Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Dissent and Disobedience from Within 9783031634055, 9783031634062

Citation preview

Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century Dissent and Disobedience from Within Edited by Pablo Sánchez León Benita Herreros Cleret de Langavant

Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century

Pablo Sánchez León · Benita Herreros Cleret de Langavant Editors

Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century Dissent and Disobedience from Within

Editors Pablo Sánchez León CHAM - Center for the Humanities Nova University of Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal

Benita Herreros Cleret de Langavant Department of Modern and Contemporary History Universidad de Cantabria Santander, Cantabria, Spain

ISBN 978-3-031-63405-5 ISBN 978-3-031-63406-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland If disposing of this product, please recycle the paper.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros

Contents

Introduction 1

Resistance in the Early Modern Iberian Empires: Historicizing an Entangled, Contentious Social Practice Pablo Sánchez León and Benita Herreros Cleret de Langavant

3

Part I Background: The Medieval Roots of Early Modern Resistance 2

3

Disobedience, Resistance and Restoration of the Social Order in Castile and Leon in the Middle Ages: Customary Practices in the Face of Power Esther Pascua Echegaray The Global Impact of the Early Modern Thomistic Revolution and the Scholastic Grammars of Daily Resistance Within Institutions José Luis Egío

25

47

vii

viii

CONTENTS

Part II Exchanges: Communities and Resistance, From the Urban Centers to the Iberian Borderlands. Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries 4

5

6

7

The Unending Conquest: Indigenous Resistance in theChilean Borders (1553–1604) Jaime Valenzuela Márquez The Cry for Freedom: Between Resistance and Political Action in Castile at the End of the Middle Ages (1450–1520) Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer Vernacular Political Practices and Everyday Forms of Resistance: Frontier Communities in the Spanish-Portuguese Borderlands During the Seventeenth Century David Martín Marcos Resistance, Opposition and Accommodation to the Portuguese in Sixteenth-Century Asia Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto

69

91

113

133

Part III Roles: The Shaping of Identities Through Resistance in the Seventeenth Century 8

9

10

11

The Triumph of Temperance: Power, Negotiation, and Resistance in Royal Entries in Portugal, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries André Godinho Male Violence and Female Resistance in the Sacrament of Penance: Accounts Before the Inquisitorial Tribunals in Colonial America (Seventeenth Century) Mariana Meneses Muñoz Urban Outcasts Facing Adversity: A Plebeian Culture of Resistance and Resilience in Seventeenth-Century Spain Tomás A. Mantecón Movellán Missionary Villages as Spaces of Resistance Fabricio Lyrio Santos

157

177

195 221

CONTENTS

12

We Have Not Been Tributaries: Peru’s Black Community, Historical Memory, and Resistance Marcella Hayes

ix

239

Part IV Dynamics: Resisting Iberian Imperialism Through the Eighteenth-Century Reforms 13

14

15

16

17

18

Policy and Indigenous Policies in the Age of Enlightenment: Agreements and Resistance Between Assimilationist Ideals and the Preservation of Differences Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida Cross-cultural Interactions, Indigenous Agency, and Resistance in the Borderlands of the Upper Paraguay Basin Benita Herreros Cleret de Langavant Between Rebellion and Resistance: Guild Government, Ancient Liberty, and Plebeian Estate in the Catalonia of the Nueva Planta Carlos Garriga Acosta

261

283

311

Political Conflict in the Indigenous and Urban Worlds in the Late Colonial Andes Sergio Serulnikov

333

Precarious Freedoms: Slaves in Cuba Between the Late Eighteenth and the Early Nineteenth Centuries Claudia Varella Fernández

353

Everyday Resistance in Late Colonial Buenos Aires: A View from Judicial Sources Emir Reitano and Jacqueline Sarmiento

377

Afterword 19

Final Thoughts on Entangled Resistances from the Early Modern Iberian Empires Pablo Sánchez León

Index

403

415

Notes on Contributors

Maria Regina Celestino De Almeida, historian, holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (2000); Professor in the Graduate Program in History at Universidade Federal Fluminense; and Researcher at CNPq. She works in the History of Brazil and History of America, developing research on the following themes: Indians, missionization, ethnic identities, and interethnic relations, Rio de Janeiro (colonial period and nineteenth century). She has authored Metamorfoses Indígenas – identidade e cultura nas aldeias coloniais do Rio de Janeiro (2003; 2013) and Os Índios na História do Brasil (2010), as well as many articles. José Luis Egío received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Murcia and a Diploma in Advanced Studies (DEA) in European Law and Institutions from the University of Geneva. He is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Philosophy and Society (Universidad Complutense, Programa Atracción de Talento, Comunidad de Madrid) and an Affiliate Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History and Theory of Law. He has devoted numerous publications to the juridicalpolitical thought of Early Modernity. Some recent books include: Rechtsgeschichte des frühneuzeitlichen Hispanoamerika (De Gruyter, 2022); Estrategias de traducción de conocimiento normativo en los albores de la Nueva España (Dykinson, 2022); T he School of Salamanca. A Case of Global Knowledge Production (Brill, 2021); and Revisión crítica de la investigación reciente sobre la Escuela de Salamanca (Dykinson, 2020). xi

xii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Carlos Garriga Acosta is Doctor in Law at the University of Salamanca (1989), and he joined the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1993 as Associate Professor of Legal History. Since 2004, he has been Full Professor of this discipline at the University of the Basque Country. He has given seminars and postgraduate courses in various European and American centers. He is the author of numerous specialized publications, mainly on the history of justice and Hispanic constitutionalism. He is currently focused on the problem of the transition between the traditional legal-political order and the national legal orders in the Ibero-American space (eighteenth-nineteenth centuries). André Godinho is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. His research focuses on public rituals of the early modern period, and his dissertation deals with the role of the body in the staging and reception of these occasions in Portugal during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has participated in several conferences and contributed to two international research projects: “RITUALS. Public Rituals in the Portuguese Empire (1498-1822)” and “RESISTANCE. Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, 16th-19th Centuries”. Marcella Hayes is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her PhD from the Harvard University Department of History in 2021. She is a social historian of the political life of the African diaspora in colonial Spanish America and early modern Spain. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission and the John Carter Brown Library, among other awards. Benita Herreros Cleret De Langavant is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cantabria and Affiliated Researcher at CHAM-Centro de Humanidades, Nova University of Lisbon. After completing her master’s studies in Latin American Studies at Stanford University, she received her PhD in History in 2016 from the University of Cantabria. Her research delves into cross-cultural interactions and indigenous resistance in the borderlands of the Iberian empires, focusing on northern Paraguay and the Chaco region. During her career, she has received the support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the Fulbright Commission. Tomás A. Mantecón Movellán is Professor of early modern history at the University of Cantabria (Spain). His research on plebeian culture,

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

violence, and uses of justice led to his book on conflict and social discipline in traditional societies (Conflictividad y disciplinamiento social en la Cantabria rural del Antiguo Régimen, 1997) and the microhistory book on murder, tyranny, and scandal in Northern Spanish rural communities (La muerte de Antonia Isabel Sánchez) published in Spanish in 1998 and in Italian in 2014. He has also published some further books on Spain in Times of Enlightenment (2014) in addition to numerous articles and book chapters in Spanish, French, and English on crime and criminal justice, popular political culture and ideas on conflict and social peace, and the counter-reformation moral aims of public peace in dialogue with plebeian practices of social control and mutualism. His current research focuses on the social uses of justice with a comparative perspective within traditional societies. David Martín Marcos holds a PhD in History from the Universidad de Valladolid. He is currently Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, in Madrid, where he teaches modules on Early Modern History. Mariana Meneses Muñoz is a Colombian historian, PhD candidate in Early Modern History at Nova University of Lisbon, FCT scholarship holder, and Researcher at CHAM - Center for the Humanities. Her work focuses on everyday moral and juridical speeches, representations, and behavior of non-elite people, and inquisitorial studies in Iberian colonial contexts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her project “Access to justice and forms of female legal representation before ecclesiastical courts in Lisbon (c. 1555-1648)” aims to identify the role that women played in the society of the early modern period, based on their interaction with the instances of Portuguese ecclesiastical justice during Counter-Reformation. Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer is Full Professor of Medieval History at the University of Seville. Apart from studies of socioeconomic history, he has published extensively on popular political culture, conflict, and revolts in both rural and urban areas of the Crown of Castile in the late Middle Ages. Esther Pascua Echegaray, Doctor in Medieval History, is the Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Open University of Madrid. Her publications include, among others, “Making communities

xiv

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

visible at the end of the 11th century: religious houses as organizational technology” (2022); “‘Invisible enemies’: the devastating effect of gossip in Castile at the end of the Fifteenth century” (JMIS 2019: 250-274); Nobleza y Caballería en la Europa Medieval. Guerra, linaje y virtud (2017). Her main research areas are the relationship between peasant communities, landscapes and conflict over communal lands, and discourses and practices of exclusion and inclusion in late medieval Castile. Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto holds a PhD in Historical Sciences and is a Researcher at CHAM – Centro de Humanidades (NOVA FCSH). He currently teaches “History of the Portuguese in Asia” and “The Indian Ocean. Societies, Commerce and War” at NOVA FCSH. His post-doctoral project focused on “Presences and Representations of the Overseas Chinese in the Ibero-Asian Societies (16th-19th centuries)”. His fields of work are the Early Modern Southeast Asia and the Iberian overseas empires (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries). Among his published works on these subjects is The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka, 1575-1619: Power, Trade and Diplomacy (Singapore University Press, 2012). Emir Reitano is Full Professor of Colonial American History and Director of the Center for Argentine and American History, Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina). He is Professor of History (1989) and holds PhD in History (2004), National University of La Plata. He is Corresponding Member of the National Academy of History (Argentina); coordinator of the Inter-institutional Program, the Atlantic World in Early Modernity (IdIHCS- UNLP); author of the book Los portugueses de Buenos Aires en vísperas de la Revolución de Mayo (2010); co-editor of the books Hombres, poder y conflicto (2015), Las fronteras en el Mundo Atlántico (siglos XVI-XIX) (2017); and author of articles on Colonial American History published in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, United States, Uruguay, Mexico, Spain, and Portugal. Pablo Sánchez León is Researcher at the Center for the Humanities of Nova University in Lisbon. He has extensively studied social and political conflicts in the Hispanic world from Early Modern to Modern History, drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives from historical sociology to the history of concepts. Among other works, he has published the monograph Popular Political Participation and the Democratic imagination in Spain. From Crowd to People (Palgrave, 2020).

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xv

Fabricio Lyrio Santos is Professor at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB). He received his PhD in History from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). His research focuses on the History of Brazil in the colonial period with an emphasis on Catholicism, Colonialism, Jesuits, and Indigenous Peoples, funded by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) through a Level 2. He is the author of the books Te Deum laudamus: A expulsão dos jesuítas da Bahia (2019), and Da catequese à civilização: colonização e povos indígenas na Bahia (2014), and the co-author of the book Guerras da Conquista: Da invasão dos portugueses até os dias de hoje (2021). Jacqueline Sarmiento holds a degree in Anthropology (2009) and a PhD in History (2016) from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina), where she is a Professor of the Chair of American History I. Her research focuses on the history of women, forms of resistance, and animal and food history in the Atlantic area. Sergio Serulnikov is Chair of the Department of Humanities at the Universidad de San Andrés and Researcher at the CONICET, Argentina. He is author of El poder del disenso: Cultura política urbana y crisis del gobierno español, Chuquisaca, 1777–1809 (2022; an English version is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), Revolution in the Andes: The Age of Túpac Amaru (2013), and Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (2003). Recent articles include “El secreto del mundo: Sobre historias globales y locales en América Latina” (2020) and “University Governance and the Culture of Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Charcas” (2023). Claudia Varella Fernández researches on slavery and manumission in nineteenth-century Cuba. She teaches at the International University of La Rioja (Spain) and is a member of the Research Group “Historia Social Comparada”. She is currently developing a project at the Bonn Center for Dependency & Slavery Studies to design a theoretical framework for the gender impact of the plantation economy on urban areas in Cuba, addressing issues such as the practice of hiring slaves. She is the co-author of the book Wage-Earning Slaves: Coartación in NineteenthCentury Cuba (University Press of Florida, 2020) and other publications, including the first analysis on nineteenth-century síndicos (Revista de Indias, 2011). ORCID 0000-0003-2763-2393.

xvi

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jaime Valenzuela Márquez Docteur en Histoire et Civilisations from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Full Professor at the History Institute of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research interests include Indigenous migrations in the southern region of the viceroyalty of Peru, Mapuche slavery in the Arauco war, and imperial circulations and connections. He is currently writing the book Captain Eraso and his connected world (1571–1617). Webpage: https://historia. uc.cl/planta-academica/planta-ordinaria/212-valenzuela-jaime

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 14.1

Central and Southern Chile (Elaboration: Jaime Valenzuela. Cartography: Francisco Cooper) Southern Chile (cited locations) (Elaboration: Jaime Valenzuela. Cartography: Gonzalo Vergara) Map of the Upper Paraguay Basin, with indication of the main Iberian settlements and forts

72 73 288

xvii

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Resistance in the Early Modern Iberian Empires: Historicizing an Entangled, Contentious Social Practice Pablo Sánchez León and Benita Herreros Cleret de Langavant

The Iberian empires of the Early Modern period have clearly gained significant ground in historical studies. Beyond a renewed interest in accounting for their prolonged domination over vast territorial expanses (for the Hispanic empire, Kamen 2003; for the Portuguese, Russell Wood 1992; Bethencourt and Ramada Curto 2007), the study of the Iberian empires has benefitted over the last decades from the development and increasing interaction of three main perspectives: Atlantic history, global history, and (new) imperial history (Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman 2007; Daniels and Kennedy 2012; Kumar 2017; Yun Casalilla 2022).

P. Sánchez León (B) Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_1

3

4

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN AND B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

This burgeoning literature is based on the powerful metanarrative of globalization as a long-term phenomenon. Despite the debate about how far back we should trace its origins (see Abu-Lughod 1989, O’Rourke and Williamson 2002; Bayly 2004; Flynn and Giráldez 2004), many historians trace them to the European transoceanic expansion led by the kingdoms of Portugal and Castile since the fifteenth century. Therefore, it is unsurprising that general assessments of the Iberian empires focus on the commercial expansion and the economy at large (Böttcher et al. 2011; Bethencourt 2013; Dobado-González and García-Hiernaux 2021); and that contributions to the renewal of approach center around issues related to agency (Polónia 2016; Adams and Reed 2020). The intersection of Atlantic, global, and new imperial history has decisively contributed to consolidating a line of inquiry that, surpassing national historiographical frameworks, assumes conjoint treatments of the two Iberian monarchies and their respective empires, highlighting entanglements, cultural exchanges, and circulations (Gruzinski 2004; Subrahmanyam 2007; Herzog 2015; Palomo and Stumpf 2018; Yun Casalilla 2019). Overall, in studies and narratives that apply the global history approach to the Early Modern Iberian empires, there is a clear predisposition to emphasize the connections between agents (economic and/or political), between institutions and between territories (Tölle 2018). However, interest in the synergistic linkages that favored major commercial transformations and the institutional conditions that ensured long-term imperial stability is not matched by a focus on the social and political confrontations that arose from their global deployment. While studies on economic or institutional aspects abound, long-term studies on socio-political upheavals, even within a single empire, are scarce (examples are Hugon and Merle 2016 and Giudicelli and Havard 2021; for a broader scope see Salinero et al. 2019; see also the studies gathered in Mantecón, Torres and Truchuelo 2020).1

1 Lists of the conflicts that punctuated Iberian colonial domination in Europe and America are only starting to be compiled. An outcome of the project RESISTANCE, the database “Rebellions in the Early Modern Iberian World” is to date the most comprehensive and exhaustive effort to gather most documented conflicts in the Iberian empires of the Early Modern period. The database lists over 500 riots, uprisings, and rebellions on both sides of the Atlantic which have been synthetically described and bibliographically referenced. See https://mappingrebellions.com/.

1

RESISTANCE IN THE EARLY MODERN IBERIAN EMPIRES …

5

Now that globalization is showing an inhospitable side with widespread warfare and conflict—marked by the resurgence of imperial aspirations—this entire facet of the Iberian worlds demands greater attention. However, it is advisable to update the approach to modes of conflict, as their very definition and hierarchical ordering has undergone profound changes, while their study has been rejuvenated with developments in other disciplines and lines of inquiry that bring new questions and debates. Incorporating the history of the Iberian empires of the Early Modern period into this review is thus a good opportunity to accommodate the theoretical derivations taking place in the study of mobilizations against power—making them useful for historical research. The fact that the Iberian kingdoms were not unique in the construction of empires, and that major revolutionary processes were absent from them prior to the nineteenth century, favored historical narratives that relegated the Iberian worlds to a secondary position compared to the trajectories of England, France, the Netherlands and their respective empires, or the United States. This book aims to unsettle the established narrative frameworks regarding the contribution of the Iberian empires to historical changes towards modernity.

Resistance Takes Center Stage: A Mode of Contentious Action Contained Within Institutional Frameworks Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, studies on conflicts have undergone significant transformations affecting the status of categories: changes in the appearance of conflicts worldwide have necessitated the reconfiguration of available classifications to analyze them; this has made an impact on the status of resistance in academic studies. In the classical perspective, revolution is understood as the epitome of social conflict, while other forms of mobilization, such as rebellion, revolt, or uprising, are defined accordingly. This descending scale reflects the scope of the originating causes, the definition of their protagonists’ intentions, and the relevance of their consequences (Zagorin 1982; Bercé 1987). However, this hierarchy has been increasingly called into question over the last few decades. Faced by the “time of riots” (Badiou 2012, 5) that have broken out in the wake of globalization, revolt is now seen as the most significant form of protest (Pakes and Pritchard 2014), its

6

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN AND B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

relevance being reassessed through historical studies devoted to the recurrent phenomenon of civic uprisings (Hernon 2006). Furthermore, during the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, and while revolution has been dethroned as the phenomenon-conduit of historical change, resistance has gained a new prominence in conflict studies.2 A focus upon cases of resistance, and even micro-resistance, has become the most apparent feature of the academic response to James Scott’s seminal book Weapons of the Weak (Scott 1985, 29; Brown 1996, 729). Scott introduced the concept of “everyday resistance” to refer to actions that were frequently invisible, individual, and disorganized. In his works, however, these actions form a counter-hegemonic infrapolitics that is articulated through “hidden transcripts” critiquing the exercise of power, a theme he later continued to elaborate upon (Scott 1990). Besides undertaking a revision of the Gramscian concept of hegemony, Scott’s proposal has proved significant because it has prompted scholars to catalog the range of “forms” that can be identified with the phenomenon of resistance in the broad temporal dimension of the “everyday” (Scott 1985; Scott and Kervliet 1986). Furthermore, the proliferation of studies inspired by Scott’s proposal swiftly led to resistance being seen as an omnipresent phenomenon, although Michel Foucault’s renowned statement, “Where there is power, there is resistance”, also added momentum to this development (Hespanha 1978, 95). In addition to its post-structuralist epistemological roots (Sato 2022), historians’ interest in resistance has also been stimulated by the emergence of subaltern studies (Guha 1983) and feminist theory (Allen 1999), which also drew on Gramsci’s counter-hegemonic critique. The latter two areas of research have contributed studies on various senses of resistance, albeit with a divergence of views. Despite resistance being widely invoked as a category and a common denominator for expressions of dissent, opposition, and the obstruction of power, the meaning and implication of this concept are rarely debated. It is only in the last decade that a systematic analysis of the features of resistance has been undertaken (Johansson and Vinthagen 2013; Baaz

2 It is not by chance that the project this volume is an outcome of is entitled “Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, sixteenth-nineteenth centuries”, and a core research theme of this project is “Everyday forms of resistance”. Furthermore, this project has taken the term Resistance as its acronym, which is a highly original choice for a project devoted to conflicts on the past.

1

RESISTANCE IN THE EARLY MODERN IBERIAN EMPIRES …

7

et al. 2016), and consensus has been reached on a number of core issues. The work of French scholars, who have long refused to reduce resistance to a habitual attitude or an inherent moral feature of the oppressed, has provided a key foundation. Michel de Certeau (1984) insisted that resistance should not be confused with a resource deployed by the subaltern, and he proposed it rather be regarded as tactics with a fundamentally individual, quotidian, and unpredictable character. Despite these tactics not always being public, and their aims and motives not always being evident, they are understood as establishing limits for the exercise of power. The relationship of the category of resistance with politics has entailed greater difficulty. One reason why it has taken time for resistance to be integrated into theories of social movements —despite being identified as a key issue (Van der Zanden 1959)—is that Scott (1981) prioritized the study of actions “without protest and without organization” that were also bound to an everyday space-time, while he introduced controversial categories—such as “infrapolitics”. A further factor is that early studies on resistance focused on rural spheres in traditional societies undergoing social change, such as those Scott studied in Malaysia. An increasing number of studies has revealed that a significantly broader spectrum of social groups questioning power engaged in revolts, thus actively contributing to dispel the prejudice embedded in certain conventional classifications of protests. Previously, some revolts were classified as “pre-political” on the questionable basis that their participants’ behavior signals they were incapable of rationalizing their actions and formulating elaborate demands. Countering such views, other scholars have reaffirmed the inherent political dimension of all social conflicts (for the central issue of uprisings, see Moran and Waddington (2016) and Bush 2010), thereby facilitating the argument that displays of resistance encompass “their own politics” (Ortner 1995, 177). In parallel, the compilation of repertories of collective action has considerably extended the semantic field of protest, which now includes the wide range of activities related to those mobilizations understood as examples of resistance. Looking back to past displays of resistance, the range of contemporary tactics fully justifies a complementary line of inquiry into those deployed in the Early Modern Age: disobedience, petitions, the use of justice, taking flight, sabotage, contraband, rumor, lampoons, and other historic “weapons of the weak”. The two features that distinguish everyday resistance from other acts of dissent or protest are: firstly, the absence of open confrontation or, at

8

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN AND B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

least, the restricted use—if not outright rejection—of violence; secondly, acts of resistance are not necessarily collective by nature. However, this does not imply that everyday forms of resistance must be separated from other modes of protest, as they tend to interact with more proactive and compulsory group practices (Lilja et al. 2017). More recently, it has been proposed that the category of resistance should be understood as an “umbrella concept” encompassing both its “everyday forms” and its “serial and organized” practices, although connections between the two demand closer scrutiny (Lilja 2022, 202). From the perspective of social struggle, resistance refers to all activities concerned with confronting power that are not a specific demonstration of “contentious politics” (Tilly and Tarrow 2007). Nevertheless, resistance does not cease to be a contentious social practice: it falls into the category of “contained contention”, that arises “when all parties are previously established actors employing well-established means of claim making” (McAdam et al. 2000, 2–3). The latter definition incorporates another important perception concerning resistance. From early on efforts have been made to overcome a strictly binary conception of resistance (oppression/resistance; power/ resistance; consensus/resistance) (Ortner 1995), which was derived from a metaphor borrowed from physics (Fleming 2005). Over time the complexity encompassed by the relationship between resistance and the power targeted by dissent has been underscored. Therefore, resistance has come to be increasingly viewed as “entangled”, instead of merely “opposed” (Chandra 2015, 564; for a general overview Ronan, Philo, Routledge and Sharp 2000). Similarly, Titone has proposed the idea of “disciplined dissent” (2016, 7–10), which underscores its capacity for negotiating with diffused forms of power.3 Thereby, the capacity of both the governed and governors to mutually influence one another is foregrounded. Likewise, Foucault’s foundational view that resistance “is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” is reinstated (1978, 95–96). On the other hand, the dominant/dominated (or oppressors/ oppressed) binary has been critiqued on the basis that it is excessively reductionist. Furthermore, it is argued that it overlooks the diversity contained within each of these categories, as well as the multiplicity of

3 On the concept of “diffused power”, see Mann (1986, 8–9).

1

RESISTANCE IN THE EARLY MODERN IBERIAN EMPIRES …

9

power relationships they comprise (Ortner 1995). It is this approach— viewing displays of resistance as forms of protest that blur the frontiers between the agency deployed from outside an institutional framework and the practices developed within this same framework—that underpins the studies that make up this volume. As will be seen, the range of protagonists of resistance studied is intentionally diverse, and likewise both individual and collective forms of resistance are addressed.

The Early Modern Iberian Empires: Entangled Resistances Within Normative Pluralities The study of resistance has prioritized scenarios located in the contemporary era such as the development of capitalism, the construction of nation-states, or decolonization. Examining the resistances of the Iberian empires brings the focus to processes developed in the Early Modern period, which once served to establish the hierarchy between revolutions, rebellions, and revolts (Benigno 2010). The centuries preceding the great accelerated change of the Atlantic Revolutions are indeed of singular relevance for understanding resistance, as they encompass scenarios where it became institutionally internalized in a genuine and probably extreme way. The critique of the teleology of modernization and the growing interest in less exceptional and intense but more widespread forms of protest have emancipated the Iberian empires from their subordinate position. Among the explanations historians have offered for their longterm stability are the crown’s negotiation capacity, the mediation of local elites, or the existence of pacts linking different communities (Fernández Albaladejo 1990; Ruiz Ibáñez and Mazin 2021), factors that have been synthesized by using the concept of “resilience” borrowed from the socioenvironmental sciences (Lake 2013), applied to the Spanish monarchy (Storrs 2006). Resilience from above and resistance from below have been shown to be two interdependent facets of an historical configuration that had something of unique to the Iberian empires. Nevertheless, they remain to be studied in an overarching and systematic manner. A precondition for this task has been laid by another major and hugely beneficial scholarly development undertaken in parallel to the emergence of studies on resistance and focused on the Ancien Régime peninsular monarchies and their empires. Initially, this academic transformation began as a critique

10

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN AND B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

of the category of the “modern state” projected onto the Early Modern and Medieval periods (Hespanha 1987; Clavero 1986; an overview in Amelang 2006). Subsequently, this line of inquiry led has led to the coinage of new terms, such as “polycentric monarchies”, invoking the idea of a complex web of relationships between court centers and a range of territorial zones exercising jurisdictional powers (Cardim et al. 2012). Furthermore, historians have recently underscored how the configuration of Portugal’s monarchy and empire extended across an exceptionally decentralized territory, their constituent regions and principal agents exercising considerable autonomy (Hespanha 2018; Bethencourt 2021). Building upon this historiographical foundation, studies on legal history have put forward a new paradigm which, in contrast to the contemporary era’s legal unidimensionality, identifies pluralism as an inherent feature of normative frameworks (Griffiths 2011). While this was a global phenomenon (Duve 2020), it was especially apparent in the Iberian empires as they were “legally plural in their core regions as well as in their overseas or distant possessions” (Benton and Ross 2013, 1; for a general overview, see Benton 2002; on Hispanic America, Owensby 2008). Furthermore, the Iberian monarchies governed political communities with their own constitutional traditions, as well as a distinctive range of jurisdictions—royal, aristocratic, territorial, ecclesiastical—that were framed by contingent relationships with metropolitan centers in the Iberian peninsula. The “jurisdictional” focus explored by these historians presents the pluricentric Iberian monarchies as hosting highly developed and sophisticated legal administrations (MacKay 1999). Yet, they are shown to have been configured within legal frameworks mediated by moral values that restricted the demarcation of power and led to it being exercised with ever-greater complexity (Garriga Acosta 2004). Furthermore, the overlay of early modern normativities and the existence of overlapping and competing spheres of jurisdiction led to endless negotiations that often broke out into conflict, creating the conditions for deploying extensive practices of resistance. The practices of resistance that corresponded to the aforesaid legal and institutional framework were complex due to their being “entangled” within a broad range of normativities established amid units like the house, the guild, or the locality, some of which were considered as either “natural” or, like the Church, “perfect” institutions. Besides their legal status, the distinctive corporations possessed a

1

RESISTANCE IN THE EARLY MODERN IBERIAN EMPIRES …

11

jurisdictional capacity, and on occasions could promulgate laws. Accordingly, resistances stemming from them could be as resilient as the formal institutional framework itself. Often—as in the case of social customs reproduced by collective memory patterns (Wood 2013)—these forms of resistance developed beyond the realm of written legal systems, and their capacity to stir up unrest could legitimately be founded on theology and visions of the life beyond this world (Marcocci 2014). To fully comprehend this structure requires, on the one hand, a deeper inquiry into the relationships between the law and everyday resistance (McCann and March 1995). The origin of the aforementioned jurisdictional perspective was underpinned by a scholarly aspiration to establish a dialogue between sociology and the history of social conflict (Hespanha 1978), which both consider “rule-following” to be the foundation of human action. In social theory, rules are ubiquitous and not all of them are formalized in codes. Thereby, all displays of disobeying power must be understood as acts that also follow rules, albeit not always those socially dominant ones, or those codified in law. On the other hand, in order to undertake an analysis of the legal dimension of resistance its manifestations need to be historically contextualized. Therefore, and as pioneering Portuguese and Spanish legal historians have highlighted, the difference between the Ancien Régime and the world that succeeded it lies in a codified and unified normative framework applied to the set of monopolistic and centralized institutions that can be found in modern nation-states. However, an autonomous and demarcated civil society was also lacking in traditional societies studied by Scott. Indeed, it is this latter factor that explains why over the last two centuries protests have tended to originate outside of the institutional framework. In contrast, throughout the Ancien Régime resistances were initiated within institutional frameworks, and they also often consummated (and consumed) themselves within the legal order. Therefore, entanglement was a structural feature of the traditional socio-legal order. And yet, this did not impede recurring outbreaks of collective violence that were capable of causing major institutional crises. Their formal analogies with the customary forms of early modern mobilization suggest, however, that prior to the modern world it was internal resistance to the socio-legal system that was the most widespread type of conflict. The foregoing theoretical framework is especially suitable for the study of the Iberian monarchies during the early modern era because

12

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN AND B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

they formed part of a highly inclusive order. Given the scant demarcation between what lay within and beyond the system, these Ancien Régime empires fostered hybrid scenarios and trans-frontier dynamics. To conclude this survey of the significance of pre-modern resistance, mention must be made of the relationships between individual and collective actions within this aforesaid social order. The interaction between political anthropology and legal studies has made a fundamental contribution to this issue, above all with regard to the contrast between the modern social body and that of the Ancien Régime. During the latter period, the legal recognition granted to subjects was of a collective rather than individual nature (Clavero 2014). However, the issue of agency in traditional social orders requires further consideration. Across the social sciences and humanities, including history, specialists have tended to adopt utilitarian assumptions when discussing human action at large, a trend that has also reached imperial history studies (Polónia 2016). Indeed, it has even been proposed that the Portuguese empire operated outside of any rules, being shaped through the individual agency of economic, political, and military entrepreneurs (Bastias Saavedra 2020). James Scott’s proposal was marked by an analogous conception of resistance, which almost from the outset was criticized for being excessively voluntarist and “hyper-agential” (Van Young 1993). This issue has not, however, been solved by scholars who, along with Michel de Certeau, reduce resistance to mere forms of limited intentionality with only a tactical scope. At the end of the day, both approaches remain bound to a narrow ends-means type of rationality. The study of resistance in historical frameworks such as that of the Iberian empires offers a testing ground for probing to what extent resistance comprised something beyond rules to be challenged and beyond interested agents. A whole dimension of everyday acts of resistance seems not to fall into the strictures of instrumental intentionality. As was pointed several decades ago, resistance is linked to whatever a subject considers non-negotiable, that is, whatever is deemed valuable beyond calculation (Bayat 1997). Such an approach draws on a third area of resistance studies that complements the work of Scott and de Certeau: Erwin Goffman’s social psychology. His definition of “secondary adjustments” is relevant to this point: it relates to acts that challenge the established realm of power, not openly, yet allowing those who perform them to conserve a sense of moral dignity (Goffman 1961, 54–55; see also Shreeya 2018). When engaging in such acts, a person cannot operate in a utilitarian manner by

1

RESISTANCE IN THE EARLY MODERN IBERIAN EMPIRES …

13

measuring the costs of an action against the expected benefits. Nor can in those circumstances resisting agents simply channel or supersede established rules. Such actions express above all the values of the individuals that undertake them (Archer 2000). Of equal, or still more importance, is the fact that these expressive acts need validation from third parties. Thereby, at the individual level agency remains linked to the communities or groups who share, advocate (or reject) the same value referents, no matter how diverse subjective interpretations of those shared values may be (Taylor 1989, 25–52). Given that resistance concerns identity, its inextricable moral dimension is of relevance for a dialogue between history and social theory (Flesher Fominaya 2010). In practice, intentions, rules, and values form part of each act of resistance undertaken within a specific historical context. An overarching distinctive feature of the Ancien Régime was that just as an individual subject’s identity depended on belonging to a social group recognized by the law, individuals who performed acts of resistance tended to behave as representatives of groups or wider communities. Furthermore, given that justice was the main institutional space from (and within) which power was exercised, judicial processes became a sort of political stage upon which both individual and collective identities were produced and reproduced. Regarded this way, as a social construct (Gal 1995), resistance was by no means an institutionally entangled routine. Rather, it was an exceptional phenomenon and could even rupture everyday routines. Taking this into consideration, there is a final feature of the Iberian empires that can be traced: the proliferation of discourse which underscored the right to resist, a phenomenon favored by the normative plurality of the Ancien Régime legal culture (Ross and Stern 2013, 110) and that produced endless debating. The essays that follow also try to shed light upon this issue, its practical ramifications, and its multiple significances within the discourse of the time.

Patterns and Perceptions of Pervasive Resistance in the Iberian Worlds The range of cases and modes of resistance deployed across the Iberian empires during the early modern period has yet to be fully traced and mapped. To do so would provide a comprehensive vision of how communities interacted with the exercise of power across a pluri-normative realm

14

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN AND B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

beset by overlapping jurisdictions, as well as zones where autonomous action was pursued by communities and individuals. With this aim in mind, the present volume brings together a range of specialists on the history of the Portuguese and Hispanic empires, including historians of law and social conflict and movements, as well as experts in social, political, and cultural history. The seventeen studies gathered here seek to be representative of the scope and variety of cases of resistance that took place across the broad intercontinental space of the Iberian empires over the course of the Early Modern Era. These studies address a range of institutional sources, which ensures that the Iberian empires’ pluri-normativity is a recurring feature. Nevertheless, the unifying theme of this volume is the analysis of conflict, as opposed to the discussion of legal procedures or their resolution. Thereby, this book explores the struggle between the different modes of power and the subjects who frequently used tools provided by the law, and who likewise challenged the law itself in court. The works on this book do not define resistance as a lower form of protest as much as a spread and diffuse type of social action relating to a plural, overlapping institutional setting and to the social distribution of resources for litigation and negotiation among different groups. Thus, while the practice is socially broad, our understanding of it is not. The book aims to chart such broadness of resistance practices developed within the normative framework and profiting from the complex intercultural setting of the Iberian worlds. This does not mean claiming for an exceptionalism of the Spanish and Portuguese empire but, rather, reframing the practices (and culture) of resistance by giving relevance to the normative and institutional setting where they took place and with which they became entangled. The combination of the history of social conflict and the history of law in this approach reveals the variety of “weapons of the weak” available within the institutional order and on its margins. It also shows the extent to which the social order provided conceptual legal resources for individuals who represented significant communities whose members could generate discourse. Furthermore, the concern for understanding substantive power relationships over formal legal relationships brings into focus the intertwining between resistance and micro-resistance, as well as with other collective, more explicit forms of conflict that were used to rupture institutional frameworks. Likewise, this volume enriches the study of plural

1

RESISTANCE IN THE EARLY MODERN IBERIAN EMPIRES …

15

normative frameworks by addressing frontier contexts and encounters between transimperial societies. In spatial terms, this volume’s focus is in wide-ranging, encompassing experiences of resistance across a significant part of the broad American world. It also addresses the Iberian Peninsula, which was home to equally complex and unequal societies, its scope also extending to Asia. Chronologically, these studies cover a lengthy period encompassing historical developments that preceded the emergence of the Portuguese and Hispanic empires, and which provided a foundation for the social and institutional logics subsequently developed over the course of the Early Modern era. In social terms, the book addresses a diverse range of individuals and groups who engaged in resistance. This focus provides a deeper understanding of the phenomenon, yet without falling prey to generic assumptions on the oppressed. The studies that follow deal mainly with lower social strata, yet they also address conflict in the form of resistance between dominant groups, and among the institutions with their own legal capacity. In addition, other representative examples are examined with regard to the resistance enacted by subaltern figures, considering gender, social status, and ethnicity, a range of concerns that is especially relevant when addressing empires comprising a diverse range of cultures. Examples of resistance involving Indigenous communities, as well as those of descendants of African peoples, are studied, along with the resistance deployed by privileged groups and corporations such as guilds. Furthermore, these studies incorporate cases of resistance from cultures harboring mutually alien and incommensurable normative systems. Also, they offer insights into those who acted as intermediaries between these systems and reveal how these intermediaries could engage in forms of resistance on behalf of their priority identity groups. The volume’s opening section, entitled Background: the medieval roots of Early Modern resistance, comprises two studies by Esther Pascua and José Luis Egío, respectively. They discuss medieval debates on the legitimacy of resistance and its limits, and trace the changing meaning of resistance in early modern legal culture. The remainder of the volume is divided into three sections, each with a combined thematic and chronological focus. The section, Exchanges: communities and resistance, from the urban centers to the Iberian borderlands. Fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, brings together chapters that address examples of resistance from the late Middle Ages to the midseventeenth century, which took place in spaces along political and legal

16

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN AND B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

frontiers; in principle these involved opposing, or at least separate, normative frameworks. The first and last studies focus on imperial borders: Jaime Valenzuela studies Indigenous resistance in southern Chile, while Paulo Pinto examines the forms of resistance and accommodation developed in Asia in response to the Portuguese territorial expansion. The Iberian Peninsula is on its part studied by Hipólito Rafael Oliva, who analyzes the discourses of resistance developed in the cities of Castile during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern era, and by David Martín Marcos, who explores the means local frontier communities deployed to protect their subsistence resources and ways of life, revealing the porosity of frontiers and the extent to which warfare and diplomatic contact overlapped. The section Roles: the shaping of identities through resistance in the seventeenth century frames the period of stabilization undergone by the Hispanic and Portuguese empire. It brings together studies on resistance involving individuals and groups from all social strata and ethnicities on both sides of the Atlantic. Santos explores everyday attitudes, including the ways in which Catholicism was questioned and re-signified by the Indigenous communities encountered by missionaries in Brazil. With regard to Hispanic America, Meneses analyzes the actions and discourses of women, principally of Spanish and Creole origin, who denounced their confessors to the Inquisition for making immoral advances. Hayes goes on to address petitions made by Mulattoes in Lima in order to avoid paying taxes they considered themselves to be legitimately exempt from. She also examines the circulation of the legal knowledge and information that enabled these individuals to make sound, effective complaints. Godinho and Mantecón address examples of resistance in Portugal and Castile that are representative of a world divided by privilege, and subsequently beset by decadence. The former analyzes the use of political celebrations as a space for making claims by different urban constituencies, while the latter reconstructs the resilient plebeian culture developed by the Castillian urban proletariat. Finally, the section Dynamics: resisting Iberian imperialism through the eighteenth-century reforms brings together six chapters focused on the Iberian world while under the influence of the institutional changes during the eighteenth century and until the dissolution of the Ancien Régime. Almeida surveys the cultural resistance shown by the Indigenous communities of Brazil to the assimilation policies implemented by the Marquis of Pombal. Serulnikov and Garriga address acts of insurgency and

1

RESISTANCE IN THE EARLY MODERN IBERIAN EMPIRES …

17

rebellion that took place in response to the reforms of the enlightenment era in Upper Peru and the Crown of Aragon, respectively. Herreros turns to discuss the Indigenous instrumentalization of Luso-Castilian competition along the frontiers of Paraguay and Mato Grosso, providing a study on transimperial resistance. The final two studies, by Varella and Reitano and Sarmiento, focus on legal documentation; the former studies the legal cases that male and female African descendants pursued in the courts in the Caribbean; while the latter use these sources to highlight the everyday resistance deployed among subaltern sectors along the River Plate in South America. In its essence, the book provides a kaleidoscope of practices of resistance across the Iberian worlds, in the Iberian Peninsula, the Americas, Asia, and along its margins. Its focus shifts from the individual to the collective, while also engaging with the ethnic and social status. It offers a broad perspective on these combined factors encompassing their medieval roots, the evolution of the transatlantic empires, the subsequent enlightenment reforms, and on to the transition to liberalism. Acknowledgements This publication is a research outcome of the projects RESISTANCE. Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, sixteenthnineteenth centuries (778076-H2020-MSCA-RISE-2017); La ciudad en acción: resistencias, (re)significaciones del orden y cultura política en la Monarquía Hispánica (PID2021-124823NB-C22) funded by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/ 501100011033/ and FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa, and the project Contrahegemonías: comunidad, alteridad y resistencias en los márgenes del mundo ibérico, siglos XVI-XVIII (Ref. PID2021-127293NA-100) funded by Spain’s Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions that have contributed to a more cohesive book and introduction.

References Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System, A. D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Adams, Julia, and Isaac A. Reed. 2020. Coda: Crossing Companies, Theories of Agency and Early Modern European Empire. Journal of World History 31 (3): 477–497. Allen, Amy. 1999. The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity. New York: Routledge.

18

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN AND B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

Amelang, James. 2006. The Peculiarities of the Spaniards: Historical Approaches to the Early Modern State. In Public Power in Europe: Studies in Historical Transformations, ed. James S. Amelang and Siegfried Beer, 39–56. Pisa: Edizioni Plus. Archer, Margaret S. 2000. Homo Econominus, Homo Sociologicus and Homo Sentiens. In Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonisation, ed. Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter, 36–56. New York and London: Routledge. Baaz, Mikael, Mona Lilja, Michael Schulz, and Stellan Vinthagen. 2016. Defining and Analyzing “Resistance”: Possible Entrances to the Study of Subversive Practices. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 41 (3): 137–153. Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. London: Verso. Bastias Saavedra, Manuel, ed. 2020. Norms Beyond Empire: Law-Making and Local Normativities in Iberian Asia, 1500–1800. Max Planck Studies in Global Legal History of the Iberian Worlds, 3. Leiden: Brill and Nijhoff. Bayat, Asef. 1997. Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the “Informal People.” Third World Quarterly 18 (1): 53–72. Bayly, Christopher. 2004. The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons, 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell. Benigno, Francesco. 2010. Mirrors of Revolution. Conflict and Political Identity in Early Modern Europe. Turnhout (Belgium): Brepols Publishers. Benton, Lauren. 2002. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. Benton, Lauren, and Richard R. Ross. 2013. Empires and Legal Pluralism: Jurisdiction, Sovereignty, and Political Imagination in the Early Modern World. In Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850, Benton, Lauren and Richars R. Ross, eds., 1–19. New York and Oxford: New York University Press. Bercé, Yves-Marie. 1987. Revolt and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: An Essay on the History of Political Violence. London: St. Martin Press. Bethencourt, Francisco. 2013. The Iberian Atlantic: Trade, Networks and Boundaries. In Theorising the Ibero American Atlantic, ed. Harald Braun and Lisa Vollendorf, 15–37. Leiden: Brill. Bethencourt, Francisco. 2021. The Portuguese Empire (1415–1822). In The Oxford World History of Empire: Volume Two: The History of Empires, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, 832–861. New York: Oxford Academic. Bethencourt, Francisco, and Diogo Ramada Curto, eds. 2007. Portuguese Oceanic Expansion 1400–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Böttcher, Nikolaus, Bernd Hausberger, and Antonio Ibarra, coords. 2011. Redes y negocios globales en el mundo ibérico, siglos XVI–XVIII . Mexico City: Iberoamericana/Vervuert- El Colegio de Mexico.

1

RESISTANCE IN THE EARLY MODERN IBERIAN EMPIRES …

19

Brown, Michael F. 1996. On Resisting Resistance. American Anthropologist 98 (4): 729–735. Bush, Ray. 2010. Food Riots: Poverty, Power and Protest. Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (1): 119–129. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, and Erik R. Seeman, eds. 2007. The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000. New York: Routledge. Cardim, Pedro, Tamar Herzog, José J. Ruiz Ibáñez, and Gaetano Sabatini. 2012. Polycentric Monarchies: How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony? Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Chandra, Uday. 2015. Rethinking Subaltern Resistance. Journal of Contemporary Asia 45 (4): 563–573. Clavero, Bartolomé. 1986. Tantas personas como estados: por una antropología política de la historia europea. Madrid: Tecnos. Clavero, Bartolomé. 2014. Person and Individual: Baroque Identities in Theology and Law. In The Transatlantic Hispanic Baroque: Complex Identities in the Atlantic World, ed. Harald E. Braun and Jesús Pérez-Magallón, 17–34. Farnham: Ashgate. Daniels, Christine, and Michael V. Kennedy. 2012. Negotiated Empires: Centres and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820. New York and London: Routledge. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendail. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dobado-González, Rafael, and Alfredo García-Hiernaux, eds. 2021. The Fruits of the Early Globalization: An Iberian Perspective. London and Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Duve, Thomas. 2020. What Is Global Legal Theory? Comparative Legal History 8 (2): 73–115. Fleming, Peter. 2005. Metaphors of Resistance. Management Communication Quarterly 19 (1): 45–66. Fernández Albaladejo, Pablo. 1990. El absolutismo frente a la constitución tradicional. Historia Contemporánea 4: 15–30. Flesher Fominaya, Cristina. 2010. Collective Identity in Social Movements: Central Concepts and Debates. Sociology Compass 4–6: 393–404. Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. 2004. Path Dependence, Time Lags and the Birth of Globalisation: A Critique of O’Rourke and Williamson. European Review of Economic History 8 (1): 81–108. Foucault, Michel. 1978. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books. Gal, Susan. 1995. Language and the “Arts of Resistance.” Cultural Anthropology 10 (3): 407–424. Garriga Acosta, Carlos. 2004. “Orden jurídico y poder político en el Antiguo Régimen”. Istor. Revista De Historia Internacional 16: 13–44.

20

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN AND B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

Giudicelli, Christophe, and Gilles Havard, dirs. 2021. Les révoltes indiennes: Amériques, XVIe-XXIe siècle. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, Americana. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Griffiths, Anne. 2011. Pursuing Legal Pluralism: The Power of Paradigms in a Global World. Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 43: 173–202. Gruzinski, Serge. 2004. Les quatre parties du monde: histoire d’une mondialisation. Paris: Éditions de La Martinière. Guha, Ranajit. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hernon, Ian. 2006. Riot! Civil Insurrection from Peterloo to the Present Day. London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press. Herzog, Tamar. 2015. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hespanha, António M. 1978. A história do direito na história social. Lisbon: Horizonte. Hespanha, António M. 1987. As vésperas do Leviathan. Instituições e poder político: Portugal, séc. XVII . Lisbon: Universidade de Lisboa-Instituto de Ciências Sociais. Hespanha, António M. 2018. Filhos da Terra. Identidades mestiças nos confins da expansão portuguesa. Lisbon: Tinta da China. Hodgson, Geoffrey M. 1997. The Ubiquity of Habits and Rule. Cambridge Journal of Economics 21 (6): 663–684. Hugon, Alain, and Alexandra Merle. 2016. Soulèvements, révoltes, révolutions dans l´empire des Habsbourg d´Espagne. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. Kamen, Henry. 2003. Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763. New York: HarperCollins. Kumar, Krishan. 2017. Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lake, Philip S. 2013. Resistance, Resilience and Restoration. Ecological Management and Restoration 14 (1): 20–24. Lilja, Mona. 2022. The Definition of Resistance. Journal of Political Power 15 (2): 202–220. Lilja, Mona, et al. 2017. How Resistance Encourages Resistance: Theorising the Nexus Between Power, Everyday Resistance and Organized Resistance. Journal of Political Power 10 (1): 40–54. Mackay, Ruth. 1999. The Limits of Royal Authority. Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power. Vol. I. A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1

RESISTANCE IN THE EARLY MODERN IBERIAN EMPIRES …

21

Mantecón Movellán, Tomás A., Marina Torres Arce, and Susana Truchuelo García, ed. 2020. Dimensiones del conflicto: resistencia, violencia y policía en el mundo urbano. Santander: Universidad de Cantabria. Marcocci, Giuseppe. 2014. Conscience and Empire: Politics and Moral Theology in the Early Modern Portuguese World. Journal of Early Modern History 18 (5): 473–494. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. 2000. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCann, Michael, and Tracey March. 1995. Law and Everyday Forms of Resistance: A Socio-Political Assessment. Studies in Law, Politics and Society 15: 207–236. Moran, Matthew, and David Waddington. 2016. Riots: An International Comparison. London: Palgrave MacMillan. O’Rourke, Kevin H., and Jeffrey G. Williamson. 2002. When Did Globalisation Begin. European Review of Economic History 6: 23–50. Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1): 173–193. Owensby, Brian P. 2008. Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pakes, Francis, and David Pritchard. 2014. Exploring the Global Stage: Globalisation, Riots, Unrest and Protest. In Riot, Unrest and Protest on the Global Stage, ed. David Pritchard and Francis Pakes, 1–11. London: Palgrave. Palomo, Federico, and Roberta Stumpf, eds. 2018. Monarquias Ibéricas em perspectiva comparada (Sécs. XVI-XVIII). Dinâmicas imperiais e circulaçao de modelos administrativos. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa. Polónia, Amélia. 2016. Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500–1800. Leiden: Brill. Ross, Richard R., and Philip J. Stern. 2013. Reconstructing Early Modern Notions of Legal Pluralism. In Legal Pluralism and Empires, ed. Lauren Benton, and Richard R. Ross,109–142. New York: New York University Press. Ruiz Ibáñez, José J., and Oscar Mazin. 2021. Historia mínima de los mundos ibéricos (siglos XV-XIX). Mexico City: El Colegio de México. Russell-Wood, Anthony J.R. 1992. The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Salinero, Gregorio, Águeda García Garrido, and Radu G. Paun. 2019. Paradigmes rebelles. Pratiques et cultures de la désobéissance à l’époque moderne. Brussels: Peter Lang Verlag. Sato, Yoshiyuki. 2022. Power and Resistance: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Althusser. New York and London: Verso. Scott, James C. 1981. Resistance Without Protest and Without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic Zakat and the Christian Tithe. Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (3): 417–452.

22

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN AND B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, James C., and Benedict J. Kerkvliet. 1986. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in Southeast Asia. London: Frank Cass. Shreeya, Anuragini. 2018. The Self as an Active Agent: Understanding Goffman’s Theory of Resistance in Total Institutions Through Life-Histories. Sociological Bulletin 67 (2): 173–187. Storrs, Christopher. 2006. The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy, 1665–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2007. Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640. American Historical Review 112 (5): 1359–1385. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tilly, Charles, and Sydney Tarrow. 2007. Contentious Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Titone, Fabrizio. 2016. Introduction. The Concept of Disciplined Dissent and Its Deployment: A Methodology. In Disciplined Dissent. Strategies of NonConfrontational Protest in Europe from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, ed. Fabrizio Titone, 7–22. Rome: Viella. Tölle, Tom. 2018. Early Modern Empires: An Introduction to the Recent Literature. H-Soz-Kult (20-04-2018): 1–72. http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin. de/forum/2018-04-001. Van Young, Eric. 1993. The Cuautla Lazarus: Double Subjectives in Reading Texts on Popular Collective Action. Colonial Latin American Review 2: 3–26. Vander Zanden, James W. 1959. Resistance and Social Movements. Social Forces 37 (4): 312–315. Vinthagen, Stellan, and Anna Johansson. 2013. ’Everyday Resistance’: Exploration of a Concept and its Theories. Resistance Studies Magazine 1: 1–46. Wood, Andy. 2013. The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yun-Casalilla, Bartolomé. 2019. Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1669. Singapore and London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Yun-Casalilla, Bartolomé. 2022. Early Modern Iberian Empires, Global History and the History of Early Globalization. Journal of Global History 17 (3): 539–561. Zagorin, Perez. 1982. Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1600: Volume 1, Agrarian and Urban Rebellions: Society, States, and Early Modern Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART I

Background: The Medieval Roots of Early Modern Resistance

CHAPTER 2

Disobedience, Resistance and Restoration of the Social Order in Castile and Leon in the Middle Ages: Customary Practices in the Face of Power Esther Pascua Echegaray

Starting Points Since the 1970s and 1980s, the interpretation and understanding of social conflict have been called into question, and attention has been drawn to the explanatory inadequacy of starting from objective living conditions or exploitation to account for movements of opposition to power (Firnhaber-Baker 2017, 1–5). The conditions of possibility of conflict are linked to the perception of exploitation and domination held by subjects and groups (oppression, rage, indignation, outrage, anger, disproportionate punishment…); a perception associated with identity and the breakdown of moral codes that legitimize a social order, just as the

E. Pascua Echegaray (B) Universidad a Distancia de Madrid, Collado Villalba, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_2

25

26

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

possibilities of successful protest are made to depend on processes of intersubjectivity (Rudé 1971; Moore 1990, 17–55; Scott 1990, 2000, 140–153). The multiplicity and complexity of the factors involved in these processes highlight the need to historicize the concepts of resistance and disobedience, and to understand them through contingent and contextual analyses. In general terms, an act or movement of resistance is an attitude or social action that obstructs, challenges or attacks power. From this elementary definition, disagreements among experts abound over whether the participants must have the intention of transgressing the order and whether their actions must also be identified as acts of resistance by their antagonists and/or their peers. The discrepancies are related to the various forms that these actions take: they can be an individual act or a collective movement; they can take place at a local, regional, national or international level; they can have a political and/or identity-based character; and they can respond to prosocial or antisocial approaches (Hollander and Einwohner 2004). The study of low-profile phenomena of social conflict, such as disobedience, dissidence and resistance, has rendered more complex the social dichotomies between dominant and dominated; it has also shown that, in certain normative or institutional frameworks, a collective or an individual can be dominant vis-à-vis hierarchically inferior groups and at the same time be subdued vis-à-vis superior ones; and finally it has shown that some everyday resistance points toward attitudes of accommodation, conformism or resignation (Hollander and Einwohner 2004, 533–539 and 549–550, drawing on Foucault 1982;Scott 1990). All this has had a decisive impact on medieval studies, which have seen established assumptions about stratification and social dynamics break down. More interest has been focused on exploring intra-class conflicts, cleavages in hegemonic discourses, peasant communities’ initiatives for action and leadership, customary uses and community memories, and to consider the outcomes of social conflicts as more unpredictable (Cohn 2006). In the Spanish historiographical panorama, since the first work on peasant resistance was published in the 1980s, the peasantry has ceased to be presented as a conservative social class, made up of restorers of the past or millenarists incapable of imagining an alternative social order (Pastor 1980; Freedman 2000). Alongside this, there has been exploration of the various forms that peasant resistance took, from protest to evasion and

2

DISOBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND RESTORATION …

27

flight, the variety of cultural references and has emphasized the need for local analysis (Martín Cea 2004; Ruíz 2009; Monsalvo Antón 2016). The peninsular historical sources available for the Early and High Middle Ages do not facilitate the task of answering the questions posed by classical works on social conflict: causes, leaders, participants, objectives and traditions (Sarasa Sánchez 1981; Valdeón Baruque 1975; Moreta Velayos 1978; Barros Guimerans 1990; Monsalvo Antón 2016); it is even more difficult to account for acts of disobedience and resistance. These typically disguised and fragile gestures have left little written trace, as they did not normally attract the attention of chroniclers and authorities. Late medieval documentation, however, allows us to identify street riots, protests, sabotage, everyday disobedience and acts of mere survival. In urban settings, “noises,” “uprisings” and rumors, the use of clothing, banners or special salutes was perceived by the powers as potential threats expressed from the space of infra-politics (Wickham 1998, 3– 24; Gauvard 1994, 129–137; Dumolyn and Haemers 2012; Nieto Soria 2004, 707–725). This chapter presents a reflection on the nature and practices of disobedience and resistance in the Iberian Peninsula as significant antecedents to the realities of the Modern period. It focuses on two case studies, one from the twelfth and the other from the sixteenth centuries, expressive of the two universes of resistance, legitimate and illegitimate, identified in the period. Medieval serfdom, which crystallized at a time of hierarchization of social ordines —together with an ideology-producing institution such as the Church and a warrior class that exercised violence—might seem to be the archetype par excellence of forms of submission of population, comparable to the slave and colonial systems. However, the political economy of feudalism did not place the infrastructures for controlling production and reproducing domination in the hands of the ruling groups. In fact, the high personalization of politics and fragmentation of jurisdiction implied the existence of multiple nodes of power and niches of rent extraction; indeed, even the Church, the best organized institution, did not function as an omnipotent power (Mann 1991, I, 529–588). Medieval peasants were organized into various community structures depending on the time and region (valley communities, hamlets, boroughs, parishes, sexmos, alfoces ). These organizations had a sense of territoriality far superior to that of any other collective, besides the fact that they possessed the means of production for their collective social reproduction. The peasants’ ties

28

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

of solidarity, cooperative practices and family and neighborhood structures were often stronger than those of the feudal class (Wickham 2005, 442–517). The theological discourse of the medieval socio-political order was hyper-naturalized. The natural and social world, seen as a reflection of the heavenly and eternal order, favored an ideal legitimation of social hierarchies, roles and obedience (Duby 1980). However, the representational system of Christianity was the product of a protracted process that did not produce a single discourse on disobedience, but saw a proliferation of diverse arguments. In contrast to the rigid tripartite models of society divided between oratores, bellatores and laboratores, the definition of the order as a religious body in which every Christian family, by the mere fact that its members had been baptized, was a full part, complicated the discourses and practices of social exclusion. Having a place in God’s work made resistance feasible when the spaces, rules and status of the faithful were violated (Freedman 1999, 1–22 and 289–307). The notion that individuals were subject to moral and religious obligation, rather than human law, conditioned obedience to the legitimacy of the command (subiectio voluntaria). For their part, temporal and spiritual power, headed by two distinct institutions, could neither embody nor deploy absolute power. In a world composed of numerous communities, the powerful had to take into account existing privileges, customs and covenants, and rule with the advice and participation of their peers and vassals (Gierke 1996, 9–21 and 35–41; Kantorowicz 1985, 157–207). Consequently, the question of the definition of the just prince and the categorization of the tyrant, as well as the response the latter merited, were frequent topics in medieval political debate (Nieto Soria 2011: 13– 27). For some authors, it was preferable to put up with the bad king and pray to God and the authorities for providential change, since disobedience led to anarchy, war and disorder. Others, on the other hand, went so far as to argue that the monarch who did not uphold justice, the common good and the covenants due to each ordo, became a usurper, and his provisions were to be disobeyed until the corrupted order was restored (Nederman 1988, 365–389).1 1 The Partidas do not contemplate resistance to the tyrant, but Title I of the Second Partida describes him as a cruel lord who usade mal de su poderio (misuses his power) and keeps the men of his dominion in ignorance, fear, discord and poverty (I, X). These principles appear in theological treatises, legal texts, municipal ordinances, preambles to

2

DISOBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND RESTORATION …

29

The fact that these issues were discussed within the realm of natural law shows that the underlying conception was that any unjust law is ultimately contrary to God. The assumption that the principles of natural law had been inscribed in the minds of all human beings conferred an important autonomy of judgment on the subject (Nederman 2019, 1–22; Salazar Sánchez 1989, 23–26). From the sixteenth century onwards, the debate about the figure of the sovereign and the legitimacy of violent resistance ceased. The issue drifted toward positive law, which denotes the weakening of the legitimate capacity to dissent as part of a significant change in the relationship between subject and sovereign (Carvajal Aravena 1992, 71–75). None of this implies that everyday life in Castilian-Leonese villages and towns was free of a high degree of violence against producers, as the system encountered great difficulties in building consensus and delimiting the obligations of the parties to rent payments and other forms of peasant subjection (Devia 2012). Moreover, at the time, resisting and rebelling was not originally a popular prerogative: the term rresistençia, an infrequent term in documentation, appears on only three occasions in late medieval Cuadernos de Cortes, always to characterize the behavior of nobles and knights who opposed the king’s decisions (Cortes de los antiguos reinos, t. III, 778 and t. IV, 65). Indeed, from the early Middle Ages onwards, part of the constitutive dynamic of aristocracies was the competition for dominion over land and people at the local level. This not only implied the exercise of horizontal violence, but also the need constantly to produce symbolic capital. The reputation and honor recognized by peers and superiors allowed for the expansion of networks of dependents, advantageous marriage settlements, defiance of peers and intimidation of peasants (Althoff 2009; White 1986, 195–263; Escalona 2004, 105–152). Upsetting the status quo, attacking the privileges and respect owed to a lineage, as well as humiliation or unreturned favors, set in motion the complex meshing of notions of gift and revenge between lineages. The affront to friendship required answering in an overt manner before third parties, in a formalized and public act, generally overacted and stereotyped, in which power and position were expressed. From the thirteenth century onwards, the breaking of the commitments acquired by the inferior vassals with their lords was the argument donations, chronicles and judicial lawsuits as a reason to justify rebellion (Lantschner 2014, 3–46).

