45 Often, conspicuous interruptions in the course of tribute extraction prompted a more proactive approach to colonial administration on the part of the royal authorities back in Europe. In a similarly censorious letter addressed to

Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and the Archbishop of Mexico Juan de Zumárraga (1468-1548) sent on May 26, 1536, the Crown condemned the encomenderos’ arrogation of royal tribute and enjoined the Real Audiencia of New Spain to curtail the illicit practices of the encomenderos.46

The King also demanded that the legislative body take a census of the number of Indian vassals dwelling throughout the territories to better account for those under his personal charge as sovereign.

While this distinctively personalist approach to the overseas administration of the colonies appears ineffective to modern eyes accustomed to the clock-like machinery of stream- lined bureaucracies, the Council’s handling of Indian affairs was neither haphazard nor undiscerning; rather, the Council operated within a setting of extensive deliberation as it sought to mediate the ideological commitments professed by the Crown and the Church with the present realities facing the King’s subjects in the colonies. Apart from the various ordinances and Reales

Cedulas issued from the Iberian Peninsula under Habsburg reign, the Council gradually

45 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 159. 46 Richard Koneztke, Cole i n de o umentos, 171. What is curious about this particular “Real Carta Sobre de Los Tributos de Indios y La Sucesión de Encomiendas” issued in 26 May, 1536 is the way in which Charles I imputes sinfulness to the negligence of public officials: “por lo cual vos encargamos y mandamos que si cuando esta veáis no estuviese hecha la tasación de los tributos que los indios han de pagar, vos juntéis en esa ciudad de México, y ansi juntos ante todas cosas oréis una misa solemne del Espíritu Santo, que alumbre vuestros entendimientos y os de gracia para que bien, justa y derechamente hagáis lo que aquí por nos os sera encargado y mandado; y oída las dicha misa, prometáis y juréis solemnemente ante el sacerdote que la hubiere dicho, que bien y fielmente, sin odio ni afición veréis las cosas de sus contendías, y así hecho el dicho juramento, vosotros y las personas que para ello señalaredes que sean de confianza y temerosos de Dios, veréis personalmente todos los pueblos que están en paz en esa tierra, y están ansi en nuestro nombre…”

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articulated its own unique vision of the future of the colonial order. As early as December 20,

1529, the Council deliberated on the question of the encomiendas and the prevailing questions of labor organization and the entitlements of the native peoples. The Council eventually informed the King of certain recurring trends in the numerous relacciones or letters of correspondence that filtered through the Council’s sub-committees. In this Consulta del Consejo de las Indias, the

Council took notice of the massive depopulation of the Indies and attributed these demographic downturns in part to the rampant abuses of the encomenderos.47 Within this same report, the

Council opined that the emancipation of the indigenous was not only preferable but necessary to avoid further “injury to the conscience [of the King]” and to facilitate the task of instructing and converting the indigenous to the Catholic faith.48 The Council also anticipated the devastating toll this would have on the conquistadores and their families. Anticipating these transitional costs that impeded all efforts at colonial reform, the Council proposed that the Spanish colonists who held encomiendas were to be compensated for their losses in the form of offices, benefices, and land so as to avoid dispersing the Spanish colonists which, in the eyes of the councilmen, would compromise the Spanish foothold in the Americas.49 Such intentions echoed throughout the cosseted halls of the Council of the Indies up to the codification of the New Laws; where by

1533, the Council assumed an even stronger and more decisive position on the topic of perpetuity:

“It is apparent to the Council that the Indians are not be subdued in encomienda at this point by anyone, and that all existing encomiendas are to be revoked later, and that the said Indians are not to be given to the Spaniards, under this or any other arrangement, so that [the Indians] can serve [their masters] through repartimiento, or some other arrangement; on account of the great cruelties at the hands of the Spanish and excessive work and lack of maintaining [the Indians]

47 Richard Koneztke, Cole i n de o umentos, 132. 48 Ibid., 132. 49 Ibid., 132. To ease the transition, the Council also suggested that half of the first year’s tribute should be redistributed to the encomenderos bereft of their primary source of labor in an agrarian society.

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and the horrendous treatment that [the Indians] have suffered, being free men, was the result of the management of the encomenderos. [This resulted in] the consumption and annihilation of the said Indians and the depopulation of the land, as had occurred on the island of Hispaniola…your Majesty should not give your vassals to other people neither temporarily nor in perpetuity because doing so would condemn [the said Indians] to the same fate of slavery and perdition.”50

In this administrative summary of its deliberations, the Council of the Indies would elaborate on the key points that would inform the codification of the New Laws in 1542. The Council clearly recognized that the encomienda as a system of labor organization and tribute extraction directly led to the impoverishment and depopulation of indigenous societies under Spanish dominion.51

The Council also believed that the authority vested in the encomenderos should be transferred to the caciques or the recognized leaders of the native communities in light of their familiarity with the people and the local communities. The Council averred that the native leaders would be better suited to handle the extraction of tribute payments than their Spanish counterparts and negotiate labor contracts on behalf of their local communities.52

To bolster its primary directive that aimed to shield the indigenous from the routine abuse of colonial overseers, the Crown assumed the role of moral legislator in the colonies and typically relied upon the Council to identify problematic trends in the individual complaints that it routinely filed. In a letter issued on October 26, 1541 to the acting governor of Peru, Francisco

Pizarro as well as to the Bishop of Cuzco and the civil attorney Vaca de Castro who acted as the

Council’s representative, the King of Spain voiced his concerns over the cohabitation of Spanish colonists and indigenous servants:

“We have been notified by correspondence that many Spaniards in this province have taken in their homes a great number of Indian women in order to consort with them and give in to their wicked desires. To rectify the situation, we order that no Spaniard can live in suspect arrangement with an Indian servant, neither to

50 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 150. 51 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 151. 52 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 152.

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impregnate nor give birth, except for those who were reserved to cook and [clean the house]. This way, many of the evil temptations can be avoided [in the future].”53

The indigenous were deemed highly impressionable by Spanish religious and civil authorities.

To a certain extent, the crimes of the Spanish were recognized as a barrier to the good will between nations that secured the evangelization of the Americas. This commitment is reflected in the Crown’s apostolic prerogative to preserve indigenous communities from the corrupting influences of colonial society. In a real cedula issued by the future Philip II on December 17,

1541, the young prince addresses the Audiencia Real of Peru where he demanded that black slaves be barred from indigenous communities. The future King of Spain reasoned that the

“drunkenness and wicked customs” of the slaves greatly harmed the indigenous. Informed by local clergymen of the deleterious influences of the African slaves, the Prince finally decided to outlaw the presence of black slaves in these communities following the advice of the Council of the Indies. 54

To assist the King, the Queen also championed this role as moral legislator in the colonies and assumed an assertive role in curtailing the iniquities that plagued colonial society.

In a characteristic fashion reflective of the personalist rule of the King, these reales cedulas commented on specific grievances and crimes committed in even the most far-flung locations of the Spanish Empire. In a letter addressed to the governor of Nicaragua that was sent on

September 9, 1536, for example, the Queen denounced the attempted rape and subsequent mutilation of an indigenous woman at the hands of a Spanish colonist:

“I have been informed that a man of some distinction in this province forced himself on an Indian woman and attempted to rape her; and that the woman defended herself and did not consent to his advances. To punish this woman for resisting, the said man set her on fire to the hut where she resided and that she

53 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 209. 54 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 213.

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endured severe burns [as a result]. This woman died shortly thereafter. Although the man was formally prosecuted, he was only fined five pesos of gold. In light of the severity of his crimes of which you must be aware, I order that you pursue this matter further and realize that this man is the one who committed this crime in the manner that I have described. You are called to proceed and exact justice and send to our Council of the Indies a relation notifying us of the [proper] punishment of this offender [in full accordance with the laws of the land].”55

Particularly alarmed by this atrocious behavior, the Queen demanded that the man be tried and punished to the fullest extent of the law as though he had committed the same crime in Castile.

At the same time, this piecemeal approach to administration and the isolated moral victories it entailed essentially disencumbered the Crown’s conscience from the systemic problems, or from the underlying causes that enabled the rampant abuse of the indigenous at the hands of the encomenderos. As physician to the colonies’ moral constitution, the Crown was treating isolated symptoms and not the disease itself. As the colonies withered away, the Crown would have to rethink its approach to colonial administration.

From the start of Habsburg rule, the Crown recognized that the reach of its authority entirely depended upon the integrity and competence of the royally-appointed officials who followed through with the directions dispensed by the King and his Council. Responding to a letter sent by Gonzalo de Guzman of the city of Santiago de Cuba in 1529, Charles I sought to modify the procedure according to which alcaldes ordinarios were locally appointed on the island of Cuba. Concerned that local residents of the city would put their own families’ interests ahead of that of their official duties, the King disqualified the common classes from participating in the electoral process and delegated the task entirely to the Regimiento instead.56 Though the

Crown left ample discretion to their colonial officials in the construction of local laws and regulations, the Crown customarily intervened in local politics whenever the Council of the

55 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 175-176. 56 Richard Konetzcke, Cole i n de o umentos, 148.

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Indies decided that existing local arrangements jeopardized the public good or compromised the

King’s tributary revenues.57

In conjunction with an ever-present concern for the competency of Spain’s imperial functionaries, the persistence of local corruption factored prominently as a source of concern for the Habsburg rulers. In a letter addressed to the alcaldes ordinarios and the local justices of the province of Chiapa, Philip condemned local corruption arising in the colonies. Informed by local subjects of the Crown, Philip criticized the self-aggrandizement and sham rulings of local judges who effectively stripped the local indigenous community of their property and rights in a manner contrary to the “laws and practical resolutions of the Kings.”58 Philip subsequently declared that

“no Indian could be charged without sufficient proof” and that suspects were to be processed in

“a manner and form suitable to those in full possession of natural rights.” The prince then commanded the local justices to review the laws as outlined and promulgated by the Council of the Indies and to treat the indigenous as they would any other vassal to the King. This particular letter, issued on December 8, 1547, was to be displayed “throughout the plazas, markets and

[other public places].” The Prince then stipulated that a fine of two-hundred thousand maravedis was to be levied on violators in the future in an effort to discourage corruption at the local levels.

57 Scholars have debated as to the precise extent by which the Spanish Crown benefited from its American possessions. In his contrarian essay titled “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?” (1978), Henry Kamen argues that scholarly talk of decline presupposes a moment of imperial glory that Castile never in fact possessed. Many Spanish arbitristas of the seventeenth century believed that the discovery of the Americas had proven to be an unfortunate burden to Castile, Kamen notes. Regardless of their dismissive view of the colonies at the time, the natural resources – particularly in the form of bouillon shipments from the American mines – helped to finance the imperial war machine under Philip II and his Habsburg descendants. Over time, the revenues generated from the American colonies helped to finance the Monarchy’s growing military debt to foreign creditors. The capital absorbed by foreign interests during the days of the Habsburgs was a wasted opportunity in that this capital could have been reinvested in Castilian economic development. Regardless of the semantics at play in the language games of scholarly circles, the Americas did in fact matter in the unfolding of political events across the Atlantic World during the seventeenth century and impacted the dynamics of power between rival States. This influenced the Crown’s formal involvement in the colonies at a time when the realizability of its own authority was routinely checked by the institutional limitations of the State and the vast geographical distances involved in colonial administration. 58 Richard Konetzcke, Cole i n de o umentos, 246.

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In many cases, the King and his Council of the Indies served as a higher forum of justice or as the preeminent court of appeals. Following a disappointing response by the then acting

Governor Domingo Martinez de Irala stationed in Asunción, Bartolomé Garcia, a conquistador who accompanied Pedro de Mendoza on his expedition into the interior of Paraguay, drafted an appeal to the Council of the Indies in 1556.59 Garcia’s plight is representative of a growing dependency class of military adventurers who were often neglected by their commanders following a successful campaign against the nearby indigenous tribes. Unsurprisingly, Garcia presents himself as a man of service who has been “wronged” by his immediate superiors: “I came to this province of the Río de la Plata twenty-years ago….in which I suffered the hardships that your highness doubtless knows all those who came in that time have suffered, and I have striven to be first in the service of your highness in every way I could, of which I would send proof if I were so bold.”60 Garcia’s compensation for his service in the company of Pedro de

Mendoza was particularly meager and the former footman was surely bold enough to bemoan of his relative poverty that encompassed “sixteen Indians [located] eighty leagues from where [he lived].”61 As if the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean did not matter, the King and the Council dealt directly with the various subjects of the realm. Accustomed to this ad hoc and personalized approach to administration, the colonists of the Americas were scandalized by the King’s hardline campaign against the encomenderos in 1542. Despite the vast distances involved, the

Spanish colonists had depended upon the King as the supreme arbiter of interpersonal disputes, but the Crown’s decision to impose comprehensive restrictions on the livelihood of an entire

59 John Lockhardt and Enrique Otte, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, 47-52. 60 John Lockhardt and Enrique Otte, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, 49 61 Ibid., 49. Garcia’s account shows how willing the conquistadores were to circumvent the chain of command in order to achieve their own personal objectives.

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social class was deemed inappropriate, illegal, and ultimately destructive in the eyes of the most prominent members of the armed colonial elites.

A Watershed Moment: The New Laws (1542) and the Limited Reach of Royal Authority

From the Crown’s point of view, the passing of the New Laws in 1542 shouldn’t have shocked the King’s subjects in the colonies.62 The indigenous were to be considered the King’s vassals; and for this reason, they could not be enslaved by another or worked in “any manner against their will” by the expressed will of the Sovereign.63 In light of the persistent disorders that disrupted governance in the viceroyalty, Charles V decided to take “the Indians under the charge of those with [seigniorial] title” where they would eventually be placed “under the

Crown” following the passing of the first generation of encomenderos.64 Those with title, who had no such legitimate claim to the Indians immediately, forfeited their fiefs to the Crown.65

Through the intervention of the local Audiencia, the Crown was also to take a decisive step in moderating the size of certain benefices and reducing the feudatory holdings of the more powerful encomenderos of the region.66 Most controversially, however, the New Laws mandated that “no viceroy, governor, Audiencia, discoverer, nor any other person could place the indigenous in the encomienda by a new provision [in the future], nor could they donate, sell, or transact in any way by dispensation or inheritance, except in the death of the one who had title to the said Indians, that are to be placed under our Royal Crown.”67 To oversee the transition,

62 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 216-217. In the preface to the New Laws, Charles reminds the colonists how they surely should “have known for several years that it has been my will and determination of putting service to God, our Lord, first and to advance His Holy Catholic Faith by the conservation of the naturals of these parts [of the Earth] and to organize good government and conservation of their persons…” 63 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 217. 64 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 218. 65 Ibid., 218. 66 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 219. 67 Ibid., 219.

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the Audiencias had “the responsibility of later making a report of those who passed away” of keeping tabs on those with remaining grants.68 The proverbial nail was placed in the coffin of the encomienda and the hammer of Fate was clasped firmly in the hand of the King. While the

Crown showed some consideration for the family of the departed conquistadores, the rents from the mita and the personal service of Indian communities had been capitulated to royal authorities.69

The immediate uproar against the New Laws revealed their radical implications.70 The strife localized along the Andean spine of South America intensified when Blasco Núñez (1490-

1546) was appointed viceroy.71 When the new viceroy arrived in Peru, he had intended to promulgate the New Laws in large part because he had an interest in reciprocating on his appointment and “in part so as to allocate encomiendas for his own advantage.”72 Feeling that they had entered into a legal contract with the Crown, the rebellious encomenderos who sided with Gonzalo Pizarro, Francisco’s brother, firmly believed that they could not be dispossessed without due reason. This sense of victimization at the hands of a recently installed governor who seized a political opportunity to install his own network of cronies motivated the brutal slaying of Núñez. Upon hearing of the revolt, Antonio de Mendoza (1495-1552), acting viceroy of New

Spain then stationed in Mexico City, decided against implementing the New Laws in his domain.

Taking note of the mounting tension in the viceroyalty of New Spain, even the mendicant orders

68 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 219. 69 Ibid., 219; Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de Documentos, 225. In a 1543 expansion of the New Laws, the King mandated that all encomederos allow for the routine inspection of their “fiefs” by the viceroy’s representatives and the members of the local audiencias for the purposes of a just tax appraisal. 70 D.A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State 1492-1867, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 68. 71 Ibid., 68. Both before and after the promulgation of the New Laws, nearly all of the Spanish colonists of Peru had been involved in a protracted struggle between two rival factions led by Pizarro and Almagro respectively. 72 Ibid., 68.

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begged the King to use caution in instituting such reforms in the colonies.73 Entrenched in the minds of sixteenth century conquistadores and their legitimate descendants was an understanding rooted in customary laws of Castilian society that any laws which impinged upon property and rights within a kingdom required the ratification and consent of the “leading citizens” of the realm.74 According to Brading, whose monumental work The First America touches upon these tumultuous years of South American history, “the rebellion was [eventually] defeated largely by assuring the encomenderos that their grants would be confirmed if they deserted Pizarro and renewed their allegiance to the Crown.”75 Either having been suspended or never implemented in the first place, the New Laws had little perceptible impact on the day-to-day transactions between the Spanish colonists and the indigenous of the Americas. This effrontery, however, would be internalized by the Spanish Crown where these rather frustrating experiences in dealing with the encomenderos would impact the course of territorial expansion along the colonial periphery in the generations that followed.

Following the debacle in Peru, the Crown intended to moderate its position by “defining the encomienda as a pension charged on royal tribute rather than as a seigniorial benefice.”76

During the course of his reign, Philip II often found himself in the danger of insolvency; in order to refinance the debt of his various European wars waged against the Dutch rebels, the heretical

English Queen, and the Protestant sympathizers in France, Philip turned to various sources. For this reason, the selling of benefices in the colonies was never completely off the negotiation table during the initial years of his reign.77 In spite of its initial hesitations, the Council finally convinced the son of Charles V to refuse perpetuity and jurisdiction to the encomenderos by

73 D.A. Brading, The First America, 68. 74 Ibid., 68. 75 Ibid., 68. 76 Ibid., 68. 77 D.A. Brading, The First America, 70.

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1562.78 In the wake of this fateful decision, colonial administrators found themselves less than convinced that this transition was in the best interest of the Empire. Even by 1564, Philip II found it necessary to clarify the succession of benefices in the colonies.79 Overseeing his far- flung empire from within the mausoleum-palace of the Escorial, Philip II continued to reflect upon the convenience of these feudatory arrangements as practiced by the first generation of conquistadores. Despite the strong-arm initiatives of the Habsburg State, the question of perpetuity still preoccupied ministers of the state well after 1568.80 During the first decade of

Philip’s reign, there was ample debate as to the precise role of the encomendero in colonial administration. Ultimately, the reign of Philip II was distinguished in this respect by a prolonged reconciliation and tentative renegotiation between the King and his colonial subordinates.

The Crown actively sought to procure official positions for those encomenderos who had been divested of their benefices as evidenced by a Real Cedula addressed on August 24, 1570 to the Audiencia Real of Nueva Galicia.81 While not going as far as abrogating the encomienda altogether in this set of laws, Philip was undoubtedly weary of the independence of mind and spirit that led so many colonists against the Crown during his father’s reign.82 The haphazard conquest of what would eventually constitute the colonial core of Spain’s American empire – that encompassed the Aztec and Incan domains – and the mismanagement of these territories had struck colonial administrators as an undesirable precedent for future exchanges between the colonists and the indigenous along the periphery.83 The history of the Peruvian Viceroyalty

78 D.A. Brading, The First America, 71. 79 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 412. 80 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 437. 81 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 461. 82 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 471. 83 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 472. Philip II took measures to ensure that future encounters would not repeat the familiar patterns of the first half of the 16th century. Exchanges between indigenous pagans and Christian colonists were to be strictly regulated: “In each region, province, and land discovered, settlements are

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under Charles V clearly provided its fair share of lessons in the minds of subsequent generations.84 Under Philip II, there was a significant overhaul in the social order of the colonies: the conqueror would become a pensioned bureaucrat of sorts. A life won by pillage and plunder was to evolve into a life dedicated to tax farming and civil service.

Counterpoint in the Colonies: An Administrator’s Apologia

The perspective of colonial administrators operating in the Spanish territories of the

Americas has long been underrepresented in most accounts of colonial Latin America’s history.

How Spanish jurists interpreted imperial regulations is unclear and the extent to which they implemented royal ordinances at the local level is much more difficult to ascertain. Fortunately, the response from the Western side of the Atlantic is not totally unexpressed: subject to the oversight of the Council of the Indies, colonial officials deliberated on how to apply the law to their respective jurisdictions. As the reales cedulas of the early colonial era clearly show, the members of the Audiencias as well as high-ranking officials of the American kingdoms petitioned both to the Council and the King in an effort to bring clarity to their administrative quandaries and to resolve lingering conflicts of competing loyalties and obligations by a direct appeal to the highest of civil authorities.85

to be established without harassing nearby natives; [moreover,] these [adjacent] territories should not be [unlawfully] occupied.” 84 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 473. Following through with the advice of colonial administrators, Philip II decided to place the former encomenderos on a government salary: “To him or his son or inheritor for the time that he was governor, captain-general, [or] high justice, he shall be given a competent salary every year, from the Royal Hacienda that in that province belongs to us.” 85 Sabine Hyland, The Jesuit and the Incas: The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 92. These polemical writings that denounced Incaic rule were in fact sponsored by the Viceroy Toledo. The work of the Jesuits such as Blas Valera and even José de Acosta served to champion the accomplishments of the pre-Columbian civilizations in an effort to help buttress the missionary project of the religious orders. The belief in the competency of the indigenous as rulers was seen as a necessary condition for their rationality as human beings. The argument for indigenous rationality was integral to the spiritual progress of the indigenous under the direction of the Catholic missionaries.

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In spite of their courteous deference to the Crown, jurists and colonial officials were not passive subordinates subject to the univocal whims of the King and his Council. Each had his own peculiar set of motives and each identified the risks and opportunities in his own unique way in face of unforeseen contingencies at the regional and local levels. The discretion exercised by the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza in anticipation of the resistance to the New Laws exemplifies the agency as well as the impotence of colonial functionaries at the local levels.

Each representative clearly possessed their normative outlook regarding how the colonies should be administered. Juan de Matienzo’s Gobierno en Peru (c. 1570) is perhaps the most elaborate and well-composed reflection on colonial governance composed by an experienced colonial administrator in the aftermath of the Civil War.86 Written with the intention of reaching the

King and his court directly, Matienzo’s treatise presents the suggestions of an experienced bureaucrat that reaffirms royal dominion over the Americas while allowing adequate flexibility for local administrators to facilitate the day-to-day management of routine affairs at the local level.87 Though Matienzo’s work does go through great lengths to refurbish monarchical authority in the Americas following years of indigenous resistance, civil war, and open rebellion

86 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, Obra Escrita en el siglo XVI por el Licenciado don Juan Matienzo, oidor de la Real Audiencia de Charcas (Buenos Aires: Compa a Sud-Americana de Billetes de Banco, 1910), viii. In the opening of his political treatise, Matienzo asserts his qualifications as a jurist by appealing his 15 years of experience as an oidor stationed in the Audiencia of Charcas. 87 Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, “Just War in the Indies”, in Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, ed. Jon Cowans, 60. While he articulated his opinions from the standpoint of an experienced legal official, the nucleus of Matienzo’s opinions about the indigenous was not, of course, original in any way. The most infamous of these antagonists to indigenous liberty, Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, rationalized the subjugation of the Indies for a variety of reasons that traced their intellectual genesis to the political works of Aristotle. Curiously enough, Sepúlveda’s argument did allow for the progress of the indigenous under the civilizing presence of Spanish dominion: “What more appropriate or beneficial thing could happen to these barbarians than to be subjected to the rule of those whose prudence, virtue, and religion must transform them from barbarians – into civilized men, at least as civilized as they can be; from stupid and lewd into upright and decent men; from impious servants of the demons into Christians and worshippers of the true God?” In many ways, Sepúlveda’s position differed from Las Casas in that the later believed that the indigenous – being rational creatures - had a genuine political existence already.

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against the Spanish King and his representatives, Matienzo’s policy recommendations to the

King are highly pragmatic and ostensibly served to mediate between two estranged parties.88

Matienzo parlayed these suggestions through the ideological discourse of Christian

Kingship, the articulation of which assumed a more emphatic tone in the backdrop of the

Counter-Reformation. Matienzo’s vision of a reformed colonial order in the Peruvian

Viceroyalty sought to supplant disorderly infighting between the King’s vassals with a harmonious set of clearly delineated hierarchical relationships between patrons and clients, lords and vassals that ultimately tied the most humble indigenous peon to the majestic person of the

Spanish King.89 Serving to mediate between two parties who regarded one another with suspicion, Matienzo attempted to broker a workable plan between an unruly military class and the Spanish Monarch. In this vision of a just society, the encomenderos were to serve the higher spiritual calling professed by the Crown and the Church in exchange for legal protections that promised a material share in the bounty of Indian tributary labor to compensate them for their services. What the former oídor of Charcas personally envisioned was a meritocracy of sorts, not that of an indolent feudal nobility, that would help govern the American colonies.

Matienzo’s argument stressed the urgent need of the Crown to accommodate the encomendero class in the unfolding of the colonial order under the reign of Philip II. The political treatise reads like an apologia of redemption for a particular social class awkwardly positioned in the

88 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ix. In his own words, the purpose of the author’s tract served to “give the King advice, so that the naturals of these kingdoms, by whose sweat and work I have nourished myself [and my family], be put to good use, so that in these haciendas may be instructed in civic virtue (“publica humana”) and the Christian religion and that the royal patrimony may be augmented without prejudice to the encomenderos and the inhabitants of this kingdom.” 89 John Lockhardt and Enrique Otte, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, 58. The infighting between encomenderos could even divide families. In a letter to his majordomo, the priest Diego Martin, in Peru sent from jail in 1545, Hernando Pizarro bemoaned the greed of his own family: “Diego Moreno told me that there was still gold in Cuzco, and those rogues in my house are holding it back to fill their hands with it as in the past. Since I had written that nothing was to be left there, there was no reason to keep it back. By your life, leave no wretches in the house; I have been told that a great deal of rascality is going on, and even though I should not write about it, don’t let anyone remain in the house who is best not there. Truly I am their enemy as much as if they had killed my father, and even more so of those who leave here fleeing and later turn everything to their own advantage.”

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colonial hierarchy amid the fallout of the New Laws. While largely unknown beyond the sphere of colonial Andeanists, the works of some of the more prominent literary figures such as

Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616) and Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala who published La

Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno in 1613 served as a collective response to the polemical works of administrators like Matienzo. Both authors devoted much of their lives to repairing the image and self-respect of the Andean peoples in the wake of the events that followed Cajamarca.90

Matienzo opens his treatise with a description of the Kingdom of Peru under the despotic rule of the Inca lords. The excoriating critique of the tyranny of the Incas presents a world contrary to the rule of “natural reason” which Matienzo utilizes as the foil for his project of

Spanish redemption.91 The Andean world of Matienzo’s own recollection was in desperate need of political and moral instruction in light of the prevailing tyranny of the Andean princes. The rampant disarray of the pre-Columbian polity justified the assertion of the Spanish King who

90 Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios Reales (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 2000), 367. Much of Garcilaso’s work sought to forge a distinction between the Andean peoples, their civilization, and their rulers. Always mindful of his European audience in Madrid, Garcilaso often framed the unfolding of Andean history as the work of Divine Providence. In this way, Garcilaso served as an apologist for Spanish rule and the Christianization of the region. Nevertheless, Garcilaso also eulogized the achievements of the Incan Empire’s just rulers such as Pachacútec whom Garcilaso portrayed as the Andes’ reformer and lawgiver (not unlike Solon or Lycurgus in the time of Ancient Greece); Huaman Poma, Letter to a King: A Peruvian Chief’s A ount of Life under the In s nd under p nish Rule (New York, E.P. Dutton, 1978), 204. Poma’s narrative, supplemented with visual depictions of the topics he covered in his narrative, attempted to enlighten Philip III of the true history of the Andes: “Your Majesty may wish to ask the author of this book some questions with the object of discovering the true state of affairs in Peru, so that the country can be properly and justly governed and the lot of the poor improved. I, the author, will listen attentively to Your Majesty’s questions and do my best to answer them for the edification of my readers and Your Majesty’s greater glory.” The author would then imagine a fictional dialogue between the author and the King that would anticipate some of the King’s questions concerning the governance and public administration of the Incas that would routinely be compared to the present abuses facing the Andean peoples at the hands of the local Spanish authorities. 91 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 11. In the critical spirit akin to Sepúlveda, Matienzo suggests that the apparent lack of writing in the pre-Columbian Andes led to a lack of order that the Inca lords could not effectively impose upon the surrounding countryside. The anarchy that ensued encouraged tyranny on the part of the Inca lords. This tyranny, in Matienzo’s own words, was contrary to “natural reason” and he supports this claim by recounting how Atahualpa committed fratricide to gain control of the Kingdom. In light of these events, the Spanish King was clearly justified, Matienzo asserts, in imposing his will upon these lands. The conquistadores were instrumental in this transition of authority.

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sought to redeem a society on the verge of collapse.92 In this way, the colonial society envisioned by Matienzo was to be placed under the aegis of the Spanish Crown where the virtues of a well-managed state were better ensured. The Inca rulers served Matienzo’s rhetorical purposes as a foil to the rule of the Spanish Kings who possessed the virtues that the indigenous lacked. As Matienzo’s treatise demonstrates, the bureaucratic officials operating in the name of the Spanish Crown would fabricate the myth of Incan tyranny to accentuate their self-fashioned image as just administrators. In a region of the Spanish Empire rife with native dissention that placed the loyalties of the indigenous communities to the Spanish Crown in doubt, this rhetorical gesture served to buttress the legitimate claim of the Crown to the entire continent by calling attention to the pandemonium that preceded the arrival of the Spanish. Throughout his treatise,

Matienzo generally ascribes a suspect character to those of indigenous extraction who are placed in positions of authority.93 The former licentiate and oidor of Charcas identifies the “kurakas”, or indigenous chieftains, of the Andean world as unscrupulous renegades undeserving of the concessions bestowed unto them by the Spanish Crown. Following their liberation from the despotism of their former Incan overlords who once ruled over local indigenous leaders by the cruel use of force, the local chieftains had grown brazen, Matienzo argues, and had taken advantage of the mercy and good graces of their civilized European rulers.94 In the opinion of

92 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 11. 93 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 13. Matienzo characterizes the caciques as a source of continued disruption: “Tampoco obsta si se dexesse que fueron muchos los excesos, muertos, y rrobos que hizieron los españoles y que no tuvieron intento de ayudallos,, sino de roballos, se rresponde que los Reyes le dieron muy Justas y santas Instrucciones a los que embiaron y por que el delito de el cacique no perjudica al señor, y por ventura fue dios servido que adquel Reyno se ganase por que aquellos tiranos fuessen castigados o por que no quedasse aquella gente Barbara perpetuamente olvidada, senales de elllo la poca noticia que por los sabios antiguos de ello se tuvo averse puesto en el Corazón de aquel famoso ginoves, los milagros que acaecieron en la población.” 94 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 17.

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the former magistrate, the latent threat to the colonial order had always been the indigenous kurakas who ruled over the local territories through any and all means of brute coercion.95

In the aftermath of the uprising in Peru that followed the promulgation of the New Laws, the Crown had become more inclined to relegate the management of tribute extraction to indigenous leaders directly.96 This portended the doom of the colonial order, in Matienzo’s opinion, for the indigenous were unreliable functionaries who often disrupted the evenhanded governance of the colonies. 97 Matienzo clearly recognized indigenous liberty as a threat to the colonial order that administrators in Madrid were not in the position to recognize. To allow the indigenous to roam freely across the territories and live capriciously according to their baser instincts, Matienzo had affirmed, would frustrate all efforts to both convert and duly tax them.98

The encomenderos, on the other hand, of Matienzo’s own imagining filled an indispensable role in the effective administration of the Spanish Empire since they had an interest in keeping an account of their indigenous workforce. Given their familiarity with the territory, the local geography, and the lands’ natural resources, the encomenderos’ knowledge in addition to their martial prowess equipped them with a unique set of capacities to exact tribute

95 John Lockhardt and Enrique Otte, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, 155-159. In the days of Pizarro’s tenure as governor, the caciques often served as underlings to the encomenderos who often had difficulty communicating with the nearby indigenous communities. In a letter written to the rebel governor Gonzalo Pizarro in 1547, a local chief by the name of Don Martin inquires about the governor’s future instructions for the community under Martin’s charge. 96 Despite the tendency to view the conquest of Peru as highly destructive, there were undeniable continuities between Incaic and Spanish rule. In a historiographical essay titled “Interpreting Peruvian Colonial History” (1988), Michael J. Gonzalez reflects upon the recent gains scholars have made in their understanding of the emergence of Spanish administration in Peru. Viceroy Toledo, often imagined to be the originator of the mita, actually adapted preexisting labor arrangements that had been practiced in the Andean highlands. Under these arrangements, the kurakas were given the responsibility of administering the labor rotation that tended to comprise 1/7 of the male population of the community on a recurring cycle. This gave the indigenous leaders substantial power at the base of the colonial economy. 97 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 18. In Chapter 7, Matienzo characterizes the caciques as lecherous embezzlers of the King’s patrimony who refuse to honor their duties as Christians and as vassals to the King. 98 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 50.

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from nearby indigenous communities.99 Matienzo believed that administrators in the colonies could determine the appropriate course of action at the local levels. Expounding upon this point, the licenciado refused to concede a “general rule” in the extraction of tribute on account of the particular customs and unique geographical features of each region.100 Experience had taught colonial administrators to eschew all ambitious plans of top-down reform dictated from across the ocean. Nevertheless, certain generalities had to apply for the sake of administration. To support the costs of war and regional defense in addition to the salaries of judges, the extraction of tribute was seen as a necessary measure that should be regulated and systematized by colonial administrators. To better account for the distribution of the gains of Indian labor, the mita was to be broken down in a precise ratio: in the seventy days of required labor, forty days were to be reserved for the encomenderos who oversaw the labor draft, eight days for the church, four days for the local community, ten days for the caciques, and eight days for the King.101 Each segment of the colonial hierarchy was to receive a share proportional to its immediate needs.

For Matienzo, the perpetuity of the encomienda was necessary for the preservation of those who were subjected to the mita because the ownership of royally sanctioned benefices encouraged the Spanish overseers to take care of those under their charge.102 The problem of colonial administration evidently did not lie with the encomenderos. The delinquency of the encomenderos was motivated by the uncertainty of their future prosperity. In a sense, Matienzo portrays the encomenderos as the victims of the Crown’s prejudice. The order envisioned by

99 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 29. 100 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 39. 101 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 53. 102 Ibid., 53. “The perpetuity [of the encomienda] is very important [to maintain] and the benefits of [this arrangement] will continue [to be apparent in the future]. The Indians will be better treated and instructed [in the faith] because it is certain that placing these vassals under the perpetual care of the encomenderos will allow the indigenous to endure their responsibilities [as vassals]. Giving these [overseers] an inheritance would result in greater yield to the royal revenue because it would make these encomenderos consider the risk their laborers would assume in the mines knowing that this would adversely affect [the inheritance and well-being of] their sons and descendants.”

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Matienzo on the other hand attempted to dispel the mutual distrust between the encomenderos and royal authorities.

Matienzo paints the abrogation of colonial encomiendas in sobering tones. He interprets the “delinquency” of the encomenderos, most apparent in the 1542 uprising, as an intelligible response to the dispossession of their fiefs as a threat to their livelihood while not going as far as to excuse the treasonous actions of the perpetrators.103 To neglect this particular social class implanted in Spanish America would naturally invite brigandry and protracted unlawfulness along the frontier or the borderlands that demarcated civilized life of the towns from the untamed periphery of the “Indies”. To suspend these arrangements therefore would not be in the interest of the nearby indigenous communities. To bolster this particular argument, Matienzo also points out a set of hurdles that would make the feasibility of a wholesale reorientation of colonial labor organization tremendously costly.104

Good governance had to take into account fixed or historical determined realities. The most efficient course of action rested in gauging the underlying motivation of the encomenderos themselves and to exploit this primary drive for the benefit of the Crown. The sensible question, according to Matienzo, was not whether the encomenderos deserved their titles; but rather, a more pressing question demanded to be asked out of sheer expediency: how were colonial officials appointed by the King and supervised by the Council to promote good governance in the local functionaries of the State? On this question, Matienzo provides a vision of a quasi- feudatory arrangement in the colonies that is contingent upon faithful service and competency of the intermediaries involved in the day-to-day administration of the Empire. The strings

103 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 57. 104 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 54-56. In this section of his argument, Matienzo lists the likely consequences of suspending the encomienda. In Matienzo’s opinion, the disastrous domino effect would involve the following: (1) The depopulation of the colonial towns and cities, (2) a weakening of the Spanish military presence, (3) an uprising of the indigenous, and (4) native reversion to paganism.

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Matienzo tied to the entitlements and legal protections desperately sought by the encomenderos is nearly meritocratic in design. The bureaucratization of the encomienda, in the manner outlined by Matienzo, would help foster a “nobility of the robe” in the colonies where the cultural capital associated with honorific titles would help cement loyalties to the Sovereign:

We should bestow noble titles of Conde, Marques, Duke [to them]; and some encomenderos, two or three in every city, to those with the largest fiefs with the charge of civil and criminal justice with the justice named by the Corregidor of the city, of those who also make a [sizable] donation, the encomenderos after perpetuity can be called comendadores as it is a more apt title [for their office].105

Placed at the top of this envisioned hierarchy, the King was to allay the anxieties of this class of functionaries by providing them with certain assurances that served to safeguard the patrimony of the encomenderos and their heirs.106 The patronage networks of the encomenderos and the fate of their dependents rested on the guarantee provided by royal authorities that their patrimony would be honored by the sovereign and his representatives in the colonies.107

In his model of ideal colonial governance, Matienzo placed the Spanish King at the head of a clearly stratified, and racially tiered, colonial hierarchy. While the encomendero played an indispensable role in this society and comprised the major focus of his treatise, Matienzo presents the King as the unambiguous overseer of colonial administration and relates how the

King factored prominently in the delinquents’ self-justification.108 Consciously looking back upon the calamities of the previous generation, Matienzo assumes a hardline stance against the treachery of armed miscreants who placed their own self-interest above the good of the kingdom.

105 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 61. 106 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 62. 107 John Lockhardt and Enrique Otte, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies,64-70. The encomenderos often headed very large extended families and their responsibilities for the well-being of their dependents often spanned entire regions and territories. In a letter to his brother Francisco Chacon in Los Hinojosos in New Castile, Andres Chacon, an encomendero of Trujillo, Peru, chastises his brother’s perpetual neediness and nearly accuses him of moneygrubbing. What is most surprising about the letters is the vast expanse of these patron-client networks which often extended over the Atlantic and across the Americas. 108 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 199.

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As he discussed the penalties that awaited delinquent encomenderos, Matienzo made no allowance for the bloody vendettas and vigilantism practiced by the encomenderos in prior decades.109 The public good as discussed by the author is secured only by the appointment of capable and honest officials without whom the republic would certainly recede into barbarism and disarray.110 To ensure a more propitious end for the kingdom, Matienzo sees royal authority as equipped with the task of relegating a set of responsibilities to royally appointed overseers charged with the apportionment of indigenous labor in the colonies. In exchange for material compensation and the recognition of their service, the Spanish colonists will more faithfully abide the will of the King.

Interests in Equilibrium: The Modus Operandi of the Mission Borderlands

Unlike his father, Philip II did not attempt to expunge the encomendero from the colonial hierarchy by placing a definite expiration date on the perpetuity of feudatory arrangements in the colonies.111 Instead, the son of Charles V chose to reform the institution of indigenous labor organization by directly regulating the activities of the encomenderos in an effort to promote stability in his territories and to better ensure the colonies’ dependence upon the Crown. Since the legitimacy of the institution itself was called into question during the reign of Philip’s father, the encomienda had to be reconfigured in terms more amendable to the Crown’s professed commitment to indigenous “liberty” that received a second coming in the wake of Trent.112 For this reason, the conquistadores and their descendants were provided with an array of privileges

109 Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 200. 110 Ibid., 200. 111 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 405. 112 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 615.

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and distinctions that set them apart from the rest of colonial society that warranted their loyalty through a set of incentives that only the Crown could dispense.113

The privileges and capacities that these offices entailed were balanced upon the notion of civil service to the Crown that, in practice, brokered the promotion of just governance throughout the kingdom.114 Under such an arrangement, what could be freely dispensed by the Crown could also be forfeited in the event that the civil servant failed to live up to the moral and professional standard becoming of a state-pensioned dignitary. While the encomienda continued to be passed down to future generations, the Crown made a routine effort to control these civil benefices and limit the influence of this quasi-feudal class of rent seekers in the colonies of the Americas.115

To achieve this end, the Crown aspired to maintain its privileged station as the nexus of an evolving web of patron-client relations that the Crown would help direct by formally officiating all transactions between its subordinate social elements in the colonies. In an effort to consolidate its royal patrimony and maximize tributary revenues at the colonial base, the Crown would bestow certain concessions to middling groups in an effort to appease its subordinates and limit fractious discontent that would jeopardize the Crown’s revenues and possibly its holdings abroad.116

Philip II’s cautious management of tribute exaction and labor organization that underpinned the legal relationship between the colonial towns and the indigenous peoples of the

Americas took into account the grim realities of American colonial society during the second half of the sixteenth century. While such placations do reflect the actual limits of the sovereign’s authority in a palpable way, Philip’s vision of the imperial order was not devoid of the idealism

113 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 417. 114 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 405. 115 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 412. 116 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 461. Conquistadores and their descendants, the encomenderos, were often the first to be considered for bureaucratic offices under Philip II’s regime.

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one would expect of a Tridentine ideologue. Philip II’s imperial agenda was ambitious in scope, and its meticulousness signaled a reinvigorated approach to colonial administration, even if

Philip remained largely bound to the traditions and conventions of his predecessors. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the borderlands of his empire where the missteps of imperial expansion could be better contained in advance.117

The Conquest of the Americas would continue to be waged beyond the nominal holdings of the Habsburg Monarchs over the course of their bicentennial reign. Taking into account the haphazard events that immediately followed the Columbian Encounter, the Crown envisioned a more orderly conduct of imperial expansion, with greater attention placed on royal oversight and the direct authorization of reconnaissance expeditions. By the last four decades of the sixteenth century, the discourse of Spanish imperialism – taken to signify the system of gestures through which authority and entitlement were conceptualized, discussed, and asserted by individual historical actors – had undergone some perceptible adjustments that have been largely overshadowed by the undeniable continuities that had started to ossify during the sixteenth- century.118 While the spirit of Philip’s authoritative decrees hardly differed from that of his father or great-grandfather for that matter, the orientation of Philip II’s administration over the

Americas exhibited peculiarities of its own and this revised approach to territorial expansion and consolidation that prioritized informed decision-making over improvisation at the local levels

117 Richard Konetzke, Colección de Documentos, 335. Philip II also issued forth instructions on the conduct of new discoveries and settlements within the second year of his reign, but his 1556 instructions were rather vague and ill- defined when compared to his more robust legal reforms in 1573. Nevertheless, the essence of Philip II’s vision was present in these early instructions in so far as they expected cooperation between the religious orders and the armed encomenderos in the pacification of the borderlands of the Andean world. Within these early instructions, Philip authorized the use of force in the event that the Indians impeded the evangelization efforts of the itinerate religious orders. 118 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, “Ordinances for the Discovery, The Population, and the Pacification of the Indies”, School of Architecture, http://cbp.arc.miami.edu/Resources/Laws%20of%20the%20Indies.html (accessed February 20, 2013). see ordinance 13.

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was perhaps best reflected in the Crown’s elaboration on the legal course of territorial expansion along the colonial periphery.

On July 13, 1573, Philip II had issued forth a rather elaborate set of protocols for the discovery, settlement, and pacification of new territories that lay adjacent to the holdings of the

Spanish Crown. This set of ordinances comprising 148 statutes in total describe in great detail the process of future expansion along the borderlands of the empire both in the Americas and beyond. Taken together, the Ordinances of Discovery reflect the Crown’s belief that the preferential option for indigenous liberty, as it were, could be reconciled with the discrete mobilization of the frontier. The Crown defined the rules of engagement between the outlying indigenous communities and the existing colonial order. These laws upheld the spirit of previous royal edicts but better defined the manner in which non-settled peoples were to be engaged by ecclesiastical and civil authorities on the fringe of the colonial provinces. Lending a formula for the creation of discrete political units in lands that lacked highly-organized states and urban centers, the Ordinances of Discovery could be said to be the first body of laws enacted to adumbrate the politics of regional development in the borderlands of Spanish America.

The most significant contribution of these ordinances underscored the illegality of unauthorized excursions by the King’s vassals into nearby territories that remained not only unincorporated, but legally undefined.119 The penalty for violating the fundamental commandment of Philip’s promulgations was severe: “No person, regardless of state or condition, should, on his own authority make a new discovery by sea or land, or enter a new settlement or hamlet in areas already discovered. If he were found without our license and approval or by those who had our power to give it, he would face a death penalty and loss of all

119 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 1 and 32.

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his possessions to our coffers.”120 Ever conscientious of the “inconveniences” that such liberties often inspired, Philip ordered that the future annexation of undiscovered lands follow a series of streamlined procedures that promised to mitigate the undesirable social byproducts of imperial expansion that would further complicate the Crown’s ability to subsequently assert its sovereignty in the future. The primary reliance upon armed combatants to actively subdue the indigenous was, for this reason, proscribed.121 In place of overt military conquest, the governors of the nearby provinces were to select a handful of men of “good standing” to discover these lands and to follow a series of ceremonial gestures that formalized the Spanish Empire’s recognition of these territories and legitimize their incorporation into the broader colonial polity.122

Such “ceremonies of possession” were, of course, hardly innovative turns in the Spanish approach to colonization by the last decades of the sixteenth century. What is exceptional is the extent by which this set of mandates was specifically tailored to suit the socio-cultural contours of the American borderlands.123 These ordinances systematized the strategic placement of fortified Spanish towns in sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped areas that clearly fell outside of the jurisdiction of colonial administrators. The deference that Philip shows to the indigenous peoples inhabiting these lands nevertheless anticipates the inevitable adoption not only of the Catholic religion but the Western notions of public life centered in urbanized social space.124 To facilitate this end, Philip II ordered the construction of towns – patterned on

120 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 1 121 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 2. 122 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 2. 123 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 5, 113, and 133. 124 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 136.

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the Spanish model also described in the Ordinances – that were to be populated by the indigenous of the recently discovered territories.125

The local Spanish towns constructed in these same territories acted as catalysts in the formation of these Indian reductions. At Philip’s insistence, the encomenderos of the nearby towns were to oversee the indigenous settlement of these new towns and the erection of religious buildings for the benefit of the indigenous converts.126 Following the construction of the fortified Spanish towns in these recently discovered territories, the colonists were to peacefully engage the surrounding indigenous population through the mediation of the Catholic religious orders who would open a spiritual dialogue with the indigenous pagans of the surrounding countryside.127 The logistics involved in the formation of these forums of religious instruction had political ramifications in so far as they relied upon existing power structures to achieve their realization. The missionaries - in collaboration with the leaders of the nearby colonial towns - would help broker fruitful relations with local indigenous chieftains who in turn would help convince their subordinates to settle in new locations and coexist amicably with the Spanish.128

The relationship posited between the encomenderos of the garrisoned towns and the missionaries of the reductions as outlined in the Ordinances of Discovery was one of mutual dependence. Both were agents of the Crown’s sweeping vision of an orderly and streamlined management of border security and imperial expansion. In these laws, the encomenderos were to primarily serve for the preservation of the King’s patrimony both to exact royal tribute from the

King’s vassals and to bolster territorial integrity of the provinces.129 With respect to the preservation of the King’s Indian vassals, the formation of the Spanish towns was primarily

125 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 36, 148, and 113. 126 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 148. 127 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 140. 128The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 139. 129 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 133 and 37.

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intended to lend greater security to the new Christian converts.130 Such paternalistic gestures of goodwill for the sake of “inferior” peoples had the intention of paving the pathway for the

Gospel, which remained the “principal objective” in the eyes of the Spanish Crown for which the

“discoveries and settlements [were to be] made.”131

The missiological concept of an Indian reduction positively achieved a well-defined and adequately promulgated legal status during the reign of Philip II.132 In practice, however, the task of applying these mandates at the local levels was delegated to the King’s representatives in the colonies who essentially disencumbered the royal conscience of the herculean task of reconciling the question of indigenous liberty with the temporal demands imposed upon all of the

King’s vassals. With respect to the province of the Río de la Plata, the promulgation of labor laws by the oidor Francisco de Alfaro in 1611 inserted clear guidelines on the reciprocal exchanges between the encomenderos, vecinos, and the local indigenous population. While the licenciado aspired to preserve the social fabric of the province, these ordinances scandalized local elites and ended “personal service”, or those forms of forced labor arbitrarily imposed by opportunistic citizens of the local Spanish towns upon the nearby indigenous communities.133

Unlike the New Laws however, the promulgation of Alfaro’s ordinances took into account the conditions of a specific region of the Peruvian Viceroyalty through the oidor’s direct

130 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 3. 131 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 36. 132 During the reign of Philip III, the messianic vision that once resonated throughout Philip II’s approach to imperial administration had been muffled by the far less auspicious realities that the Spanish Habsburgs faced in the seventeenth century. In Philip III and the Pax Hispanica, 1598-1621: The Failure of Grand Strategy (2000), Paul Allen argues that Philip III acknowledged the change in circumstances and assumed a Realist’s diplomatic posture in negotiating temporary measures of peace with the heretical powers of the North Atlantic. This new geopolitical strategy signaled a new approach to dealing with Spain’s enemies, but the overall ambitions of the Spanish Monarch remained more or less unchanged in most other respects. The author makes a convincing case for ideological continuity that underlies a change in strategically thinking. Plagued by other concerns in Europe, Philip III, like his father before him, relied upon the discretion of his administrators in the colonies to bring order to his various domains. 133 Richard Konetzke, ed., Cole i n de o umentos p r l istori de l orm i n o i l de isp no m ri 1493-1810, vol. 2 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cient ficas, 1958), 223.

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appraisal of the provinces in corroboration with the insights of the local ecclesiastical and civil authorities.134 Following his investigation of the region, Alfaro concluded that the obligations routinely imposed upon the indigenous were not only inconsistent with the Crown’s preferential option for indigenous liberty; moreover, he declared that these exploitative arrangements posed a threat to the viability of these new Christian communities along the riverine frontier of the Río de la Plata basin. Alfaro reasoned that the proliferation of the town-dwellers’ feudatory claims and the overlapping claims of various encomenderos threatened the livelihood of the Indians on accounts of the staggering toll such demands made on the schedule of indigenous converts.135

To correct these abuses, Alfaro’s ordinances attempted to impose a set of feasible protocols that better managed the time and movement of indigenous laborers, with greater attention placed on the sustainability of such working arrangements over time. These laws elucidate the more subtle implications of empire: time, and not merely space, becomes colonized as the demands of powerful elites encroach upon the leisure and self-determination of subordinates. In this effort to curtail the exploitation of the indigenous at the hands of both the local vecinos and the encomenderos, Alfaro ordered that the indigenous be compensated for their services to the local

Spanish towns in the form of a daily wage.136 Furthermore, as vassals of the King, the indigenous were not to be harmed or put in servitude against their will by any of the King’s other vassals in the nearby Spanish towns. In light of the newfound status as vassals to the King, the

134 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 227. Alfaro passed these ordinances following his visits throughout the provinces: “These abovementioned ordinances are what I’ve deemed appropriate, [as they reflect] what I’ve learned from [my] visits, and [even] more from special relations [with the local authorities], because in this land many would [naturally] fear what these ordinances deem convenient, which arrived to the disorder of this land, [and I] have communicated these ordinances with the Governors present and past, and with all the religious of this city, and almost all of the government [officials], and many other individuals of it, and especially with the appearances I have named cities of this city of Asunción.” 135 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 224. 136 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 211.

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indigenous were to be given full restitution in the event that an encomendero or one of his dependents harmed an Indian.137

The nearby towns populated by the Spanish were to serve as exemplary models of civitas and christianitas for the new converts who happened to visit the nearby cities to trade with the towns’ citizens.138 For this reason, Alfaro’s particular commitment to the incorporation of the

Guarani into the colonial order not only concerned itself with the adoption of beliefs, attitudes, and practices regarding fealty to the Holy Church and Its Sacraments, the oidor also placed barriers between the indigenous converts and the more deleterious influences of the colonial order to help protect the anticipated gains of the missionaries. For this reason, Alfaro imposed restrictions on the sanctioned interactions between the Guarani and the Spanish colonists, which included the limitation placed on the number of nights an encomendero could stay in his encomienda.139 For similar reasons, the service of women was barred entirely in order to better preserve existing family structures.140 In addition to his restrictions on the movement and interactions of legally distinguished groups, Alfaro set regulations on the means of exchange between the Spanish and the Guarani at a time when regional trade networks depended heavily, if not exclusively, on barter. Indians, for example, were not to be compensated for their labor with vicious wares such as “vino, chicha [beer], miel [honey], or yierba.”141 To safeguard the

137 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 210. 138 The Knight Program at the University of Miami, see ordinance 136. This particular ordinance emphasizes the provisional segregation of Indians and colonists pending the final construction of the garrison towns: “While the town is being completed, the settlers should try, inasmuch as this is possible, to avoid communication and traffic with the Indians, or going to their towns, or amusing themselves or spilling themselves on the ground [sensual pleasures?]; nor [should the settlers] allow the Indians to enter within the confines of the town until it is built and its defenses ready and houses built so that when the Indians see them they will be struck with admiration and will understand that the Spaniards are there to settle permanently and not temporarily. They [the Spaniards] should be so feared that they [the Indians] will not dare offend them, but they will respect them and desire their friendship…” Evidently, Philip worried that premature contact with the colonists would give the indigenous a false impression of what urban life entailed. 139 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 208. 140 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 220. 141 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 215.

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public morality in these nascent communities and instill discipline in this growing segment of frontier society, the oidor ordered that certain Indian officials be invested with the responsibility of arranging the drunk and disorderly, charging these appointed officials with the responsibility of bringing these dissidents to the Spanish towns to be legally processed and jailed.142 The formation of these communities, as disclosed in the publican’s ink, evidently called for the active participation of the local Spanish towns to help facilitate the formation of these new pueblos in the outlying territories.

Within this set of controversial laws, Alfaro posited a degree of collaboration between missionaries and encomenderos that belies the latent animosity that often frustrated these competing agents of the Spanish Crown. This joint venture between the Catholic religious orders and the conquistadores was stipulated in the ordinances themselves, which required extensive cooperation in the joint preservation of the royal patrimony. Missionaries, for example, were required to assist the encomenderos in the selection of the indigenous laborers who would be drafted into the mita. Having an intimate knowledge of the age and physical condition of the Guarani converts, the missionaries would be able to identify those who were fit for service.143 Meanwhile, the descendants of the conquistadores, who had been imparted the offices of Justicia Mayor and Alcade Ordinario by Alfaro, were entitled to a fixed rate of compensation for every indigenous convert subject to the tribute.144 In this way, the King’s tax farmers, who descended from the most prominent conquistadores of the region, had an incentive to appraise the King’s patrimony on a consistent basis – year-to-year.145 For their part, the encomenderos were to provide for the religious instruction of the indigenous, the exaction of the

142 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 208. 143 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 222. 144 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 218. 145 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 222.

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King’s tribute, the preservation of the civil peace, and the defense of the communities under their official jurisdiction.146

Despite the attempt of the oidor to proffer a workable solution for all the King’s vassals in the region, the reaction of the Spanish towns was one of overwhelming resentment. By 1618, the Spanish Crown intervened to moderate some of Alfaro’s provisions in an effort to mollify the disgruntled colonists of Asunción and the outlying Spanish settlements. While the Crown did applaud Alfaro’s efforts to forestall the abuse of the Guarani converts, Philip III also recognized that the economic development of the region required the drafted labor of the indigenous to help construct local infrastructure through this fledgling province of the Peruvian viceroyalty. Since many of the Spanish pobladores did not have title to the indigenous, the mita continued to be the primary means of economic assistance to the development of the Spanish towns. To provide for these vecinos who did not enjoy the lucrative civil benefice of an encomendero, the Crown reserved 1/12 of its tributary revenues for the vecinos of the garrison towns of the Río de la Plata region.147 While Alfaro realized this as well, the concessions he made to the towns were more modest. With the Crown’s mediation, the Spanish settlements secured more substantive gains for all of the Spanish citizens of the local district. Similarly, the shortage of available laborers willing to work in the towns constrained inter-regional trade and the growth of these frontier settlements. According to Alfaro’s statutes however, no indigenous convert could be forced into the services of merchants who compelled the Guaraní to tend the caravans or to help navigate the waterways of the province. Understanding that the dearth of indigenous workers willing to aid the colonists would continue to be in short supply, the Crown suspended its formal commitments by the written approval of the governor provided that the indigenous laborers were justly

146 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 222. 147 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 215.