30

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

most used by the high nobility to confront the king and legitimize their own alliances (amistanças, lawsuits, postures, town councils; Escalona 2002, 131–162). On the other hand, the reception of Roman law by the feudal monarchies, and the convergence of action between these and the Church, presented noble violence as a crime, as an act of lèse-majesté and therefore of treason against the kingdom (Gauvard 1999, 87–115). For their part, in the last medieval centuries, the towns complained in courts and parliaments about the lack of justice for the robberies and violence carried out by the innkeepers and lords (astragadores ) of the land; they denounced the tyrannical rule of the powerful, who did not respect laws, privileges and vassals, and who harassed the “poor and the weak”; and they cried out against the impoverishment of the land due to their greed, and the damage they did to the respublica and the common good (Moreta Velayos 1978). Serving the king was instead conceived as an act expressive of the cities’ loyalty and commitment to peace and to the maintenance and prosperity of the kingdom (Oliva Herrer 2004, 82–95; Naegle 2010, 55–70). The critique of Aristotle’s work by the theologian Egidius Romanus at the end of the thirteenth century masterfully summarizes many of the elements presented so far. The author understands that dishonor, outrage and public insult received by superiors or inferiors unleashes the feeling that he considers most characteristic of the powerful: anger. The revenge it can trigger, however, will also have to be carried out before the eyes of all, and its aim must be to restore respect and redress the wrong through just punishment. The author warns that the nobles must carry out these actions without falling into tyranny, and by accepting the submission and repentance of the poor in order to curb their actions. The text shows that the Augustinian theologian knew from experience that what used to happen was quite different, for he ends up accusing the privileged groups of sowing fear, doing evil without reason and indulging in disorderly, unnecessary and violent despotism (Sère 2010, 103–112). The disobedience and resistance of medieval peasant and urban communities did not usually openly question the established social order, but rather responded to this arbitrariness in the exercise of power by nobles and knights and to non-compliance with instituted social roles. The discourse that accompanied their actions tended to claim that at some point in the past things were otherwise: this was not a mythified scenario, but a powerful uchronia that allowed the mobilization of egalitarian notions of the collective imaginary backed by the divine order.

2

DISOBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND RESTORATION …

31

Notions of social pacts, the common good, justice and the unity of Christendom were at the basis of calls to contest, defend and rebel against the misuse of power. In the early Middle Ages, the territorial breadth of God’s peaces and truces was remarkable: established between 980 and 1110, they were rooted in a combination of organological representations and practices of communal consensus developed in mass assemblies led by the clergy (Barthélémy 2006; Head and Landes 1992, 327–346). In the late Middle Ages, meanwhile, the taking up of arms by the popular sectors was also justified by accusations against the nobles of not fulfilling their commitment to the military defense of Christendom, the land or the kingdom—while persisting in their abuses and violence against their own vassals. The breakdown of the social compact made them unworthy of receiving rents and enjoying privileges.2

Collective Peasant Dissidence In the Iberian Peninsula, the rural community and its collective struggles begin to define their contours in written records from the second half of the eleventh century onwards. In this period of growth, the great Benedictine monastic centers in the north of the Peninsula monopolized royal and noble donations, adding villages and minor monasteries to their patrimony. In the twelfth century, the episcopates, in conflict with the monasteries, joined in this process of seizure of land and jurisdiction. Finally, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the cities and their oligarchies joined in, intensifying the phenomena of peasant dependence. The main conflicts of the period are reflected in the written documentation of these centers of power. Although it is a biased source, the impression conveyed is that the peasants were forced to defend themselves in search of the protection of justice against the arbitrariness of the nobility. The issues in dispute were mainly communal lands and the payment of rents (Freedman 2000, 37). The response to these abuses was not expressed in open revolts, but mainly in the lodging of complaints and

2 Some well-known examples are the revolt of the Tuchins of Languedoc in 1382–

1384, the Irmandiños of Galicia in 1467–1469, the Hungarian peasants in 1514, the Castilian brotherhoods against manorial violence and many of the judicial claims of the fifteenth century in the Iberian Peninsula (Oliva Herrer and Challet 2005–2006, 83–89; Barros Guimerans 1990, 1993, 11–49; Freedman 2000, 34–35; Oliva Herrer 2004, 28 and 151).

32

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

appeals against non-compliance with customs, as well as in covenants and payments to the lords, and in daily sabotage and resistance. The most odious rents were those that directly taxed the economy of the peasant household (huesas or ossas, mañería, nuncio or mortuorium and rapto or rauso), the rents of collective work (labores, operas ) that occupied the peasants in tasks far from the village (anubda, fonsado, facendera, castellaria, carraria and vereda), and the fines and caloñas that fell on the term of the village, such as homicide (Pastor de Togneri 1980, 238–239). In the areas of communal use, lawsuits, compensation, appeals to the king and the exercise of open violence had to be combined with those led by heirs, the so-called diviseros. The monastic cartularies provide an inkling of repeated disobedience and complaints, in an atmosphere of tension caused by the definition of the uses of the territory and the right of the neighbors to the forest for livestock and timber exploitation. The lawsuits initiated in this respect had different results: sometimes the monastery imposed its will on the neighbors, and on other occasions the villages managed to endorse local practices—among them the obligation to respect the sol a sol system in the use of the communal pastures, to reserve the pasturelands for working cattle for the use of the neighbors, to close or hire high pastures, to co-designate the shepherds who looked after the joint herds or to prevent the installation of permanent huts and corrals.3 The inhabitants of the villages surrounding the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla (La Rioja) did not respect the boundaries or the access to the mountain ports granted by the king to certain villages dependent on the monastery, and dared to prohibit their inhabitants from passing through the mountains. The monastery grazed pastures for its exclusive use and penalized the peasants for bringing in livestock, building huts (tuguria), cutting wood and collecting firewood, customary practices up to that time. In 1070, the inhabitants of Pazuengos (La Rioja)

3 Some examples taken from the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla (La Rioja), among many: García Andreva 2010: Doc.CCCXXI.1, pp. 1050–1051; Doc.XI.1, pp. 147– 148. In the village of Ojacastro, its inhabitants, around 1063, named the shepherds who guarded the livestock of the monastery and the village that went up to the ports (Doc.1*, pp. 105–106). In 1154, Ojacastro, Valgañón and Ezcaray appointed the shepherds together with the monastery. In exchange, the villas imposed that the monastery could not sell or lend any of its oxen and draught cows that were kept in the summer ports (Doc.7*, p. 1162).

2

DISOBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND RESTORATION …

33

destroyed the monastery’s cowsheds and released their animals (García Andreva 2010, Doc.VI.1, p. 143). Such actions denote the existence of proactive communities capable of devising strategies of non-consent and of sustaining, to the extent of their possibilities, long-term challenges against monastic overlordship. These villages had ample resources for action: in the face of enquiries and before the courts hearing the cases, local elders and good men were summoned to ratify customary rules and usages (Reuter 2006, 193–216; Escalona et al. 2019, 17–23 and 25–26); in turn, communityappointed witnesses and confirmers endorsed written documents, and the commoners confirmed to whom watering places belonged, who worked particular lands, the distribution of “times” to make use of grain mills, or the days on which markets were established. In the villages, collective actions were regularly validated in the presence of other dwellers (Martín Viso 2018, 1–17). In sum, collective memory and customary practices granted legitimacy to what is sometimes expressed as public disobedience and sometimes as hidden resistance (Wickham 2017, 155–167). An illustrative case of dissent, sabotage and revolt is the confrontation between the village of Grajal de Campos (León) and the monastery of Sahagún. In 1152, the Infanta Sancha, sister of King Alfonso VII of León and Castile, initiated an enquiry in response to complaints made by the monastery about the actions (iniurias et dampna et molestias ) of the men of this royal town located on the Valderaduey stream, some 11 km from the monastery. Witness accounts allow us to reconstruct a 29-year-old conflict that broke out in the context of a war between Aragon and Castile that affected the entire northern plateau. One day in 1123, the cillerero of Sahagún and an assistant found that no water was flowing down the mill channel of the River Cea. In the village, they discovered the inhabitants of Grajal had destroyed the dam and were fishing. The story goes that, when reproached for their behavior, they threatened to kill the monk, stoned him and insulted him, and his servant was on the point of having his throat slit had it not been for the mediation of a man of prestige in the village who restrained the locals. The monk fled to Melgar de Arriba, a village located some 10 km away and dependent on the monastery, whose inhabitants were summoned at the sound of a bell. The villagers were ready to go out to attack those of Grajal when, once again, another notable of the town cut them off on the road and dissuaded them from taking revenge. It was not easy for him, as he had to come to blows

34

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

with the young men and plead with the old men (iuuenes percutiendo et maiores rogando), offering to mediate with Grajal’s council. When the monastery’s cillerero died later, the residents of Grajal returned to break the dam and fish in the waters of the river. In 1139, the Infanta Sancha reiterated the prohibition to destroy the dam for fishing. But the men of the town invoked the custom that, when King Alfonso VII and his sister came to the town, the tax collectors broke the dams and offered them fish from the river; they did the same, “almost by ancient custom” (quasi ex antiqua consuetudine). The enquiry of 1152 begins after a new protest by the monastery before the king’s courts. On this occasion, it is reported that all the inhabitants of the council, men and women, young and old (tam viri quam femine a iuvene usque ad senem), had sworn an oath on the cross to destroy the dam and to declare, when questioned, that they did so by immemorial custom (ex antiquitate et consuetudine longa) and to do all possible harm to the monastery ( facerent omne malum quod possent abbati et monachis Sancti Facundi). Speaking the same language as the peasants, the abbot claimed that the dam was not broken by custom but by evil, by force and for a short time (a paruo tempore, non longo. Martínez Sopena 1985, 552–555). It has been argued that behind this tension was the fact that the monastery of Sahagún was forcing the peasants of Grajal to pay the portazgo (town toll) to enter the Sahagún market—or that the market had been moved to Sahagún. Whatever the cause, the action shows that a council close to the largest monastery in León dared to defy it by repeatedly destroying its infrastructure, and also by appeling to the king. The case shows that these villages possessed cultural and discursive references that allowed them to defend the legitimacy of their actions. They were collectives that reached a consensus and took coordinated action against their lords; and their members also constituted a legitimate source of knowledge for the royal officers of justice, as they themselves testified and attested that what they claimed was true. The anecdote shows the peasants’ ability to operate where the regional powers could not be constantly vigilant. Regardless of the sentences, the tenacious reiteration of these acts of rebellion was not the result of irrational stubbornness, but the expression of a creation of custom produced in the very process of publicly contesting a supposed monastic right. Undoubtedly, the community of neighbors was internally marked by social inequalities, as is shown by the mention of the two notables who contained the popular anger and mediated the conflict. The altercations,

2

DISOBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND RESTORATION …

35

however, brought all the villagers together, showing that the communities devised strategies for their defense, combining moments when their dissent was only latent with moments of sabotage of installations, and outbursts of open rebellion and unleashed violence. Their calculations included the possibility of ending up in the courts of the monastery or the king, so they met in assembly to specify their counter-attack. This action crystallized in the constitution of an organization typical of the time: an association created around a fraternity of spiritual kinship, by means of a collective religious oath celebrated with a public act before a cross. In parallel, they developed arguments with which to defend themselves, based on the powerful notion that time and social practices were guarantors of what was just and due (Miceli 2012; Fentress and Wickham 1992, 96–114). The tension between the monastery and the inhabitants of the council resulted in a scenario in which monarchs had to intervene on different occasions (Pastor de Togneri 1973, 13–101; Astarita 2019, 475–505; Alfonso Antón 1997, 20–21). The case presented occurred within a broader general context: that of the querimoniae addressed to the royal courts for the defense of the village fueros (super foris et consuetudines, sicuti mos est o consuetudo terre). The twelfth- and thirteenth-century fueros are the documentation that allows us to understand the tensions caused by the advance of serfdom in a period of economic growth, in which the inhabitants of rural communities understood the need to set down their customs in a written statute. The struggle to demand that the practices of the jurisdictional powers be adapted to the customs of the region points to the existence of regulatory frameworks, not necessarily written or linked to the relationship between the communities and the lords, but which the inhabitants of the villages and burghs considered fundamental to limit the arbitrariness of the lordship. Thus, the royal charters forbade violent entry into peasant houses, assault on the village territory, and stipulated the appointment of municipal posts among the villagers, the rents they had to pay and the voluntary condition of rents in labor.4 In some codes, even the right to kill cruel and unjust lords is

4 Fuero de Alfonso VIII to the settlers of Arlanzón in 1191 (González González 1969, II, Doc. 579, 31). 1126: the council of Venialbo (Zamora) would perform rent in labor only with their consent: nisi qui voluerit pro anima sua et pro suo gradu (Rodríguez Fernández 1990, 5).

36

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

surreptitiously recognized—as long as it was a justified and individual act (Jacob 1990; Barros Guimerans 1991).5 In the thirteenth century, a distinction was made between bad fueros (malos foros ), qualified as a yoke of servitude (iugo seruitutis exempto), and new good fueros (foros bonos ), which were granted to alleviate previous situations that began to be seen as abusive (karta de alleuiatione de los malos foros quos prios habebatis ) (Pastor de Togneri 1980, 231–232 and 335). The proliferation of the good laws denotes the emergence of new forms of dependence and rent, the growing royal power and its alliance with towns and villages. As the cities gained in importance in the same century, the milites, beneficiaries of land and vineyards, became, together with the urban oligarchies, the main enemies of the villages of the municipal district, the commons and the royal estate. In the struggle to avoid falling into their dependence, they once again demanded respect for the fuero, the fixing of the rents and exemptions that could be imposed, the defense of freedom of movement and the prohibition of taking communal lands (Alfonso Antón 1997, 22, on the location of Arroyal, in Burgos). The villagers were also aware of the negative consequences of the now more marked juxtaposition between the status of vassal and that of vecino, as well as of the problem derived from the constitution of nobiliary lineage-bands that would run through the entire political life of villages and towns during the late Middle Ages. The local scale of practices of resistance and peasant conflicts in the Iberian Peninsula in the central centuries of the Middle Ages requires a multifactorial explanation. Possibly the most important feature is the fact that in the regions north of the Duero river, land ownership was highly fragmented among several feudal lords who could have different status: ecclesiastics, laymen and the king himself. The different jurisdictional attributions multiplied the number of lords and blurred the problems that communities faced. The existence of borders with other Christian kingdoms and with Islam may also have inclined peasants who were dissatisfied or desperate with their living conditions to emigrate or flee southwards in search of security or better opportunities. This emigration may have hindered the establishment of the networks of trust and solidarity necessary for collective action. Particularly on the Camino de Santiago (Way 5 Cases of the murder of the lord by rural communities are few and far between. The example of Paredes de Nava, in 1371, when the villagers killed their lord, Felipe de Castro, is well known. They suffered harsh repression (Martín Cea 2009, 145–163).

2

DISOBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND RESTORATION …

37

of St. James), the settlers were heterogeneous in terms of origin, cultures and languages, and certain groups even had their own legal status and significant mobility, making it difficult to organize a unified peasant resistance. All these factors played different roles in diverse contexts but in the Iberian Peninsula, in general, peasant resistance was more localized and fragmented than unified and coordinated at regional or kingdom level.

Excluded Resistances All power relations hierarchize, homogenize and normalize but, above all, they define otherness and exclude. If medieval formations justified resistance through their ideological production and socio-political practices, they also defined their internal and external borders with radical intransigence. In particular, the religious nature of medieval collective identity rendered unacceptable and alien dissent from other religions, which was labeled with nouns such as stubbornness, blindness or ignorance. Outside Christendom, eleventh-century military expansion brought war to the frontiers against Islam, but also encouraged the first assaults on Jewish aljamas in their own territory. From the beginning of the Crusades, the legitimacy conferred by the defense of Christianity and the expansion of its borders allowed the exercise of violence ranging from war of conquest to genocide, land expropriation, rape of women, and sacking of cities, all of which were encompassed by the label of “just war” and/or “holy war” (Ayala Martínez 2012; Williams 1990, 13–58). In the case of monotheistic religions, rejection was mitigated by a recognition of some common sources of faith, by shared cultural traditions, and by centuries of inter-communal contact, which did not prevent the circulation of prejudices and attacks. Within Christendom, heretical sects constitute the most persevering and ubiquitous case of religious, political and social resistance. These subaltern collectives of wandering status, sometimes under the leadership of an ecclesiastical figure, often had a discourse of disobedience against the sacraments or the church hierarchy, gave a significant role to women, criticized the power and corruption of the church, and proclaimed apostolic life and preaching. They considered themselves better Christians than the representatives of the Church who, in turn, branded them as heretics and a great threat to the social order. With this aim, Church sources distorted their image with stereotypical descriptions, exaggerating their errors and emphasizing the danger they posed to the honor of women. However,

38

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

many of these sects tended to enjoy the sympathy and support—material, moral or symbolic—of the common people, who saw in them channels of expression for their own indignation at the wealth of the Church and legitimate critics for the latter’s corruption. In the Iberian Peninsula, the persecution of other faiths (Jews and Muslims) and of new groups classified as heretical, such as Judeo-conversos (converted Jews) and Moriscos (converted Muslims), became particularly virulent from 1391 onwards. The cultural minorities lived an existence progressively cornered in the urban space—inside the aljamas —subjected to forced discretionality in a context of opportunism in their treatment by the monarchy and the nobility, exposed to intense pastoral propaganda and growing popular hostility (Haliczer 1973, 2008). The idea spread that contact between different cultures led to contamination of beliefs and practices (Nirenberg 2014, 89–114). Those who came to be known as old Christians had their position in the social body safeguarded, while those who originally came from another religion and maintained other daily habits were stigmatized. The eventual creation at the end of the fifteenth century of the Inquisition, an institution of systematic persecution of these communities, had enormous consequences in terms of dissidence and resistance, which have been extensively worked on by historiography on the sixteenth century. The main objective of the conversos was their social and economic integration into peninsular society, but in the face of growing suspicion of discordant practices, the most widespread attitude was dissimulation and concealment. In fact, the construction of an identity of resistance was expressed in the memory and preservation of this received heritage: the reproduction of Jewish customs and traditions in improvised houses as centers of worship (Contreras 2008, 289–292) or joining mystical religious movements such as the Alumbrados (Pastore 2010). There were other ways of questioning the legitimacy and methods of the Inquisition; in texts, thinkers criticized its authoritarianism, its excesses with the new Christians or its rigidity in the interpretation of religious doctrine. In this sense, oppositional discourses are characterized by the sophisticated metaphors and winks characteristic of sixteenth-century literature (Giordano 2010, 43–91; Da Costa Fontes 2005, 231–250; Prendergast 2011, 11–32). Similarly, the inquisitorial proceedings were denounced in the courts because of the defenselessness of the rights of the accused in the face of anonymous and secret testimony and the weakness of evidence and

2

DISOBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND RESTORATION …

39

witnesses. There were even protests, riots and challenges to inquisitorial activities. All these forms of resistance took place in contexts of frequent confrontation between local, municipal or noble authorities and inquisition officials for the control of jurisdiction and for asserting their authority over local communities, including those of Judeo-converts (Pastore 2003, 45–70; Contreras 1992). Most of these groups have left no documentary record of their own and are known through the interrogations of the Inquisition. However, despite its partiality, this documentation opens the door to learning about the practices of resistance within families. An illustrative case of dissent, resistance and defeat documented is that of Lázaro Álvarez, which takes us to the devices of coercion, repression and persecution of modernity in the face of this type of disobedience. Berlanga de Duero is a town in Soria which had around 500 inhabitants at the end of the fifteenth century, of whom around 125 were new Christians. The families, some of whose older members remembered it, had experienced the trauma of the 1492 expulsion. At first, many of the conversos went into exile in Portugal, but eventually most returned. As one of them declares, they left rich and returned poor and disoriented, but within a short time they re-established themselves in their old trades. There were wealthier families, with members in the service of the Counts of Frías, such as the Buenaventura and Álvarez families, who were at odds with each other, and other families with fewer resources, dedicated to professions such as shoemakers, tailors, shopkeepers… Protection and survival in the face of a hostile Castilian society were achieved by creating a close network of family relationships in adjoining streets of the town, making frequent visits to relatives in nearby towns, keeping the trades within the close family circle, helping each other economically and meeting periodically in houses to meet with other conversos, celebrate rites and maintain traditions. The Inquisition tribunal in Cuenca made a first visit to the area in 1523, asking the neighbors if there was anything suspicious to report. This filled the converso community with fear and apprehension. Their first reaction was to organize themselves to prevent the court from acting in Berlanga, going so far as to bribe the regional powers and even daring to say in public that they were against its presence. The families did not anticipate the unbearable pressure to which they would be subject, hence their first decision was to resist: to deny all the charges and to close in on themselves. The representative of one of the great local families, Lázaro

40

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

Álvarez, was arrested and taken to the dungeons of Cuenca, and on 16 June 1525, his trial began. The resistance strategies he put in place went through various phases. Even before his arrest, he offered money to some of his neighbors so that they would not testify against him; once imprisoned, his relatives informed him on the development of the trial through servants and other prisoners who came in and out of the cells of the Holy Office. The family tried to influence the case from the outside in order to speed up the process and ensure that the prisoner received good treatment. His wife, Leonor Álvarez, made payments and gifts of plums, sultanas and apples to the bailiffs. She also sought protection from the Constable of Castile and the Duchess of Frías. The instructions they gave Lázaro were to hold out not to confess anything and to defend his cause “even if they were to leave him in his shirt and saw him in two” to avoid a chain of denunciations. When his cellmate enjoyed a release, Lázaro instructed him to go to Atienza to contact his son-in-law and daughter so that they could look for favorable witnesses. He told them, as a sign to know how his case was progressing, that if it was going well, they should bring him some antojos (cravings) to the prison and if it was going badly, a çinta de çeñir (girdling band). The Inquisition continued to make arrests and seize goods in the town and, after three years in prison, Lázaro Álvarez was condemned to death. This change of scenario led the prisoner to confess against his own converted neighbors, triggering a spiral of cross-examinations and incriminations. The brutal inquisitorial pressure had succeeded in breaking the group’s pacts of silence and solidarity. On 14 June 1534, after ten years in prison, the inquisitors passed Lázaro Álvarez to the secular arm to be burnt at the stake (Muñoz Solla 2022, 220–230). In a short space of time, on both sides of the Atlantic, the implacable devices of coercion, persecution and torture managed to enter the most recondite spheres of the lives of Christians and pagans. The resistance of external and internal subaltern groups had no place in the medieval interpretative universe, in which the laws and customs of religious minorities were conceived as alien to the system and unassimilable. The goal, backed by the representatives of the Church, could only be exile, conversion or extermination (Bennassar 1984, 177–178). This notion of domination by religious justification shaped the colonialism of the Portuguese and Spanish empires in America and Africa, designed not to recognize traditions, laws, institutions or ways of life, particularly

2

DISOBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND RESTORATION …

41

when confronted with polytheistic and animistic religions. In these, the communities subdued by arms were left radically defenseless, since their conquerors did not seek to assimilate the dominated, but to legitimize their superior right, endorsing their privileges over racial and religious categories and denying the past, memory, laws, traditions and cultures of the vanquished (Memmi 1965, 8–18 and 45–68). The historiography of resistance has shown that the dominated not only cannot and often do not speak their minds, but also do not act accordingly, except in reserved spaces, within groups they trust, and always with caution (Scott 2000; Moore 1990). However, despite the fact that coercion, fear and powerlessness can occlude disobedience and revolt, this work has presented a repertoire of resistance, lawsuits, rebellions and sabotages that coexisted with exercises of dissimulation, concealment and murmuring. The aim was to show that, except in the sphere of other religions, resistance was conceived as a collective and legitimate action, which also had to be expressive and public, constituting for its protagonists, be they peasants, bourgeois or nobles, practically an obligation. The fragmentation of power in medieval society, the nature of its social groups, the profusion of thought in relation to the right to rebel and the long period of transformations it witnessed explain this wide range of forms of resistance. All social groups were socialized in communal experiences around which their members confirmed their in-group positions through practices of normative and performative public recognition. In contrast to the modern legal subject, the medieval moral subject, embedded in communities, could question the political-religious order. Faced with a situation of abuse, arbitrariness or humiliation, groups of kinsmen, lineages, neighbors, vassals or dependents appealed to their obligation to defend their space and social position. The fact that the political language of popular groups was shared with that of the literate and dominant classes does not limit its transgressive character. Its transformative charge lies in the use that was made of the same language to underline the contradictions and failures of the hegemonic discourse itself in order to place it at the service of the claims of the common people. It is not the words and ideas that make a particular formulation innovative, but the “re-creation” of words and concepts taken from tradition and put into circulation from the present. It is a complex socio-cultural process of competition for the narrative in the public space that shapes, over time, the identities and positions of those who take part in it. In this sense, the medieval indistinction

42

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

according to which every private positioning should also be experienced as a public positioning precedes some notions of resistance exhibited by contemporary social movements.

References Alfonso Antón, Maribel. 1997. Campesinado y derecho: La vía legal de su lucha (Castilla y León, siglos X-XIII). Noticiario De Historia Agraria 13: 15–31. Althoff, Gerd. 2009. Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Astarita, Carlos. 2019. Revolución en el burgo. Movimientos comunales en la Edad Media. España y Europa. Madrid: Akal. Ayala Martínez, Carlos de. 2012. Las Cruzadas. Madrid: Silex Ediciones. Barros Guimerans, Carlos. 1990. Mentalidad justiciera de los irmandiños, siglo XV . Madrid: Siglo XXI. Barros Guimerans, Carlos. 1991. Violencia y muerte del señor en Galicia a finales de la Edad Media. Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 9: 111–158. Barros Guimerans, Carlos. 1993. Vivir sin señores. La conciencia antiseñorial en la Baja Edad Media Gallega. In Señorío y feudalismo en la Península Ibérica (ss. XII-XIX), ed. Elíseo Serrano Martín and Esteban Sarasa Sánchez, 4: 11–49. Saragossa: Institución Fernando el Católico. Barthélémy, Dominique. 2006. El año mil y la paz de Dios. La Iglesia y la sociedad feudal, Granada: Universidad de Granada. Bennassar, Bartolomé. 1984. Modelos de la mentalidad inquisitorial: Expresión generalizada en la historiografía. Métodos de su ‘pedagogía del miedo.’ In Inquisición española y mentalidad inquisitorial, ed. Ángel Alcalá Galve, 174– 182. Barcelona: Ariel. Carvajal Aravena, Patricio. 1992. Derecho de resistencia, derecho a la revolución, desobediencia civil. Una perspectiva histórica de interpretación. La formación del derecho público y de la ciencia política en la temprana Edad Moderna. Revista de Estudios Políticos (nueva Época) 76: 63–101. Cohn, Samuel K. 2006. Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Medieval Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425. Italy, France and Flanders. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Contreras, Jaime. 1992. Sotos contra Riquelmes. Regidores, inquisidores y criptojudíos. Madrid: Muchnik. Contreras, Jaime. 2008 [1992]. The Urban Conversos in Spain After the Expulsion. In The Jews of Spain and the Expulsion of 1492, ed. Moshe Lazar and Stephen Haliczer, 289–298. Lancaster: Labyrinthos. Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos. 1866. RAH, Madrid, vol. III and IV. Da Costa Fontes, Manuel. 2005. The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain. Rojas and Delicado. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

2

DISOBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND RESTORATION …

43

Devia, Celia. 2012. Violencia y dominación en la Baja Edad Media castellana, Doctoral thesis, Buenos Aires. Duby, Georges. 1980. Los tres órdenes o lo imaginario del feudalismo. Barcelona: Petrel. Dumolyn, Jan, and Jelle Haemers. 2012. ‘A Bad Chicken Was Brooding’: Subversive Speech in Late Medieval Flanders. Past and Present 214: 45–86. Escalona, Julio. 2002. Los nobles contra su rey. Argumentos y motivaciones de la insubordinación nobiliaria de 1272–1273. Cahiers De Linguistique Et De Civilisation Hispaniques Médiévales 25: 131–162. Escalona, Julio. 2004. Misericordia regia, es decir, negociemos. Alfonso VII y los Lara en la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris. Annexes Del CLCHM 16: 105–152. Escalona, Julio, Orri Vésteinsson, and Stuart Brookes. 2019. Polities, Neighbourhoods and Things in Between. In Polity and Neighbourhood in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Julio Escalona, Orri Vésteinsson and Stuart Brookes, 11–38. Turnhout: Brepols. Fentress, James, and Chris Wickham. 1992. Social Memory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Firnhaber-Baker, Justine. 2017. Introduction: Medieval Revolt in Context. In The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt, ed. Justine FirnhaberBaker and Dirk Schoenaers, 1–15. Abingdon: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry 8: 777–795. Freedman, Paul. 1999. Images of the Medieval Peasant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Freedman, Paul. 2000. La resistencia campesina y la historiografía en la Europa medieval. Edad Media 3: 17–38. García Andreva, Fernando. 2010. El Becerro Galicano de San Millán de la Cogolla. Edición y Estudio. Logroño: Aemilianense, Fundación San Millán de la Cogolla. Charters’ reference from: Becerro Galicano Digital (http://www. ehu.eus/galicano/). Gauvard, Claude. 1994. Rumeur et stéréotypes à la fin du Moyen Âge. In La circulation des nouvelles au Moyen Âge, XXIV Congrès de la SHMES, 129– 137. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Gauvard, Claude. 1999. Violence licite et violence illicite dans le royaume de France à la fin du Moyen Âge. Memoria y Civilización (Universidad de Navarra) 2: 87–115. Gierke, Otto. 1996. Political Theories of the Middle Ages. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Giordano, María L. 2010. ‘La ciudad de nuestra conciencia’: los conversos y la construcción de la identidad judeocristiana (1449–1556). Hispania Sacra, LXII, 125: 43–91. González González, Julio. 1969. El reino de Castilla en la época de Alfonso VIII . Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 3 vols.

44

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

Haliczer, Stephen. 1973. The Castilian Urban Patriciate and the Jewish Expulsions of 1480–1492. The American Historical Review 78: 35–62. Haliczer, Stephen. 2008 [1992]. The Expulsion of the Jews as Social Process. In The Jews of Spain and the Expulsion of 1492, ed. Moshe Lazar and Stephen Haliczer, 237–251. Lancaster: Labyrinthos. Head, Thomas, and Richard Landes, ed. 1992. The Peace of God. Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Hollander, Jocelyn A., and Rachel L. Einwohner. 2004. Conceptualizing Resistance. Sociological Forum 19 (4): 533–554. Jacob, Robert. 1990. La meurtre du seigneur dans la société féodale: la mémorie, le rite, la function. Annales E.S.C. 45: 247–263. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1985. Los dos cuerpos del rey. Un estudio de teología política medieval. Madrid: Akal. Lantschner, Patrick. 2014. Revolts and the Political Order of Cities in the Late Middle Ages. Past and Present 225: 3–46. Mann, Michael. 1991. Las fuentes del poder social, Vol. I. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Martín Cea, Juan C. 2004. Violencia y conflictividad social en Castilla, vista desde el prisma de la historia local (siglos XIV y XV). In Conflicto, violencia y criminalidad en Europa y América. IV Jornadas de Estudios Históricos del Departamento de Historia Medieval, Moderna y de América (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2002), 105–144. Bilbao. Martín Cea, Juan C. 2009. El legado de los vencidos: repercusiones de la conflictividad social bajomedieval en el régimen señorial castellano. Paredes de Nava. Siglos XIV y XV. In Castilla y el mundo feudal: Homenaje al profesor Julio Valdeón, coord. by María Isabel del Val Valdivieso and Pascual Martínez Sopena, vol. 3, 145–163. Valladolid. Martínez Sopena, Pascual. 1985. La Tierra de Campos Occidental: poblamiento, poder y comunidad del siglo X al XIII . Valladolid: Diputación Provincial de Valladolid. Martín Viso, Iñaki. 2018. Organización campesina y dominios políticos en la cuenca del Duero altomedieval. Sociedades Precapitalistas: Revista De Historia Social 7 (2): 1–17. Memmi, Albert. 1965. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Londres: Beacon Press. Miceli, Paola. 2012. Derecho consuetudinario y memoria. Práctica jurídica y costumbre en Castilla y León (siglos XI-XIV). Madrid: S.L. Dykinson. Monsalvo Antón, José M. 2016. Los conflictos sociales en la Edad Media. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis. Moore, Barrington. 1990. La injusticia: bases sociales de la obediencia y la rebellion. México: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales-UNAM.

2

DISOBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND RESTORATION …

45

Moreta Velayos, Salustiano. 1978. Malhechores-feudales. Violencia, antagonismos y alianzas de clases en Castilla, siglos XIII-XIV . Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. Muñoz Solla, Ricardo. 2022. Inquisición y conversos. La comunidad judaizante de Berlanga de Duero en los siglos XV y XVI . Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada. Naegle, Gisela. 2010. Armes à double tranchant? Bien Commun et chose publique dan les villes françaises au Moyen Âges. In De Bono Communi: The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th–16th century): Discours et pratique du Bien Commun dans les villes d’Europe (XIIIe au XVIe siècle), ed. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, 55–70. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers. Nederman, Cary J. 1988. A Duty to Kill: John of Salisbury’s Theory of Tyrannicide. The Review of Politics 50 (3): 365–389. Nederman, Cary J. 2019. Three Concepts of Tyranny in Western Medieval Political Thought. Contributions to the History of Concepts 14 (2): 1–22. Nieto Soria, José M. 2004. La parole: Un instrument de la lutte politique dans la Castille de la fin du Moyen Âge. Revue Historique 632: 707–725. Nieto Soria, José M. 2011. La gestación bajomedieval del derecho de resistencia en Castilla: Modelos interpretativos. Cahiers D’études Hispaniques Médiévales 34: 13–27. Nirenberg, David. 2014. Neighboring Faiths. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R. 2004. Justicia contra señores. El mundo rural y la política en tiempos de los Reyes Católicos. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R., and Vincent Challet. 2005–2006. La sociedad política y el mundo rural a fines de la Edad Media. Edad Media. Revista de Historia 7: 75–98. Pastor de Togneri, Reyna. 1973. La primeras rebeliones burguesas en Castilla y León (siglo XII). Análisis histórico social de una coyuntura. In Conflictos sociales y estancamiento económico en la España medieval, ed. Reyna Pastor de Togneri, 13–101. Ariel: Barcelona Pastor de Togneri, Reyna. 1980. Resistencias y luchas campesinas en la época del crecimiento y consolidación de la formación feudal. Castilla y León, siglos X-XIII . Madrid: Siglo XXI. Pastore, Stefania. 2003. Il vangelo e la spada. L’inquisizione di Castiglia e i suoi critici (1460–1598). Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura. Pastore, Stefania. 2010. Una herejía española. Conversos alumbrados e Inquisición (1449–1559). Madrid: Marcial Pons. Prendergast, Ryan. 2011. Reading, Writing and Errant Subjects in Inquisitorial Spain. Farnham: Ashgate.

46

E. PASCUA ECHEGARAY

Reuter, Timothy. 2006. Assembly Politics in Western Europe from the Eighth Century to the Twelfth. In Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson, 193–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodríguez Fernández, Justiniano. 1990. Los Fueros locales de la provincia de Zamora. Salamanca. Rudé, Georges. 1971 [1964]. La multitud en la historia: los disturbios populares en Francia e Inglaterra 1730–1848. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Ruiz, Teófilo. 2009. Voices of the Oppressed: Peasant Resistance in Late Medieval Castile. In Castilla y el mundo feudal: homenaje al profesor Julio Valdeón, ed. María I. Val Valdivieso and Pascual Martínez Sopena, 3: 63–72. Valladolid. Salazar Sánchez, Marta. 1989. La doctrina del derecho de resistencia en la filosofía política hispana tradicional. Revista De Derecho Público 45 (46): 19–30. Sarasa Sánchez, Esteban. 1981. Sociedad y conflictos sociales en Aragón. Siglos XIII-XV . Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores. Scott, James C. 1990. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Abingdon: Routledge. Scott, James C. 2000. Los dominados y el arte de la resistencia. Discursos ocultos. Méjico: Ediciones Era. Sère, Bénédicte. 2010. Déshonneur, outrage et infamie aux sources de la violence d’après le Super Rhetoricorum de Gilles de Rome. In Violences souveraines au Moyen Âge. Travaux d’une école historique, ed. François Foronda, Christine Barralis and Bénédicte Sère, 103–112. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Valdeón Baruque, Julio. 1975. Tensiones sociales en los siglos XIV y XV. Actas de las I Jornadas de Metodología Aplicada de las Ciencias Históricas, II. Historia Medieval. Santiago de Compostela: Secretariado Publicaciones de la Universidad: 257–279. White, Stephen. 1986. Feuding and Peace-making in the Touraine Around the Year 1100. Traditio 42: 195–263. Wickham, Chris. 1998. Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry. Past and Present 160: 3–24. Wickham, Chris. 2005. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wickham, Chris. 2017. Looking Forward: Peasant Revolt in Europe, 600–1200. In The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt, ed. Justine FirnhaberBaker and Dirk Schoenaers, 155–167. Abingdon: Routledge. Williams jr, Robert A. 1990. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Global Impact of the Early Modern Thomistic Revolution and the Scholastic Grammars of Daily Resistance Within Institutions José Luis Egío

Introduction The global and reiterated invocation of the specter of the Comunidades — a revolt that almost put an end to the reign of Charles V (1500–1558) (Pérez 1977; Espinosa 2009; Rus Rufino and Fernández García 2022)— from the 1520s onwards (Ballone 2018, 186–188), reflects a turning point in the history of political ideas and socio-cultural mentalities in the Iberian worlds. If during the late medieval period it was common to read and hear in academic circles such as the very prestigious University of Salamanca (Castillo Vegas 2005) legal-political discourses embedded in the

J. L. Egío (B) Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_3

47

48

J. L. EGÍO

Aristotelian characterization of the king-turned-tyrant and very sympathetic to the urban elites, the crushing of the comunero revolt forced a change of paradigm in the academic and popular understanding of the nature of royal authority and its limits. From this period onwards, which coincides—by chance?—with the arrival of Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) (as holder of the chair Prima de teología) to the University of Salamanca in 1526 (Coujou and Zorroza 2014, 17), monographic treatises on monarchy and royal power were practically abandoned. Many conflicting issues related to the legitimacy and limits of royal potestas began to be approached only in an oblique manner. The post-comunero masters of theology in Salamanca almost diluted this kind of legal-political polemics in their very extensive commentaries on Aquinas’ (1224–1274) Summa theologiae, which from this period became also the standard manual for the formation of theologians in Salamanca, Coimbra, Évora and many other Iberian universities and colleges of the mendicant orders (Lanza and Toste 2021b). Aquinas’ and Salmantine’s influence extended also to the incipient American universities and colleges, created from the 1530s onwards (Duve et al. 2021). In pragmatic genres such as literature for confessors and historical works, we also find the same type of oblique reflections on royal power, always to be read between the lines (Strauss 1941). The focus of this chapter is to explain the relationship between the evolution of discourses on tyranny elaborated in sixteenth-century IberoAmerican academic spheres and the simultaneous transformation of daily practices of resistance exercised by many different lettered actors in their interactions with the extra-academic world. The text shows the theoretical and practical success of new “political grammars” on resistance,1 according to which any direct criticism to the monarchy and monarchs was consciously avoided. Increasingly strategic and prudent, the prototypical early-modern Iberian respectful resistant never accused his king of doing wrong, lying or abusing his powers. Poor kings were rather considered to be misinformed by bad advisors, usually foreigners and newcomers taking advantage of their trust and kindness, as it happened when young Charles V arrived to Castile accompanied by an entourage of Flemish counselors (De Carlos Morales and González Heras 2021). This widely-extended European political dynamic and way to deal with

1 See also the reference to this term in Hipólito Oliva’s chapter.

3

THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE EARLY MODERN THOMISTIC …

49

conflicting issues in an underhand way2 can be perceived in contemporary Iberoamerica, where almost every agent of jurisdiction (encomenderos, royal officials, clerics, friars, native caciques...) accused each other of “tyrannizing the land” (Motolinía 1555). The king, above good and bad, seems to be in this period an empty signifier (Laclau 2005, 95), an inexhaustible hope for potential change that every agent tries to seduce with gentle remonstrances. Even more, the figure of the despotic or tyrannical king becomes, according to this logic and grammar, the absolute oxymoron of political thought. Given the progressive loss of legitimacy of open and violent resistance against royal authority—and, in general, against every holder of jurisdiction superiorem non recognoscens —from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries the exercise of political and tributary opposition became more peaceful and sophisticated than in the unstable and conflictive late medieval period: above all, resistance got institutionalized and ascribed to practices belonging to daily life. Making an extensive use of contemporary institutions, plaintiffs tended to define their grievances according to the many possibilities contemplated in the huge normative bodies of the time (not only legal, but also religious, moral or technical ones)3 and to draw attention to their claims in transgressive cultural manifestations, at the limits of tolerable.

2 Parallels can be drawn, for example, with the kind of indirect political criticism addressed to the last Valois Kings during the French Wars of Religion. In this case, Italians counselors, bankers, and merchants were often used as a scapegoat (Heller 2003). 3 In the Hispanic monarchy, legal corpora approved by the Castilian Kings such as Alfonso X’s Partidas, Leyes de Toro (1505), Nueva Recopilación (1567), but also traditional compilations of Roman Law (Corpus iuris civilis ) and Canon Law (Corpus iuris canonici). As stated in legal-historical literature (Duve 2017), Early Modernity is a period in which many different sources of normativity coexisted within complex regimes of laws, norms, and regulations. Even the doctrines of learned jurists and moral theologians and the customs applying to each kingdom and city (including the Prehispanic ones in the case of the American territories) could be invoked in an act of legal resistance.

50

J. L. EGÍO

Progressive Erosion of the Aristotelian Objective Criteria of Tyranny as Touchstone of Excessive and Extraordinary Taxation One of the key intellectual issues affecting the evolution of theories and practices of resistance in Early Modern period was the progressive erosion of the criteria of tyranny provided by Aristotle in fourth century B.C. Making use of all he has seen and read about the tyrannical regimes of the Mediterranean basin and the Persian Empire, the Philosopher wrote down in his Politics (Aristotle 1999, 30–35) a detailed and objective list of the measures usually put into practice by tyrants: from the duty of godly reverence to the ruler, to the use of spies, the construction of fortresses and the provocation of internal societal conflicts. Two of the universal criteria of tyranny mentioned by Aristotle were still trending topics in the political literature of fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: monopoly of the government by flatterers, serving the tyrant with an unworthy docility and coming often from the lowest social groups, and excessive taxation (Aristotle 1999, 30–31), understood as an indirect way of seizing vassals’ goods or properties with the deliberative aim of keeping them poor. During the late Middle Ages, when the political and ethical Aristotle was rescued from oblivion, his criteria for defining tyranny were reproduced almost verbatim in Bartolus’s De tyranno, written by the middle of fourteenth century (Bartolus 1983, 175–213). This was also the tradition which prevailed at the University of Salamanca until the arrival of Vitoria as holder of the prima chair of Theology in 1526, coinciding probably not by chance with the attempt by the University to turn the page from the comunero revolt. Before Vitoria, three generations of Salmantine masters, leaded by Alonso Fernández de Madrigal “El Tostado” (ca. 1410–1455) in the middle fifteenth century, Pedro Martínez de Osma (ca. 1427–1480) and Fernando de Roa (ca. 1448–1507) at the turn of the century, remained extremely faithful and dependent on Aristotle’s perspectives. In fact, Osma’s and Roa’s main writings were either commentaries to Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics, used as teaching materials in the chair of Moral Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts and in the Faculty of Theology,

3

THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE EARLY MODERN THOMISTIC …

51

or extraordinary repetitiones dealing with specific passages of the abovementioned Aristotle’s works.4 Drawing inspiration from the criticism with which this Aristotelian tradition of political and legal thought regarded tyranny, the students and teaching staff of the University of Salamanca— and other Castilian colleges and Universities in Valladolid and Salamanca as well—actively supported the comunero revolt, playing roles such as spokespersons and articulators of popular demands (Nieva Ocampo 2011, 48–50). This intellectual tradition was abruptly cut off after 1521, followed by a systematic destruction of this important heritage of Castilian political thought.5 Such a virulent purge is not surprising if we take into account that, in the turbulent context of the revolt, late medieval debates on taxation, common good and extreme necessity of the res publica were revived. We know, in fact, that Charles exigence to the Castilian Cortes —assembled in Santiago and La Coruña in March–April 1520—of an extraordinary subsidy in order to finance his personal campaign for the nomination as Holy Roman Emperor was among the main causes of the revolt’s outbreak (Rus Rufino and Fernández García 2021, 13). The procuradores of the Castilian cities, assembled in Ávila in Summer 1520, not only rejected this contribution, but declared themselves categorically and perpetually opposed to the imposition of any kind of extraordinary charges or taxes, as stated in the famous Ley Perpetua de la Junta de Ávila (Peralta 2010, 151–152). Vitoria’s arrival to the Convent of San Gregorio in Valladolid (1523), his appointment three years later to the chair at the University of Salamanca—by the time, the most important chair of theology in Castile— and the way in which Vitoria successfully introduced Aquinas’ Summa

4 Little studied before and rather overshadowed by Vitoria and later generations of

Salamanca scholastics, these figures benefited from a growing interest in the last three decades. While Castillo Vegas and Villacañas dedicated interesting studies to all of them, the critical editions of José Labajos, Inmaculada Delgado Jara and the impressive editorial team integrated by José Manuel Ruiz Vila, Tomás González Rolán and Antonio López Fonseca has contributed to an unprecedented outreach of the writings of those fifteenthcentury Castilian scholastics (Ramírez Santos and Egío 2020, 327–328). 5 In the months following his victory against the comuneros, Charles V sent a commission to the Salamancan University. This commission was in charge to destroy all the books and manuscripts dealing with “political matters” and corresponding to the period 1480– 1525. Charles’ agents were so meticulous that only a few texts from that period survived (Martínez 2021, 25; Fernández Valladares and Merle 2021; Jerez 2007, 225).

52

J. L. EGÍO

theologiae as textbook—replacing Peter Lombard’s (ca. 1100–1160) Four Book of the Sentences —until now studied from a non-political perspective (Barrientos García 2003, 57), should also be understood as an important part of the imperial strategy aimed at erasing the ideological foundations of the comuneros. In fact, by implanting the Thomistic theological-political paradigm in Salamanca, Vitoria consciously eroded the classical Aristotelian distinction between royal and tyrannical rule. The appeal to common good and extreme necessity as alibis justifying the adoption of extraordinary salutary measures by kings and rulers, to be obeyed by their vassals even if harsh and unpopular, so criticized by such fifteenth-century Salamancan masters as Tostado,6 was admitted in Aquinas’ influent Summa theologiae.7 It reappeared in Vitoria’s approach to royal authority, granting the king ample room to act in an arbitrary way. Vitoria’s perspectives on fiscal issues, presented to the Salamancan university community in De potestate civili—the first relectio dictated by Vitoria at the University of Salamanca (1528)—illustrate the decline of the neo-Aristotelian republican tradition and of the comunero dream. For Vitoria, the payment of any tribute required for the common good and the defense of the res publica should not only be considered a legal obligation, but a moral-religious duty whose “transgression” implied “a mortal sin.” Contrary to the positions held by Tostado and the Junta de Ávila, Vitoria leaves also in the hands of the kings the definition of situations of extreme necessity making indispensable the payment of servicios extraordinarios (Vitoria 1557, 204). A quick contrast between Vitoria’s political perspectives and those taught at nearby dates in other Iberian faculties of Theology yields quite

6 Glossing the biblical passage 1 Samuel, 8: 11–17, Tostado denounced the appeals to “necessity” and “the common good of the kingdom” as the usual false pretenses of tyrants. For Tostado, only tyrants could claim for themselves a dominion over the goods of their subjects, and “no need could make licit to treat vassals as serfs” (Tostado 1615, 154–155). 7 Drawing also on the First Book of Samuel, Aquinas had conceded that “it may happen, however, that even a good king, without being a tyrant, may take away the sons, and make them tribunes and centurions; and may take many things from his subjects in order to secure the common good” (Aquinas 1892, Ia- IIae, q. 105, art. 1, 262– 263).

3

THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE EARLY MODERN THOMISTIC …

53

significant results. In the Portuguese kingdom,8 Francisco de Monzón (ca. 1499–1575), one of the many learned Castilians men hired by King John III (1502–1557) to promote the recently restored University of Coimbra (1537), followed almost verbatim Vitoria’s reasoning on extraordinary tributes, even if completely independent from Vitoria and Salamanca.9 In his Libro Segundo del espejo del Príncipe Christiano [1544], Monzón recommended kings to avoid as far as possible the imposition of this kind of taxes, abhorred by the three Estates of the kingdom and frequent cause of rebellion. Nevertheless, as Vitoria in Salamanca, Monzón granted kings the potestas to impose them in case of an urgent need (“necesidad urgente”) holding, by the way, a fairly broad conception of public urgent necessity. Among other dubious justifications for requesting extraordinary tributes, he included expenses to be met by the king and his relatives, such as raising the dowry necessary to marry a daughter or knighting one of his sons (Monzón [1544], 2012, 66–67). Swimming against this general proto-absolutist tide, after the Comunidades only few “Salmantine” scholars would dare to oppose to taxation pointing not only to its excess, but also to the fact that many taxes and services didn’t correspond to specific needs suffered by the kingdom or Christendom, but were asked to satisfy particular interests or personal urgencies of the monarch. At the beginning of seventeenth century, Juan de Mariana’s criticism on disproportionate increase in royal expenditure— 15 times higher in 1564 than in 1429, according to reliable documents consulted by Mariana—in De monetae mutatione (Mariana [1609] 1987, 89–90) appears as an exceptional cry of resistance in a sea of silence and compliance. It is not surprising that in the new post-comunero political context, a type of criticism that would have caused displeasure but not incomprehension in the monarchs of the fifteenth century appeared to be totally scandalous and out of place. The rigor against any kind of complaints on fiscal abuses increased to the point that the treatise De monetae mutatione was forbidden in Spain by mandate of the Royal Council and the Inquisition; in addition, Mariana, author of the book was immediately imprisoned—before a formal trial was initiated and witnesses 8 A diachronic perspective on the specula principum written in Portugal from the fourteenth until the end of the sixteenth century in Toste (2012). 9 Monzón studied Arts and Theology in Alcalá. The topics and theological-political genres he cultivated were different from those that interested Francisco de Vitoria in this period (Lanza and Toste 2021a, 150–151; Toste 2012, 455-456).

54

J. L. EGÍO

were heard. Due to his advanced age (73 years old) and after having obtained his word that he would stop dealing with sensible political issues, he was released after one and a half year of reclusion (Fernández de la Mora 1993, 88–91).

The Global Effects of the New Thomist Paradigm for the Seizure of Natives’ Lands and Rebels’ Enslavement Far from being erudite speculations deprived of any connection with the world of practices, the changing academic perspectives on tyrannical rule and taxation above mentioned had a rapid global impact. Their echoes can be retraced in sixteenth-century America, where many issues related to land ownership, tributes and personal services requested from native vassals took as a starting point the scholastic debates on the limits of royal authority, licit and illicit taxation. When Alonso de la Vera Cruz (1507–1584)—one of the first disciples of Francisco de Vitoria in the 1520s, missionary in Mexico since the mid1530s and master of Theology at the University of Mexico, founded in the mid-1550s (Lazcano 2007, 17–20; Ramírez González 2007, 641)— decided to intervene in some of the most heated land ownership and tributary issues being debated in contemporary Spanish America (Ruiz Rivera and Pietschmann 1996) with his De dominio infidelium et iusto bello (1556)—the first relectio written and read in an American University—he approached the topic coming back precisely to what Aquinas, Tostado and others had said about extreme necessity and common good. Vera Cruz’s cultural translation of Aquinas doctrines to the Western Indies implied that, in case of necessity, the Emperor could dispose of Natives’ goods as if they were their own possessions. That reasoning applied even to Natives’ persons and workforce (Vera Cruz [1556] 1968, 280–281). Given that the Spanish colonists were, in fact, needed to secure the temporal and spiritual good of the commonwealth, Native lands—especially if communal, superfluous and not cultivated by the local populations—could be distributed to the Spaniards eager to build “estancias,” “cavallerías de tierra” or “molinos” (Vera Cruz [1556] 1968, 274–275). “Common good” meant in this case and, above all, the conservation of the New World in Spanish hands. On its own, the “extreme necessity” to be attended was that of the indigent Spanish colonist who,

3

THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE EARLY MODERN THOMISTIC …

55

lacking of goods and lands, will surely leave America and its inhabitants in the lurch. Another interesting scholastic source written in the Spanish American colonial context is a Tratado de la importancia y utilidad que ay en dar por esclavos a los indios rebelados de Chile, written at the end of sixteenth century by Melchor Calderón, a third-generation member of the School of Salamanca10 who, after having completed his studies at the Salamancan Faculty of Theology, became treasurer of the cathedral in Santiago de Chile. Calderón’s Tratado was one of the documents that the procuradores of the kingdom of Chile presented to the Council of the Indies as part of their claims against the “rebel” Native Mapuche populations (Parodi 2019; Jara 1971, 192–202). In 1598, the Mapuche managed to destroy all the small cities stablished by the Spaniards southern to the Bíobío River. This resounding defeat of the Chilean settlers was strategically presented as a rebellion (Calderón 1607, [4–5]) even if, given the dispersion of the Mapuche and their lack of a central authority, it was not clear how many of them had previously accepted the supremacy of the Spanish authorities and could, therefore, be considered rebels in full sense (Valenzuela Márquez 2009, 2011, 2017; Quinteros Rivera and Díaz Blanco 2021). We can consider that Calderón went even a step further in the abovementioned Thomist erosion of the Aristotelian perspectives on tyranny, not only because he—together with other learned clergymen serving the cause of the slave lobby in Chile (Jara 1971)—argued in favor of enslaving the Mapuche “rebels” to punish their violent rejection of the Spanish domination (Calderón, 1607, [13]), but also—and specially—because of the radical realism and utilitarianism which distinguishes his appeals to common good and extreme necessity in the problematic frontier context of Chile. Before entering into the typical scholastic evaluation of the different juridical and theological arguments which could determine the justice or injustice of the wars undertook against the Mapuche and their enslavement, Calderón opened his treatise with a dramatic account on

10 Calderón obtained his bachelor degree at the Salamancan Faculty of Theology in 1552. The holder of the chair Prima de teología at this period was Melchor Cano (1509–1560), who, on his own, has been disciple of Francisco de Vitoria in the 1520s. Unfortunately, we don’t know much about Calderón’s biography, including the dates of his birth and death.

56

J. L. EGÍO

the economic and military situation of the Spanish settlements in Chile, already ruined or in serious troubles. According to his “argumentos de importancia” o “utilidad”, only a drastic increase in the number of Indigenous slaves serving the few Spanish colonists living in Chile—too poor to pay slaves imported from Africa—would make Chile an attractive destination for other Spaniards, allowing the survival of the colonial and evangelizing enterprise (Calderón 1607, [3]).

Some Erudite Forms of Internal Resistance Within the Spanish Block: Alonso de la Vera Cruz’s Speculum Coniugiorum (1556) Scholastic sources not only provide a long-term view on the changing semantics with which armed resistance against practices such as overtaxation and dispossession of land and resources was conceptualized and envisaged in the Iberian worlds since the late Middle Ages. In the specific ways of arguing properly up to erudite normative fields of knowledge such as moral theology and Canon law, we also find the grammar of other types of resistance, neither violent nor disruptive, yet institutionally framed and accepted. Different to the above-mentioned violent clashes between tyrants and peoples, noblemen and commoners, Spanish settlers and Native American peoples, which have long fascinated a historiography driven by the concept of revolution and prone to use revolutionary processes as models for understanding any episode of resistance, we have to see, here, with the recurrent internal tensions and conflicts between different holders of jurisdiction, all of them making part, on their own, of a complex structure of domination. Much more common than occasional explosions of disagreement between irreconcilable actors, resistance appears as a kind of woodworm that took place daily within religious and judicial institutions, in long-term processes difficult to reconstruct in detail. The overlapping jurisdictions that characterize governmental structures in early-modern America allowed not only subjects to demand justice through multiple channels and exploiting the concurrence of plural normative systems, but also lower holders of jurisdiction, acting at the local scale, to challenge the domination that mid-range powers exerted or wanted to exert over them. As opposed to some of the episodes above mentioned, in these complex cases of resistance between local and regional holders of jurisdiction, the authority of kings, popes, emperors

3

THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE EARLY MODERN THOMISTIC …

57

and other summae potestates superiorem non recognoscens [highest authorities, not recognizing a superior] was not challenged. On the contrary, in many cases those prominent holders of power became key tools in the resistants’ agency: it was precisely because such a kind of uncontested powers existed, that a local actor operating at a medium or low range, obliged to follow the rules and normative criteria dictated by a higher local authority—in the ecclesiastical realm, a bishop, a provincial Council or a local synod—could resist by deploying a delaying or dilatory tactic. That is, for example, the strategy that the Augustinian friar Alonso de la Vera Cruz put recurrently into practice in another of his writings, the Speculum coniugiorum of 1556. The unstated objective of this canon-legal and theological treatise was precisely to resist the instructions on Indigenous people’s marriage approved by the First Mexican Council, celebrated one year before in Mexico City. The Council had exhorted missioners to separate native spouses having contracted marriage in forbidden degrees of consanguinity and affinity before converting to Christianity (Primer Concilio Mexicano [1555] 2004, 47), at least until they received a dispensation coming from Rome or from the local bishop. Friars acting as missioners were also compelled to be examined by the archbishop of México, whose criteria they had to follow if they wanted to keep on administering marriage and other sacraments (Primer Concilio Mexicano [1555] 2004, 72–73). Against such a shift toward more rigorous criteria, which Vera Cruz considered to be counter-productive in a context where missionaries had to be extremely cautious and flexible, the Speculum coniugiorum made a plea for continuing recognizing and tolerating all kind of marriages, with the sole exception of the ones having been contracted between parents and children. All other cases, including the marriages between brothers and sisters and even between twin brothers—which were, for example, customary among the Inca nobility—didn’t clearly contravene the first principles of natural law according to Vera Cruz. They should be tolerated until a pontifical decision concerning those difficult cases would be issued in Rome (Vera Cruz 1572, Pars II, Art. XXII, 441).11 Such an appeal to a summa potestas and to the need to wait for its hypothetical forthcoming resolution gave Vera Cruz de facto free rein to follow his own criterion of action against those settled by the highest 11 I am quoting here the third edition of the treatise, printed in Alcalá in 1572 and adapted to the decrees on marriage promulgated by the Council of Trent.