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compensated.148 If the Crown proved willing to negotiate on its formal commitments under the pressure of local discontent, these pragmatic revisions of Alfaro’s promulgations certainly reflect the prevailing attitudes of the garrison towns of the Plate borderlands which felt distressed by these statutes.

While the Society of Jesus did voice opposition to “personal service” well before and certainly after the promulgation of Alfaro’s controversial ordinances, the preferences of the missionaries, as distinguished from those of the colonists, should not obscure the interdependencies in place between missionaries and the Spanish towns during the founding years of the Jesuit Reductions. These codependent arrangements, having a fixed basis in the

Laws of the Indies, proved indispensable for the formation of these mission communities in an ethnoscape that would otherwise resist arbitrary changes demanded of the indigenous converts.

The remoteness of the Jesuit Reductions from the nearby Spanish towns, relative to those indigenous communities in place before the arrival of the Society into Paraguay, continues to give the false impression that the Jesuits undertook an enterprise of their own in the untamed borderlands of the Río de la Plata Basin, planned out according to their own mandate and fulfilled by their own initiative. An assessment of the ideological currents in motion over the course of the sixteenth century, manifest in the legal evolution of the Spanish Empire, plainly shows that the religious orders of the early modern Catholic world, including the Jesuits, served in a unique capacity as the state sanctioned intermediaries between the existing colonial order and the outlying indigenous peoples of the Americas. The precise role of the religious orders can be better discerned if one considers their function in relation to a much more sophisticated machine of early modern Spanish Imperialism. Having been reserved a unique task by the

Crown, the missionaries found themselves dependent not only upon the King’s continued

148 Richard Konetzke, Cole i n de o umentos, 210.

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support but the support of his colonial subordinates as well. While frictions would often risk combustion as they did in preceding decades, the early history of the Jesuit Reductions in the

River Plate basin was distinguished above all by the collaborative efforts between civil and ecclesiastical actors on the local level who, despite their mutual suspicion of one another, nevertheless found the services rendered by either party beneficial to the long-term interests of the other. This partnership, in part a fulfillment and reflection of the Habsburg’s ideology of conservation through accommodation along the remote fringes of its Empire, would expedite the ministries of the first generation of Jesuit missionaries operating along the fluvial frontier of the

River Plate basin.

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CHAPTER 3

THE POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS CONVERSION IN THE PLATE BORDERLANDS

Creative (Dis)agreement in the Plate Frontier

Following the Jesuits’ arrival into the Plate River basin, the King of Spain voiced his own expectations for the course of expansion along the colonial periphery: as stipulated in “the ordinances of new discoveries and settlements”, the indigenous were not to submit to the encomienda, nor would they immediately be subjected to royal tribute. Apprised of the recent discoveries of these territories, Philip III proclaimed a ten year exemption for indigenous converts from tributary obligations to the Crown.149 The exemption meant to encourage the adoption of the Catholic religion and intended to expedite the settlement of the indigenous along the periphery of the Río de la Plata.150 While the Crown traditionally professed an idealized (and often impracticable) position on the conduct of Colonial-Indigenous relations in the New World, the discretion enjoyed by local authorities characteristically prevailed beneath a veneer of deference to royal authority. In previous generations, the King’s declarations were inevitably filtered through the channels of various local powerbrokers who worked out their own practical arrangements in the exaction of tribute.151 Relatively unacquainted with the conditions in place

149 Pablo Hernández, Misiones del Paraguay. Organización Social de las Doctrinas Guaraníes de la Compañía de Jesús (Barcelona: G. Gili, 1913), 511. 150 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u vol. 1 (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1912), 173. In a letter dated from April 30, 1610, the first Jesuit Provincial of Paraguay, P. Diego de Torres, implored the the King of Spain to exempt the new indigenous communities from tributary obligations to the crown. Torres cites the benefits of relaxing these obligations so as to encourage permanent residency in the reductions. 151 Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The South American Expeditions, 1540-1545 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), 172. Few accounts of the 16th century survive, but evidence of coerced labor arrangements do

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within the fluvial borderlands of the Plate region, the Society of Jesus was not culturally well- adapted to the local social environment of the Plate basin at the time of their arrival.152 The newcomers adamantly embraced the King’s labor reforms – evidently to the letter – both because it was their expressed interest to do so, but conceivably their stance was also a reflection of their inexperience in the local politics of the region. What would have otherwise been greatly amended in practice ultimately earned the full-fledged commitment of the Society that greatly scandalized the pobladores of the nearby Spanish towns.153

The Spanish colonists of the local garrisoned towns did not feel slighted by the Crown or even by the King’s administrators, but by the imprudent intervention of a new religious order that had aspired to fulfill the King’s mandates and bring the indigenous to a settled way of life along the Paraná and Uruguay rivers for the exclusive purpose of evangelizing these peoples and safely administering the Sacraments along the frontier.154 The distance between these new

surface prominently in the wake of Cabeza de Vaca’s incumbency as governor. As early as 1545, an uprising was organized against Cabeza de Vaca by Domingo de Irala who felt that the governor had acted too favorably toward the indigenous. A reign of intimidation ensued against the indigenous who were threatened with violence by the Irala and his men. The reaction was taken against the governor when he was bedridden and the feeling of revulsion for the events that followed Cabeza de Vaca’s imprisonment is especially compelling: “And as soon as he had been taken prisoner, Domingo de Irala and his officials had openly allowed all their friends and toadies and servants to run amok through all the towns and homesteads of the Indians, where they took women and young girls and hammocks and everything else the people had by force and without any kind of payment. This was the sort of thing that lent very little to the service of your Majesty and the pacification of the country.” 152Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 391. The Society of Jesus in the provinces of Paraguay and the Río de la Plata had at times implicated themselves in the partisan divides between the governor and the bishop that often impaired governance in this region during this period. In reaction to the scandals of the previous decades, the Provincial P. Nicolas Duran issued a set of ordinances in 1623 that sought to extricate the Jesuits from these affairs. One of the ordinances forbade the Jesuits from explicitly speaking against public officials during the Jesuit fathers’ sermons. 153 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 218. In a letter from the Bishop of Paraguay to the King composed in 1612, the bishop complained about the lack of indigenous laborers following the promulgation of Alfaro’s Ordinances. Casting himself as the voice of moderation, the Franciscan bishop believed that neither outright slavery nor absolute freedom were appropriate in light of the dire circumstances in the local economy. 154 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en la Provincia del Paraguay, 141. Curiously enough, the local cabildos of the Spanish towns originally petitioned the Crown for Jesuit priests to make up for the deficit of secular priests in the dioceses of the region. In 1609, the cabildo secular in the city of Asunción wrote to the King thanking the Crown for the funding of the Jesuit college’s construction. In this same letter, the town council asked for more Jesuit priests.; Pastells, Historia de la Compania de Jesus en la Provincia del Paraguay, 153. In 1607, to name

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communities and the city of Asunción, in particular, was imposing and the remoteness of the

Jesuit reductions from Asunción placed a heavy burden on the indigenous converts of the new communities who would have had to travel great distances to the Spanish towns in order to provide their tributary services.155 In times of hardship, such feudatory obligations jeopardized the livelihood of these nascent communities that struggled to reach a level of manageable subsistence. For this reason, the promulgation of Alfaro’s ordinances in particular emboldened the Jesuits who had already fiercely criticized “personal service” since their arrival into the

Province in 1607.156 The Jesuits may have continued to admonish the activities of the vecinos safely from the pulpit, but the missionaries’ advocacy for the new indigenous communities endangered the socio-economic status quo that had remained relatively undisturbed for generations.157 Unlike the more densely populated vice-regal power centers of Peru and New

Spain, the quasi-feudal arrangements of the encomienda would endure throughout Paraguay’s colonial history despite the routine protestations of both the Jesuits and the Spanish Crown. The controversy of “personal service” divided the local families of Asunción who seemed to have internalized the fundamental contradiction of the Spanish Empire that had hampered Colonial-

Indigenous relations since the days of Columbus’ governorship.

The Guaraní converts’ refusal to work for the exclusive benefit of the citizens of the

Spanish towns at the time was interpreted as an act of subversion and intimated, in the eyes of the colonists, the early stages of a full-fledged Indian insurrection against Spanish rule. In a another example, the Cabildo of Cordoba asked for Jesuit priests for the promotion of church doctrine, the administration of Sacraments, and for moral example that the Jesuit fathers would set. 155 Roque González de Santa Cruz, et al. Cartas de los Santos González de Santa Cruz, Roque, Alonso Rodríguez, and Juan del Castillo de la Compañía de Jesús. Mártires de las Reducciones Guaraníes. (Asunción: Secretariado del Paraguay, 1980), 99. 156 Roque González de Santa Cruz, et. al., “P r que los indios se n libres”: es ritos de los mártires de l s reducciones guaraníes (Asunción: Centro de Espiritualidad Santos Mártires, 1994), 19. 157Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 219. Pedro Sanchez Valderramas, the Teniente of Asunción, notified Gov. D. Diego Marin Negron in 1612 of the deleterious impact of Alfaro’s reforms upon the vecinos of Asunción who had lost their “haciendas” much to their personal detriment.

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letter addressed to his older brother, the Teniente General Francisco Gonzalez de Santa Cruz, the

Jesuit missionary Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz (1576-1628) strongly objected to the persecution of the Jesuit fathers by the citizens of the provincial capital following the promulgation of Alfaro’s laws in 1611. The rumors that the Jesuits encouraged indigenous sedition were unwarranted, in Roque’s opinion, because the priests of Roque’s order were simply complying with the King’s mandates.158 Feeling that the Jesuits had abetted indigenous resistance to the Spanish, however, the colonists once dared to drive the priests out of Asunción

“by force”, where the priests had been expelled from their church, and barred from “reentry which prevented [them] from saying mass” and carrying on their religious obligations.159 The vecinos would add insult to injury by attempting to extort the indigenous of the adjacent indigenous reductions as they entered the city to attend Mass in the Society’s chapel.160 Roque’s utter dismay at the sheer impertinence inspired the composition of this rather lukewarm familial letter to his brother that served as a response to the recent harassment of the indigenous converts by the local vecinos of Asunción who demanded that the indigenous work in the local mines.161

While his sentiments are understandable, and even predictable in certain respects, the precise phrasing of Roque’s complaints is rather illuminating: apart from their informative role as advocates and intermediaries for the Guaraní peoples, the Jesuits had no effective control over the indigenous communities of colonial Paraguay. In the words of Roque, “the blame ha[d] been thrown at the Company” in large part “because [the indigenous] d[id] not come to serve.”162 In a tactful rejoinder to his brother’s complaints, Roque stated that Society was not responsible for the private decisions of indigenous families who had settled in these new communities. The

158 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 91. 159 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 92. 160 Ibid., 92. 161 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 101. 162 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 92.

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implication that the Jesuits had such authority over their converts clearly resonated with the pobladores, but in the eyes of the Jesuits this was unfounded and perhaps even disingenuous on the part of the disgruntled townsmen. The Jesuits certainly gave counsel to the indigenous, but this in no way implied that the missionaries were ultimately responsible for the caciques’ decisions.163

Ever since the arrival of the first European explorers, such as Hernando Solias who first ventured up the River Plate in 1516, relations between the indigenous of the region and the

Spanish colonists remained potentially combustive for the greater extent of the colonial period.

The world from which Roque Gonzalez arose was not exceptional in this respect. In the year before Gonzalez left for the frontier, violence had broken out between the colonists of Jerez, a colonial town located 80 leagues north of Asunción, and the indigenous of the surrounding area.164 Upon subjugating these peoples, the colonists of Jerez enslaved the vanquished population at which point the survivors were distributed among the victors as the spoils of war.

Hearing of this development, a junta of ecclesiastical and civil authorities convened in Asunción to condemn the unlawful seizures of these self-appointed encomenderos. Fr. Lorenzana, a Jesuit of Italian extraction, was appointed the task of publically condemning these actions in his

Sunday sermons much to the disgruntlement of his congregation.165 As an outspoken critic of

163 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 92. In this letter to his brother, Roque makes this point explicit: “Pero ni los indios ni nosotros, aunque se lo aconsejásemos, tenemos culpa, antes merito delante de Dios Nuestro Se or y de Su Majestad el Rey…” (italics added). 164 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 19. “Acaso le ayudo a dejar el siglo el caso horroroso que aconteció en 1609: una represalia organizada por el teniente governador en la cual las victimas, pacíficos indios guatos, estaban pagando por los culpables de haber asesinado a españoles en Jerez, a 80 leguas al norte de Asunción. El Dean y provisor del obispado, convoco una junta de clérigos, y de las autoridades militares que habían intervenido. Aunque estos rehusaron asistir, la junta condeno la represalia, exigiendo la liberación de los guatos cautivados, y encargo al P. Lorenzana qu hiciese pública la condena en su sermón dominical en la catedral; precisamente cuando el Dean, bastante anciano, salía de Asunción para visitar otros pueblos de la diócesis. Mientras el P. Lorenzana explicaba los fundamentos y las exigenticas de reparar la injusta represalia, el Tesorero de la Catedral le obligo a callar y a bajar del pulpito. El P. Roque, asistente habitual a los sermones del P. Lorenzana, lo observo todo; y semanas después entraba en la Compa a.” 165 Ibid., 19.

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servicio personal arrogated by the encomenderos of the Río de la Plata, Lorenzana lacked sympathizers among the more prominent citizens of the city. Nevertheless, this priest made a deep impression on the young Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz who regularly attended these sermons. Evidently, Roque underwent the “Spiritual Exercises” at the direction of Lorenzana who likely inspired the young Roque to enter the Society of Jesus for the spiritual welfare of the indigenous who inhabited the fringes beyond the reach of the Church.166

The professed purpose of the frontier missions under the direction of men like Roque

Gonzalez was to “preach the Gospel…[in a manner] that did not demand the use of firearms and other weapons.” In fulfillment of the Catholic Kings’ apostolic charge, “only the example of a good life and the holy doctrine as had been carried out in the times of the apostles” could inspire genuine conversion in the indigenous pagans, although the price was often high enough as in the days of the early Christian martyrs, who similarly “shed their [own] blood, as [did] the three saintly men of [the] Company…in Chile.”167 From the beginning, the Jesuits projected this self- fashioned image of a flourishing apostolic church among the “heathen peoples” of the Americas, where the missionaries often identified themselves as modern counterparts of Paul of Tarsus and

Thomas the Apostle. Like the early Christian missionaries of late Antiquity, the Jesuits undeniably encountered resistance and even outright hostility from the pagan peoples that they had actively proselytized. However, this analogy is far from a perfect pairing in so far as it overlooks one crucial distinction that differentiates the Early Modern from the Apostolic Church: the Jesuits had the backing of a militarily superior colonial network that aided their ministries in more ways than one, the reliance of which set the tenor of the “Spiritual Conquest” that would have otherwise achieved a radically different expression in the absence of Santiago!, the

166 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 19. 167 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 95.

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perennial counterpoint to spiritual conversion that echoed the infamous exploits of the Spanish conquistadores. The nearby presence of technologically superior military forces that were culturally and politically bound to the itinerant religious orders had a considerable influence on the subsequent course of events following the Jesuits’ arrival into Paraguay.

The antagonism between the Jesuit missionaries and the pobleros of the Spanish garrisoned towns, while palpable and enduring, should not obscure the fact that the success of the Jesuit Reductions – in so far as one can label them as such during this time – depended not only upon the aid of royal authorities but upon the presence of the armed colonists as well.168

The adversity that the Society’s first missionaries faced in the frontier could not be overcome by their resourcefulness alone; their fulfillment of a broader agenda outlined in the “Laws of the

Indies” depended upon the participation of other imperial actors who collaborated in the joint pacification of the borderlands. While the Crown, the Jesuits, and even the local civil authorities at times professed their shared commitment to a conquest without recourse to arms, the formation of these new settlements was in reality motivated by the wider disturbances wrought by an emerging colonial order that involved the introduction of new diseases, the rapid demographic shifts that would naturally ensue, and the consequent power struggles at the local level that attempted to fill the political vacuum along the edge of the Spanish Empire. If anything, the Spanish presence in the region greatly facilitated, if not determined outright, the pattern of indigenous settlement in the recently discovered territories of the Río de la Plata basin.

The early ministries of Jesuit missionaries, such as Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz, reflect this.

168 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 177-179. In a series of letters dated from 1610, issued by Gov. Diego Marin Negron to the Spanish Monarch, the governor notified the Crown that the indigenous of the province who had slaughtered some Spaniards along the road to Cordoba had finally been brought to justice. The governor would go on to mention how he sent the Jesuits to subjugate these peoples with their knowledge of God. According to the governor, the Jesuits were the “soldados” best equipped to wage “esta guerra” with their tongues, whereby the Gospel was the best means to pacify the more pugnacious tribes of the region.

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Only God Can Make Something from Nothing: Colonial Interdependencies and Limitations for

Success in the Mission Frontier

Roque’s ministries along the frontier of the River Plate spanned between the years 1609 and 1628, the fateful year of his martyrdom among the indigenous insurgents near Caaró.

During the first few years on assignment, Roque was assigned with the intimidating task of proselytizing to the warlike Guaycurues who dwelt within the Gran Chaco immediately north of

Asunción. Though the need for political mediation between the indigenous and the colonists was indeed a perennial concern to both missionaries and colonists alike, the efforts of the religious orders to proselytize these peoples proved unavailing.169 Like the others who ministered in this particular region, Roque’s penetration was marginal and his efforts fruitless in comparison with the great achievements that awaited him along the Paraná and Uruguay rivers to the east and south of Asunción.170

Following his unpromising stint at the border of the Gran Chaco, the anuas cartas that have been compiled and preserved together with his voluntary correspondences with his confrères and intimates attest to a more prolific period of his ministries. These accounts broadly reflect a self-motivated personality who labored extensively in securing a foundation for these

169 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 389. In 1626, the bishop of Río de la Plata composed a letter to the King of Spain that celebrated the learning of the Jesuits. The bishop also lamented the lack of linguistically trained clerics who could further facilitate the reduction of the nearby indigenous population. From the sixteenth century through the first few decades of the seventeenth, the ecclesiastical authorities routinely complained about the understaffing of the local parishes of the Spanish towns. Few priests were therefore available to minister to the Indian communities. The overwhelming numbers of indigenous relative to the deficit of priests in the mission field strongly suggests that the spiritual gains in the borderlands were largely superficial. If this is true, the scholarly consensus must better account for the political dimensions of religious conversion. Such gestures of allegiance are especially salient during the first generation of the Jesuit reductions. 170 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 403. By 1622, six years before Roque’s martyrdom, the Jesuits had founded 14 reductions and reduced an estimated 30,000 indigenous Guaraní. Many of the towns that would constitute the core of the thirty reductions (Jesuit reductions) were founded by Roque Gonzalez and the local indigenous groups that he encountered during his sojourn in the frontier. Pastells, 504. By 1635, seven years after Roque’s martyrdom, the Jesuits had founded 24 reductions along the Parana and Uruguay and baptized 40,327 converts.

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fledgling communities along the frontier despite the adversity that faced him. Within these letters, Roque routinely presents himself as an itinerant, diligent, and often exhausted servant of the Church who, even when he employs self-depreciating commentary on the perceived setbacks of his ministries, does so in a manner that indirectly casts himself as a dedicated member of the

Society.171 Throughout his life’s work, Roque served as an informant, a translator, an advocate for indigenous rights, and, perhaps most importantly, as an intelligible liaison to the indigenous people of the frontier.172

Over the course of Roque’s life, the native son of Asunción founded nearly a dozen reductions of what would eventually constitute the core of the thirty Jesuit reductions situated between the Uruguay and Paraná rivers. His experiences can for this reason be interpreted as fairly representative of the early history of this evolving network of mission-communities.

While these were not the first reductions in the province, the rapid expansion and longevity of the reductions under Roque’s pastoral guidance marked a new chapter in the history of the province at a time when all previous efforts to reach out to the Guaraní-speaking peoples of the

Río de la Plata were hampered not only by cultural and linguistic differences, but by the

Franciscan friars’ general compliance with the encomenderos’ demands in the Spanish colonial

171 Jean de Brébeuf, “Important Advice to Those Whom It Shall Please God to Call to New France, Especially the Country of the Hurons”, in Jesuit Writings of the Early Modern Period, 1540–1640, ed. John Patrick Donnelly (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), 123. The expatiation of “petty martyrdom” was not confined to Paraguay alone. Both Matteo Ricci in Ming China and Jean de Brebeuf among the Huron complain of the indignities that they faced among the natives. Brebeuf in particular was quite dissatisfied with his treatment by the natives in New France who did not respect men of university learning much to the Frenchman’s displeasure. The infantilization of the missionary only extenuated his misery that was complicated by the discomforts of his living arrangements among the Huron. 172 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 190. In a letter addressed to Gov. Negron that dates from 1611, the acting Provincial of Paraguay, Diego de Torres, S.J., was sure to remind the governor that the presiding bishop had originally invited the Jesuits to the Río de la Plata region in order to preserve the peace of the jurisdiction. In order to accomplish this end, the Jesuits would be provided fiscal support under the Real Hacienda.

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towns.173 While originally invited to assist in the evangelization of Paraguay, it was apparent by the first decade of Roque’s undertaking in the Plate River basin that the Jesuits would assume a leading role in the missionary activities within this part of the world, one that set them apart from those who came before them. At the same time, the Jesuits have typically been portrayed as highly exceptional when compared with the other interest groups in the region, often by the hands of their own fellows, both apologists and chroniclers alike, and their particularism can often be overstated for this reason. During the early history of the reductions, the collaboration between the Society of Jesus and the surrounding colonial order, however, greatly complicates this historiographical tendency to prioritize the agency of this particular religious order at the expense of the other historical actors simply because the sources passed on down to scholars were composed by the Jesuit fathers themselves.

Nevertheless, Roque’s annual letters to his superiors provide a glimpse into the modus operandi of early modern missionaries occupying the remote fringes of the Catholic World.

One would think that these letters would shed light on the manner in which missionaries engaged prospective converts over spiritual questions, often for the very first time. Unfortunately, no such religious dialogue surfaces in these particular accounts, probably for good reason, since the very notion of a religious dialogue presupposes culturally determined boundaries regarding the sacred and the profane that are not, in fact, universal. Read critically with attention placed on the fundamentally distinct grasp of the supernatural by these converging historical actors, these encounters reflect a rather disparate set of interests and motivations that distinguish the outlook of the missionary from the pagan converts during this period.174 These letters, addressed to the

173 Magnus M rner, L Coron Esp ol Los oráneos En Los Pueblos de Indios de Am ri (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wicksell, 1970), 316. 174 A study conducted by Hélène Clastres titled La Terre sans Mal. Le prophétisme tupi-guarani (1975) focuses on the Tupí-Guaraní understanding of the supernatural and its bearing on the immediate social events leading up to and

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provincial in Asunción who had been apprised every year of the developments in the field, tend to focus on localized events, conditions, individual figures, and groups of people that the missionaries had recently encountered in the field.

From these early accounts, the indigenous Guaraní’s decision to dwell among the Jesuits was not exactly motivated by a desire to (re)connect with a transcendent deity, as the Jesuit missionaries surely would have liked to believe; for the activity that occupied these priests in the borderlands was curative in the most immediate sense of the term. Pestilence stalked the land of seventeenth century Río de la Plata and the contagious diseases that plagued “Indigenous

America” lingered about the inland tributaries of the Plate River. Entire mission communities, such as the reduction of Candelaría, were in fact devastated by “consumption.”175 The attention of Roque’s early writings, for this reason, focused on the morbidity of the land and the afflictions of the indigenous who often came to the Jesuit fathers for medical assistance, not spiritual enlightenment.176 The principal task of the missionaries, from the beginning, was the two fold cure of both the body and the soul, the distinction of which was of the Jesuits’ own intellection.177

following the colonization of the region by Europeans. According to Clastres, the migratory patterns of the Tupí- Guaraní peoples during the early colonial period had constituted a collective search for an earthly paradise, or “a land without evil.” As the mediators of the spiritual realm, the karai class of itinerant storytellers and shamans relied upon the artful use of speech to undermine the authority of the traditional power structures where they openly contended with indigenous chieftains for the loyalty of indigenous communities. In Clastres’ opinion, this dispersion signaled the collapse of the pre-Columbian social order that in many ways prefigured the colonization of the Brazilian coasts and the Río de la Plata in the following centuries. The Tupí-Guaraní’s discourse of individuation eventually engendered a quest for a better life. For this reason, large numbers of Tupí-Guaraní groups abandoned their villages and traditional territories to embark on a search for an idyllic existence in the adjacent territories. 175 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 278. 176 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 302. In an advisory summary provided to the King of Spain by the Council of the Indies in 1618, the Council advised that the King send to the “casas y misiones de la Compania de Jesus del Río de la Plata la limosna de medicinas para curar sus enfermos.” During this period, the Jesuits relied upon the material assistance of the Crown in an effort to minister to the needs of the reductions. 177 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 118.

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Often, the decision of the indigenous to comply with the Jesuits was motivated by a desire to be physically restored. The indigenous clearly recognized the Jesuit missionaries as faith healers and medical practitioners who had the avowed knowledge to restore those afflicted with disease.178 Roque, in fact, provides several accounts of indigenous pagans who would send for Roque in the event that they had fallen ill.179 Naturally, it was their practical approach to the supernatural, rather than their yearning for spiritual illumination, that lent the indigenous Guaraní to skepticism over the perceived efficacy of baptism as a ritual of power that promised to wash away infirmities and restore the well-being of the baptized. What the Guaraní seemed to have anticipated was the magical restoration of the afflicted body, not an initiation into a larger community of faith or the redemption of the human soul. One of the initial obstacles to

Christianization along the frontier, for this reason, was the belief on the part of the indigenous that baptism was harmful, if not fatal, to the baptized. Roque laments in one of his letters, how

“the damage wrought by this plague” allowed “the devil…to close the door to the conversion of the infidels, making them believe that baptism cuts their lives short and imperils them”; “for this reason”, Roque concluded with a heavy sigh, “we have reduced few converts along the

Uruguay.”180 For the Jesuit missionaries, such as Roque, this initial setback was rooted in ignorance and delusion. From the standpoint of the indigenous, however, the ritual was a

178 José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 443. This phenomenon of indigenous peoples enlisting the aid of Europeans in faith healing is not unique to Paraguayan history. As Acosta relates: “In the strange peregrination described by Cabeza de Vaca, later governor of Paraguay, which began in Florida with two or three companions who were the only survivors of a fleet, during which they spent ten years among the savages, journeying as far as the Southern Sea, he recounts (and he is a writer worthy of belief) that the savages compelled them to cure them of certain illnesses, and told them that if they did not do so they would be killed. They knew nothing about medicine, nor did they have any instruments for it. But, driven to it by necessity, they became evangelical doctors and cure those sick men by saying the prayers of the Church and making the sign of the cross.” 179 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 111. 180 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 100.

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proximate cause of death or, at the very least, an unpromising and ineffectual vehicle for salvation in this life.181

Stories of death-bed conversions similarly abound within Roque’s letters, all of which resonate with a prevailing sense of vindication for the Jesuit father. In times when death from pestilence and malnutrition was omnipresent, the spiritual victories of the fathers were often recognized through the redemption of the dying up to their release from this life.182 Roque’s stories assume a similarly consolatory tone at a time at a time when the young missionary remained deeply frustrated with the obstacles that barred the indigenous from participation in the life of the Church. Roque presents several anecdotes of spiritual triumph in the inauspicious wilds of this fluvial landscape. One such story tells of an old cacique of “more than ninety years” who succumbed to the light of the Gospel after his stubborn reluctance gradually gave way:

Upon seeing him, his vassals, who were also infidels, had taken him out of the town saying that they all determined to die with their ancestors, and that [their chieftain] wanted to be buried in a large pot, according to their custom. Knowing that they were determined to follow through with this, the others sent for me and brought him to me, and I told him what he had done wrong in leaving us behind, since we had already persuaded him to become a Christian, where his life would end happily; and so, I began to catechize at length in order to better secure the baptism, which I administered shortly before he died. I named him Ignacio, being that it was around the feast of our holy father. After being baptized, he was filled with great joy, and he clasped his hands together and thanked God our Lord for the good they had all received, and I was hugged and thanked because he had been baptized, and soon after he left to heaven, as we expected. 183

181 From Montoya’s writings, explored in the next chapter, it is apparent that the indigenous viewed the Jesuits as powerful shamans in possession of magic, the value of which was entirely practical. The Jesuits who struggled against competing spiritual traditions of pre-Columbian origins in some sense understood this. 182 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 140. 183 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 42. “El cual viéndole sus vasallos, que también eran infieles, muy malo, lo llevaron fuera del pueblo diciendo que querían que muriese con sus antepasados, y que le querían enterrar en una olla grande, a su usanza. Sabiendo y esta deanada determinación, envié por el y me lo trajeron; y diciéndole lo mal que había hecho en dejarse llevar, reñí a los indios, y a él le persuadí se hiciese cristiano, lo cual acabe con felicidad, y así, le comencé a catequizar y a hacer capaz para el bautismo, el cual le di poco antes que muriese, y le llame Ignacio, por estar cerca la fiesta de nuestro Santo Padre; este pues, después de batizado con gran jubilo, puso las manos y dio gracias a dios nuestro señor por el bien que había recibido, y a mi me abrazo y dio las gracias porque le hab a bautizado, y de all a poca se fue al cielo, como lo esperamos.”