58

J. L. EGÍO

ecclesiastical authorities in New Spain (the Mexican Council and archbishops). Such a strategy of dissent and opposition can be conceived as a kind of loyalist resistance, inasmuch as the defense of the own criteria of action and the disobedience to local and regional authorities was justified and presented not as a direct opposition against them, but as a demonstration of fidelity to a higher global authority, acknowledged by all parties in dispute. That kind of dilatory strategies, frequent in Early Modernity and not exclusive of the American context, seem to have found a fertile ground in the new multicontinental governance networks of the Iberian Empires and the Roman Church. Distance of the American dioceses and municipalities to the main centers of power (Madrid, Sevilla, Rome,…) granted, in fact, local actors a supplementary degree of autonomy. Between the emergence of a problematic case or local conflict of jurisdiction and the intervention of popes and kings through bulls, cédulas or appellate decisions, years—and even decades and centuries— could go by. In this situation of irresolution, each actor could continue to defend its own criterion of action without incurring in open disobedience and resistance. It is important to take into account that such a loyalist commitment to metropolitan powers was, above all, a rhetoric strategy. When—and if—a royal or pontifical decision finally arrived from Europe to the distant Americas, even if promulgated and sent with a lead seal from Rome or Madrid, it was also rare that it met great success and a high degree of compliance. That used to be the case when local actors considered a certain mandate to be a good resolution in general but not fitting well with the specific cases they had to judge and resolve. In this same Speculum coniugiorum, there are many examples illustrating the deployment of other kinds of erudite rhetoric strategies to resist this same pontifical authority that Vera Cruz used to invoke in his frequent clashes with the secular clergy of Mexico and Michoacan. For example, in the first edition of his Speculum coniugiorum (1556), Vera Cruz had proposed a rather flexible implementation of the traditional regulatory framework of clandestine marriage—marriage contracted without witnesses and not celebrated in facie Ecclesiae. Vera Cruz had appealed to old prescriptions considering that some “urgent” or exceptional “causes”—such as a context of war, the need to hide from evil parents and tutors, etc.—could justify the celebration of a clandestine matrimony, making it licit and not sinful. The consideration of these and other kind of “urgent causes” fitted well for the missionaries operating in

3

THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE EARLY MODERN THOMISTIC …

59

the American context: sometimes, it could be difficult to find a sufficient number of witnesses; Pagan parents’ and Native authorities could also be an obstacle for the public celebration of a Christian marriage; very often, the bride and groom lived many miles away from the Church in which they were supposed to celebrate their marriage. After the conclusion of the Council of Trent and taking account of the increased rigor against any possible justification of clandestine marriage— one of the most transcendental Tridentine initiatives12 —Vera Cruz was obliged to rewrite all the passages dealing with this topic. His strategy, in this case, shows the similar kind of erudite and sophisticated dissenting obedience that we found in his respectful resistance against the Mexican secular clergy: instead of erasing the sections on clandestine marriage he had previously written, Vera Cruz opted in the post-Tridentine edition of his Speculum—published in Alcalá in 1572—for introducing some brief lines referring to the Tridentine canons, abided and duly mentioned, but not explicitly defended (Vera Cruz 1572, Pars I, Art. X, 77). These forced and succinct references to the official positions of the Church contrast with the brilliance and breadth with which the Augustinian friar had presented a few lines back his own criteria. In Vera Cruz’s Speculum coniugiorum also comes into play another form of erudite resistance relying in a very specific way of arguing within early-modern theological and juridical literature: probable argumentation (Castelnau L’Estoile 2009; Tutino 2018; Egío García 2022). Vera Cruz underlined that even if finally approved, the Tridentine resolution making null every clandestine marriage had found a great opposition among many of the attendants to the Council, more than fifty bishops (Vera Cruz 1572, Pars I, Art. X, 81). That reminder—almost said in passing—was, in fact, an open invitation to his readers to consider the newly adopted rigoristic positions against clandestine marriages as a kind of temporary fashion, to be amended perhaps—as it has been the case with other ecclesiastical polities—by later Councils and Popes. Furthermore, irrespective of what the Council might have determined, the number and quality of the opponents to the resolution, more than fitty bishops, left a certain room for maneuvering. Vera Cruz could not ignore the Tridentine resolutions, acting and arguing as if nothing had happened, but he kept on considering as valid and non-sinful some clandestine marriages. Even if 12 As stated in the canons approved in session XXIV, which took place in November 1563 (Latasa 2019; Reynolds 2016, 896–982).

60

J. L. EGÍO

in the new state of affairs the legitimacy of these marriages could not be absolutely affirmed (determinate), Vera Cruz considered the arguments in their favor as probable valid opinions.

Concluding Remarks In the New World, the topic of ius resistendi should not be confined and understood as a kind of clash between a monolithic block of colonial masters and a passively suffering Indigenous population. Spanish colonists were, in fact, responsible for the greater episodes of resistance against royal authority in sixteenth-century America (Salinero 2015). Apart from violent secular upheavals such as the Gran Rebelión de Encomenderos peruanos, which has been well studied (Lohmann Villena 1977; Puente Brunke 1992; Varón Gabai 1997), what distinguishes a much more common creole resistance to local (bishops, Audiences,…) and metropolitan authorities (kings, Popes, Councils) in America is, in most cases, its loyalist, quiet and non-violent character. A renewed approach to resistance in which ius resistendi would be examined in its true complexity should not prescind from the kind of less disruptive, violent and, so to say, spectacular forms of resistance. This is the specific type of opposition that an actor such as Alonso de la Vera Cruz, who was simultaneously master and vassal—that is to say, playing the role of ruler among the Augustinians and their doctrinas de indios and being obliged to obey different higher authorities—put into practice in writings such as Speculum coniugiorum. Although its lack of dramatism, which makes it even difficult to perceive, resistance from within was not only much more common than open revolts in Early-Modern period, but far more efficient than direct confrontation. Coming back to the conflicts between Vera Cruz and sixteenth-century Mexican bishops such as Alonso de Montúfar (1489–1572) and Vasco de Quiroga (1470– 1565), archival records attest that he was quite successful in his erudite resistance to the resolutions against clandestine marriage dictated by the Council of Trent and some other rigoristic aspirations of the Mexican bishops. Forced to return to Spain as procurator of the Mexican Augustinian friars in 1562 (Lazcano 2007, 73), he was very active in the Court of Philip II and in the Roman Curia. As a result of his constant pressure, in 1567 he obtained a pontifical brief and a motu proprio bull in which Pius V excepted the American missionaries from the obligation to implement

3

THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE EARLY MODERN THOMISTIC …

61

the strictest Tridentine resolutions.13 In this same period, King Philip II issued two royal decrees requiring his officials in the Indies to enforce the newly adopted pontifical resolutions and warning the secular clergy to allow the autonomous actions of the missionary friars.14 Vera Cruz struggled for autonomy and jurisdiction, while making fragile and provisional alliances with other holders of iurisdictio and potestas (Rubial García 2007; González González 2014). These fights illustrate a world based on the paradigm of legal pluralism (Garriga 2004; Guevara Gil 2009; Hespanha 2016). Learned and astute men such as Alonso de la Vera Cruz learned and taught others to use for their own advantage the clash between the conflicting potestates of kings, emperors, popes, bishops, provincial orders, nobles and cities. Although historiography has tended to see this particular path as a kind of anachronistic obstinacy and delay of the Iberian worlds in their way to Modernity, the reflection on the interplay between obedience and resistance in this context and period is extremely important to understand our contemporary world, where national sovereignties collapse and let the rule of the world in the hands of different other formal and informal actors fighting for power and influence at a regional, national or international scale. Acknowledgements This chapter is a result of the research project El nacimiento de la Escuela de Salamanca (1526): el pensamiento de Francisco de Vitoria en sus maestros y discípulos funded by the research program Comunidad de Madrid. Ayudas destinadas a la Atracción de Talento Investigador para su incorporación a grupos de investigación de la Comunidad de Madrid. Referencia 2022-T1/HUM-24004. The study on Vera Cruz’s writings benefited from a research stay at the Colegio de Michoacán (Mexico) funded by the research project Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, sixteenthnineteenth centuries, European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 778076.

13 Exponi nobis nuper, March 1567; Bull Etsi Mendicantes Ordines, June 1567. 14 Royal cédulas from September 1567 and January 1568 (Mendieta [1597], 2018,

483).

62

J. L. EGÍO

References Sources Aristotle. 1999. Politics. Books V and VI . Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aquinas, Thomas. 1892. Summa theologiae, Ia- IIae q. 71–114 cum commentariis Caietani. Rome: Typographia Polyglotta. Bartolus. 1983. De tyranno. Firenze: Olschki. Calderón, Melchor. 1607. Tratado de la importancia y utilidad que ay en dar por esclavos a los Indios rebelados de Chile. Madrid: [n.e.]. López Cano, María Pilar, ed. 2004. Primer Concilio Mexicano. México: UNAM. Mariana, Juan de. 1987. De monetae mutatione. Madrid: Ministerio de Economía y Hacienda. Instituto de Estudios Fiscales. Mendieta, Jerónimo de. 2018. Historia eclesiástica indiana. Barcelona: Linkgua. Monzón, Francisco de. 2012. Libro segundo del Espejo del perfecto príncipe cristiano. A Coruña: Seminario Interdisciplinar para el Estudio de la Literatura Aurea Española. Motolinía, Toribio de. 1555. Carta al Emperador, Tlaxcala, 2 de enero de 1555, Archivo General de Indias, AGI,PATRONATO,294,N.1. Peralta, Ramón, ed. 2010. La ley perpetua de la Junta de Ávila (1520). Madrid: Actas. Vera Cruz, Alonso de la. 1556. Speculum coniugiorum. México: Juan Pablos. Vera Cruz, Alonso de la. 1572. Speculum coniugiorum […]. Nunc tertio opus elaboratum, ab authore a plurimis mendis, quibus scatebat, limitatum, & in multis locis auctum, & iuxta diffinita & declarata in sacro concilio Tridentino. Alcalá: Juan Gracián. Vera Cruz, Alonso de la. 1968. De dominio infidelium et iusto bello. In The Writings of Alonso de la Vera Cruz, Vol. II, Defense of the Indians: Their Rights, ed. Ernest Burrus. Rome and St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute/St. Louis University. Vitoria, Francisco de. 1557. Relectiones theologicae, Vol. I. Lyon: Jacques Boyer.

Bibliography Ballone, Angela. 2018. The 1624 Tumult of Mexico in Perspective (c. 1620–1650): Authority and Conflict Resolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Barrientos García, José. 2003. La Teología de la Universidad de Salamanca en los siglos XVI y XVII. In Saberes y disciplinas en las Universidades hispánicas, ed. Luis Enrique Rodríguez- San Pedro Bézares and Juan Luis Polo Rodríguez, 51–96. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca.

3

THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE EARLY MODERN THOMISTIC …

63

Castelnau L’Estoile, Charlotte. 2009. Le mariage des infidèles au XVIe siècle: doutes missionnaires et autorité pontificale. Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée 121 (1): 95–121. Castillo Vegas, Jesús L. 2005. Aristotelismo político en la Universidad de Salamanca del siglo XV. Alfonso de Madrigal y Fernando de Roa. La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures & Cultures 33 (1): 39–52. Coujou, Jean-Paul, and Idoya Zorroza. 2014. Bibliografía vitoriana. Pamplona: EUNSA. Carlos Morales, Carlos J. de, and Natalia González Heras, eds. 2021. Las Comunidades de Castilla: Corte, poder y conflicto (1516–1525). Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid/Polifemo. Duve, Thomas. 2017. Was ist “Multinormativität”? – Einführende Bemerkungen. Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History Rg 25: 88–101. Duve, Thomas, José Luis Egío, and Christiane Birr. 2021. The School of Salamanca. A Case of Global Knowledge Production. Leiden and Boston: Brill Egío García, José L. 2022. The Global Origins of Probabilism: Some Neglected Contributions in the Mercantile and Sacramental Writings of Vitoria, Mercado and Vera Cruz. Studia Historica. Historia Moderna 44 (2): 115–151. Espinosa, Aurelio. 2009. The Empire of the Cities. Emperor Charles V, the Comunero Revolt, and the Transformation of the Spanish System. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Fernández de la Mora, Gonzalo. 1993. El proceso contra el Padre Mariana. Revista de estudios politicos 79: 47–100. Fernández Valladares, Mercedes, and Alexandra Merle. 2021. Impresos comuneros. Propaganda y legitimación política al fragor de las prensas. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. Garriga Acosta, Carlos. 2004. Orden jurídico y poder político en el Antiguo Régimen. Istor: revista de historia internacional 16: 1–21. González González, Enrique. 2014. Fray Alonso de la Veracruz, contra las reformas tridentinas: el Compendium privilegiorum pro novo orbe indico. In Reformas y resistencias en la Iglesia novohispana, ed. María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano and Francisco Javier Cervantes Bello, 77–110. México and Puebla: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Guevara Gil, Jorge A. 2009. Diversidad y complejidad legal. Aproximaciones a la Antropología e Historia del Derecho. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Heller, Henry. 2003. Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hespanha, António M. 2016. Direito comun e direito colonial. Panóptica 3: 95–116.

64

J. L. EGÍO

Jara, Álvaro. 1971. Guerra y sociedad en Chile. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria. Jerez, José Joaquín. 2007. Pensamiento político y reforma institucional durante la guerra de las Comunidades de Castilla (1520–1521). Madrid, Barcelona and Buenos Aires: Marcial Pons. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. La razón populista. Buenos Aires: FCE. Lanza, Lidia, and Marco Toste. 2021a. The Influence of Salamanca in the Iberian Peninsula. The Case of the Faculties of Theology of Coimbra and Évora. In The School of Salamanca: A Case of Global Knowledge Production, ed. Thomas Duve, José L. Egío and Christiane Birr, 120–168. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Lanza, Lidia, and Marco Toste, ed. 2021b. Summistae. The Commentary Tradition on Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologiae” from the 15th to the 17th Centuries. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Latasa, Pilar. 2019. Matrimonios clandestinos y matrimonios secretos (DCH). Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Research Paper Series 2019: 11. Lazcano, Rafael. 2007. Fray Alonso de Veracruz (1507–1584), misionero del saber y protector de indios. Madrid: Editorial Revista Agustiniana. Lohmann Villena, Guillermo. 1977. Las ideas jurídico-políticas en la rebelión de Gonzalo Pizarro. La tramoya doctrinal del levantamiento contra las Leyes Nuevas en el Perú. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid. Martínez, Miguel. 2021. Comuneros. El rayo y la semilla. Gijón: Hoja de Lata. Ocampo, Nieva, Guillermo. 2011. Frailes revoltosos: Corrección y disciplinamiento social de los dominicos de Castilla en la primera mitad del siglo XVI. Hispania. Revista Española De Historia 71 (237): 39–64. Parodi, Karime. 2019. La esclavitud indígena en Chile: Argumentos, autoridades y pseudo-diálogo en el Tratado de Melchor Calderón. Colonial Latin-American Review 28 (4): 496–513. Pérez, Joseph. 1977. La revolución de las Comunidades de Castilla (1520–21). Madrid: Siglo XXI. Puente Brunke, José de la. 1992. Encomienda y encomenderos del Perú. Sevilla: Diputación provincial de Sevilla. Quinteros Rivera, Katherine, and José M. Díaz Blanco. 2021. Discursos mercedarios en torno a la esclavitud mapuche (Chile, siglo XVII). In Tratas atlánticas y esclavitudes en América. Siglos XVI-XIX, ed. Manuel Fernández Chaves and Rafael Pérez, 249–270. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla. Ramírez González, Clara I. 2007. Alonso de la Veracruz en la Universidad de Salamanca: Entre el tomismo de Vitoria y el nominalismo de Martínez Silíceo. Salmanticenses 54: 635–652. Ramírez Santos, Celia A., and José L. Egío. 2020. Conceptos, autores, instituciones. Revisión crítica de la investigación reciente sobre la Escuela de Salamanca (2008–19). Madrid: Dykinson.

3

THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE EARLY MODERN THOMISTIC …

65

Reynolds, Philip L. 2016. How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments. The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from Its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubial García, Antonio. 2007. Fray Alonso de la Veracruz, agustino. Individualidad y corporativismo en la Nueva España del siglo XVI. In Innovación y tradición en fray Alonso de la Veracruz, ed. Carolina Ponce Hernández, 79–101. México: UNAM. Ruiz Rivera, Julián B., and Horst Pietschmann. 1996. Encomiendas, Indios y Españoles. Münster: LIT. Rus Rufino, Salvador, and Eduardo Fernández García. 2021. Cinco siglos de un debate: Rebelión y reforma frente a revolución en las Comunidades de Castilla en su V Centenario. Foro Interno. Anuario De Teoría Política 21: 3–16. Rus Rufino, Salvador, and Eduardo Fernández García, coords. 2022. El tiempo de la libertad. Historia, política y memoria de las Comunidades en su V Centenario. Madrid: Tecnos. Salinero, Gregorio. 2015. Rebeliones coloniales y gobierno de las Indias en la segunda mitad del siglo XVI. Historia Mexicana LXIV 3: 895–936. Strauss, Leo. 1941. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Social Research 8 (1): 488–504. Tostado, Alonso Fernández de Madrigal. 1615. Commentaria in Primam Parte I . Regum. Venice: Barezzo Barezzi. Toste, Marco. 2012. Specula principum Lusitaniae. The Importance of Aristotle’s Practical Works. In Universality of Reason: Plurality of Philosophies in the Middle Ages. XII Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia Medievale, 17–22 settembre 2007, ed. Alessandro Musco, Carla Compagno, Salvatore D’Agostino, and Giuliana Musotto, 451–458. Palermo: Officina di Studi Medievali. Tutino, Stefania. 2018. Uncertainty in post-Reformation Catholicism: A History of Probabilism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valenzuela Márquez, Jaime. 2009. Esclavos mapuches. Para una historia del secuestro y deportación de indígenas en la Colonia. In Historias de racismo y discriminación en Chile, ed. Rafael Gaune and Martín Lara, 225–260. Santiago: Uqbar Editores. Valenzuela Márquez, Jaime. 2011. Revisitando el «indigenismo» jesuita: en torno a los «bárbaros» de Arauco, la guerra y la esclavitud mapuche en el siglo XVII. In Fronteiras e identidades. Encontros e desencontros entre povos indígenas e missões religiosas, ed. Graciela Chamorro, Thiago Cavalcante, and Carlos Gonçalves, 61–79. São Bernardo do Campo: Nhanduti Editora. Valenzuela Márquez, Jaime. 2017. Indias esclavas ante la Real Audiencia de Chile (1650–1680). Los caminos del amparo judicial para mujeres capturadas en la guerra de Arauco. In América en diásporas. Esclavitudes y migraciones forzadas

66

J. L. EGÍO

en Chile y otras regiones americanas (siglos XVI-XVIII), ed. Jaime Valenzuela Márquez, 319–380. Santiago de Chile: RIL. Varón Gabai, Rafael. 1997. Francisco Pizarro and His Brothers: The Illusion of Power in Sixteenth-Century Peru. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

PART II

Exchanges: Communities and Resistance, From the Urban Centers to the Iberian Borderlands. Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

CHAPTER 4

The Unending Conquest: Indigenous Resistance in the Chilean Borders (1553–1604) Jaime Valenzuela Márquez

Mas es su obstinación, rebeldía y aborrecimiento que tienen a la nación española tanta que se ha visto muchas veces alancear la tierra donde los españoles han puesto los pies.1

1 “Memorial del capitán Alonso Fernández de Buenrostro” (1629), Archivo General de Indias, Chile, Leg. 4, Consulta de la Junta de Guerra nº 38.

This work has been prepared under the framework of the projects FONDECYT Regular Nº 1190966, and “RESISTANCE. Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, sixteenth-nineteenth centuries” (European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 778076). The translation was supported by the Dirección de Investigación of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_4

69

70

J. VALENZUELA MÁRQUEZ

The Valley in which Santiago del Nuevo Extremo was founded seemed suitable: with a Mediterranean climate, protected by well-arranged mountain ranges, and crossed by the Mapocho River, that irrigated the corn cultivated by the locals and mitimaes Incas; the latter had relocated from The Andes for the safe keeping of those southern limes of Tawantinsuyu (Silva Galdames 1977–1978; Sotomayor and Stehberg 2012). Chile’s capital began its construction in early 1541, with a handful of Spaniards and hundreds of natives incorporated in Cuzco to the conquest expedition led by Pedro de Valdivia. The first contacts with the local habitants seemed promising, as Valdivia revealed in his letters to the emperor. The invaders concentrated on achieving their main objectives: finding gold deposits—which they found, not far from the valley—and organizing the Indian labor for its extraction; in addition to satisfying their late-feudal yearnings, that fed their lordly imaginations, thanks to the distribution of large land extensions and numerous native “vassals” in encomiendas (Contreras Cruces 2017). But this apparent passivity soon revealed its true dimension: the inhabitants of the Mapocho and the nearby comarcas, far from taking on the Hispanic presence with reverential terror, organized a counter-offensive which took place that same year, with a fulminating attack on the city. The conclusion was evident: Chile’s conquest would not be easy, which was shown by the resistance presented by the native communities of central Chile for the following years (León Solis 1986, 1991a). But the Hispanic expansion did not intend stopping in those territories. Valdivia and part of the colonizers who came to settle in that imperial periphery soon continued their advance to the ill-reputed lands of the purum-aucaes. This was the name the Incas had designated for the hostile habitants that they also encountered on their exploration to the south, especially beyond the Maule River (Fig. 4.1). Auca was a Quechua term used under the Inca empire to refer to the irreducible, indomitable, and violent character of this population, which the Incas associated with their own concept of “barbarism”, in relation to those who resisted beyond the borders of the Tawantinsuyu (León Solis 1983; Silva Galdames 1986; Téllez Lúgaro 1990; Sánchez Romero 2001–2002; Valenzuela Márquez J. Valenzuela Márquez (B) History Institute, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected]

4

THE UNENDING CONQUEST: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE …

71

2023). These were the same “nations”, to the South, that the first “discoverer” of Chile—Diego de Almagro—encountered around 1536 which led to his speedy return to Perú, frustrated by the lack of gold and native hostility (Barros Arana 1999–2005 [1884–1902], I: 149–158; Giudicelli 2010). Thus, since the arrival of Valdivia’s expedition, in the middle sixteenth century, the term auca will be adopted to refer to that human universe of southern Chile who successfully opposed for the rest of the century—and even more—the Hispanic attempts to establish their domain south of the Biobío River, by blood, fire, and exile (Villalobos 1985; Boccara, 1999b).

Leadership “from within”: Between Lautaro and Anganamón Toward the end of 1546, Valdivia and his hueste faced, for the first time, those “indomitable aucaes ”, when they reached the vicinity of the outfall of the Biobío and then, further south, at Quilacura (Fig. 4.2). They would soon cross the entryway to the region of Arauco, immortalized by Alonso de Ercilla, and later expanded in its epic—and tragic—projections, denominated as “Purén indómito” or “Flandes indiano” (Ercilla 2009 [1569–1589]; Arias de Saavedra 1984 [1603]; Baraibar 2013). Surprised by the organizational capacity and the strength of the native attacks, the expedition accumulated a series of clashes with bitter triumphs. Victory always proved herself ephemeral, since the “enemy” forces reorganized and returned tenaciously, causing the days and nights to pass in a state of constant alert (Vivar 2001 [1558]; Góngora Marmolejo 2015 [1575]; Mariño de Lobera 1960 [1580]). The violence unleashed by the invaders, accustomed to the brutality they had been displaying in other conquests on both sides of the Atlantic, was not sufficient (Espino López 2012). Faced with the threat and vulnerability presented by the riverbanks of the Biobío, and after murdering, mutilating, and capturing children and women for their servile or sexual use, the hueste decided to return to the relative safety that Santiago could offer them. Although among the captive “enemies” that accompanied that strategic retreat was the adolescent Lautaro, son of a Mapuche lonko (chief), who would soon become the leader of the Indigenous resistance built “from within” the Spanish world (Góngora Marmolejo 2015 [1575]: 174–182; Mariño de Lobera 1960 [1580]: 333–359), the young Lautaro was assigned to Pedro the Valdivia’s service, which allowed

72

J. VALENZUELA MÁRQUEZ

Fig. 4.1 Central and Southern Chile (Elaboration: Jaime Valenzuela. Cartography: Francisco Cooper)

4

THE UNENDING CONQUEST: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE …

73

Fig. 4.2 Southern Chile (cited locations) (Elaboration: Jaime Valenzuela. Cartography: Gonzalo Vergara)

Lautaro to accompany him during the following years in his armed expeditions, being able to observe and memorize the war strategies of the Spaniards, as well as their weaknesses and vulnerabilities (heavy armor, gunpowder rendered useless because of the frequent rains of the Chilean south, difficulties moving the cavalry in swampy zones—such as the

74

J. VALENZUELA MÁRQUEZ

Purén region, and the plains east of the Nahuelbuta Sierra—or wooded areas—like the dense jungles that abounded in the region, etc.) (Zavala Cepeda 2014). The life experience among the Spaniards was fundamental for someone like Lautaro, who kept a permanent revindication of his ethnic belonging, and who, at the same time, was part of an ethnic universe—such as the Mapuche—who did not shun the assimilation of any alterations which could enrichen its material or spiritual culture. A process of “incorporation of the other” which we will return to later (Boccara 2007). So, after accompanying the expeditions his “master” led against the natives of the zone in which he would establish Concepción, and, after, the one against the lebos of Tucapel, and after watching how they amputated hands and noses to all the defeated survivors (Valdivia 1991 [1545–1552]: 156), Lautaro decided on abandoning the invaders sphere and re-joining the one of the invaded. During the next three years, he dedicated himself to organizing the cohesion of different linages from the coast of Arauco and the nearby populations of the Nahuelbuta Sierra, a land which it will be practically impregnable from that moment (Zavala Cepeda and Dillehay 2010). After this period of preparation and development of territorial alliances, Lautaro will reappear in 1553 leading what would be the first big native uprising of the Chilean south. The uprising began with outbreaks of hostility round the fortifications recently built in Arauco, Purén, Angol, and the furthest away in Villarica. It would be in Tucapel where Lautaro’s cunning wisdom finally managed to defeat the reinforces brought by Valdivia himself, articulating an attack from diverse blanks and in successive waves of fresh troops that managed to extenuate the Spaniards and their horses (Góngora Marmolejo 2015 [1575]: 165–189). The conqueror himself would be captured and later sacrificed according to the native’s logical rituals, that marked the triumph over an enemy by the way of anthropophagic assimilation (Goicovic 2018). The following years were characterized by a Spanish retreat from all the region, including the flaming population of Concepción. The warlike violence had switched bands, in a conjunction of native strengths that ran out all European presence and moved toward north, only to be defeated in 1557, north of the Maule River (Barros Arana 1999–2005 [1884–1902], I: 330–333; Góngora Marmolejo 2015 [1575]: 229). Forty years later, another great indigenous uprising would sow chaos and destruction once more in the always fragile Spaniard presence further south of Biobío. History seemed to be repeating itself, with other

4

THE UNENDING CONQUEST: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE …

75

Mapuche leaders that led the attack against Governor Martín García Oñez de Loyola’s retinue, another governor died—and was literally digested— in the hands of Mapuche “barbarians”, in what the Spaniards would name the “Disaster of Curalaba”. With the leader of the uprising, the toqui (war chief) Pelantaro was Anganamón, a cona (warrior) that emerged with his military talent amid this conjuncture. More so, he would be in charge of leading the attacks against the Spanish settlements and “cities” of the region (Goicovic 2006: 118). There are no major records about Anganamón’s previous years, other than him being part of the lebo of Purén, key entity in crystalizing the Mapuche alliance that began forming after Governor Oñez’s death. But, alas, it is extremely curious the description, made by the fray Diego de Ocaña, under his drawing, when the echoes of the uprising still sounded and the toqui was still amid the consolidation of the regional power: “Anganamón, yanacona of Governor Martín García de Loyola, who killed said governor […], and has destroyed the whole kingdom” (Ocaña 2010 [c.1605]). Whether true or not, the reference provided by Ocaña that the native leader was the governor’s personal servant—his yanacona—and that afterward he had betrayed him, turning into his executioner, is the reflection of an imminent and proven possibility, more so, with the case of Lautaro and the conqueror Valdivia. It gathers a central phenomenon in the memory and experience of the war that Spaniards had faced all those decades: natives assigned to the service of encomiendas of circumstantial allies of Spanish expeditions against their rival lebos —called “Indian friends” (Ruiz Esquide 1993; Contreras Cruces 2022: 131–160)—could turn, in sight of the breakup of the “friendship” or the reconfiguration of internal alliances, into powerful enemies; the latter thanks to the knowledge acquired from their customs and strategies. Apart from them, the rising presence of Spaniards or mestizos that deserted to join the Mapuche rebels must be taken into consideration, since they could reinforce the resistance with tactical information, knowledge about technologies and the European uses of warfare, and their own war experience (González de Nájera 2017 [1614]: 355–363; Contreras Cruces 2021). Lautaro and Anganamón were preponderant signs of a surging dynamic that generalized throughout the continent, as the colonial spaces and interactions were taking roots. This was the experience of becoming more cunning. In its origin, the concept alluded to the knowledge the natives acquired of the Spanish tongue that turned them into a sort of

76

J. VALENZUELA MÁRQUEZ

linguistic passeurs who could circulate between both “worlds”. This experience went much farther than the language appropriation, extending to wider and more complex dimensions: the indio ladino (cunning Indian) was that who knew the sleights and fissures of the colonial system, through which they could generate a situation or take advantage of an occasion to obtain benefits. Prudence, sagacity, and management of collective and polyvalent codes of the colonial society were also part of this experience (Valenzuela Márquez 2014). Even though this is a situation more well developed in urban areas, it still is a valid concept for approaching processes such as the ones we are analyzing, considering that the native enemies could also be built “from within”, as the leaders mentioned. After a successful participation in the beginnings of the uprising, Anganamón will develop an important career in function of the sociomilitary and geo-political rearticulation of the native communities during the years that followed Curalaba. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, and due in most part to his military merits, he will position himself as a prominent ulmen-toqui, in charge of the strength of the conas (warriors) from his lebo of Purén. But he also had political attributes, which were shown when, later, in 1612, the Jesuits hosted a meeting in Paicaví, destined to generate some type of peace deal, prisoner exchange, and authorization for the passing of missionaries to “inside land” (tierra adentro). It was the leader, Anganamón, who took charge and dialogued with the lebos of the different territories, even reaching the furthest ones of Valdivia and Osorno (Goicovich 2006: 149). Later, in the decade of 1630, the undisputed political and military leader would assume the role of gentoqui: meaning the most superior military authority of the lebo, organizer of the warriors’ rituals, and holder of the stone axe, that symbolized a status of superior symbolical power (Boccara 1999a: 434–435). Anganamón reinforced, this way, a cycle of unwavering and successful resistance, in a territory sowed by decades of violence. His figure finally confirmed the auca paradigm, the savage and rebel Indian, the “enemy from within” which, among other names and in other frontiers of the continent, were present in the “Indians of war” tales (Giudicelli 2008, 2011; Oliveto 2010; Santamarina Novillo 2015), and the poet-soldier— and on-the-ground witness—Diego Arias de Saavedra synthetized in a rosary of adjectives: “arrogant, haughty, daring, disloyal, cruel, inhumane, like untreatable people raised without faith, nor law, nor king, nor

4

THE UNENDING CONQUEST: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE …

77

police” (Arias de Saavedra 1984 [1603]: 153). Concepts to be reinforced later, when that same year of 1612, the very Anganamón would lead the martyrdom of three Jesuits in Elicura (Gaune Corradi 2016: 273–288).

The War as the Key to Resistance and the Phagocytizing of the “Other” Studies from the last decades have coincided with the pioneer work of Álvaro Jara, in the sense that in order to being able to comprehend the long-lasting duration of the warlike phenomena that took place in Chile’s south, and the permanent failure of Spain’s monarchy in its attempts to control the Mapuche and Huilliches territories and populations, it is essential to focus on the role played by the war inside the autochthonous society (Jara 1984 [1961]). In line with Guillaume Boccara, whose work has marked a paradigm for all approaches to the subject, it is fundamental to understand the construction of the Mapuche armed resistance as a phenomenon structurally tied to its society and its culture (Boccara 1999a, 1999b, 2007). The war would be a “totally social fact” from the economic to the politic aspects, including the family and community organization. It marked the stages of life, and the death references, as well as the social values, and the political and gender references that exalted the condition of warrior of men, and their position within society. The bravery shown in combat was appraised based on the legitimacy of the individual, in victory—which allowed its valorization in the community hierarchy—as well as in defeat and death—that let its valorization in the collective memory (Goicovich 2003: 161). And it was warlike activity that, also, structured and gave sense to the Mapuche socio-political and territorial organization, based on the lebo as the crucial articulation in the native society. It was a web that connected several hamlets (quiñelob) of a territory, which participated in economic activities, rituals, and common defenses. Each quiñelob, on its own, was compounded of several rucas —the homes/rooms that made up the unit of the social base—and which its relationship with one another was the belonging to the same lineage. It was by lebo in which the festive meetings and transcendental religious ceremonies took place. More so, the identity of the Mapuche individual was built upon the belonging to a lebo and its rehue (ceremonial space of each lebo). Moreover, at this level, it would be

78

J. VALENZUELA MÁRQUEZ

defined the codes of legal matters and the resolution of conflicts (Boccara 1999a: 429–431). The lebo or rehue also had a fundamental role in the context of military logic. At its core, all issues relative to the war and peace were resolved, including the formation of alliances with other lebos, in case of a more forceful external threat, such as the one displayed by the Spaniards. The internal political dynamic was defined through war and internal competition of a lebo, which resulted in their leadership and defined the relative prestige between the ulmen, that were the heads of their lineages. The ulmen (important person, who could become an ulmen-toqui or a gentoqui, to lead warlike activity) was, most importantly, a great warrior (cona), under whose superior command were the toquis (commanders of different squads of conas ). Meanwhile, the religious chiefs—boquivoye— were a key to determine war and peacetimes. This way, an almost Spartan profile of a society, whose masculine experience (including ludic practices) was marked by warlike activity, was shaped (Boccara 1999a: 434–436). But before continuing with the associative evolution that will develop after the arrival of the European invaders, it is necessary to incorporate an aspect that caused the Spaniards a true impasse among its domination logic: the political fragmentation that autochthonous structure implied. More so, one of the aspects in which they insisted the most regarding the obstacles faced in their conquest of the indomitable Mapuches was, what they understood as, political disorganization: the lack of a univocal authority and a pyramid-like organization that could be “beheaded”, and with that, the capacity of a centralized resistance would be eliminated (as it had occurred with the Mesoamerican and Andean empires). “Without a head nor a king” was a commonly used phrase to refer to the range of quiñelobs and lebos spread across a geography plagued with abrupt and wild mounts, its dense woods ideal for ambushes, with rivers that were impossible to cross during the long winters, and with swamps in which the natives could “make themselves stronger” when they were overran (Góngora Marmolejo 2015 [1575]: 242 and 246; Zavala Cepeda 2007). In 1592, little before taking on the role of Chile’s governor, the ill-fated Oñez de Loyola distinguished himself as the foremost “force and difficulty” in the war against the Mapuches “the impregnability of the rough and hilly place of his room, and not having for his abode a congregation of towns but one of different and wild hamlets in the most remote site in the mountains”, as his own personal secretary, Domingo de Eraso, had experienced in an expedition to capture a group of enemies in the

4

THE UNENDING CONQUEST: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE …

79

forest (Medina 1956–1982, vol. 4: 320; Archivo General de Indias, Santa Fe, leg. 99, doc. 14). Toward 1614, there was another experienced soldier in the zone that dedicated a specific chapter of his work to “The war brought on by the Indians against our Spaniards with the great force of their land” (González de Nájera 2017 [1614]: 301–314). A physical and humane geography that without a doubt assisted the generation of leaders with the broadest communitarian reach, in the context of an open and everchanging war. Captain Fernández de Buenrostro himself, who is cited in the epigraph, wrote in 1629 a report in which he recommended, on the basis of his almost twenty years participating in the war in Chile, to send soldiers with experience on that front, being this a very different war to the one taking place in Flanders—and where many recommended removing the necessary reinforces—“because [the Mapuches] were enemies without a body, and they could not be populating towns nor cities, but only twenty in the thickness of the mounts, fifty in a riverbank o near a pond” (Archivo General de Indias, Chile, leg. 4, Consulta nº 38). It would then be a matter of a “segmented society”, such as the ones who populated central Chile when the Spaniards arrived, and in which there was no unitarian government nor a recognized “chief” much further than the heads of family groups. Moreover, one of the keys of these societies would be their flexibility to adapt this system in function of external threats, like with the Inca invasion, and, later on, with the Spanish one. The latter, in this sense, would have provoked the emergence of leaders capable of agglutinating families and wills in service to the defense of a common space (Silva Galdames and Farga Hernández 1997). The arrival of Pedro de Valdivia’s hueste made way for a different type of aggression than the Inca one, of never-seen proportions, that began increasing and becoming more complex over the years. This led to a transformation process in the capacity to form offensive support networks with a bigger territorial reach, as an answer to the spatiality, also wider, that the Hispanic aggression had (Goicovich 2002: 74). This way, it will be valorized and regularized through time a coalition type superior to the lebo, the ayllarehue—formed by a military alliance of nine lebos or rehues —that maintained their political autonomy. This was an alliance, momentary at the beginning, that would end once finalized the threat or military operation for which it was created. But, alas, since its effectivity proved itself in the rebellion that cost conqueror

80

J. VALENZUELA MÁRQUEZ

Valdivia’s life in 1553, an institutionalization process to become a permanent entity began (Boccara 1999a: 432). Perhaps this is what, one of the first chronists in Chile, the soldier Jerónimo de Vivar—direct witness of Governor Valdivia’s campaigns—observed when comparing the order deployed by the natives in combat with that of the ancient Romans. Vivar also confirmed that “anciently [the Mapuches] had wars with one another”, but now those conflicts were overcome in order to form a resistance to the common invader (Vivar 2001 [1558]: 250). As the century progressed, and the war against the Spaniards became permanent, even bigger territorial entities began developing, that provided more coordination and a bigger contingent for attacks in different places, which the sources identify with the name of vutanmapus : wide and circumstantial alliances, born after the 1553 uprising; and that, later, in the eighteenth century would crystallize in three longitudinal strips: the Arauco coast, the central plains, and the Andean foothill (Goicovich 2002: 77). The war against the Spanish invader would not only be a matter of armed resistance, but also a wider and deeper phenomenon. The centrality of the war in the Mapuche society went much further, since it also played a fundamental role in the making of the difference of the “Other”. A permanent remaking of the identity, based on the openness to the alterations, assimilating the enemy’s qualities to boost the owns. This assimilation could include the digestion—literally and symbolic—of the defeated enemies that have been noted by their courage and ability, as are shown in the numerous examples of ritual anthropophagy (González de Nájera 2017 [1614]: 248–256; León Solis 2009; Villar and Jiménez 2014). In this same logic, the adoption, from the conas ’ part, would insert itself, in the combat clothes of the Spaniards and the generalized use of horses, that, nearing the 1598 uprising comfortably mixed itself with the coordinated attack’s infantry, that crushed Chile’s south. It would be an adaptable adoption; in other words, it would take credit for the benefits of the alterations but adjust it to the local reality. Thus, for example, the Hispanic’s lattice and morion, made from metal, would be reproduced with animal leather, as is reflected in the caption of Lautaro’s drawing in Ocaña’s work: “This is the clothing the Chilean Indians used in the war. The armour is made of raw cow leather” (Ocaña 2010 [c.1605]). In 1601, not going much further, just having arrived at Chile, the Governor Ribera (who came from the Flanders War to neutralize the Mapuche

4

THE UNENDING CONQUEST: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE …

81

rebellion) took notice of the major offensive power to the Indians. Capacity, in part associated with weapons, horses, and armors that were stolen from the Hispanic forts and settlements in said uprising: “[…] they have a great number of arrows and spears, more than four hundred arquebuses, more than six hundred chain mails, lead and gunpowder, corsettes, leather shields and helms, and a great services over us since they have watchmen posted everywhere […] and they know our intentions and attempts” (Medina 1956–1982, vol. 7: 59). Already in the first decade of the conquest the chronist Vivar had described the clothing’s characteristics and the native war strategies, surprised by the capacity to adapt and the rapid coordination of the conas, a specialized group in the use of different weapons and forms of attacks (Vivar 2001 [1558]: 250–252). It was added the progressive use of the construction of palisades, the same way the Spaniards did, and the fortification of places that allowed a better defensive strategy (León Solis 1989, 1991b; Medina 1888–1902, vol. 26: 438). At the beginning of the following century, this reality established a generalized and consolidated experience between the groups that lived in the “war land” that, by then, extended to the more southern regions of Valdivia, Osorno, and Chiloé (Urbina Carrasco 2009). This was confirmed by a Spaniard soldier that in 1614 numerated “the cunning tricks, strategies and sagacity with which the Indians fought their wars against us”, describing the organization of their “troupes”, the type of weapons, the way they convocated alliances, the cavalry use, etc. (González de Nájera 2017 [1614]: 315–354). All the latter, not only answered to a proper military tactic—a strategic use of forms, experiences, and materials of the enemy—but also of a search of an identification of the opposer, to boost their own attributes. It was a process of ethnogenesis, in which adaptation to change from the encounter and assimilation of the “other” Spaniard that would implicate the resistance capacity shown by the Indians south of Chile (Schwartz and Salomon 1999; Boccara 1999a: 439–440; cf. Svriz Wucherer 2017).

Conclusions During the expansion of the Tawantinsuyu, the Incas had already faced the hostility of the habitants of the southern confines. So, they decided to stop their advances, in the region in which later the city of Santiago would be founded, far from the group of Mapuche Indians who would

82

J. VALENZUELA MÁRQUEZ

be referred with the Quechua adjective of auca: indomitable rebels, incapable of having a “civilized” treatment. But Valdivia and his companions were part of an imperial logic that obsessively looked for the control of the geography, the habitants, and the resource of a continent that they considered theirs. The search for gold, as with the control and the usufruct of the Indian labor, would be the everlasting motivations that soon led them to the aucaes ’ territory. This would be the start of this “unending conquest” displayed between the Biobío River and the Gulf of Reloncaví, sowed with cruelty and violence, in a difficult geography that favored the native resistance, which entailed, since the beginning, a high capacity of political and military resilience (Sauer 2015; cf. Kicza 2003). Indian communities knew how to strategically use their comparative advantages, the social uses, and political representations, which were revested in war-logic, and the cultural flexibility to appropriate and successfully adapt certain techniques, methods, and instruments displayed by the Spanish invader. Resistance that, additionally, marked a fundamental landmark with the defeat and death of the conqueror himself and first governor of Chile, in 1553, and the next “general uprising” that lasted until 1557. This conjuncture gave way to half a century of almost permanent hostilities, focused, on its majority, in the valleys of Purén, and the Arauco coast, the latter being the most emblematic zone of the conflict, becoming to be known as “the kidney of the war” (Consulta del Consejo de Indias, 1626, in: Erauso 2021 [c.1626, 1653]: 284). Moreover, and even though after suffocating the rebellion, there was a period of apparent calmness, that allowed the reinstallation of settlers and soldiers, the distribution of some encomiendas , that was only a fragmented, and vulnerable occupation in a state of constant tension before an environment—human and natural—evidently hostile to their presence. New villages were refounded, but in practice they were no more than modest forts barricaded; like the difficult operation of gold pits whose Indian workers fluctuated from the escape of their encomienda and the sabotage of their duties, taking advantage of the fragile Hispanic control that did not allow their coercion; and agriculture-livestock estates in constant insecurity, under the threat of thefts and attacks. We are facing a context of constant native resistance, of everyday expressions of violence, perhaps less spectacular than the most relevant ephemeral uprisings, that manifested the endemic rejection to a Hispanic presence. Fragile presence that found itself in clear numeric and

4

THE UNENDING CONQUEST: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE …

83

geo-politic disadvantage, and in a fragile and inefficient Christianizing action—missionary—in this initial stage of the Spanish settlement. This fed, during the whole period of study—and extended in the following decades—the image of a “internal enemy”—the auca universe of the Mapuche-Huilliches—that had to be destroyed or exiled; and of a rebel and “barbaric” territory in the generic sense: a physic and human geography defined as “land of war” (cf. Giudicelli 2012; Lucaioli 2021; Montoya Guzmán 2022). The end of the sixteenth century coincides with a conjuncture that surges from another major event of the structural resistance: the death of another governor, Martín García Oñez de Loyola, who also had the fame of beating the last Inca, Tupac Amaru, and of being the grandnephew of the founder of the Company of Jesus. This Spanish defeat not only served as a corollary for half a century of unfruitful conquest, but also started a massive and general rebellion that involved the better part of the regions and ethnic groups up until Chiloé. The Spanish empire would see its domain retreated to the north of the Biobío River that, from now on, would be part of a stubborn frontier. The success of this uprising, that will just begin to subdue near 1604, will be an indelible mark to the local reality and an unequivocal sign of the geo-political challenge that it implied to the Spanish empire (Montañéz Sanabria and Urbina Carrasco 2019). The “disaster of Curalaba” will then lead to the monarchy to re-design their policy regarding this American border, in what we can denominate as a “frontier spin”. Soon, a new governor will be sent directly from the Flanders War, who will take charge of organizing a semi-professional army, financed, regularly, by Perú. Soldiers who will install themselves in a web of forts, stablished according to a most organic and planned logic, in alliance with Jesuit or Franciscan missionaries who will keep on contesting for the final and common objective of the control of the elusive territory and the hostile population (Guarda 1990; Concha Monardes 2016; Casanueva 2017; Contreras Cruces 2022; Foerster 1996; Pinto Rodríguez 1988; Jaque Hidalgo 2014; Gaune Corradi 2016). On its behalf, the decree which in 1608 legalized the enslavement of the captured natives in the war was the corollary of the Spanish monarchy’s desperation that was not able to dominate this “internal enemy” (Valenzuela Márquez 2009, 2020); although soon after, the monarchy tried the opposite path, via a “defensive war” proposed by the Jesuits to attempt a different conquest… but, alas, equally failed (Díaz Blanco 2010).

84

J. VALENZUELA MÁRQUEZ

In this manner, Chile entered the seventeenth century amid strategic experiments and frustrations that permeated in every scale of analysis (local, vice-royal, and imperial). Sentiments and imaginaries that were reflected in the soldier Alonso González de Nájera, who after fighting in the European wars, went on, in 1601, to serve in Arauco. In 1607, he was sent to the Spanish court to inform the situation in Chile, and to obtain new military support, but found himself with the successful argumentation of the defensive Jesuit option. González, then, will dedicate to write a lengthy text that looked to countersign the war “of blood and fire” and the slavery as the sole solutions to the problems in the far away Mapuche territories (González de Nájera 2017 [1614]). His work’s title—Desengaño y reparo de la guerra del reino de Chile—can be seen as a warning and desperate cry of a whole empire who searched for a way to submit to their domain a territory and a human group that did not draw back their resistance, and one who would be maintained for many more years in an unending conquest. Translation: Camila Sáenz Larroucau.

References Arias de Saavedra, Diego. 1984 [1603]. Purén indómito. Ed. Mario Ferreccio. Santiago: Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. Baraibar, Álvaro. 2013. Chile como un ‘Flandes Indiano’ en las crónicas de los siglos XVI y XVII. Revista Chilena de Literatura 85: 157–177. Barros Arana, Diego. 1999–2005 [1884–1902]. Historia general de Chile, 16 vols. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria/DIBAM. Boccara, Guillaume. 2007. Los vencedores. Historia del pueblo mapuche en la época colonial. San Pedro de Atacama: Universidad Católica del Norte. Boccara, Guillaume. 1999a. Etnogénesis Mapuche: resistencia y reestructuración entre los indígenas del centro-sur de Chile (siglos XVI–XVIII). Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (3): 425–461. Boccara, Guillaume. 1999b. El poder creador: Tipos de poder y estrategias de sujeción en la frontera sur de Chile en la época colonial. Anuario de estudios americanos LVI (1): 65–94. Casanueva, Fernando. 2017. Historia de un ejército colonial. El caso de Chile en los siglos XVI y XVII . Temuco: Universidad de la frontera. Concha Monardes, Raúl. 2016. El Reino de Chile. Realidades estratégicas, sistemas militares y ocupación del territorio (1520–1650). Santiago: CESOC. Contreras Cruces, Hugo. 2022. Soldados, soldadesca e indios amigos en la frontera: Chile, siglo XVII . Santiago: Ediciones del Despoblado.

4

THE UNENDING CONQUEST: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE …

85

Contreras Cruces, Hugo. 2021. Dejar de servir al rey para hacerle la guerra. Los renegados en la Guerra de Chile, 1560–1630. Historia 54 (II): 441–465. Contreras Cruces, Hugo. 2017. Oro, tierras e indios. Encomienda y servicio personal entre las comunidades indígenas de Chile central, 1541–1580. Santiago: Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. Díaz Blanco, José M. 2010. Razón de Estado y buen gobierno. La Guerra Defensiva y el imperialismo español en tiempos de Felipe III . Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla. Erauso, Catalina de. 2021 [c.1626, 1653]. Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alférez. Barcelona: Castalia. Ercilla, Alonso de. 2009 [1569–1589]. La Araucana. Ed. Isaías Lerner. Madrid: Cátedra. Espino López, Antonio. 2012. Granada, Canarias, América. El uso de prácticas aterrorizantes en la praxis de tres conquistas, 1482–1557. Historia 45 (II): 369–398. Foerster, Rolf. 1996. Jesuitas y mapuches, 1593–1767 . Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. Gaune Corradi, Rafael. 2016. Escritura y salvación. Cultura misionera jesuita en tiempos de Anganamón. Siglo XVII . Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado. Giudicelli, Christophe. 2012. Géographie de la barbarie: la tierra adentro. Confins américains (XVIe –XVIIe s.). e-Spania. https://journals.openedition. org/e-spania/21869. Giudicelli, Christophe. 2011. Calchaquí ou l’ennemi intérieur. Souveraineté et enclaves rebelles (Tucumán, Santa Fe, XVIIe siècle). In Marges et liminalité en Amérique latine, ed. Louise Bénat-Tachot, 87–120. Paris: Le Manuscrit. Giudicelli, Christophe. 2010. Hétéronomie et classifications coloniales. La construction des ‘nations’ indiennes aux confins de l’Amérique espagnole (XVI–XVIIe siècle). Nuevo Mundo/Mundos Nuevos. https://journals.opened ition.org/nuevomundo/59411. Giudicelli, Christophe. 2008. ¿Naciones de enemigos? La identificación de los indios rebeldes en la Nueva Vizcaya (siglo XVII). In El Gran Norte de México. Indios, misioneros y pobladores entre el mito y la crítica, ed. Salvador Bernabeu, 27–66. Seville: EEHA/Doce Calles. Goicovich, Francis. 2018. Un sistema de equivalencias: el ritual del sacrificio en la cultura reche-mapuche de tiempos coloniales (siglos XVI y XVII). Historia 51 (II): 423–454. Goicovich, Francis. 2006. Alianzas geoétnicas en la segunda rebelión general: génesis y dinámica de los vutanmapus en el alzamiento de 1598. Historia 39 (1): 93–154. Goicovich, Francis. 2003. En torno a la asimetría de los géneros en la sociedad mapuche del período de la conquista hispana. Historia 36: 159–178.

86

J. VALENZUELA MÁRQUEZ

Goicovich, Francis. 2002. La Etapa de la Conquista (1536–1598): origen y desarrollo del ‘Estado Indómito.’ Cuadernos de Historia 22: 53–110. Góngora Marmolejo, Alonso de. 2015 [1575]. Historia de todas las cosas que han acaecido en el reino de Chile y de los que lo han gobernado, ed. Miguel Donoso Rodríguez. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria/Universidad de los Andes. González de Nájera, Alonso. 2017 [1614]. Desengaño y reparo de la guerra del reino de Chile, ed. Miguel Donoso Rodríguez. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. Guarda, Gabriel. 1990. Flandes indiano. Las fortificaciones del Reino de Chile, 1541–1826, 2 vols. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile. Jaque Hidalgo, Javiera. 2014. Misiones jesuitas en la Guerra de Arauco: resistencia mapuche, negociación y movilidad cultural en la periferia colonial (1593–1641). Rocky Mountain Review 68 (2): 177–194. Jara, Álvaro. 1984 [1961]. Guerra y sociedad en Chile, y otros temas afines. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. Kicza, John E. 2003. Resilient Cultures: America’s Native Peoples Confront European Colonization, 1500–1800. Hoboken: Prentice Hall. León Solis, Leonardo. 2009. La antropofagia mapuche, siglo XVI. In Fragmentos para una historia del cuerpo en Chile, ed. Alvaro Góngora and Rafael Sagredo. Santiago: Taurus. León Solis, Leonardo. 1991a. La merma de la sociedad indígena en Chile central y la última guerra de los Promaucaes, 1541–1558. Scotland: University of St. Andrews. León Solis, Leonardo. 1991b. Las fortificaciones araucanas de Quiapo y Lincoya (1551–1569). Nütram VII: 3–28. León Solis, Leonardo. 1989. La alianza puelche-huilliche y las fortificaciones indígenas de Libén, Riñihue y Villarrica, 1552–1583. Nueva historia 17: 15– 44. León Solis, Leonardo. 1986. La resistencia anti-española y el rol de las fortalezas indígenas en Chile central, 1536–1545. Cultura, hombre, sociedad (CUHSO) 3 (1): 53–116. León Solis, Leonardo. 1983. Expansión inca y resistencia indígena en Chile, 1470–1536. Chungará 10: 95–115. Lucaioli, Carina. 2021. Metáforas coloniales: aproximaciones simbólicas sobre la tierra adentro del Chaco. Antipod. Revista de antropología y arqueología 42: 85–106. Mariño de Lobera, Pedro. 1960 [1580]. Crónica del Reino de Chile, escrita por el capitán D. Pedro Mariño de Lobera, reducido a nuevo método y estilo por el padre Bartolomé de Escobar, de la Compañía de Jesús. In Crónicas del reino de Chile, ed. Francisco Esteve Barba, vol. 131. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas (Biblioteca de Autores Españoles).

4

THE UNENDING CONQUEST: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE …

87

Medina, José Toribio, comp. 1888–1902. Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de Chile, desde el viaje de Magallanes hasta la batalla de Maipo, 1518–1818, 30 vols. Primera serie. Santiago: Imprenta Elzeviriana. Medina, José Toribio, comp. 1956–1982. Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de Chile, desde el viaje de Magallanes hasta la batalla de Maipo, 1518–1818, 7 vols. Segunda serie. Santiago: Fondo Histórico y Bibliográfico José Toribio Medina. Montañéz Sanabria, Elizabeth, and María X. Urbina Carrasco. 2019. The Spanish Empire’s Southernmost Frontiers: From Arauco to the Strait of Magellan. In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, ed. Danna A. Levin Rojo, and Cynthia Radding, 717–740. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guzmán, Montoya, and Juan David. 2022. La fabricación del enemigo: los indios pijaos en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1562–1611. Trashumante 19: 96–117. Ocaña, Diego de. 2010 [c.1605]. Viaje por el Nuevo Mundo: de Guadalupe a Potosí, 1599–1605. Ed. Blanca López, and Abraham Madroñal. Madrid/ Frankfurt/México/Monterrey: Iberoamericana/Vervuert/Bonilla Artigas/ Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. Oliveto, Lia G.. 2010. Chiriguanos: la construcción de un estereotipo en la política colonizadora del sur andino. Memoria americana 18 (1): 43–69. Pinto Rodríguez, Jorge. 1988. Frontera, misiones y misioneros en Chile y Araucanía (1600–1900). In Misioneros en la Araucanía, 1600–1900, ed. Jorge Pinto, 17–119. Temuco: Universidad de la Frontera. Ruiz-Esquide, Andrea. 1993. Los indios amigos en la frontera araucana. Santiago: DIBAM, Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana. Sánchez Romero, Rodrigo. 2001–2002. El Tawantinsuyu salvaje en el Finis Terrae Australis (Chile central). Revista chilena de antropología 16: 87–127. Santamarina Novillo, Carlos. 2015. Salvajes y chichimecas: mitos de alteridad en las fuentes novohispanas. Revista española de antropología americana 45 (1): 31–56. Sauer, Jacob J. 2015. The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Araucanian Resilience. Cham: Springer. Schwartz, Stuart, and Frank Salomon. 1999. New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era). In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Frank Salomon, and Stuart B. Schwartz, III-2: 443–501. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Silva Galdames, Osvaldo, and Cristina Farga Hernández. 1997. El surgimiento de hombres poderosos en las sociedades segmentadas de la frontera inca: el caso de Michimalonko. Revista de historia indígena 2: 21–28. Silva Galdames, Osvaldo. 1986. Los promaucaes y la frontera meridional incaica en Chile. Cuadernos de historia 6: 7–16.

88

J. VALENZUELA MÁRQUEZ

Silva Galdames, Osvaldo. 1977–1978. Consideraciones acerca del período Inca en la cuenca de Santiago (Chile Central). Boletín del Museo Arqueológico de La Serena 16: 211–243. Sotomayor, Gonzalo, and Rubén Stehberg. 2012. Mapocho incaico. Boletín del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural 61: 85–149. Svriz Wucherer, Pedro O. 2017. Un levantamiento indígena en las fronteras imperiales. La rebelión de Arecayá (1660). London: Editorial Académica Española-OmniScriptum. Téllez Lúgaro, Eduardo. 1990. De incas, picones y promaucaes. El derrumbe de la frontera salvaje en el confín austral del Collasuyo. Cuadernos de historia 10: 69–86. Urbina Carrasco, Ximena. 2009. La frontera de arriba en Chile colonial. Interacción hispano-indígena en el territorio entre Valdivia y Chiloé e imaginario de sus bordes geográficos, 1600–1800. Santiago: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso/DIBAM, Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana. Valdivia, Pedro de. 1991 [1545–1552]. Cartas de don Pedro de Valdivia que tratan del descubrimiento y conquista de la Nueva Extremadura. Santiago and Barcelona: Editorial Andrés Bello/Lumen. Valenzuela Márquez, Jaime. 2023. “Auca/Awqa, Aucaes”, Lexicon of Resistance in the Iberian Empires, 1500–1850 [online]. https://www.resistance.uevora. pt/lexiconwords/aucaawqa-aucaes-(es)-or-aucaawqa-aucaes-(pt)/. Valenzuela Márquez, Jaime. 2020. ‘Infieles traídos de la guerra del sur’. Perspectivas desde el bautismo de indios cautivos y desnaturalizados de la guerra de Arauco (Santiago de Chile, 1585–1610). Anuario de estudios americanos 77 (1): 161–192. Valenzuela Márquez, Jaime. 2014. Indios urbanos: inmigraciones, alteridad y ladinización en Santiago de Chile (siglos XVI–XVII). Historia crítica 53: 13– 34. Valenzuela Márquez, Jaime. 2009. Esclavos mapuches. Para una historia del secuestro y deportación de indígenas en la Colonia. In Historias de racismo y discriminación en Chile, ed. Rafael Gaune, and Martín Lara, 225–260. Santiago: Uqbar. Villalobos, Sergio. 1985. Guerra y paz en la Araucanía: periodificación. In Araucanía. Temas de historia fronteriza, ed. Sergio Villalobos, and Jorge Pinto, 7–30. Temuco: Universidad de la Frontera. Villar, Daniel, and Juan Francisco Jiménez. 2014. En lo alto de una pica. Manipulación ritual, transaccional y política de las cabezas de los vencidos en las fronteras indígenas de América meridional (Araucanía y las Pampas, siglos XVI–XIX). Indiana 31: 351–376. Vivar, Jerónimo de. 2001 [1558]. Crónica y relación copiosa y verdadera de los reinos de Chile. Ed. Ángel Barral Gómez. Madrid: Dastin.

4

THE UNENDING CONQUEST: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE …

89

Zavala Cepeda, José M. 2014. The Spanish-Araucanian World of the Purén and Lumaco Valley in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. In The Teleoscopic Polity, ed. Tom D. Dillehay, et al., 55–73. New York: Springer Publishing. Zavala Cepeda, José M., and Tom D. Dillehay. 2010. El ‘estado de Arauco’ frente a la conquista española: estructuración sociopolítica y ritual de los araucano-mapuches en los valles nahuelbutanos durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Chungará 42 (2): 433–450. Zavala Cepeda, José M. 2007. La Cordillera de Nahuelbuta, ¿lugar de naturaleza o de cultura? Concepcion del espacio cordillerano en las fuentes españolas de los siglos XVI y XVII. Actas VI Congreso chileno de antropología. Valdivia: Colegio de Antropólogos de Chile A.G. https://www.aacademica.org/vi.con greso.chileno.de.antropologia/156.

CHAPTER 5

The Cry for Freedom: Between Resistance and Political Action in Castile at the End of the Middle Ages (1450–1520) Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer

In 1516, the people of Valladolid gathered in the main square to demand that the council of aldermen not accept any further impositions on the villa in the context of a royal ordinance to form and pay a new corps of soldiers.1 Crying ‘Freedom!’, they proclaimed that they would not agree to it.2 A similar episode took place in Santiago de Compostela in 1520, at the outbreak of the War of the Communities of Castile. The common people gathered in front of the town hall to demonstrate their rejection of the local corporation when it became known that collection of a new 1 This chapter is the result of the research Project “La construcción de la ciudadanía: practicas, dinámicas civico-políticas y conficto a fines de la Edad Media”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. 2 Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), MS 1779, fol 7v.

H. R. Oliva Herrer (B) University of Seville, Sevilla, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_5

91

92

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

tax, which had been approved in the Cortes of La Coruña that same year, and which lay at the origin of the War of the Communities, was going to be enforced. When the news came out that the council of aldermen had finally decided to collect the tax, they stormed the homes of the aldermen shouting, ‘Death to the traitors!’ and ‘Freedom!’ (Dánvila y Collado 1897–1899, V: 625). Also during the War of the Communities, the inhabitants of the villa of Dueñas, who had rebelled against their lord, the Count of Buendía, justified their revolt by arguing that they had risen up to obtain their freedom (Oliva Herrer 2014b). The common factor in these three episodes is the use of a shared political language constructed around the same terms: freedom is articulated in opposition to subjection to the will of others, the opposite of the real or metaphorical idea of oppression.3 While the appearance of the language of freedom, in common use at the end of the fifteenth century, is certainly late, practices such as the ones described above, expressed through a different political language, were quite frequent throughout the fifteenth century in Castile. They could be defined as practices of resistance, with some nuances, since in some cases they would also fit into another social science category, that of revolt. The concept of resistance is undoubtedly multifaceted. Authors such as M. Foucault (1988) have built a complex interpretive framework around the power-resistance dynamic. Authors such as Michel de Certau have attempted to map the set of individual practices of reappropriation and creative transformation of the techniques of socio-cultural production, which he himself refers to as the ‘network of anti-discipline’ (Certeau, 1990). Meanwhile, James C. Scott’s reflections (1985 and 1990) brought the discussion within more manageable boundaries, insofar as the concept of power as the object of resistance was replaced by that of domination. On this point, it could be argued that, while the notion of resistance figured prominently in the titles of his works, Scott’s real aim was not so much to analyze and map resistance as to refute the Gramscian-inspired notion of hegemony. Scott’s work had a significant impact on medievalism (Freedman 1997), although criticisms were raised on various fronts, either

3 For the content of the notion of freedom, see the collection of articles in the dossier Libertad, autonomía y orden político a fines de la Edad Media, Edad Media. Revista de Historia, 21 (2020): 1–290, especially, “Le libertà delle città italiane nel tardo medioevo: qualche riflessione”, 11–30, and “Libertad y orden político en las ciudades castellanas a fines de la Edad Media”, 257–90.

5

THE CRY FOR FREEDOM: BETWEEN RESISTANCE …

93

by accusing him of overestimating the lack of acquiescence of the subordinated, or some of them, or by highlighting the political nature of social relations and the negotiated nature of authority (Wood 2006). The application of his concept of ‘hidden transcript’ was also questioned, pointing out that, at least in medieval cities, the population outside the institutions had the necessary channels and repertoire of political languages to formulate and voice discourses of protest (Watts 2014), a nuance that can be accepted as long as we do not forget that the distribution of power was decidedly unequal in those societies. The question of resistance inevitably raises other important issues, starting with who the subject of that resistance is and how it is constituted. In this respect, G. Spivak warned of the danger of what she called ‘strategic essentialism’, or in other words, the risk of normalizing as negative consciousness, something, in this case resistance, that may in itself be quite heterogeneous (Spivak 1985). Working within quite different parameters, J. Butler (2015) introduced other useful precautions when interpreting popular political action in terms of resistance. She makes the point that, insofar as resistance develops into collective action, it is not necessarily only reactive but has performative effects in the definition of a ‘we’. De Certeau himself (1994) had warned of the implications of what he called la prise de la parole (taking the floor). Apart from that, the concept of resistance has a long-standing presence in the tradition of Medieval History studies. In Hispanic medievalism, it featured extensively in the 1970s and 1980s, when talking about resistance to seigniorial rule. In another context, the concept of resistance was used in the international research program launched by Jean-Philippe Genet and Wim Blockmans, “La Genèse de l’État Moderne”; more specifically, the volume coordinated by Peter Blickle (1997) questioned the role of the common man in the processes of state-building, although other concepts were invoked in addition to ‘resistance’, in particular those of ‘representation’ and ‘community’. This article is situated squarely in this line of research and that of subsequent studies that have extended and modified it (Oliva Herrer et al. 2014; Dumolyn et al. 2014). It starts from the premise that late medieval societies were characterized not only by the existence of multiple ways of resisting coercion, but also by conceptions of autonomy, assertion of political will and expressions of protest characteristic of a dense web of public culture, institutions and community principles that could serve as a check on arbitrary power and channel the political expectations of

94

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

the population. My aim here is to try to situate the political actions and speech acts that I referred to at the beginning in a broader context, in order to carry out a reading of the forms of political action employed by the popular classes in the transition from Medieval times to the Early Modern Age. I use here the frequently problematic concept of ‘popular’ in a strictly political sense to refer to those who were in a position of subordination (Dumolyn et al. 2014).

Freedom in the City: On Resistance and Political Activity in Castilian Cities Hispanic historiography has a long tradition of analyzing urban conflicts. The starting point for these reflections is usually the introduction of the institution of the regimiento, or council of aldermen, in the middle of the fourteenth century, which gave control of the institutions of local government to an elite. The introduction of this reform gave rise to a period of intense contestation, which we can follow in part through the documentation of the sessions of the Cortes. The sequence begins at the Cortes of Ocaña in 1422 and continues at the Cortes of Palenzuela, where it is recorded that the townspeople defied the authority of the councils, gathered publicly, and expressed their determination to participate in local political power.4 In 1465, the Cortes of Toledo provides documentary evidence that this type of practice persisted, although the explicit will to be included in the sharing of local power is no longer openly expressed; the fact that the monarchy upheld the authority of the council of aldermen is explanation enough.5 In essence, these were ways of doing politics that the city commons employed in conditions of weak institutional representation: expressing their rejection of particular rulings taken by the local council and trying to influence their policies. Public gatherings and the occupation of space were one of these measures. Thus, in Palencia, in 1483, the residents gathered in front of the council building to demand that the aldermen should proceed with the lawsuit against the bishop, lord of the city (Esteban Recio 1989, 195). In Logroño, in 1490, the population assembled when they found out

4 Cortes of Ocaña (1422), Cortes de los antiguos reinos de Castilla y León. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1868, III: 45 and 60. 5 Ibid., 740.

5

THE CRY FOR FREEDOM: BETWEEN RESISTANCE …

95

about the leasing conditions of the butchery business. Considering that the price of meat was too high, they demanded an investigation, during which irregularities in the concession came to light.6 In Madrid, in 1504, at a time when wheat prices were very high, many townspeople went to the council to demand that the bread that the large landowners, and even the council, were holding in their granaries, be distributed, and threatening to confiscate it otherwise.7 Sometimes these gatherings went even further. In Aguilafuente in 1515, faced with the public proclamation of new ordinances, an attempt was made to physically prevent the aldermen from signing them, protesting that they were against the general interest.8 But they could also form part of more complex strategies, as was the case in Toro in 1486, where the local council of aldermen complained that the commons had gathered at the sound of a bell to discuss and draw up some allegations in order to take them to court.9 The documentation refers to gatherings of this type as alborotos [tumults, commotions]. While they were not always effective, they served as a kind of symbolic limit on measures that could be taken to threaten the breakdown of social peace. They could also serve to escalate conflict, prompting the monarchy to intervene in the city, a scenario that could favor the interests of the common people. The mobilizations we observed at the dawn of the War of the Communities followed similar patterns. In Murcia, on the day of the Assumption, the common people gathered at the cathedral, armed themselves and ran through the city before assembling in the Plaza de Santa Eulalia, from where they marched on to the market square. There they made several proclamations and took an oath to assemble the next day. No attacks on the local authorities were recorded. Nevertheless, this choreographed threat made it clear what the town’s position should be with regard to the meeting of the Cortes of Santiago, which was taking place at the time.10 6 Archivo General de Simancas (AGS), Registro General de Sello (RGS), IX-1490, fol. 266. 7 Acuerdos del Concejo Madrileño, 1502–1515, ed. Rosario Sánchez González; María del Carmen Cayetano Martín, Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1987: 96. 8 Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid (AGCHV), Registro de ejecutorias, C. 308, 50. 9 AGS, RGS IV-1486, fol. 66. 10 Archivo Municipal de Murcia, Actas del concejo [City Council minutes] (1520), fols.

165r–167v.

96

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

The procedure was not unlike the one documented in León a hundred years earlier, when the aldermen decried the fact that the locals were gathering at the sound of the bell, marching with weapons through the city and questioning the authority of the council (González González 2014). Appropriating city space was not only a way of negotiating power; it was a statement to the council that can be interpreted as a proclamation of sovereignty about who formed the core of the political community.11 In terms of the way these mobilizations were organized and the institutions that could act as a counterbalance to the policies of the council, the guilds did not play the leading role that they did in some European cities (Dumolyn 2014), although there were some exceptions. We know of successful strikes in some towns in the Basque Country that were organized by trade guilds (García Fernández 1997), as well as mobilizations in cities with significant textile activity.12 The most successful trade guilds however were the seafaring guilds in the north of the peninsula (Solórzano Telechea 2013). The reason for this is obvious: they made up the majority of the population of these towns and their strength lay in their ability to rally people to their cause. The limited scope of the guilds as a tool of political struggle was partly replaced by charitable confraternities, which offered the possibility of organizing assemblies and breaking into public space. We know that mobilizations during the War of the Communities in places like Agreda, Murcia and Toledo made use of confraternities (Dánvila y Collado 1897–1899, 562; Martínez Gil 2002). The same had happened in Palencia. In 1453, the confraternity Cuerpo de Dios (Corpus Christi), which comprised more than a thousand local residents, had become a veritable political platform for the commons (Esteban Recio 1989, 186). But not even these tools were strictly essential. What sustained this network of mobilizations was a form of politicization without formal institutions, linked to a civic culture composed of a set of conceptions of how power should be exercised, and supported by informal networks. While some of the large public gatherings mentioned above had been organized by confraternities, others were organized in private homes, and some of them originated simply from the publicizing of certain actions by local councils.

11 These practices are similar to those documented in other European cities (Dumolyn 2017). 12 ARCHV, Registro de ejecutorias, C 36-1.

5

THE CRY FOR FREEDOM: BETWEEN RESISTANCE …

97

Apart from occupying public space, another of the strategies employed was to undermine the authority of local officials through smear campaigns or the publication of humiliating lampoons that sought to undermine their reputation by accusing them of moral corruption or being unfit for office. To be sure, this type of campaign was not a strategy that was exclusive to the popular classes (Haemers 2014). In Tamara de Campos, for example, in an episode that was connected to clashes over control of the council, lampoons appeared accusing the mayor’s wife of adultery (Oliva Herrer 2006). In Valladolid, there is evidence of rumors circulating about one of the aldermen, who was accused of being a coward and a traitor. Meanwhile, in a town in the Basque Country, the reputation of the mayor was attacked by pointing out that he was under his mother’s thumb.13 Disparaging remarks could also be uttered publicly in a variety of contexts, including calls for mobilization. For example, in the town of Jaraíz de la Vera, following an increase in local taxes, one individual publicly proclaimed that all the local councilors were perjurers.14 Indeed, one very illuminating aspect of strategies of opposition is the centrality of the accusation of perjury, or the related notion of treason. In the small locality of Venialbo, the aldermen were immediately removed from office by their neighbors, who accused them of perjury after a tax increase.15 On other occasions, mention was made of the aldermen’s lack of respect for the oath they swore upon taking office.16 What the use of this particular political language, charged with references to the community, shows us is the extent to which the local political community was constituted of a set of expectations and reciprocal behaviors expected of the local government. The last mechanism used to challenge the actions of local governments was to use institutional channels, either by appealing to the royal tribunals, or by means of actions brought before the body of aldermen by the community’s own institutional representatives, the procuradores or jurados. Although the presence of the latter only became widespread in Castilian cities when the Catholic Monarchs came to power, in some cities they existed beforehand. They were generally summoned by the

13 ARCHV, Registro de ejecutorias, C. 328, 28. 14 Ibid., C 278, 36. 15 AGS, RGS, IX-1498, fol. 220r. 16 ARCHV, Registro de ejecutorias, C 328, 28.

98

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

authorities so that they could give the city’s consent to the imposition of far-reaching measures, often new tax demands. Although their room for maneuver was limited, they petitioned the councils about policies to be developed, censured the actions of the aldermen, and where the local governments showed signs of weakness, they were able to open up spaces for political negotiation. Thus, for example, in Burgos in 1433, in response to the council’s demand to introduce a tax to finance a corps of armed men to guarantee the exercise of justice, the procuradores replied that the residents themselves were ready to guarantee the defense of the city and that the main threat came precisely from the links that local officials maintained with some nobles.17 The demands of the Burgos procuradores intensified in the 1550s. In a situation of significant economic difficulty for the council, the negotiation of new taxes made it possible for them to demand something in return to protect the common good, urban public space, and ensure that the city was well provisioned.18 The activity of the Seville jurados in the mid-fifteenth century was not very different. They inspected the activity of the local aldermen, spoke out against their remuneration, as well as their ties to the aristocrats of the kingdom. Of course, the effectiveness of such inspections was limited, and often linked to their ability to raise the conflict to a higher level, leading to the intervention of the monarch, or to mobilization on the streets. This was the case in 1454, when the activities of the jurados took place in parallel with a mass gathering outside the town hall, loudly proclaiming that the aldermen had been put in their posts for the good governance of the city (Collantes de Terán 1974). The increasing number of procuradores of the commons gave rise to a proliferation of grievances made to the Crown of similar content. These procuradores were elected either in general assemblies or through representatives, elected in turn in the parishes (Polo Martín 1999, 483). Their social background has led Spanish historiography to emphasize their function as a means of social advancement and personal promotion for an elite of the commons (Val Valdivieso 1994), but the issue is more complex than that. One factor to be taken into account is the need for the commons to find suitable intermediaries. What is clear is that when scenarios of open

17 Archivo Municipal de Burgos, Actas capitulares [City Council minutes] (1433), fol.

79 v. 18 Ibid., Actas capitulares (1461), fol. 138r.

5

THE CRY FOR FREEDOM: BETWEEN RESISTANCE …

99

conflict arose, some of the procuradores , those who were in tune with the broader aspirations of the collective, continued to carry out representative functions, while others were replaced by individuals who did not belong to the more prosperous segment of the commons. Otherwise, there is evidence of petitions requesting the dismissal of procuradores who were considered not to be defending their interests,19 and even evidence, as in Ávila, of violent actions by the city against the procurador who was supposed to be representing them (Polo Martín 1999, 485). The election of procuradores led in some cities to the development of a systematic policy of monitoring the actions of the council of aldermen. Of course, they were not allowed to vote on the town council, but they could express their opposition to certain measures taken by the aldermen and inform fellow residents of measures that had been adopted. The consolidation of the procurador as a political figure advanced in parallel with attempts by the political community as a whole to create political spaces of their own, which included the power to convene meetings at the request of the procuradores, or to obtain economic resources, which would allow them to pursue in court any cases they might bring against the aldermen. Overall, the range of actions was very broad. In particular, they questioned issues relating to the use of communal goods, taxation, and local supplies (Oliva Herrer 2014a, b). Two issues are worth highlighting. The first is that their claims, most likely drafted with legal advice, show a shift in focus from the discourse of protest referred to above. The political language of reference is that of the governance of the city and the common good, even if for the inhabitants as a whole, appeals to the common good were laden with specific aspirations (Mineo 2014). Nonetheless, on several occasions they reminded local governments of their obligations with respect to the good governance of the city. The second issue of note concerns the claim made by these officials that they represented the political community as a whole vis-à-vis the aldermen. As can be seen in a number of claims made in various cities, they appealed on behalf of the whole community.20 The wording was not mere rhetoric; they

19 As in the cities of Toro or Badajoz, AGS, RGS, III–1495, fol. 300; XII–1496, fol.

248. 20 For example, in Valladolid and Burgos, Archivo Municipal de Valladolid, Actas municipales [City Council minutes] (5 April 1503), and A. Salva, Burgos en las Comunidades de Castilla, Burgos, 1985, 19, respectively.

100

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

invoked a political concept that expressed their determination to represent the city as a whole against the aldermen, regardless of the fact that it was the council of aldermen that had the right to govern,21 an issue that would emerge with some force in different cities during the War of the Communities. One particularly important aspect concerns the framework within which this repertoire of forms of protest that I have just described should be situated. They have traditionally been seen as struggles of the commons—or an elite of the commons, in other interpretations— for political inclusion, sometimes with the explicit assumption that the confrontations between oligarchy and commons would have their correlate in the construction of antithetical discourses. What has been taken less into consideration is the extent to which these practices reveal a shared political grammar at the urban level, linked to the collective construction of the community itself and its very existence as a body politic, as well as to the constitutive tension between the aldermen and the political community as a whole. In other words, the council of aldermen governs the city but does not suppress it as a political body. The set of protests and demands we have just analyzed were expressed in political language and appealed to notions that in one way or another can be directly linked to a certain idea of citizenship.22 Regardless of the form of government that prevailed in the city, there was a complex set of shared assumptions about how the city should be governed. These assumptions operated in a hierarchical political order that co-existed with social inequality, but also constituted implicit limits to local government action that were always being tested. The protests in the streets clamoring for freedom were reports of these limits being transgressed. Under such conditions, the commons saw their resistance as justified. It is precisely this urban grammar that we see at work during the War of the Communities. Whereas, before 1520, aldermen in cities such as Valladolid or Aranda de Duero had been accused of serving their own interests or those of the aristocrats with whom they had ties Ruiz (1978) and Peribáñez Otero (2014), in 1520, they were dismissed on charges of treason. As the wife of one of the comunero leaders in Aranda put

21 For the application of the concept of representation Genet et al. (2017) and especially Hébert (2018). 22 This is in line with what was stated for English cities in Liddy (2017).

5

THE CRY FOR FREEDOM: BETWEEN RESISTANCE …

101

it, the aldermen … were traitors who robbed the world, so that as long as there was a world, their posts would not be returned to them. From this point onwards, in some towns, pre-existing institutional structures that had traditionally been subordinate to the aldermen came to the fore, claiming to represent the community as a whole and establishing a new legitimacy. This was a substantive change and one that did not, in any case, come about in terms of oligarchy versus commons; the acting subject driving the change was not the commons, but the city, or to be more precise, the political community (Oliva Herrer 2020).

Violence, Seigniorialization, Resistance Perhaps where the concept of resistance continues to be most operative is in the processes of the extension of seignorial rule at the end of the Middle Ages. In his classic interpretation of late medieval social conflict, J. Valdeón stated that social conflict was inscribed within the antagonistic nature of the feudal system itself. Resistance at the end of the Middle Ages was opposed to the feudal offensive led by the powerful and had two paradigmatic manifestations: feudal violence and the intensification of seigniorialization. Historians of the 1970s and 1980s interpreted feudal violence as a response to the fall in noble rents in the wake of the crisis of the fourteenth century (Valdeón Baruque 1975; Moreta Velayos 1978). More recently however it has tended to be interpreted from a fundamentally cultural point of view, arguing for its constitutive status and the alleged legitimacy of the nobility to exercise it against other social classes as a mark of their social superiority (Claussen 2015; Algazi 2000). Influenced by legal anthropology, this interpretation is framed within broader processes of conflict resolution, often without taking into account the extent to which seigniorial violence, private wars in particular, created victims and also generated resistance (Challet and Juchs 2021). The documentation of the Cortes at the beginning of the fourteenth century is full of allegations made by city procuradores about practices that they call malfetrías [evil acts], described as against the law and violent. Some of these practices refer to the effects of private wars or fighting between private alliances of nobles and the king, involving devastation, the burning

102

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

of crops and looting of towns and rural communities.23 Another significant part of the protests reporting rapes, robbery and bribery carried out from the fortresses of the nobles refers to the attempt to establish new forms of exaction, generally in a context of political instability in the kingdom as a whole. In short, the accusations refer to ways of establishing rights involving conflict, probably violent, from a position of power. The basic question, still not completely resolved by Castilian historians, refers to the evolution of noble violence, which clearly surfaces in contexts of political crisis in the kingdom as a whole as part of the process of constructing a centralized monarchy (Firnhaber-Baker 2010). But in addition to other discourses that serve to discredit these practices, it is also a period when progress was made with the legislative framework, that of royal justice, which made it possible to report these practices as unlawful and to organize resistance, either in the form of widespread revolt, as in the Irmandiña movement in Galicia (Barros Guimaraens 1990), or through institutions such as the Hermandad General [General Brotherhood]. Historians of this movement of confederated local councils have perhaps overemphasized its pro-monarchist character and its defense of public order, leaving somewhat diluted in their interpretations the fact that these institutions were an expression of an autonomous political project on the part of the cities and, for the purposes we are concerned with here, an expression of their resistance to the nobility’s use of violence (González Mínguez 2006). The latter aspect can be clearly appreciated in the Brotherhoods in the time of Henry IV, which associated the breakdown of public order with noble violence, as is evident from their multiple ordinances articulating what was known as Brotherhood justice (Bermejo 1998; Oliva Herrer 2008), which in essence consisted of an armed response to the actions of these second-tier nobles.24 Basically, these violent practices, largely perpetrated by members of the lower nobility, can be considered a variant of a more general tendency on the part of higher-ranking nobles to attack the royal domain. The attempt to expand their lordships at the expense of the royal patrimony was a constant throughout the fifteenth century in Castile. On most occasions, it was done legally and with the acquiescence of the monarch himself, who handed over a significant part of his patrimony in order to guarantee

23 Cortes of Madrid (1329), Cortes de los antiguos reinos, II: 430. 24 On the justice of the Brotherhood, Tate and J. Lawrence (1988).

5

THE CRY FOR FREEDOM: BETWEEN RESISTANCE …

103

the political collaboration of different nobles, which, as is well known, resulted in the establishment of a significant number of new lordships. On other occasions, at times of political crisis, the attacks took the form of direct violence against the communities, as for example, in 1438, when the Marquis of Santillana deployed an armed force in two small valleys in the north of the Peninsula, demanding that the inhabitants recognize him as lord of the land. The creation of a new lordship at the expense of the royal domain was a complex undertaking that required, in addition to an armed deployment, a process of co-optation of local elites, which had been happening for some time in these places (Oliva Herrer 2004, 205). Even in times of relative political stability, such as the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, the use of coercion and violence to subjugate rural communities was still evident. This was the case in the small villa of Osorno de Yuso, around 1488, which was subject to pressure from a nobleman of the Rojas lineage, Juan de Guevara, an important landowner in the area. The construction of a fortified house on the site was followed by the installation of peasant tenant farmers and attempts to control the local council by bringing in like-minded men and attacking the local inhabitants. There were many ways for the villagers to resist. They could seek help from nearby councils, or even from other lords in the area. The most efficient was to appeal to the royal justice system at a time when, as we shall see, the monarchs had already made maintenance of the status quo one of the cornerstones of their policy (Oliva Herrer 2000). The capacity to use force was obviously greater for the seigneurial nobility than for the rural communities, which explains the mostly peaceful nature of the forms of resistance undertaken by the latter. But violence was not used exclusively by the lords. Several of the villas ceded by the Crown as lordships to various nobles organized armed resistance, which in some cases were successful and forced the Crown to rectify the situation. Emblematic cases, such as those of Paredes de Nava in 1471 (Valdeón Baruque 1975, 105; Martín Cea 2009) or San Felices de los Gallegos in 1474, ended with the death of the lord (Valdeón Baruque 1975, 173). Other places, such as Becerril de Campos, expressed this opposition explicitly. In 1501, the local council passed an ordinance decreeing that, in the event of aggression or any attempt that might lead to the seigniorialization of the village, the villagers, gathered together at the sound of the bell, were to prepare themselves for armed defense. The ordinance expresses the marked anti-noble sentiment that preceded the anti-seigniorial outburst of the communities (Gutiérrez Nieto 1973). To

104

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

those who fell in defense of the freedom of the villa, since it could happen that someone from the town might die for it now or that some lord might order him to be killed on the roads, the sworn community offered the greatest symbolic honor, perpetual inscription in the collective memory (Oliva Herrer 2002, 262). The use of violence in the creation of a lordship was also the origin of a foundational memory that lent support to later acts of resistance. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the inhabitants of Dueñas recalled the resistance of the town to the new lord and that the latter had had several of those who had led the resistance beheaded more than sixty years earlier (Oliva Herrer 2004). Lordly violence could be used again when the lord’s position of power over a place was threatened. This occurred in Lemos, in Galicia, at the end of the fifteenth century, when someone went around the nearby villages to convince the inhabitants to appeal to the king’s justice rather than seigniorial justice. The result was that the agents of the lord’s justice arrested him and cut off one of his feet.25 In contrast, the killing of a lord as a form of resistance was rare and when it happened, it was an extreme, albeit deliberate, measure resorted to as part of a wider conflict (Barros Guimaraens 1991). The case of Fuenteovejuna is one of the best illustrations. The execution of the local lord, the commander of the Order of Calatrava, was well orchestrated and carried out according to the same ritual that the royal justice system reserved for traitors (Mackay and Mckendrick 1988; Bazán, 2007). By killing him in this way, the rebels were accusing the local lord of taking sides with the King of Portugal in his confrontation with the Catholic Monarchs. The public execution of the commander as a traitor lent legitimacy to their aspirations to be restored to the royal patrimony (Oliva Herrer 2017). In any of these cases, it seems clear that openly challenging the lordship and channeling it through the local institutions was an undertaking that had to face a series of major difficulties, not to mention the possible consequences of a backlash from the lordship. First and foremost, it required a high degree of local community cohesion, as well as control of the local council, where interests could be divergent and co-optation of individuals by the lords was the order of the day. All of this explains why demands for open contestation would surface when there was a window of opportunity, although this should not lead us to project an

25 ARCHV, Pl. Civiles, Pérez Alonso (F), C.120, 3.

5

THE CRY FOR FREEDOM: BETWEEN RESISTANCE …

105

excessively negative view of the capacities of rural communities for both resistance and negotiation. Certainly, medieval records have not extensively documented the kinds of micro-resistance practices that J. C. Scott 1(985) defines as infrapolitics, although there is evidence of evasion in the payment of some rents. Some exceptional cases also enable us to observe the combination over time of complex resistance strategies that sought to define the limits of seigniorial domination in a more favorable way. A case in point would be the town councils of Trigueros del Valle, in Valladolid, which were places that had the status of behetrías, a weak form of lordship. In 1396, Henry III handed them over to Pero Núñez, transforming their legal status into that of solariegos, a more onerous form of lordship.26 For more than a hundred years, and using a number of strategies, they tried to reverse their situation in the judicial courts, until finally, in 1520, they rebelled openly during the Revolt of the Comuneros, stormed the castle of the lord and proclaimed that they were part of the royal patrimony (Gutierrez 1973, 142).

Calling for Justice, Becoming Part of the Community of the Realm One of the most common ways of standing up to the power of the nobility was to claim justice before the royal courts. Although there is earlier evidence of this practice, the real surge in lawsuits in the royal courts took place during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, who had made the restoration of justice the central pillar of the legitimacy of their rule, which provided arguments to initiate the lawsuits (Pérez 1995; Oliva Herrer 2004, Owens 2005). Indeed, their accession to the throne can be seen to coincide with a widespread desire to redress grievances, some of which had been silenced for generations (Monsalvo Antón 2001). Indeed, it was stated in talks held at the time that King Ferdinand would not take long to incorporate what had been seized into the Royal Crown (Oliva Herrer 2004). Through the demands raised in these lawsuits, many rural councils expressed their desire to maintain a direct relationship with the Crown and to become part of the royal patrimony. Among them were places that

26 ARCHV, Registro de ejecutorias, C 259–29. For an in-depth analysis of this conflict, see Oliva Herrer (2004).

106

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

had been seigniorialized during the years of political turbulence in the fifteenth century and which denounced this process as illegitimate, but a more revealing aspect is that places with a long tradition of seigniorial dependence searched for some kind of past relationship with the Crown in order to substantiate their aspirations to be incorporated into the royal patrimony. Thus, many lordships produced memories of their links to the royal estate, claiming situations going back a long time, with documents, sometimes preserved from three hundred years before, to substantiate their claims. These documents had been scrupulously kept, probably because they were part of the very core of the community’s identity.27 This aspiration coincides with the one that many places would manifest publicly—with a clear sense of continuity—when, in 1520, they rose up against their lords (Gutierrez 1973): they wanted to integrar la comunidad del reino (be part of the community of the realm). They were clearly able to conceive of a situation in which they were linked to the Crown without any kind of seigniorial mediation that would guarantee them greater autonomy and terminate their subordination, real or symbolic. Mere resistance had turned into contestation and the expression of their own political aspirations. The process also refers to the more complex dynamics of the construction of a centralized monarchy and its compatibility, both institutionally and discursively, with pre-existing power structures, in other words, the way in which the extension of royal power was also transforming the definitions of lordship, and how those changes were experienced by the rural world. While the question of compatibility with the institutions seems relatively straightforward, the discourse of the assertion of royal power could clash with those factors that legitimized seigniorial power: protection and justice (Oliva Herrer 2002; Bourin and Martínez Sopena 2007). The clearest demonstration of this can be seen in a lawsuit brought by the lordship of Cisneros, one of the many localities during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs that applied for incorporation into the royal patrimony. The procurador representing it argued before the Chancery that there was no need for a lord, since the monarchy itself guaranteed the defense of the town and the administration of justice.28 The referential assertion of royal power was even transforming the very meaning of

27 For a more extensive analysis of all this, Oliva Herrer (2004). 28 AGS, Cámara de Castilla, Pueblos, Cisneros, leg. 6, fol. 54.

5

THE CRY FOR FREEDOM: BETWEEN RESISTANCE …

107

lordship, which was increasingly understood as the transfer of royal jurisdiction (Quintanilla 2002; Estepa Díez 2008). This explains why those forms or indicators of seigniorial dependence with no explicit legal status other than custom were particularly questioned. The illusion, however, was soon dispelled because a centralized monarchy and lordship proved to be perfectly compatible and the widespread aspiration of many rural communities to be integrated into the royal estate was only sporadically realized (Oliva Herrer 2004; Owens 2005). The protagonists of these actions later conveyed their obvious disappointment. As one villager of Dueñas said, with reference to the period of the Catholic Monarchs, in their time there was justice but not entirely; there was no justice against the knights because the monarchs needed them for the … wars (Oliva Herrer 2004, 74). This did not prevent the royal courts of justice from continuing to function as a political sphere within which the limits of seigniorial dependence could be negotiated, and the rural councils used them to channel major demands for political autonomy, although their overriding ambition to be part of the patrimony of the Crown was, in the majority of cases, not met. These actions drew on public knowledge and memory. Their recollections were made up of a series of accounts and assessments of the political past conceived as a period when the kings of Castile had been subject to the will of the nobility. So, John II’s reign was looked back on as wasted years, when every knight seized whatever, and there was no justice, and the king was not free to dispense it (Oliva Herrer 2004, 51). This view coincides exactly with that of the reign of his successor, Henry IV, which explains the prevailing expectations when the Catholic Monarchs came to the throne. Indeed, this remembered past—collectively experienced and disseminated within the popular sectors of the population—constituted a framework of references that could be activated at any time. It explains the initial popular misgivings at the arrival of King Charles I, and the fear that he would be another king controlled by the nobility, as well as the tone of hostility to the nobility that the Revolt of the Comuneros ultimately acquired. Otherwise, memory was also full of accounts and motifs that symbolized popular resistance (Oliva Herrer 2004, 65) and could even be used to justify revolt, which we know about even though our access to the oral tradition of the past is partial and limited. These accounts circulated through informal networks that allowed for criticism and, in the right spaces, mediated by both oral and written practices, made mobilization possible.

108

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

By Way of Conclusion This chapter can be read in part as a catalog of those forms of resistance practiced by the popular classes in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, but also of practices that go further than the content of the concept, unless we broaden its meaning considerably to include all kinds of political action carried out by those who were in a position of subordination. For what it tells us is their complex understanding the world around them, their capacity to construct autonomous discourses on the nature of power and the way in which, in certain circumstances, they sought not only to resist but also to transform those same power relations. The concept of resistance proves useful for exploring issues relating to cultural categories that justified certain actions of opposition and protest, but less useful for addressing the political action of the popular classes as a whole and their capacity to advance their own political agendas. Inevitably, the center of gravity of the concept of resistance is the notion of power; it could even be argued that it is a category constructed from the perspective of power and therefore not necessarily designed to account for the set of categories and aspirations informing the actions of subordinates. This leads us ultimately to a paradox. If we abandon the notion of resistance altogether, we implicitly run the risk of naively ignoring the fact that power in past societies was unequally distributed, whereas if we cling to it completely, we may underestimate the capacity of the popular classes in those same societies for exerting influence, their possibilities for agency and even their political imagination.

References Algazi, Gadi. 2000. Pruning Peasants: Private War and Maintaining the Lords’ Peace in Late Medieval Germany. Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power and Gifts in Context, ed. Esther Cohen and Maike de Jong, 245–274. Leiden: Brill. Barros Guimaraens, Carlos. 1990. Mentalidad justiciera de los Irmandiños, siglo XV . Madrid, Siglo XXI. Barros Guimarans, Carlos. 1991. Violencia y muerte del señor en Galicia a finales de la Edad Media. Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 9: 111–148. Bazán, Iñaki. 2007. La pena de muerte en Castilla en la Edad Media. Clio & Crimen 4: 306–352. Blickle, Peter, ed. 1997. Résistance, représentation et communauté. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

5

THE CRY FOR FREEDOM: BETWEEN RESISTANCE …

109

Bourin, Monique, and Pascual Martínez Sopena, eds. 2007. Pour une anthropologie du prélévement seigneurial dans les campagnes médiévales (Xle–XIVe siècles): Les mots, les temps, les lieux. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Butler, Judith. 2015. ‘We the People’: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly”. In Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 154–192. Princeton: Harvard University Press. Certeau, Michel de. 1990. L’Invention du quotidien. Arts de Faire. Paris: Folio. Certeau, Michel de. 1994. La Prise de parole, et autres écrits politiques. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Challet, Vincent, and Jean P. Juchs. 2021. Nouveaux regards sur la violence seigneuriale: signification et sens social des «désordres» nobiliaires», Criminocorpus. http://journals.openedition.org/criminocorpus/9173. Claussen, Samuel A. 2015. Honor, Courage, and Blood: An Elite Ideology of Violence in Trastámara Castile, 1369–1474. PhD dissertation, Rochester University. Collantes de Terán, Antonio. 1974. Un requerimiento de los jurados al concejo sevillano a mediados del siglo XV. Historia, Instituciones, Documentos 1: 41– 74. Dánvila y Collado, Manuel. 1897–1899. Historia crítica y documentada las Comunidades de Castilla, 6 vol. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia. Dumolyn, Jan. 2014. Guild Politics and Political Guilds in Fourteenth-Century Flanders. In The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe. Communication and Popular Politics, ed. Jan Dumolyn, Jelle Haemers, Hipólito R. Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, 15–46. Turnhout: Brepols. Dumolyn, Jan. 2017. Espaces et lieux urbaines comme enjeux de la politique communales en Flandre Medievale. In Territoires, lieux et espaces de la révolte: XIVe–XVI e siècles, ed. Paloma Bravo and Juan C. D’Amico, 23–40. Dijon: Presses Universitaires de Dijon. Dumolyn, Jan, Jelle Haemers, Hipólito R. Oliva Herrer, and Vicent Challet, eds. 2014. The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe. Communication and Popular Politics. Turnhout: Brepols. Esteban Recio, Asunción. 1989. Palencia a fines de la Edad Media. Una ciudad de señorío episcopal. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid. Estepa Díez, Carlos. 2008. La monarquía castellana en los siglos XIII–XIV. Algunas consideraciones. Edad Media. Revista de Historia 8: 87–92. Firnhaber-Baker, Justine M. 2010. Seigneurial war and royal power in later medieval Southern France. Past and Present 208: 37–76. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Le sujet et le pouvoir. Dits et écrits II . 1976–1988, 1041–1162. Paris: Gallimard. Freedman, Paul. 1997. Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe-Approaches to the Question of Peasant Resistance. Filozofski Vestnik 18 (2): 179–211.

110

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

García Fernández, Ernesto. 1997. Las cofradías de oficios en el País Vasco durante la Edad Media. Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 15: 11–40. Genet, Jean P., Dominique Le Page, and Olivier Mattéoni, eds. 2017. Consensus et représentation. Le pouvoir symbolique en Occident (1300–1640). Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. González González, Raúl. 2014. Construir la identidad pechera: la lucha contra la exención fiscal en Astorga, León y Oviedo. Los grupos populares en la Edad media europea, ed. Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, Beatriz Arizaga Bolumburu and Jelle Haemers, 523–544. Logroño: IER. González Mínguez, César. 2006. Hermandades concejiles y orden público en Castilla y León durante la Edad Media. Clio & Crimen 3: 13–35. Gutiérrez Nieto, José I. 1973. Las comunidades como movimiento antiseñorial. La formación del bando realista en la guerra civil castellana de 1520–1521. Barcelona: Planeta. Haemers, Jelle. 2014. Filthy and Indecent Words. Insults, Defamation, and Urban Politics in the Southern Low Countries, 1300–1550. The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe. Communication and Popular Politics, ed. Jan Dumolyn, Jelle Haemers, Hipólito R. Oliva Herrer, and Vincent Challet, 247–267. Turnhout: Brepols. Hébert, Michel. 2018. La voix du peuple. Une histoire des assemblées au Moyen Âge. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lecuppre-Desjardin, Élodie, and Van Bruane, Anne L., ed. 2010. De bono Communi. The Discourse and Practice of the Common God in the European City (13th–16th c.). Turnhout: Brepols. Liddy, Christian D. 2017. Contesting the City. The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackay, Angus, and Geraldine Mckendrick. 1988. La semiología y los ritos de violencia: Sociedad y poder en la Corona de Castilla. En la España Medieval 11: 153–154. Martín Cea, Juan C. 2009. El legado de los vencidos: repercusiones de la conflictividad social bajomedieval en el régimen señorial castellano. (Paredes de Nava, siglos XIV y XV). In Castilla y el mundo feudal. Homenaje al profesor J. Valdeón, ed. María I. del Val Valdivieso and Pascual Martínez Sopena, vol. III, 145–163. Valladolid. Martínez Gil, Fernando. 2002. Furia popular: la participación de las multitudes urbanas en las comunidades de Castilla In En torno a las comunidades de Castilla actas del Congreso Internacional “Poder, Conflicto y Revuelta en la España de Carlos I” (Toledo, 16 al 20 de octubre de 2000). Toledo: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha: 209–364. Mineo, Igor. 2014. Caritas e bene comune. Storica 59: 7–55.

5

THE CRY FOR FREEDOM: BETWEEN RESISTANCE …

111

Monsalvo Antón, José M. 2001. Usurpaciones de comunales. Conflicto social y disputa legal en Ávila y su Tierra durante la Baja Edad Media. Historia Agraria: Revista de Agricultura e Historia Rural 24: 89–122. Moreta Velayos, Salvador. 1978. Malhechores feudales. Violencia, antagonismos y alianzas de clase en Castilla, siglos XIII–XIV . Madrid. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R. 2000. Libertades de behetría y ofensiva señorial a fines de la Edad Media: La señorialización de la behetría de Osorno de Yuso. Historia, Instituciones, Documentos 21: 183–204. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R. 2002. El señorío representado: La transformación en solariego de la behetría de Castromocho. Edad Media Revista de Historia 4: 265–282. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R. 2004. Justicia contra señores. El mundo rural y la política en tiempos de los Reyes Católicos. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R. 2006. Espacios de comunicación en el mundo rural a fines de la Edad Media: la escritura como contrapeso del poder. Medievalismo: Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales: 93–112. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R. 2008. Révoltes et conflits sociaux dans la Couronne de Castille au XIVe siècle. In Rivolte urbane e rivolte contadine nell’Europa del Trecento: un confront, ed. Monique Bourin, Giovanni Cherubini, and Giuliano Pinto, 72–92. Florence: Firenze University Press. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R. 2014a. ‘¡Viva el rey y la Comunidad! Arqueología del discurso político de las Comunidades. La comunidad medieval como esfera pública, ed. Hipólito R. Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn, and María A. Carmona Ruiz, 350–355. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R. 2014b. Popular Voices and Revolt. Exploring AntiNoble Uprisings on the Eve of the War of the Communities of Castile. In The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe. Communication and Popular Politics, ed. Jan Dumolyn, Jelle Haemers, Hipólito R. Oliva Herrer, and Vincent Challet, 49–62. Turnhout: Brepols. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R. 2017. De Fuenteovejuna à la Guerre des Communautés. Sur la violence populaire en Castille à la fin du Moyen Âge. Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanists—Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 34 (2): 87–106. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R. 2020. Libertad y orden político en las ciudades castellanas a fines de la Edad Media. Edad Media Revista de Historia 21: 257–290. Oliva Herrer, Hipólito R., Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn, and María A. Carmona Ruiz, eds. 2014. La comunidad Medieval como esfera pública. Universidad de Sevilla: Sevilla. Owens, Jack B. 2005. “By My Absolute Royal Authority”: Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age. Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.

112

H. R. OLIVA HERRER

Pérez, Joseph. 1995. Los Reyes católicos ante los movimientos antiseñoriales. In Violencia y conflictividad en la sociedad de la España bajomedieval, 91–99, Saragossa: Universidad de Zaragoza. Peribáñez Otero, Jesús G. 2014. Territorio, sociedad y conflictos en el tránsito hacia la modernidad. La Ribera del Duero burgalesa a finales de la Edad Media. PhD Dissertation, Valladolid. Polo Martín, Regina. 1999. El régimen municipal de la Corona de Castilla durante el reinado de los Reyes Católicos: organización, funcionamiento y ámbito de actuación. Madrid: Colex. Quintanilla, María C. 2002. El estado señorial nobiliario como espacio de poder en la Castilla bajomedieval. In Los espacios de poder en la España medieval. XII Semana de Estudios Medievales de Nájera, ed. José I. de la Iglesia, 256–261. Logroño: IER. Ruiz Martín, Felipe. 1978. Disensiones en Valladolid en vísperas de las Comunidades. Cuadernos de Investigación histórica 2: 433–457. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Solórzano Telechea, Jesús A. 2013. ‘Commo uno mas del pueblo’: acción colectiva y ambiciones políticas del común en las villas portuarias de Cantabria en la Baja Edad Media. Edad Media. Revista de Historia 14: 239–257. Spivak, Gayatri. 1985. Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography. In Subaltern Studies IV , ed. R. Guha, 330–363. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Valdeón Baruque, Julio. 1975. Los conflictos sociales en el reino de Castilla en los siglos XIV y XV . Madrid: Siglo XXI. Verdon, Laure. 1999. La voix des dominés. Communautés et seigneurie en Provence au bas Moyen Âge. Rennes. Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Val Valdivieso, María I. del. 1994. Ascenso social y lucha por el poder en las ciudades castellanas del siglo XV. En la España Medieval 17: 157–184. Watts, John. 2014. Popular Voices in England in the War of the Roses, c-1445–c 1485. In The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe. Communication and Popular Politics, ed. Jan Dumolyn, Jelle Haemers, Hipólito R. Oliva Herrer, and Vicent Challet, 107–122, Turnhout: Brepols. Wood, Andy. 2006. Subordination, Solidarity and the Limits of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire Valley c.1596–1615. Past & Present 193: 41–72. Zorzi, Andrea. 2020. Le libertà delle città italiane nel tardo medioevo: Qualche riflessione. Edad Media. Revista de Historia 21: 257–290.

CHAPTER 6

Vernacular Political Practices and Everyday Forms of Resistance: Frontier Communities in the Spanish-Portuguese Borderlands During the Seventeenth Century David Martín Marcos

Introduction In 1645, farmers from the municipality of Mértola, in the Alentejo, submitted a lawsuit to the House of Bragança concerning a number of grievances. They were angered by the ruling issued by the government in

The research for this chapter was undertaken as part of the project Contrahegemonías: comunidad, alteridad y resistencia en los márgenes del mundo ibérico (PGC: PID2021-127293NA-I00), which is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. D. Martín Marcos (B) Departamento de Historia Moderna, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_6

113

114

D. MARTÍN MARCOS

Lisbon that they had to rear horses to reinforce the Portuguese cavalry. They presented a battery of allegations that set out the diverging criteria informing, on the one hand, the political-military elite’s approach to the war against the Hispanic Monarchy (1640–1668) and, on the other, the rural communities’ concerns about the war. Amid the throes of the conflict, horses were a valuable logistic and strategic factor for the army, but for rural communities their military use was by no means progress; maintaining them was yet another burden added to the many difficulties they already faced living close to the frontier. Periodically, for example, they had to undertake guard duty in the trenches and at crossings on the Guadiana River, which meant they were left little time to attend to their own obligations. Furthermore, the region’s land was by nature lacking in pasture and sources of water, and there was little available forage. The logical conclusion was simple: if it was nearly impossible “to sustain people, it was all the harder to do so for mares”.1 In the wake of the 1640 uprising that placed Duke John of Bragança upon the throne in Lisbon, nearly three decades of war pitted the Portuguese and Spanish against one another. However, rural communities’ resistance to undertaking what was demanded of them could, as in this case, give rise to legal measures, as well as recourse to formal procedures as a means of opposing the orders imposed upon them. Nevertheless, it is clear that in both Castile and Portugal these forms of protest often extended beyond such formal channels and gave rise to unregulated mechanisms that were intended to challenge all aspects of the war. Thereby, rather than trying to resist the enemy attacks—a practice which has generally been analyzed in a highly reductive manner in order to add a national veneer to what were essentially dynastic concerns (Hespanha 1993)—the frontier communities initiated another type of resistance at an everyday level, one that was intended to challenge the political order that obliged them to either wage war or support the war effort. Given that military maneuvers and their outcomes rarely formed part of frontier communities’ ways of life and customs, defending these ways of life became the unifying element of their diverse forms of opposition. This study analyzes the conflict between Portugal and the Spanish Monarchy from this perspective, and it aims to explain how the war was understood 1 Lawsuit for grievances, supplementary information sent by the State Council of the House of Bragança to Bento Lobo da Gama. Lisbon 6 October 1645. Arquivo Histórico da Casa de Bragança, Novo Numeramento Geral, 1290.

6

VERNACULAR POLITICAL PRACTICES AND EVERYDAY …

115

in the very locations that were at the center of this military confrontation in the Iberian Peninsula. By tracing the borderland communities’ motives and actions, this analysis sheds light on how the dominant logics operated at the heart of the communities on both sides of the Raya—the name still used today to refer to the frontier between Spain and Portugal. The discussion that follows will demonstrate how what essentially underpinned their actions—often incomprehensible to those from the upper strata of society, those who monopolized the accounts about the war— was in fact a complex agenda of everyday resistance, one which historians have tended to neglect. The dynamic of opposition referred to here is, from this perspective, a good example of the dialectic concerning governance and the responses it gives rise to. A succinct synthesis of this issue is provided by the explanation Michel Foucault gave to the question “How to govern?”, one that played a structural role in the Early Modern Period: a second equally pertinent question must be asked, “How not to be governed?” (Foucault 1990). From the Early Modern Age onward—if not beforehand—there existed the conviction that preventive measures could be implemented against political plans that had an impact on everyday life. Thus, Foucault’s second question provides a sound point of departure for establishing a discourse dedicated to the idea of disobedience. Nevertheless, this is not a case of denying the existence of a central power, but rather of charting its limits (Mackay 1999), and tracing its confrontation with the preponderance of local realities in liminal zones such as the Raya. It has primarily been anthropologists who have engaged with the so-called non-privileged groups’ art of not being governed, and on occasions they have highlighted their voluntary isolation from politicaladministrative structures linked to the state (Scott 2009; Godinho 2017). Yet, on the other hand, there can be little doubt that the empty spaces that some of these individuals would have supposedly occupied also indicate a type of incapacity that besets an elite that was based far from the frontier, and was thus peripheral to the frontier, when it sought to impose its aims and sovereignty over that extensive strip of land (Magalhães 1994). It is indeed probable that both factors proved to be concomitant and provided the backdrop for a number of narratives that circulated in the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere, which told of the existence outlaws and undesirable people when referring to the frontier communities. In the villa of Alburquerque on the Raya in 1641, it was stated: “Sir, here, in this region, no justice has been administered for many years (…), and

116

D. MARTÍN MARCOS

so it has become a custom that if anybody denounces someone who has brothers or relations, they just shoot him [the informer] with two arquebuses, and this is the way things are done”.2 On the basis of testimonies such as this, in the eyes of the authorities the frontier evidently presented spaces where there was a relative lack of control, although the scale of observation could vary. Thus, it may be argued that what was perceived along the Raya were solutions with a pronounced degree of autonomy, as well as displays of neighborly solidarity, and both were key elements for sustaining the community in the face of any specific form of authority and the danger it represented. An overarching aim of this study is to bestow a preponderant space upon the local community as an entity capable of uniting in the face of external threats. Yet, the pages that follow do not deny the tensions that existed within these communities. Nor do I sidestep the issue that their members’ access to wealth was governed by internal hierarchies, which in turn gave rise to highly specific forms of resistance prompted by the community’s conflicting interests. Furthermore, what is explicitly addressed in this study is that the desire to maintain the local community and its resources was, as a rule, shared by all its members. The latter factor fostered the community’s cohesion to the extent that its participants were integrated as a community through extraordinarily resilient bonds, thereby reinforcing them against the impact of the outside world. Needless to say, this type of phenomena was not exclusive to the frontier zones analyzed here. However, the context of the war and the fact that it has a greater impact on the borderlands’ ecosystem than other internal “rearguard” zones—a factor that imposed still greater pressure on the border community—are invaluable for a deeper understanding of the choice of defense mechanisms put into practice by local communities in predominantly rural zones.

The Threats Aires Varela, canon of the cathedral of Elvas between 1637 and 1655, gave a detailed account of the threats faced by the communities along the Raya during the war in his book Sucessos que ouve nas fronteiras… (Varela 1643). The Portuguese army’s sieges of a number of fortresses in 2 Conde de Villamediana to Philip IV. Alburquerque, 25 de agosto de 1641. AGS (Archivo General de Simancas), GyM (Guerra y Marina), leg (legajo) 1401.

6

VERNACULAR POLITICAL PRACTICES AND EVERYDAY …

117

Extremadura are meticulously recorded in his treatise and his accounts of them provide a basis to question the view that for the frontier communities the early years of the war were a low-level conflict (White 2003). In fact, the trail of destruction and pillaging the Portuguese campaign left in its wake had a far-reaching impact on these regions of Extremadura, and the same can be said about the effect of many of the Spanish incursions into Portugal that were recorded at that time. Nevertheless, the idea that the bad news faced by these communities came exclusively from the other side of the frontier is mistaken. Concerning La Codosera, in the same region, it was said at that time that in the wake of Portuguese attacks it was members of the Spanish garrison posted in the village’s castle who caused the worst damage: “they burn doors and windows [and go about] cutting down trees and [doing] other types of damage”.3 Due to the effects of militarization, almost all the regions along the frontier suffered serious depopulation. In the summer of 1643, one informant lamented that the district of Badajoz had become bereft of inhabitants: its population had fled to Andalusia and avoided the efforts made to recruit them for the military units.4 In the nearly Villalba de los Barros, the population had fallen from 200 residents at the start of the war to no more than 70 in 16495 ; Fregenal de la Sierra, which then numbered 1,000 souls, had been asphyxiated by having to provide quarters for 450 soldiers in its houses.6 Further north, Ciudad Rodrigo was declared “devoid of residents” in 1668.7 Given this situation, the Bragança political propaganda was not wholly misguided when, to illustrate the demographic crisis afflicting Castile, it was declared in the Mercúrio Português that Spanish soldiers, “not content with occupying houses, obliged their owners to provide them with food, as well as gifts”.8 In Portugal, the situation was no different. In Almeida, in the province of Beira, in 1644 the locals’ complaints targeted the behavior of the soldiers whom they had to provide lodging for in their houses. It was

3 Juan de Garay to Philip IV. Badajoz, 1 August 1642. AGS, GyM, leg. 1461. 4 Diego Gallo de Avellaneda to Juan de Garay. Badajoz, 4 July 1643. AGS, GyM, leg.

1501. 5 Memorandum from Villalba de los Barros. 1649 AGS, GyM, leg. 1730. 6 Memorandum from Fregenal de la Sierra. 1649 AGS, GyM, leg. 1730. 7 Ciudad Rodrigo to the Queen Regent. Ciudad Rodrigo, 1668. AGS, GyM, leg. 2187. 8 Mercúrio Português (February 1663).

118

D. MARTÍN MARCOS

said that these soldiers did considerable damage in the vineyards, and it was deemed necessary to provide them with garrisons where they would be better controlled, otherwise ill-feeling among the local residents would grow stronger.9 At that time, the military presence in Portuguese villages and towns was proving to be highly disruptive, and in fact two years later the câmara, or municipal council, of Campo Maior, in the Alentejo, stated that providing lodging for the military was one of its greatest concerns.10 Given this situation, population figures declined in many areas due to military pressure. To tell the truth, the Raya had never been a highly populated zone, whereby it may be inferred that the conflict heightened this inherent issue. From the fourteenth century onward, the creation of cotos de homicianos—designated spaces on the edges of the Iberian kingdoms, where those condemned for theft or crimes involving bloodshed could have their sentences reduced in exchange for living there—had been one of the principal repopulation strategies intended to tackle the lack of men along the frontiers (Moreno 1974; González Jiménez 1989). The introduction of this measure indicates the difficulties that the Iberian monarchies encountered when endeavoring to effectively take possession of their territory. Likewise, this demographic trend serves to illustrate the origins of the century-long tradition of disrepute that blighted the frontier population. Due to the presence of these ex-convicts, the frontier communities were presumed to be disloyal. So, during the seventeenth century, with the war already underway, their location midway between two political entities converted them into a new source of threat. Thus, yet another burden was added to the more commonplace problems caused by the frontier’s militarization. Luís Marinho de Azevedo’s Commentarios…, which was published in 1644, contains the notorious statement on the residents of Barrancos: “finding no place in the world” they found in their hamlet a “refuge to commit misdeeds without any fear of being called to account” (Azevedo 1644, 15). Azevedo not only identified this village on the Alentejo frontier as an example of a refuge for miscreants, he also invoked the mistrust 9 Consultation undertaken by the Council for War. Lisbon, 25 August 1644. ANTT (Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo), CG (Conselho de Guerra), Consultas, mç. (maço) 4-B, nº 328. 10 Municipal council of Campo Maior to John IV. Campo Maior, 12 January 1646. ANTT, CG, Consultas, mç. 6, nº 22.

6

VERNACULAR POLITICAL PRACTICES AND EVERYDAY …

119

felt by other Portuguese toward its people due to their close ties with Castile. From Azevedo’s perspective, the combination of these two factors justified any reprisal that might be taken, and he explained that the hamlet was destroyed as soon as the war began by none less than a Portuguese military contingent.

Containing the War During the war, life along the Raya became prone to risk and although there were many who fled, it must be asked why, given the extreme conditions, others did not do likewise. Their attitude seemingly goes against the logical theory of migrating toward safer lands, but this same “logic” is based on an a priori model that relegates certain lower strata social groups to markedly passive roles. As a result, this model overlooks certain nuances of their behavior, which in fact signal the broad range of solutions that were available to the frontier communities, and that shaped their environment in a range of ways. One of these possibilities, one which sought to counter the generalist trends, underpinned the establishment of tacit agreements of nonaggression, such as that which was put into practice during the early years of the conflict in the Castilian village of Zarza la Mayor, in Extremadura, and the Portuguese village of Salvaterra do Extremo, in Beira. It was said of both places that “throughout this summer [of 1641] no act of unneighborliness was committed in either place”. The war had already sown destruction along much of the frontier,11 whereby it may be argued that strategies for containing the violence inevitably required collaboration on both sides of the Raya in order to succeed. The good ties existing between both communities, which were the result of close contact between them, was essential for maintaining access to the few available resources that could sustain farming and cattle in the territory; otherwise, this would be affected by enemy raids. Admittedly, in the late summer of 1641 Castilian troops sought to capture Salvaterra; however, this offensive seems to have been so far removed from the intentions of

11 ‘Copia de la relazión que ymbió Don Guillermo de Burgo de los lugares de que se compone el distrito de Alburquerque y de la Guarnizión que quedó en ellos [Copy of the account sent by Don Guillermo de Burgo concerning the places that make up the district of Alburquerque and the garrison that remains there]’. Alburquerque, 18 January 1641. AGS, GyM, leg. 1458.

120

D. MARTÍN MARCOS

the inhabitants of Zarza, that afterward some of the village’s residents had no qualms about going to the Portuguese village to apologize and explain that those who had ordered the attack were “outsiders” (Martín Marcos 2023, 105–109). The war could be understood as a conflict between Madrid and Lisbon, whereby it had no reason to interfere in everyday life along the frontier. Thus, battles and military operations would have to run their course, yet without altering the relationships between the peasants, and, above all, the war would not oblige the latter to take part in guard and vigilance duties, whose overarching aim, according to the military class, was not always understood by the rural population.12 However, even among the elite there were some doubts about the effectiveness of a war based on pillaging and attacks upon the rayanos. In 1643, Urbano de Ahumada, maître-de-camp in Ciudad Rodrigo, opposed the scorched earth policy that was devastating both sides of the frontier to the extent that he ordered his soldiers not to cross the Raya; he said that at the very least, they should not do so with the simple aim of pillaging and torching the land, given that he considered both the Portuguese and the Castilians to be “all vassals” of the King of Spain.13 In a certain sense, Ahumada was right. According to the government in Madrid, the Portuguese were subjects who had risen up against Spain’s monarchy, and John IV of Bragança, who had since begun ruling over Portugal, was just a rebel. However, Ahumada’s respect for the frontier communities was also based on practical considerations. He argued that if, sooner or later, the Spaniards had to enter Portugal “in order to return it to its former situation”, it would be better not to destroy everything so they would be able to find inhabitable spaces to accommodate the troops, and have access to provisions with which to feed them. This shift in tactics would also have a positive impact on Campo de Argañán, the region that extended between Ciudad Rodrigo and the frontier; it was argued that agriculture and livestock rearing would flourish there once more. In light of the foregoing discussion, it is probable that some frontier communities’ efforts to alleviate the impact of the war found occasional 12 ‘Memória que Sua Magestade mandou fazer (…) relativa à Provincia de Traz os Montes [Memorandum that His Majesty ordered to be written (…) concerning the Province of Trás-os-Montes]’ [¿1645?]. BDA (Biblioteca da Ajuda), 51-IX-7, f. 23. 13 Urbano de Ahumada to Philip IV. Ciudad Rodrigo, 19 April 1643. AGS, GyM, leg. 1503, s. f.

6

VERNACULAR POLITICAL PRACTICES AND EVERYDAY …

121

allies in military figures such as Ahumada. Nevertheless, they would have been many who criticized any close contact between the frontier communities, as well as their attempts to make effective and lasting local truces. “When the [Spanish] troops enter Portugal together, they are not to be referred to, as Your Graces do, as thieves; they enter [Portugal] to gather information, they enter to endeavor to break the enemy, they enter to distract them so attacks can be launched elsewhere, and they enter to inflict hostilities”, explained Juan de Balboa, governor of the frontiers of Seville, in a letter addressed to the municipality of El Cerro de Andévalo in 1655.14 The authorities of this frontier villa had previously argued to the governor that the raids launched on the other side of the Raya led to Portuguese reprisals that caused considerable harm.15 However, for Balboa any sign of comprehension shown toward the Portuguese was an indication of complicity. He ruled that if it was proven that any village informed the Portuguese it would be torched immediately.16 El Cerro de Andévalo was also singled out because its livestock barn had been raided by the enemy troops; however, this had resulted with the subsequent return of the stolen livestock (Almeida and Pegado 1940, 53). King John IV of Portugal had ordered the commanders of the army of the Alentejo to ensure that the animals be returned as a demonstration of respect toward the pact of non-aggression, which then governed everyday life in the Portuguese territory to the east of the Guadiana River and in the county of Niebla in Castile. Although El Cerro was a demesne villa and not located within the county’s limits, its dealings with Portuguese were undertaken through this territory and this shaped the deference it showed. Concerning this major local peace agreement, it has traditionally been stated that it was prompted by the family interests of Portugal’s ruling dynasty: the county of Niebla was one of many estates belonging to the house of Medina Sidonia, and given that the latter family was related to the Bragança dynasty through the marriage of Luisa de Guzmán and John IV, concerns of kinship would have justified this policy of non-violence (Meneses 1698, 757).

14 Juan de Balboa to the villa of El Cerro [1655]. AGS, GyM, 1876. 15 Villa of El Cerro to Juan de Balboa. Seville, 26 September 1655. AGS, GyM, leg.

1876. 16 Juan de Balboa to the villa of El Cerro cit.

122

D. MARTÍN MARCOS

It may be argued that the latter manner of understanding how the frontier was managed is far removed from the reality of everyday life. It fails to take into account how in the early years of the conflict attacks were in fact launched in this zone of the Raya. As proof of this statement, in 1643 a military contingent from Beja attacked Paymogo, a village in the county, and shortly afterward the episode was praised in the official Portuguese propaganda (Carvalho 1644, 75). Bearing in mind that the latter event discredited the Braganças’ supposed intention not to wage war along this front, it seems more insightful to devote attention to the borderland communities in order to discern the finer details of this local peace agreement, which was implemented in the wake of the latter events and remained in place almost until the end of the war. According to the account that gained currency in the region, although the king of Portugal had given orders that raids were not to be launched in the zone, he had done so at the express request of the municipal council of Serpa. Thereby, it was the frontier communities who had assumed the role of constructing a peace zone in the midst of the war, and who had communicated to the government in Lisbon the obligation that its troops had to respect what had been agreed.17 In this regard, it is significant that there is not a single copy of the supposed royal instruction in the register of decrees concerning municipal governance, whereby it may be inferred that it would have been oral tradition—as a mechanism of transmission— that was used to ensure the truce was not forgotten. In contrast to written proof, the value that the traditional rural cultures bestowed on oral testimony would also explain why the pact with the Castilians in the county of Niebla was maintained, and why the control the rayanos exerted over pillaging was based on a cross-frontier policy. For example, in 1644 cereal crops were harvested along the Raya without any fear of attacks, and it was even proposed at that time that fishing could be resumed as normal along the frontier section of the Guadiana River.18 “It is not good that there is this type of communication with the rebels, nor the suspension of fighting”, it was declared in Madrid at that time.19 17 Municipal Council of Serpa to the Count of São Lourenço. Serpa, 19 February 1649. ANTT, CG, Consultas, mç. 9, 72. 18 In letters from Philip IV. Ayamonte, 11 June and 5 March 1644, respectively. AGS, GyM, leg. 1551 and 1564. 19 Gregoria de Tapia to Maître-de-camp Francisco de Rada Alvarado. Madrid, 1 November 1644. AGS, GyM, leg. 1552.