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For Roque, the Sacrament of Baptism provided the indigenous a propitious “end to their strenuous excursion”, settling them in a land that allowed them “to rest eternally.”184 However, the political dimensions of this sacred rite cannot possibly be ignored by contemporary scholars who recognize that the Jesuits’ missiological focus tended to be directed towards indigenous leadership.

As can be gleaned from the previous example, one indispensable tactic that the Jesuits were quick to adopt was the conversion of the indigenous from the top-down.185 The conversion of local chieftains, or caciques, was a necessary measure to broker the conversion and allegiance of the cacique’s family members and vassals. This was a necessary approach to waging the

Spiritual Conquest whenever the missionaries lacked the dependable military protection from

Spanish armed forces either in the West or East Indies.186 In 1609 to name but one example,

Alonso Maldonado de Torres, the President of the Audiencia of La Plata, had notified the King of the pacification of the Chiriguanes which had been brokered through the baptism of the cacique Tambalera.187 Military intervention in the frontier of colonial Paraguay was, of course, never completely off the table, so to speak.188 Nevertheless, the reliance upon linguistically competent mediators, such as the Jesuits, allowed for more reliable diplomatic brokerages in

184 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 42. 185 See John Patrick Donnelly’s edited compilation of early Jesuit writings in his Jesuit Writings of the Early Modern Period, 1540-1640 (2006). The Jesuit approach to evangelization primarily targeted the powerful elites of the communities that they evangelized. In the case of Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the Jesuit missionary famously adopted the manner and dress of a Mandarin scholar after learning that the “bonzes”, or Buddhist monks, were not the most widely influential group in Imperial Ming China. Roberto Nobili (1577-1656), who engaged the Brahmin elite of India, learned Sanskrit and adopted the dress of the priestly caste in the Hindu world. 186 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 115. Often, indigenous leaders would vouch for the missionaries, which helped guarantee the safety of these new priests among the local community. This was the case with Aguaraguavi, a cacique of Caazapá Mini who eventually settled down in Candelaría, who had shielded Pedro Romero from his own people when tensions escalated. 187 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 151. 188 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P raguay, 302. A Real Cedula in 1618, for instance, sanctioned the use of force against the Payaguas and Guaycurues in reaction to the atrocities those groups had committed against the friendly indigenous tribes that dwelt near Asunción and Concepción. The Crown condemned, in particular, the burning of a local mission church and the enslavement of the women and children of the reductions.

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conflict resolution at a time when the Spanish Empire was not in a position to unilaterally impose its will upon the Spanish American periphery.189 As collaborators in the pacification of the

Platense borderlands, the civil authorities of the local jurisdictions who often had personal ties to the Society had an interest in providing a timely account of the shifts in the local political situation in the neighboring territories. For civil and ecclesiastical authorities alike, the

Sacraments played an indispensable role in signaling political realignments in a highly volatile cultural landscape of the seventeenth century Río de la Plata basin.

The indigenous perspective of the missionaries was undoubtedly pragmatic, not at all devoid of some degree of skepticism as was surely the case with regard to the indigenous perception of baptism. The missionaries were mediators, but this was not immediately apparent to the Guaraní-speaking tribes of the Río de la Plata basin. One of the hurdles to early expansion of the reductions was the lingering belief on the part of the indigenous that the missionaries were spies for the armed Spanish colonists of the nearby towns. Roque caustically mentions at one point how “those who remained alive [were] growing more deluded with each passing day”, where the indigenous “los[t] themselves to their imaginations that have pegged us as spies of the

Spanish.”190 This anxiety undoubtedly stemmed from the shared racial identity of both missionary and conquistador, but the suspicion also reflected the high degree of cooperation between the missionaries and Spanish colonists.

189 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 384. In a letter of petition to the Spanish King that asked for his resignation from holy office, the Bishop of Tucuman painted the state of the provinces in sobering tones in 1626. In the bishop’s eyes, the vast geographical distances in combination with the chronic personnel shortage in the region made governance – both civil and ecclesiastical – fairly difficult. While he lamented the lack of progress with regards to the conversion of the indigenous, the bishop nevertheless applauded the Jesuits’ indispensability as mediators with the indigenous peoples of the region. The negotiations brokered with these peoples vis-à-vis the Jesuit missionaries clearly benefited all: “…que todo el poder de S.M. en esta tierra no los ha podido conquistar hasta ahora, y oblige a dicha ciudad a que este con ordinario presidio, y por miedo de el están siempre dichos indios a punto de guerra, y por vía de paz han enviado los Gobernadores dos Padres de la Compañía para que estén entre ellos, y aunque no hacen fruto de conversiones, no es poco servicio el que se hace con asegurar la tierra.” 190 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 100.

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The founding of the reductions was a systematic effort to reduce the indigenous pagans to fixed domestic arrangements in an effort to better inculcate these peoples in the Catholic religion. In practice however, the reductions served as a means to pacify the borderlands and cease the outbreak of hostilities between warring indigenous groups that often involved the local

Spanish towns of the frontier.191 In a region that depended upon the river trade networks, the settling of the adjacent territories had an unambiguous instrumental value to the local colonial order. Despite their many disagreements, the missionaries and the local colonists shared a firm belief in the necessity of pacifying the borderlands and settling these peoples. In an annual letter to P. Diego de Torres dated from April 8, 1614 that commented on the limited success of the missionaries along the Paraná, Roque explains how the bellicose character of the indigenous

“destroyed and obstructed all trade and useful commerce along the Paraná River.”192 As

Roque’s comments suggest, the Jesuit fathers heavily depended upon the secure passage of the river-system that connected the reductions to the wider network of the nearby colonial towns and the regional economy.

Sheepfolds of a “Lost Arcadia”: the Construction of the Reductions in Colonial Paraguay

The formation of these new communities, though subject to the uncertain contingencies at the local level, nevertheless fit securely within the broader panorama of the Spanish colonial order as envisioned by royal and ecclesiastical decrees. As agents of this unfolding vision of

Spanish Imperialism under the Habsburg Kings, the Jesuits endeavored to incorporate each and

191 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 281. In a summary of the missionary activities in the region, the depopulation of these indigenous communities had several immediate causes that administrators recognized. A reduction that had been staffed by Mercedarian priests in Itacurubi over the Rio Negro, for example, was destroyed by the Charruas. Pastell’s account shows that many early reductions had been transferred to other sites or abandoned completely during the early colonial history of the region. 192 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 65.

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every indigenous forastero and pagan into a new network of apostolic communities that paid allegiance to God and the Spanish Sovereign. The ambition was global, but the resourcefulness of the missionaries was often very limited. For this reason, the missionaries would often fret over the missed opportunities in the field as Roque clearly did whenever he would contemplate the spiritual fate of the pagans that lived beyond his reach:

Many people have died and many will continue to die each day; blessed is the Lord who has deigned to profit from this small harvest, but the devil has been the greater on account of the four thousand souls that dwell near the Paraná, many of whom remained behind rather than settled down here, where there are but three hundred, and these have notified us of the many who [still] dwell near the ponds and in the mountains…The nearest towns of five and seven leagues away where we have baptized some creatures, those who have gone to heaven, but, as there are many, some die without baptism - even those who live close by. See Your Reverence, [if this is true], what about those who dwell well beyond our present reach? The Lord looks with eyes of mercy and assuages this plague by giving [the afflicted] to those who cultivate them…your reverence and the Jesuit fathers will serve to remedy these missions and reductions so replete with countless miseries and hardships as your reverence will see…193

Always anticipating future prospects along the periphery, the Jesuits founded these new communities with the consent of their converts as a series of settlements.194 The reductions were

193 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 126. “Ha muerto mucha gente y va muriendo cada dia; bendito sea el Señor que se ha dignado en hacer su agosto en esta pequeña mies, aunque el demonio la ha tenido mayor, porque de cuatro mil almas que había por este Paraná no se ha podido acudir más que a las reducidas de aquí, que son como trescientas, y estas nos han dado y nos dan bien en que entender, por estar muchas en las charcas y en los montes de miedo y horror que han cobrado al pueblo. Se han dado algunas ligeras a los pueblos más cercanos de a cinco y siete leguas y bautizado algunas criaturas, que han ido al cielo; mas, como no puede haber asistencia en sus pueblos, se mueren muchos sin el bautismo aun de los cercanos. Vea Vuestra Reverencia lo que será de los que están más lejos. El señor los mire con ojos de misericordia aplacando esta peste y dándoles quien les cultive y traiga a vuestra reverencia y a los padres con bien para que se remedien estas misiones y reducciones tan cargadas de miserias y trabajos como vera vuestra reverencia trayéndoles nuestro señor por esta reducción y de mayor…etc.” 194 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 141. In Roque’s own words, “Ni podemos llegar por el a sus pueblos, salir a la mar, porque a las sesenta leguas donde está su boca, se acaba lo navegable, y todo lo demás son pantanos de donde su origen. Y así es fuerza buscar por donde entrar a hacer nuevas reducciones de los cinco o seis mil indios que hay que reducir en ese espacio de cincuenta leguas. Yo, como dije, he venido mirando y tantando la tierra. Y así he visto que por donde hemos de comenzar esta conquista spiritual, es por la parte de San Nicolás, porque a lo más largo habrá del Piratini (que es el riacho sobre que esta la reducción de San Nicolás) veinte leguas al Tape, y por el Ibicuiti hay de San Nicolás al Tape cien leguas, antes más que menos porque a la reducción de los Reyes hay cuarenta, y de la de los Reyes al Tape sesenta. Fuera de esto, procuramos ir entablando nuestras reducciones cerca unas de otras, como comenzamos ya por aquella vía, porque de la Concepción de San Nicolás no hay más de cinco leguas; y donde pretendíamos hacer otra hay otras cinco leguas. Y así con facilidad se proveerán las reducciones; y lo principal que se ayudaran a reducir la gente, porque es cosa

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not haphazard arrangements, nor was the foundation of the reductions necessarily piecemeal in design. The highly consistent layout of these communities suggests not only a shared vision of colonial expansion along the periphery with royal administrators, but extensive collaboration in carrying out this task that transcended local differences.195 Each new mission from the beginning clearly maintained a place within a much larger community in the minds of missionaries such as Roque, as well as their superiors in Asunción, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and

Rome who had greater aspirations in mind.

While the r ison d’etre of the reductions was religious in conception, these cities of God

– of the missionaries own imagining – were very much communities of this world. Realizing that the salvation of the indigenous converts entirely depended upon a stable background – in terms of the provision of nourishment, physical security, and medical treatment – the missionaries such as Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz assumed other responsibilities that supported their primary directive. Apart from serving as a priest and as a bearer of the Gospel,

Roque assisted in other capacities as well. Given the fact that the Guaraní often lacked an acquaintance with Western farming techniques, building construction, and animal husbandry to name some prominent arts and sciences, the missionaries and their brethren from nearby colleges would have to oversee the application of these practical arts in the maintenance of these new communities, as outlined in Philip II’s ordinances of discovery. Roque relates how Jesuits from nearby colleges in the colonial towns would routinely assist in the construction of the chapels, domiciles, and other buildings that comprised the layout of the reductions.196 Roque himself was celebrated among his confrères as an exceptionally gifted carpenter who directed the

cierta que una reducción hace la otra, y la otra a la otra: lo cual no puede ser si están veinte o cuarenta leguas unas de otras, porque estaremos mil años en hacer las reducciones, como hemos experimentado. Y créame, V.R. el Paraná estuviera hoy por reducir.” 195 See Ordinance 33 of the Ordinances of Discovery and Pacification (1573). 196 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 113.

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construction of the reductions that he founded.197 What the Jesuits brought with them was not simply religious knowledge and esoteric truths, but also the practical arts and sciences necessary for a self-sustained civil existence along the untamed wilderness of the Plate river basin. The

Catholic religion, as understood and practiced by early modern Spaniards, was not amenable to life on the frontier. The flourishing of this particular religious faith required the construction of urban space for the preservation of the sacred in a world marred by sin.198

Roque’s first encounter with the Guaycurues at the beginning of his vocation troubled him for the rest of his life. The missionary’s heightened scrupulosity particularly with respect to sexual morality contradicted the societal norms of the indigenous tribes that tended to hold considerably less stringent views on human sexuality. Like other missionaries who followed

Roque’s footsteps, such as Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, the seasoned missionary – particularly sensitive to the lure of the flesh - found the communal domestic lodgings of the indigenous unacceptable:

This year, having to make a community of these people appeared to us in good order to remove many inconveniences and problems that exist in these long houses, which the Indians have constructed throughout the mountains, and although we understood that this would not do in the long run, in light of the old quarrels in the manner of their ancestors,

197 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 37-38. “Viendo pues esta incomodad, y que por nuestra salud y descanso de los indios, y menos costa y trabajo suyos y nuestros, era bien de aprovecharnos de la madera que está cerca, antes que la consumiesen y quemasen estos indios hacienda sus rozas, nos pareció tardar de hacer una casa y cortar la madera para la iglesia, y así se los escribía al Padre Rector de la Asunción al cual le pareció bien, aunque, en los que tocaba a la iglesia, me escribió era bien aguardase a Vuestra Reverencia. Puse luego mano a la labor y arme una casa de ciento diez pies, que en todo este mes de octubre se acabara con perfección; la cual tiene tres aposentos y muy bien sobrados, cada uno de quince a diez y seis pies en cuadro, con su refectorio, despensa y cocina; y todo muy acomodado y proporcionado, con sus puertas y ventanas de cedro, de que hay abundancia en esta reducción; y aunque la techumbre es de paja, nos ha costado bien el cubrirla por haber poco aquí para cubrir casas, y esta es la causa de que los indio no tengan acabadas sus casas. Para cuando venga Vuestra Reverencia tenemos todo lo que dice la delantera de nuestra casa cercado de palos, con lo cual estaremos con comodidad, y clausura; y todo esto he procurado hacer como Vuestra Reverencia nos lo manda en la instrucción.” 198 Pablo Hernández, Misiones del Paraguay, 586. In a letter of instruction issued by the provincial Diego de Torres for the missionaries of Guairá, Parana, and the Guaycurues, the Jesuits were provided with a list of instructions regarding how the reductions were to be constructed and administered. In these instructions, the Jesuits were to construct houses for each family while the church was to be located at the center of the town. Attention was to be given to the construction of the churches. The Jesuits along with royal authorities desired that the church be completely enclosed. Schools were to be constructed to instruct the children of the caciques in reading and writing.

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it did not follow the predictable course exactly. [In fact], they took it very well, and are very happy in their new homes, which were passed on even before they finished, being spacious…this was a town of nine blocks: one serves as a plaza, each block of six feet has six houses, and each house has five sets of twenty feet, and in each set of these an Indian living with his family. In one of these houses, the most colorful and decorated and placed near the square, is the site for the church, which now awaits Your Reverence’s visit and will meet the expectations according to the writ of His Majesty. 199

Apart from pacifying the borderlands, the reductions sought to amend these “inconvenientes”, or sexual indiscretions, indirectly by reconfiguring the domestic sphere of the Guaraní in the new settlements. When communication between the indigenous and the missionaries was frustrated by cultural incongruities and differing value-systems, the Jesuits took recourse in resolving this particular problem by adjusting the settlement’s infrastructure to better suit their agenda. The redesign of housing units was one such solution that bypassed the theological dialogue on sin and sexual morality, a convenient course of action whenever the indigenous languages lacked comparable terms of use that engender remote concepts such as Mortal Sin. While the success of the Jesuits in singlehandedly adjusting indigenous sexuality by urban planning remains unclear, and very difficult to verify at this moment in time, the portrait of the reductions tends to mirror the prescriptions of the Jesuit superiors.200 In his letters to Torres, Roque clearly portrays himself as a faithful servant who has followed through with these prescriptions. In obstructing the “occasions of sin”, by installing physical barriers to all carnal temptations that routinely led

199 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 36-37. Este ano, habiendo de hacer pueblo estos pueblos, digo indios, nos pareció lo hiciesen con buen orden para irlos poniendo en buena policía y quitar muchos inconvenientes que hay en esas casas largas, que tienen los indios en toda la sierra, y aunque entendimos que no lo tomarían bien, por quererles quitar eso tan antiguo de sus antepasados, no fue así; antes lo tomaron muy bien, y están muy contentos en sus casas nuevas, a las cuales se pasaron aun antes de estar acabadas, por estar holgados y anchurosos, y cantar, como dicen…esta pues el pueblo en nueve cuadras: la una sirve de planza; cada cuadra seis casas de seis pies, y cada casa tiene, digo haces, cinco lances de a veinte pies, y en cada lance de estos vive un indio con su chusma. En una de estas casa, la más vistosa y acomodad y junto a la plaza, se señala el sitio para la iglesia; que esperamos ahora con la venida de vuestra reverencia se dará orden como se ha de hacer según la cedula de su majestad. Aquí en la misma cuadra pegada a la Iglesia se señalaron nuestras habitaciones, de la cual tenemos harta necesidad por estar casi sujeta a todas las influencias del cielo donde ahora vivimos, que apenas tenemos en toda ellas cuando llueve donde colgar las hamacas sin mojarnos. 200 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 37.

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to illicit sexual unions, the Jesuits hoped to keep their communities morally pure so as to secure the salvation of the indigenous through the sacramental life unobstructed by the sins of the flesh.

As a Catholic missionary, Roque’s principal undertaking was the conversion of the indigenous and, to little surprise, the focus of his accounts rarely deviates from this purpose.

While the inconveniences and arrangements had to be voiced whenever temporal concerns posed a hindrance to the missionary’s efforts, comparatively little commentary on the Guaran and other nearby peoples is offered. Roque, who had been formally instructed in the “lengua general”, or the traversable dialect of Guaraní, shows very little interest however for the indigenous way of life leading up to the founding of the reductions themselves. Roque’s interests clearly resided in the constitution of these new communities and his letters offer little insight into the customs of the people he had been directing. The anuas cartas informed the superiors of new developments, to alert them of new prospects and persistent difficulties, to give a general outline of the local geography.201

Roque’s letters do, however, describe the routines of the indigenous converts with some degree of detail; since the religiosity, configured in terms of sacramental participation and doctrinal reception, was his principal interest. During this phase of the reductions’ history, the missionaries devoted much of their time to the instruction of the youth and their other converts in an effort to open the converts’ eyes to an understanding of these shifting boundaries between the sacred and the profane that occurred over a relatively short period of time.202 This

201 Roque González de Santa Cruz , Cartas de los Santos, 139. In his overview of Uruguay, Roque tries to estimate the number of “Indios” inhabiting the expanse of the different tributaries such as the Ibicuiti, the Tebiquari, the Cayysi, and the Icay. He demonstrates some skepticism as to the indigenous estimations and submits his own hypotheses to his superiors. 202 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 66-68. In his 1614 letter to P. Diego de Torres, Roque outlines some of the daily routines of the converts of these recently founded communities. On Sundays and Feast Days, for example, two hours were reserved for reading and writing instruction of the youth while additional time was reserved for older converts who needed additional catechistic instruction. Catechism was in fact prioritized during this period. Even upon granting Last Rites to the dying, the Jesuits would often catechize the moribund in a

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preoccupation was shared by others. There was expressed anxiety on the part of missionaries and policymakers, in fact, who jointly feared the profanation of the Blessed Sacrament with the utmost concern. Ecclesiastical and civil authorities alike, including the King, shared a commitment to warding off the profanation of the Blessed Sacrament by the hostile forces of the wilds. 203 For this reason, great effort was undoubtedly made to instruct the indigenous in the rudiments of the faith and upstanding Christian conduct prior to the administration of the

Sacraments.204 Great care was made to construct chapels worthy of housing the Sacred Host in the frontier. The Crown had even taken the initiative to provide the materials needed for construction of these churches.205 To reassure their patrons both in Madrid and Rome, the missionaries made a great effort to chronicle their gradual progress, and this possibly lead to great embellishments on the part of the correspondents during the founding years, especially at a time when visitations of the bishop were less frequent.

The Sanctioned Use of Force in the Borderlands

Following the promulgation of Alfaro’s ordinances throughout the Río de la Plata basin

(1611, 1612, 1613) that followed the ordination of Roque, the affairs of Jerez came to officially constitute an unlawful breech in the conduct of indigenous pacification in the eyes of local authorities. Even before the pronouncement of these laws, the course of territorial expansion within the interior of South America had already assumed a slightly adjusted trajectory that appears to have internalized the legal revisions regarding the sanctioned course of new rather conservative effort to dispel the lingering pagan “superstitions” that would render profane the otherwise solemn reception of the Sacred Host. 203 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 404. 204 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 317. 205 Pablo Pastells, Historia de la Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 407. In 1627, a letter of commission that the Crown issued to the Viceroy of Peru, El Marques de Guadalcazar, notified him that the Jesuits needed resources to help construct their chapels and houses. This letter was likely prompted by a letter from the Archbishop of Charcas in the same year that petitioned the Crown for assistance.

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discoveries and settlements. Military confrontation was routinely downplayed, whereas the reliance upon missionaries as representatives to the indigenous was instead given precedence.206

This, of course, did not bar opportunism in the course of new discoveries that had purely materialistic motivations underlying them. In the case of Luis Arana de Vasconcelos, an explorer who ventured deep into the Amazonian frontier in 1626, the pioneer would send his reconnaissance reports directly to the Council of the Indies where he mentioned his peaceful dealings with the indigenous while notifying the King, at the same time, of the existence of precious gems in the interior of Brazil.207 While they had been originally envisioned to better safeguard the royal patrimony in newly discovered lands, the new protocols for expansion along the colonial periphery opened up new opportunities for the exploitation of indigenous converts in practice. In this respect, Roque’s denunciation of the local practices is very telling when he cites the pobladores’ justification for using indigenous laborers to work the nearby mines as a service to be rendered to the Spanish King.208

In spite of these invariable frictions between the Jesuits and the local townspeople, the missionaries’ reliance upon the armed garrisons of the Spanish towns is manifest in Roque’s letters. The Jesuit of Asunción himself once extoled the efforts of Francisco Trujillo, a captain of the armed guard of Asunción, who assisted the Jesuit fathers in reducing the thinly dispersed indigenous population of the cordillera in Uruguay. To reward the assistance of the captain,

Roque sent a petition to the King of Spain that asked that Trujillo and his men be compensated for their services to God and the Spanish Monarch.209 The utility of the armed escort was

206 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 153. 207 Pablo Pastells, Historia de la Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 394. 208 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 96. 209 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 81. “…todos los que la presente vieren como el capitán Francisco Vallejos…ha servido a su majestad a su costa y misión. Y entre otros servicios sé que, yendo el capitán Juan Caballero Bazan a la visita de los indios del rio arriba fue el dicho Capitán Francisco Vallejos con gente a unas ladroneras de indios que estaban retirados en los montes del Curupaiti, de donde saco mucho lnumero

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especially indispensable in the cordillera, a fairly inaccessible terrain typically inhabited by the more isolated and apparently less mercurial tribes. Governor Hernando Arias de Saavedra, or

Hernandarías as he was better known, who had originally welcomed the Jesuits to the region alongside the bishop of Paraguay, often led expeditions of his own throughout his province. The governor once pacified the lands that bordered the Taraquiso which helped pave the way for the missionaries who sought to reduce the local indigenous population to fixed settlement.210

Despite his strong objections to the traditional privileges misappropriated by the local vecinos,

Roque collaborated extensively with civil authorities throughout his ministries. During the first few decades of the Jesuit province’s history, the incentives for indigenous settlement seem to have been motivated by an overarching fear of the Spanish encomenderos and vecinos.211

Recognizing that the military protection of his armed escorts intimidated the indigenous pagans,

Roque’s own understanding of the presence of armed Spaniards in the region is not at all devoid of providential speculation212:

de almas que se redujeron en el pueblo del Pitu y Atira, para ser allí doctrinados y bautizados. Y, además de esto, siempre el dicho capitán se ha sacrificado en ayudar a los religioso y sacerdotes doctrinantes, como fue en la reducción de Yuti al P. fray Luis de Bolanos y a los Padres de la Compañía de Jesús en el rio Paraná y al canónigo Pedro González de Santa Cruz en el rio arriba del Paraguay. Lo cual todo ha sido de gran servicio de Dios nuestro Señor y de su majestad. Por lo cual y por otros muchos servicios que ha hecho a las dichas majestades merece que los señores gobernadores le hagan merced y remuneren su trabajo y servicios. Y para que a todos conste, di está firmada de mi nombre…” 210 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 44. 211 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “Para que los indios sean libres”, 138. In a letter issed from Boroa to the Provincial in 1619, the motivations of the caciques to settle in these new communties typically reflect the indigenous leaders’ desire to obtain advocacy from the Jesuit fathers: “Tienen los indios rebeldes temor que van contra ellos los españoles y viene el Cacique Principal del Rio con 400 a favorecerse de los Padres; favorécelos y quedan agradecidos y con ánimo de reducirse y hacerse cristianos.” 212 The use of the word “Spanish” is uniquely employed in this region and is not devoid of its caveats. As early as 1954, the anthropologist Elman Service, underscored the degree of cultural hybridity that characterized upper Platense culture during the early colonial period. In Service’s opinion, Paraguayan culture was more informed by Guaraní practices than by the cultural loanings brought over by the Spanish conquistadores. In terms of language, sexual practices, and economic exchange, this is well-attested, especially in the sixteenth century. Service concluded that the personal service demanded of the indigenous reductions near the Spanish towns expedited acculturation to a much greater degree when compared with the Guaraní who inhabited the reductions founded by the Jesuits. The indigenous dwelling in the Jesuit Reductions were merely subject to the mita and did not participate as fully in the life of the Spanish colonial towns. For this reason, the terms “Spanish” or “colonial” are reserved for

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I have also written to the Governor for the preservation and perpetuation of Christianity of these new Christians, and the reductions they have founded in this province. It would be very convenient, and [indeed] it is necessary to found two Spanish towns and their appropriate sites are rather obvious: the one is the Albiaca, a seaport, and falling in the kidney of the Indies, who termed it the Ibicuiti, and the other near the reduction of San Francisco Xavier, with which two towns will help fence in or contain the province without which our efforts may unravel, because these locations are so far-flung and thinly dispersed, and so there is no fear [on the part of the indigenous], and, when they have no fear, one cannot hope to accomplish anything. For it is certain that our Lord has taken this as His means (the dread and fear of Spanish) according to his own secret designs so that these people may come to know Him. I do not feel that anything in nearly forty years will prove to be as worthwhile. And so I cannot leave my feelings unexpressed to Your Reverence who is the father of all, that, as such, the remedy of our concerns.213

The fear that the Spanish colonists evidently instilled in the indigenous pagans informed the decision of the indigenous to convert, a fact of which Roque Gonzalez was not only aware, but especially grateful.

Given the assistance of civil and ecclesiastical authorities both in the province of Río de la Plata and across the Atlantic, the Jesuit fathers who operated in Paraguay, Uruguay, and other adjacent lands could undertake their ministries with a greater degree of assurance that their new communities would not be uprooted by the predatory threats of the frontier. The financial backing, papal endorsement, royal patronage, and military support of the bishop and the governor greatly disencumbered the missionaries from the burdens that would have otherwise

those people, regardless of their racial background or position in society, who dwelt among the conquistadores and their mestizo descendants. 213 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 143. “También he escrito al Se or gobernador que para la conservación y perpetuidad de la cristiandad de estos nuevos cristianos, y de las reducciones que se fueren hacienda en esta provincial, convendría mucho, y es necesario se hagan dos pueblos de Españoles y se señalen los puestos: que el uno es el Albiaca, Puerto de mar, y que cae en el riñón de los Indios, que dicen del Ibicuiti, y el otro junto a la reducción de San Francisco Xavier, con los cuales dos pueblos se pondrán dos frenos a la provincia, sin los cuales a cada paso han de disipar, porque esta muy a trasmano todo esto; y así no hay miedo ninguno, y, en no habiéndolo, no se puede hacer cosa alguna. Porque es cosa cierta que Nuestro Señor ha tomado este medio (del temor y miedo del Español) por sus secretos juicios para que estos pobres vengan a su conocimiento, y se haga algo con ellos. No siento otra cosa en cuasi cuarenta años que los trato muy de cerca. Y asi no puedo dejar de decir mi sentimiento a V.R. que es padre de todos, para que, como tal, de remedio en todo.”