6

VERNACULAR POLITICAL PRACTICES AND EVERYDAY …

123

However, it was not easy to alter the local communities’ commitment to this type of agreement. The truces that protected the rayanos were proving to be a useful shield, and both before and afterward there were reports of peace agreements being implemented elsewhere. These were measures that sought to protect the frontier, whereby everyday life gradually continued to the surprise of those near and afar. There was nothing like activating contingency plans capable of guaranteeing a minimum degree of stability that would permit the region’s inhabitants to resist the war’s impact.

The Other Wars On the basis of the foregoing discussion, it would be a mistake to claim that the frontier communities solely sought to avoid confrontation; instead, pillaging raids were frequently undertaken by them. Incursions into enemy territory, although prone to risk, could in fact provide their protagonists with a rapid form of acquiring wealth (White 1987). Thus, it would be wrong to view such operations simply in terms of a confrontation between the Spanish and Portuguese, as this fails to consider other relevant aspects of these local missions. Given that this type of activity also gave rise to numerous complaints from military commanders over what they considered to be rayanos meddling in the military manner of conducting warfare, it becomes clear that these raids were motivated by specific interests. Therefore, conceived as a means of survival, pillaging raids were not far removed from what was essentially signified by the non-aggression pacts. It is this interpretation that sheds light on an event that took place in September 1650; confronted by thefts that a group of individuals from the Portuguese hamlet of Soajo committed in Galicia, the military governor of the province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho thought that one of them should be hung in order to discourage the others.20 His decision was prompted by reports of disturbances that undermined stability in the region, as well as military discipline; however, for some frontier communities thefts of this kind, despite the order issued by the governor, were merely yet another opportunity provided by the war to address their needs. Thus, the rayanos’ attitudes, far from suggesting any

20 Viscount of Vila Nova de Cerveira to Pedro de Faria. Viana do Castelo, 23 September 1650. BDA, 51-VIII-32, ff. 25r-26r.

124

D. MARTÍN MARCOS

form of contradiction, demonstrate how frontier societies were so diverse that what was advantageous for some was a threat for others. Furthermore, there were rayanos who made pillaging a way of life and even gained a degree of fame. This was the case of “o Couros”, a Portuguese highwayman based in Castile, who was arrested in Portugal in the mid-1640s having terrorized the inhabitants of Castelo de Vide with his thefts for some time. He was such a sought after criminal that as part of a prisoner exchange, the Castilians freed “many prisoners and among them a captain” in return for him (Coelho 1940, 8–9). It was all a question of notoriety. Similarly, “el Manquilho”, a raider from Zarza la Mayor—the villa that had once made a pact with the Portuguese vila of Salvaterra—went on to attain a comparable reputation some years later. His death at the hands of the residents of São Pires following a frustrated attack against their hamlet in 1664, prevented a new episode of destruction along the Raya, and what is more his demise was also deemed worthy of inclusion in the pages of the Mercúrio Portuguez (May 1664) along with other celebrated military endeavors. Prior to “el Manquilho’s” death, in Zarza and other frontier villages, it was believed in Portugal that villagers were entitled to seize items from the other side of the frontier, and they could keep any booty taken without having to submit the quinto real to the royal treasury—the 20% tribute that had to be paid to the king for this type of seizure. Undoubtedly, this was a major stimulus for attacks against the Portuguese, which according to the military governor of the province of Beira deserved to be emulated.21 Not only are there indications that these attacks really took place in Castile, but also that once this practice became authorized in Portugal, the disadvantages it gave rise to soon became apparent. As the general auditor of the army of the Alentejo lamented in 1646, many soldiers undertook raids in Spanish territory, taking a couple of rayanos with them in order to conceal their activities and share out the profits without paying the quinto real.22 Needless to say, as a general rule, the approaches taken by the rayanos tended to lead to disagreements with the senior military commanders. This is what occurred in Noudar, a walled fortress that had been built 21 Consultation undertaken by the Council for War. Lisbon, 7 February 1646. ANTT, CG, Consultas, mç. 6, nº 34. 22 Consultation undertaken by the Council for War. Lisbon, 29 May 1646. ANTT, CG, Consultas, mç. 6, nº 158.

6

VERNACULAR POLITICAL PRACTICES AND EVERYDAY …

125

on an outcrop overlooking the confluence of the Ardila and Múrtiga rivers; the residents, along with some soldiers, had expelled their capitãomor, leaving the maître-de-camp of the Alentejo incapable of doing anything except replace him.23 Likewise, in the nearby villa of Encinasola, its inhabitants’ continual incursions and pillaging raids in Portugal constituted a major concern for the kingdom’s commanders in Seville. According to the asistente, Juan de Santaelices y Guevara, the city’s senior authority, the attacks tended to be led by the Infante brothers—who governed Encinasola—and they solely sought “booty”, while ignoring any wider context, as well as the decisions being adopted at a supralocal level on how to wage the war on this front.24 The form of warfare practiced in Encinasola was so out of synch with the military strategy that orders were even given to capture the Infante brothers; however, they fled in the mid-1640s, only to return at a later date at the request of the villa’s residents themselves.25 The latter two examples of this state of affairs signal, firstly, the frontier communities’ noteworthy capacity to act autonomously, independent of the central powers, and, secondly, their ability to condition the monarchies’ political-administrative structures along the Raya. In this sense, it is significant that these communities, besides from refining or altering how they operated, used the context of the war to incorporate local deep-rooted disagreements—essentially ones that had little to do with the war—into the political agenda of their respective monarchies. Thereby, communities’ disputes over the right to use land became the true motive for some attacks and also underpinned various controversies that broke out, for example, in Encinasola and Noudar, as well as in more distant places such as Serpa, Moura and Aroche. Across this whole region, there had been an extensive strip of frontier land known as La Contienda, which had been the subject of a debate about who really owned it, and this had subsequently led to agreements over its shared use; however, the war radically altered this panorama: the agreements were provisionally suspended. Later, in the early eighteenth century, when other armed

23 Consultation undertaken by the Council for War. Lisbon, 28 March 1646. ANTT, CG, Consultas, mç 6, nº 78. 24 Juan de Santelices y Guevara to Philip IV. Seville, 27 September 1644. AGS, GyM, leg. 1553. 25 Marquis of Távara to Felipe IV. Badajoz, 10 September 1647. AGS, GyM, leg. 1673.

126

D. MARTÍN MARCOS

conflicts returned to upset the equilibrium along the Raya, a considerable number of attempts were made by rayanos to exploit the tabula rasa provided by the fighting and modify the position of the markers demarcating the frontier (Herzog 2015). The ensuing nationalization of the local context that these disputes gave rise to was undoubtedly yet another result of the local communities’ agency (Sahlins 1989). Active when not indefatigable, the rayano communities’ activities demonstrated they were capable of transferring their quarrels to a supralocal level, as well as camouflaging them in order to benefit from the successive Spanish-Portuguese crises; they exploited these national disputes for their own benefit when the circumstances permitted. With this goal in mind, their strategies were also unmistakable forms of frontierization. However, this is not to say that their postures were inflexible. Likewise, confrontation with individuals living on the other side of the frontier could arise autonomously without having to make recourse to supralocal dynamics.

Contraband: Subsistence and Frontierization Subversive forms of behavior along the frontier have been the focus of a great deal of historical discussion concerning the nature of life on the Raya. A recurring theme of scholarly debate has been that boundaries arose as a form of imposition, whereby communities rebelled in retaliation. It has also been argued that the issue of contraband became “a state issue” (Castellano Castellano 1991; Melón Jiménez 2009). Undoubtedly, it was from the seventeenth century onward when the issue of smuggling and its negative impact on the public treasury began to have an increasing presence in debates on the governance of the Iberian monarchies. However, with regard to contraband it is also possible to propose that its significance for the societies that made of use it was by no means a negative one, and that it was frequently a socially accepted practice within rayano communities. For those who observed this form of behavior with alarm, the issue boiled down to the fact that the frontier’s inhabitants were “people lacking obedience”, and who had to be punished and subjugated for their contact with the enemy side26 ; however, it should be noted that 26 Francisco de Rada Alvarado to Philip IV. Ayamonte, 3 September 1645. AGS, GyM, leg. 1612.

6

VERNACULAR POLITICAL PRACTICES AND EVERYDAY …

127

this view eclipsed the existence of a whole other world. From a local perspective, contraband formed part of an ethic of subsistence and was integrated into the set of mechanisms that could ensure the survival of a community in a “legitimate” manner according to their specific practices and customs. It was supported by the so-called moral economy, as discussed by E. P. Thompson (1971), and this explains, for example, how during the war there were a considerable number of popular uprisings when the authorities on both sides of the Raya sought to arrest smugglers and tackle the issue of contraband (Martín Marcos 2023, 83–97). It is these cases that reveal the profoundly different perspectives—both from afar and up close—that shaped how this phenomenon was perceived, and these contrasting criteria are insightful when it comes to denationalizing certain attitudes upheld by popular groups. Historians’ tendency to trace indications of rayanos’ disloyalty or affinity toward the Spanish or Portuguese lends weight to cognitive biases that undermine attempts to analyze what was a much more complex reality. Therefore, it is necessary to restrict the influence that the confrontation between Portugal and the Hispanic Monarchy exerts upon discussion of the issue of contraband. Essentially, this can be done by taking an approach focused on smuggling as a basic modus vivendi in many places along the Raya. In my view, this is the most insightful interpretative approach for tracing the activities of frontier communities during the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the rayano communities’ subversion of the frontier does not mean they were denying its existence as a structure. Nor does it demonstrate that, in reality, they formed part of a—single and homogenous—community which was threatened by political boundaries that had been traced from the centers of government. Through contraband and other forms of relationship, borderland communities could seem to be, as was denounced in Portugal in 1641, “closely related and committed to these ties” with Castile27 ; however, these same communities undoubtedly continued to acknowledge the otherness of the people these activities brought them into contact with. The proximity between the communities on both sides of the frontier, which could be a cause of concern for the authorities, was instead, on an everyday basis, an inevitable source of distinctions, ones that could not be discerned from afar; those from inland regions saw only a dangerous and suspicious uniformity that was the result 27 Count of Óbidos to John IV Faro, 25 November 1641. ANTT, CG, Consultas, mç. 1, nº 32.

128

D. MARTÍN MARCOS

of the diffuse frontier (Braga 1997). As a result, contiguity and stable relationships, along with the use of or dispute over resources, provided self-sufficient stimuli for the construction of discourses concerning a territory in which confrontation with one’s neighbor was independent of the postulates of specific political identities. Contraband was a powerful tool of frontierization in the popular sphere, and it demonstrated that any violation of the frontier, rather than eliminating its symbolic weight, reinforced the stereotypes of those on both sides who took part in smuggling. The smugglers’ likely recourse to this preconception is certainly difficult to reconstruct, and this is above all due to the predominance of orality in this type of rural society, yet this does not mean it did not exist. Field work undertaken in frontier zones with clear evidence of contraband activity suggests that even in the twentieth century, at a local level, differentiation between the two sides of a frontier took forms other than the postulates of state-nation, and the pejorative use of ethnonyms was commonplace in the context of intra-community disputes (Rovisco 2013). On the other hand, it comes as no surprise that those who could obtain a greater return from the frontier boundary—albeit without respecting it—would be those most interested in preserving it. It is revealing that on occasions, the Raya’s communities did not declare themselves to be openly against the imposition of fiscal measures on illicit trading activities in this region. Instead, they sought to condition how these measures would be applied. At the end of the war over Portugal’s separation from Spain, one official found out this for himself; when revising the Spanish custom houses to the south of the Guadiana River, he found that the jueces, or supervisors, who oversaw them were usually local individuals and could even be illiterate. As a result, errors in the account books of these dry ports proved a constant issue.28 However, if, on the one hand, the customs infrastructure was not watertight, on the other hand, it is fairly likely that the rayanos’s inexperience was not what it seemed, and their supposed ignorance was an astute and obstinate manner of avoiding any control being exerted over their activities.

28 Jerónimo de Arredondo to Mariana of Austria. Badajoz, 30 June 1668. AGS, Consejo y Juntas de Hacienda, leg. 1239.

6

VERNACULAR POLITICAL PRACTICES AND EVERYDAY …

129

Conclusion It is a well-established cliche to claim that the war led to an episode of material and moral devastation that ravaged the villages along the Raya. In conjunction with the scholarly discourses that have viewed the separation of Portugal as the cleavage of one empire from another, and the rupture of the geographical and cultural space classical authors once identified as Hispania, which thus gave rise to a set of fluid categories (Valladares 1998, 13), the view of the war as devastation seems to have shaped one of the three major levels of interpretation of this conflict. Although the central years of the seventeenth century were a time of immense difficulty for the Spanish-Portuguese frontier communities, it did not cease to be a period during which these same communities were capable of deploying a range of instruments to guarantee their survival. Although the war was a threat, it was also a scenario that foregrounded these communities’ resilient character. Within this context, the community practices of exploiting agricultural and cattle rearing resources, non-aggression pacts and subversive types of interaction such as contraband, as well resorting to armed raids, were forms of behavior that, even with an armed conflict as a backdrop, essentially met these communities’ needs for subsistence. Reading these forms of behavior exclusively in terms of the conflict between Spaniards and Portuguese can give rise to an overly biased framework, one that eclipses a territory that was as remarkably plural as the Raya was. There, the communities’ everyday forms of resistance were in reality an outcome of pursuing their own interests, whereby it is probable that this scenario, when studied with a close attention to detail, as undertaken here, can shed light on a local frontier which was rife with daily trans-frontier interaction, and that this was central to the life of those living on either side of it. Although the processes of frontierization activated by the rayanos’ are difficult to perceive in a written register, they left an indelible mark on how the Raya was articulated; it is these processes that can provide proof of the existence of a consensual vernacular politics, one that was often implemented effectively, and which gave rise to significant forms of resilience. On the basis of the foregoing discussion, it is this vernacular politics that prompted the rayanos’ defense of the local, and it fueled their diverse forms of resistance.

130

D. MARTÍN MARCOS

References Almeida, Manuel Lopes d’, and César Pegado (Eds.), 1940. Livro 2º do Registo das Cartas dos Governadores das Armas (1653–1657). Coimbra: Biblioteca da Universidade. Azevedo, Luís Marinho de. 1644. Commentarios dos valerosos feitos que os portuguezes obraram em defena do seu Rey, & patria na guerra de Alentejo. Lisbon: Lourenço de Anveres. Braga, Isabel Drumond. 1997. A fronteira difusa entre Trás-os-Montes e a Galiza ou as povoações místicas de Santiago, Rubiães e Meãos. Brigantia 3–4: 3–13. Carvalho, António Moniz de. 1644. Francia interessada con Portvgal en la separación de Castilla con noticias de los intereses comunes de los Príncipes, y Estados de Europa. Paris: Migvel Blageart. Castellano Castellano, Juan L. 1991. Fiscalidad y contrabando en el pensamiento de la Ilustración. In La burguesía de negocios en la Andalucía de la Ilustración, ed. Antonio García Baquero Cádiz, 225–235. Cádiz: Diputación de Cádiz. Coelho, Possidonio M. Laranjo (ed.). 1940. Cartas dos governadores da província do Alentejo a el-Rey D. João IV . Vol. I. Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da História. Foucault, Michel. 1990. Qu’est-ce que la critique? [Critique et Aufklärung ]. Bulletin de la Societé Française de Philosophie 84 (2): 35–63. Godinho, Paula. 2017. O futuro é para sempre: experiência, expectativa e práticas possíveis. Lisbon and Santiago de Compostela: Letra Livre-Através. González Jiménez, Manuel. 1989. Poblamiento y frontera en Andalucía (S.S. XIII–XV). Revista de la Facultad de Geografía e Historia 4: 207–224. Herzog, Tamar. 2015. Frontiers of Possession. Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hespanha, António M. 1993. A «Restauração» Portuguesa nos Capítulos das Cortes de Lisboa de 1641. Penélope. Fazer e desfazer a História 9 (10): 29–62. Mackay, Ruth. 1999. The Limits of Royal Authority. Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castile. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Magalhães, Joaquim Romero. 1994. Fronteras y espacios: Portugal y Castilla. In Las relaciones entre Portugal y Castilla en la época de los descubrimientos y la expansión colonial, ed. Ana M. Carabias Torres, 91–101. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Martín Marcos, David. 2023. People of the Iberian Borderlands. Community and Conflict Between Spain and Portugal, 1640–1715. New York and London: Routledge. Melón Jiménez, Miguel Á. 2009. Una cuestión de Estado: la persecución del contrabando durante los reinados de Carlos III y Carlos IV. Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 39 (2): 83–103.

6

VERNACULAR POLITICAL PRACTICES AND EVERYDAY …

131

Meneses, Luís de. 1698. Historia de Portugal restaurado offerecida ao serenissimo príncipe Dom Pedro Nosso Senhor, Vol. II. Lisbon: Miguel Deslandes. Moreno, Humberto Baquero. 1974. Elementos para o estudo dos Coutos de homiziados instituídos pela Coroa. Portugaliae Historica II: 13–63. Rovisco, Eduarda. 2013. Não queirais ser castelhana. Fronteira e contrabando na Raia da Beira Baixa. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. Sahlins, Peter. 1989. Boundaries. The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Los Angeles: University of California. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed. An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Thompson, Edward P. 1971. The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century. Past & Present 50: 76–136. Valladares, Rafael. 1998. La Guerra olvidada. Ciudad Rodrigo y su comarca durante la Restauración (1640–1668). Ciudad Rodrigo: Centro de Estudios Mirobrigenses. Varela, Aires. 1643. Sucessos que ouve nas fronteiras de Elvas, Olivença, Campo Mayor, & Ouguela, o segundo anno da recuperação de Portugal, que começou em primeiro de Dezembro de 1641. & fez fim em o ultimo de Novembro de 1642. Lisbon: Domingos Lopes Rosa. White, Lorraine. 1987. Las actitudes civiles hacia la guerra en Extremadura. Revista de Estudios Extremeños 43 (2): 487–502. White, Lorraine. 2003. Estrategia geográfica y fracaso en la reconquista de Portugal por la Monarquía Hispánica, 1640–1668. Studia Historica. Historia Moderna 25: 59–91.

CHAPTER 7

Resistance, Opposition and Accommodation to the Portuguese in Sixteenth-Century Asia Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto

The Muslims of Malibar lived a happy and prosperous life on account of the benevolence of their rulers, their regard to the time-honoured customs, and their kindness. But the Muslims undervalued the blessings of Allah, and transgressed and disobeyed. So Allah set on them the people of Purtukal, who were Christians. They oppressed the Muslims, corrupted them and committed all kinds of ugly and infamous deeds, too bad to be described. The Portuguese scoffed at the Muslims and held them up to

This work is funded by national funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (https://doi.org/10.54499/DL57/2016/CP1 453/CT0016). It also had the support of CHAM (NOVA FCSH / UAc), through the strategic project sponsored by FCT (UIDB/04666/2020). P. J. de Sousa Pinto (B) CHAM-Centro de Humanidades, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_7

133

134

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

scorn. (…) They plundered their properties, burnt their cities and mosques, seized their ships and trod down the Quran and other books under their feet and burnt them away. (Nainar 1942, 60)

Introduction The chronicle Tuhfat-al-Mujahidin, written circa 1580 by the Keralese Muslim, Zain al-Din Ma’bari, is a short historical treatise that recounts the impact of the arrival of the Portuguese in India. The landfall of the Portuguese is presented as a divine punishment for the sins committed by the Muslims, and the deeds of the Portuguese are invariably described as a succession of acts of violence and treachery. The treatise begins with an appeal for jihad, and Zain al-Din Ma’bari clearly aimed to glorify the military feats his contemporaries committed against the European intruders, whereby his history recounts a narrative of resistance to foreign oppression. Four centuries later historians of post-colonial India have returned to Zain al-Din Ma’bari’s narrative of the Indian rulers and communities’ opposition and resistance to the Portuguese. In his book Portuguese Pirates and Indian Seamen (later revised to The Kunjalis, Admirals of Calicut ) published in 1955, O. K. Nambiar describes the “hundred years’ naval war fought between India and Portugal in the sixteenth century and the heroic part played by the Kunjalis, the admirals of Calicut” (Nambiar 1963, vii). Further east, in the Malay-Indonesian region, the Sejarah Melayu (or “Malay Annals”), a compilation of narratives on the origins of the Sultanate of Malacca written during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, describes the bravery shown by Sultan Mahmud Syah when defending the city against Portuguese aggression in 1511 (Brown 1952, 167–171). In 1958, around the same time that O. K. Nambiar wrote his work, the Malay author Harun Aminurrashid published Panglima Awang, a historical novel about the individual generally known as “Henry of Malacca”, the Malay servant of Ferdinand Magellan who accompanied him on his expedition and about whom very little is known. Aminurrashid’s literary vision presents Henry as Commander (Panglima) Awang, a Malaccan military leader who heroically resisted the Portuguese and was captured and imprisoned by them. Following the epic voyage around the world, Awang returned to his native land, where he reunited with his companions and revived his struggle against the Portuguese oppressors

7

RESISTANCE, OPPOSITION AND ACCOMMODATION …

135

(Aminurrashid 2011). Panglima Awang is both a modern adaptation of canonical works of Malay literature, as well as an identity-nuanced vision of the Federation of Malaya, which had just gained independence from the British empire (Hooker 1999; Koster 2009). The two episodes are prescient examples for how the establishment of the Portuguese empire in Asia prompted active resistance across various regions, and how it was recorded in contemporary local chronicles and later integrated into post-colonial narratives. In the second half of the twentieth century, these narratives of resistance provided historians with a means of contradicting the colonial historiographical models, which relegated Asians to a merely passive or secondary role. Nevertheless, this subject continues to raise several questions concerning how the Asian world reacted to the arrival and establishment of the Portuguese. Assuming that the political and economic control effectively exercised by the Portuguese in Asia was limited and ephemeral and that the realities of the Portuguese empire in Asia were instead far more heterogeneous, fluid and complex than has traditionally been argued, one can ask how the Asian world replied to the challenges posed by the Portuguese. Was there a generalized reaction? Or, on the contrary, did local and regional dynamics give rise to a range of distinctive responses with a greater or lesser degree of reluctance, to the presence of another player operating in the cosmopolitan and diversified scenario of maritime Asia? In this regard, it is necessary to establish a deeper understanding of a process of adjustment and accommodation—which was in fact mutual—that seemingly became widespread, albeit with certain exceptions, over the course of the sixteenth century. Indeed, following the impact of initial encounters marked by a greater degree of aggression, the Portuguese empire definitively emerged as a type of network distributed across an array of strategic positions throughout maritime Asia; the defining characteristic of this network was adapting to and accommodating the local conditions and contexts. The Estado da Índia gradually became an Asian power, yet without ceasing to be a European Imperial undertaking. As Jorge Flores has stated, “‘Portuguese Asia’ constituted another – European, Catholic – stratum of life in the complex world of the Indian Ocean, contributing in turn to the urban, mercantile, social and religious networks that characterized the region around 1500 and beyond” (Flores 2014, 35). The response of the Asian world, which ranged from welcome to outright hostility, depended on the specific spaces and contexts involved

136

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

and on the variety of actions used by the Portuguese to impose restrictions, to limit the freedom of movement for both trade and politics, in addition to employing arbitrariness and violence. The reaction was therefore adaptive and very diverse, which in turn reflected Asian diversity and heterogeneity. There were cases of accommodation, tension and, frequently, rejection within a broader framework that also encompassed a mutual process of learning and adjustment, and the pages that follow examine a number of traces and episodes of this multifaceted phenomenon.

Unexpected Visitors In the late fifteenth century, the Indian Ocean was a diverse and complex space. Both locally and regionally, maritime connections were undoubtedly more dominant than land routes. From the Swahili Coast to the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago, powerful merchant networks guaranteed the exchange and circulation of merchandise, and this gave rise to flourishing port cities that functioned independently of the major continental political structures. As Geneviève Bouchon and Denys Lombard have stated, “the Indian Ocean coastline did not give the appearance of a maritime front of continental states, but rather of a group of fairly autonomous ports. This was because, either the ports and their territory formed independent kingdoms (Hormuz, Kilwa, Malacca), or the merchant communities there had complete freedom in the oceanic trade (India-Malay world)” (Bouchon and Lombard 1987: 48). The Asian world, dynamized by commercial activity, was ideally suited to the aspirations of the Portuguese, and they had little difficultly adapting to its port and merchant environments. Maritime freedom was the norm. However, the idea that prior to the sixteenth century the Indian Ocean was a region of complete freedom, and that it was the Portuguese who introduced the first control over trading routes, as well as the practice of capturing ships and merchandise, is incorrect and has recently been contested (Prange 2013; Thomaz 2011, 267–276). The latter debate intersects with another still larger issue: is it correct to use European concepts such as piracy in Asian contexts (Reid 2010; Prange 2011)? Despite being unprecedented, the arrival of Portuguese ships along the Indian coast in 1498 was a discreet affair. In contrast to the impressive Chinese expeditions that had landed there almost a century earlier, the fleet that inaugurated the first maritime link between Europe and Asia

7

RESISTANCE, OPPOSITION AND ACCOMMODATION …

137

was a modest one (Ptak 1989). The Portuguese were poorly informed about Asia, and they harbored strange ideas and beliefs. They were convinced that India was peopled by Christians. They also considered that the Hindu religion was a degenerate form of Christianity, and they viewed Muslims with great mistrust and hostility. In addition, they had not arrived ready for trade—essentially, the acquisition of spices—in accordance with the customary practices of the Indian Ocean. The merchandise Vasco da Gama had brought with him (coarse fabrics, metal basins, olive oil and honey), and which he tried to offer to the Zamorin of Calicut were completely out of place in the Asian trading context. Despite the diplomatic rhetoric of presenting the wealth and power of the King of Portugal, Vasco da Gama was virtually humiliated before the court of the Zamorin, the latter stated that “he had told him that he came from a very rich kingdom, and yet had brought him nothing” (Ravenstein 1898, 62). The Portuguese rapidly became aware of the far more complex reality that operated in India. One of the most important factors was the scale, power and degree of organization among the Muslim communities, who dominated maritime trade, and, in particular, the spice trade. The spread of Islam had been peaceful, maritime and mercantile, unlike in the inland regions of the Indian subcontinent. There were Muslim communities, which had originated in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, as well as local ones, which had grown and prospered over the centuries; for example, the Mappila in Kerala, the Nawayath along the Kanara Coast and the Labbai along the Coromandel Coast, among others. These communities were deeply rooted within their wider local communities and had solid ties to those who wielded political power—generally Hindus—and they formed strategic alliances that enabled them to produce, distribute and export merchandise in a manner that benefited all involved (Bouchon 1999, 36–39; Wink 2020, 114–116). The Portuguese also became aware of another fundamental factor: there was a high degree of political fragmentation and rivalry between the diverse cities and states. The most significant example was the situation encountered in Kerala. The hostility shown by Calicut was rapidly compensated by the welcome they received from a rival power, Kochi, which saw the new arrivals as a powerful strategic ally. Therefore, it was in Kochi that the Portuguese took on supplies of pepper and established a base for operations, up until Goa emerged as capital of the Estado da Índia. In Kochi, they acquired essential knowledge about the norms,

138

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

practices and know-how of Asian trade, or rather, what Jean Aubin has termed their “apprenticeship about India” (Aubin 1987). India’s political fragmentation enabled the Portuguese to penetrate local trade networks and political contexts, which permitted them to efficiently deploy two basic tools for building an empire: war and diplomacy. The Portuguese used these to establish both a commercial advantage and political pacts.

War and Diplomacy Around the same time that Zain al-Din Ma’bari wrote his treatise and recounted the display of Indian resistance to Portuguese aggression, an anonymous author elaborated an extensive account of Portugal’s territories and trading interests in Asia. Dedicated to Portugal’s new king, Philip I (r. 1581–1598), this text provides a straightforward description of how the Portuguese established themselves in India and elsewhere: their intentions were strictly pacific and commercial, and the King of Portugal solely sought to establish “peace and amity” with all the Asian rulers. Force was only used when peaceful trade with the Portuguese was rejected. Therefore, responsibility for the outbreak of war lay with the Muslims who dominated the spice trade and sought to expel the Portuguese fleets, and it was considered that they were “forming alliances and confederations in order to destroy us, and demanding and telling the kings and princes of those regions not to welcome us in their ports, nor engaging in any form of agreement, neither peace nor amity with us, as was done in particular with the great Zamorin of Calicut” (Luz 1952, 110). Needless to say, this narrative, as well as Zain al-Din Ma’bari’s, was written a posteriori. What really happened was far more complex. The truth is that in a number of regions the Portuguese did not seek to simply obtain access to spices; instead, they sought to impose a monopoly. Furthermore, they demanded the exclusion of Muslim communities from the trade routes, which was an unprecedented demand and, according to the customary practices and patterns of Indian commerce, unacceptable. This strategy was a fundamental piece of far grander plan masterminded by King Manuel (r. 1495–1521), who sought to supply Europe with spices via the Cape Route, while destroying the traditional trade routes via the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. Systematically attacking Muslim shipping, blockading the Red Sea and cutting off the flow of spices would bring ruin upon Egypt, the principal intermediary state for this trade. From then on, and adhering to the same plan, it would be possible to

7

RESISTANCE, OPPOSITION AND ACCOMMODATION …

139

bring about the collapse of the Muslim world and the reconquest of the Holy Land through an alliance between Christian Ethiopia—Prester John was avidly sought after—and a union of Christian forces under the aegis of King Manuel, who believed he had been chosen by God for this purpose (Thomaz 1990; Marcocci 2012, 151–175). Thus, war was inevitable. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam has stated, Portugal’s strategy in Asia, at least in the early years of the sixteenth century was “to trade where possible, to make war where necessary” (Subrahmanyam 2012, 65). The Portuguese ships wielded a terrifying power as they had experienced crews, better artillery and impressive fire power. The Portuguese introduced new naval warfare tactics into the Indian Ocean, such as exploiting the prevailing wind to gain advantage when attacking, and also using long distance cannon fire, which avoided drawing close to the enemy and the risk of being boarded. As a result, the Portuguese fleets were unquestionably superior to the Asian navies, and they would be for some time to come (Rodrigues 2004, 198–200). This advantage became a special asset for resolving political disputes as well as obtaining trading agreements. However, neither the Portuguese ships’ technical advantage, nor the efficiency of their artillery gave them absolute superiority in Asian theaters of war. On the contrary, what unfolded was a process of mutual apprenticeship and adaptation, which led to the gradual erosion of Portugal’s military and naval advantage over the course of the sixteenth century (Jesus 2021). Diplomacy was an essential instrument for the foundation and management of Portugal’s Estado da Índia. For a range of motives, this has not been studied by either colonial or post-colonial historians; the former were overly focused on the “rise and fall” of the Portuguese empire, while the latter have considered diplomacy a minor aspect of European domination in Asia. Recently, it is a subject that has attracted increasing attention, although its complexity continues to raise difficulties in terms of comprehension. Zoltán Biedermann has commented: “… this complexity is still often not acknowledged by historians, particularly in countries where the imprint left by British scholarship dating back to times of Anglo-Portuguese colonial rivalry retains influence under the surface” (Biedermann 2014, 9). The strategy pursued by the Portuguese consisted in general terms of the simultaneous or alternate use of diplomacy and war. Typically, they sought favorable conditions for trade and authorization to establish a factory, and this agreement would be sealed with a declaration of

140

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

“vassalage” to the King of Portugal, who offered his protection and a commitment to “amity”. On occasions, submission to the Portuguese king required the payment of a tribute referred to as páreas, which continued a medieval custom. Its value could vary greatly; in some cases, this tribute was a mere display of fidelity with a symbolic value, which might be paid in commodities, while in others a heavy economic burden was imposed, and this could be exacerbated by imposing punishments in the event of any reluctance or refusal to pay. For example, Hormuz had its páreas increased on various occasions following its subjugation in 1508, and this tribute reached an overwhelming sum in the wake of the 1521 revolt (Couto 2002, 196–206). The first known treaty was signed with Calicut in December 1503 and it stipulated that permission was given for the Portuguese to build a fortress, likewise jurisdiction was granted to the Portuguese over their own people. Furthermore, it incorporated a strategic alliance with Kochi and Kannur, and, finally, the concession of advantageous conditions for all merchandise shipped aboard Portuguese carracks (Thomaz 2006). Over the years that followed, numerous diplomatic initiatives were implemented. They were highly heterogeneous and depended on the specific underlying aim, the status of the Portuguese in the place in question, the local context, and above all the ruler they were addressed to. The Governor Afonso de Albuquerque (1509–1515), aside from being an astute strategist and implacable soldier, was also a competent diplomat: “he soon sensed that there could be no conquest without negotiation, on the one hand, and no diplomacy without palpable military pressure, on the other” (Biedermann 2014, 16). Aside from making contact with city ports, more prudent and complex strategies were required to forge relations with major continental powers, win their political approval and even establish strategic alliances. The most evident example involved the diplomatic contacts made in India with the Hindu empire of Vijayanagara, whose power reached its peak during the reign of Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509–1529), and with whom there was a bond of anti-Islamic solidarity, above all, with regard to Bijapur, which the Portuguese defeated in Goa in 1510 (Rubiés 2004, 164–200). Another significant case involved Safavid Persia, which despite being Muslim was hostile toward Mamluk Egypt and, above all, the Ottoman expansion into the Persian Gulf. To exploit these scenarios Albuquerque devised a diplomatic strategy intended to forge contacts and possible political alliances (Cunha 2011, 16–18).

7

RESISTANCE, OPPOSITION AND ACCOMMODATION …

141

Shock and Reaction The arrival of the Portuguese in Asian waters did not prompt immediate hostility. Instead, the reaction depended, principally, on whether their activities clashed with any pre-existing interests. Communities and cities that were directly prejudiced resisted and this could be either sporadic or sustained. The clearest examples are Calicut and the Sultanates of Bijapur and Gujarat. Nevertheless, others preferred to show compliance, or even offered to collaborate, such as Malindi, Kochi and Kannur. During the governorship of the first viceroy, Dom Francisco de Almeida (1505–1509), the Portuguese managed to build several fortresses and defeat outbreaks of resistance along the East African coast (Kilwa, Sofala, Mombasa), as well as in the Arabian Peninsula (Socotra) and the Persian Gulf (Hormuz), and also down the Indian coast (Anjediva). Once the impact of their presence extended beyond local dynamics and attained a much vaster scale, a more robust and organized reaction came from other regions, and, above all, from Mamluk Egypt. This sultanate had managed to impose a state monopoly on the trade in spices and luxury Asian commodities intended for Europe since the reign of al-Ashraf Barsbay (r. 1422–1437) (Petry 2014, 30). The Portuguese attempts to block the Red Sea, along with their systematic attack on Muslim shipping placed Egypt’s privileged position in danger and rapidly caused alarm in Cairo, as well as in Venice, its commercial partner and political ally. Sultan al-Ghuri (r. 1501–1516) initially pursued a diplomatic strategy. In 1504, a year in which the blockade of the Red Sea proved particularly effective and when the Portuguese won an important victory against Calicut, the sultan sent an emissary to Venice and Rome. He threatened to destroy the Holy Sepulchre and sacred Christian sites in Jerusalem, unless the Portuguese halted their attacks in the Indian Ocean immediately (Thomaz 1994, 179–180; Barros 2019, 720–721). Faced by the failure of this initiative, which the Portuguese king merely understood as a sign of the enemy’s weakness and reinforced his determination, the sultan and his Venetian allies moved into action. Work began on constructing a fleet of ships, financed by Venice and equipped with artillery provided by the Ottoman Empire, which was intended to definitively expel the Portuguese from the Indian Ocean. Having been prepared with some difficulty, the fleet departed from Suez, crossed the Red Sea and entered the Indian Ocean in 1507 under the command of Amir Husain al-Kurdi, Mamluk governor of Jeddah, and

142

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

Malik Ayyaz, governor of Diu. The alliance brought together Venice, Egypt, Gujarat, Calicut and the principal Muslim communities. The first attack was launched in 1508, near Chaul and the Portuguese were defeated. Nevertheless, in February the following year the Egyptian fleet was completely defeated at a naval battle near Diu, which definitively confounded the Egyptian Sultanate’s aspirations to expel the Portuguese. Efforts to build a new fleet were irremediably lost in August 1510, when the stocks of timber for its construction were destroyed in a naval raid made by the Order of Malta on the Bay of Ayas (today Yumurtalık) (Aubin 2006, 476–479). The failure of the Egyptian naval endeavor accelerated a geopolitical transformation with a major impact: weakened and ruined, the Mamluk sultanate succumbed to the expansion of the Ottomans, whom they had sought military aid from. In January 1517, Cairo was captured by the forces of Selim I. As a result, a new and formidable enemy of the Portuguese arose, one that had menaced Europe for a century, controlled the eastern Mediterranean and now had a gateway to the Indian Ocean. The Ottoman threat loomed over the Estado da Índia for some time. In the 1530s, the Ottomans obtained control of Basra and gained access to the Persian Gulf as part of their conflict with Safavid Persia. Diu, the principal Portuguese fortress in Gujarat, was attacked twice to provide support for an offensive launched by local sultan. Subsequently, Muscat was then attacked, and Hormuz besieged (Couto 2018). Nevertheless, hostility between the Ottomans and Portuguese gradually declined and was eventually transformed into an undeclared truce, a modus vivendi according to which the Portuguese ceased any further attacks in the Red Sea, while the Ottoman forces abandoned their endeavors to expel them from the Indian Ocean. Diplomatic contacts were then established, and emissaries exchanged with the intention of signing a peace treaty. Indeed, proposals were even negotiated for the Portuguese supplying pepper in exchange for deliveries of wheat. However, a formal agreement was never reached (Özbaran 1990; Thomaz 1995, 482–484). Following the death of Manuel I in 1521, the Portuguese trade was, one could say, “liberalized”, instead of being exclusively undertaken by Crown factors and vessels: the system of customs houses was reformed, the policy of low customs duties was reinforced, and a far-reaching debate took place concerning how to reform commercial activity in India (Marcocci 2012, 281–287; Thomaz 1998, 48–88). In fact, the whole

7

RESISTANCE, OPPOSITION AND ACCOMMODATION …

143

system was corroded from within, as official orders were often ignored or circumvented. An illustrative example is provided by the clove and nutmeg trade from East Indonesia, which was allegedly a royal monopoly that shipped these spices directly to Europe; in fact, only a small part of these goods was exported in this manner. With the complicity of Portuguese officers, most cargoes were sold in Hormuz to Muslim merchants, who redistributed this merchandise across the Middle East (Lobato 2009, 299–300).

Beyond Sri Lanka The Portuguese Asian empire was built in an uneven manner in accordance with orders issued from Lisbon and through adaptation to local contexts. In the western regions of the Indian Ocean, due to the Mamluk, and subsequently, Ottoman opposition, as well as the resilience of the Muslim communities of Gujarat and Kerala, the Portuguese built a network of fortresses, factories and bases to support their ships; this endeavor was underpinned by their intention to control, channel or tax trade routes, above all those devoted to spices. As a result, it was in this region that the capital of the Estado da Índia was based—firstly, in Kochi, later in Goa—and it was where the Portuguese concentrated their naval forces. Further east, in the Bay of Bengal, in Southeast Asia and in the China Sea, the situation was different. There was no visible military threat, and Islam, besides being a recent phenomenon, was not dominant. Nor did the Portuguese pursue conquests or any systematic policy of a naval blockade. Any intentions they may have had of controlling trade routes and obtaining exclusive access to merchandise were pursued briefly and with little efficacy. The Portuguese presence in this region was sparse, predominately informal and their fortresses were restricted to one in Malacca, along with smaller forts in the Moluccas. Malacca provides a key case study. The Portuguese first landed there in 1509, having arrived in a fleet sent directly from Lisbon. According to Malay sources, the inhabitants thought the Portuguese were “white Bengalis” and showed a keen interest in their ships, garments and physical features (Brown 1952, 157). As was the case in Calicut the initial reception was easy-going, but relations swiftly soured. Two years later, Afonso de Albuquerque took the city by force. Having fallen to the Portuguese, Malacca was an isolated city, dependent on external support and far from

144

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

the principal Portuguese centers of power. Therefore, a prudent policy was pursued, which had diplomacy as its principal tool. Efforts were made to establish good relationships with the neighboring powers, as well as keep the city open to trade with the region’s range of mercantile communities, including Muslim ones. Malacca adhered or adapted to the essential characteristics of the Malay sultanate, and applied low customs duties and respected port practices, as well as the autonomy of the diverse trading communities (Pinto 2013, 69–73). This strategy was only partially successful. On the one hand, it permitted the Portuguese to reconnoitre Southeast Asia and the South China Sea through various partnerships with Asian merchants. Traveling aboard their junks the Portuguese learnt about navigational routes, practices and commodities. They were also able to obtain credit and valuable information. The Portuguese visited and established contact with a network of kingdoms and port cities in Southeast Asia, from Sumatra to Timor, as well as Siam and the kingdoms of Lower Burma, and even China, which they reached in 1513. One of their principal goals was the islands that cultivated spices, above all the Moluccas (cloves) and the Banda Islands (nutmeg), which they reached in 1512. Nevertheless, the conquest of Malacca prompted immediate opposition. Sultan Mahmud Syah, defeated but not conquered, retreated from the city. His successors settled definitively in Johor, located on the tip of the Malay Peninsula. As a result, the sultan’s political prestige remained intact in the neighboring sultanates and Muslim communities, and subsequently grew stronger with Johor fighting the Portuguese for control over the Strait of Malacca. Until the mid-sixteenth century, hostility between the two powers was a dominant concern. The outcome of the Portuguese offensives was identical to the capture of Malacca: they obtained military victories but were incapable of vanquishing the enemy. Invariably, the Sultans of Johor would abandon their seat of power and re-establish their authority elsewhere, thanks to their region-wide network of support (Andaya 1975, 20–24). The 1530s witnessed the emergence of a new and formidable enemy in the northwest of Sumatra. The Sultanate of Aceh began a process of territorial expansion and established itself as a growing regional power. One of the structural elements of this process was the reorganization of Muslim trading networks—above all the Gujarati merchants who were expelled from Malacca in 1511—with regard to the supply of spices for the Red Sea routes. The sultan’s forces invariably received logistical and

7

RESISTANCE, OPPOSITION AND ACCOMMODATION …

145

naval support from the Ottoman Empire. The fleets from Aceh attacked Malacca in 1537, which was the opening episode of a long, albeit intermittent, conflict, one that extended throughout the period of Portuguese control over Malacca (Boxer 1969). Johor and Aceh are the most evident examples of opposition to the power of the Portuguese, as well as resistance to their attempts to control trade in the Strait of Malacca. Paradoxically, there are also examples of collaboration, which arose due to the enmity between these two Asian powers. Aceh’s expansion constituted a threat for several kingdoms in the region and, in particular, for Johor, which inevitably sought Portuguese assistance to resist this new challenge. Malacca did the same on the occasions that it was attacked by Aceh. Therefore, resistance to the Portuguese coexisted with a degree of accommodation to their presence, which could also take the form of open collaboration depending on the strategic interests of the various regional powers. The strategy the Portuguese tended to use in the Indian Ocean region —diplomacy combined with the use of force to exploit the rivalries and tensions between local powers—could not be applied in contexts dominated by stronger powers. This was above all the case with China. It was probably the support by Chinese merchants when the Portuguese captured Malacca that prompted them to swiftly make contact with the Middle Kingdom. It was first made in 1513, and a number of trading voyages followed, which were prepared in Malacca. In 1517, Canton (Guangzhou) received an embassy, which made its way to the capital in accordance with Chinese diplomatic etiquette. A series of misfortunes led to its failure and the imprisonment of all its members. A decisive factor that led to this outcome was the presence of a delegation from the Sultan of Malacca at the Ming court. As representatives of a tributary kingdom of China, the sultan’s envoys sought protection from the Portuguese, who were labeled as pirates, as well as the recapture of Malacca (Loureiro 2000, 87–88; Pelliot 1948). Over the years that followed, the imperial navy inflicted a series of defeats on Portuguese fleets along the coast of Guangdong, despite the superiority of their European artillery (Brook 2013; Andrade 2016, 124–131). The Folang-ji—the name used to refer to the Portuguese in China until the mid-sixteenth century— were then banished from China by an imperial edict. So, for two decades the Portuguese lived in a semi-clandestine situation, embroiled in the merchant/pirate groups that dominated the South China Sea. It was not until the 1550s that the provincial authorities of Guangdong authorized

146

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

the presence of the Portuguese, which led to them establishing themselves in the Macau Peninsula (Chin 2009; Ptak 1992). Macau is a good example of the way in which the status of “foreigner”, linked to its informal nature and to the complete absence of any type of military threat, slotted perfectly into place with the Asian reality. The city swiftly became an important trading outpost in the South China Sea, and it went on to play an intermediary role for trade with Japan, which the Portuguese had recently reached. By acting as intermediaries, the Portuguese proved both useful and convenient for the Chinese authorities and their Japanese counterparts. This was further strengthened by the hostile relationship between the two countries and the proliferation of corsairs and pirates—known as Wako or Wokou—networks, which had dominated the Chinese and Korean coasts and the neighboring sea for over a century. The Portuguese presence in the Japanese Archipelago provided another striking example of pragmatism and mutual accommodation: in a country divided by unceasing civil war, the Portuguese were well received by various daimy¯ o or feudal lords, who exploited—and disputed among one another—the economic potential and military knowledge of the new arrivals for their own benefit; as had been the case in Siam, Burma, Bengal and later in China Portuguese firearms were sought after by those in power and the status of the Portuguese as “foreigners” provided further support for their role as commercial and diplomatic agents. In 1569, ¯ the Japanese daimy¯ o Omura Sumitada granted the port of Nagasaki to the Portuguese and specifically to Jesuit missionaries. Trade with Macau, which permitted the flow of Japanese silver and other products to China, became the most lucrative trading connection throughout the Estado da Índia.

The Religious Factor The Portuguese empire in Asia is generally associated with its religious dimensions, but missionary activity did not evolve until later on in the sixteenth century. The attitude of tolerance, or at least, a relative official indifference concerning the religious matters gradually changed with the emergence of a new ideological context underscored by a proselytism based on the precepts of Catholic Reform. The principal impulse for this new approach to the empire resulted from the missionary efforts of the Jesuits, who rapidly became the principal instrument of Catholic

7

RESISTANCE, OPPOSITION AND ACCOMMODATION …

147

proselytism. Other religious orders, namely the Franciscans and the Dominicans, rapidly followed the trail blazed by the Society of Jesus, creating their own colleges and missions across Asia. The creation of the tribunal of the Holy Office in Goa, during the governorship of Viceroy Dom Constantino de Bragança (1558–1561), set the stage for a new era of religious repression. The Holy Office was particularly active in India, through the creation of a range of mechanisms for social conditioning and the vigilant control of Catholic orthodoxy (Aranha 2014, 289–291). In the inland territories of Goa, the first signs of intolerance emerged earlier in the 1540s, when the first systematic destruction of Hindu temples took place in conjunction with initiatives of land expropriation that favored Christian converts; these measures were pursued throughout the following decades along with the expulsion of Brahmins from the Portuguese administration and the implementation of other measures to encourage conversion to Christianity (Xavier 2022, 75–83; Vila-Santa 2019). This trend provoked growing opposition from the non-Christian communities, especially in the villages of the Salcete region. Here, the resistance of the local communities to the pressure of the Portuguese authorities led to several episodes of open revolt, the most significant of which occurred in 1583, when several Jesuit missionaries were killed in Cuncolim (Xavier 2022, 244–268). The repressive drive was not limited to the practices and beliefs of gentiles and neophytes, and it rapidly incorporated the so-called St Thomas Christians, in other words, the Syrian-Malabar Church. Throughout the second half of the century, there was growing pressure to subject them to the obedience of Rome and impose a Latin rite instead of their traditional practices, which were considered to be “superstitious rites”. Their definitive integration was declared in 1599 by the Archbishop of Goa, Dom Frei Aleixo de Meneses, at the Synod of Diamper (Županov 2005, 87–110). This new scenario significantly altered the profile of the Portuguese presence in Asia, and it led to an overlaying, on occasions a fusion, between politics, commerce and Catholic evangelization, which until then had remained relatively separate in the eyes of Asian communities and their leaders. On many occasions this meant that to accept or engage in trade with the Portuguese, or else to establish a political alliance— for example against a common enemy—involved accepting the presence and activity of the missionaries, in other words, a combination of politics, business and proselytism.

148

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

What took place in the Moluccas in the second half of the century was paradigmatic of this new pattern. The Portuguese were initially well received in Ternate, the principal clove growing center and the region’s hegemonic power, but they swiftly became ensnared in the sultanate’s internal struggles. Incapable of understanding the balances and subtleties of local politics, the captains and missionaries attempted to impose their will, their norms and even their candidates for succession to the sultanate, which led to division and hostility. At the time Islam was expanding across the region, and it led to Portuguese involvement in local struggles, frequently becoming a clash between Catholicism and Islam. This reached its peak in 1570, when the Sultan of Ternate was assassinated by the Portuguese, which unleashed a widespread uprising that led to their expulsion shortly afterwards (Lobato 1999, 110–121). At this point, the religious divide between Islam and Christianity— which camouflaged political tensions and economic competition—underwent a further escalation. This time the conflict was not limited to a specific local or regional context, but it spread all over maritime Asia, from the Middle East to the Eastern Indonesia. This process was sparked off by the battle of Talikota, in January 1565, and it resulted in the defeat and definitive fall of the Hindu empire of Vijayanagara at the hands of a confederacy of Muslim sultanates. Their victory echoed across the Indian Ocean and led to an alliance being formed between diverse Asian powers. More than Islamic solidarity, this alliance was prompted by a shared anti-Portuguese sentiment, as it drew support from several Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms in Kerala and Sri Lanka (Thomaz 1995, 484– 487). Over the course of the following years, various sieges and attacks were launched on Portuguese strongholds—Chaliyam by Calicut, Chaul by Ahmednagar, Goa by Bijapur and Malacca by Aceh—in addition to unrest in the Moluccas and widespread hostility from Javanese communities toward Portuguese shipping in Southeast Asia (Pinto 2012, 82–85, 137–141). The case of Aceh is especially significant because it reveals the impact and articulation of anti-Portuguese structures on an unprecedented scale. Aceh’s offensive included artillery and logistical support from the Ottoman Empire, which reinforced their diplomatic prestige in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago (Casale 2005, 49–56). Despite being short-lived, this anti-Portuguese league provided the greatest threat to the Estado da Índia during the second half of the century, and it was the most significant example of a union of Asian powers against the Portuguese.

7

RESISTANCE, OPPOSITION AND ACCOMMODATION …

149

A final and significant development in the late sixteenth century concerns the emergence of a new model of expanding the empire that had been absent from official Portuguese strategies, that of territorial conquest. Possibly influenced by the success of the Spanish colonization in the New World and in the Philippines, the Portuguese outlined various projects of military conquest and territorial domination in various parts of the Indian Ocean. The most important case was Sri Lanka where the model was effectively executed. In 1597, the Portuguese carried out a policy of territorial conquest after the death of the King of Kotte, who had bequeathed his throne to the King of Portugal after converting to Catholicism. This process led to widespread opposition against the Portuguese, both from the Buddhist elites and from the various political powers on the island, and ultimately led to the failure of the Portuguese military campaigns after a crushing defeat in 1638 (Biedermann 2018).

Conclusions Historicizing the resistance(s) to the Portuguese Asian empire in the sixteenth century requires us to consider various dimensions and contexts that emerged from the very processes of the formation and consolidation of the empire. These processes unfolded differently in space and time, with different goals and strategies and, of course, different degrees of political, social and economic pressure as well. If, on the one hand, the Portuguese tried to adapt to the existing trade practices and structures in the Indian Ocean, it is also true that they caused clashes and ruptures, imposed tribute by force, disrupted trade routes and arbitrarily demanded favorable conditions and exclusive rights. Building the empire therefore involved the combined or random use of diplomacy and war, persuasion and threat, peaceful trade and plunder. The reaction of the Asian world to the intervention of the new power was neither widespread nor uniform. In the Red Sea, Gujarat and Kerala, the impact of the arrival of the Portuguese was significant, but political fragmentation meant that each port city had to compromise and try to resist or adapt to the newcomers as best it could. Some quickly adapted to the new balance of power, accepting the conditions imposed by the Portuguese and signing trade treaties and political alliances. Others, however, sought an organized reaction, which emerged under the leadership of Mamluk Egypt and the Muslim merchant networks. Later, this role fell to the Ottoman Empire, which brought together the various

150

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

forces opposed to the Portuguese empire. A particularly aggressive antiPortuguese dynamic emerged in the 1560s, when various Islamic powers, stretching from India to Java, acted in concert to attack Portuguese fortresses and armadas. Regional differentiation is a fundamental dimension to be taken into account. In the Bay of Bengal, Southeast Asia and the Far East, the reaction to the Portuguese presence was much milder, precisely because the Portuguese generally accommodated themselves to local structures and, with a few exceptions, did not try to impose oppressive conditions, obtain commercial exclusivity or enforce their demands with the force of their artillery or naval power. In some situations where this was attempted, it failed miserably, as in Guangdong, but in others, as in Malacca, it succeeded. Less tension did not mean, however, that it did not exist, as the vitality of rival Muslim trading networks based in emerging powers such as Johor and Aceh demonstrated. Religion was a fundamental factor of resistance to the Portuguese empire, firstly because of the growing religious intolerance and oppressive imposition of Catholicism in the territories under its administration, particularly in Goa. Moreover, in the second half of the century, the mixture of trade, political pressure and religious proselytism became common practice in various parts of the empire, creating new cleavages and giving rise to new resistances and episodes of rejection and hostility, such as in the Moluccas and Sri Lanka.

References Andaya, Leonard Y. 1975. The Kingdom of Johor, 1641–1728. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Andrade, Tonio. 2016. The Gunpowder Age. China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Aminurrashid, Harun. 2011. Panglima Awang. Kuala Lumpur: Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad. Aranha, Paolo. 2014. Early Modern Asian Catholicism and European Colonialism: Dominance, Hegemony and Native Agency in the Portuguese Estado da Índia. In Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity, ed. Klaus Koschorke and Adrian Hermann, 285–306. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Aubin, Jean. 1987. L’apprentissage de l’Inde. Cochin 1503–1504. Moyen Orient & Océan Indien, XVIeme-XIXeme Siècles 4: 1–96.

7

RESISTANCE, OPPOSITION AND ACCOMMODATION …

151

Aubis, Jean. 2006. Le Latin et l’Astrolabe III. Études inédites sur le règne de D. Manuel, 1495–1521. Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian. Barros, M. Filomena Lopes de. 2019. In the Name of the Minorities: Lisbon’s Muslims as Emissaries from the King of Portugal to the Sultan of Egypt. In Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies, ed. Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche, 711–724. Leiden: Brill. Biedermann, Zoltán. 2014. Negotiating Empire: Portuguese Diplomacy in Asia in the Sixteenth Century. In The Portuguese in Sri Lanka and South India— Studies in the History of Diplomacy, Empire and Trade, 1500–1650, 7–32. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Biedermann, Zoltan. 2018. El problema de la territorialidad en el estudio de la conquista de Ceilán. Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 48 (2): 101–120. Bouchon, Geneviève. 1999. Les Musulmans du Kerala à l’époque de la découverte portugaise. In Inde Découverte, Inde Retrouvée, 1498–1630, Études d’histoire indo-portugaise, 23–75. Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian. Bouchon, Geneviève, and Denys Lombard. 1987. The Indian Ocean in the Fifteenth Century. In India and the Indian Ocean 1500–1800, ed. Ashin Das Gupta and Michael N. Pearson, 46–70. Calcutta: Oxford University Press. Boxer, Charles R. 1969. A Note on Portuguese Reactions to the Revival of the Red Sea Spice Trade and the Rise of Atjeh, 1540–1600. Journal of Southeast Asian History 10 (3): 415–428. Brook, Timothy. 2013. Trade and Conflict in the South China Sea: Portugal and China, 1514–23. In A Global History of Trade and Conflict Since 1500, ed. Lucia Cappolaro and Francine McKenzie, 20–37. Palgrave MacMillan. Brown, C. C. (ed.). 1952. Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals/A Translation of Raffles Ms. 18. Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 25 (2/3): 5–276. Casale, Giancarlo. 2005. ’His Majesty’s Servant Lufti’—The Career of a Previously Unknown Sixteenth-century Ottoman Envoy to Sumatra Based on an Account of His Travels from the Topkapi Palace Archives. Turcica 37: 43–81. Chin, James. 2009. The Portuguese on the Zhejiang and Fujian Coast Prior to 1550 as Seen from Contemporary Chinese Private Records. In Macau During the Ming Dynasty, ed. Luís F. Barreto, 119–137. Lisbon: Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau. Couto, Dejanirah. 2002. Réactions anti-portugaises dans le Golfe Persique (1521–1529). In Aquém e Além da Taprobana, ed. Luís F. Thomaz, 191–221. Lisbon: Centro de História de Além-Mar. Couto, Dejanirah. 2018. The Decline of an Exceptional Career: Piri Re’is, the Siege of Hormuz (1552) and que Question of Basra. In Uma relação entre Portugal e a Turquia em torno de Piri Reis, ed. José dos Santos Maia e Luís Couto Soares, 127–165. Lisbon: Academia de Marinha.

152

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

Cunha, João Teles e. 2011. The Eye of the Beholder: The Creation of a Portuguese Discourse on Safavid Iran. In Portugal, the Persian Gulf and Safavid Persia, ed. Rudi Matthee and Jorge Flores, 11–50. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. Flores, Jorge. 2014. Floating Franks: The Portuguese and Their Empire as Seen from Early Modern Asia. In The Routledge History of Western Empires, ed. Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie, 33–45. London: Routledge. Hooker, Virginia M. 1999. History, Literature and Social Change: Harun Aminurrashid’s Independence Novel ‘Panglima Awang’. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 72 (2) (277): 5–16. Jesus, Roger Lee de. 2021. Reassessing Portuguese Military Superiority in Asia in the Sixteenth Century—The Case of Land Warfare. In The First World Empire. Portugal, War and Military Revolution, ed. Hélder Carvalhal, André Murteira and Roger Lee de Jesus, 152–166. London: Routledge. Koster, Gijs L. 2009. A Voyage to Freedom. Indonesia and the Malay World 37 (109): 375–396. Lobato, Manuel. 1999. Política e Comércio dos Portugueses na Insulíndia. Malaca e as Molucas de 1575 a 1605. Macau: Instituto Português do Oriente. Lobato, Manuel. 2009. Pájaro sin alas. Acción política de Andrés de Urdaneta y su descripción geo-antropológica de las islas de Maluco. In Andrés de Urdaneta: un hombre moderno, ed. Susana Truchuelo García. Ordizia: Ayuntamiento de Ordizia. Loureiro, Rui M. 2000. Fidalgos, Missionários e Mandarins. Portugal e a China no século XVI . Lisbon: Fundação Oriente. Luz, Francisco Mendes da. (ed.). 1952. Livro das Cidades e Fortalezas que a Coroa de Portugal tem nas Partes da Índia. Boletim da Biblioteca da Universidade de Coimbra 21: 1–147. Marcocci, Giuseppe. 2012. A Consciência de um Império. Portugal e o seu Mundo (sécs. XV–XVII). Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra. Nainar, S. Muhammad Husayn (ed.). 1942. Tuhfat-al-Mujahidin- an historical work in the Arabic language. Madras: University of Madras. Nambiar, Odayamadath K. 1963. The Kunjalis, Admirals of Calicut. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Özbaran, Salih. 1990. An imperial letter from Süleyman the magnificent to Dom João III concerning proposals for an Ottoman-Portuguese armistice. Portuguese Studies 6: 24–31. Pelliot, Paul. 1948. Le Ho¯˘ja et le Sayyid H . usain de l’Histoire des Ming. T’oung ˘ Pao II 38 (2/5): 81–292. Petry, Carl F. 2014. The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pinto, Paulo J. de Sousa. 2012. The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka, 1575– 1619: Power, Trade and Diplomacy. Singapore: NUS Press.

7

RESISTANCE, OPPOSITION AND ACCOMMODATION …

153

Pinto, Paulo J, de Sousa. 2013. Share and Strife—The Strait of Melaka and the Portuguese (16th and 17th Centuries). Orientierungen Themenheft 2013, 64–85. Prange, Sebastian R. 2011. A Trade of no Dishonor: Piracy, Commerce, and Community in the Western Indian Ocean, Twelfth to Sixteenth Century. American Historical Review 116 (5): 1269–1293. Prange, Sebastian R. 2013. The Contested Sea: Regimes of Maritime Violence in the Pre-Modern Indian Ocean. Journal of Early Modem History 17: 9–33. Ptak, Roderich. 1989. China and Calicut in the Early Ming Period: Envoys and Tribute Embassies. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1: 81–111. Ptak, Roderich. 1992. Early Sino-Portuguese relations up to the Foundation of Macao. Mare Liberum 4: 289–297. Ravenstein, Ernest G. (ed.). 1898. A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama. London: Hakluyt Society. Reid, Anthony. 2010. Violence at Sea: Unpacking “Piracy” in the Claims of States over Asian Seas. In Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers, ed. Robert J. Antony, 15–26. Hong Kong University Press. Rodrigues, Vítor L. Gaspar. 2004. A Guerra na Índia. In Nova História Militar de Portugal, II, ed. António M. Hespanha, 198–223. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. 2004. Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance. South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2012. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700—A Political and Economic History. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Blackwell [1st ed., London: Longman, 1993]. Thomaz, Luís Filipe F. R. 1990. L’idée Imperiale Manueline. In La Découverte, le Portugal et l’Europe. Actes du Colloque, ed. Jean Aubin, 35–103. Paris: Foundation Calouste Gulbenkian. Thomaz, Luís Filipe F. R,. 1994. Os Portugueses e a rota das especiarias. In De Ceuta a Timor, 169–187. Lisbon: Difel. Thomaz, Luís Filipe F. R. 1995. A Crise de 1565–1575 na História do Estado da Índia. Mare Liberum 5: 481–519. Thomaz, Luís Filipe F. R.. 1998. A Questão da Pimenta em meados do século XVI . Lisbon: Centro de Estudos dos Povos e Culturas de Expressão Portuguesa. Thomaz, Luís Filipe F. R.. 2006. De Pace & Fœdere Inter Reges Portugalliæ & Calechut: a armada dos Albuquerques e o Primeiro Tratado Internacional Firmado pelos Portugueses na Índia. Humanitas 58: 309–332. Thomaz, Luís Filipe F. R.. 2011. The Portuguese control over Indian Ocean and the cartaz system. In Os Mares do Oriente. A Presença Portuguesa circa 1507 . Lisbon: Academia de Marinha.

154

P. J.

DE

SOUSA PINTO

Vila-Santa, Nuno. 2019. Resistência e contemporização: tensões políticas na implementação da Contra-Reforma no Estado da Índia (1557–1580). In Martinho Lutero e Portugal: diálogos, tensões e impactos, ed. Edite Alberto, Ana Paula Avelar, Margarida Lalanda and Paulo Lopes, 153–172. Lisbon: CHAM/Edições Humus. Wink, André. 2020. The Making of the Indo-Islamic World: c. 700–1800 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Xavier, Ângela Barreto. 2022. Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Županov, Ines G. 2005. Missionary Tropics. The Catholic Frontier in India (I6thI7th Centuries). Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

PART III

Roles: The Shaping of Identities Through Resistance in the Seventeenth Century

CHAPTER 8

The Triumph of Temperance: Power, Negotiation, and Resistance in Royal Entries in Portugal, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries André Godinho

At first glance, the solemn entries of Portuguese royalty may not seem a fertile field for reflection on resistance, even in its most institutionalized modalities. We are dealing with practices that can be considered rituals, a category associated with a set of assumptions that are not very compatible with the theme of this volume. There is an extensive genealogy of anthropological and historiographical reflections that associate this type of act with the inculcation of consensual values, hierarchies, and forms of power. According to these perspectives, rituals materialize and sacralize the social order, shaping the political perceptions of participants through symbolic devices (Turner 1974; Geertz 1983; Durkheim 2008). Even

A. Godinho (B) Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_8

157

158

A. GODINHO

“rites of inversion”, so called because they stage chaos and hierarchical disorder, are read as escape valves that ultimately reinforce temporarily subverted power relations (Kertzer 1989, 131–132). Nevertheless, there are several authors who have highlighted the potential of rituals as sites of expression of dissent and resistance to authority. David Kertzer speaks of “rites of rebellion” that are more than mere moments for venting frustrations, proving themselves capable of shifting the horizons of participants’ political expectations and providing an emotional charge to opposition to established power (Kertzer 1989, 151–173). Nicholas Dirks emphasizes the fragility of rituals in the face of boycotts, appropriations, and disputes, arguing that their importance in externalizing authority can become a motive for conflict rather than consensus, opening up ample space for resistance against the reproduction of order (Dirks 1994). Catherine Bell suggests that the ritualized structuring of power relations is a process necessarily dependent on the external consent of participants and open to internal resistance (Bell 1992, 314–315). As far as historiography is concerned, studies devoted to public rituals of the Ancien Regime have not underestimated their subversive potential. In the case of royal entries, the particular characteristics of their script made them propitious moments for dialogue between the institutions that governed the host cities and the visiting king. Alfredo Chamorro Esteban locates the two conceptions of power that met: on the one hand, the privileges of the municipalities materialized by local festive traditions, and on the other, the courtly politics that privileged displays of the king’s trust and proximity as signs of political might (Esteban 2017, 320–321). A confrontation was generated between the preservation of the municipal dignity projected in the traditional script of the entries and the attempts of alteration and manipulation by the kings and their retinues. In this context, Edward Muir characterizes the formalities of the receptions as a strategy of symbolic defense of the cities’ autonomy against the visitor’s interference in the local order (Muir 1997, 264–265; see also Persson 2019). At the same time, complex and ambiguous political discourses were developed through gestures, enunciations, and iconography, in which local institutions and guilds presented their concerns and demands to the king (for the Portuguese case, see Alves n.d.; Cardim 2001; Megiani 2004; Fernández-González 2021, 97–136). In light of this panorama, we will attempt to problematize the subversive potential of three fronts of tension and dispute that can be observed

8

THE TRIUMPH OF TEMPERANCE: POWER, NEGOTIATION …

159

in the sources that have left us traces of the royal entries celebrated in Portugal. First, we will consider what the documents that circulated behind the scenes have to tell us about the debates concerning the cost of organizing these events. Next, we will analyze the terms of dialogue between the host cities and the visiting kings during the entries themselves, giving an account of the performance that was expected of the kings in the face of discourses presented on these occasions. Finally, by confronting the official accounts with other types of textual traces of the rituals under study, we will attempt to surprise disagreements about the meaning of these practices, paying particular attention to the role of popular participation in establishing the meaning of the entries.

Expense, Service, and Negotiation Royal entries were rituals that marked the first visit of a king or consort to a city. The usual script included a reception at the gates by the municipal authorities, followed by a tour through the streets to the royal residence, with an obligatory stop at the mother church so that the local clergy could pay homage to the newcomer. These occasions implicated a series of expenses for their promoters, namely the host cities and their various guilds and institutions, which were responsible for covering the costs. Gates, streets, and buildings had to be cleaned, repaired, and decorated as splendidly as possible; revelers, bulls, and fireworks had to be procured and prepared; and the representatives of the local authorities had to be properly attired. The documentation that circulated during the preparations provides us with a glimpse of the power relations between the crown and the cities, allowing us to outline the terms of the commitment made by the hosts to the visitor, highlighting possible strategies of negotiation and denial on the part of some financiers, and identifying the political narratives mobilized in the debate. During the preparations for the reception of Maria Sophia of Neuburg in Lisbon in 1687, the city officials declared that the occasion called for “the necessary radiance, through which the Senate wishes to show the zeal with which it serves Your Majesty” (Oliveira 1896, 9: 2). In several instances, the officials speak of the “care that an occasion of such consideration requires”, stating that nothing was enough to solemnize it and that expenses were a necessity (Oliveira 1887–1894, 2: 449, 6: 593, 8: 445). After all, as it was said in 1682, the entries marked an event “of the

160

A. GODINHO

greatest importance and prestige for this Crown” and should be adorned “with sumptuous and bright pomp, for which great expenditures must be made” (Oliveira 1894, 8: 446). These practices were framed as service to the king: a duty of ostentatious spending by subjects who should show loyalty to their sovereign and help materialize his greatness, as well as a form of gratitude for the favors granted. It is a narrative clearly stated in the correspondence about Philip III’s reception in Lisbon, in 1619, with the king expecting the city to proceed in such a way as to demonstrate the esteem of its inhabitants for the favor shown by his presence (Oliveira 1887, 2: 449). This framework made it difficult to resist the costs implicated in the staging of entries. During the preparations for the reception of the Duke of Savoy in 1682 (which would eventually be canceled), Lisbon’s French merchants tried to avoid financing a triumphal arch that would adorn the doors of the city’s mother church (Oliveira 1894, 8: 448–449). It was an expense that the community had already assumed for the entry of Queen Maria Francisca of Savoy in 1666 (Xavier et al. 1996, 53). This time, the plaintiffs claimed that they were unable to cover the cost of the work, since it was the most sumptuous among its counterparts, and the city council proposed that the task be given to Lisbon’s Portuguese merchants, who would accept it “obligingly” out of “pleasure” and “joy”. The Crown did not accept the resolution and forced the French to pay for the arch: apparently, a mere complaint about the immensity of the burden was not enough to guarantee its relocation. The imbalance among financiers could be a stronger argument, appealing to justice as a criterion for contributions: in 1687, the Spanish consul in Lisbon convinced the king to exempt him from the construction of an arch on the grounds that, as the only one of his “nation” in the city, he would have to bear the entire cost of the building. On the same occasion, the Florentine merchants used a similar argument. Since there were only two houses in the city, they were able to reach a compromise: they avoided financing an arch on their own, but had to contribute to the structure for which the other Italians were responsible (Oliveira 1896, 9: 7–10). These negotiations contrast with the rhetoric adopted in the allegorical discourses presented during the entries. Take the case of the reenactment of the judgment of Paris staged by Lisbon’s goldsmiths in 1687: the Trojan prince, who appeared “dressed in rustic clothes” and holding a staff, offered Maria Sophia of Neuburg a golden apple coveted by

8

THE TRIUMPH OF TEMPERANCE: POWER, NEGOTIATION …

161

Pallas, Juno, and Venus. The account states that Paris symbolized the “mystical body” of the goldsmiths and that what he gave to the queen was “the height of affection, the richness of will & the matter of the profession” (Coutinho 1687, 8). According to the text, the goldsmiths’ investment in the arch combined all the qualities of a virtuous offering: it celebrated without interest, implied a great sacrifice of money, and represented a voluntary and affectionate commitment (Coutinho 1687, 10–12). A discourse far removed from the financial concerns that had circulated behind the scenes during the previous weeks, but one that can be perfectly situated within the logic of seeking favor with the monarchy through lavish spending in its praise. Expectations of compensation are clearly evident in mentions of the entries during negotiations between the cities and the sovereign after their execution. In 1669, a request for financial support to the Crown from the Lisbon city council recalls the 22,000 cruzados spent on the entry of Maria Francisca of Savoy, “because it was understood that on this occasion these expenses were indispensable” (Oliveira 1894, 7: 136– 140). We find an even clearer case in a letter from the representatives of the craftsmen of Lisbon, in response to a voluntary contribution toward the relief of the “states of India” decreed in 1623. The document refers to the entry of Philip III in the city in 1619, saying that “since everything is so tight, there is no room for the city and its people to spend more, what was done for the entry of His Majesty in this kingdom was enough, with spending and hosting feasts, that have never been done to any other monarchy in the world, without any compensation to the city or its people” (Oliveira 1888, 3: 59–60).

Formality, Performance, and Petition In 1581, the reputational implications of the union of the Iberian Crowns and their overseas territories were one of the recurring themes of Philip II’s entry into Lisbon: the motto of the occasion was well summarized by Cabrera de Córdoba when he stated that the king “had achieved what he had sought, since there was no more to desire, and his reputation had spread throughout the entire globe” (Córdoba 1619, 1129). Amid the celebration, a dissonant note appeared, as Laura FernándezGonzález has already pointed out. In one of the ephemeral buildings, Desire could be seen in the form of a man leaning over the world, “who, wanted to eat it with his mouth without tiring”. Next to the figure, and

162

A. GODINHO

pouring a jug of water over his head, appeared an effigy of Temperance on a triumphal chariot, crushing “Kings and Philosophers who allowed themselves to be vanquished by their vices and desires” beneath its wheels (Fernández-González 2021, 134–135, Guerreiro 1581, f. 50v– 51v). Perhaps the boldest element of the composition was a flag with the arms of Portugal that the figure was flying: the image seemed to allude to the abnegation that Philip II should demonstrate toward his new subjects at the expense of his whims, encouraging a virtuous and thoughtful government that was able to overcome the tests of Time and Gossip, characters that flanked the panel. This is a very clear example of the type of claims that could be presented on these occasions, with the guarantee that they would reach the king and the public that gathered to watch him pass by, and would then be disseminated in written testimonies. Although this dynamic was present in most of these ceremonies in Portugal, as has been suggested by authors such as George Kubler, Ana Maria Alves, and Ana Paula Torres Megiani, the entries celebrated during the journeys of Philip II and Philip III to the kingdom were marked by political tensions and the experience of distance from power, giving rise to especially visible statements of local concerns, expectations, and agendas vis-à-vis the royal visitors (Alves n.d., 50–67; Kubler 1972, 110–112; Megiani 2004, 132–133. See also Olival 2006, 225–257; Bouza 1998). From 1640 onward, the sedentarization of the court in Lisbon resulted in a concentration of these rituals in the city and in their association with the arrival of the new consorts to the kingdom. At the same time, there was a growing closeness between the officials of the municipality and the court. These two factors have been shown to loosen the vindicative tone of “bottom-up” political communication on these occasions (Alves n.d., 68–72; Muir 1997, 242). Having made this note, let us begin by sketching the discursive environment that framed claims presented at royal entries, considering, from the outset, the reflections of Maurice Bloch on formality. According to the author, the fundamental distinction between the enunciations uttered in a ritual context and those that govern everyday political life is the predictability and limitation of language: the link to a script sustained by a liturgical order that was framed by referents outside the discretion of the participants, such as custom, legal order, or divine will (Bloch 1964, 59–67). During royal entries, as is well known, this commitment to a preestablished program removed the relations between the kings and the

8

THE TRIUMPH OF TEMPERANCE: POWER, NEGOTIATION …

163

host cities from their time and placed them in the ahistorical context of the ritual, consecrating the ancestral liberties and privileges of the local authorities and delegitimizing voluntaristic actions of the crown (Cardim 2001, 102–104). The conjunctural play of forces is substituted by a theatricality that puts into play the transcendent ideal of the relationship, recovering the foundational contract between the parties through a supposedly timeless staging. A sequence of gestures and enunciations was imposed, which, as proposed by Don Handelman, endowed the entry with a complexity and self-organization capable of differentiating themselves from the surrounding social and political experience, and thus reframing the participants’ status on its own terms (Handelman 2005). The materialization of the performance was not an irenic issue, and there are many instances of doubts, conflicts, and appropriations. In the framework identified by Alfredo Charmorro Esteban, some of these negotiations centered on disagreements between local authorities and the royal court, opposing the customs that reproduced the idealized relationship between the parties to extravagant interferences that disrupted the traditional staging (Chamorro Esteban 2017, 320–321). For example, the Duke of Uceda’s presentation on horseback during Philip III’s journey provoked strong reactions among the Portuguese, who argued that the tradition in the kingdom dictated that only the king should ride during the receptions, with the nobility participating on foot (Soares 1953, 421; Olival 2006, 247; Megiani 2004, 179–180). The complaints were eventually successful, and the duke did not enter Lisbon on horseback. Faced with subjects jealous of their prerogatives, and given the public dimension of these acts and the debates surrounding them, a king who did not want to risk an open rupture had to submit to the performance dictated by custom: returning to Handelman, he was forced to protect the selforganization of a ritual that would reframe him in terms beyond his direct control. The central moment of the entry was the handing over of the keys to the city, usually held in front of its gates. This was a highly codified interaction: the official in charge of the gesture clarified its meaning with an invariable proclamation: taking as an example the one uttered at the entry of Philip III into Évora in 1619, “This city offers Your Majesty’s service the keys to all its gates, as well as to the loyal hearts of all its inhabitants and to their persons and possessions”. As expected, the king returned the keys, saying “I offer them to you, so that you keep them” (Lavanha 1621, f. 5). The sequence renewed the king’s sovereignty over

164

A. GODINHO

the city and the city’s willingness to serve him, while legitimizing the authority of municipal officials as representatives of the inhabitants. In addition to this formalized exchange, it was customary for a welcome speech to be uttered by a scholar in the name of the locality, which did not have the same limitations regarding form and content. As requests for the king’s commitment with the “usual favors” and “necessary privileges” of the cities (Guerreiro 1581, f. 37v), these greetings could include observations of a petitionary or pedagogical nature: from generic appeals to royal magnanimity to concrete references to the political situation. In the interest of the idealized representation of the ties that bound the sovereign to the local population, these speeches should receive a response that showed the king’s openness to what was said to him, with an enunciation that was not fixed but was usually similar to that said by Philip III on his entry into Évora: “I thank you for what you have said, and my vassals in this city for the delight they have shown in my presence, for I have bent my path to come and see you. And regarding what you say on privileges I will see to it, and I shall grant you favor” (Lavanha 1621, f. 5v). We return to Edward Muir’s observations regarding the symbolic defense of cities through protocol: on pain of offending his subjects, the king’s posture toward the hosts was “stuck in the words” that were appropriate, and his maneuverability in the political dialogue was limited (Muir 1997, 264–265). Kings were expected to perform a docile reception of the discourses that were put before them during the entries. The visitor was to present himself as an attentive, patient, and affectionate ruler, and the official accounts insist on this image: Philip III made sure to revisit the route of his entry into Lisbon so that he could see the arches at leisure (Lavanha 1621, f. 61), and testimonies of his predecessor’s entry into the city justify the choice of the time of the ceremony with his desire not to disturb religious celebrations and to ensure that the city had time to “use” everything it had prepared (Guerreiro 1581, f. 5v; Velázquez 1583, f. 120). Similarly, a set of instructions that have been attributed to the entry of Maria Francisca of Savoy in Lisbon, in 1666, states that the royal carriage was to go “very slowly so that, without stopping, [the queen] may notice the arches and satisfy the zeal and love of those who made them” (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal [BNP], Colecção Pombalina [PBA], liv. 653, f. 359). During the entries, there was no shortage of opportunities to place demanding or pedagogic messages before this attentive and receptive

8

THE TRIUMPH OF TEMPERANCE: POWER, NEGOTIATION …

165

gaze. Making use of the ambiguity and polysemy characteristic of the allegorical language employed on these occasions, the laudatory discourses could engage political agendas that went beyond the demonstration of affection or reverence. Liberality appears or is mentioned in almost all of these occasions and can be read as a symbolic materialization of expectations regarding the monarchy’s distributive policy. At the entry of Maria Francisca of Savoy in Lisbon, for example, the arch built by the tailors featured a scale designed to “distribute the wealth well”, an image of prudent liberality that Ângela Barreto Xavier and Pedro Cardim associate with the criticism of the targets of royal favor that could be heard at the time of that reception (Xavier et al. 1996, 68–69). In other cases, the discourse was less subtle and more focused on specific areas that were portrayed as deserving of the king’s liberal inclinations. In 1619, the ephemeral building erected by the officers of Lisbon’s customs house included an allusion to the “royal liberality” that “supports widows & nobles”, emphasizing the institution’s role in enriching the coffers that allowed “everyone to be satisfied with jewels and prizes”, a task that would merit the king’s attention: “please visit this celebrated & universal emporium, and enrich it and enlarge it” (Lavanha 1621, f. 10v–14). The distance from the court was a common theme in these discourses, with an insistence on the gratitude for its momentary interruption and a presentation of the “hopes” surrounding the visit. The scholars in charge of the welcoming speeches usually wove in characterizations of each city that focused on the difficulties caused by the king’s absence or on the resilience and good fortune that managed to relieve his lack of attention. The combination of these images and the memory of past services framed narratives of need and deservingness of royal favor. In 1573, in Tavira, King Sebastian was told that the city was plagued by “defects, ruins and decay” and that the king should “necessarily” remedy them with his generosity (Loureiro 1984, 117). On the other hand, in Santarém, in 1664, the “honors and favors” expected from Afonso VI were due to the ancient foundation of the city, the greatness of its location, the nobility of its inhabitants, and the “zeal, love and fidelity” they had always shown in the service of the Crown (BNP, Cód. 589, f. 62v). In a political culture in which good government was supposed to be oriented toward justice and peace rather than the satisfaction of the prince’s individual impulses (Buescu 1996; Xavier 1998, 138–142, 157–159), clemency and justice were themes with great potential for

166

A. GODINHO

petitionary messages. Philip II’s entry into Lisbon was filled with this kind of discourse. We can find it in the figure of Julius Caesar pardoning Marcellus, which, according to one account, was “an example to His Majesty, so that, forgetting the past mistakes of some Portuguese lords and nobles, who were absent and hated by him, (…) he should restore them to his grace, with forgiveness of their faults” (Guerreiro 1581, f. 19v). These were the followers of D. António, prior of Crato, who had opposed the accession of Philip II to the Portuguese throne (Bouza 2005, 57–193; Valladares 2010). The recommendation of magnanimity as a solution to the problem raised by this faction recurred throughout the king’s journey to Portugal: upon his entry into Tomar, the town where he was to sign a general pardon for those who had opposed him, the welcome speech advised him to carry out this clemency, since those who were granted such favor would incur a debt of gratitude that would be passed on to their children (Serrão 1956, 588). In Lisbon, the arch erected by German merchants affirmed the advantages of this generosity not only over vengeful punishment, but also over the much-praised territorial expansion: “To conquer kingdoms, to subjugate lands, as your Majesty does every day, is worthy of great praise, but if you bend the zeal of revenge for those who have greatly offended you and show the mercy of forgiveness, your victory will be of greater glory” (Guerreiro 1581, f. 19v). The use of pardon thus appears as an ideal sacrifice of the king’s impulses in a political culture that valued clemency and the affectionate recomposition of order (Cardim 2000, 267–292; Hespanha 1993). This affirmation of the common good over Philip II’s impulses appears in its most assertive form in images of the sacrifices of Marcus Curtius and Quintus Murcius Scaevola for Rome, accompanied by signs which stated that the king, like them, would be willing to suffer the “greatest tribulations” and give his life for Portugal as “father of the fatherland” (Guerreiro 1581, f. 18v–19). This narrative didn’t just call for the king to exert his magnanimity toward the Portuguese who had opposed him, but also to recognize and reward the loyalty of those who had accepted his enthronement. In the welcome speech presented to Philip II in Lisbon, the speaker constructed a narrative of the city’s rapid adherence to his cause, proving it by recalling the death of the councilor Fernão de Pina at the hands of a servant of the prior of Crato. The support for D. Antonio in Lisbon is framed as the work of some “weak minds” and the city’s

8

THE TRIUMPH OF TEMPERANCE: POWER, NEGOTIATION …

167

obedience and sacrifices are presented as a reason to expect gratitude from the king (Guerreiro 1581, f. 38v). In a daring intervention that went beyond the usual script of the receptions, the municipal officials who held the canopy that covered Philip II approached him in Lisbon’s mother church, asking him to extend the general pardon signed in Tomar to all those who had been excluded from it. In order to take advantage of the potentialities of the entry as a context for political dialogue, the officials employed what Margit Thøfner has described as “improvisation” in a ritual context (Thøfner 2014). The king’s reply echoes the usual responses to welcome speeches on these occasions: he thanked them for the remark and promised that he would “see how that could be achieved”. This exchange reproduces the expectations of docile reception that we have laid out. As stated in one account of the occasion, here we can find this ideal faced with a group of subjects who, contrary to custom, make a request “of this magnitude” without showing the king “any respect, nor giving any other excuse than his royal clemency, which is always very prompt for similar petitions” (Guerreiro 1581, 46–46v).

Reframing and the “Popular Voice” In his account of Maria Sophia of Neuburg’s arrival in Lisbon, António Rodrigues da Costa includes a series of vignettes of the excitement generated by the arrival of the queen: the crowds threw themselves into the Tagus to watch the disembarkation, filling the streets during the entry and acclaiming the royal family as they passed, causing visible joy on the faces of Peter II and his new consort (Costa 1694, 121, 263, 267). Through the physical presence of momentarily visible and accessible sovereigns, the entries were expected to reflect the affective relationship between the protagonists and the audience (Cardim 2001, 110–111). As Teófilo Ruiz has suggested, the staging of good government required large crowds: an enthusiastic and moved “popular voice” that validated the representation of royal power at the moment of entry and in its written memory, attesting to the strength of the bonds between king and subjects (Ruiz 2012, 352). Official accounts assiduously provide images that correspond to these expectations, but we can find other kinds of narratives in texts that were not committed to the concerns of the organizers, as is the case of memoirs, correspondence, and some contemporary historiography

168

A. GODINHO

(Megiani 2004, 145–183; del Río Barredo 2021, 214–220). Molded by different pressures, routines, and objectives in their production and circulation, these documents reframe the official ritual narratives in ways that open up space for interventions that made royal entries possible stages for “popular” resistance. The most drastic example comes from the entry of Philip II into Lisbon, as described in the Memorial of Pero Ro˜ız Soares, a source that is heavily shaped by the author’s hostility toward Philip II and his Portuguese supporters. On the same occasion that the printed accounts describe the joy of the crowds at the presence of a king who presented himself with “tender joy in his face and smiles of his mouth” and thanked God for the tranquility and contentment with which he was received (Guerreiro 1581, f. 42–42v), the memoirist reverses the model. In the pages he dedicates to the entry, Soares subverts the commonplaces that were reiterated in official accounts and revises the meaning of the discourses that were put on display. We can see this in a description of a mysterious fog that chased the king in the Tagus, but also in the interpretation of an effigy of the city of Lisbon placed at the gates of Ribeira as a beggar for alms. This reading served the author’s criticism of spending on the festival during a time of severe economic hardship (Soares 1953, 192–193). With regard to the crowd, the author notes that “the people lamented with tears the pain that they had, showing their sorrow for seeing him king and not the one they wanted”, while Philip II walked through the streets, satisfied and surrounded by “those who gave him the kingdom and joined him”, including Lisbon’s municipal authorities (Soares 1953, 194). In the internal logic of the ritual, the collective weeping replaces the euphoric manifestations, decontextualizing the friendly gestures of the councilors who put the “loyal hearts”, bodies, and possessions of all inhabitants at the service of the king. We are faced with a popular demonstration that reveals itself capable of subverting the meaning of the entry (Curto 2011, 23–178; Domulyn et al. 2014). The inversion of script questions the legitimacy of the visitor, while also emptying the position of the members of the city council as representatives of a cohesive and loyal political body. In other sources, these collective and generalized expressions were particularized through the reproduction of concrete enunciations: according to a handwritten account, in the same entry in Lisbon, a fishwife is said to have told Philip II that they “received and sworn his majesty

8

THE TRIUMPH OF TEMPERANCE: POWER, NEGOTIATION …

169

as their king and lord while King Sebastian didn’t come; but when he did, he should return to Castille with God and leave the kingdom”. The king’s response to this statement was informed by the performative expectations we described in the previous section: “his majesty smiled a lot” (Relato da Chegada… 2019, 225; Fernández-González 2021, 133). This passage is a complete reversal of the opinions of two women from popular stratum that were recorded in one of the official accounts. The first, in Campo Maior, reassures the king by saying, “Be rested, my lord, for we wish to see you just like the others”. The second, described as an old woman from Santarém who had been a favorite of the prior of Crato, was “delighted by the pleasurable figure of his majesty” and thought that he was “misused in Castilians” (Velázquez 1583, f. 79, 109). The preoccupation with fixing these voices illustrates the place of female bodies in figuring the receptivity of cities, while also suggesting the anxieties surrounding their intrusion into public discourse (Reid 2022; Abreu-Ferrira 2017). The implications of the conflicting narratives surrounding audience participation become clear when we consider its role in shaping the memory of the entries of Habsburg kings after 1640. In January 1642, an account of the thanksgiving procession for the first anniversary of the acclamation of John IV informs readers that the older members of the audience marveled at the crowd’s enthusiastic reaction at the sight of the king, since no one had ever cheered Philip II and Philip III during their visits (Gazeta de Dezembro de 1641 1642). Decades later, the first volume of Luiz de Meneses’ Historia de Portugal Restaurado recalls that Philip II “entered Lisbon with magnificent pomp: but the city showed more power than affection; for it was observed that there was no voice to acclaim him” (Meneses 1679, 33). In this narrative, which is interested in contesting the legitimacy of the visitor and leaving the hosts unharmed, the absence of the enthusiastic and receptive “popular voice” empties the staging of legitimate royal power, but splendor survives as evidence of the strength of the city and its institutions. On another front, alternative sources to the official testimonies show us some ways of escaping the obligation of participation and investment in the entries by groups absent from the correspondence we analyzed earlier. According to Pero Ro˜ız Soares, when it became known in Sintra that Philip III was on his way, the inhabitants of the town “emptied it and went to the woods and farms, leaving their houses stripped”. With no one to “shelter” them, the king and his retinue continued on their way

170

A. GODINHO

(Soares 1953, 433; Silva 1987, 297–298). This total refusal to prepare a reception is not only a denial of the entry as a service, but also of its possible mobilization as an instrument of negotiation with the crown. Sintra also serves as the setting for a case described by Francisco Manuel de Melo in Hospital das Letras: when preparations were being made for a royal festival in the town, local authorities ordered farmers to contribute to a milk fountain to be set up in the square. However, “since they thought that a single jug of water would not be noticed among so much milk, each one brought his own jug of water”. The result was that “a purer and more crystalline fountain of water had never been seen”. As already mentioned by Diogo Ramada Curto, this passage can be read as a trace of “resistance” or “simple disinterest” in the “exchange regime offered by the festivities related to the ceremonies of the monarchy” (Curto 1991, 223). These unofficial discourses also bring us closer to the tension inherent in the possibility of physical interaction between the crowd and the protagonists (especially the king himself). The need for the intervention of city officials and even local militia or regular troops to ensure the passage of the procession through the crowded streets is common in the accounts of the entries and a very visible concern in their regulation (BNP, PBA, liv. 653, f. 359v). Some texts even describe physical confrontations between the mobs and those tasked with controlling them, but these references do not necessarily damage the harmonious narrative. In fact, they usually serve to reinforce the crowd’s function as a vast human mass eager for a glimpse of the king (Guerreiro 1581, f. 47). This doesn’t mean that some sources don’t reveal anxieties surrounding the behavior of those who watched. In 1581, in addition to concerns caused by the epidemic that ravaged the kingdom, the correspondence of the Castilian authorities reveals uncertainty about Philip II’s safety among the Portuguese people, who were “very loose, without fear of justice, with little restraint, with much hatred for the king and very much complaining about him”. Esteban de Ibarra even recommended that Philip II “shows more restraint when going to and from his residence and in public acts” (Valladares 2010, 277). Even outside this particularly tense context, there are cases that attest the fragility of the king’s body in this kind of ritual, such as the woman who forcibly grabbed King Sebastian during his entry in Castro Marim, or the attempt on John IV’s life planned for the Corpus Christi procession in Lisbon in 1647 (Loureiro 1984, 122; Costa and Cunha 2006, 183).

8

THE TRIUMPH OF TEMPERANCE: POWER, NEGOTIATION …

171

This risky side of the public display of sovereigns brings us back to the tensions inherent in these events for both visitors and their hosts, and to the refuge of formality as a way of controlling gestures, enunciations, iconography, and written memory. In accounts that were not bound by formalization, these limits of expression fade away, offering us a glimpse of the horizons of opposition, inversion, and appropriation of the entries by those usually portrayed as passive participants.

Final Remarks Throughout the previous pages, we have delineated three forms of tension that can be detected in the preparation, staging, and description of royal entries: (a) attempts to evade and politically instrumentalize financial burdens that were formally framed as disinterested means of gratitude and service to the crown; (b) the appropriation of protocol by municipal authorities and guilds to defend local prerogatives and present petitions to the king; (c) the emptying of the consensual and affective meaning of the entries through the materialization of dissent in popular manifestations of discontent and opposition. Both in the backstage negotiations and in the discourses presented during the ritual, the claims of local authorities and guilds were enacted within a formalized framework: they did not fundamentally question extant power relations or the validity of the entries themselves as a means of materializing and renewing them. It could even be said that they actively contributed to a magnanimous image of royal power, crystallizing the prevailing structures of authority and representation. On the other hand, both the spontaneous evasion of contributions to the entries and the popular demonstrations of contempt and displeasure opened up a significant space for subversion. They did this by questioning not only the legitimate and non-coercive image of royal power that was to be conveyed, but also the authority of the officials who received the king as representatives of the very people who were demonstrating. In this framework, royal entries were structured by a contractual and consensual rhetoric that was necessarily open to the exteriorization of political concerns and agendas on the part of the visiting king’s subjects, while also proving to be permeable to gestures of resistance to the staged order.

172

A. GODINHO

Acknowledgements This chapter was written as part of the project “Public Rituals in the Portuguese Empire (1498-1822)”, PTDC/HAR-HIS/28364/ 2017 and the project “RESISTANCE Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, 16th -19th centuries”, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020, Research and Innovation Staff Exchange, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Grant Agreement No 778076.

References Manuscript Sources Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal: Colecção Pombalina, liv. 653; Fundo Geral, cód. 589.

Printed Sources Córdoba, Luis Cabrera de. 1619. Historia de Felipe II, primera parte. Madrid: [s.n]. Costa, António Rodrigues da. 1694. Embaixada que fes o Excellentissimo Senhor Conde de Villar-Maior (hoje Marques de Alegrete) ao Serenissimo Principe Philippe Guilhelmo Conde Palatino do Rhim Conduçam da Rainha Nossa Senhora a estes Reinos, festas, & applausos, com que foi celebrada sua felix vinda, & as augustas vodas de Suas Majestades. Lisboa: Miguel Manescal. Coutinho, Pascoal Ribeiro. 1687. Arco Triunfal. Idea, e Allegoria Sobre a Fabula de Paris em o Monte Ida, cuja ficçam há de servir para o Arco Triunfal, que a Rua dos Ourives do Ouro celebra, em applauso dos felicissimos Desposorios das Augustas, & Lusitanas Magestades. Lisbon: Miguel Manescal. Gazeta de Dezembro de 1641. 1642. Lisbon: Lourenço de Anveres. Guerreiro, Afonso. 1581. Das festas qve se fizeram na cidade de Lisboa, na entrada del Rey D. Philippe primeiro de Portugal. Lisbon: Francisco Correia. Lavanha, João B. 1621. Viagem da Catholica Real Magestade del Rey D. Filipe II N.S. ao Reyno de Portvgal e rellaçao do solene recebimento que nelle se lhe fez S. Magestade a mandou. Madrid: Thomas Iunti. Meneses, Luís de. 1679. História de Portugal Restaurado. t. 1. Lisbon: João Galrão. Oliveira, Eduardo Freire de. 1887–1896 Elementos para a História do Município de Lisboa, 1.ª parte, vols. 2–9. Lisbon: Typographia Universal. Relato da chegada a Lisboa de Filipe II de Espanha (I de Portugal) (1581). 2019. Transcribed by Maria T. Morujão Novais de Oliveira. Fragmenta Historica 7: 223–225.

8

THE TRIUMPH OF TEMPERANCE: POWER, NEGOTIATION …

173

Soares, Pero Roiz. 1953. Memorial de Pero Ro˜ız Soares, leitura e revisão de Manuel Lopes de Almeida. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra. Velázquez, Isidro. 1583. La entrada que en el Reino de Portugal hizo la S.C.R.M. de Don Philippe inuictissimo Rey de las Españas segundo deste nombre, primero de Portugal, assi con su Real presencia como con el exercito de su felice campo, [n.p]: Manuel de Lyra.

Bibliography Abreu-Ferrira, Darlene. 2017. Female foul language and foul female agents in pre-modern Portugal. Ler História 71: 9–32. Alves, Ana M. [n.d.]. As Entradas Régias Portuguesas. Uma Visão de Conjunto. Lisbon: Livros Horizonte. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, [s.l]. Oxford University Press. Bloch, Maurice. 1964. Symbols, song, dance and features of articulation: Is religion an extreme form of traditional authority? European Journal of Sociology 15 (1): 55–81. Bouza, Fernando. 1998. Sola Lisboa, casi viuda. La ciudad y la mudanza de la corte en el Portugal de los Felipes. In Imagen y Propaganda. Capítulos de história cultural del reinado de Felipe II , 95–120. Madrid: Akal. Bouza, Fernando. 2005. D. Filipe I . Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Buescu, Ana I. 1996. Imagens do príncipe: discurso normativo e representação, 1525–1549. Lisbon: Cosmos. Cardim, Pedro. 2000. O Poder dos afectos: ordem amorosa e dinâmica política no Portugal do Antigo Regime. PhD diss., Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Cardim, Pedro. 2001. Entradas solenes, rituais comunitários e festas políticas, Portugal e Brasil, Séculos XVI e XVII. In Festa. Cultura e Sociabilidade na América Portuguesa, ed. István Jancsó and Íris Kantor, I: 97–124. São Paulo: EDUSP. Chamorro Esteban, Alfredo. 2017. Barcelona y el rey. Las visitas reales de Fernando el Católico a Felipe V . Barcelona: La Tempestad. Costa, Leonor Freire e Mafalda Soares da Cunha. 2006. D. João IV. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Curto, Diogo Ramada. 1991. Ritos e cerimónias da monarquia em Portugal (séculos XVI a XVIII). In A Memória da Nação, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto, 201–265. Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa Editora. Curto, Diogo Ramada. 2011. Cultura Política no Tempo dos Filipes (1580–1640). Coimbra: Edições 70. Dirks, Nicholas. 1994. Ritual and Resistance. In Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry B. Ortner, 483–503. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

174

A. GODINHO

Dumolyn et al. 2014. The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe: Communication and Popular Politics. [n.p.]: Brepols. Durkheim, Émile. 2008. Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fernández-González, Laura. 2021. Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire. University Park: Penn State University Press. Geertz, Clifford, 1983. Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power. In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 121–46. New York: Basic Books. Handelman, Don. 2005. Introduction: Why Ritual in Its Own Right? In Ritual in Its Own Right. Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation, ed. Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist, 1–34. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Hespanha, António M. 1993. A Punição e a Graça. In História de Portugal: O Antigo Regime (1620–1807 ). Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Kertzer, David. 1989. Ritual, Politics and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kubler, George. 1972. Portuguese plain architecture: between spices and diamonds, 1521–1706. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Loureiro, Francisco de Sales. 1984. Uma jornada ao Alentejo e ao Algarve: a alteração nas linhas de força da política nacional. [n.p.]: Livros Horizonte. Megiani, Ana P. Torres. 2004. O Rei Ausente: festa e cultura política nas visitas dos Filipes a Portugal (1581 e 1619). São Paulo: Alameda. Muir, Edward. 1997. Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olival, Fernanda. 2006. D. Filipe II de cognome «o Pio». Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Persson, Fabian. 2019. The Shield of Ceremony. Civil Ritual and Royal Entries in Wartime. In Occasions of State: Early Modern European Festivals and the Negotiation of Power, ed. J.R Mulryne, Krista de Jonge, R.L.M. Morris and Pieter Marten, 127–139. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Reid, Elizabeth. 2022. Female Representation and Violence in the Ceremonial Entries of the Italian Wars. Renaissance Studies 36 (5): 750–768. Río Barredo, Maria J. del. 2021. La otra ciudad: conflictos ceremoniales e identidad en Madrid, 1590–1650. Estudis. Revista de Historia Moderna 47: 201–226. Ruiz, Teófilo. 2012. A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Serrão, Joaquim Veríssimo. 1956. O reinado de D. António, prior do Crato. Coimbra: Atlântida. Silva, Francisco Ribeiro da. 1987. A viagem de Filipe III a Portugal: itinerários e problemáticas. Revista de Ciências Históricas 2: 297–298.

8

THE TRIUMPH OF TEMPERANCE: POWER, NEGOTIATION …

175

Thøfner, Margit. 2014. «Willingly We Follow a Gentle Leader...»: Joyous Entries Into Antwerp. In The Dynastic Centre and the Provinces: Agents and Interactions, ed. Jeroen Duindam e Sabine Dabringhaus, 185–202. [s.l]: Brill. Turner, Victor. 1974. Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors. In Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Symbolic Action in Human Society, 23–59. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Valladares, Rafael. 2010. A Conquista de Lisboa – Violência militar e comunidade política em Portugal, 1578–1583. Alfragide: Texto Editores. Xavier, Ângela Barreto, Pedro Cardim, and Fernando Bouza. 1996. Festas que se fizeram pelo casamento do Rei D. Afonso VI . Lisboa: Quetzal. Xavier, Ângela Barreto. 1998. EI Rei aonde póde, & não aonde quer: razões da política no Portugal seiscentista. Lisbon: Colibri.

CHAPTER 9

Male Violence and Female Resistance in the Sacrament of Penance: Accounts Before the Inquisitorial Tribunals in Colonial America (Seventeenth Century) Mariana Meneses Muñoz

On the eve of the festivity of Corpus Christi in 1686, Gertrudis Flores knelt in the confessional of the chapel of Our Lady of Solitude in the great convent of San Francisco in Mexico City. Tomás de Ocón, a Franciscan friar described as “very pale-faced, thin, with dark hair, and a thick beard,” listened to her confessions. Later, before the tribunal of the Inquisition in Mexico, Gertrudis stated that in order to be absolved, Friar Tomás offered her the opportunity to take care of his clothes in exchange for additional income beyond the two daily reales she received from her “compadre,” with the condition that she lived well and served God.

M. Meneses Muñoz (B) CHAM-Centro de Humanidades, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_9

177

178

M. MENESES MUÑOZ

The response was positive. However, Ocón insisted on asking her if she could wash and take care of his clothes. There was no issue for her in doing this for her spiritual father. He also asked her where she lived and who provided for her, to which Gertrudis provided information on her living arrangements and confirmed that she lived alone. The priest then asked if she believed that his visit would cause any problems or be viewed negatively, to which she responded negatively, stating that it was because he was her confessor. However, why did this man of God insist so much? Gertrudis identified the ill intention behind this proposal and added to her testimony that “she replied that she did not try to live badly but to serve God and it was this intention that she came to confess, even if she had to eat stones” (Archivo Histórico Nacional [AHN], Inquisición, 1733, Exp. 27, f. 2r). Friar Tomás tried to persuade her by telling her that she was an angel, caressing her face, and asking if she felt anything in her body—referring to her intimate parts—to which she responded negatively. She stood up and left without finishing her confession. These narratives are very common in the denunciations and testimonies received by the tribunals of the Spanish Holy Office on behalf of women subjected to the seduction strategies and abuse of power of their confessors. Solicitation in sacramental confession (Solicitatio ad turpia) was a practice exclusive to the male clergy and highly dangerous. It was considered a form of heresy as it violated the sacrament of penance.1 The offense committed by priests of souls during the confession of sins disrupted the ritual of redemption for the penitent. Furthermore, the absolution of sins “is not only a mere ministry or [a way] of proclaiming the gospels or declaring that sins are forgiven; but it is a judicial act in which the priest pronounces the sentence as a judge” (López de Ayala 1785, 182). Being considered a heretical practice, Solicitation fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.2 It was also deemed a disciplinary offense by 1 A complementary, more institutional view on solicitation and its normative is addressed in my text “Circulation of regulations on the Sollicitatio ad turpia between the Supreme and the inquisitorial tribunals of Spanish America (16th and 17th centuries),” which will be published this year in the series Max Planck Studies in Global Legal History of the Iberian Worlds. 2 The first reference to the transfer of jurisdiction from episcopal courts to the Spanish Inquisition is found in the constitution issued by Pope Paul IV for the Archdiocese of Granada in 1555. Subsequently, the Inquisitor General of the Spanish Holy Office, Fernando Valdés, included it in his Instructions for the Inquisitorial Procedure, published in 1561. It was not until 1622 that Pope Gregory XV provided a comprehensive and

9

MALE VIOLENCE AND FEMALE RESISTANCE …

179

confessors as it violated the vow of chastity. It contradicted the established standards for moral and sexual behavior, as outlined in the Council of Trent. The mere intention of Solicitation was already deemed an offense, as were any carnal acts committed with penitents within the context of confession (before, during, or after). In the praxis of the Inquisition, there were different perspectives on Solicitation, as evidenced by a prosecutor’s accusation against the Jesuit Juan del Castillo in 1682 in Oaxaca, Mexico: “The aforementioned individual is testified to have engaged in inappropriate touching with different women who confessed sacramentally to him, during and immediately after the sacramental confession, under the pretext of relieving their fear and shame in order for them to confess properly” (AHN, Inquisición, 1733, exp. 2, f. 2v). The “intimate” abuses of power against penitents in the context of sacramental confession and the forms of violence perpetrated by the clergy against marginalized groups in colonial contexts elicited various responses. Both men and women lodged complaints with the ecclesiastical authorities regarding their experiences with their confessors, leading to accusations against soliciting priests before the Inquisition. This was the case with Gertrudis Flores, who, upon changing confessors, was instructed by her new confessor to report what had happened with Friar Tomás to the Holy Office so that her sins could be forgiven. Although the early-modern definition of Solicitation encompassed both men and women, surviving accounts of denunciations indicate that women were the primary targets of harassment by confessors. According to the social discourse of the time, women were perceived as being disadvantaged and assigned roles of obedience and passivity in spaces predominantly occupied by men. This text analyses the narratives of resistance by solicited women before the inquisitorial tribunals of Hispanic America in response to the abuse of their confessors. My argument is that female actions were based on informal knowledge about what could happen in the context of confession. Solicitation’s processes and causal relationships will be addressed in the three inquisitorial tribunals in America during the seventeenth century: Mexico, Lima, and Cartagena de Indias, found in the National

specific definition of Solicitation as an offence that affected Catholic orthodoxy, in the papal brief Universi Dominici Gregis of 1622.

180

M. MENESES MUÑOZ

Historical Archive in Madrid.3 The expressions and actions against the sexual demands of men of God can be interpreted as forms of everyday resistance, mostly unorganized. Additionally, women’s formal use of ecclesiastical justice demonstrates the improper and extra-sacramental use of the confessional space as part of male seduction and violence strategies. The chapter is divided into three parts: an examination of the relationship between Solicitation and gender, a focus on identifying strategies and forms of male abuse, and finally, examples of female defense and resistance. These three aspects will be studied considering two categories defining the methodological approach: the dimension of orality in judicial records and the concept of agency before the courts of justice. A third element to highlight is the concept of resistance (mainly inspired by the works of James C. Scott), which will serve as the theoretical foundation for this discussion. In relation to the first element, that of the orality in the judicial documentation, which denotes the presence of the narratives of the subjects who intervened in the judicial proceedings: through it, together with the institutional language, it is possible to perceive features typical of the social and moral order of the time, as well as the forms of circulation of information and its “interpretation” by the institutions represented by their agents; in the words of Elizabeth Cohen “To grasp the construction of judicial expression, we must begin by tracking an oral-written stratigraphy in the trial protocols. The written records, those that survive for us, carried much weight in the latter phases of a prosecution” (Cohen 2012, 410). The concept of agency, predominantly employed in English-speaking historiography, proves valuable in delineating the scope and extent of women’s actions during the Ancien Régime. It also illuminates how gender relations were perceived, transcended, or even subverted within the context of female engagement with the courts of justice. This analysis surpasses a mere description of actions and the homogenization of various forms of female agency. Martha Howell suggests that researchers should be attentive to moments when deviations from gender expectations occurred and should elucidate the role of women in such transformative instances. This approach enables the identification of how social status, 3 This period was chosen because it preserves the highest number of denunciations in the archive, and also because these processes occurred after the reception of the Hispanic American ecclesiastical authorities of Gregory XV’s papal brief on Solicitation.

9

MALE VIOLENCE AND FEMALE RESISTANCE …

181

temporality, and territorial affiliation may have influenced these actions (Howell 2019, 22). Lastly, the concept of resistance focuses on how women’s refusals and rejections, when solicited and even raped, in some instances, constituted everyday forms of gender-based resistance against sexual oppression in the confessional (Scott 1990, 33–62). Women expressed their experiences of abuse using institutional ideas and language, which can be seen as a tool of the powerless, as suggested by Scott and E.P. Thompson (1984, 39). Additionally, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991, 1243) suggests that prevailing structures of domination shape various discourses of resistance: “People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of institutions they are challenging.” In this case, women presented themselves as devout Christians within the inquisitorial process as a justification to demand redress for the abuse they had experienced. I do not believe that solicited women were fighting against the patriarchal system of the time or even the Catholic Church. I believe these women spoke out against their confessors to improve their violated or threatened individual realities, as well as their familial or communal situations. The mass denunciations that reached the Supreme Tribunal exerted pressure on the surveillance of this crime against the faith. Studies specifically analyzing Solicitation began in the 1990s and focused on Spanish inquisitorial tribunals (Sarrión Mora 1994; Alejandre 1994; Haliczer 1996). In contrast, Latin American historiography has approached Solicitation sparingly, mainly from a regional and institutional perspective (Millar Carvacho 1996; González Marmolejo 2002). More recently, some works have studied Solicitation, problematizing colonial power relations. These studies emphasize socio-racial and gender analysis and give greater prominence to individual voices over institutions in the context of early-modern Hispanic America (Tortorici 2017; Delgado 2007, 2018; Molina 2011). In the context of studies concerning clerical luxury and solicitation in Portugal and Portuguese America, it is pertinent to note the work of Jaime Gouveia (2011, 2015). However, despite these efforts, the studies still predominantly examine this practice through local inquisitorial tribunals, resulting in a limited understanding of the circulation of people and discourses and a lack of comparative perspectives on Solicitation across territories under Spanish administration. It should be noted that complete processes for Solicitation in the American inquisitions are scarce, especially for the tribunals of Cartagena de Indias and Lima, which have some books of case records mainly

182

M. MENESES MUÑOZ

from the seventeenth century. This fragmented information deprived many accusers of their identity, creating a methodological challenge for researchers in characterizing women in these processes. As Fernanda Molina indicates regarding Indigenous women in the tribunal in Lima, “only on rare occasions do they appear with their baptismal names, while in most cases they remain anonymous, barely referenced by their marital status or age” (Molina 2011, 123). Nevertheless, a comparative approach using these documents allows for the identification of groups of those solicited (social belonging and place of residence). From each fragmentary piece of evidence, the strategies of violence, resistance, and defense of the individuals involved can be reconstructed, leading to the identification of a pattern of Solicitation and abuse with common features reflecting the strong influence of Hispanic and pan-Hispanic masculinities in the Early Modern period.

Confession, Solicitation, and Gender In a culture influenced by the moral discourse of the Church, which prioritized masculinity over femininity, attitudes and behaviors were prescribed based on gender. This resulted in both public and private conduct of men and women being directed toward conforming to societal expectations. In this context, the notion that women should always be under the supervision of a male figure, to whom they were expected to be obedient, permeated all aspects of women’s lives, put it them on a perpetual biological place of inferiority, perpetuated by long term the ways of social and gender classification made by male authorities. These constructions limited female freedom of action and imposed specific roles characterized by their subordination to male authority. However, the reforms implemented after the Council of Trent, aimed at strengthening clerical discipline and the sacrament of penance, did not guarantee control over the behavior of the clergy. This is because both men and women shared cultural values inherited from society at that time. The patterns that shaped Iberian and pan-European masculinities in the Early Modern period imposed certain virtues on women, such as piety, humility, and obedience, while also dictating the attitudes that religious confessors should adopt toward their female penitents beyond the spiritual bond. This was particularly evident in the intimate setting of confessions, where a relationship of familiarity was established following the deep-rooted theological metaphor of father and daughter

9

MALE VIOLENCE AND FEMALE RESISTANCE …

183

in confession. This allowed for a more open language concerning feelings and religious expressions. Devotion, subordination, and repentance were attitudes required to receive the sacraments. I just want to put two examples of religious speeches about women and sin, but as we should know the idea of moral order of a catholic society after the Council of Trent. In the Compendio y suma de confessores (1588) by Martín de Azpilcueta, little differentiation is made regarding women. When mentioned, femininity is portrayed as a passive entity and a vehicle for male sin (Chapter XXVII: De los clérigos de orden sacra 31 ss.). Another example in manuals for confessors can be found in the Examen de confesores (1639) by Jesuit Antonio de Escobar y Mendoza, who proposed resolving doubts about confession using a more pedagogical language. In the Suma, women are depicted in various roles assigned to them as Christians (maiden, mother, wife, and nun); they also appear under categories related to public sins (concubine, unfaithful, relative, unmarried), and once again, as objects and vehicles of carnal sins—as reflected in the questioning regarding the practice of penitents that confessors had to use for the sixth and ninth commandments: “I had pollution with an unmarried woman and engaged in lascivious touching with myself, with an unmarried woman, and with many others […]” (Escobar y Mendoza 1639, 131). These elements could be instrumentalized by the solicitor who, based on the knowledge/power dynamic, guided the conversation in the confessional toward the complete revelation of sins, as suggested by the penance manuals. However, they could also be used to satisfy their personal interests. Both approaches shared the conventional idea that women should always be under the protection of a male authority figure, a pater familias, and ready to obey them in all aspects of life. Juana del Peso, a 27-year-old married woman, testified before the tribunal in Lima that in September 1650, Father Rafael Vanegas of the Jesuit College in Santiago de Chile used his authority to call her into the confessional. She stated: “She does not remember the exact words of love and indecency that said father said to this confessor, as they were all directed towards his intention of soliciting her, to make her comply with his desires and satisfy him” (AHN, Inquisición, 1648, exp. 1, f. 9r.). Juana narrated to the Holy Office how this religious figure pretended to hear her confession while asking her to touch his “shameful parts” and later ejaculated onto her hands, persuading her to meet him at the Jesuit college at night for sexual encounters.

184

M. MENESES MUÑOZ

Some characteristics attributed to men of Peninsular origin, related to the notion of nobility (hidalguía), coexisted with the characteristics expected of religious men and are reflected in expressions of strength and domination mentioned in cases of Solicitation. At the same time, the image and position of women in the social and legal order of the time turned them into valuable objects, living vessels that contained the honor and reputation of families. Both masculine and feminine representations crossed the Atlantic and were adopted by the authorities and individuals from the Old World. However, both female and male experiences were different in these territories. Daily negotiations and confrontations among groups, social classes, and genders were part of the colonial everyday “realities” found in the documents, sometimes contradicting the discourses emanating from those in power. Being, aspiring to be, and appearing established the blurred boundaries of discourses that attempted to impose themselves on identities in the New World.

Abuses and Forms of Violence The hierarchical and vertical nature of the confession fostered the sharing of intimate and even sexually charged aspects of life alongside instances of verbal and physical violence. Moreover, “patriarchal social relations, gender beliefs about sin, and the beliefs about the particular vulnerability and distinguished weakness of women in sacramental experiences compared to those of men gave rise to abuses of power by soliciting priests” (Delgado 2018, 19). The words and actions of these priests align with a cultural male model that can be reproduced in a society where established behavioral norms existed for each social class. By examining these behaviors, one can identify shared patterns that extended throughout the American territories, warranting the oversight of the Holy Office, which held jurisdiction over the prosecution of solicitors (from 1561 for the Spanish tribunal until the abolition of the Inquisition in 1821). In the processes related to America, individuals of different backgrounds and social statuses, both men and women, are represented. The processes analyzed from the seventeenth century indicate that the women who were solicited in urban areas were predominantly of Spanish or Creole origin, with fewer cases involving mestiza and Mulatto women. In contrast, Indigenous women were more commonly encountered in rural spaces. Importantly, the consulted documents do not contain any

9

MALE VIOLENCE AND FEMALE RESISTANCE …

185

reports of enslaved African women being solicited, or even mentioned the presence of slaved people on the trials; this would suggest that women had differential access to the sacraments based on their socio-racial background. Moreover, the majority of women who reported Solicitation were young, ranging from 20 to 45 years old, and they had various marital statuses: single, married, widowed (to a lesser extent), and even nuns. There were also reports involving public women within urban spaces. Fray Luis de Saavedra, a confessor in the town of Mompox in the New Kingdom of Granada, was denounced in 1614 before the Court of Cartagena de Indias by seven women: three professed nuns from the Convent of San José, two young Spanish women, and two older Indigenous women. One of the testimonies recounts how this religious figure forced a 20-year-old maiden, whose name is not mentioned, to touch and allow him to kiss her after threatening to ask her father to send her to a convent. The testimony describes how Fray Luis attempted to “persuade” this woman for a second time by trying to kiss her during confession, showing her his genitals, and asking her to touch them. She resisted while Fray Luis masturbated until he “ejaculated on the ground, stepped on it, and said, ‘Look what you’re missing.’” The witness tried to “move away from the accused [who] had her held with his cloak and tried to touch and lift her skirts” (AHN, Inquisición, 1020, fol. 77r.). After this incident, Fray Luis proposed that she leave her house at night to meet him at the Convent of San Agustín, which she refused. Before letting her go, he asked her not to speak to anyone about what had happened during confession and explained that “because she was quiet, he dared to do those things” (77v.). The documentation reveals a modus operandi that religious figures followed when soliciting women: they employed verbal strategies, offered money, or resorted to physical violence to persuade them. Depending on the women’s background and status, they sometimes used words of “affection” to seduce. In the same year, Fray Luis, mentioned earlier, was reported by an Indigenous woman (whose name is not mentioned in the process). She went to confess with him at the Convent of San Agustín, following her mistress’s orders. While she knelt before her confessor, he took her to his cell and attempted to offer her beads in exchange for sex. “The witness got off the bed, and the accused struggled with her to make her return to the bed. They wrestled, and eventually, the witness left the cell. The accused told her, ‘Keep your mouth shut and do not tell anyone.’ The witness went home without confessing” (78r.).

186

M. MENESES MUÑOZ

Franciscan friar Fray Bernardo Gaitán was denounced by seven women from the city of Guatemala before the tribunal in Mexico in 1675 (Meneses Muñoz 2019). They expressed their complaints against Fray Bernardo, stating that “he interrupted their confession with indecent words, grabbing their hands, and then proceeding to touch their private parts” (AHN, Inquisición, 1732, exp. 31, f. 9r). Additionally, Fray Bernardo would ask some of these women about their marital status to determine if they had a man in the family and if he could meet them outside of the church. This was revealed by Lorenza Molina de la Paz, a 21-year-old married Spanish woman, who, when asked about her marital status and if he could visit her at her house, responded: “As for my confessor, what suspicion could there be? Fray Bernardo Gaitán replied, ‘If I were to come to your house, would there be any suspicion?’ to which I answered, ‘What suspicion could there be with my spiritual father?’” (AHN, Inquisición, 1732, exp. 31, 11r.). This example highlights a safety strategy employed by Fray Bernardo, who “examines” the situation to get closer to Lorenza’s house, taking advantage of his position as a religious figure to offer a visit in a more intimate space. Similar to Gertrudis Flores’ testimony in the tribunal of Mexico, confessors would “confirm” their proposals, emphasizing the expression “if there would be no problem in.” Lorenza responded to this Franciscan by emphasizing his image as a religious and spiritual father and how this figure inspired trust without delving into the malice suggested by the confessor. Unfortunately for Lorenza, Fray Bernardo went to her house with Fran Antonio de la Vega on the same day after attending Mass under the pretext of buying some cocoa, knowing that her husband was absent. The religious figure took advantage of the situation to enter her quarters and force himself upon her. While this was happening, Lorenza tried to dissuade him from his actions, saying: that he should see what he was doing, that if he was the devil, by the passion of our Lord and by his most holy mother, the ever-virgin Mary, he should leave me and take note that I had just received the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, that if he was a heretic, he should consider that he was my spiritual father, to which Fray Bernardo responded “I will be your spiritual father in everything and for everything, do not fear, and I will be your confessor, and you shall not confess to another, for I command it”. (11v.)