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smothered their enterprise in its nascence.214 At the behest of the bishop of Paraguay in 1609, for instance, the Jesuits were provided with haciendas to help sustain themselves in light of their perennial poverty.215 This especially controversial privilege was again reaffirmed by the Spanish

Crown in 1620.216 To safeguard these channels of patronage, the missionaries and their superiors pressed their supporters for continued relief by relating their triumphs and the accompanying threats that routinely undermined their hard-earned success in the field. These information channels were the conduits through which the resources needed for continued success were provided by the surrounding colonial order.217 Far from being a mere form of record, the cartas anuas had an instrumental value as well at a time when the Jesuits found themselves constrained by limited resources and personnel.

Throughout his relations, from the very beginning of his assignment to the final days of his ministries, Roque kept his superior apprised of the reception of the new faith. Anecdotes of questionable authenticity, exaggerated not so much out of outright mendacity as wishful- thinking, pepper his accounts. Stories of impassioned religiosity among the indigenous converts lent reassurance to the Jesuits at a time when their dealings with these peoples did not perfectly align with their expectations. In one of his annual letters, Roque mentions the story of a bereaved cacique who ventured into his homeland to find a new wife among the people of his nation. According to Roque, the cacique had no personal desire in his heart to return to the infidels but only did so out of deference to his nation’s traditions. Upon receiving the blessing of

214 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 137. The papal contribution to the Jesuit missions in the Americas had comprised 3% of the total stipends of the Jesuit missionaries. The vast majority of the fiscal assistance to the Jesuits came from the Real Hacienda; Pastells, Historia de la Compania de Jesus, 176. The King was often asked for additional financial support. Royal officials in Buenos Aires asked the King in 1610 for 1,400 annual pledge in pesos to help finance the reductions. 215 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 152. 216 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 321. 217 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 159; Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 173.

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the Jesuit fathers, the indigenous leader sought to replace his recently deceased wife who had died from “la peste” along with the majority of his vassals. When the indigenous leader returned to his new home among the Jesuit fathers, he brought with him his wife-to-be in addition to some of his own relatives. All were baptized by Roque Gonzalez, after which they all resolved to live the rest of their days very “cristianamente”, and as a good example to the rest of the community.218

Roque was sure to underscore the religiosity of his coverts whenever such displays of piety seemed to authenticate the sincerity of their religious conversion. In one curious example, the Jesuit of Asunción applauded the determination of the local indigenous community who wanted to raise a cross in the middle of a recently founded mission settlement. To help accomplish this end, Roque had notified P. Marciel de Lorenzana, the Rector of the college in

Asunción, to supply Jesuit companions who would assist in the construction of the town’s infrastructure. The attention Roque devotes to this episode in his chronicle for that year, however, suggests that this was a rather unexpected event. In light of their recent conversion,

Roque seemed to be especially touched when the indigenous swore an oath of allegiance to the cross and vowed to defend the cross with their lives, “as if they had been Christians for several years”. The converts reportedly took up their “bows and arrows”, in the defense of the holy cross against all transgressors who lingered both outside and inside the new community.219 The remarkability of this story, in the eyes of Roque and his superiors, suggests to the contemporary scholar of the Jesuit reductions that such displays of piety during the founding years of the reductions were rather exceptional.

218 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 100. 219 Roque González de Santa Cruz , Cartas de los Santos, 113.

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While the modern researcher would likely read such accounts with some measure of skepticism, one should not dismiss the general authenticity of these reports. The Jesuit missionaries wrote to their superiors, all of whom had the intention of visiting these communities.220 The familiarity of Roque’s superiors and fellow missionaries with the reductions and the general background of these new developments would place parameters on the young missionary’s freedom of representation with respect to the recent episodes in the lives of these new Christians. Verisimilitude is necessarily informed by everyday experiences. The relations therefore adequately capture the general developmental trends of these emerging communities during these first few decades of the Jesuit Reductions’ history even when certain individual episodes have questionable authenticity.

Within their own chronicles, the general landscape as rendered by the Jesuit missionaries is one of salient contrasts and this was surely the case since the beginning of their enterprise in colonial Paraguay. As bearers of the divine light amid a land of darkness, the reductions served as a new Israel among the benighted “gentiles” of the R o de la Plata basin. This metaphor – tracing its formation from the founding years of the reductions – served as the germ for the

Jesuits future efforts to legitimize their privileged role along the mission frontier of Spanish

America. Such tropes of redemption and divine election would prove an indispensable rhetorical device that would contribute to the eventual armament of the Jesuit Reductions following the rupture of the Iberian Union that tore the Spanish and Portuguese worlds apart in the upcoming decades. As a contrast to this simplified Manichean narrative of the Society’s own design, however, the Jesuits’ actual relationship with the existing colonial order was far more multifaceted than the missionaries would have cared to admit. There was never a perfectly clear distinction between the reduction communities and the outlying indigenous peoples, just as there

220 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 143.

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was never a perfectly clear distinction between the Jesuits and the other Spanish settlers in the minds of the indigenous converts. Often articulated several years after the fact, these stark contrasts that surface in the Jesuits’ reflections on their missionary enterprise often obscured the degree of ambiguity in the field which both facilitated and, at times, frustrated the missionaries’ efforts during the founding years.

A Conquest without Arms?

The first generation of Jesuit missionaries in the Río de la Plata region was overwhelmed by the imposing task of convincing the indigenous peoples to abandon their ancestral ways.

Despite their tendency to affirm the overall progress and inherent promise of their initiatives, the missionaries encountered a variety of indigenous tribes who responded to these early modern evangelists in unpredictable ways. More often than not, the encounters frustrated the missionaries and the impact of the Jesuits’ teachings was much more limited than the missionaries would often lead others to believe. In their dealings with the Chiriguanaes, for example, the Jesuits simply could not convince the indigenous chieftains to cease their polygamous practices despite six months of religious instruction.221 The missionaries encountered ample resistance from their prospective converts over the lifestyle expected of a

Christian convert. In a letter from Antonio de Añasco to Governor Diego Marín de Negrón in

1611 for instance, Añasco notified the governor of the great frustrations that the Jesuits experienced in the missionary field and the difficulty they experienced in delivering the local peoples to fixed domestic arrangements.222 Relations evidently could break down - often to a violent extent - as was clearly the case with the Guaycurues, where the caciques had gone as far

221 Pablo Pastells, Historia de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 142. 222 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 195.

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as to renounce their Christian names whereupon they resumed the practice of adopting monikers from those they had slain.223 As the letter from Governor Negrón to the King in 1613 reveals, the indigenous could often react violently to the encroachment of the Spanish townsmen to such an extent that the Jesuit fathers would seek military aid following the breakdown of their ministries and the razing of their churches.224 Apostasy was a real concern in the frontier not only for the missionaries, but for civil authorities as well. The rejection of Christ signaled a withdrawal from the colonial order, an act of political insubordination, which would in turn nullify the legal protections that Alfaro’s statutes bestowed to the indigenous.225

In their annual letters to their superiors, the Jesuit missionaries pointed out not only their relative gains and achievements in the field; most characteristically, these men often underscored the looming hostility that their extended visitations provoked. In reaction to the apostasy of certain native groups, such as the Calchaquies of the Salta Valley, civil authorities would often mobilize in the hope that the fortified military presence of the Spanish in the area would suppress the resurgence of paganism and nonconformity in the frontier.226 The frontier was indeed volatile and the Jesuits not only had to manage the antagonistic relations between the vecinos and the “friendly” indigenous tribes, they also had to suffer the traditional rivalries between different indigenous ethnic groups such as those of the Guaycurues and the Payaguas.227 Such tensions between ethnic groups were so disruptive evidently that external pressures could even lead indigenous converts to completely abandon their reductions in the event that they felt threatened by nearby enemies.228

223 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 220. 224 Pablo Pastells, Histori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 249. 225 Ibid., 249. 226 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 455. 227 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 234. 228 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 278. Well before the martyrdom of Roque Gonzalez, the Amerindians of Cunumayis, located near Jerez, fled the mission town on account of the

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To venture the borderlands beyond the aegis of the armed forces garrisoned in Asunción and other colonial cities was a dangerous undertaking that posed many risks. Within their early accounts, written in the final years of their lives, the martyrs Roque Gonzalez, Juan del Castillo, and Alonso Rodriguez clearly recognized this, but these Jesuit missionaries proved all the more intransigent despite the visible indications that their ministries were often unwelcomed. The motivations of this generation routinely exposed to the horrors of plague, famine, and bloodshed, may be difficult to surmise with any satisfying degree of reliability. However, the distress that they experienced in such an alienating environment as the seventeenth century Río de la Plata cannot be overlooked either as evidence of their limitations or as a reflection of their continued dependence upon colonial authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. The isolation of the Jesuit missionaries, as an expeditionary force armed with the Gospel alone, was certainly real in many cases – but their isolation was often debilitating, and not nearly as liberating as has been often imagined. In a letter sent to his superior and spiritual advisor, P. Diego de Torres, Roque denigrates his own personal failings and expresses his looming sense of despair:

I live dying here, and I fear that I am losing my mind, as I have a tired and broken head with the ongoing war with these thoughts. My scruples have always gotten the best of me and I am so lonely in the depth of my melancholy: yet, I am resolved to remain here, though I will die a thousand deaths and suffer a thousand trials, that will not be to my detriment, but I will profit by them, and so, my Father Provincial, dispense what Your Reverence wishes of me as is deemed appropriate for the greater service to our Lord. 229

The depth of Roque’s disappointments was proportional to the height of his expectations. In this same letter, dated from November 26, 1614, Roque mentions the on-going confessional

perceived insecurity of their new domestic arrangements. Clearly, lingering hostilities between rival indigenous groups did not cease once one party decided to convert to Christianity. 229 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 83. Que me veo y me deseo, y tan pique de perder la vida, o dar en algun disparate…Digo que vivo muriendo aqui, y temo perder el juicio, segun tengo la cabeza cansada y quebrada con la continua Guerra que siempre tengo con tangos escrupulos y tanta soledad y melancholias: con todo digo estar resuelto a estarme aquí, aunque muera mil muertes y pierda mil juicios, que no serán para mi perdidas, sino ganacias, y asi, mi padre provincial, dispaga lo que vuestra reverencia de mi como viene mas convenir al servicio del nuestro se or…

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discussion between himself and his confessor over the course of his ministries. The expectations of the Jesuits at work in this part of the world overshadowed what they ultimately encountered in the field. Along with his confrère José de Acosta (1540-1600), the Jesuit missionary Roque

Gonzalez believed that the relative simplicity of nomadic and semi-sedentary peoples, such as the Guaraní, would lend them to greater malleability.230

The perceived “primitivism” of the infantilized Guaran was in reality a mixed blessing in the eyes of Catholic authorities in the Americas. While the absence of such practices as idolatry and human sacrifice were largely witnessed in a positive light, the missionaries also presumed that semi-sedentary peoples proved especially difficult to Christianize in comparison with the advanced civilizations of Mesoamerican and the Andean worlds. In the opinion of José de

Acosta, the indispensable factor that facilitated the adoption of Christianity among these advanced peoples had been the recognition of “an overlord” by the Ancient Peruvians and

Mesoamericans. The lack of a fully formed political consciousness, of the Spaniards’ own imaging, was consequently projected onto the tribes in the remote areas of the Americas that dwelled in “Florida and Brazil, and in the Andes and a hundred other places”, as Acosta himself assayed, “where in fifty years less progress ha[d] been made than in five years in Peru and New

Spain.”231 In lieu of any centralized authority that enjoyed a monopoly on the use of force, or at least a hegemony that contained its multiplicity, the resistance that the missionaries faced would prove considerable in the minds of the religious authorities who struggled to achieve a foothold in these regions.232 The indomitable pride of the caciques who knew nothing of political life or

230 José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 442. 231 José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 445. 232 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 53-54. “Pero la venida que más nos ha consolado fue la no esperada de un indio que levanto el Paraná contra el Padre Lorenzana y esta reducción cuando se vio en el aprieto que Vuestra Reverencia sabe; que por venir a ocasión y paréceme que no se escribió la causa porque los indios del Paraná quisieron matar al Padre Lorenzana y a los indios de esta reducción, lo poder aquí, en breve, para que se vea como, si al Padre y a estos indios les hubiera cabido tan dichosa suerte, fueran muy gloriosos mártires, diciendo que

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the hierarchical chain of command, as recognized from the standpoint of the Spanish colonial order, inhibited the Guaraní’s adoption of a new mode of life, one that involved self-restraint and the recognition of the Sovereign’s authority.233 Even in the minds of the Jesuit missionaries, the pacification of the borderlands involved far more than the adoption of the new faith. The decision to convert was an overt political gesture.234 Taking into account these deeply entrenched preconceptions about the indigenous peoples of this neglected region, the great triumph of P. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya resided in his rhetorical capacity to overcome these long-lasting prejudices, which eventually led to the royal endowment of firearms to the Jesuit

Reductions following the mass evacuation of the Guairá reductions in the years to come.

The slaying of the Jesuit missionaries in 1628 followed the unfavorable portents of the founding years. In this region of Spanish America, an indigenous leader by the name of Ñezu was gaining ascendancy over the unconquered lands beyond the walls of the colonial cities and presidios. This sorcerer’s ascendancy to power precipitated the rising agitation of the indigenous in the recesses of Uruguay. Roque, apparently alarmed by these developments, decided to travel to the lands of the Ibicuiti river, the inhabitants of which P. Pedro Romero, had suspected of treachery. Through his indigenous informants, Romero believed that the belligerent tribes had the intention of ransacking the reduction of Los Reyes.235 Determined to confirm these rumors,

quería ser cristiana y casarse con otro indio: el Padre la amparo y su marido y mancebo la siguió y vino tras de ella con muchos fieros, diciendo le diese su mujer: el Padre le dijo que mirase que quería ser cristiana y que así no quería volver con él; y que, pues él tenía la primera mujer, se contentase con ella, y que no podía tener otra, y que además de esto le había dicho que si la llevaba la había de ahorcar en el camino a ella y a una hija suya; que no la había de llevar; que se volviese. El indignado, no quiso, antes hizo alguna fuerza para llevarla, y algunos me han dicho que puso las manos en el Padre Francisco San Martin. Viendo pues que todo lo que el haca era sin provecho, se volvió al Paraná donde convoco y levanto los indios de el para dar sobre esta reducción. 233 José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 447. 234 Pastells, Historia de la Compania de Jesus, 258. The connection between conversion and submission to colonial rule could be rather palpable. In 1616, for instance, Gov. Hernandarias visited the reductions of the Guaycurues with his soldiers where he personally witnessed the baptism of the caciques’ children. 235 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 134. “Estando de partida para el Ibicuiti del Puerto de la reducción de Candelaria, escribí largo a V.R. de todo lo de por acá, y ahora también lo hago por ser necesario. Y tomándolo un poco de atrás digo: que viniendo bajando de la reducción de la Concepción a esta de los Reyes, recibí

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Roque asked some of his converts familiar with the area to escort him to the hinterlands of

Uruguay. Cognizant of these dangers, Roque’s diffident allies refused to fully accompany the priest to the village in the other lands.236 While Roque convened with the natives of the lowland areas, the villagers received threats from those dwelling in the cordillera. The situation became so disquieting for the villagers that Roque considered leaving Uruguay to quell their anxieties.237

The soon-to-be martyr, of course, did not. The son of a prominent hidalgo of Asunción would not flee from his spiritual battles.238

The news of the martyrdom of Roque and his confrères, Juan de Castillo and Alfonso

Rodriguez, echoed across the land and animated the retaliation on the part of the indigenous allies of the Jesuits who acted in league with the local colonial garrisons led by Captain Emanuel

Cabral who was quick to capitalize off of this misfortune.239 In the years that immediately followed, the forces of Ñezu were eventually routed and the territory of Uruguay once again opened up to the Jesuit missionaries. The aggressive incursion of Spanish military forces into

Uruguay following the murders of the missionaries did momentarily unveil the true ambivalence of the Habsburg vision of pacification that downplayed the overt use of force in the borderlands. cartas de Buenos Aires y un billete del padre Pedro Romero en que me escribía y decía que había malas nuevas de los del Ibicuiti. Porque decía que habían hecho gran junta para venir a dar en esta reducción, porque los de ella habían recibido a los padres y Españoles, pero que un buen cacique la había deshecho; y que así no curare yo de bajar tan presto hasta que se supiere la verdad del caso. Yo por el mismo caso apresure mi viaje, y así llegue a esta reducción adonde me informe, y todos me dijeron que era verdad; pero con todo, por entender que sería mentira, determine (después de haber encomendado a Nuestro Señor y consultadolo) ir a ver lo que había. Y así me partí luego, y habiendo caminado más de veinte leguas por el Ibicuiti arriba, me encontraron dos canoas de Indios, que el padre Pedro Romero había despachado de esta reducción a saber la verdad de los sucedido; los cuales me dijeron me volviese, porque los Indios Serranos estaban bellacos, y habían venido, luego que yo Sali de allá, a tratarme mal; y que como no me hallaron, quemaron la capilla y derribaron la cruz y la quemaron. Con esto estuve algo perplexo de lo que hab a de hacer; y para determinarme me quedé aquel d a all …” 236 Roque González de Santa Cruz, Cartas de los Santos, 137. 237 Ibid., 137. 238 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 116. A fugitive from San Xavier, named Potirava, had alerted the Jesuit fathers of the intentions of Nezu of Jyuy who had aspired to kill the Jesuit missionaries. The certainty of hostility and the specific dangers awaiting the missionaries was known to the fathers in advance. 239 Roque González de Santa Cruz, “P r que los indios se n libres”, 117. As the Jesuit chroniclers would recall, Nezu was defeated by a coalition of the indigenous converts of the Jesuit Reductions, led by the cacique Neenguiru, and a smaller contingent of colonial forces led by the Portuguese Captain Emanuel Cabral in 1628.

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The commitment to indigenous liberty, while professed at a distance from above, was never unconditional. Consciously in line with his father’s promulgations of 1573, Philip III had endorsed the Jesuit reductions in 1607, unaware of the enormous difficulty of the task in mind:

As you know, in these parts there have been some [recent] discoveries, and in some provinces that have been recently discovered, the naturals (Indians) have been reduced to our holy Catholic faith; and as is demanded by the Ordinances of new discoveries and populations, the order is given that the Indians be relieved and alleviated as soon as possible: I have maintained that those who have been recently reduced to our holy Catholic faith and my obedience only through the light of the Gospel...240

The vision of a “Spiritual Conquest” without the use of arms, tracing its ideological roots to the advocacy work of Las Casas and his spiritual experiment in Vera Paz, proved elusive for missionaries and policymakers alike in the centuries that followed. The following decade would prove to be just as precarious as the founding years under the pastoral guidance of the three martyrs. Facing rising pressures exerted by the colonial order itself, complicated by ill-defined borders and the dissolution of the Iberian Union, the reductions under the leadership of a new generation of missionaries, endeavored to secure the patronage of the Habsburg Crown at a time when local colonial order became less accommodating to these new communities.

240 Pablo Hernández, Misiones del Paraguay, 511.

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CHAPTER 4

WAGING THE SPIRITUAL CONQUEST

A Supplicant’s Tale

Unlike the perfunctory yearly reports that the Society of Jesus demanded of its various ministers in the provinces, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's Spiritual Conquest is an exceptionally finessed work of rhetoric written with the intention of reaching a far wider audience than that of

Montoya’s Jesuit superiors. The text, penned in the Castilian vernacular, sought to bring a systematic account of the reductions’ histories, and succeeded in going well beyond the individual chronicles of each mission and the particular trials and tribulations of each fallen missionary. In his literary undertaking, Montoya attempted to bring a synthesis to the reductions’ founding histories in a way that would lend moral justification to the Jesuits' operations throughout this region. This particular work of advocacy served as the basis of a much broader appeal on the behalf of the Society of Jesus and those under their spiritual tutelage during a moment in the reductions’ history when local hostilities escalated to an unprecedented extent under the banners of paulista slavers.241 The moral suasion of the “Apostle of Paraguay”

(1585-1652) is similarly reflected in the illuminating work of Montoya’s premier biographer,

Doctor Francisco de Jarque, who composed the first biography of this missioner-philologist

241Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 436. In 1629, Fathers Justo Mansilla and Simon Maseta issued a report on the atrocities committed by the slave-raiding bandierantes based out of São Paulo then located in the captaincy of Sao Vicente. Over the year, the “Mamalucos” with auxiliary support from the nearby Tupí tribes sacked 11 reductions in Guairá alone. Within the region of Tape, these paulistas pillaged 7 reductions. In total, 10 indigenous communities were relocated during this year alone. The priests who accompanied the slaves would later petition the Governor general D. Diego Luis de Oliveira in an effort to procure the freedom of the captives and to put an end to these raids. For a succinct scholarly overview of the bandeirantes, see Richard M. Morse’s The Bandeirantes: The Historical Role of the Brazilian Pathfinders (1965).

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toward the end of the seventeenth century. While the contents of Montoya’s hagiographical narrative continue to inform our present understanding of everyday life in these communities,

Montoya’s tract, composed during Montoya’s sojourn in the royal court in Madrid, also served as the basis of a broader appeal that ultimately differentiated the Jesuit reductions from the surrounding colonial order that centered in the nearby Spanish towns. This distinction embodied in this work contributed to the armament of the Jesuit Reductions in the months that followed its initial publication in 1639. This remarkably successful campaign for indigenous liberty that transpired in the court of Philip IV signaled a radical departure from the sanctioned approach to border security in the colonial periphery that had come into place over the preceding generations.

Confined to a close reading of the texts in question, this study will attempt to situate the

Jesuit Reductions within the context of Spanish hegemonic decline by focusing upon two interrelated concepts: the Habsburg notion of vassalage and the right to bear arms in order to defend the King’s patrimony along the borderlands. Going against the grain of conventional wisdom that more or less reflected the deep-seated chauvinism of colonial administrators at the time, the stockpiling of firearms within indigenous communities had to be justified in terms that prioritized devoted service to the King and the Catholic faith in the struggle against the rising tide of political dissidence and religious heterodoxy in the Atlantic World. For this reason, the conduct of an upstanding Christian was predicated upon the conduct of a faithful vassal. To provide for the defense of the Jesuit Reductions at a time when the colonial order began to become less propitious to its continued expansion along the periphery, the Jesuits attempted to take the defense of these communities into their own hands through a direct appeal to the King that alerted Philip IV of the problems endemic to this rather far-flung and largely ignored region of Spanish America.

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In an effort to help advance the Jesuits’ agenda in this particular province, Montoya’s narrative attempted to cast the indigenous converts of the Jesuit Reductions as capable of being wholly transformed by the light of the Gospel and the Christian example of the Jesuit fathers.

The conversion of the Guaraní-speaking pagans of the forests into upstanding Catholics, however, entailed far more than the tacit acceptance of the basic tenets of the Christian faith: those teachings both reflected and, in turn, espoused European notions of vassalage that were projected onto the Guaraní converts by their Jesuit overseers for the purpose of winning over the

Spanish King to the cause of Guaraní mobilization along the frontier. These notions of an emergent political life in the Jesuit Reductions that contrasted with the “barbarism” endemic to the New World, specifically entailed allegiance to two rather remote figures – the King of Kings in Heaven and the Spanish Monarch in Madrid. The new life provided to these previously benighted “savages” of the wilds, who fell under the pastoral direction of the Jesuit fathers, would come to serve as the flickering light among the darkness that had befallen a decadent colonial environment ensconced within the unpropitious frontier of the Río de la Plata basin.

As past scholarship has shown, the Jesuit reductions were one of many possible collective arrangements in which the indigenes of Paraguay were to be incorporated into a larger regional economy that ultimately connected the colonial periphery to the European world.242 This text, along with Jarque’s general description of the province in the final years of Habsburg reign ultimately served to convince the intended readership that the reductions advanced the “common good” of this larger imperial community in ways that previous approaches to labor extraction had not.243 The Jesuits consciously framed their own enterprise in a manner that was amenable to the

242 See Juan A. Villamarin and Judith E. Villamarin, Indian Labor in Mainland Colonial Spanish America, (Newark: University of Delaware, Latin American Studies Program, 1975). 243 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest Accomplished by the Religious of the Society of Jesus in the Provinces of Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay, and Tape, tr. C.J. McNaspy, S.J. (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources,

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perceived interests and fundamental values of their European audience, stationed at the Habsburg court back in Madrid, as well as those staffed in official positions throughout the American colonies of the Spanish Empire.

The capacity of the Jesuits to fulfill their ideals clearly met resistance on multiple fronts.

The socio-cultural transformation of the Guaraní-speaking inhabitants of the River Plate frontier was fraught with difficulties and uncertainties from the beginning, which would naturally lead the critical reader of Montoya’s narrative to question the authenticity of his assertions. This is especially true when the reader considers the rhetorical dimensions of this work as an act of overt political persuasion tailored to suit a specific audience. This study sees Montoya’s narrative as part and parcel to the broader interface between the Jesuits, indigenous communities, and imperial authorities wherein the Jesuits served as an imperfect medium for the conciliation of converging traditions that never fully understood one another, but whose interests incidentally aligned in the years preceding the dissolution of the Iberian Union in 1640. As a narrator of traumatic events that warned of the impending doom of the mission church in this rather remote corner of the world, Montoya reprised the Jesuitical role of intercessor who mediated between the world of the indigenous Guaraní and the surrounding colonial order that threatened to engulf the Jesuits’ enterprise during the first decades of the reductions’ history.

1993), 132. The competitive form of organization looms in the background of Montoya’s narrative. Throughout his work, Montoya consistently repudiates the practices of the encomenderos of the nearby Spanish towns: “Many among the Spanish are eager for His Majesty to handing the Indians over to them in encomienda after the ten years of exemption granted them by His Majesty following the reception of baptism, thus to impose upon them the unparalleled yoke of personal service – the measure devised by Pharaoh for oppressing the people of Israel – which in the Indies has caused the death of countless people without hope even of eternal life because of their want of instruction, their continuous occupation (as His Majesty puts it in his royal letters patent) in this diabolical personal service denying them time to acquire and practice it.”

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A Worldly Yet Blessed Endeavor

To properly gauge the significance of these Jesuit sources within the political and religious context of seventeenth century Spanish America, the rhetorical dimensions of these texts must be panned out in full before their particular contents can be considered. Rather than focus on the individual snapshots of these narratives in some piecemeal and impressionistic fashion, a more systematic analysis of these sources demands that they be considered first and foremost as holistic works, which were ultimately bound by their shared rhetorical objective of winning over their targeted reader.

The authors of these two sources clearly had two distinct audiences in mind as they composed their respective narratives. Tailoring his account of the reductions to suit the sensibilities of the royal court, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya placed added care in the formal composition and rhetorical arrangement of his representation of the Jesuit enterprise. Montoya's text in fact, the more renowned of the two documents, directly addresses the King and His

Majesty’s royal court in Madrid. To underscore its legitimacy, the report opens with a letter of approbation signed by the Bishop of Río de Janeiro, Doctor Don Lorenzo de Mendoza.

Undeniably aware of the pressures exerted upon the Reductions by the slave raiders from São

Paulo, the approbation of a Portuguese-born bishop proved especially convincing in lending authenticity to Antonio Ruiz's Spiritual Conquest.244

Towards the end of his narrative, the author inserts a letter of "exhortation" written on behalf of the bishop of Tucuman, a respected member of the Council of the Indies.245 In this letter addressing the acting provincial of the Society of Jesus, Father Diego de Boroa, Fray

Melchor, the personal secretary to the bishop, praised the concerted efforts of the Jesuits - taking

244 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 27. 245 Ibid., 27.

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particular note of the bishopric's reliance upon the Catholic religious orders in light of the qualitative and quantitative limitations of its secular clergy.246 Capturing a recognized transference of responsibility from the "disburdened" secular clergy to the Society, Montoya consciously repositioned the Jesuit missionaries under the aegis of the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy while at the same time rationalizing the flexibility with which the Society was implicitly imparted.247 The author supplements this particular gesture of deference to religious authority with an additional letter that this very same bishop of Tucuman later sent to the King of

Spain which confirmed the beneficial impression that the religious orders, such as the Jesuits, made on those previously benighted to the Catholic faith. Confirming the hardships endured by these religious and their continued persecution at the hands of hostile native groups, Brazilian bandeirantes, and even the Spanish colonists under the prelate's own pastoral care, this letter bolsters the apologetic framework of Montoya's account.248 To the townsmen of São Paulo and

Asunción, the indigenous of the reductions were desirable sources of compulsory labor at a time when the natural resources of both colonial Paraguay and Brazil remained largely unexploited.