9

MALE VIOLENCE AND FEMALE RESISTANCE …

187

In the testimony, various forms of physical, verbal, and intimidation tactics employed by Fray Bernardo are evident. Not only did he sexually abuse Lorenza despite her pleas for him not to do so, but he also imposed exclusivity on her for confession, indicating certain possession of her body through the use of the sacrament of the confession. This strategy, common among solicitors, was likely employed to protect themselves and maintain secrecy regarding the abuses committed, thereby ensuring female silence. A similar incident occurred with an Indigenous unmarried woman, aged 20 (whose name is not mentioned) from the province of Tucumán, involving the Mercedarian friar Mateo Alvarado. When she refused to engage in sexual relations with him, stating that she did not want to commit that sin in the church with a father, as it was a great sin, he sexually abused her by forcing her onto the church floor. Afterward, he had regular encounters with her for an extended period. Jocelyn Catty (2011) pointed that secret was part of the “nature” of the rape, normally without witnesses because it was practiced in very hidden and intimate spaces, situations that offered more confidence and impunity to the rapist. Tomás Mantecón (2005, 115) highlights that during that period, there was a significant blurring of the distinction between seducing and forcing a woman. This ambiguity was also present in the perspective of civil authorities when addressing complaints related to such situations. In the context of inquisitorial processes concerning Solicitation, the focus on the sexual behavior of the clergy was diminished, as well as the mention of various forms of physical and verbal violence reported by the women who were solicited. “In reality, the true boundary between seducing and forcing a woman lay in her will and the manner in which she either consented or refused to engage in ‘carnal acts’ or ‘indecent behaviour’ with a man.” The spiritual father figure acted as a seductive presence, sometimes resembling the role of a pater familias, as he possessed legitimate authority within the community and a certain level of control over the women who confessed to him. These dynamics allowed him to manipulate female religiosity and piety, exerting violence with a certain sense of impunity.

188

M. MENESES MUÑOZ

Expressions of Female Resistance In cases of Solicitation, the female voice is more prominent than in other inquisitorial documents. The women’s complaints triggered the proceedings against the confessors. The accumulation of female testimonies served as procedural evidence to establish the existence of sacramental transgression and open sexuality of the male clergy. In inquisitorial documents, it is evident that the solicited women played multiple roles: accuser, victim, and witness. They used their devout Christian identity as an argument to openly denounce and discuss their experiences with the confessors who solicited them. As noted by Jessica Delgado (2018, 20): “Inquisitors asked open-ended questions about their histories with clergymen and sacraments, and in response, laywomen spoke broadly about their experiences, referencing practices, emotions, and learned strategies that often went beyond what the Inquisitors were looking for.” Therefore, these proceedings are rich in expressions and actions related to sexuality, abuse, and emotions. According to the documentation, the majority of women appeared “voluntarily” before the Holy Office. They conveyed knowledge of the abuses committed by their confessors. At the same time, the Holy Office could summon women mentioned in previous testimonies, building a repertoire that contributed to understanding Solicitation. In some cases, the intervention of other confessors guided women to denounce the solicitors. Regardless, making a denunciation was a condition for obtaining absolution for a shared sinful and heretical experience in the confessional. This was the case for Melchora de San José, a Carmelite nun, who wrote a denunciation before the tribunal of Lima in 1697 against her former confessor, Father José de Buendía. Melchora was threatened not to disclose that this Jesuit had solicited her for four years. When Fray José learned of Melchora’s change of confessor, he sent her a message stating that if she accused him to the new confessor, a Discalced Carmelite, “he would poison us” (AHN. Inquisición, 1648, exp. 20, f. 12r.). The collaboration between penitent and confessor could be based on the need to fulfill the sacramental duty for serious offenses that prevented genuine contrition, as well as the awareness of irregularities in the administration of the sacrament. It was also motivated by the discomfort experienced and the feeling that what the confessor proposed or even did was inappropriate.

9

MALE VIOLENCE AND FEMALE RESISTANCE …

189

One of the ways in which resistance was formed among the solicited women was through their organization, although identification became more problematic as it had to occur in everyday life. However, by analyzing a series of individual actions before other authorities, it can be inferred that internal communication among women sometimes culminated in collective action against the solicitors. Different types and degrees of female resistance can be identified by examining the information regarding women’s refusal to immediately and voluntarily comply with the demands of religious figures. Women’s refusal sometimes triggered violent behaviors, as shown in Lorenza’s testimony or also demonstrated in the testimony of the Indigenous woman who stated that she struggled with Fray Luis de Saavedra. Another form of rejection toward the demands of confessors was carried out by Lorenza de Molina during her confession. She stated, “Having started my confession and being in the middle of it, the said Father Bernardo Gaitán grabbed my hands and began saying words of love to me. I tried to free my hands, telling the said Fray Bernardo Gaitán to focus on my sins” (AHN. Inquisición, exp. 27, f. 11r.). By refusing the demands of their confessors, women attempted to remind them of their place and decorum as spiritual fathers. Some even left the confessional without being absolved due to male insistence, expressing that they left in anger. Despite the secrecy surrounding the sacrament of penance and the “requests” and threats from the solicitors to maintain silence, women would confide in their family members, neighbors, or other confessors. In the trial against Fray José de Olivia, confessor of Guadalajara in 1663, three women from the same family voluntarily testified: Polonia de Trejo (a married Moorish woman), the mother, and her two daughters, Clara de Trejo (a married Mulatta), who made their accusations on the same day. Nicolasa de Trejo (a widow) testified four days after her mother and sister. In 1595, twenty-two Indigenous women denounced Fray Andrés Corral, the president of the San Francisco convent in Juntas, Tucumán, before the tribunal in Lima. One Indigenous woman, aged 24 (whose name is not included in the documentation), testified that when Fray Andrés invited her to spend the night with him in the convent, she responded, “I did not want to do that because I had heard that those who had relations with priests, when they died, turned into mules and that it was a great sin” (AHN, Inquisición, 1029, f. 78r.). In order for women’s testimonies to be deemed valid in the proceedings, the accusers and witnesses had to adhere to the Church’s definition

190

M. MENESES MUÑOZ

of acceptable female behavior. In a letter from the Suprema to the Inquisition of Mexico in 1577, which outlined procedures for dealing with solicitors, significant importance was placed on the quality of the witnesses “and the credibility that should be given to them.” It was explicitly mentioned that careful consideration should be given to whether these “are dishonourable or passionate women, and any other defects they may have, which should be verbally informed by reputable and unsuspected individuals” (AHN, Inquisición, 352, f. 109r.). These opinions, derived from the investigations conducted by the responsible authorities, were often noted in the margins of documents. For instance, in the investigation of the case against the Franciscan friar Juan de la Peña before the tribunal of Cartagena de Indias, two women were mentioned—a single Spanish woman and a Black woman who was a slave of a city resident. In the margin, it was recorded: “According to the commissioner’s information, this woman is considered a respectable and virtuous person, deserving of credibility. However, the commissioner notes she has a history of immoral behaviour and lacks credibility in other matters.” Consequently, her testimony was disregarded (AHN, Inquisición, 1020, f. 127r.). In his defense, Father Juan de la Peña, a professed priest of the Order of San Francisco from the convent in the city of Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola, attempted to discredit the women who accused him by alleging that “said women led immoral and dishonourable lives and where his enemies, as well as other religious witnesses who acted out of enmity” (130r.) Similarly, Diego de Sanabria, a doctrinero from Susa who was denounced by 12 Indigenous women before the tribunal of Cartagena, claimed that the accusations against him were false and unfounded. He argued that they were spread by a cleric who sought to take control of his encomienda. Furthermore, he argued that Indigenous people were not trustworthy due to their origin. As a result, the Holy Office set him free, stating that “after his case had been conclusively examined, it was decided that he should be released and granted definitive freedom from the proceedings, and this decision was duly executed” (309v.). The jurisdiction it fell under was one of the reasons for the impunity surrounding Solicitation. Despite the acts of violence and abuse against women, which secular justice considered an offense against female honor, the primary focus of the Holy Office was whether the behavior of the religious figures violated the sacrament of confession. This is why there were constant inquiries about the position, gestures, and words used by

9

MALE VIOLENCE AND FEMALE RESISTANCE …

191

the solicitors. In cases where the transgressions were numerous, scandalous, and deemed serious by the inquisitors, the superiors of the solicitors imposed a series of punishments. However, this internal discipline provided no resolution for the women and, in fact, protected the solicitors by transferring them and temporarily or permanently depriving them of administering confession.

Conclusions The excerpts discussed in this text exemplify the diverse mechanisms employed by solicited women to denounce and resist the various strategies of seduction and abuse employed by their confessors. Whether through organized efforts guided by others or driven by their Christian beliefs and the assertion of their right to a proper confession, women utilized what James Scott termed “weapons of the weak.” Rumors circulated within communities through familial and neighborhood relationships, leading to the development of a discreet discourse evident in the testimonies of witnesses documented by the Inquisition. The expressions of opposition and resistance from some of the solicited women provide insight into their attempts to defend themselves against male abuse through words or actions, often done in a way that would not be seen as a transgression against femininity. The testimonies of these abused women played a significant role in enabling historians to analyze their words and actions from a gender perspective and as acts of agency within the justice system. The bodily and verbal expressions directed at the solicitors indicate that the women’s forms of resistance were influenced by the intimate realms of authority and devotion imposed by the Church and sacramental education. However, there were instances where women directly confronted the demands of men, not just as parishioners opposing their minister or the institution’s failure to adhere to established norms. The defense and resistance of these women go beyond the image of being devout Christians. When they shared their experiences of abuse with a second confessor, a member of the Inquisition tribunal, or a family member, they demonstrated a heightened awareness and concern for their physical bodies and integrity. They even expressed remorse for being seduced through words or gifts. The aforementioned actions can be interpreted as the women’s desire to restore their individual honor and expose

192

M. MENESES MUÑOZ

the vulnerability they faced in the midst of the violation and transgression of behavioral norms that bestowed authority upon the male clergy, at the same time to denounced through institutional ways, the abuses that women experienced during the sacrament of confession offered an opportunity for women to create their own narratives about Solicitation, revealing the secret that their abusive confessors wanted. This moral and emotional context reflects the cultural representations of male dominance over women and the social and spiritual hierarchy of the period. These representations dictated that women should submit to men and rely on them as their guides. Lastly, it is essential to acknowledge the debt that historians owe to those who remain silent, the marginalized and racialized groups who lacked access to justice and whose narratives are still missing from the archives. Acknowledgements This paper had the support of CHAM (NOVA FCSH/ UAc), through the strategic project sponsored by FCT (UIDB/04666/2020). I would like to thank the members of the research group MEMIC—Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Cultures—for their comments on this text.

References Primary Sources AHN (Archivo Histórico Nacional - Spain), Inquisición, Manuscripts 352, 353, 1008, 1020, 1029, 1648 (exp. 20), 1732 (exp. 31), 1733 (exp. 20). López de Ayala, Ignacio (trad.). 1785. El sacrosanto y ecuménico Concilio de Trento. Madrid: Imprenta Real.

Bibliography Alejandre, José A. 1994. El veneno de Dios: la Inquisición de Sevilla ante el delito de solicitación en confesión. Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores. Catty, Jocelyn. 2011. Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England. Unbridled Speech. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, Elizabeth. 2012. She Said, He Said: Situated Oralities in Judicial Records from Early Modern Rome. Journal of Early Modern History 16 (4–5): 403– 430. Córdoba Ochoa, Luis M. 2011. Historia de la vida privada en Colombia, vol. I: La elusiva privacidad del siglo XVI . Bogotá: Taurus.

9

MALE VIOLENCE AND FEMALE RESISTANCE …

193

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review 46 (6): 1241–1299. Delgado, Jessica L. 2007. Foregrounding Marginal Voices: Writing Women’s Stories Using Trials. In Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Synoptic Methods and Practices, ed. K. Melvin and S. Sellers-García, 155-168. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Delgado, Jessica L. 2018. Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism in New Spain, 1630–1790. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Delumeau, Jean. 1991. L’Aveu et le pardon: Les difficultés de la confession (XIIIeXVIIIe siècle). Paris: Fayard. Escobar y Mendoza Antonio de. 1639. Examen de confessores y práctica de penitentes en todas las materias de la teología moral. Pamplona: Juan de Orteyza. Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch. Women, Body and the Primitive Accumulation. New York: Automedia. González Marmolejo, José R. 2002. Sexo y confesión. La Iglesia y la penitencia en los siglos XVIII y XIX en la Nueva España. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia-Plaza y Valdés editores. Gouveia, Jaime R. 2011. O sagrado e o profano em choque no confessionário. O delito de solicitação no Tribunal da Inquisição. Portugal 1551–1700. Coimbra: Palimage. Gouveia, Jaime R. 2015. A Quarta Porta do Inferno. A Vigilância e Disciplinamento da Luxúria Clerical no Espaço Luso-Americano (1640–1750). Lisbon: Chiado Editora. Haliczer, Stephen. 1996. Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howell, Martha. 2019. The Problem of Women’s Agency in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. In Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed. Sarah J. Moran and Amanda Pipkin, 21-31. Leiden: Brill. Mantecón Movellán, Tomás A. 2005. El mito del cortejo galante. Seducción y abuso sexual masculino en la Castilla moderna. In Le plaisir et la transgression en France et en Espagne aux XVI e et XVII e Siècles, ed. Maurice Dumas, 109-149. Pau: Editions Gascogne. Meneses Muñoz, Mariana. 2019. Solicitación y praxis inquisitorial en los tribunales de México, Cartagena y Lima, siglo XVII. Fronteras de la historia 24 (2): 110–135. Millar Carvacho, René. 1996. El delito de solicitación en el Santo Oficio de Lima. Hispania Sacra 48 (98): 741–803. Molina, Fernanda. 2011. Crónicas de la hombría. La construcción de la masculinidad en la conquista de América. Lemir: Revista de Literatura Española Medieval y del Renacimiento 15: 185–206.

194

M. MENESES MUÑOZ

Molina, Fernanda. 2022. Miserables o mentirosas. La participación judicial y el tratamiento inquisitorial de las mujeres indígenas en las causas por Solicitación (Santo Oficio limeño, siglos XVI-XVII). Diálogo Andino 65: 117–131. Sarrión Mora, Adelina. 1994. Sexualidad y confesión: la solicitación ante el Tribunal del Santo Oficio (siglos XVI-XIX). Madrid: Alianza Universidad. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New York: Yale University Press. Thompson, Edward P. 1984. Tradición, revuelta y conciencia de clase: estudios sobre la crisis de la Sociedad preindustrial. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica. Tortorici, Zeb. 2017. Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Durham: Duke University Press. Walker, Garthine. 1998. Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England. Gender & History 10 (1): 1–25.

CHAPTER 10

Urban Outcasts Facing Adversity: A Plebeian Culture of Resistance and Resilience in Seventeenth-Century Spain Tomás A. Mantecón Movellán

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the epicenter of European urbanization continued to be the major urban centers of the Mediterranean powers along with the Central European cities, whose interconnections shaped the North–South exchange between the Baltic and the Mare Nostrum, while also fostering new synergies and interregional complementarities. Within these boom contexts of European urbanization, some cities proved especially attuned to the renewed opportunities for growth offered by expansion across the Atlantic region, as well as the enhanced forms of communication. These interurban networks adapted to the conditions for trade created by the activity undertaken in the continent’s most dynamic regions.

T. A. Mantecón Movellán (B) Departamento de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea, Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_10

195

196

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

Seville and Lisbon played an essential role in these contexts around the time that Europe’s maritime expansion turned toward the Atlantic. To the rhythm set by these two Iberian ports an extensive arc of nodes steadily emerged along Europe’s western coast, to the north of Lisbon and Porto, and on from Galicia and the Cantabrian villas up to the Sund, passing through Bourdeaux and along the length of the English Channel, with Amsterdam, London and Hamburg as vibrant neuronal centers. The interconnections between these nuclei—and the systems—of nodal port cities varied in response to times of peace and war, but they were never severed, and at worst these were intermittent connections, as opposed to permanent ruptures, which exploited the opportunities offered by each of these urban contexts. Over the course of this period, all these urban centers underwent increasing growth, albeit on differing scales and rates. Viewed from a broad chronological perspective, the global impact of these dynamics of change on European cartography progressively shifted Europe’s economic and urban heart from south to north and from the Mediterranean toward the Atlantic. During the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and subsequently during the eighteenth century, even deeper transformations occurred that consolidated the aforementioned long-term processes by overlaying the trends that had been enunciated. For many people and from all walks of life, some of these urban centers offered appealing expectations of improved life chances. Such aspirations were based on the increasing vitality of the most interconnected ports and cities, and it suffices to highlight London’s immense expansion. The British capital’s population more than doubled during the eighteenth century and it did so at a faster rate than Paris, which had a higher population than London by 1700, but not by 1800. London’s growth occurred on a scale that was wholly unparalleled across the European region. The English capital, like its French counterpart, spread beyond its territorial limits, invading the outlying rural areas in order to accommodate a mass influx of immigrants. London also witnessed a major growth in its urban lumpenproletariat. The eighteenth-century megalopolises revealed serious issues of governance. Over the course of this century, this phenomenon was portrayed by authorised observers such as Hogarth,1 Defoe (1724a, b, 1725, 1741) and Gay (1742), and more 1 His series of engravings entitled Industry and Idleness (1747) and A Harlot’s Progress (1731) are excellent examples.

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

197

recently and in greater complexity by Rudé (1967) and Farge (1979), as well as Hitchcock and Shoemaker (2015), among many others. One impact of London’s dynamism was that one in ten British had spent some part of their life in the capital urban districts seeking employment or a way of life in the city (Porter 1982). By 1700, London, like Paris at that time, or Madrid on a scale four times smaller, stirred up expectations among immigrants, whose number far exceeded what these cities’ economic and political vigor could absorb. During this period, this problem was one of the many concerns that the governors of these macro-cities sought to address. Albeit on a different scale, but with considerable renown, this problem had been faced from a much earlier date by those charged with tackling the social underworlds of the cities of the Low Countries, as well as the busy port cities of Le Havre, Nantes, Bourdeaux, La Rochelle, Spain’s Cantabrian ports, Lisbon, Porto, Seville, Valencia, Genoa, Naples and Venice, to cite some well-known and representative examples.2 On the other side of the Atlantic similar problematic social scenarios also arose, and these were shaped by the complex structure of their urban societies. The rhythms of employment growth in these urban centers did not always keep time with the surging influxes of immigrants, nor with the economic and life expectations these people brought from their places of origin. The problems derived from overcrowding along with the impact of a growing urban underworld have been demonstrated for a range of cities along the extensive Atlantic arc. Historically, this was by no means an unknown phenomenon. It favored the formation of social ecosystems amid which developed an immensely complex and heterogeneous lumpenproletariat . In addition, this phenomenon also posed major challenges for the urban police and contributed to the formation of cultures of vital resistance that were molded in accordance with the life strategies developed.

Lumpenproletariat and the Indigent Class By the early sixteenth century, the progressive spread of this type of urban policing issues was being noted in relation to the development of both an urban proletariat and lumpenproletariat in the most abundant and 2 Two collective volumes suffice to demonstrate this: Fortea and Gelabert (2006) and García-Hurtado (2016).

198

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

dynamic cities.3 These cities reacted with a diverse range of measures, combining disciplinary and control actions with forms of social welfare. The types of welfare ranged from institutional initiatives—inspired by those provided by the central or municipal authorities, and that also operated in convergence with various ecclesiastical measures—to other more informal approaches, based on interpersonal bonds of a highly diverse nature (Geremek 1980, 1991; Jütte 1996). In Spain, the stimulus provided by the former option, which followed the Gallic or Central European model, did not prevent the widespread presence of forms of welfare based on customary solidarity and mutual interpersonal assistance, and this pattern dominated throughout the Ancien Régime period. Mutual assistance was the primary welfare option within the Hispanic model, as also occurred in the New World in addition to broad regions of Southern Europe (Rumeu de Armas 1944; Martz 1983; Mantecón 1988). A final component of this welfare scenario was the limited but widely distributed aid provided by the parishes or council representatives; this was a further semi-formalized welfare option, as it combined an institutional dimension with an interpersonal mutual aid facet, which was based on reciprocity. Entities such as guilds and confraternities operated on this plane along with other associational spheres, and they supported complementary actions intended to mitigate the harsh conditions adversity imposed on the most fragile segments of urban society. The greater degree of formalization of these welfare experiences and traditions has facilitated historical analysis of more complex and systemic proposals. The other side of this coin is revealed by solidary forms of mutual aid and informal versions of “self-help,” a sort of an interpersonal gift economy; these were based on emotional ties that overlay family bonds, or else relationships based on neighborhood, birthplace, status in the civil population, trades (even within marginal spheres), friendship, mutual aid, reciprocity, gender, religion and ethnic groups. The research done by Beckerman-Davis (1993), Walter and Schofield (1991) and Mantecón (1997b) on France, England and Spain provides contrasting images of the phenomenon of parish welfare and the varieties of self-help deployed to tackle uncertainty and need.

3 With regard to the European context, the impact of these measures has been studied in detail by Lis and Soly (1979, 1993).

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

199

Therefore, it has been possible to demonstrate forms of human behavior that were both intuitive and emotional, as well as interpersonal and based on pacts or agreements between parties, along with others that were grounded on mutual aid or altruistic premises based on values such as solidarity, reciprocity or almsgiving, as well as sentiments such as empathy. Such forms of behavior were especially widespread and persistent during the period when the highly diverse communities that composed and consolidated the lumpenproletariat roamed the cities of Ancien Régime Europe; meanwhile their ranks swelled to the rhythm, as result of urbanization and industrialization. The hypothesis that provides the point of departure for this study is that the majority of the displays of resilience from this urban lumpenproletariat formed part of a complex and plural plebeian culture that was expressed through ordinary women and men usual behavior beyond the well-known patriarchal stablished patterns.4 And this culture gave rise to the formation of its own specific languages, both verbal and non-verbal ones. It even came to denote a set of ethical values rooted in forms of everyday life. The plebeian culture of the urban lumpenproletariat came to bestow a certain personality and identity on cities both individually and as a group, and this affected how historical change unfolded. Another wholly different issue is whether or not other forms of class consciousness, albeit primitive ones, emerged within these cultural forms; this is suggested by the terms normally used to label far more complex realities, as is the case for the classical Marxist notion of the lumpenproletariat. As soon as this category (lumpenproletariat ) was coined by Marxist theorists, it resulted in the reification of the most impoverished sectors of society and they became associated with marginality and a lack of class consciousness, and perhaps even culture. Hence, it may be asked: could they have possessed some sense of class consciousness? Lumpen literally alludes to rags, while lumpig refers to a ragged, insignificant or squalid person. Marx used this term with these connotations, both in the debates he had with Max Stimer on the capacities of the proletariat and again in the Communist Manifesto. He also invoked them in his considerations on the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 4 This last viewpoint has very often been well studied. See for instance Ozment (1983), Hufton (1997), Wunder (1998) as well as Llanes Parra (2008), Uribe-Urán (2015), Candau Chacón (2016), or Franceschini-Toussaint et al. (2023) last publications on early modern Hispanic societies.

200

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

in which he expressed his distrust concerning this class’s proclivity to accept bribes, and therefore its inconsistency with regard to achieving the general aims of the working class. For Marx lumpenproletarians constituted a sort of degenerate mob, although they were also victims of the capitalist order. They formed a dangerous class that was diluted within the world of crime and never took up conscious revolutionary or reactionary positions, despite their participation in the events of the Europe of 1848 (Hayes 1988; Bussard 1987; Stallybrass 1990; Bourdin, 2013). European romantic literature also perceived the vitality of the lumpenproletariat, although it was identified with other words and seen as possessing other qualities and abilities. Victor Hugo speaks of a classe indigente (indigent class). Hugo referred to nameless people who formed a highly heterogeneous and amorphous social tier with vague frontiers; it formed a fragmentary, atomized and déclassé community. However, this social realm also provided a space for subjects with ideas, and positive and altruistic sentiments, as well as dignity and a capacity for action (Metzidakis 1993). Other nineteenth-century observers echoed Hugo’s perceptions. Their images were not so different from those set out on other scales and in other contexts by Cervantes when writing about the Seville of Rinconete and Cortadillo, and also the London known to Defoe and Hogarth, for which examples abound. More recent studies have identified forms of lumpen consciousness as encompassing a construct with the potential to achieve social justice (Cleaver 1972). Subsequently, with greater precision, Munford (1973) overcame Eldridge Cleaver’s (1972) more neoliberal perspective and acknowledged lumpen activism, although not necessarily a lumpen ideology. The major cities have always shown themselves to be huge devourers of people. In these contexts, this was not the sole concern, as governance and urban policing issues were also generated by this urban dynamic. The cultures associated with déclassé ways of life in urban spheres have demonstrated a huge diversity and richness. As a result, they have inspired an abundant literary and artistic legacy. Cervantes provides thousands of examples amid his observations and descriptions of central Castile. His writing on Castile is equally authoritative as his discussion of Seville, which he knew so closely and faithfully, even the universes enclosed within Seville’s prisons. Around the same time, one Doctor Carlos García, who remains an enigmatic figure, wrote a short work intended to provide an explanation for La desordenada

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

201

codicia de los bienes ajenos (the disordered covetousness for the property of others). It was published in Paris in 1619 and offers a response in the manner of Cervantes’s court of Monipodio, as well as the recurring descriptions contained in the ordenanzas mendicativas (the Lawes and Ordinances, that are inviolably to be observed among Beggars)5 that were compiled in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. The latter pulse with the same resonances as the behavior of the protagonists and characters found in all picaresque literature. García transmitted numerous authoritative literary testimonies and perceptions to contemporary readers in order to forewarn them and as a means of crime prevention. The genre of avisos (cautionary advice) to outsiders and visitors even resulted in the boom of a specific kind of narrative. Perhaps one of the most noteworthy examples of this literature is the succulent morsels of cautionary advice that Liñán y Verdugo (1635) issued to those who arrived in Madrid during the seventeenth century. The descriptions enclosed within these literary visions fed into the construction of historical explanations that have proved to be highly controversial with regard to the morphology of organized crime networks in early-modern cities. The subtlety of the lines written by these literary authors gave rise to a debate about whether they described forms of organized crime, or rather criminal organizations, and even whether either of these, or even both if compatible, fitted within the proactive cultures established by déclassé communities through their own everyday way of life and the strategies they deployed to sustain it. The latter also included forms of mutual aid solidarity that were neither necessarily nor absolutely horizontal, despite being among plebeian people. Relationships could at times be asymmetrical in terms of superiority and inferiority, even within a lumpen framework, or between the lower classes. Nevertheless, sharing or supplying accommodation, offering defensive support in hostile environments, covering employment shortages in precarious forms of work and providing food aid formed part of an extensive range of similar mutual aid options (Mantecón 1997b). The urban authorities tackled the aforementioned phenomena to the extent that these engaged with social interests and posed problems that

5 Translator’s note: this is the translation given by James Mabbe in The rogue: or the life of Guzmán de Alfarache, 1634, p. 193.

202

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

hindered the establishment of forms of social coexistence capable of minimizing any possible negative impact on economic dynamism, and likewise the affairs of all those concerned with this, which ranged from the city’s corporate entities and their members as well as the crown itself. Furthermore, there was a double-faceted urban government, which declared its aim to be, on the hand, the preservation of the common good and policing, while, on the other, the implicit preservation of a climate of social coexistence that protected the groups represented by the council, as well as their sectors of activity along with those of the Crown. Undoubtedly, the economic activity operating in and around these urban centers adopted both legal and illegal forms. It even went to create the conditions for both the institutional and innovative development of financial resources, as well as the creation of highly lucrative mercantile activity, and these were undertaken through more or less established networks that involved forms of criminal organization. The sample offered by Florike Egmond’s (1993) analysis of criminal organizations in the Low Countries presents a stimulating scenario and reveals the variety of this phenomenon. Mantecón’s (2006) comparative analysis of Seville and Amsterdam revealed features of a phenomenon that has also been addressed through specific studies of examples from the Old and New Worlds. In addition, projections have been made that open up approaches within the same citizenry context, as well as an urban systems framework, and likewise the interweaving nodes created by a range of cities, which in turn formed extensive networks encompassing transoceanic connections. Details for both common patterns and contrasting features have been underscored with regard to Seville (Perry 1980; Iglesias 2016) and the Iberian Peninsula’s Atlantic coast, see García-Hurtado (2009, particularly 103–123). For example, on the other side of the Atlantic see Moutoukias (1988) and Benito de la Gala and Mantecón (2010). The most active cities and regions developed social ecosystems that fostered the formation of networks of this kind, and these created huge interests derived from exploiting opportunities for eluding commercial control and maximizing profits, which in turn distributed markedly unequal shares on each step of the reticulated entanglement that resulted from the fraudulent trade in all kinds of merchandise. On each rung of the network information was fragmentary, which prevented the trade undertaken at that level collapsing in the event that one of its nodes gave way. At the base of these pyramidal structures, the people who participated in

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

203

these networks also engaged in numerous other approaches to pursuing their own livelihood, whereby they contributed to the development of plebeian cultures of resistance to adversity (Mantecón 1997b). Some time ago, the Hobsbawm-Block debate laid the foundations for the discussion on the social articulation that gave rise to forms of criminal organization in distinctive historical contexts. Today the arguments from this debate continue to prompt forthright contemporary perspectives (Wagner 1991) which demonstrate the vitality of the controversy over the degree of autonomy and/or exclusion, or integration of individuals proscribed from certain social environments. Over the course of the pages that follow, I focus attention on the dynamic urban centers of port societies in Castile during the time of Cervantes, and using the latter debate as a foundation, I also draw on the resonances bequeathed by literary sources, art and appreciations from qualified contemporary observers, including those provided by the ordenanzas mendicativas recounted in Guzmán de Alfarache, Miguel de Cervantes’s description of the court of Monipodio, and the human types portrayed by Ribera and Caravaggio. Literary sources have bequeathed us a range of information that has enabled the construction of archetypes for how the networks of the underworlds of these urban societies in Spain and Europe were articulated during this period and those that followed. Daniel Defoe’s (1724, 1725) accounts, for example, record the activities and social milieus of the renowned products of London’s eighteenth-century underworld as Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. Despite the considerable license Defoe granted himself, he explicitly stated that what he recounted was based on statements from the protagonists themselves, recounted in and from their cells and prisons. At the same time as London was growing at a wholly new rhythm and comprised Europe’s greatest urb in Europe, duplicating its population during the period today known as the Enlightenment, Daniel Defoe and others visited Newgate Prison, drawn by an anthropological curiosity in the people of the city’s underworld. William Hogarth recorded their faces and poses. Mutatis mutandi situations of this type were commonplace within the dynamics of the complex urban societies of the pre-industrial era. As a result, this shaped how outcast subjects, men and women, were perceived and likewise the cultural constructs concerning forms of

204

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

criminal organization. Furthermore, it informed perceptions of the environments created by governments and the instruments they deployed to control social deviation and, when relevant, crime. Narratives, iconographic representations and even theatrical dramatization echoed not only the recording of the physical image and behavior and activities of people from the urban underworld, and also, to put it differently, their ecosystems within the city, as well as their development and specific use of language. The Beggar’s Opera, which premiered during this same period, is an excellent example with regard to London. However, it has also been possible to trace forms of gestural and verbal languages in the spheres of the urban underworld of early modern Spain. Caro Baroja (1986) highlighted explicit references to language in early-modern Spanish printed sources, as a rule literary ones. The documentation generated by the institutions set up to administer urban discipline has likewise permitted the analysis of models of behavior corresponding to a plebeian culture within which emerged values with positive and negative features, forms of discipline and authority, which were neither institutional nor formalized. Likewise, it reveals languages that expressed cultural manifestations rooted in cohabitation as well as personal bonds of interdependence, both those established between equals and those of an asymmetrical and hierarchical nature. The frameworks and roots of the social relationships within which evolved the needs of the people living in the contexts created by the huge expanding cities, as well as the responses dispensed to them, have opened up a broad field of academic study, and this has enabled the identification of those who lived on the streets, as well as the people who operated the cities’ shifting and elusive markets, which could be both informal and illegal. Seventeenth-century Dutch cities, along with other large Southern European cities such as Naples, Palermo and Seville, have likewise left testimonies of the fortitude shown by this substantial segment of urban society.

Thugs, Prostitutes and Miscreants The aggregate of women and men who contemporary testimonies identify as living within the urban lumpenproletariat reveals this social class to have encompassed considerable breadth in social terms, as well as mobility and heterogeneity. The environs of the Sevillian church and hospital of St Andrew periodically brought together a number of these

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

205

people seeking help, and in order to attain this aid on occasions they attended the sermons of local clerics and missionaries. Within this Sevillian neighborhood, heartless men, criminals, thugs or valentones, cut-throats, assassins and outlaws all gathered; people whom the representatives of the police and urban or royal justice sometimes dared not confront, and who between themselves maintained a set of power and dependency relationships that could be highly complex. As was the case in many other cities, but on a much larger scale in Seville due to its size, density and the dynamism generated by its port activity, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the Andalusian capital it was not easy to separate the people of the lumpenproletariat from the other sectors of urban society who might merge with the realms of this social underworld; these were the people who entered and left this marginal sphere, youths of both sexes who combined temporary employment in the port with forms of malentretenimiento or a dissolute life, and occasionally with a wide range of crimes. Feast days and festivities offered occasions for a perfect storm to break out, which foregrounded the problems of public order, and also how the communities and strata of the aforementioned social complex interacted. And this not only occurred during the most renowned festivities, but also on a more frequent and recurrent basis on Sundays. Brawls, killings and confrontations all took place and blood was spilled upon the streets of the Andalusian capital, as was the case for the cities of central Castile. Young men gathered for these disputes, and they were joined by gangs of other “dissolute” individuals who sought to avenge themselves with stonings and other forms of urban confrontation. The pedreas or apedreamientos (stonings), as well as other pendencias (faction violent quarrels) between criminal bands or factions, very often young adult male groups fighting each other in order to control urban districts or as an expression of their mutual everyday competitions and relationships, formed part of the periodic outbreaks of violence that left a very specific mark on urban life during these festive junctures, and also on many other less foreseeable occasions, which were prompted by territorial conflicts between rival groups, as well as disputes over the hierarchical status of factions and bands. Feast days also led to a surge in activity around Seville’s three brothels; each was overseen by a brothel keeper, who leased out the use of certain houses to other individuals. These locations brought together women and men who had migrated from other cities and surrounding comarcas (an

206

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

administrative region made up of various municipalities). Many young women were drawn there having been abandoned, or else due to poverty, as well as the profits to be made from the trade, although their takings soon slipped through their finger once swept up into this genuine inferno. The civic ordinances proved wholly ineffective and reflected the laxity of the municipal control when faced by the dominion of the brothel keepers and the ruffians who subjected the women to a disgraceful form of slavery. The action taken by the Casa de Recogidas and the Casa Pía (charitable entities intended to help prostitutes flee this way of earning a living) had a very limited impact on very few women. It is calculated that these two institutions usually assisted around forty women in a city that in the early seventeenth century numbered over 100,000 inhabitants. Despite the relevance of this initiative in terms of the experience it generated, its proportions highlight the limited impact of the work undertaken by these two institutions. Furthermore, as the social circumstances of the women they took in did not change significantly, before long they lapsed back into their “fallen state.” In parallel, consideration must be given to the interests generated by this activity in the city. The women were closely and deeply dependent on the ruffians involved, who bound them to their adversity, and also exploited them in every way possible to attract niñas perdidas (lost girls), as well as obtain them through a range of methods.6 Thus, they literally raised young girls in order to later profit from them when a suitable occasion arose. The city’s parish priests and missionaries, the Jesuits in particular, sought to put a stop to these practices in so far as they could. Sometime young girls were seized from their mothers to prevent them being sold, and they were placed in the Casa Pía, but this institution did not usually accommodate more than about twenty. From there they sought to relocate them to work in domestic service, with the intention that in this environment they would not be abused, although the controls to prevent this were very superficial. However, many other women in similar situations ended up incarcerated, serving time aboard the galera para mujeres perdidas (galley for lost women), following decisions and the actions of bailiffs. As a result, their situation only worsened.

6 Biblioteca Universitaria de Salamanca (BUS), Ms. 573, volume I, ff. 18-18vº.

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

207

In La Madera, Las Barbacanas and Murallas, Las Tarrancas and Hoyas de Tablada and other locations across the city déclassé marginalized young women set upon distracted young men. The latter not only ended up being duped, but more often than not they also fell ill due to the city’s unabated contagion, despite the supposedly periodic visits made by a salaried surgeon paid by the city. The latter measure was intended to avoid the propagation of venereal diseases. However, the only thing achieved by these medical inspections was that the sickest women were banished, which further prejudiced their status and marginality. Furthermore, wherever they were relocated they would be identified with nicknames such as venida (newcomer) or residenta (resident), which cast doubt upon their origin, past and honesty. The latter fate, banishment, was the start of a still more degrading path, which the women walked in accordance with their fate, and they soon fell prey to those who oversaw the bordels and as well as aggressive ruffians, depending on how evident their fall had become. By then the relationships of subordination reduced these women to a form of slavery that it was extremely difficult to escape from. The experience of these women placed them on a wholly different plane and in unique circumstances, even within the urban lumpenproletariat. Therefore, when work became available women also worked, even taking on the toughest jobs on the docks. These women’s modus vivendi by no means disdained all they had learned from their harsh school of life. Highly diverse forms of authority were formed on the streets, which were the result of day-to-day experience. The periodic arrival of the Indies fleet and the activity generated by the tunny fishing fleet led to an increased availability of work across all the related spheres of activity in the Andalusian capital and other port cities. On these occasions greater flexibility was shown toward the standard controls over public order. The work offered by the tuna fishing season attracted dangerous people, whom contemporary chronicles referred as the most lost people of the world (la gente más perdida del mundo). During these periods, men and women lived a sus anchuras , como moros sin rey (as they wished, like Moors without a king).7 All this went on despite the concern shown by those responsible for maintaining order.

7 Ibid., ff. 30vº–31.

208

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

The tunny fishing undertaken in the Gibraltar Strait was linked to the seasonal migrations of tunny, which had been known about since the late Roman empire, and had been exploited with some frequency during the medieval period; however, it intensified at the end of the latter era, and in 1499 the Crown granted authority to the dukes of Medina Sidonia to control the fishing waters of Gibraltar Strait and exploit their resources, although the licenses the Crown granted to this noble family dated back to the end of the thirteenth century (Pérez de Colosía et al., 1991, 243–244; Ladero Quesada 1999, 49–51). This fishery granted increasing profits to the dukes in the first half of the sixteenth century and even afterward. By the mid-sixteenth century, during the summer this activity brought together what was almost an army of laborers, and, albeit not without disputes, this continued until the anti-aristocratic regulations established by the Cortes of Cadiz. Furthermore, these fisheries generated other relevant sources of income for neighboring urban centers with complementary activities, such as the production of salt to conserve the tuna, as well as work linked to salt extraction and its use and application, which offered complimentary opportunities for business and employment, and attracted many people from the region (Moreno Ollero 2018). During the tunny fishing season, the Duke of Medina Sidonia himself appointed a captain and a senior judge to punish any exorbitant crimes that upset the conditions of minimal tolerance required to ensure the fishing was carried out; according to contemporary observers, it is clear that the protagonists of crimes were not always pursued with great efficacy. On the contrary, it seems that these people were protected by a fuero (local law) throughout the fishing season, just as if they had sought sanctuary within a church or sacred place; thereby during these periods they enjoyed extensive impunity, and this was even extended to known outlaws and murderers. Nevertheless, scenarios such as this provided opportunities for work and earning a living for the whole social complex of the lumpenproletariat from across the kingdom. Dissolute women and fish salters likewise came in search of employment salting and barreling tuna, but no young women were allowed, only those aged over forty; this was the rule. A great number of these women had previously been considered as individuals renowned as de mal vivir (dissolute) or for living con gran libertad (with great laxity). In these circumstances, como la gente de xauega son de traje y pelo dellas no haçen asco de sus semejantes (as the people who work

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

209

the nets wear their clothes and hair in the same way as the women do, they do not disdain them).8 There was considerable sexual license, and it may be supposed it was not always consensual, whereby rape must have been a frequent occurrence. As the women did not have dueños (owners) or pimps, there were no disputes about sexual abuse in these contexts. Nevertheless, there were frequent outbreaks of violence. Reprobate thugs and outlaws also turned up with their gangs, attracted by the daily wage and the opportunities for gambling, robbery and theft. The social practices that resulted led to people being killed or injured for the slightest motive, and extremely violent forms of discipline were exercised within the lumpenproletariat without there being any opportunity for trial or appeal. The violence expressed forms of authority, gangs and factions, and seemingly with the same ease the coalitions and loyalties established within these groups would dissolve; they developed a law among themselves without any external control stifling the vigor and tension of these ties, nor the exercise of their own forms of discipline. Among the stevedores other coalitions of this type arose; these were based on trade affiliations or interests, and these were imposed on those of the déclassé lumpenproletariat. With regard to the tunny fishery, the seafaring men were divided, on the one hand, into those considered to be armadores (shipwrights), in other words, the artisans employed to build and repair ships, along with their subordinates, and on the other hand, those considered to be remendadores de redes (net repairers). Tensions easily erupted between the two groups. Furthermore, when conflict broke out, coalitions and loyalties in each band could be underscored by other factors, such as an individual’s origin. During the spring of 1582, for example, a conflict arose between dos cuadrillas (two gangs), which led to them inflicting numerous forms of violence upon one another. That year, a demand for help made by a remendador from Béjar to an armador from the Levante—Spain’s eastern coast, whose inhabitants were renowned for being belligerent—was taken as an insult due to the way it was asked and a taunt that was made. The offended party kept quiet about the affront he considered to have been committed until other compatriots arrived. When they did, and given that the Levant faction said they would wait for a chance to burn their adversaries alive in their huts, those from Béjar and the staff and assistants serving the Duke of Medina Sidonia had

8 Ibid., f. 39vº.

210

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

to remain on guard and seek means and solutions to ease the tension between the factions. As both sides seemed wary of the other, and the duke did not want to lose out on the profits provided by the fishing he made recourse to the jurisdiction and mediation of the Jesuit missionaries. He put his trust in those who conozían sus fueros y leyes y modo de viuir (knew their codes and laws and way of life), in other words, the missionaries, who had learned about the culture of these people in order to provide spiritual guidance to the prisoners in Seville’s jails, and they could use their knowledge to calm the conflict that had been caused by this segment of the lumpenproletariat, and thus avoid the tragedy that would be caused by a confrontation, as well as any loss of profits from the fisheries for the duke. The offender, as a result of the Jesuits’ mediation, said he had not recognized the other person, nor their trade. He explicitly added that he had considered the individual to be honorable. As a result, he had to stand down, as if publicly retracting his words, something which he himself would also have perceived as degrading in its own right. However, his statement established that no harm had been intended for the person he had addressed. Thereby the individual who had supposedly been insulted was now deemed to have not been offended. A banquet held by the duke on the express request of the missionaries finally brought the conflict to an end. The cost of the banquet must have been wholly worthwhile given that the tunny fishing earned the duke over 80,000 ducats.9 That year was a good fishing year, although evidence for the income provided by the duke’s tunny fishing during the mid-seventeenth century suggests that from one year to the next the average earnings did not vary much from this figure. During this period, this source of income provided substantial support for the duchy’s fortune (Pérez de Colosía et al., 1991). Everyday life among the communities that made up this lumpenproletariat led to the emergence of mutual aid practices linked to card playing, gambling and work, quarrels once again, and the taverns where the wages were consumed; however, given that the camaraderie they developed also involved the exchange of food, there was seemingly no lack of things to eat so long as they were not too choosy about what they ate. The activity generated by these pícaros pelados (penniless rogues) and the

9 Ibid., ff. 34–34vº.

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

211

milieu created by this picaresque life attracted mozos hijos de gente principal (young sons of prominent people), who were swept along by the gambling, the brawls and the mujercillas (fallen women), in addition to the endless jokes that they were a source of entertainment and an expression of a vigorous sociability that was by no means exempt from considerable personal risk. In the rural areas, livestock breeders and country folk, from Tarifa, Gibraltar, Béjar and Medina, might come across outlaws and bandits who were a source of danger and fear on the roads. In this regard it was hardly any different elsewhere. The highwaymen also developed their own social practices and internal hierarchy, which was reinforced by their capacity to inflict violence among themselves and on other people. Throughout the Ancien Régime, highwaymen would paint their faces black so they could operate at night, as did the smugglers along Spain’s Atlantic coast, the bandits and outlaws of central Castile and the lowland Levante region, practice continued on beyond the rupture of the social structures of this period (Mantecón 1997b; Inarejos 2005; Madrazo 2014). In order to compensate the demographic deficit that resulted from the expulsion of the Moriscos, there was an influx of immigrants from a range of origins, including Castile and Galicia. This occurred with greater intensity in the regions where there had been greater conflict with the Moriscos after 1568, and a number of comarcas (territorial districts) in the province of Granada were particularly affected. Numerous people arrived in the Lecrín Valley to replace the absent Moriscos. There were individuals from a range of places, some of whom were deemed undesirable, de fieras e incultas costumbres (with wild and uneducated customs), idlers and people with bad intentions. Each of them received the fate-allotment of land that had before been assigned to three or four Moriscos; nevertheless, they died of hunger. The amounts with which ten times more Moriscos had once fed themselves did not suffice. According to some contemporary observers, this was because they did not dedicate enough time to their work as their past and now expelled tenants had done.10 In other areas of the Alpujarras, as in many rural regions of central Castile and the Cantabrian coast, community practices supported mutual aid, reciprocity and solidarity amid communities in order to overcome penury and adversity. Among these communities, moral weakness or a

10 Ibid., ff. 54–54vº.

212

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

proclivity to swearing oaths, and even a reticence toward confession and communion, as well as the sacrament of marriage, all formed part of a way of life that was also formed within peasant cultures, which likewise structured the use of agricultural spaces. Within this order of things, the use of language, exclamations, even the development of a specific lexicon linked to ways of life and the social practices that evolved were in general elements that provided an identity among the plebeian people of all kinds, gender and origin. It was experienced with greater intensity in the frontier regions in which Castilian and Portuguese formed hybrid combinations that evolved in an empirical and thereby very unsystematic manner. In Lobón, a comarca along the border with Portugal, the missionaries themselves stated that auíamos menester un vocabulario para entenderlos (we have created a dictionary in order to understand them) because the people tienen vocablos mezclados y ni bien son castellanos ni portugueses (use combinations of words and they are neither Castilian nor Portuguese).11 In the tunny fisheries, there was work to be done loading and unloading as part of the dockside activity, and there were also various forms of temporary work, whereby social practices between the seasonal workers veered from one extreme to another: support and integration, or conflict and exclusion. In the latter case, unequivocally violent situations could arise in order to protect an individual or group’s employment. Attacks also took place on the streets, which demonstrated the violent discipline imposed by the stevedores. Legal documents demonstrate this, even with regard to the highly specific Sevillian case (Mantecón 2008). The patterns that were wholly evident in urban zones were also found in rural comarcas that had the capacity to offer employment to seasonal or day laborers of all kinds. In the region of the Aracena Mountains, the seasonal work required on the vineyards also attracted itinerant laborers and gente de mal andar (dissolute people), outlaws, thieves, gamblers and vagabonds from Andalusia and Extremadura; these troublemakers were called bergas, as a shortened form of bergante (scoundrel) and it meant the same, a shameless pícaro or rogue. When the need arose, the searches undertaken by the authorities of Utrera and Dos Hermanas with the intention of capturing these miscreants faced innumerable difficulties due to resistance put up by the local

11 Ibid., ff. 73–73vº.

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

213

communities. When someone was captured, very little information was obtained to assist with their incarceration. The rogues created a form of silent law, threatening everyone and all the neighboring areas with death threats. They maintained this practice even after having been imprisoned, and when released from jail. Silence became a protective element for relationships within these underworlds which existed on the frontier between licit and illicit activities. The social universes of the Andalusian lumpenproletariat around 1614 must have included at least around a thousand people who recognized one another, used specific forms of speech and traveled around the comarca’s noble estates.12 Their activity intimidated travelers and led the muleteers to change their routes and journeys. Their very existence on the margins of the centers of power, employment and social representation among the people who made up the lumpenproletariat signified the formation of plebeian cultures of resistance against adversity. The information analyzed here has demonstrated how specific languages, both oral and gestural, values and the forms of discipline exercised within each social space also fragmented it, as if they were tesserae of a single social mosaic depicting the cultures of these déclassé communities: the lumpenproletariat.

Conclusions: A Plebeian Culture, Resilient and Resistant The lexicon we use today places the realities framed by the words, resistance and resilience, in close proximity. In the pre-industrial era, the former expressed the notion of opposing an action, situation or the use of violence; it served to defend oneself against the adverse. Many of the attitudes and forms of behavior analyzed above demonstrate that in earlymodern Spain there were people who belonged to the lumpenproletariat who had the capacity to form life strategies, and on the basis of them to construct a culture, a plebeian culture associated with the everyday need to resist the adversity of life experiences dominated by vulnerability. Seville constituted a special social laboratory in early-modern Spain for many reasons, but also due to the diversity of its urban lumpen, and those who walked the city’s streets and its urban districts were fully aware of

12 Ibid., ff. 86–86 vº.

214

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

this. It suffices to recall a fleeting encounter described by the Jesuit Pedro de León in the heyday of Cervantes, which took place by the entrance to Seville’s Hospital of St Andrew. On leaving a sermon, a man approached him and acknowledged that he had gone eighteen years without making confession, and he stated that he intended to leave Seville and go to Sanlúcar, and from there travel on to Ceuta or Tangier, as he would face less danger in those places than in Seville.13 The man acknowledged both the scenarios and cultures that had evolved in his social strata; in other words, the indigent class. He was wholly aware of the vulnerability of his situation, and so he chose other ecosystems in other North African settings and other social configurations to that of Seville urban lumpenproletariat. His awareness and attitude were not out of the ordinary; instead, they were commonplace. As has been discussed, literary works have echoed many of these circumstances, and they indicate how the communities that made up this social tier were aware of their situation, as well as their capacity and initiative to tackle new risks and overcome those they knew. Resilience adds two essential characteristics to the aforementioned connotations set out for resistance: the subjects’ capacity to adapt to perturbing situations, states or elements, in addition to adversity; and, secondly, their ability to recover from the possible negative effects of the circumstances or agents they had encountered. The aforementioned episode described by Father Pedro de León, along with many of the others analyzed here, expresses forms and practices of resilience. Within this social underworld, the life paths people took could also harbor processes of personal degradation. Every aspect of the polyhedral spheres of prostitution clearly reveals this, and they demonstrate forms of gender domination that are inexplicable unless considered in accordance with the established values: women despite their role in the world of work, even within highly exploitative forms of labor, were not recognized by their male peers as possessing traits of humanity. There are cases that record the kidnapping and confinement of women for financial gain, forms of behavior that are comparable to the practice of horse thieves with their loot. Many such scenarios remain to be explored in this field.

13 Ibid., f. 7.

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

215

The documentation handled by the institution set up for the practice of imposing urban discipline, in addition to literary sources and the chronicles and testimonies of qualified observers and analysis of the Ancien Régime, permits an analysis of models of behavior that responded to a plebeian culture formed from the outcome of the survival strategies pursued by the people of the lumpenproletariat. They allow us to identify this social segment at the heart of the pre-industrial societies as having been an active part of the society, while it was also amorphous, complex and adaptable to the circumstances offered by each context and scenario or social ecosystem. Plebeian culture was resilient in historical time, yet also resistant to the adversity and the alternatives involved in making a living on a daily basis. Within the framework of this plebeian culture, values were developed to which were assigned characteristics, whether positive or negative, forms of discipline and authority, needless to say neither institutional nor formalized, and likewise languages that permitted this culture to express itself verbally through signs, or else through actions or forms of behavior. Furthermore, the complex range of situations and contexts studied here has also permitted the recognition of an active lumpenproletariat, and it has set out a number of expressions of the complexity of social class, as well as its active role in constructing and sustaining the dynamism of a resilient culture of resistance. Acknowledgements Research undertaken as part of the project PID2021124823NB-C22 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and FEDER-Una manera de hacer Europa; RESISTANCE. Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, 16th–19th centuries (778076-H2020-MSCARISE-2017), and also linked to the goals of the FECYT project: THEMIS (EIN2020-112239).

References Beckerman-Davis, Laura. 1993. Reconstructing the Poor in Early SixteenthCentury. French History 7 (3, September): 249–285 Benito de la Gala, Julia and Tomás A. Mantecón. 2010. Redes delictivas y formas de crimen organizado en las ciudades de la Europa atlántica durante el Antiguo Régimen. Anuario IEHS 25: 179–204. Bourdin, Jean-Claude. 2013. Marx et le lumpenprolétariat. Actuel Marx 54: 39–55.

216

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

Bussard, Robert L. 1987. The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels: The Rise of the Idea of the lumpenproletariat. History of European Ideas 8 (6): 675– 692. Candau Chacón, María Luisa, ed. 2016. Las mujeres y las emociones en Europa y América. Siglos XVII-XIX. Santander: Universidad de Cantabria. Caro Baroja, Julio. 1986. Realidad y fantasía en el mundo criminal. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Cleaver, Eldridge. 1972. On lumpen ideology. The Black Scholar 4 (3, November–December): 2–10. Defoe, Daniel. 1724a. Narrative of all the Robberies, Escapes, etc. of John Sheppard. London: Applebee. Defoe, Daniel. 1724b. The Fortunate Mistress: or A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Furtunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Called the Countess de Wintselsheim, in Germany, Being the Person Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles. London: Aplebee. Defoe, Daniel. 1725. The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild, Not Made up of Fiction and Fable, But Taken from His Own Mouth, and Collected from Papers of His Own Writing. London: Applebee. Defoe, Daniel. 1741. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. London: J. Brotherson [1st ed. 1722]. Egmond, Florike. 1993. Underworlds. Organized Crime in the Netherlands, 1650–1800. Oxford: Polity Press. Farge, Arlette. 1979. Vivre dans la rue à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard. Fortea, José I., and Juan E. Gelabert, eds. 2006. La ciudad portuaria atlántica en la historia, siglos XVI-XIX . Santander: Universidad de Cantabria. Franceschini-Toussaint, Marie E., Sylvie N. Hanicot Bourdier, and Margarita Torremocha, eds. 2023. Mujer e identidad en tierras hispanohablantes : historia y civilización. Nancy: Éditions Universitaires de Lorraine. García-Hurtado, Manuel-Reyes, ed. 2016. Fronteras de agua. Las ciudades portuarias y su universo cultural (siglos XIV-XXI). Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. García-Hurtado, Manuel-Reyes, ed. 2009. Soltando amarras. La costa noratlántica ibérica en la Edad Moderna. Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. Gay, John. 1742. The Beggar’s Opera written by Mr. Gay. London: John Watts printer [first ed.1725]. Geremek, Bronislaw. 1980. Truands et miserables dans l’epoque Moderne (13501600). Paris: Gallimard. Geremek, Bronislaw. 1991. Les fils de Caín. L’image des pauvres et des vagabonds dnas la littérature européenne du XVe au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Flammarion.

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

217

Hayes, Peter. 1988. Utopia and the Lumpenproletariat: Marx’s Reasoning in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’. The Review of Politics 50 (3): 445–465. Hitchcock, Tim and Robert Shoemaker. 2015. London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hufton, Olwen. 1997. The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe. London: Fontana Press. Iglesias Rodríguez, Juan J. 2016. Conflictos y violencias en la frontera de lo cotidiano. Hacia una tipología de las transgresiones en la Edad Moderna. en Identidades y fronteras Culturales en el mundo ibérico de la Edad Moderna, ed. José L. Betrán, Bernat Hernández and Doris Moreno, 333–348. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Inarejos, Juan A. 2005. Para una caracterización del bandolerismo manchego en la sociedad agraria liberal (1854–1868). In Las figuras del desorden:heterodoxos , proscritos y marginados. Madrid, Siglo XXI, CD-Rom. Jütte, Robert. 1996. Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ladero Quesada, Miguel Á. 1999. Andalucía a fines de la Edad Media. Estructuras , valores , sucesos. Valencia: Universidad de Valencia. Liñán y Verdugo, Antonio. 1635. Guía y avisos de forasteros , adonde se les enseña a huir de los peligros que ay enla vida de corte y devaxo de nouelas morales, y exemplares escarmientos, se les auisa y aduierte de como acudirán sus negocios cuerdamente. Valencia: Silvestre Esparta. Lis, Catharina, and Hugo Soly. 1979. Poverty and Capitalism in Preindustrial Europe. Brighton: Harvester Press. Lis, Catharina and Hugo Soly. 1993. Neighbourhood Social Change in West European Cities: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. International Review of Social History 38 (1): 1–30. Llanes Parra, Blanca. 2008. El enemigo en casa: el parricidio y otras formas de violencia interpersonal doméstica en el Madrid de los Austrias (1580–1700). Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [On line]. Madrazo, Santos. 2014. Bandolerismo castellano-bandolerismo levantino. Divergencias y analogías. In Cambios y resistencias sociales en la Edad Moderna, ed. Fernando Andrés et al., 203–212. Madrid: Sílex. Mantecón Movellán, Tomás A. 1988. Contrarreforma y religiosidad popular en Cantabria. Santander: University de Cantabria-Asamblea Regional de Cantabria. Mantecón Movellán, Tomás A. 1997a. Conflictividad y disciplinamiento social en la Cantabria rural del Antiguo Régimen. Santander: Universidad de Cantabria-Fundación Botín.

218

T. A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN

Mantecón Movellán, Tomás A. 1997b. Los pobres y sus actitudes en la temprana Edad Moderna. Debats 60: 91–107. Mantecón Movellán, Tomás A. 2006. Las culturas criminales portuarias en las ciudades atlánticas: Sevilla y Ámsterdam en su edad dorada. In La ciudad portuaria atlántica en la historia, siglos XVI-XIX, ed. José I. Fortea and Juan E. Gelabert, 159–194. Santander: Universidad de Cantabria. Mantecón Movellán, Tomás A. 2008. ’La ley de la calle’ y la justicia en la Castilla Moderna. Manuscrits 26: 165–189. Mantecón Movellán, Tomás A. 2016. Vida cotidiana, disciplinamiento social y cambio Histórico en el Antiguo Régimen. en Identidades y fronteras Culturales enel mundo ibérico de la Edad Moderna, ed. José L. Betrán, Bernat Hernández and Doris Moreno, 299–314. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Martz, Linda. 1983. Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Metzidakis, Angelo. 1993. On Rereading French History in Hugo’s Les Misérables. The French Review 67 (2, December): 187–195. Moreno Ollero, Antonio. 2018. Sal para las almadrabas del duque de Medina Sidonia (el abastecimiento de las pesquerías de atún de Conil y Zahara en la primera mitad del siglo XVI). Boletín del Centro de Estudios de la Costa Noroeste de Cádiz 8: 144–154. Moutoukias, Zacarias. 1988. Burocracia, contrabando y autotransformación de las élites: Buenos Aires en el siglo XVII. Anuario IEHS 3: 213–248. Munford, Clarence J. 1973. The Fallacy of Lumpen Ideology. The Black Scholar 4 (10): 47–51. Ozment, Steven. 1983. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press. Pérez de Colosia, Inés/Sarriá Muñoz, Andrés. 1991. Las almadrabas del duque de Medina Sidonia en Tarifa. Baética: Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea 13: 241–254. Perry, Mary E. 1980. Crime and Society in Early Modern Seville. Maine: The University Press of New England. Porter, Roy. 1982. English Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Penguin Books. Rudé, George. 1967. The Crowd in History. A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Rumeu de Armas, Antonio. 1944. Historia de la previsión social en España. Madrid, Rev. Derecho Privado. Stallybrass, Peter 1990. Marx Heterogeneity: Thinking the lumpenproletariat. Representations 31 (Summer): 69–95. Uribe-Urán, Victor. 2015. Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

10

URBAN OUTCASTS FACING ADVERSITY: A PLEBEIAN …

219

Wagner, Kim A. 1991. Thuggee and Social Banditry Reconsidered. The Historical Journal 50 (2, June): 353–376. Walter, John and Roger Schofield, eds. 1991. Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wunder, Heide. 1998. He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 11

Missionary Villages as Spaces of Resistance Fabricio Lyrio Santos

Introduction The following chapter aims to describe the dynamics of resistance played by the Indigenous peoples of the current Brazilian territory within the missionary villages, focusing on the period of the dynastic union between Portugal and Spain (1580–1640). This phase corresponds to the consolidation of the Iberian presence along the coastal region, establishing the initial outline of Portuguese America. It seeks to establish that, beyond the direct confrontation with and reaction to the colonial conquest, native resistance was present in the daily interactions in the settlements, characterized by a constant attitude of questioning, adapting, and translating Christianity into indigenous terms.