The Jesuit author similarly relies upon the support of nearby secular authorities as well to help buttress his reported findings and infuse legitimacy into his personal reflections. Selecting two sections of a letter sent by the serving governor of Buenos Aires, Don Pedro Esteban Davila, to the king of Spain in 1637, Montoya indirectly tackles the rumors of precious metal deposits buried beneath the surrounding environs of the Reductions.249 By citing the findings of an official investigation undertaken by the preeminent secular authority of the region, Montoya sought to dispel any looming doubts in the minds of royal court officials regarding the professed

246 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 186. 247 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 187. 248 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 188. 249 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 191.

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penury of the Jesuit fathers who had taken up the thankless task of ministering to the remote and substantially impoverished frontier territories. The rumors of a Jesuit “state” operating within the province of Paraguay evidently had reached the King during this time, which threatened to alienate the Society from its chief provider during this time of crisis.250

While Montoya took ample measures to secure the perceived legitimacy of his report, he also tactfully enjoined the King and the royal court to honor their official commitments; for this reason, Ruiz appended the royal letters patent previously adjured by the King to the final chapter of his Spiritual Conquest to remind the royal courts the King’s own professed desire to restore the indigenous to “their full liberty, honoring them with the noble title of his own vassals.”251 By concluding his apologia with the King's own pronouncements, Montoya hoped to position his individual report in line with the sanctioned decrees of royal authority. Like the other members of the Society, Montoya was perfectly aware of the Crown’s ideological commitment to the indigenous of the New World and the native son of Lima turned the Habsburg vision of Empire to his own advantage in his concerted effort to exact a very specific measure of assistance from the King.

Francisco Jarque's own church chronicle entitled Estado que al Presente Gozan Las

Misiones de la Compania de Jesus en Las Provincias del Paraguay, Tucuman y Río de la Plata serves as the third and concluding part of his Insignes Misioneros de la Compania de Jesus. The first two books of this three part publication cover the lives of Fr. Simón Maceta and Fr.

Francisco Diaz Tano, two missionaries to the Río de la Plata region. Incorporating this detailed

250 Pablo Hernández, Misiones del Paraguay, 562; Pablo Hernández, Misiones del Paraguay, 564. During the first half of Philip IV’s reign, the Crown received a steady supply of grievances from the nearby colonial authorities of the region who attempted to persuade the King that the Society had undermined royal authority on the local levels. While the King generally supported the Jesuits in the region in spite of these reports, there were occasions when the Habsburg Monarch voiced his growing concern over the actions taken by these regular priests in the decade that followed the armament of the Jesuit Reductions. 251 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 192.

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synthetic history of the Reductions into a biography of two esteemed missionaries, clearly suggests that Jarque had a more exclusive audience in mind, which was likely comprised primarily of fellow Jesuits and other men and women of the cloth. Given the sheer amount of practical detail in Jarque's account combined with a noticeable absence of "interior experiences", as Montoya termed the visions which stipple his Spiritual Conquest, Jarque's decidedly more mundane overview of the missions could have been directed towards those anticipating a future assignment in the region. Stylistic distinctions aside, Jarque's narrative consciously aligns itself with the work advanced by Montoya and subsequent missionaries engaged with the Guaraní- speaking peoples. In the introduction to the third book, Jarque alludes to the groundwork undertaken by Paraguay's "first apostles", of whom he specifically mentions Simon Maceta,

Francisco Diaz Tano, Jose Cataldino, and Antonio Ruiz de Montoya himself.252 Francisco Jarque devoted much of his life to chronicling the lives of these particular missionaries. The outlook he assumes throughout his own crafted overview of the seventeenth century reductions stands firmly and confidently upon the deeds, recollections and personal reflections of these men.

Francisco Jarque's account comprises thirty-five chapters that follow a chronological layout opening with a general description of the territories of Paraguay, Río de la Plata and

Tucuman - including a summary of the geographical, ecological, and socio-cultural landscape.

After providing a serviceable breakdown of the relevant ecclesiastical, militaristic, and civil forms of government in the province in addition to their background histories, Jarque's narrative assumes a chronological trajectory beginning with the battle of San Gabriel in 1679 and concluding with the attempts of the Society of Jesus to press further into the relatively unexplored expanses of South America. Jarque's narrative occasionally pauses as he delves into

252 Francisco Jarque, El estado que al presente gozan las Misiones de la Compañía de Jesús en la Provincia del Paraguay, Tucumán y Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 2008): 25.

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the day-to-day goings-on of reduction life. While Jarque reads his contemporary history through a providential lens, interpreting the unfolding events as the reflection of a Divine Will equally beholden to justice as to mercy, his narrative remains tightly focused upon reported events and more general conditions of the reductions. His chronicle stands apart from the first-hand anecdotes and subjective recollections characterizing Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's far more peculiar narrative.

The emotional distance that Jarque enjoys as a chronicler is conspicuously lacking in

Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's Spiritual Conquest. As an active missionary involved in the

Reductions themselves, Montoya's memoirs employ the full throttle of his own personal frustrations and sympathies from the beginning to the end of his account. As in Jarque's book, the Spiritual Conquest remains generally faithful to the chronological format beginning with the author's personal calling to missionary life in the later years of his adolescence and concluding with the invasions of San Cristobal and Natividad by slave-raiding parties from São Paulo and nearby Brazilian towns. Montoya's memoirs - blending the literary boundaries of autobiography, martyrography, and church history - go beyond the providential tone typical of most church chronologies. Throughout his narrative, Montoya consistently divides the world along

Manichean lines sparing little if any room for moral ambiguity. The history of the Reductions, according to Montoya's perspective, served as a microcosm for a wider struggle between two rival camps that were entrenched in eternal warfare under the respective allegiance to either God or Satan. Such an all-encompassing metaphysical struggle between the God-fearing and the wicked clearly transcended linguistic and territorial divides – as did the Society of Jesus. This unflinching absolutism characteristic of this particular text manifests in various anecdotes, which subordinate verisimilitude to didactic value; this dichotomy runs in constant parallel throughout

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the entire span of narrative - whereby virtue and vice are both rewarded and punished to their fullest extent.253

Both authors handle the representation of the Jesuits, encompassing the goals and fundamental outlook of the Society, with particular care. At a time when the ambitions of the

Society were commonly held in suspicion by both the Catholic and Protestant worlds, detailed accounts of the Jesuit fathers' activities both at home and abroad became paramount in overhauling their reputation throughout the Catholic World. Despite the different audiences that each author had in mind, both Jesuits recognized the vulnerability of the missions in the Río de la

Plata region at a time when the defense of these communities was in no way guaranteed.254 The intensity of religious zeal or fervor, which clearly served to dispel inklings of worldliness and profiteering often levied at the Jesuits, surges past hyperbole throughout Montoya's depiction of both himself and his mission project. Upon encountering native resistance to the Jesuits in the province of Tayaoba, for example, Montoya discloses his personal self-abandonment at the heights of a particularly dire confrontation:

Without budging from the spot, I stood waiting for them. One of the Indians in my escort entered my hut and begged me to leave. He returned a second and third time, saying 'Father, for the love of God, let us go; they are going to tear you to pieces!' Flinging his arms around my neck, he persuaded me by his pleas to leave. In him I seemed to see not an Indian but an angel from heaven. Hardly had we left when we began to feel the arrows they were shooting at us.....Beside me stood the good Indian who had pulled me out of the hut. He saw me surrounded by volleys of arrows and in evident peril. To save me from the hands of death, he exposed himself with manifest risk to his own life. Without saying a word to me, and with all the speed that the crisis demanded, he pulled the cloak off my back and my hat as well, and said to another Indian: 'Get the Father into the woods!' Donning my cloak and hat, and running by himself through the field

253 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 178-179. The selection from ch. 74 provides a perfect example of this underlying pattern. 254 The controversy of indigenous armament would perplex policymakers back in Madrid for decades. Over the course of Habsburg rule in the Americas, the Crown would vacillate on its initial 1640 provision of arms to the Jesuit Reductions (Several cedulas reales were promulgated such as those of 1644, 1645, 1646, 1661, 1668, 1669, 1672, and 1679). Evidently, the Crown grew suspicious of the Jesuits procurement of additional firearms through the region’s black-market.

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in sight of the enemy, he gave me time and opportunity to take refuge in the woods, which were quite thick...255

By representing his fate as being placed entirely in providential hands of indigenous converts,

Montoya is able to suggest two things to his readers. First, the Jesuits, having taken the “Spiritual

Exercises” and prescriptions of Ignatius Loyola to heart, remained willing to die at any waking moment for the advancement of the Catholic faith. Second, the native converts truly loved their masters - to such an extent that they were evidently willing to place their own lives in jeopardy to protect the Jesuit missionaries. Such heartfelt displays of filial piety of course found their reciprocal term in the paternalism of the Jesuit priests.256 While it clearly asserts a hierarchical relationship between two groups analogous to that of father-child relationship, paternalism necessitates some degree of self-identification between the father and his child. In Jarque's account, the bond of mutual impoverishment served as a link allowing for a certain measure of self-identification. Luxuries such as salt, beds, tableware, and other amenities were evidently forsworn by the Jesuits. Not intended for personal convenience, these items were used to minister to the needs of the natives and to win over the pagan communities. Coming from noble houses of Europe and generally accustomed to the comforts of an aristocratic lifestyle, the Jesuits routinely emphasized their poverty and their willingness to forgo a life of luxury in willing acceptance of hardship.257 These high-born missionaries, called to the frontier of Empire, lived off of the same products of the land as the native Guaraní throughout this "most impoverished

255 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 90-91. 256 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 37. When describing the native converts’ appreciation of their Jesuit fathers, Francisco Jarque employs a line of similes: "los aman como a maestros, los reverencian como a padres, los buscan como a redentores, y los veneran como a santos, y aclaman como a apóstoles." (tr. "[The Indians] love [the Jesuits] like teachers, they revere them like fathers, they look to them as redeemers, and they venerate them like saints, and they praise them like apostles." Ultimately, Jarque idealizes this bond between the missionary priest and his congregation of impassioned converts for an audience of like-minded religious for whom little else could possibly compare. 257 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 58-59.

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region in all of the world", as Jarque routinely described Paraguay and other adjacent territories in his narrative.258

The relationship between the indigenous converts and the Jesuit fathers, at least as depicted by the Jesuit missionaries themselves, possessed a palpable degree of emotional depth.

For example during the flight of the Reductions of San Ignacio and Loreto from the hands of the bandeirantes when the surviving converts continued to face starvation, disease, and even drowning beneath the river rapids following their displacement, Montoya consciously betrays moments of doubt or confusion over his confidence in Providence on account of the sheer misery of the displaced Guaraní converts:

I confess an intense grief overwhelmed me. Tears streaming from my eyes, I turned to heaven and placed the blame for these woes on my own faults. Looking toward God, who to a living faith is vividly present, I said, 'Lord, can it be that you brought this people forth from their own country for this - to break my eyes at this sight after breaking my heart with their sufferings?’259

This self-doubt, of course, revealed years after the events being described also serves a purpose within the author's primary narrative. By ostensibly assuming full responsibility for the physical and spiritual safety of his flock and incurring the guilt following his failure to live up to this commitment, Montoya mobilized his personal feelings of culpability for events clearly beyond his control to convey a sense of scrupulousness and sanctity to his audience.

Biblical metaphors obviously abound in both texts. The diction employed by each author draws freely from biblical sources and relied heavily upon Scripture as the principal vehicle in service to the world-view of the Jesuits engaged in ministries abroad. The indigenous converts of Paraguay and adjacent provinces, for example, were routinely characterized as a "New Israel" in Montoya’s account while the Jesuits are described as fulfilling the apostolic tradition by

258 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 36. 259 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 110.

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bringing the Gospel to non-believers along the frontier. Within both texts, the forced migration of the indigenes seeking refuge from the marauders of São Paulo is routinely compared to the accounts described in the Book of Exodus. In chapter IV of Jarque's narrative, the fabled flight of the Reductions from Guairá in modern day Brazil is described as ”transmigration quite similar to the one that Moses made from Egypt to Palestine, with the People of God, [undertaken] for the sake of freeing them from servitude to the Gypsies.”260 The analogy also runs throughout

Montoya's account well.261

Apart from this gleaming image of a "New Israel", the designation of the primitive church in the unspoiled “New World”, metaphors of savagery, barbarism, ignorance, and above all childishness and animality nevertheless characterize the indigenous present within both narratives.262 In Jarque's account, the natives are represented in one peculiar instance as being completely ignorant of the ailments threatening both their bodies and souls. Choosing to consume raw, uncooked meat infested with worms, for instance, placed the bodily health of the indigenous in great harm according to Jarque's diagnosis. This ill-advised practice, in the eyes of

Jarque and his fellow missioners, found an obvious parallel in the indigenous misapprehension over the concept of sin.263 By characterizing the indigenous as hopeless dependents, fully incapable of providing either for their salubriousness in this life or their salvation in the next, the

Jesuits were able to justify their presence in the reductions as well-meaning paternalistic guides to bodily and spiritual convalescence.

The Jesuits symbolic use of militaristic discourses of conquest appealed to the sensibilities of the less spiritually inclined as well. Throughout both texts, the metaphors of

260 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 39. 261 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 109. 262 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 130. 263 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 94.

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spiritual conquest unabashedly draw upon the experiences of violent intrusion upon the Indies at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors. In Jarque's account, military conquest is routinely interpreted as a necessary precursor that paved the way for the spiritual salvation of the vanquished.264 In the eyes of the Jesuits, the secular arm of Empire served the interests of the

Church in protecting the missionary enterprise from emerging threats along the frontier. The two forms of conquest, one temporal and the other spiritual, remained clearly distinct from one other in terms of both the consequent obligations they imposed upon the vanquished and the manner by which the victorious were to be subsequently glorified.265 However, the fact that the missionaries so often depended upon military intervention cannot be overlooked.266 By examining the language of conquest, it becomes apparent that religious discourses clearly served to justify military intervention while Empire, in turn, remained obliged to responsibly live up to the ethical guidelines imposed by a divine authority. To project this image at all levels of society, irrespective of what actually occurred upon the local levels, was imperative to the

Habsburg self-understanding at a time when central command was visibly frustrated by geographical and technological limitations of the Early Modern State.

Appeals to pathos, ethos, and logos characterize both accounts of the reductions. Pathos especially colors the tone of the indigenous of the reductions who faced countless hardships and misfortune. Seeking refuge from the marauders who sought to enslave them, the converts of the reductions received a pitiable portrayal by the pen of Montoya who reflects on the loss of their

264 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 141. 265 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 129. Ruiz clearly distinguishes spiritual and temporal forms of conquest: "It is not my intention to speak of virtues and achievements of the laborers in this vineyard, men who left their native countries, families, and comforts and penetrated into foreign lands, sacrificing themselves to hunger, nakedness, and even the sword (as we shall see), renouncing the acclaim they would have garnered here in Spain for their teaching, preaching, and other distinguished activities - lures that can bring down the highest-flying falcon. Nor do I wish to compare this spiritual conquest with other splendid ones. This conquest is completely lacking in outward splendor; it has only the interior splendor of countless souls." 266 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 44-45.

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most profound source of joy:

With emotion they recalled their houses, and above all the house of God where for so many years they had worshipped, humbly served, and received him into their souls in the life-giving Sacrament. They still had the harps and musical instruments which they had used to make music to God in their homeland on festival days, their devotion swelling amid sweet motets and their prolonged sessions in church seeming short as they listened to the sound of their well-tuned instruments. Now stingless, broken, and serving but to bring back sad memories, these were abandoned among the crags of that rugged path.267

Here, Montoya clearly represents the converts as devout, innocent, and unjustly displaced from their homeland. By focusing on the heartfelt destruction of their preferred means of worship, something that was undeniably important to Montoya and the Jesuit fathers, Montoya is also able to deftly accentuate the sincere piety of the indigenous converts; and by doing so, the author indirectly extols the Jesuits' evangelical efforts as bearers of the Gospel.

The sympathetic treatment of both the Jesuits and their congregation and the vilification of obstinate pagans and wicked bandits infuse nearly every chapter of these select texts.

However, both authors rely upon other persuasive means to garner support for their shared religious cause. Appeals to ethos generally extend to the Jesuits’ selflessness and diligence in the mission field. Most subtle of all, however, is the reliance upon logos, which factors into the

Jesuits' apologia more generally but also serves to defend the more controversial actions of the

Jesuits. Criticism levied at the Jesuits by regional colonial authorities, for instance, often needed to be addressed and ultimately the rationalization of past decisions needed to be explicitly accounted for.268 The liberties taken by the Jesuits in the transmigrations invoked the scorn of local ecclesiastical and civil authorities. In part, Montoya’s narrative served to rationalize the

267 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 109. 268 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 127-28. Within this passage, Ruiz de Montoya defends his decision to relocate the reductions prior to receiving written permission by the royal audiencia of Chuquisaca. He addresses the censures he received from various prelates and other members of the clerisy by suggesting that a strict respect for hierarchy and protocol would have ended in disaster given the particular set of circumstances facing the reductions at the time.

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decisions of the missionaries who failed to enjoin the bishop’s approval to permit the evacuation of the region.

By virtue of the appeal they consciously engendered, these select texts were in no way, shape, or form inert epiphenomena afloat in the minds of their respective authors. The use of language itself hints at real-world motivations and a desire to reach out to the individual minds of the readers to elicit real change. Whether or not they specifically impacted the decisions of secular and religious authorities is of course difficult - if not impossible- to ascertain with any degree of specificity; nevertheless, their rhetoric served its function in perpetuating the ideology of the Conquest throughout the “New World” chiefly by aligning the interests of the mission project with that of the existing colonial order. These particular texts emerged from existing discourses of Spanish Imperialism between both authors and their intended readership at a time when the hegemony of the Spanish Habsburgs was being challenged. Montoya’s literary project was primarily undertaken to influence the course of imperial policy at a time when local colonial actors in Paraguay were growing less propitious to the viability of the Jesuit reductions themselves. Following the lack of cooperation on the part of the Jesuit missionaries, local civil authorities were simply not at all inclined to provide the reductions with the military support that they desperately needed.269 During this particular crisis, the pobladores of the Spanish towns had shown that they had no intention to provide for the defense of these indigenous communities in the face of the incursions of well-armed Brazilian slave-raiders.270 From the standpoint of the

269 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 420. Governor D. Luis de Cespedes Xeria’s letter to the King in 1628 denounced the paulistas and their incursions into Spanish territory. Nevertheless, the governor refused to grant the Indians and the Jesuits control of firearms to protect their communities from these slave-raiders. 270 Pablo Pastells, Histori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 464. The vecinos showed little concern for their official duties as guardians of the King’s patrimony: In 1631, Cristobal Denis wrote to Capitan Francisco Benitez reporting on the poor conduct of Alonso Riquelme de Guzman, Maestre de Campo and Teniente de Gobernador in Villarica del Espiritu Santo. Evidently, Guzman had abandoned his post at the mouth of the Inyay or Itupe, which allowed for the free passage of the Portuguese raiders into the territory.

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townsmen of Asunción, there was little to be gained, and so much to lose. Montoya’s activism in

Madrid should be understood as a concerted effort to alleviate these mounting pressures.

Appraising the rhetorical dimensions of these texts also helps to dispel the lingering impression that the Reductions were somehow detached from wider political affairs, or hermetically sealed off from the colonial order. However geographically remote and relatively inaccessible they may have been, the Jesuit Reductions were not, in fact, severed from the context of Empire. For these rhetorical devices strongly suggest the contrary: the Reductions functioned very much in concert with other historical actors and institutions in this historical setting that spanned the great expanse of the Atlantic, and the characterization of the indigenous under Jesuits’ charge strongly suggests that the politics of conversion entailed the formation of upstanding vassals at a moment in time when sedition on the part of the King’s vassals outside of

Castile plagued Habsburg administrators. The Jesuits’ own early historiography served as a response to highly localized and recurring events peculiar to this region of South America that neither they nor their converts could resolve by themselves. The source of this problem reveals a far deeper preoccupation over the looming question of how the colonial system of labor was to be organized and administered at a time when traditional arrangements clearly were not sustainable.

The Question of Labor and Tribute Extraction in Spanish Colonial Society

Both Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's Spiritual Conquest and Francisco Jarque's synthetic accounts of the Jesuit Reductions served as a collective response to the pressures exerted upon the Reductions by those who wished to enslave the indigenous residents of these fledgling

Christian communities. Each author devoted the vast majority of his textual account to narrating

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these particular atrocities and to comment on their adverse consequences for the missionary enterprise as a whole.271 While they remained hesitant to openly criticize the concessions and entitlements the Catholic Kings had granted to the early conquistadors, these Jesuit authors clearly identified the various forms of institutionalized Amerindian bondage as the primary threat to their apostolic work along the frontier of Spanish America. The Jesuits, mindful of the pagan aversion to the lifestyle changes that the missionaries expected of them, consistently dispense a high-handed stamp of disapproval on the illicit activities of the Iberian colonists and their minions who threatened to poison the missionaries' delicate relationship with the non-Christian world of the Río de la Plata region. As seen within both documents, an idealized portrayal of reduction life is purposefully juxtaposed to a pessimistic representation of the colonial towns that encompass the moral degeneracy, immodest depravity, and sheer destructiveness that were festering under the other competing forms of labor extraction and organization. These images of moral decline and political chaos intended to disquiet a European audience already beleaguered by the disenchanting course of events on the European continent and the ferment of sedition looming on the Iberian Peninsula itself. These images of the Jesuits’ own self-fashioning reflected a breakdown in the colonial order. Out of necessity, the indigenous converts under the

Jesuits’ pastoral care would come to assume a more prominent position over that of this decadent colonial environment that did not fulfill the Sovereign’s expectations.272

271Ernesto J.A Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1632 a 1634 (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional del Historia, 1990), 138. There was anxiety on the part of the missionaries that the displaced Indians would revert back to their pagan lifestyles. In their flight from the bandeirantes, many Guaraní converts would find asylum with the people of their nation. Having taken refuge in the mountains to evade the Portuguese, these peoples risked perdition. The scattering of the converts clearly undermined the Jesuit enterprise. 272 In The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (2008), David Albulafia, a Medievalist of the Mediterranean World, emphasizes that the contending perceptions over the humanity of the American Indians were all fundamentally condescending, having been conditioned by the expectations inherited over the centuries that led up to the Columbian Encounter. Regardless of what they happened to profess, both Las Casas and Sepúlveda ascribed inferiority to the American “naturals” which only served to justify the intervention of the European peoples into the domains of the indigenous societies. While they often appeared to have different

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Of the eighty-one chapters which constitute the Spiritual Conquest, nine exclusively focus on the incursions of opportunistic slave-raiders from Brazil, who were looking to capitalize off of the vulnerability of the native converts concentrated within these residential communities.

The Jesuit fathers, assuming responsibility over the well-being of the converts, often attempted to relocate these reductions in advance, but in most cases such foreknowledge proved a luxury.

The flight of the reductions of San Ignacio and Loreto, perhaps the most detailed of all such events described within Montoya's account, sheds revealing light on the logistical problems which threatened the lives of these refugees. To feed the hungry and to treat the sick while simultaneously fleeing the captious tendrils of hostile bandeirantes who were skulking behind them proved especially taxing for both the Jesuits and the indigenous refugees. The Jesuit fathers and the leaders of the indigenous communities faced with severe food shortages along their journey often resorted to combing the land for resources and, when the environment proved less accommodating, they depended entirely upon the charity of nearby colonists. This particular operation, described in detail by Montoya, was costly both in terms of the lives it claimed and on account of its economic toll on nearby agricultural resources throughout the regional economy:

During this difficult time about thirteen thousand head of cattle were consumed, some of them purchased and others donated as alms. Two thousand pesos were spent on cotton, wool, and linen to clothe [the converts'] nakedness, and on seed for food and planting, apart from a substantial alms that Father Diego de Boroa, today provincial, brought and distributed with his own hand.273

objectives in mind, the real debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda was over the conduct of this intervention. The perceived ‘childishness’ and ‘backwardness’ of the American Indian would serve to rationalize the subjugation of the Amerindian peoples under an emerging colonial regime. Within Columbus’ letters to the Catholic Kings, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ qualities of the Indians are both equally voiced and they jointly reflect this overarching belief in the cultural backwardness and simplicity of the American peoples compared to that of both Christian Europeans and the Islamic peoples of the Mediterranean world. This fundamental assumption of European superiority ostensibly placed the indigenous in a passive role whether under the encomenderos or the religious orders. For this reason, the armament of the indigenous as a practical means of promoting defense even in times of emergency was rarely entertained during, or even after, the colonial period. For the greater part of the colonial period, the indigenous were seen as the primary threat to the colonial regime. 273 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 112.

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Such events proved anything but exceptional.274 Within Francisco Jarque's account, published nearly half a century after the Spiritual Conquest, similar threats reemerged in the future as a group of slave-raiders encroached upon Spanish territory, strategically positioning themselves on the fluvial island of San Gabriel, in indubitable preparation for amphibious incursions into nearby reductions.275 This looming threat, as represented by Jarque later in 1687, never receded entirely from the imagination of nearby indigenous communities. As Jarque relays to his reader, the reductions remained ever vigilant against these persisting threats since the time of their initial displacement in the days of Montoya’s ministries.276

Unsurprisingly, the men involved in such nefarious enterprises are routinely denigrated throughout both accounts. Montoya in particular attempts to evoke feelings of disgust in his readers by describing the sheer depravity of the bandeirantes and encomenderos. Recounting the paulista invasion of San Francisco Javier, Montoya provides one particular anecdote of unmitigated repulsiveness describing a mother's defense of her infant child from the rapacious clutches of a bandeirante raider:

Failing to subdue her, the villain snatched the child from her breast and carried it off. The child was not yet able to eat, and one of the Fathers went to ask for it so

274 Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1632 a 1634, 122. Much of the Jesuit accounts dated from the 1630s discuss the demographic impact and the economic toll of this “anabasis” of Paraguay. Often the refugees from the reductions of Guairá could rely upon the charitable assistance from the reductions located along the Parana. This was the case when the Reduction of San Ignacio provided material support for the influx of refugees from the east: “Y el ano de 33 llevando a este pueblo una gran tropa de Chriaturas del Guayra desperecidas de hambre y que no podian sustentarlas sus madres fue de grande edificacion ver contender a las Indias deste pueblo por regalarlas y sustentarlas en sus casas con el amor y carinyo que a sus propios hijos y fue necessario que el Padre les moderase senyalandoles las que Avila de sustentar a cada una.” 275 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 65-69. 276 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 61. Jarque describes in chapter IX of his third book the defensive measures the reductions have acquired over time: "Este enemigo resguardan las reducciones, enviando corredores cada ano a todos los campos y caminos por donde puede acercase. Algunos pueblos que están más expuestos a las invasiones contribuyen indios todos los meses del verano en que pudiera venir el enemigo, y con el bastimento bastante para un mes, caminan cincuenta o cien leguas, reconociendo si hay rastro, voz o sospecha de enemigos; y según las noticias que adquieren, vuelven a sus pueblos." (tr. The reductions stand vigilant against this enemy, sending runners every year through all of the fields and pathways through which they could enter. Some towns that are most exposed to invasion devote Indian sentinels during every month of spring during which the enemy would strike, and with provisions to last each month, they walk fifty or one-hundred leagues, uncovering every face, voice, or telling sign of the enemy's presence; and subsequently they return with their report.")

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that it would not starve to death. The man who had it refused to give it up, demanding the mother as a prisoner. She lamented the suffering of her little son. Long indeed was the time the Father spent trying to soften the brutal heart of that tiger.277

Commenting further on the raids made on the reductions of San Antonio and San Miguel,

Montoya describes the complete lack of scruples of the bandeirantes who, upon leaving with the healthiest and most sexually appealing converts of the reductions, proceeded to set fire to the huts occupied by the injured, the infirmed, the old, and the lame.278

While these affronts to the "natural freedom" of the indigenous often invoked the ire and despair of the Jesuit fathers, the crimes of these bandeirantes also directly challenged the authority of the Church. Montoya's account in particular describes several incidents where churches were razed to the ground by slave-raiding invaders and the holy contents of those churches - including sacred art, altar pieces, vestments, oils, and other objects - were desecrated by pillagers.279 Such acts of defilement constituted a reprehensible offense to God in the eyes of the Jesuits stationed in the reductions and to the church officials and fellow religious who likely read these accounts. By connoting an utter lack of fear in the Lord in the minds of these offenders, both authors likely conveyed the magnitude of unmatched lawlessness within the

King's sovereign domain.280

277 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 104. 278 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 102. 279 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 107. In chapter 38 of the Spiritual Conquest, Ruiz describes the intrusion of bandeirantes into a local church: "Their outrageous hands might have been stayed at least by the doors' beautiful workmanship, if only by the realization that these were churches where God had for so many years been worshiped. Trooping boisterously into the churches, they assailed the altarpieces, knocking out their columns and throwing them to the ground, carrying them off in pieces for their cooking fires. They themselves confessed to certain religious that after committing this act of barbarism their flesh quaked at their own temerity. They took up their lodging in the churches and in our cells. The latter, which had never seen a woman before, they filled with Indian women." 280 Pablo Pastells, Histori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 461. For their part, the paulista officials as well as the leaders of the slave-raiding expeditions claimed that the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay had fallen under their territorial jurisdiction and that the infidels, who lived in these communities, could be forcibly removed on account of their alleged cannibalism and other reprehensible acts. These claims do prompt an important

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Though both authors placed emphasis on the threats emerging from Brazilian towns such as São Paulo, the criticism was in no way confined to the intruding foreigners who encroached upon the reductions.281 In other instances of Montoya's narrative, the subjects of the Spanish king likewise take the brunt of the Jesuit father's criticism. Having arrived from the nearby town of

Villa Rica to ostensibly aid Montoya during his struggle with the indigenous "unbelievers" of

Tayaoba province, for instance, an organized band of vecinos confidently marched into the frontier to defeat the hostile enemy forces mobilizing against the Jesuit missionaries. Facing unlikely victory over a force of overwhelming size, the armed townsmen decided to retreat - albeit not empty handed. Taking advantage of the trust the missionaries and their converts placed in them, the armed company from Villa Rica conspired to take the converts from the

Jesuits as compensation for their troubles.282 Even following the flight of the reductions from the slave-raiders, the townspeople of the Spanish frontier towns would find fault with the Jesuits who had been pegged as a disruptive influence in the customary practices of the region.283

The characterization of these scheming colonists intent on usurping the autonomy of the indigenous peoples of the Río de la Plata region for personal gain ventures well beyond that of incidental acts of malevolence. Both authors clearly believed that indigenous bondage fundamentally undermined their apostolic mission and, by extension, the colonial order as a

question however: to what extent did the indigenous “converts” of the Jesuit reductions differ from the pagan Guaraní of the countryside? 281 Stuart B. Schwartz, a well-respected specialist in colonial Brazilian history, outlines the political history of Brazil during the Iberian Union (1580-1640) in his article "Luso-Spanish Relations in Hapsburg Brazil: 1580-1640". Schwartz argues that the boundaries distinguishing the claims of separate colonies of the Spanish and Portuguese- speaking realms were not clearly established in the minds of the colonists. The imagined boundaries were highly fluid and this held true for the greater part of the seventeenth century. 282 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 97. 283 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 421. There was concern that the transmigration of the eastern reductions would disrupt the mita. For this reason, restitution was demanded by the townspeople of towns like Villarica. The displacement of the reduced converts over the course of this decade evidently opened up old wounds with regard to the ten year exemption clause from royal tribute. In response to the Jesuits’ insistence that the indigenous of these communities had been recently converted, the vecinos demanded an investigation.

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whole. To convince their audience of the indelible harm of indigenous slavery, the authors sought to untangle and expose the baser elements of Spanish colonial society which engendered moral degeneracy and political disorder at the local levels. Given the debauchery rife in certain quarters of the colonial cities, life among the bandeirantes provided enslaved native

Amerindians with little time for spiritual devotion and little incentive for moral self-inspection.

Without the painstaking efforts of the missionaries who devoted their very existence to the conversion of the native Tupí-Guaraní peoples of this region, the souls of many risked the certainty of perdition. Recounting the sordid life of an enslaved indigenous woman in Brazil, for example, Montoya provides a concrete instance of individual piety that helps underscore the capacity of the indigenous to actively seek alternatives to the calamitous fate imposed upon them by colonial outsiders:

One of the many carried off by the raiders of São Paulo was an Indian girl. In Brazil, she married, and then gave free rein to her inclinations. No one should be surprised that their lack of instruction produces such disorders. She heard that our faithful were going to Communion and leading Christian lives in the reductions which we had at the time of the Guairá. She was fired with a desire to enjoy such a life, and besought her husband to get her out of the brutish life they were leading. They set off through dense forests, fling from the cruel treatment which their master would wreak on them if he pursued and caught them.284

The mistreatment of the indigenous at the hands of their colonial masters served to undermine the process of acculturation, which the Jesuit missionaries wished to carry out. In diametrical opposition to the Christian life that the Jesuits so desperately tried to instill in their converts, colonial society of the Jesuit's own imagining provided no such assurance for an orderly and virtuous life. Antonio Ruiz's characterization of the bandeirantes assumes a particularly disparaging tone, for instance, when he reproves the corrosive effect of the paulista raiders' lifestyles on existing family structures: "They go out for two or three years at a stretch, hunting

284 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 116. This passage may simultaneously be read as a means of elevating the Jesuits competency as missionaries.

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human beings like animals. Some have been out ten or twelve years. They return home to find new children born to other men who, thinking them dead, had married their wives. They themselves bring home children they had sired in the forests.”285 The missionary enterprise, despite the best efforts of the Society of Jesus, remained precariously situated near less morally stringent communities. The degenerate lifestyles typically followed by the colonial handlers of tributary labor and personal service clearly stood in contradiction to everything that the Jesuits hoped to accomplish as agents of moral rectitude, civic responsibility, and Christian virtue. By appealing to the religious sensibilities of their audience, these Jesuit authors in particular were able to differentiate the reductions from other forms of labor organization in the colonial world that invited moral dissipation in colonial society.

The actual reach of Imperial authority had noticeable limits during the early history of

Ibero-America. The encomienda, tracing its roots back to the decades that immediately following the arrival of southern Europeans in the New World, served as a convenient compromise between conquistadors and imperial authorities in Spain following the Conquest of the Americas.286 From the very beginning, this make-shift system of tribute extraction had been assiduously criticized by certain religious figures who feared that the enslavement of the indigenous would thwart further efforts at evangelization throughout Iberian America. In

"Encomienda or Slavery? The Spanish Crown's Choice of Labor Organization in Sixteenth-

Century Spanish America", Timothy J. Yeager argues that an ideological bias against slavery constrained the official decisions of royal authorities during the early modern period. In effect,

285 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 101. 286 Timothy J. Yeager, “Encomienda or Slavery? The Spanish Crown’s Choice of Labor Organization in Sixteenth- Century Spanish America,” The Journal of Economic History 54 (1995): 842. Yeager summarizes the rationale of this particularly efficient system of labor organization during the first few decades following the Conquest: "The Crown preferred the encomienda because the property rights granted to encomenderos reduced threats to [the Empire's] security.”

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this particular stance placed certain limitations on the activities of labor extractors in the New

World. Yeager concludes that these labor regulations imposed by royal edict, which dictated the periods of service, gave encomenderos the incentive to overburden their laborers during specified periods of employment and provided, in turn, little to no incentive to invest in long- term arrangements:

Second generation encomenderos knew that the Crown would confiscate their encomiendas upon their death. Any constructive planning past their lifetime was [therefore] irrational [on their part]."] Coerced forms of labor such as the encomienda system, most notably, had traditionally been deemed necessary by governing elites in large part because a free-wage labor was simply not a viable alternative during the Conquest. Since no low-labor intensive resources were then available for transatlantic exchange, the colonial economic system required the use of coerced forms of labor.287

While the Crown actively sought to place limitations on the coerced forms of indigenous labor, the impact of these royal pronouncements and their ecclesiastical support from the pulpit often did not translate into decisive action at the regional level. In "Survival and Abolition: The

Eighteenth Century Paraguayan Encomienda", James Schofield Saeger demonstrates that, while the encomienda outlived its economic utility by the eighteenth-century, retaining the possession of an encomienda nevertheless translated into a "status symbol" for colonial elites in the region.288 The encomenderos, the self-proclaimed descendants of the conquistadors of the

287 Yeager, “Encomienda or Slavery?,” 895. 288 James Schofield Saeger, “Survival and Abolition: The Eighteenth Century Paraguayan Encomienda,” The Americas 38 (1981): 60. Within this particular article, Saeger contrasts regulations pronounced “from above” with the real world practices within the remote provinces of the Río de la Plata region. Saeger draws a distinction between the two primary forms of indigenous servicio: the mitaria and the originaria. Whereas the Mitaria constitutes the labor entitlements allotted to each encomendero within prescribed days of the year, the originaria is comprised of the personal servants whom encomenderos had direct and perennial control over. Saeger's research also reveals that encomederos often worked around imperial regulations. For example, while the age and sex requirements for the mitaria had been 18-49 yrs of age and male, documents from the period suggest that boys as young as 13 and women of advanced years were often enrolled into service as well. Though encomenderos were

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sixteenth century, maintained their sense of privilege through their entitlement to the servicio which the Crown had legally bestowed upon their ancestors during the time of Domingo

Martinez de Irala.289

Both Montoya and Jarque sense this discontinuity which evidently disrupted imperial authority at the local level. Each author voiced his frustration regarding the lack of support on the part of the colonists for the decrees of Spanish royal authorities. Along the journey of

Fathers Simon Masseta and Justo Mansilla to the town of São Paulo, for instance, Montoya depicts the reception of the Jesuit missionaries by the local townspeople as anything but congenial.290 Openly harassed and reviled by the townspeople, the municipal authorities apparently placed the Jesuit fathers under arrest and incarcerated them without just cause in response to the social uproar.291 The utter lack of respect shown to the priests registered within

Montoya's narrative as a telling sign of the perverse inversion of the hierarchical order, in the

Jesuits’ eyes, upon which both the legitimacy and well-being of colonial society entirely depended. A similar concern for lawlessness at the regional level surfaces in Jarque's account as well. Recognizing that the inclinations of unaccountable authorities entirely rested on their perceived self-interest, Jarque bemoans the level of corruption rife in areas far removed from the recognized chain of command.292

entitled to 60 days of service every year, Saeger's research suggests that these limitations were often violated as well. 289 In 1556, Irala led an armed band of creole adventurers to subdue the indigenous of Paraguay. Keen on finding precious metals upriver, the conquistador quickly turned to the indigenous peoples as compensation for his unavailing exploits into the frontier of South America. 290 Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 450. In a letter sent to the Procurador General de las Indias in Madrid in 1630, P. Simon Masseta who had been sent to São Paulo in an appeal to the paulista governor complained of his treatment as well as the general lack of cooperation and compliance on the part of local civil authorities. 291 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 102. 292 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 32. Chapter II, section 3 of Jarque's report specifically mentions the problem of legal enforcement along the periphery of the colonial world: "A este modo sucede que siendo muy recto el gobernador de la provincia, no lo sea el corregidor del pueblo de indios, y aunque este proceda desinteresado no carezcan de codicia los demás que tienen alguna superintendencia en dicho pueblo, o los parientes

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In the minds of the Jesuits, slavery in all of its vicious forms served to undermine the evangelization of the indigenous along the frontier of the River Plate region. As Elman R.

Service argues in his article on the encomienda in Paraguay, the various decrees promulgated from the top of the colonial hierarchy, such as those proclaimed by Francisco de Alfaro in 1611, had little impact along the frontier of Spanish America. In light of the fact that they were repeated so often as "correctives" in subsequent decades, their enforcement, Service reasons, must have remained largely ignored throughout the period.293 Within Paraguay, the encomienda assumed an entirely different trajectory than it had in other parts of colonial Latin America.

Upon their arrival in Paraguay, the perceived "lack of political power" left the Spaniards and their immediate descendants with the impression that the indigenous Tupí-Guaraní peoples needed "immediate and specific" supervision in the direct administration of tribute.294 This apparent lack of political structure justified the imposition of direct control in the minds of the conquistadors and their legitimate descendants and their perceptions of the Guaraní-speaking peoples in part explains the tenacity of this relatively outmoded form of labor organization during later periods. This more intimate presence on the part of the colonial elites assumed an especially perverse dimension in the institutionalization of the originaria which, as Service and other researchers have discovered, often translated into little more than sexual servitude on the part of Guaraní women. As an outgrowth of indigenous polygyny and native sexual politics of

de estos; y como lo mas común entre los hombres es inclinarse cada uno a su interés, singularmente en Indias, a las cuales pasan tantos sin otro fin que disfrutarlas como pudieran a una selva llena de frutas silvestres, o a coger riquezas como agua del más caudaloso rio, sin recelo de agotarle ni examinar si esto será posible. De codicia tan ciega han dimanado los intolerables danos que a toda prisa van destruyendo las Indias, siendo tanto menos remediables cuanto aquellas regiones están más remotas de los ojos de su real dueño y ministros que le asisten, cuyo justificado celo, habiendo de gobernarse como es forzoso por informes de los mismos interesados, no puede lograr los aciertos a que siempre endereza sus reales mandatos." 293 Elman R. Service, “The Encomienda in Paraguay,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 31, (1951): 241. 294 Service, “The Encomienda in Paraguay,” 232. As the anthropologist Elman R. Service notes in his article, "The Guaraní society was not class-structured with an hereditary hierarchy of chiefs whose authority extended over great numbers of conquered or federated villages"

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concubinage, young women continued to be traded in exchange for commodities and as a substitute for indigenous male labor in the form of the mitaria.295

As a form of tribute, the mitaria in particular relied upon a preexisting indigenous economic system of natural resource extraction and cultivation. However, as Robert G. Keith argues in his structural analysis of colonial labor organization, the profitability of the mitaria and of the encomienda system in general wholly depended upon the demographic and social stability of entire indigenous communities in lieu of the capital investment absent under feudatory arrangements.296 As native communities withered away in the face of disease, enslavement, and other abuses at the hands of the Iberian colonists, the mitaria gradually became defunct and an increasingly unprofitable arrangement. Keith argues that the Spanish Crown, having never been keen on the idea of exporting the feudal nobility to the New World, remained open to new systems of tribute extraction which would naturally strengthen royal authority throughout the

Americas.297 Land in the region still remained relatively underdeveloped in the minds of government officials, being that the territories were remote and its arable lands relatively uncultivated. Revenue remained tied to rural development and the cultivation of agricultural resources remained inextricably linked to the question of how labor was to be more efficiently organized.

The sense of order and the life of virtue promised by the ideal of the Jesuit reductions stood in perfect contrast with the disarray of a failing makeshift arrangement that left the indigenous continually exposed to the treachery of morally debased and short-sighted opportunists. The appeals the Society of Jesus made to both religious and secular authorities

295 Service, “The Encomienda in Paraguay,” 238. 296 Robert G. Keith, “Encomienda, Hacienda and Corregimiento in Spanish America: A Structural Analysis,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 51 (1971), 431-446. 297 Robert G. Keith, “Encomienda, Hacienda and Corregimiento in Spanish America: A Structural Analysis,” 440.

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back in Europe, therefore, aimed to further consolidate official commitments to the missionaries' various enterprises abroad. The Jesuits appealed to the perceived self-interest of such authorities in addition to their moral sensibilities as devout Catholics. The Jesuits likewise sought to win support at a time when the reductions remained fairly vulnerable to various local threats. For their part, the authors of these two particular texts interpreted the vices accompanying indigenous enslavement through a theological lens which typically framed the “sins of the flesh” as the very crux of all such corruption. Under Jesuit supervision, these bestial impulses could be effectively redirected and channeled to achieve more productive ends.298 As the following section of this study will argue, the Jesuit fathers believed that the success of the colonial project (and

Christendom moreover) fundamentally rested on the Sacramental life uniquely envisioned and in turn exclusively provided by the Church. The moral integrity which bestowed order and harmony to the realm ultimately depended upon the grace of God as mediated through the

Sacraments. As the providers of these vessels of sanctification along the frontier, the Jesuits would fulfill the role that the encomenderos clearly could not accomplish in providing for the political, moral and religious instruction of the King’s indigenous vassals.

298 Rafael Carbonell de Masy, La Reducción Jesuítica de Santos Cosme y Damián (Asunción: Makrografik, 2003), 43. The raids of the bandeirantes interrupted the economic development of these communities from the onset of the incursions in 1628 through the period of indigenous mobilization of the mission frontier following Montoya’s sojourn in Madrid. While the Jesuits were first interested in simply providing for the sustenance of the converts in the first few decades of the reductions’ history, the missionaries also deployed new agricultural practices during this time. These new practices included the diversification of crops as a failsafe against famine. The experiences of intensified hardship during the transmigration of the reductions also seemed to convince the indigenous of the practicality of a new agronomy of the Jesuits’ own insistence. The need for a more dependable source of food prompted the Guaraní to abandon their traditional modes of gardening subsistence and hunting-gathering. This adoption of Western techniques of cultivation and agronomy was an indispensable step that contributed to the steady demographic growth of the reductions during the second half of the seventeenth century, a trend well attested in the works of historians such as Barbara Ganson.

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Sanctification and Sacred Space in the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay

Confined by the chains of indigenous servitude on one the one hand and the rigorous restrictions of Tridentine Catholic morality on the other, the history of the region's gradual integration into the colonial system centers around the control of indigenous bodies. For the early Jesuits, this call to a spiritual life necessitated rigorous self-discipline and this fastidiousness resonates in their authorial voice and their self-depiction. This uncompromising attitude in the face of temptation resounds throughout Montoya's narrative in particular where the values of chastity and self-effacement were projected onto the seemingly “lecherous” and

“unruly” indigenous converts. Though missionaries appreciated the perceived absence of material idols and polytheism among the Tupí-Guaraní peoples, they nevertheless found fault with the cultural values of the indigenous for whom "the universal idol” remained that of “the flesh.”299 Jarque similarly conveys this sense of disenchantment over the indigenous Guaraní 's alleged moral laxism and lack of self-restraint.300

This perception of indigenous immoderation accompanied in the minds of the Jesuit missionaries an incapacity for abstract thought. Both Jarque and Montoya mention within their respective narratives a conspicuous absence of higher numerals in the Guaraní tongue. The inability of the Guaraní to properly quantify their sins for the purpose of confessing them during the Sacrament of Penance likewise accompanied a qualitative hurdle on the part of the Guaraní

299 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 139. 300 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 33. Jarque clearly believed that the indigenous Guaraní were predisposed to profligacy and carnality: “Mayor es en los indios que han quedado el daño de sus costumbres, porque asi acosados no acuden a oír la doctrina cristiana, los sermones y platicas de sus curas, con que por mas celosos que estos sean de las almas, con gran dificultad pueden juntarlos y hallarlos de sazón para oír lo que feligreses tan materiales y tocos penetran poco, y menos aman; porque de su natural son propensos a lo sensible y puramente perciben por los sentidos del cuerpo, más que nación alguna de Europa; y así raro será el indio que atienda a las cosas espirituales y pureza de su alma sino es a fuerza de continua enseñanza de quien con grande tesón a instruirle..."

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who consistently failed to distinguish between venial and mortal sins.301 These perceived inadequacies hampered the administration of confessional absolution and barred many from receiving the Blessed Sacrament. The difficulties the Jesuit fathers encountered in administering the Sacraments - which figured so prominently in their understanding of the mission - forced the priests of the reduction to adapt in the face of such challenges. Recognizing that the elderly in particular had the most difficulty relinquishing their ancient habits and learning the "higher truths" of the Gospel, the Jesuits devoted more time and energy to catechizing the youth.302 In addition, the Jesuit fathers possibly found the regulation of domestic arrangements in particular and social space in general a more efficient means of limiting the converts' “occasion to sin” and preserving, thereby, the purity of their conscience.303 To encourage participation in the devotional life, the Jesuits would often segregate their congregation and install partitions between the sheep and the goats of the reductions. Such “was our regular practice”, Montoya freely admits, “[that] at daybreak we would visit the sick….we would [then] celebrate Mass, with a sermon after the Gospel, after which the pagans were dismissed, much to their chagrin at seeing themselves ejected from the church like dogs. They envied the Christians who stayed behind, and this spurred them to learn the catechism for baptism as soon as possible and to set aside every obstacle.”304

The administration of the Sacraments served as the only means through which the salvation of the indigenous could be secured. To preserve this life-line between the Sacraments

301 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 45. 302 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 143. In his overview of the Reduction of Nuestra Senora de los Reyes, Ruiz mentions that the zealous efforts of Father Diego de Salazar focused on "the young people, so that they would not grow up with the bad habits of their parents." 303 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 93. In his overview of the daily religious devotions of the reductions, Jarque humorously quips that "it appears that those new Christians live more in the temple of God than in their homes with their families..." Here, Jarque comments on the religiosity of the new Christians while often stating how much more devout the indigenous seemed in comparison with the Spanish colonists. 304 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 51.

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and the indigenous converts, the Jesuits attempted to manipulate the social space of the reductions in order to both stymie sinful impulses and foster an enduring spiritual connection that reinforced native religiosity which would place the individual convert, the reduction community, and the Divine into harmonious accord.

In a world characterized by contagion, malnourishment, and violence, death was omnipresent. Though one's time in the evanescent world was undeniably finite, the soul's destiny nevertheless depended on its sanctification through the life-giving Sacraments. The fact that these spiritual vehicles to the individual soul's redemption had a spatio-temporal dimension in this world, confined within the church and the urban space of the reductions themselves, implied that one’s venturing into the wilds and being far removed from these sacred sites could potentially end in the soul's perdition beyond bodily death.305 For these reasons, measures were taken to instill in indigenous converts a deep reverence for the Sacraments expressed in the form of heightened self-scrutiny, exacting moral perfectionism, and an aversion for the ancient ways.306 What Montoya portrays is a community highly conscious of the social divides engendered by these sacred rites and by the acts of defilement that barred the indigenous from participation in the devotional life. In this sense, the haves and the have-nots of divine sanctification through Holy Communion became keenly aware of the sense of privilege and self- worth inherent in ritualistic participation.307 In light of the outward performance of sanctification that the sacraments visibly entailed, the interiorized sense of guilt accompanying penance was essentially reinforced by heightened public scrutiny which distinguished those worthy of

305 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 164. 306 Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1632 a 1634, 147. In an account on the reduction of Nuestra Señora de la Asumpsion del Acaragua, missionaries had reported that the Indians had started to feel culpable for their grievances against God where they would voice concerns over their own sanctity. This report, written in the early years of the 1630s, suggests that the first generation of arrivals in these new communities did not find a parallel in the emotional lives of their new spiritual advisers. 307 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 116.

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receiving the Blessed Sacrament from those who were barred from it. Perhaps in no other way were the Jesuits so successful than in the propagation of sodalities throughout the reductions.

These lay organizations, to which only the truly devout could belong, effectively inscribed new divisions within the indigenous community separating the worthy elect from those bound by mortal sin.

The Jesuits also targeted the young for catechistic instruction following some initial difficulties in instructing older people, the Jesuits effectively forged a wedge between generations within these indigenous communities during the formative years of the reductions.

Within Montoya’s account, he speaks of children piously and politely chastising their adult relatives over their lingering “superstitions” that stood in erroneous contrast with the new life stationed around the Sacraments of the Holy Church which could even mend old ethnic rivalries:

“[Father Diego de Salazar], an old missioner…established harmony among the various nationalities and types in this town. He devoted his attention to the young people, so that they would not grow up with the bad habits of their parents. There was an Indian who consistently avoided sermons and instruction in the faith. A child went past him, so small that it could barely walk or utter articulate speech. The Indian asked, ‘Child, where are you going in such a determined way?’ The child replied, as though with an adult mind, ‘I am going to hear the word of God that the Fathers preach in the church; I don’t not want to be left outside with the animals.’ Those words pierced the man’s heart. Lessoned by a child, he followed its example and persevered in coming regularly [to Mass].”308

Sanctity, or worthiness before God and the Jesuit fathers, was measured according to the solemnity one showed in recognition of a new set of boundaries that demarcated the sacred from the profane.

If the reductions depended upon the institutionalization of new modes of social discrimination in this sense which served to distinguish sinners from the devout, these new

308 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 143.

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boundaries had to be constructed upon preexisting forms of social distinction recognized by the

Tupí-Guaraní peoples well before the arrival of the Europeans. To better implant themselves within the nearby native communities, the Jesuits often directed much of their attention to the caciques, or the local chieftains of indigenous pre-Columbian societies. Winning the good will of these community leaders was often indispensable to the establishment of the reductions.309

Their utility being recognized by the Jesuit fathers, the caciques at the same time often undermined the authority of the missionaries. In his tale of the “sorcerous” cacique Taubici, for example, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya explains how this particularly fiendish chieftain had domineered over his people, abusing them to his satisfaction and killing them "at whim.”310

Clearly, within the reductions, no single mortal man could act out his vile caprices. If order was to be at all realized, responsible leadership was required which entailed some measure of self- restraint. The caciques and other prominent figures, meanwhile, garnered considerable respect among the indigenous population regardless of religious affiliation; the Jesuit fathers quickly realized that any successful negotiation with nearby pagan communities would have to accommodate these prominent figures in indigenous society, elevating them in an entirely different light as no less influential but nevertheless upstanding members of a new Christian community.

Nurturing the continuity of pre-Columbian indigenous political arrangements proved a convenient option for the Jesuit fathers, but the values and fundamental outlook of the caciques and other principales would have to conform to a new Christian standard if these individual

309 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 165. Ruiz recounts how, on his deathbed, a notable cacique received baptism; and upon his death, he ordered all of his vassals to follow him in example and become Christians. Ruiz relates that this particular story explains the origins of the reduction of Natividad de Nuestra Senora (also, see footnote 50); Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 136. Along similar lines, the reduction of San Ignacio on the Parana was founded by a cacique who believed his victory over his chief rival was due in part to the support granted to him by Father Marciel Lorenzana who had baptized both the cacique and his vassals prior to battle. 310 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 46.

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figures were to retain their prominent social standing within an apostolic setting. For this reason, the caciques received special treatment at the hands of the Jesuits in exchange for the their compliance: they alone could dispense corporal punishment onto other bodies of reduction society; furthermore, their children alone would go on to receive advanced instruction in music, writing, and reading while the commoners were to be relegated to domestic tasks such as weaving, smithing, and farming.311 Labor was clearly not divided impartially. Social divisions within reduction society continued to reflect pre-Christian cultural distinctions regarding the relative prestige collectively assigned to a particular vocation or occupation.312

The Jesuits proved ever resourceful in incorporating preexisting indigenous polities into their missionary enterprise to better serve their evangelical purposes.313 However, their attempt to transform the Guaraní and other peoples in the Río de la Plata region from "country dwellers to civilized members of a Christian polity" would require some degree of external stability and peaceable social conditions in order to achieve this over time.314 In their effort to reduce the pagan indigenous to a "Christian life, both rational and political, and to human commerce, in towns", the Jesuits would have to radically adjust the preexisting set of values and cultural associations according to which the indigenous had traditionally lived. By tailoring their

311 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 132. 312 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 32. The indigenous conception of work is characterized by the Jesuits as being strongly averse to tedious repetition: "Nobody looks upon himself as a handworker, since everyone has learned simply by doing the work in his own house. For example, though a shoemaker makes shoes in public, he does not want to be called a shoemaker by trade, claiming that he merely picked up the skill by his own wit. By this subtle distinction they attempt to provide for their needs and at the same time hold on to the noble status bequeathed to them by their ancestors, all of whom belonged to the nobility." 313 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 48. Montoya was committed to proving that the Guaraní were capable of political subservience to the King. The root of this political consciousness in the Guarani was the Guarani language itself. In his chapter on the “Customs of the Guarani Indians”, Montoya states how “The pagans lived, and still live today, in quite small villages…but not without government. They had their caciques, who were universally recognized as possessing noble status as inherited from their ancestors, based upon their having had vassals and ruled over people. Many acquire noble status through eloquence of speech, so great is their esteem for tehrir language – rightly so, for it is worthy of praise and of being celebrated among the tongues of renown. By their eloquence they gather followers and vassals, thus ennobling both themselves and their descendents.” 314 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 46.

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narratives around the progress that had already been made by the reduced converts, citing their transition from a depraved condition marked by godlessness, laziness, ultra-violence, and inhumanity to that of piety, industriousness, tranquility, and charity, the Jesuits were able to convey to their largely European audience their instrumentality in fostering a common venture that placed the interests of Empire and the Church in mutual accord.

This interminable transformation of the indigenous pagans of Paraguay into faithful subjects of the realm and devout Christians of the Catholic faith was destined in the eyes of the

Jesuit fathers to involve some degree of resistance. In his overview of the foundation of the first reductions in the early decades of the seventeenth-century, Francisco Jarque argues that the challenges facing missionaries in the hinterlands of the Americas were uniquely onerous in ecclesiastical history: the apostles, he specifically mentions, proselytized the faith to "civilized" peoples of Classical Western Antiquity – who were “already political, already rational…and even possessing universities populated with learned doctors.”315 Consequently, the Jesuits recognized themselves not merely as preachers of Catholic doctrine; they had to assume other roles given the absence of the supporting social, cultural, and physical infrastructure that made a fully "Christian life" possible in the eyes of Catholic Europe. The Jesuits had to assume other responsibilities in managing the outlying temporalities which ultimately supported Christian fellowship and Sacramental devotion. In short, such a life could not be possible without tailors, carpenters, wheat and wine. The flourishing of Catholicism along the colonial periphery necessitated the economic development of the region.

315 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 45. “ya politicos, ya racionales…y aun con universidades poblados de sabios doctores.”

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Throughout both narratives, the indigenous are consistently represented as capable and willing pupils eager to learn from those they emulated.316 Attesting to the limiting inexperience of the indigenous in adopting European ways, Jarque comments on the appropriation of

European techne to service local indigenous needs in the form of housing construction, cyclical crop rotation, metalworking, and other crafts: “The truth is that one can hardly find an Indian who can produce masterly work on account of his work; that which they accomplish is done through imitation. In light of their mistakes, it is necessary for the fathers to continue with their supervision, to prevent [the indigenes] from making such mistakes for lack of proper training.”317

The Jesuits believed that with proper instruction the reduced indigenous peoples of Paraguay could adopt a "rational and "civilized" life becoming of a devout Christian.318 As missionaries as well as pedagogues, the Jesuits effectively served as cultural workers on the behalf of the

Spanish Empire - instilling desirable new habits in reduced catechists in an attempt to replace less desirable behavioral traits deemed unacceptable to the Jesuit fathers and their European audience.

Taken in this light, the reductions were not Edenic islands of virtue cropping up amid a sea of darkness, nor were the Guaraní passive containers to be emptied and refilled at the will of the Jesuit fathers. Rather, the reductions were sites of negotiation where the loyalties, personal outlooks and beliefs of the indigenous hardly seemed fastened to the idealizations of the Jesuit missionaries during this transitional period. The reductions were emphatically not the result of the Jesuits’ efforts alone - though the fathers have traditionally been credited as the sole founders

316 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 97; Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 89. 317 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 51. "Verdad es que apenas se hallara un indio que obre con arte como maestro, dando razón de lo que obra; lo que saben es imitar; y para que yerren, es necesaria en los padres continua vigilancia, por su dejado natural; y también porque no les disuenan los yerros, por la ignorancia científica del arte.” 318 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 115. Always the pedagogue, Ruiz explicitly mentions how the "lack of instruction produces [all] such disorder.” In this particular context, the indigenous would continue to do “good”, in the minds of the Jesuit fathers, provided they were given a permanent model fit for emulation.

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of these particular communities. As the final section of this study will contend, the reductions emerged in a confrontational exchange between the Jesuit fathers and the Guaraní dwelling both within the reductions and well beyond the strict oversight of the missionary fathers.

Narratives of Antipathy and Confrontation

Since their foundation, the reductions have traditionally been represented as self- contained and relatively autonomous communities that were detached from the wider colonial context on account of their geographical isolation. While the effective reach of imperial authority was clearly limited, the lingering impression that the reductions tended towards hermetic seclusion from their immediate socio-cultural environment is misleading. Indeed, the

Jesuits represented the vast untamed wilderness encircling the reductions, as an infernal domain of ignorance, social aversion, barbarism, and depravity; but such representations tended to distort the experiences of the indigenous converts to better suit the expressed interests of the Jesuit fathers in the field. Within both narratives, the actual porosity or permeability of the reductions as described in both narratives belies the prescriptive measures implemented by the Jesuits for the purposes of severing the converts' enduring connections to the outside world. In addition to these overt controls, the Jesuits relied upon more subtle means to confine the free movement of the indigenous to questionable success. Montoya’s narrative, for example, contains several accounts of the reported misfortunes befalling those converts who abandoned their faith by withdrawing into the dangerous wilds.319 Undoubtedly, such stories, similar to the miraculous accounts of resurrections and visions, provided ripe topics for Sunday sermons.

319 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 198. One notable example describes a young man who skipped Mass to go hunting in the forests on Sunday. Before he returned to the reductions, however, he was said to have been mauled to death by jaguars lurking about in the woods.

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While the Jesuits sought to prohibit the free exit and entry of individuals to and from the reductions, there were ample exceptions to this prescriptive rule. Jarque mentions the frequency with which the reductions would barter with nearby indigenous pagans for the purposes of purchasing slaves, most of whom were women and children.320 In this sense, commerce between the indigenous pagans and the converts exemplified the expansionist logic of the Jesuit

Reductions. As Montoya points out in his overview of the reduction of Santos Cosme and San

Damián, the agricultural surplus accrued on account of European farming techniques imported by the Jesuits yielded "abundant crops with which [the Jesuits] fed the sick and attracted the people who had taken refuge in the forests.”321 Jarque similarly recognized the central importance of rural economic development as an effective mechanism for evangelization.322

The conversion of entire indigenous polities - involving the caciques and their vassals - often served as the terms of a commercial transaction between Guaraní-speaking peoples who needed iron farming implements and the Jesuit priests who remained more intent on "harvesting souls" through the means of baptism.323 And yet, despite these apparent short-term victories, the

Jesuit fathers realized early on that the indigenous reception of Christianity did not perfectly align with what they had intended to profess.324 Through material concessions and familiar gestures, the Jesuits hoped to eventually awaken the soul to "higher truths". However, such gestures often failed to translate coherently across the transcultural gradient. This process of acculturation would take time and the Jesuits understood that great patience would be required in order to deal with the indigenous resistance to the Jesuits’ instruction in the short-term; such measures would prove ultimately profitless however if the surrounding colonial environment

320 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 112. 321 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 163. 322 Francisco Jarque, Las Misiones Jesuiticas En 1687, 46. 323 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 131. 324 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 151.

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threatened to uproot the Jesuits’ activities in this region entirely. The Jesuits desired stable background conditions in order to facilitate their professed undertaking in these new mission communities.

While the reductions routinely forged connections with the outside world to help support the continued expansion of the missionary enterprise, other exchanges between the reductions and the surrounding indigenous communities often served to undermine everything that the

Jesuit fathers had hoped to accomplish. During the first decades of the Jesuit reductions, the fathers often encountered competing claimants to the supernatural domain. According to the missionaries, these "sorcerers" or "magicians” as they were variously labeled by the Jesuits, all possessed an incomparable quality in their capacity to both deceive and impress through an inventive grasp of the Guaraní language. The shamans vied with the Jesuits over the adherence and loyalties of the reductions. Throughout Montoya's narrative in particular, these spiritual mediators are depicted as highly articulate figures equally capable of winning the admiration of the indigenous and capable of instilling fear in the minds of the converts through malicious threats and invectives.325 These figures, in the minds of the Jesuits, clearly sought to enthrall the converts with their impassioned rhetoric that concealed what the Jesuits’ interpreted as demonically-inspired quackery.

The worries of religious opposition appear to have been warranted. In one of the reductions following the death of a prominent shaman, a troop of catechists openly confronted

325 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 63. Several of such men individually named by Ruiz are distinguished above all by their "eloquence". The magician Guirabera, for instance, claimed to be divine. Through his "lies and fables" he was said to have won the "credence" of many indigenous men and women. He is described as being keen on disrupting the faithful's access to the Word of God. Ruiz recognized, first hand, that this particular shaman "owed his high enthronement to his eloquence."; Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 114. In a similar account, Ruiz describes an indigenous man by the name of Zaguacari who "pretended to bestow rain, good weather, and crops" to those who served him. Ruiz further mentions how this beguiling figure was quite capable of adapting to unfortunate contingencies, lying "his way out (of his incompetence) by claiming he had [reneged on his promises] because of the people's provocation in not providing for his needs."

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the Jesuit fathers over their hardline stance against his veneration. They were particularly upset over the exhumation of the shamans' tombs and the dismantling of their shrines. In the minds of these baptized indigenous of the reductions, the bodies of these deceased members of the indigenous community promised "good crops, fertile years, and favorable health" even in death.326 The purpose of veneration and religious devotion appear to have been purely utilitarian

- a means of channeling spiritual power from a higher source to improve the condition of the living. This pragmatic approach to religious devotion - which resembles in many ways an equitable exchange between the supernatural and the human transacting parties over the terms of natural events - clearly remained at odds with the Jesuit conception of Christian piety which emphasized God’s transcendence and autonomy from the world of human affairs.

According to Montoya, the inhabitants of the reduction of Concepción de Nuestra Señora, having been reduced by Father Alonzo de Aragona, proved especially reluctant to relinquish their ancient practices. The town was said to have been inhabited by many indigenous

"sorcerers" who only capitulated their old commitments following the insistence of Father

Alonzo. However despite these efforts, many presumably feigned their conversion to the new faith. One particular congregant of Concepción de Nuestra Señora, for example, had reportedly misled his priest during confession on a regular basis. Only following the reported intervention of St. Francis Xavier, during a dream, did the man change his mendacious ways.327 This indio’s transition from a servant of the devil to a devout Christian likely captures the reluctance of many new Christians, who were hesitant to relinquish their past social standing within the reductions.

Such conversion stories told by the Jesuits both in their letters abroad and during Sunday sermons in the field likely reflect a shared preoccupation with regard to the sincerity of religious

326 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 88. 327 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 141.

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devotion of their "flocks". The Jesuit fathers nevertheless were very persistent in identifying and uprooting competing mediators to the supernatural realm in an effort to protect their converts from the corrupting influences of frontier society. The stories also reflect the tremendous difficulty many missionaries experienced in making unique spiritual claims in a world which retained its traditional conceptualization of the supernatural.328 When the Jesuits’ interpretation of the Gospel message demanded personal and collective sacrifices on the part of the indigenous, as in the case of forced monogamy, these frictional encounters between the Jesuits and indigenous pagans could prove combustive.329

The factual content of the authors' anecdotes in general is beside the point as far as the ultimate significance these stories is concerned. Taken together, they advance the agenda of both authors: the reductions were clearly born out of adversity and the continued support of the Jesuits operations in Paraguay had to account for these setbacks in a way that placed the Jesuits in a becoming light as dedicated missionaries charged with a difficult task. The reductions were sites of contention over the bodies and the souls of the converted against the backdrop of a degenerate social order that threatened to engulf the mission church. There is truth to this interpretation as far as the fate of these indigenous societies is concerned, but this "second conquest" - taking place within the reductions themselves - was hardly a decisive victory. This particular war over the hearts and minds of the indigenous would in fact last throughout the entire history of these new communities.

This holy struggle against the formidable foes of “superstition” and “barbarism” within the indigenous communities was placed into jeopardy by a degenerative colonial order that

328 Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1632 a 1634, 161. The Jesuits endeavored to uproot the obstinate superstitions of the Guaraní. In one of their yearly reports on the province, the Jesuit fathers complained of the pre-Columbian belief in the efficacy of tears and publicized lamentations in suppressing the spread of disease and misfortune in the community. 329 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 61.

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sustained itself through the exploitation of indigenous bodies. In their accounts, the Jesuits make an effort to differentiate themselves from the encomenderos of the region. By 1634, there was some indication on the part of the Crown that the encomienda had become a superfluous institution throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru.330 Interested in expanding its patrimonial claims,

Montoya’s narrative provided a viable alternative, one which the Habsburg Monarch was already inclined to accept. For this reason, the missionary cast the Jesuit enterprise as a more sustainable, more productive, and decidedly more Christian alternative to the conventional approach to labor organization that had taken root in this particular region of Spanish

America.331 Already in a position to handle the pagan Guaraní more effectively than lay overseers, all that the Jesuits truly lacked was the means to defend their mission communities and protect their converts from the hostile social elements of the borderlands. The sanctioned approach to border security proved to be largely ephemeral during a time of genuine crisis. This evident deficit of security, clearly voiced in the accounts of Montoya and his confreres who soon followed him, helped bolster the cause of indigenous armament in this region when no other options seemed feasible at the time.

The looming hostility to the Jesuits and their converts on either end of a poorly defined border erupted in violence by the final decade of the Iberian Union. When their State-sanctioned protectors in the colonies proved inept or unwilling to aid them in the defense of their mission communities, the Jesuits actively sought – through their own initiative - to provide for the defense of these new communities in fending off the external threats that the colonial system itself had fostered. The advocacy work of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya that motivated the

330 Pablo Pastells, Historia de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 499. 331Pablo Pastells, istori de l Comp de es s en l Pro in i del P r u , 491. In a Real Cedula dated from 1633, the Crown decried that the encomenderos had made “poor ministers” of God’s Word. The audience of Montoya’s narrative clearly predisposed towards an alternative arrangement in labor relations on the local levels by this time.

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composition of the Spiritual Conquest served an instrumental role in convincing the Spanish

Monarchy of the Guaraní converts’ faithfulness as vassals in a way that underscored the Jesuits’ competency as spiritual overseers who would reign in lingering pagan excesses and stifle sedition in the frontier. By the same token, the Jesuits served as advocates for the caciques of the local reductions and worked to supply the indigenous leaders with the means to better defend themselves against their ravenous enemies.

Such anxieties, however, were not confined to the Society of Jesus alone. These highly localized concerns over the permanency of the mission church in the Plate frontier paralleled the

Habsburg State’s general preoccupation over the perceived legitimacy of its own authority and its limited influence over the course of events in Western Europe. This malaise proved to be responsive to the Jesuits’ broader message of redemption in the colonial frontier at this particular juncture in the reductions’ history when the missionaries found themselves hard-pressed to acquire more significant forms of support than the verbiage circulating among courts, councils, and princes.

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CONCLUSION

As Antonio Ruiz de Montoya ruminated on the events of his life and the experiences of his fellow missionaries in the privacy of his own study during his sojourn in Madrid, the crisis that he had been personally assigned to contain threatened to consume the mission church of colonial Paraguay. During his residence in Spain, the threat resurfaced and the Jesuits found themselves pressed to take drastic counter-measures or risk the obliteration of their enterprise altogether. Upon hearing reports of an inbound incursion into Tape, Father Diego de Alfaro, the son of the preeminent lawgiver, mounted a defense of the reductions of Santa Teresa, San

Nicolas, and San Carlos in 1638.332 While the Jesuit priest hoped to organize his own detachment in an effort to free the enslaved converts, Alfaro simultaneously enlisted the auxiliary support of the governor and his men to help stage a counter-offensive against the armed bandeirantes who had assumed a fortified position in the Caazapá Guazú near Caaró, where the three martyrs had shed their blood nearly a decade before.333

While this particular threat from the east had preoccupied the Jesuit fathers even during the ministries of Roque Gonzalez, the increased dependency of the Brazilian towns on indigenous slave labor following the ascendency of the Dutch across the southern Atlantic roused both the frequency and intensity of organized slave-raids within the interior of the

American continent. As the sheepfolds of a recently pacified flock, the Jesuit Reductions made particularly appealing targets since the bandeirantes would have to spend considerably less time

332 Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1637 a 1639 (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1984), 72. 333 Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1637 a 1639, 143.

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and energy combing the forests for sizeable bounties within their own sparsely populated territories. In a sense, the Jesuit fathers had already done most of the work for these slavers.

The raids on these new indigenous communities sent shock waves throughout the region and prompted one of the greatest mass exoduses in early modern history. This lupine opportunism of the paulista raiders greatly dismayed the Jesuit fathers who had worked so tirelessly over the span of several decades to convince the Guaraní to settle into these new communities for their own spiritual and material welfare. The lamentation over this unfortunate series of events resounds throughout the chronicles of the Jesuit missioners, where the irony of the converts’ fate only further embittered the missionaries’ disconsolate hearts:

Incredible! New Christians brought to their ruin by old Christians (if they are so deserving of the title)! Mistreated, butchered, the children tied up against trees, the old and the sick forced into exile, and torn to pieces or left half-dead by the devouring tigers. Who upon hearing and considering these events could not be moved to tears?334

To defeat this pressing threat from the east, Diego de Alfaro sought to forge a coalition with the asuncionistas under Governor Pedro de Lugo’s command. However, the loose alliance between the indigenous converts and the vecinos of the provincial capital, which managed to work following the martyrdom of Roque Gonzalez within the same region, did not coalesce as the

Jesuit provincial had expected. For his error in judgment, Diego de Alfaro would ultimately pay with his own life, as a Jesuit chronicler later observed:

Alfaro took charge of his army, going out on horse in the middle of the fray, as a good pastor and a loyal protector of these miserable Indians. [There,] he roused their spirits in a commanding voice. This brought [much] luck to the combatants, who by divine right and human law had the right to defend the honor of God and the King, [where] they could take vengeance on these [fiends]. While the Indians [were] shedding their sweat and blood in battle…..in the heat of this skirmish, one of the enemy soldiers, having hidden himself in the thicket, took aim at Father Alfaro and fired a shot that pierced the temple

334Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1637 a 1639, 69.

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and took out the priest’s left eye. Alfaro fell dead instantly [as the Spanish soldiers simply set back and watched].335

Under the pressure of a more formidable opponent, the townsmen saw no good reason to take to the defense of these indigenous communities which had proven over the span of several decades to be far less compliant than Asunción had anticipated. The image of a secure and well-managed colonial periphery as dictated under the laws of the Spanish Habsburgs had shown its ephemeral mien under the impending threat of a real enemy from across the borderlands. 336

Unsurprisingly, the incursions persisted - wave after wave - well into the decades that succeeded the events of Montoya’s own narrative.337 Under the periodic threat of enslavement, the reductions had only two available options for the self-preservation of their freedom: to fight or to flee from these oncoming threats. Under the spiritual and often military guidance of the

Jesuit fathers, the reductions did in fact organize for their own defense, but the success of their

335 Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1637 a 1639, 143-144. The reports of the Jesuits were especially bitter about the percieved betrayal: “Animaronle nuestros Padres y avanzaron en dos columnas, para rodear al enemigo. Prepararonse para la batalla los indios fieles con la confesión y los catecúmenos con el bautismo. Cuando estaban enfrente del enemigo, comenzó la pelea con mucho brío de parte de los indios, ya que se trataba de su religión y libertad, y por consiguiente de una causa justísima. No podían los lusitanos aguantar semejante empuje, aunque eran superiores por naturaleza y por los armamentos. Huyeron hacia el salto, protegiéndose en la espesura del bosque. Mientras tanto que peleaban los indios tan valerosamente, estaban mirándolos el Gobernador y sus soldados desde lejos e inmóviles, como si se hubieran encontrado en un circo de gladiadores. Este famoso Gobernador Pedro de Lugo, había amenazado con la pena de muerte a sus soldados, para que no se moviesen de su lugar, despreciando las encarecidas súplicas del Padre Alfaro, dirigidas a él en nombre del Rey. Entonces tomó el Padre Alfaro a su cargo la dirección del ejército, metiéndose a caballo en medio de la batalla, como buen Pastor y fiel Protector de estos miserables indios, animándolos en alta vox. Le daba pena la suerte de los combatientes, ya que los que por derecho divino y humano debían y podían defender la honra de Dios y del Rey, descansaban vergonzosamente, mientras que los indios derramaron su sudor y sangre en la batalla. Con este mal ejemplo no podían menos los españoles que animar al enemigo a la resistencia. En el calor de la refriega dirigió uno de los enemigos escondidos en el bosque su arma hacia el Padre Alfaro y le tiró un balazo, que penetró por las sienes y le arrancó el ojo izquierdo. Cayó el instante sin sentidos.” 336 Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1637 a 1639, 139. Within their own chronicles, the Jesuits portrayed the Guaraní as distinctly distrustful of the Spanish following these calamitous events but still willing to continue their faithful service to God: “Dirán algunos: Hay que despreciar todo esto, cuando se trata de la salud del alma. Esto precisamente se les dijo tantas veces. Y ellos contestaron que querían servir a Dios en su patria, añadiendo que los que aborrecían más, era acercarse a los españoles, a los cuales tenían odio y con mucha razón, por lo mucho que habían sufrido de ellos, y sufrirían sin duda en adelante. Estaban además íntimamente persuadidos, como ya hemos advertido arriba, que los nuestros llamaban a los lusitanos para privarlos de su libertad.” In the minds of the missionaries and the converts alike, the Spanish townsmen were faithless allies who were no different than the bandeirantes. 337 Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1637 a 1639 , 76-77.

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initial resistance was often frustrated by the instrumental military advantage of the paulista raiders. As a Jesuit chronicler would later bemoan in the decade that followed the mass exodus of Guairá, any guarantee of victory against these raiders was seriously hampered by virtue of the paulistas’ “modern arms and military formation[s]” to which “these rude and nude Indians…who

[so] often wavered in terror at the sound of a gunshot” paled by comparison.338 In the minds of the Jesuits and their indigenous converts, the possession of firearms promised to level the psychological playing field and helped to dispel, in turn, the lingering impression that the colonists were in possession of a hitherto unknown source of power that only the Europeans and the colonial towns could properly handle.

To counterbalance this lopsidedness on the field of battle, one of the tasks delegated to the Procurator of Paraguay was the responsibility of acquiring the royal authorization for these communities’ self-armament. For his part, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya succeeded in convincing the royal audience of Philip IV and his court of the necessity of this unorthodox measure by highlighting the calamities of this region at this particular moment in time. The lawlessness attributed to these provinces had been underscored in Montoya’s account and the Jesuits alone remained in place to redress these grievances and restore order to these lands. Having brokered an enduring relationship with these indigenous peoples, all that was lacking was the means of defense that the colonial towns and presidios could not guarantee in the face of a real crisis.

The Crown’s decision to grant the indigenous the privilege to bear firearms in defense of the King’s patrimony was a controversial departure from the sanctioned approach to border pacification that had taken root in this particular region of Spanish America. The measure nevertheless proved a tremendous boon to these indigenous communities during this time of heightened insecurity. By 1641, the indigenous converts had successfully routed a bandeirante

338 Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1637 a 1639, 161.

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threat in the Battle of Mbororé and this victory renewed hope in the possibility of a viable future for both converts and missionaries alike.339 Having obtained equal footing with their enemies, the Jesuit Reductions now possessed not only the martial capacity to stave off foreign threats; by the Jesuits’ own self-promotion throughout the Spanish Empire, the Guaraní converts essentially transformed from that of a backwards and benighted infantile barbarian race into the most faithful and morally upstanding vassals of the Spanish King within this contested region of the

Peruvian Viceroyalty.340 This transformation in character is no small rhetorical feat on the part of

Montoya and his Jesuit brethren who alone had the training and the transatlantic political connections to accomplish this end on behalf of illiterate non-Spanish speakers. In a gesture of appreciation for their faithful military service to the Crown, Philip IV rewarded the new mission communities by temporarily suspending all outstanding tributary obligations of his Guaraní vassals under the Jesuits’ spiritual charge. In this letter of approbation, Philip IV also praised the qualities of the Guaraní as upstanding vassals of the King’s dominion.341 The privileges bestowed upon these communities furthered their differentiation from the background colonial order and undoubtedly opened up old wounds that would never heal again.

This hard-won gesture alone was clearly not enough and the Jesuits were inclined to pursue the matter in full under the aegis of royal endorsement that Montoya had worked so tirelessly to secure. In the years that followed, the material concessions grew more considerable.

In 1646, the Spanish Crown dispatched a flotilla that carried munitions to the port of Arica for

339 Ernesto J.A. Maeder, ed. Cartas anuas de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, 1641 a 1643 (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistóricas, 1996), 7. 340Rafael Carbonell de Masy, La Reduccion Jesuitica de Santos Cosme y Damián, 110. In this community study of the towns of Santos Cosme and Damian, Rafael Carbonell de Masy, S.J. lists the impressive string of victories against the bandeirantes in the decade that followed the armament of the Jesuit Reductions: “En 1650, abundan sus pruebas de fidelidad con las armas, tanto en la governacion del Paraguay como en la del Río de la Plata. En 1651 habian rechazado los bandierantes en sus cuatro asaltos simulatneos a Corpus en el Paraná, y a Yapeyú, Sto Tomé y Asunción del Mbororé (o La Cruz) en el Uruguay; y en 1657 los habían derrotado fuera del territorio ocupado por las doctrinas, gracias a las patrullas de reconocimiento.” 341 Pablo Hernández, Misiones del Paraguay, 514.

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the purpose of arming these indigenous communities while simultaneously ordering the officials in Potosi to forward additional arms to the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay.342 The gradual self- aggrandizement of these mission communities incurred the suspicion of the nearby colonial towns that held no reservations in issuing complaints of their own to the King and his ministers.

The lingering questions that these tensions prompted certainly perplexed administrators in the decades that followed: After all, where were the firearms to be stockpiled? And, for that matter, who was to be given free access to these weapons and under whose authorization could they be deployed? The dividing issue of armament - compounded by economic anxieties and mutual resentment - would continue to strain relations between the Jesuit Reductions and the nearby colonial towns.

The presence of firearms in the reductions greatly complicated these antagonistic relations in an entirely unprecedented fashion. In the past, the Spanish townsmen had enjoyed a military advantage over the indigenous converts for well over a century. Following the armament of these indigenous communities, the bargaining position of the colonial towns grew seriously constrained. From the standpoint of the vecinos, the Jesuits had originally gained entry into this region in an effort to reduce the Indians under the assumption that doing so would make the Guaraní more docile and compliant under the yoke of Asunción and the other nearby towns. In an unexpected turn of events, this rather uncooperative religious order had pursued a different agenda entirely, one that clearly did not align with the preferences of the local townsmen and the encomenderos of the region. Instead of facilitating labor extraction through the pacification of the Guaraní pagans as was expected, the Jesuits had taken the initiative to provide the indigenous Guaraní with firearms of all things! Between the arrival of the Jesuits into the region in 1607 and the final dissolution of the Iberian Union in 1640, the course of conduct

342 Pablo Hernández, Misiones del Paraguay, 532.

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relating to the sanctioned use of force along the borderlands between Brazil and Spanish

America had undergone a conversion of its own – one far more compelling than the “Spiritual

Conquest” itself.

This transformation, however fleeting and impermanent in the long-run, clearly marks an intriguing departure from the standard colonial depiction of the indigenous Other; for if the

Guaraní had been childlike primitives incapable of a genuine political existence, how is it that these semi-nomadic peoples were uniquely endowed with a privilege that more advanced indigenous societies had failed to acquire in the wake of the Conquest? While the necessity spurred by a lack of viable alternatives may account for the Crown’s decision to endow the

Guaraní reductions with firearms at this particular moment in time, the bond of trust that accompanied such political privileges still had to be forged. Taken in this light, the Jesuits had to convince royal authorities of the viability of their own enterprise in order to enlist the endorsement and material support of the Crown. In this light, the Jesuits served an instrumental role for the advancement of the Guaraní’s interests abroad.

Everything one can possibly know about the early history of the Jesuit Reductions of

Paraguay is mediated through the words of the missionaries themselves. Everything that these men wrote clearly conformed to their vocation as missionaries and each text reflects the immediate connections through which they identified both the risks and opportunities for their enterprise. This underlying assumption has guided the course of this study. Considering these texts as historical artifacts themselves, as vehicles of influence and persuasion crafted at a particular moment in time, is a necessary measure since the historical topic remains subject to divergent interpretations at the hands of modern researchers. While researchers are interested in understanding the past as it was experienced, the “scientific” reconstruction of past events

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through these accounts is greatly complicated by the literary qualities that they clearly exude.

Instead of reducing these accounts to their bare “facts”, the modern researcher should keep in mind that the more fantastic elements of these accounts had historical relevance at a particular time and place as well.343 Texts, after all, are composed in order to be read. Embellishments, cadence, and seemly literary constructions are relied upon in an effort to captivate the audience.

If the events in question reflect upon political realities, the object of such texts is to captivate the audience in an effort to persuade. These features should not be ignored. They should be prioritized.

Reflecting upon this palpable change in emphasis - from one of vulnerability to that of rationalized self-defense - demonstrates how the early history of the Jesuit Reductions involved, above all else, the incorporation of indigenous communities into a larger polity. Such a transition clearly served the temporal interests of the Empire: the Jesuits, as agents of Spanish imperialism, served a key role in the formation of a buffer territory that helped protect the King’s patrimony and check the expansionist ambitions of Lusitanian interests. Although the stabilization of the territories over time eventually ushered in unprecedented material prosperity in the following century, the early history of the reductions from their foundation to their militarization was distinguished by uncertainty, apprehension, and persistent pressures exerted on a variety of levels. In a world where the laws professed from afar were often ignored in practice, armament was a necessary precondition for the immediate security of these communities that also better assured their future prosperity.

The bulk of the primary source documentation on the Jesuit Reductions’ early history is currently distributed in three archival locations: The Jesuit Archives in Rome, the Archive of the

343 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 4.

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Indies in Seville, and the Argentine National Archives in Buenos Aires.344 Any groundbreaking historiographical project on the early period of these mission communities will have to consult the documents stored at these three sites. By focusing on the artifactual condition of these documents - as historicized vehicles of persuasion, conflict mediation, and solidarity formation - historians can better distinguish between the representations of the Jesuits’ own self-imagining and the real-world conditions from which these particular texts emerged as intelligible responses to actual problems.

344 Nicholas Cushner, Why Have You Come Here?: The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native America (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 102.

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