The author is grateful to UFRB for supporting the translation of this chapter and to Karl H. Arenz for reviewing the first English version. F. L. Santos (B) Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia, Cruz das Almas, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_11

221

222

F. L. SANTOS

It is known that the Iindigenous settlements (also called “reductions” or “doctrines”) consisted of communities controlled by missionaries and colonial authorities that brought together Iindigenous groups of different ethnicities and origins, constituting a fundamental part of the process of occupation and colonization of the American Continent by the Iberian crowns. Traditionally, both historical ethnography and historiography (particularly in Brazil) have defined these settlements as entirely colonial spaces, where “acculturation” took place, that is, the imposition of European culture over indigenous culture. The only viable alternatives of resistance for the Iindigenous would be to make war or flee to the hinterlands, that is, the regions not yet controlled by the Europeans. In recent decades, however, studies that have revealed other dimensions of Amerindian resistance have gained prominence. The daily resistance was characterized both by the refusal of the catechesis and by the appropriation of European religious and cultural elements from the native perspective, as well as by the junction of these with gentile beliefs and rites, expressing an adherence to Christianity seen as superficial or inconstant by the missionaries and settlers. To bring such experiences to light, we carried out a careful reading of the documentation, with emphasis on the reports produced by the Jesuits Manuel da Nóbrega, Fernão Cardim, and Fernão Guerreiro, the Franciscan Friar Vicente do Salvador and the Sergeant-Major Diogo de Campos Moreno, as well as the Historians Pero de Magalhães de Gândavo and Gabriel Soares de Sousa. Although they tried to attribute to the natives a passive posture or incomprehension of the Christian message, the sources reveal that the village populations actively participated in the historical process, adapting to the conditions imposed by colonization when necessary and fighting for their autonomy whenever possible. In the Iberian colonial context, the period 1580–1640 shaped what the Historian Serge Gruzinski (2014), based on descriptions of the time, called “Catholic monarchy”. From the economic perspective, there was a growing projection of the sugar industry in international trade, driven by the increase in Luso-Brazilian production. This, in turn, implied the advance on the American territory aiming the access to land and native labor (free or enslaved), as well as the expansion of the slave trade on the African coast (Schwartz 1988; Alencastro 2000; Strum 2012). Regarding the territorial expansion in America, it was during the domain of Philipp II that the wars of conquest on the Brazilian coast were concluded, enabling the Iberian control over an extensive coastal strip

11

MISSIONARY VILLAGES AS SPACES OF RESISTANCE

223

from São Vicente, in the South, to Rio Grande do Norte, in the current Brazilian Northeast (Milanez and Santos 2021). Moreover, successive colonial onslaughts consolidated control over the captaincies of Paraíba and Sergipe d’El Rei, as well as the estuary of the São Francisco River, favoring the advance into the sertão (backlands) in the second half of the seventeenth century. In 1615, the French were defeated in São Luís and, in the following year, the Presépio Fort was founded, which would come to the house the initial nucleus of the city of Belém, in Pará. In 1621, the official policy of colonization of the Amazon valley began with the creation of the State of Maranhão, later known as the State of Grão-Pará and Maranhão (Hemming 1978; Carvalho 1992; Carvalho Jr. 2017). Following this advance, the mission settlements also multiplied, preferably located around the main colonial towns and cities. From 1580 on, Franciscans, Benedictines, Carmelites, and Capuchins settled in the LusoBrazilian colony, assuming a preponderant role in missionary activities, alongside the Jesuits. The latter, despite the presence of secular clergy and the sporadic passage of members of other religious orders through the Luso-Brazilian coast, were the only missionaries permanently active in Portuguese America in the previous three decades and were the main agents responsible for the conversion of the native populations. The religious of the recently created Society of Jesus arrived in Bahia in 1549 as part of the official entourage for the foundation of the city of Salvador and the installation of the General Government, which would be responsible for centralizing the administration of the territory on behalf of the Portuguese crown and guarantee its defense (Santos 2014). Supported by privileges and prerogatives granted by royal legislation, the missionaries exercised civil and spiritual authority over the inhabitants of the villages, seeking to transform them into good Christians and vassals loyal to the monarchs. Insofar as they constituted settlements governed by colonial legislation, these communities were seen for a long time by historiography and historical ethnography as spaces of domination and imposition of European will over native groups, leaving in the background the Indigenous agency and protagonism, as can be attested from the work of the Jesuit Historian Serafim Leite (1938–1950) and authors considered classics of Brazilian social thought, such as Gilberto Freyre (1933) and Caio Prado Junior (1942). More recent works, such as the one by Historian Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile (2006), seek to unveil the motivations and ideas that moved the Jesuits, keeping the emphasis on the missionaries, to the detriment of the natives.

224

F. L. SANTOS

In a critical essay published at the end of the 1970s, the Anthropologist Luiz Felipe Baêta Neves defined the settlements as “a great total pedagogical project”, that is, they were spaces meant not only to “convert certain peoples to a certain religion” but also places designed to teach “forms of behavior, economic practices, body techniques, interdictions, penalties, etc.”. With this, the author sought to unveil and denounce the catechesis promoted by the religious (especially the Jesuits) as “an active form of violating the indigenous cultures”; not paying attention to the role played by the Indigenous themselves in this process (Neves 1978, 162–164). Without denying the violence inherent to the missionary expansion in the colonial context, we will try to prove in the following pages that, even though they constituted fundamental spaces for the affirmation of the policy of occupation of the territory and domination over the native peoples in favor of the Iberian metropolis, the settlements were also characterized by Indigenous action, configuring a reality crossed by contestations, adaptations, and resistance.1

Indigenous Sanctities (santidades) The royal regiment granted to the first Governor-General of the Colony, Tomé de Souza (1549–1553), foresaw the concentration of those Indigenous people who were inclined to convert in settlements separated from the others, but it was after the governments of Duarte da Costa (1553– 1557) and, mainly, his successor, Mem de Sá (1558–1570), that these indigenous settlements became part of the official policy of the Crown, although they suffered criticism from the settlers, who saw the religious action as an obstacle to the capture of Indian labor force. Despite the conflicts, the settlements imposed themselves because of their importance for the pacification of the territory and the expansion of the faith (Monteiro 1994; Paraíso 2011; Couto 1998). Within those communities, despite the authority exercised by the missionaries, the indigenous resistance continued to challenge the most

1 We dialogue with a series of researches developed in recent decades, which can be exemplified by Cunha (1992), Monteiro (2001), Almeida (2003), Pompa (2003), and Corrêa (2018). These researches have dedicated more attention to the process of implantation of the Jesuit missions and to the period after the expulsion of the Dutch in the 1640s. Thus, we opted for a chronological period less studied by these authors.

11

MISSIONARY VILLAGES AS SPACES OF RESISTANCE

225

selfless of the priests, even calling into question the Lusitanian colonial project. Among their main opponents were the native religious leaders, who associated (with a good dose of accuracy) the arrival of Europeans and Christianity with the evils that befell those populations, such as the great epidemics, the exhausting work on the sugar cane plantations, and the prohibitions related to traditional rites and customs: “These are the biggest contraries that we have here”—said Father Manuel da Nóbrega (2017 [1549], 86). The protest expressed by the pajés or caraíbas translated into the most eloquent example of native resistance against the missionaries’ authority in the settlements. The so-called Indian sanctities were religious movements led by several groups of the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family confronted by the Europeans on the coast, especially the Tupinambás (Fausto 1992; Vainfas 1995). Facing the colonizer’s invasive presence, such movements acquired a strong contestatory and even anti-colonial connotation. Not by chance, their frequency was documented in a more accentuated way between the end of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, although the first records date back to, at least, the arrival of the Jesuits in 1549. The testimony of Father Nóbrega, transcribed below, evidences the existence of “Indigenous sanctities” before their arrival on the continent: Only among them are ceremonies done in the following way. Every few years some sorcerers come from faraway lands, pretending to bring sanctity. [... When the sorcerer arrives with great festivity at the place, he enters a dark house, and puts a gourd he carries, in human form, in the most convenient place for his deceits, and, changing his voice as if it were a boy’s, and near the gourd, he tells them not to work, not to go to the field, that the food will grow by itself and that they will never lack what to eat, and that by themselves they will come home, and the hoes will dig, and the arrows will go into the bush to hunt for their lord, and that they will kill many of their enemies and capture many for their meals. [...] Thus, they believe that there is something holy and divine inside the gourd, which tells them those things that they believe in. (Nóbrega 2017 [1549], 85–86)

The best-documented episode of colonial Indigenous “holiness” came a little later, around 1585, in the vicinity of Jaguaripe, located in the region baptized by the Portuguese as Baía de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints) (also known as Recôncavo Baiano). The Santidade de Jaguaripe

226

F. L. SANTOS

has already been the object of several studies, and it is not necessary to resume here the discussions articulated around this episode, which have been very well summarized by Pacheco (2020). We follow closely the perspective of Vainfas (1995), dialoguing also with Schwartz (1988, 54– 56), Pompa (2003, 99–132), and Metcalf (2005, 195–234).2 The leader of the Santidade was a caraíba or indigenous shaman who had been catechized and converted by the Jesuits, having been baptized as Antônio, probably in the village of Tinharé, in the former Captaincy of Ilhéus. Testimonies tell that he proclaimed himself “the true pope” and was recognized by his followers as Tamandaré, an important figure in Tupi mythology. The woman with whom he shared the leadership of the movement was called “Santa Maria” and “Mother of God”. She led the migration of a part of the group, which was taking refuge from the colonial authorities in an unknown region identified as the Sertão das Palmeiras Longas (backlands of the long palm trees), to the plantation of Fernão Cabral de Taíde, near Jaguaripe, where they built a hut in which they celebrated their cults and ceremonies—a mixture of Iberian Catholicism and Tupi prophetism (Vainfas 1995). Indigenous people from different sugar plantations and other settlements in the region were attracted by the sanctity, as well as Blacks, Mestizos (“mamelucos”), and not a few whites, which generated protests before the General Governor Manuel Teles Barreto (1583–1587), who determined its destruction. Some years later, in 1591, the first visit of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition of Lisbon arrived in Salvador, a fact that gave rise to several confessions, accusations, and processes about the events in Jaguaripe (Vainfas 1995, 163–187). Similar movements preceded and continued after the well-documented Jaguaripe episode. To evoke a testimony, we can quote the Jesuit Fernão Guerreiro. Writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century, he attests to the presence of sanctity in the backlands of Bahia, nourished by the beliefs and certainly by the non-conformism of Indigenous people who, having been catechized and coexisted with the Portuguese on the coast, escaped to the hinterland of the continent. These poor people are so blinded by what they call holiness, that they totally believe there is no other kind, and that they are the only ones who 2 We do not neglect Sztutman’s (2012) thought-provoking observations, with which we do not entirely agree.

11

MISSIONARY VILLAGES AS SPACES OF RESISTANCE

227

do it right, all the others and us, are wrong. From the news they have about the church, some Indigenous people who fled from the Portuguese and went into the hinterland, baptized their own relatives, although not in the form of the church, and they call all the men JESUS, and the women Mary. (Guerreiro 1930 [1603], 381)

In addition, Sergeant-Major Diogo de Campos Moreno, author of the Livro que dá razão ao Estado do Brasil (1612), warns about the danger of the sanctities. When defending the law that had recently been enacted by the Spanish crown regarding the settlements and the Indigenous freedom, Moreno criticizes the low-level learning of Christianity by the Indigenous and the performance, in his opinion not very fruitful, of the religious: By this method [before the passing of the law] the State is filled with veins of piety, under which many incomes to His Majesty’s Treasury disappear, which the Indigenous people can undoubtedly give him, and many farms which, with their help, being general, can be increased for the whites, avoiding, with the fulfillment of the said act, the expansion of maroon communities among the blacks, or the groupings of fugitives that they call Santidades and other evils that we have seen all along this coast derived from the doctrine that they (as incapable people) hardly learn, or that their tutors barely teach them, without the presence of lay captains. (Moreno 1955 [1612], 109)

Contrasting catechesis with the military defense of the colony, the author also did not hesitate to argue for the weapons rather than the cross, proposing the rapid integration of Indigenous populations into the colonial troops so they could help the Iberians fight the forces opposing their presence in the territory (Moreno 1955 [1612], 111). However, despite his critical view of the missionaries, the author recognized the importance of the settlements for the advance of colonization, registering their presence in almost all the regions described in his work, namely: Porto Seguro, Ilhéus, Bahia, Sergipe, Itamaracá, Paraíba, and Rio Grande do Norte. The only exceptions were Pernambuco and the surroundings of the São Francisco River.3

3 This region will be the stage of dozens of villages from the second half of the seventeenth century on, as well as successive conflicts between settlers and indigenous people. See Pompa (2003, 295–335) and Puntoni (2002).

228

F. L. SANTOS

Inconstancies and Appropriations Beyond episodes such as the sanctities, which openly challenged the catechesis and colonization itself, what we understand in this chapter as resistance also included less spectacular events inscribed in the daily life of the settlements, which reveal an active and conscious posture on behalf of the inhabitants toward the immense transformations brought about by the European colonization and, more specifically, by the repeated attempt to impose the Christian religion. Missionaries and colonial authorities sought to restrain or clothe Indigenous behavior with their own meaning. Dissenting attitudes were often portrayed in official accounts as incomprehension of the Christian message or “inconstancy”, that is, superficial and short-lived adherence to Christianity. We understand that it is possible, through an “ethnographic reading” of the documentation, to define the “inconstancy” and the “incomprehension” as expressions of resistance, that is, processes of appropriation of the Christian religion in an indigenous way (Pompa 2003). From this perspective, we affirm that Indigenous resistance went beyond the “reaction to conquest” postulated by the Anthropologist Florestan Fernandes (2009, 22–43). It included particular modalities by which a significant part of the native population, inserted in the colonial society through catechesis and mission settlements, appropriated the Christian message in their own terms, in a broad process of exchanges and cultural mediation, often encouraged by the religious themselves (Montero 2006; Estenssoro 1999; Vainfas 1995; Arenz 2014). The predilection of the settled populations for certain feasts in the Catholic calendar is indicative of this dynamic of translation, adaptation, and appropriation of the Christian message in Indigenous terms. Writing at the end of the sixteenth century, Jesuit Fernão Cardim indicates that religious commemorations favored the acceptance of Christianity, pointing out those that were preferred by the natives: the feast of Saint John, Palm Sunday, and Ash Wednesday. The reasons given by the religious man appear in the excerpt below: These Indigenous people celebrate three feasts with great joy, applause, and particular taste. The first is the bonfires of St. John, because their villages burn with fires, and to jump over the bonfires they do not let their clothes get in the way, although they sometimes scorch their leather. The second is

11

MISSIONARY VILLAGES AS SPACES OF RESISTANCE

229

the Feast of Palm Sunday because it’s something to see, the words, flowers, and daisies that they seek, the celebration with which they hold them in their hands at the ceremony, and they seek for holy water to fall on the palm branches. The third that they celebrate more than all, is the day of the Ashes [Ash Wednesday], because ordinarily none is missing, and from the end of the world they come to the ashes, and they like that a big cross be traced on their foreheads, and if the priest doesn’t go to the villages, for not being without ashes they give it to each other, as happened to an old woman who, the priest being absent, summoned the whole village to the church and gave them the ashes, saying that so did the Abarés, that is, Fathers, and that they wouldn’t be on such a solemnity without ashes. (Cardim 1980 [1590], 156)

A little later, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Franciscan Chronicler Friar Vicente do Salvador, venting about the difficulties faced in the daily life of the catechesis, also indicates the Indigenous predilection for the festive moments of the Catholic religion and points out the preeminence of certain celebrations to the detriment of others. As in Cardim’s description, the feasts of Saint John, Ashes, and Palm Sunday are highlighted, plus the feasts of the All Souls and Holy Thursday: I confess that it’s hard to work with these Gentiles with their inconstancy because in the beginning, it was good to see the fervor and devotion with which they went to church, and when the bell was rung for doctrine or mass, they would run with an impetus and noise that seemed like horses; but soon they began to cool down so that it was necessary to take them by force, and they went to live in their fields and farms, outside the village, so that they wouldn’t be forced to do so. They only come willingly on feasts with ceremonies, because they are very fond of novelties, like the day of Saint John the Baptist, because of the bonfires and the chapels; the day of the general commemoration of the dead, to make offerings for them; the day of the ashes and the palm branches, and especially for the procession of the Holy Week, to discipline themselves, because they consider it an act of bravery. (Salvador 1982 [1627], 286)

On the other hand, there were not few colonial records from missionaries and from lay chroniclers who insisted on the so-called Indian inconstancy, that is, the apparent fluidity and lack of firmness in their adherence (or even refusal) to Christianity (Viveiros de Castro 2002, 183– 264). Returning once more to the period proposed in this chapter, we find in Father Manuel da Nóbrega one of the earliest testimonies of this

230

F. L. SANTOS

alleged attitude. Through one of the interlocutors of his Dialogue on the Conversion of the Gentiles, the first Jesuit superior in Brazil states: These people have one thing, worst of all, that when they come to my tent, with a fishhook that I give them, I will convert them all, and with others, I will convert them again, because they are inconstant and the true faith does not enter their hearts. (Nóbrega 2017 [1556–1557], 202)

The already mentioned Diogo de Campos Moreno also addresses the theme of “Indian inconstancy”, when criticizing the attribution, in his view mistaken, of the tutorship of the indigenous people to the missionaries: “the natives are variable, incapable and out of all government and reason by themselves, but even under incompetent tutors they are less useful” (Moreno 1955 [1612], 109). In summary, we can affirm that the inconstancy, that is, the supposed constant change of opinion by the Indigenous people (if you will permit me the pun), reveals a very decided posture, even if divided between the acceptance and the refusal of the Christian message and European habits. The first—the acceptance—is often driven by curiosity or interest in something that turned out to be new or necessary (the fishhook cited by Nóbrega, for example). The second—the refusal—is caused by illness, overwork, prohibitions imposed by religious and authorities, or any other “light thing”, according to the opinion of Chronicler Pero de Magalhães de Gândavo: Throughout all the captaincies of this province, there are monasteries of the Jesuits and in some parts, some churches built among the indigenous people who are of peace, where some priests live to indoctrinate them and make them Christians, which they all easily accept without any contradiction. For as they have no law, nor anything among themselves to worship, it is very easy for them to take one of ours. And so it is just as easy for them to leave it again for anything light, and many flee to the hinterlands, after being baptized and instructed in Christian doctrine. (Gândavo 2008 [1576], 143)

11

MISSIONARY VILLAGES AS SPACES OF RESISTANCE

231

Penance as Bravery Besides the inconstancy, which could turn into rebellion (“they run away to the backlands”), the colonial reports register episodes that show what we have previously called translation, dialoguing with Pompa’s work (2003). An example of extreme interest regarding this issue can be seen in an episode narrated by the aforementioned Friar Vicente do Salvador, in the sequence of the complaint transcribed above. Let us leave the floor to the storyteller: And this is so [referring to the difficulties of the catechesis] that a principal [chief] named Iniaoba, and afterward Jorge de Albuquerque, a Christian, being absent during Holy Week, came to the village on the eighth day of Easter, and when the others told him that children and adults had been disciplined, he came to me, who was in charge there at the time, and said: how could there be in the world that even children were disciplined, and he, being so valiant (as indeed he was), should keep his blood in the body without spilling it? I answered him that all things had their time and that in the Endoenças [Holy Week] they had been disciplined in memory of the flagellation that Christ our Lord had suffered for us, but that now His glorious resurrection was being celebrated with joy. Moreover, he did not even stop at this, but made so many demands on me, saying that I would be dishonored and considered weak, that I had to tell him to do as he wished. Therefore, he immediately went and flogged himself hard all over the village, spilling as much blood from his back as the others were, like at a feast, pouring wine on the flanks. (Salvador 1982 [1627], 286–287)

Initially, it is important to emphasize that the author, before writing his chronicle, worked as a missionary in the “doctrines” (settlements) of the Franciscan Order in Brazil and participated in the episode being narrated. The Historian Venâncio Willeke places him in the Captaincy of Paraíba between 1603 and 1606, the period when the conflict with Iniaoba took place (Willeke 1974, 38). Thus, it is almost certain that he was in charge of a settlement composed of natives of the Potiguara ethnic group, belonging to the large Tupi linguistic family. When dealing with the conquest of Paraíba, the Chronicler Gabriel Soares de Sousa mentions and describes the “Pitiguar Gentile”, who, before the Luso-Spanish conquest, “lorded over” (i.e., dominated) the region from Rio Grande do Norte to Paraíba, in present-day Northeastern Brazil. This is the same group identified in other colonial sources

232

F. L. SANTOS

(and which today calls itself Potiguar or Potiguara). Their initial relations with the Portuguese were one of opposition and animosity, aggravated by the alliance established with the French, who were more concerned with establishing trading posts on the coast than with occupying and colonizing the land. This alliance earned these people the byname “betrayed”, according to the description of the same chronicler, who did not fail to recognize their qualities and abilities: Moreover, these gentiles are very belligerent, warlike, and treacherous, and friends of the French, to whom they always keep company, and, industrious with them, enemies of the Portuguese. They are great growers of their own food, of which they are always very well provided for, and they are good hunters and such arrow-makers that they never miss an arrow they shoot. They are great line fishers, both at sea and in freshwater rivers. They sing, dance, eat and drink according to the order of the Tupinambás, where their life and customs, which are almost the general practice of all the gentiles of the Brazilian coast, will be briefly described. (Sousa 2010 [1587], 50)

The conquest of Paraíba happened through a succession of wars and invasions in which the Luso-Brazilian troops, in a strategic way, managed to exploit for their own benefit the existing rivalries between different Indigenous leaderships present in the region (Hemming 1978, 161–174). When the military actions were over, the conversion of the Potiguaras, former rivals of the Portuguese, was attributed to the Franciscans, who had recently settled in Pernambuco (Willeke 1974, 47). Regarding what we proposed in this chapter—and already heading toward its conclusion—it is interesting to resume in more details the narrative of Friar Vicente do Salvador about the chief Iniaoba. First, there is nothing being told about what the Indigenous leader, named Jorge de Albuquerque, was doing during the period when he was out of the village. Was he involved in activities unrelated to his condition as a villager? Would he have followed Christianity to the letter, far from the vigilance of the missionary? We know nothing about this and can hardly speculate since no clue is left in the report. However, we can assume that if he had been sent to carry out a mission or embassy in the service of the missionary or some civil authority, this would have been mentioned. Therefore, we can only imagine that the principal was motivated by his own interest. What we know for sure is that, upon returning to the village, Iniaoba regretted having missed the celebration of Holy Thursday, as he enjoyed

11

MISSIONARY VILLAGES AS SPACES OF RESISTANCE

233

showing his bravery. It is evident in the religious’ report that the Indigenous chief and the other villagers showed little Christian piety or devotion with regard to the suffering of Christ, valuing the penitential rite as something that, as we will see below, made sense within their own culture. The Jesuit Fernão Cardim develops a similar interpretation of this issue when he narrates a procession witnessed by the second visitor of the Society of Jesus in Brazil, Cristóvão de Gouvêa, in the 1580s, in the village of Espírito Santo, on the coast of Bahia. The episode also took place on the occasion of the Endoenças: The procession was very devoting with many torches and fires, with most of the Indigenous people disciplining themselves, beating themselves cruelly, and they have this not only for virtue, but also for bravery, to take blood from themselves, and to be abaeté, that is, brave. (Cardim 1980 [c. 1590], 159)

Bravery, associated with war, was an inestimable value for the various Indigenous peoples of the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family, who comprised the largest population contingent of the settlements established along the coast in the century that stretches from the landing of the first Jesuits in Bahia to the mid-seventeenth century. The linguistic proximity among Potiguaras, Caetés, Tupinambás, Tupiniquins, and other peoples corresponded with relative cultural uniformity, composing what the Anthropologist Carlos Fausto and others defined as “Tupinambá Culture” (Fausto 1992; Fernandes 2006; Cunha and Viveiros de Castro 1986). Within this “Tupinambá Culture”, described by at least a dozen chroniclers between the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the war had a central value. Driven by revenge (not by material ambitions), it constituted a true cultural system that culminated in the ritual execution of the imprisoned enemy and the acquisition of a new name by the killer, which attested to his bravery (Fernandes 2006). According to a classic essay by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, revenge was “the institution par excellence of Tupinambá society” (Cunha and Viveiros de Castro 1986, 63). The choice of the “principals” (leaders) of each family and of the local community was based on the assertion of bravery expressed through a propensity for warrior activity:

234

F. L. SANTOS

Although the sons of chiefs had a greater chance of becoming chiefs, access to leadership and its exercise depended on the long process of constitution of domestic units, matrimonial strategies, and the personal virtues of the individual. Status was earned, not awarded; one had to be able to articulate a strong kinship, be feared and respected as a warrior, and be, like the great shamans, an effective orator. (Fausto 2000, 78)

The Chronicler Gabriel Soares de Sousa, among other colonial authors, identifies war as a central element for the existence and reproduction of local groups in the Tupi-Guarani context: “As the Tupinambás are very belligerent, all their reasons for being are how to wage war against their adversaries” (Sousa 2010 [1587], 308). It is worth remembering that this same chronicler stated that the Potiguaras sang, danced, ate, and drank “by the order of the Tupinambás”, that is, they shared several cultural elements among themselves. Sousa also described the Potiguara people as “very belligerent” (Sousa 2010 [1587], 50). Thus, Iniaoba’s questioning is perfectly coherent with the Indigenous cultural logic: “How could there be in the world that even the children were disciplined, and he, being so brave (as he was), would keep his blood in the body without spilling it?”. However, opposed to the will expressed by the principal (chief), the Franciscan friar tried to dissuade him, insisting on the Christian meaning of the practice of discipline and on the liturgical time designated for it: “I answered him that all things had their time, and that in the Endoenças they had been disciplined in memory of the flagellation that Christ our Lord had suffered for us, but that already now His glorious resurrection was being celebrated with joy”. Nevertheless, to his dismay, the principal “did not even stop at this”. After insisting so much, “saying that he would be dishonored and considered weak”, he managed to get the missionary to give in, accepting that he would finally “do whatever he wanted”. With this, Iniaoba paraded through the village inflicting suffering on his own body while the others watched the bloody spectacle, “pouring wine on his flanks”.4 The dramatic outcome of the episode certainly moves us. However, his sense of resistance should not escape us: even after being baptized and subjected to the Christian routine inside the village, Iniaoba managed to

4 The colonial chroniclers used the term “wine” in a generic way to refer to cauim and other fermented beverages made by the indigenous people on the base of manioc (see Fernandes 2004).

11

MISSIONARY VILLAGES AS SPACES OF RESISTANCE

235

attribute an Indigenous meaning to the Christian rite, openly confronted the religious’ authority before the community, and finally imposed his will.

Final Considerations The event involving the chief Iniaoba helps us to think of the mission settlements as spaces characterized by both European and Indigenous action. Subjected to the colonial authority and the constant preaching of the missionaries, the inhabitants of the villages thought and acted on their own, incorporating the Christian message and the European habits in their own way, despite the diligent vigilance of the religious. This behavior mobilized the missionaries to constantly adapt their message to the local audience by developing strategies considered more effective for conversion. In doing so, they translated Indignous autonomy into Christian terms, reducing it to terms such as “ignorance”, “incomprehension”, or “inconstancy”. On the other hand, the translation of Christianity into Indigenous terms could sometimes generate more effective conflicts, such as the sanctities, which openly challenged the colonial authority and the control of the missionaries over the villagers. We may wonder if it was not the memory of such episodes that would have led Friar Vicente to give in to the insistence of the principal (chief) in demonstrating his bravery before the community, that is, the fear of a greater reaction from the villagers, who might decide to support him, putting the village at risk. The fine line between inconstancy and rebellion forces us to broaden the concept of resistance beyond the anti-colonial reaction, the open conflict, or the “flight to the backlands”. In the context of the successive losses represented by the advance of colonization over their territories, their lives, and their cultures, the act of surviving, translating the religion that was imposed on them in their own way, attests to the tenacity of peoples who, since then, have never stopped resisting and reinventing resistance.

Sources and References Alencastro, Luiz F. de. 2000. O trato dos viventes - Formação do Brasil no Atlântico sul. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

236

F. L. SANTOS

Almeida, M. Regina Celestino de. 2003. Metamorfoses indígenas - identidade e cultura nas aldeias coloniais do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional. Arenz, Karl H. 2014. Além das doutrinas e rotinas: índios e missionários nos aldeamentos jesuíticos da Amazônia portuguesa (séculos XVII e XVIII). Revista História e Cultura 3 (2): 63–88. Cardim, Fernão. 1980 [1583–1601]. Tratados da Terra e Gente do Brasil. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia; São Paulo: Edusp. Carvalho, Filipe Nunes de. 1992. A evolução do Brasil durante a realeza de Filipe I e Filipe II. In O Império Luso-Brasileiro, 1500–1620, ed. Harold Johnson and Maria Beatriz N. da Silva, 171–198. Lisbon: Estampa. Carvalho Jr., Almir Diniz de. 2017. Índios cristãos - poder, magia e religião na Amazônia colonial. Curitiba: CRV. Castelnau-L’Estoile, Charlotte de. 2006. Operários de uma vinha estéril - os jesuítas e a conversão dos índios no Brasil, 1580–1620. Bauru: EDUSC. Corrêa, Luís R. Araújo. 2018. Interações sociais e mobilidade indígena no cotidiano dos aldeamentos coloniais. Revista Historia da UEG 7 (1): 252–277. Couto, Jorge. 1998. A construção do Brasil - Ameríndios, portugueses e africanos, do início do povoamento a finais de Quinhentos. Lisbon: Cosmos. Cunha, Manuela Carneiro da. 1992. Introdução a uma História Indígena. In História dos Índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela C. da Cunha, 9–24. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Cunha, Manuela Carneiro da., and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 1986. Vingança e temporalidade: os Tupinambás. Anuário Antropológico 10 (1): 57–78. Estenssoro, Juan C. 1999. O símio de Deus. In A outra margem do Ocidente, ed. Adauto Novaes, 181–200. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Fausto, Carlos. 1992. Fragmentos de história e cultura Tupinambá. In História dos Índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 381–396. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Fausto, Carlos. 2000. Os índios antes do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. Fernandes, João Azevedo. 2004. Selvagens bebedeiras - Álcool, embriaguez e contatos culturais no Brasil colonial. PhD Dissertation. Niterói: Universidade Federal Fluminense. Fernandes, Florestan. 2006. A função social da guerra na sociedade tupinambá. São Paulo: Global. Fernandes, Florestan. 2009. A investigação etnológica no Brasil e outros ensaios. 2nd ed. rev. São Paulo: Global. Freyre, Gilberto. 1933. Casa Grande & Senzala. Formação da família brasileira sob o regime de economia patriarcal. Rio de Janeiro: Maia & Schmidt. Gandavo, Pero de Magalhães. 2008 [1576]. História da Província Santa Cruz. São Paulo: Hedra.

11

MISSIONARY VILLAGES AS SPACES OF RESISTANCE

237

Gruzinski, Serge. 2014. As quatro partes do mundo - história de uma mundialização. Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG; São Paulo: EDUSP. Guerreiro, Fernão. 1930 [1603]. Relação anual das coisas que fizeram os Padres da Companhia de Jesus nas suas missões - Tomo primeiro, 1600 a 1603. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra. Hemming, John. 1978. Red Gold—The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leite, Serafim. 1938–1950. História da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil—Vol. 1–10. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro, Lisbon: Portugália. Metcalf, Alida C. 2005. Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600. Austin: University of Texas Press. Milanez, Felipe, and Fabricio Lyrio Santos. 2021. Guerras da conquista - da invasão dos portugueses até os dias de hoje. Rio de Janeiro: HarperCollins. Monteiro, John. 1994. Negros da Terra - Índios e Bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Monteiro, John. 2001. Tupis, Tapuias e historiadores - Estudos de História Indígena e do Indigenismo. PhD dissertation. Campinas: UNICAMP. Montero, Paula (ed.). 2006. Deus na Aldeia - missionários, índios e mediação cultural. São Paulo: Globo. Moreno, Diogo de Campos. 1955 [1612]. Livro que dá razão do Estado do Brasil. Recife: Arquivo Público Estadual. Neves, Luís F. Baêta. 1978. O Combate dos soldados de Cristo na terra dos papagaios - colonialismo e repressão cultural. Rio de Janeiro: Forense-Universitária. Nóbrega, Manuel da. 2017 [1549–1568]. Obra completa. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. PUC-Rio; São Paulo: Loyola. Pacheco, Moreno Laborda. 2020. The Santidade de Jaguaripe Revisited: Tupi Catholicism or Cannibalism? e-Journal of Portuguese History 18 (2): 1–21. Paraíso, Maria H. Baqueiro. 2011. Índios, náufragos, moradores, missionários e colonos em Kirimurê no século dezesseis: embates e negociações. In Baía de todos os santos: aspectos humanos, ed. Carlos Caroso, Fátima Tavares, and Cláudio Pereira. Salvador: EDUFBA. Pompa, Cristina. 2003. Religião como tradução - missionários, Tupi e Tapuia no Brasil colonial. Bauru: EDUSC. Prado Jr., Caio. 1942. Formação do Brasil contemporâneo. São Paulo: Brasiliense. Puntoni, Pedro. 2002. A Guerra dos Bárbaros - Povos indígenas e a colonização do sertão nordeste do Brasil, 1650–1720. São Paulo: HUCITEC-EDUSP-FAPESP. Salvador, Vicente do. 1982 [1627]. História do Brasil—1500–1627 , 7th ed. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia; São Paulo: EDUSP. Santos, Fabricio Lyrio. 2014. Da catequese à civilização - colonização e povos indígenas na Bahia. Cruz das Almas: UFRB. Schwartz, Stuart. 1988. Segredos internos - Engenhos e escravos na sociedade colonial, 1500–1835. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

238

F. L. SANTOS

Silva, José Justiniano Andrade e. 1854. Collecção Chronologica da Legislação Portugueza—Volume I, 1603–1612. Lisbon: Imprensa de J. J. A. Silva. Sousa, Gabriel Soares de. 2010 [1587]. Tratado descritivo do Brasil em 1587 . São Paulo: Hedra. Strum, Daniel. 2012. O comércio do açúcar - Brasil, Portugal e Países Baixos, 1595–1630. Rio de Janeiro: Versal Editores. Sztutman, Renato. 2012. O profeta e o principal - a ação política ameríndia e seus personagens. São Paulo: EDUSP. Vainfas, Ronaldo. 1995. A Heresia dos índios - catolicismo e rebeldia no Brasil colonial. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2002. A inconstância da alma selvagem e outros ensaios de antropologia. São Paulo: Cosac Naify. Willeke, Venâncio. 1974. Missões franciscanas no Brasil (1500/1975). Petrópolis: Vozes.

CHAPTER 12

We Have Not Been Tributaries: Peru’s Black Community, Historical Memory, and Resistance Marcella Hayes

On May 7, 1624, the watchful defenders of the port of Callao, the maritime gateway to Lima, Peru, sounded the alarm: enemy ships had been spotted on the horizon. The Nassau Fleet, the pride of the Netherlandish navy, was making the second Dutch attempt in ten years to assault the viceregal capital and gain access to the flow of precious metals, lifeblood of the Spanish empire, that came from Potosí and other Peruvian mines. Some six miles inland, the viceroy of Peru, Diego Fernández de Córdoba, Marquis of Guadalcázar, fearing for his life and his city, made a desperate plea for more defenders. He asked every sector of limeño society to protect the city from the Dutch menace. He not only called on armed and able-bodied Spanish soldiers, but also on the students at the University of San Marcos; members of the clergy; and most of all, the city’s

M. Hayes (B) University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_12

239

240

M. HAYES

negro and mulato residents, both free and enslaved (Bradley 1977, 63). While some fled the city in fear, enough remained to make the difference between victory and defeat. Lima’s political authorities would later agree that Lima’s negros and mulatos were among the most valiant of the city’s defenders. During the four months that the enemy attempted to blockade the port, these impromptu warriors bravely mustered on Callao’s shore with whatever weapons came to hand, repelling Dutch landing parties. The attackers, beset not only by Spanish artillery, swords, and gunfire but also by scurvy and desertion, turned tail on August 24, having failed to take the city or capture any of the ships bearing silver back to the king’s treasury. Lima had been saved. As they celebrated their victory, a group of mulato veterans gathered their community together to discuss what might be done next. They had proved their loyalty and saved not only the city but also the mainstay of the king’s treasury. What kinds of rewards might they gain from the crown for their service? The resulting petition would eventually garner a decree from the king and Council of the Indies granting a tribute exemption for all negros and mulatos who had fought the Dutch in Lima. Yet, curiously, though the text clearly limited the reward to only a few, the decree would be enshrined in historical memory as an exemption for every negro or mulato in Peru, both in the viceregal city itself and outside its borders. This thread of the history of the Black community in the Viceroyalty of Peru presents a fascinating case study for thinking about resistance and rebellion. The tribute exemption for the negros and mulatos of Peru began as a standard request for a privilege, in exchange for a particular service, and executed through normal channels of petition and response in the imperial bureaucracy (Masters 2023). Through some as-yet-unknown method of transmission that was most likely oral, the tribute exemption became more enduring, and much broader in scope, than the language of the royal decree that granted it. By the late eighteenth century, the historical memory that free negros and mulatos living in Peru had never had to pay tribute, and should never have to pay it, had become so entrenched that it formed the basis for a successful rebellion. In the early nineteenth century, this memory also formed the basis of a popular protest against new restrictions on the political lives of negros and mulatos in Spanish America that were outlined in the Constitution of Cádiz. This historical memory was the basis for this interpretation of the tribute exemption within the Black population of the viceroyalty of Peru. I will ask not only how this happened, but also how to use this case to probe the edges

12

WE HAVE NOT BEEN TRIBUTARIES: PERU’S BLACK …

241

of the concept of resistance. Resistance was neither in the writing of the petition nor in the broad interpretation of the decree, both of which, I argue, fell within a widely accepted use of legal knowledge by Spanish subjects and represent a contribution by this community to the interpretation of law. Resistance here lies in the use of that interpretation, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, to combat sweeping changes that centralizing reformers attempted to impose.

The Historiography of the Invention of Tradition, Obedience, and the Black Militia The scholarship on the “invention of tradition” and the sociopolitical use of lies, forgeries, and fictions during the medieval and early modern period is well developed (for some examples see Bloch 1963 [1948]; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Zemon Davis 1987). Viewed one way, the story of the broadening of the tribute exemption may be seen as such a fiction. From another point of view, it is more closely related to the official disobedience against royal orders that has obsessed legal historians of the Spanish empire for generations. John Leddy Phelan has argued, for instance, that bureaucrats in the Spanish Americas could respond to a royal order with “I obey, but I do not comply” (obedezco, pero no cumplo). This allowed a subordinate to show his loyalty to the king but refuse the order on the grounds that because of the distance, the monarch was not in possession of all the necessary information, and therefore made an unjust decision (Phelan 1960, 59). Other scholars have developed and clarified this argument, as well as other methods for circumventing royal orders (for example see Gómez Gómez 2019). These studies, while helpful for understanding the flexibility of bureaucratic response, do not necessarily explain how an entire community could interpret a royal order so widely, nor why, for nearly two centuries, most colonial authorities accepted this interpretation. Yet, legal scholars of Spain and Spanish America during this period have also convincingly argued that there were no clear and unequivocal legal norms, and that even royal instructions and pronouncements were not prescriptive (Herzog 2021; Duve and Danwerth 2020). Rather, they were part of what Tamar Herzog has called a “communicative legal and theological sphere” that, in the search for justice, permitted disagreement even with the king’s opinion (Herzog 2021, 6). Within this sphere, even

242

M. HAYES

illiterate people from remote corners of the empire expressed their opinions about law using the same terms and arguments that legal scholars did (Herzog 2003, 2015). They had both knowledge of law and confidence to make interpretations about it. I argue that descendants of Africans in Peru who selectively interpreted the decree were not necessarily “lying” consciously, nor did they see themselves as directly “refusing” a royal command: for them, the law and the historical memory of the community became one and the same thing. The fact that the language of the original petition was not remembered, even as the historical memory of the tax exemption survived, became a source of freedom. There was power and possibility in what remained unwritten and in the force of local custom. The negro and mulato militias of Peru remain an understudied topic, especially in the first two centuries of Spanish settlement. Those who have studied similar militias in other parts of Spanish America, such as New Spain and Río de la Plata, have been able to draw on surviving local military records, such as muster rolls, in order to study these men and their communities (Borucki 2015; Gharala 2019; Schwaller 2012; Vinson 2001). Historians have not so far found similar documents that cover the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Lima. The existing literature is based on papers that were sent to Spain, now housed in the Archivo General de Indias, such as reports from the viceroy, along with petitions from individual negro and mulato militiamen (Ares Queija 2006). The literature on Black militias in Peru in the late Bourbon period is more robust (Campbell 1972, 1975; Sobrevilla Perea 2011). Scholars have shown that Black people in Spanish America were able to use military might to show loyalty and to gain privileges on that basis. Militiamen could acquire both tangible capital, such as monetary rewards or tax exemptions, and social capital, such as prominence within the community and the ability to advance their concerns with political authorities (Morales Moya 1988; Prak 2015).

The Black Militia in Lima The history of the enslaved soldiers and free Black militias of Spanish America presents a paradox: A mistrusted and despised segment of the population was considered skilled in warfare and was expected to defend their owners, their neighbors, and the territory of the king of Spain (Ares Queija 2006; Walker 2017). Yet many laws existed that banned them from carrying arms for fear they would rise up, and colonial officials fretted

12

WE HAVE NOT BEEN TRIBUTARIES: PERU’S BLACK …

243

about this possibility (Campbell 1972; Schwaller 2012; Vinson 2001). In Lima, the city council passed the first such law in 1538, and various new declarations from the council reinforced this many times throughout the seventeenth century.1 Not only was Lima a nucleus of power and strategically important port, but also, by the year 1600, more than half the people living there were descended from Africans (Bowser 1974, 340– 341). Lima’s elite felt themselves outnumbered. In 1634, one prominent limeño wrote to the king that the city’s negros “are more the masters of our lives than we are of their liberty.”2 Indeed, when the Nassau Fleet attacked in 1624, they hoped that their invasion might inspire the enslaved and Indigenous people on land to revolt against the Spanish. The viceroy Guadalcázar reported to the king and Council of the Indies that the Dutch had some pre-printed letters that would grant freedom to enslaved people who joined them, with a blank space for the names (Bradley 1989, 69–70). This did not happen. As mentioned, the negros and mulatos of Lima were among the fiercest defenders of the city. However, it is not clear they knew about the Dutch promise or what they might have done if they had known. By the 1620s, several permanent corps of free negro and mulato militias had formed and were operational. The official authorization for this must have occurred sometime in Guadalcázar’s tenure, because by 1628 they appear in his writings (Campbell 1975, 119). The group that defended Lima from the Dutch in 1624 may or may not have been recognized as a permanent militia as yet, though its members almost certainly considered themselves such by the time they finally sent their petition for tribute exemption to the king.

1 For the earliest ban see Libros de Cabildo de Lima, ed. B.T. Lee, vol. 1 (Lima: Torres Aguirre; Sanmartí, 1935), 203, 29 April 1538. The Cabildo banned Black men from carrying arms in 1600, 1608, 1616, 1651, 1661, 1665, 1682, and 1699. For all of the following references, see Archivo Municipal de Lima, Libros de Cédulas y Provisiones. For 1600 see II, 168r–169v; for 1608, see IV, 64v; for 1616, see III, 391r; for 1651, see XI, 21v; for 1661, see XIII, 2r; for 1665, see XII, 222v; for 1682, see XVII, 1r; for 1699, see XVIII, 337r–337v. 2 Juan Esquivel de Triana, 12 May 1634, Archivo General de Indias [AGI], Lima 162. “se puede afirmar que son mas dueños de nuestras vidas que nosotros de su livertad.”

244

M. HAYES

Tribute Taxes and Imperial Control The system of taxation in Spanish America could be quite complex. On the peninsula, ordinary Spaniards had to pay a tribute called a pechero, while nobles were exempt from tribute. When commoners came to the Americas, this tax was waived as recognition for their service in settling a new territory (Gharala 2019, 28). Settlers argued that by participating in this invasion, they gained a form of noble status. Because Indigenous people were not acting in service to the king to settle the region for Spain, they had to cement their vassalage by paying other types of tribute, especially the labor tribute called mita (Stern 1993 [1982], 80–107). The case of the free negros and mulatos was more complicated. They were settling the new territory for Spain, and yet unlike Spaniards, they (or their ancestors) had not all done so willingly, because they had been kidnapped and enslaved. Sometimes they were pressured to do extra labor or accept close supervision in order to demonstrate their good vassalage (Graubart 2019). However, the broadest solution was the demand of financial tribute from free negros and mulatos across the empire. In 1574, Philip II declared this in a royal decree. He cited four principal reasons for the new tribute: first, they had paid tribute to their previous rulers in their places of origin; second, they should live in the lands of Castile “in peace and justice”; third, they now had the opportunity to gain riches in Castile; and fourth, by the grace of the king they had passed from slavery to freedom (Konetzke 1955, 482). The first reason shows that tribute payment was how a population maintained ties to its ruler; tribute practices were indeed a tactic used to maintain hierarchical sociopolitical relationships in West and West-Central African societies, though in those places, tribute did not have the same kind of social resonance that it would in the Spanish empire, where payment was an explicit act of recognition of subjection (Gharala 2019, 1–2). The second indicates that tribute was considered an essential instrument for peacekeeping. The logic was that by doing this, the king had earned their gratitude, and therefore their money, which would theoretically be reinvested in financing the area’s defenses. The final reason for demanding this tribute shows that formerly enslaved people became free vassals and were expected to pay tribute just as Indigenous people or common Spaniards in the Iberian Peninsula did (Bowser 1974, 302–306; Escobedo Mansilla 1981). The negro and mulato tribute was infrequently and haphazardly collected across the empire. In Lima, when the viceroys bothered

12

WE HAVE NOT BEEN TRIBUTARIES: PERU’S BLACK …

245

attempting to collect the funds at all, they tried giving a sheriff (alguacil ) a salary to do it. When attempting to collect taxes the sheriff reported resistance, including physical violence. The funds collected were extremely slim. In 1611, a colonial bureaucrat was trying to assess the free Black population’s tribute responsibilities by making a survey of the free mulatos and negros in Lima. He wrote a frustrated report to the king and Council of the Indies, explaining that the mulatos objected so strongly to the tax that they were gathering in meetings ( juntas ) to protest against it.3 It is unclear how large these gatherings were, what took place there, or who led them, but some kind of collective action was happening. There was also a formal process by which negros and mulatos could individually petition to be excused from the tax. Though the petitions have not survived, there is evidence that at least some of them were granted (Escobedo Mansilla 1981, 47–48).

The Mulatos Request Their Reward In 1627, some of the mulato veterans who had fought the Dutch three years earlier requested their reward. They sent a petition from Lima to the king and the Council of the Indies asking for a tribute waiver. They signed it “the mulatos and mulatas of the city of Lima.”4 They did not list their names, nor did they say how large their group was. It is possible that this was the same group of people that had been meeting to protest the tribute tax since 1611, though there is no way to be certain. The mulatos and mulatas of Lima requested that their tribute payment be waived or diminished, citing their fierce defense of the port of Callao against the Dutch as proof of their loyalty. This petition resembled other petitions that formed part of the petition-and-response system of the Spanish empire (Masters 2023). The mulatos and mulatas explained that in 1624, the viceroy placed them in an extremely dangerous position on the field of battle, which they fought valiantly. But for their loyalty they were not well repaid, they explained. “The officials came to our houses in search of the tribute and bothered us a thousand different ways, snatching the jewelry from our women’s necks. They abused us with words and brought us to prison

3 Francisco de Carrasco, 22 April 1611, AGI, Lima 141. 4 “Mulatos y mulatas al Rey,” 18 March 1627, AGI, Lima 158.

246

M. HAYES

and mistreated us.”5 They did not deserve this, because “on every occasion in which the Kingdom has needed us we have acted as very loyal vassals.”6 In other words, the community had already recognized their submission to the king in other ways, and so the tax was not necessary. Fascinatingly, though the primary service cited in the petition was military in nature and only men were able to claim they had defended the city with arms, women were co-petitioners and their experiences with tribute were also considered. This may merely be because the tax payment was collective, which would include women, but it is also possible that women had helped during the blockade in some other way, perhaps bringing supplies or offering medical services. The royal favor requested, therefore, was a reduction or abolition of the tribute for all the members of this group of mulatos , not just the soldiers. They were implicitly associating themselves with Spaniards rather than Indigenous tributaries. They had defended and settled colonial territory just as Spaniards did. Therefore, the entire population should be exempt, just as Spaniards were. They occupied a high place in the social hierarchy and therefore had rights and obligations that were like those of Spaniards. Moreover, militia service was the most prominent, but not the only reason for including them in tribute exemption: the mulatos considered their guild’s displays at festivals on behalf of the royal family another essential civic duty. They mentioned it in the same breath with their military service, citing a recent parade on horseback that they organized to celebrate the birth of an Infanta. The mulatos’ claims of loyalty and heroism in battle might have been dismissed as boasting, but the crown attorney of the Audiencia of Lima lent his support. He spoke not only of mulatos, but of negros as well; whether this was a deliberate inclusion or an unintentional conflation of the two communities via an imprecise use of ethnoracial terms is unclear (Konetzke 1958, 333–334). He added that the collection of the tribute had been very troublesome for local officials. The members of the Council

5 “Mulatos y mulatas al Rey,” 18 March 1627, AGI, Lima 158. “son tantos los agravios y molestias que recivimos de los officiales Rs y alguaciles en Raçon de un tributo o pecho en achaque destos ttributos entran en nuestras cassas y nos hacen mill molestias quitando a nras mugeres las gargantillas y otras prendas. Y ttratandolas mal de palabra y a nosotros llevandonos a la carcel y maltratandonos.” 6 “Mulatos y mulatas al Rey,” 18 March 1627, AGI, Lima 158. “todas las occasiones que en este Reyno se an offrecido avemos acudido como muy leales basallos.”

12

WE HAVE NOT BEEN TRIBUTARIES: PERU’S BLACK …

247

wanted more corroboration. They wrote to the Viceroy Guadalcázar for confirmation, who gave it, suggesting that the negros and mulatos had not only earned the reward, but would also be more likely to volunteer to serve without recompense if future viceroys needed them to defend Peru from enemies (Escobedo Mansilla 1981, 51). In other words, if the negro and mulato limeños continued to be disgruntled with the tax, they would be less inclined to continue to serve gratis in the city’s defense. By acknowledging the mulatos as trusted vassals who could answer a call to arms, Guadalcázar also tacitly admitted that these people did occupy the place in the social order that they asserted. The Council of the Indies then asked the Audiencia of Lima for its opinion as a body, and they also said they favored the tribute abolition (Escobedo Mansilla 1981, 51). In December of 1631, King Philip IV partially conceded the mulatos’ request. The royal decree said that the men and women who had served in the negro and mulato militias should be exempt from tribute for as long as the viceroy and his successors deemed appropriate (Konetzke 1958, 334– 335). By their military service, all agreed, they had proven their vassalage. It also expanded the scope of the original request to include both negros and mulatos, as the crown attorney and the viceroy had. Did the mulatos and mulatas of Lima who petitioned for tribute exemption in 1627 intend to claim tribute exemption for all Peruvian people of African descent? They did not mention the negros of Lima in their petition. They also did not speak of tribute exemption for anyone beyond the city. Indeed, in their petition they purposefully excluded some mulatos living in the city who they felt had not served Lima and did not merit the tribute exemption: “Because we are naturales (natives) of these parts, we should not be counted in the decree [that established the tribute], and the tribute should be paid by those mulatos who are strangers to these lands, coming from Spain and other places.”7 At least one petition demonstrates that the mulatos of Lima had conflicts with those from other parts of the kingdom who refused to participate. In 1632, Pedro Martín Leguizamo, a goldsmith from Panama who resided in Lima, asked the king to declare him officially Spanish. He said that a group of local mulatos (who were almost certainly the same group as 7 “Mulatos y mulatas al Rey,” 18 March 1627, AGI, Lima 158. “anssi Por ser naturales destos reynos como no sser conprehendidos en la cedula Rl. q por ella se manda q este tributo lo paguen los mulatos q fuesen estranjeros destos reynos benidos despaña y ottras partes.”

248

M. HAYES

the 1627 petitioners) had been trying to coerce him to enlist as part of their militia and pay them dues for organizing festivals.8 Leguizamo said that he was the child of a mulata and a Basque hidalgo, meaning he was a Spaniard, and requested a decree from the king to that effect (Ares Queija 2004; Bowser 1974, 306). The king and Council of the Indies did not know what to do with Leguizamo’s petition and sent it back to the viceroy, whose decision is not known. Yet here is proof that Lima’s mulatos had a clear understanding of what was required of a good mulato vassal. The mulatos believed that earning the tribute exemption would require active displays of loyalty, expressed disdain for newcomers who had not proven themselves (like the Panama-born Leguizamo), and did not think that the tribute exemption should apply to those people. The result, therefore, grew far beyond what they had requested when they wrote the petition.

Interpreting the Decree Why was the decree interpreted so broadly? This is partly because, as already indicated, local officials did not want to use their limited time and resources to collect tribute money, and they desperately wanted to maintain negro and mulato militias as a cheap defense of the territory. But this does not account for the full expanse of interpretation. How, then, did Peruvian negros and mulatos develop such a strong sense of their tribute exemption as a privilege granted to them by royal decree, when this was not in fact what it said? Several possibilities occur. One is that, as mentioned above, it was quite normal for corporate bodies such as cities, universities, militias, and confraternities to disagree with a royal proclamation and to proceed otherwise. Militias had jurisdiction over the people who belonged to them and the norms that should or should not apply; the king’s opinion had weight and a strong recommendation, but it was part of this broader “communicative sphere” in which others had a say as well (Herzog 2021, 5–6). Therefore, parameters about how to reach a just result were available to all to use. In this case, these included: reciprocity and reward; the value of military service; the duty of the king to protect vassals; and payment to royal authority to show subjection. The king, the members

8 Pedro Martín Leguizamo, 16 July 1632, AGI, Escribanía de Cámara 1023b.

12

WE HAVE NOT BEEN TRIBUTARIES: PERU’S BLACK …

249

of the Council of the Indies, the petitioners, and the denizens of Peru would have known about the principles and could apply them to multiple valid legal interpretations of the situation. They might have come to different results, but based on these overarching ideas, many answers, even if contradictory, were plausible, and therefore possible. There is also precedent for the interpretation of a single decision as a general rule. In the early modern period, in both the French and Iberian contexts, legal scholars in search of systematic legal customs used case studies to try to make much broader rules that would apply to everyone (Herzog 2018, especially 119–130). If jurists could engage in this process, as part of the same “communicative sphere,” it stands to reason that the corporations, like militias, could do the same. Perhaps they brought the result of a single case—that of Lima’s mulatos in 1631—and expanded it to all people of African descent in Peru. It is also possible that the expansion of the interpretation of the decree had something to do with the transmission of information. In a world in which most people were illiterate, royal decrees were proclaimed throughout the empire by criers (pregoneros ). Fernando Bouza has argued that in Spanish territories in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the spoken word was believed to hold as much or more power to preserve memory than the written (Bouza 2004 [1999]). Throughout Europe and European overseas possessions, criers provided the populace with access to news and royal pronouncements. There are no major monograph-length studies of the crier in Spanish America, and they are not mentioned with frequency in the scholarly literature (for one exception see Gargurevich Regal 2002, 98–105). However, studies of them in Europe, especially France and Italy, abound (Lett and Offenstadt 2003; Milner 2013; Santos 2016; Smail 2016). What these scholars have found reveals the amount of power criers held as intermediaries between official, authorities, and the popular classes. A closer look at Peruvian Black pregoneros, especially in Peru, may provide us with clues as to how the reshaping of legal knowledge took place. There is evidence that descendants of Africans played important roles as royal heralds and trumpeters in Iberia from the fifteenth century forward. Iberians in particular, and Europeans in general, believed that Black Africans were particularly skilled at music and used them as drummers and trumpeters at royal courts (Lowe 2010 [2005], 35–40). The playing of the trumpet accompanied royal proclamations as a way of attracting the attention of the nearby crowd. This may be how Black people became

250

M. HAYES

associated with the practice of heraldry and crying the news. On the one hand, the practice of dressing Black men in fine clothing to act as ceremonial accessories, and therefore as testaments to imperial wealth and power, could be demeaning (Walker 2017). On the other, teaching an audience to pay careful attention when a Black man made an announcement may have had effects that Spanish elites did not intend. In the aftermath of the invasion of the Americas, for instance, several early Black invaders became criers, including Juan García, who was the first official crier of Lima, as well as the doorman for its city council (Lockhart 1972, 380–384; Restall 2000, 191). Indeed, in his short biography on García in Men of Cajamarca, James Lockhart commented that it was common practice to use descendants of Africans as criers (Lockhart 1972, 380). Other parts of the Viceroyalty of Peru and New Granada, such as Quito and Popayán, featured Black criers (Lane 2000, 231). Lima was no exception. Most criers in Lima, from Juan García’s day to the end of the colonial period, were men of African descent.9 Yet for all those who have mentioned these curious facts, none have given serious thought to what the implications might be for the spreading of the news. Lima’s pregoneros would have been responsible for informing a mostly illiterate population about the new decree on tribute exemption. Could the pregoneros have shortened the proclamations for simplicity, or selectively interpreted the new laws for their own communities? Could they have been the instrument of the local corporations, such as the militia? The power to announce the law to the community was a strong one: jurisdiction, after all, comes from juris-dictio, “they say the law.” It is an intriguing possibility, though impossible to prove decisively with the evidence at hand, and scholars should be careful not to ascribe too functionalist a role to the pregonero in this case. Many people spoke about and debated the law: the pregonero was only one of many.

9 For instance, the use of a negro or mulato crier was mentioned at the auctions of

the belongings of the deceased in the following wills: Archivo Arzobispal de Lima [AAL], Testamentos, Legajo 31, Expediente 39, Juana Barba, 1651; AAL, Testamentos, 66, 30, Isabel Vique Maldonado, 1666. In the seventeenth century three different negro and mulato criers performed their services at public auctions to benefit Lima’s Hospital San Bartolomé: AAL, Hospitales, San Bartolomé, Legajo II, Expediente 27.

12

WE HAVE NOT BEEN TRIBUTARIES: PERU’S BLACK …

251

The Rebellion of Lambayeque Throughout the rest of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the exemption became an important element of negro and mulato identity in Peru. Descendants of Africans fought fiercely to defend it, and by extension their role within the social order as defenders of the empire who had earned the privilege of not paying tribute. This was true along the Peruvian coastline, where this population was significant. A 1791 census found that Peru’s northern coast had a population of descendants of Africans that was approximately 16.6%; the central coast (where Lima lay), 41.0%; and the southern coast, 12.4% (Arrelucea Barrantes and Cosamalón Aguilar 2015, 21). In late 1779, the royal inspector (visitador general ) José Antonio de Areche tried to begin implementing the same tribute regime for free people of color in Peru that was common in New Spain. Areche deputized Juan de O’Kelly, an artillery militia captain who was also the royal administrator (corregidor) of nearby Saña, to collect the money from free pardo militiamen in Lambayeque on the northern coast.10 O’Kelly anticipated that they would resist the payment if it was called “tribute,” and attempted to frame the payments as a voluntary “military contribution” that would help Lambayeque by funding local troops to defend the city from invasion by other European powers (Campbell 1972, 145–146). Though Areche, a peninsular Spaniard, may not have fully understood the charged history of tribute collection in the region, O’Kelly clearly had more familiarity with it and knew he had reason to proceed with caution. The free pardo militiamen of Lambayeque, who were not convinced by O’Kelly’s reasoning and clearly recognized the “contribution” as a tribute by another name, protested strenuously. They had four arguments against the tribute, which they detailed in a petition to O’Kelly. First, they felt that the demand for tribute payment implied that they were not very loyal to the king and they had been incorporated into the Spanish empire by military force, neither of which were true (Campbell 1972, 146). By this argument, they once again associated themselves with Spaniards rather than Indigenous tributaries. Second, they argued that they could refuse to 10 Pardo, like mulato, was a term that indicated descent from both Africans and Europeans. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, political authorities tended to use pardo and mulato as interchangeable. By the eighteenth century, a strong association had developed between the pardo label, freedom, high social status, and a certain financial standing.

252

M. HAYES

pay this tax because of their “People’s Rights” (derecho de gente) (Campbell 1972, 146). This may have been a reference to ius gentium, the Roman law of nations. If so, they may have been suggesting that this was a case governed by universal moral standards with which all should comply.11 Third, they said that no European power other than Spain took tribute from its subjects (Campbell 1972, 146). And fourth, they asserted that free Black people had never been required to pay any form of tribute. They said that only a letter from the viceroy himself would convince them to pay (Campbell 1972, 146–147; for more on legal challenges to authority by Black and Indigenous people in the eighteenth century, see Premo 2017). According to O’Kelly, the leaders of the group, Captain Celedonio Oliva and Lieutenant Manuel Bejarano, delivered this petition to his house by walking in with their hats still on their heads, throwing the petition onto the table and sitting down without having been invited to do so (Campbell 1972, 147). O’Kelly reported all this to Areche, who turned to the viceroy, Manuel de Guirior. In the two reports he sent to the viceroy, Areche acknowledged that he knew that tributes from descendants of Africans had not been collected in a long time, but he insisted that some had still contributed without protest; he cited successful collections of tribute money from castas (both descendants of Africans and Indigenous people) in Arequipa, Moquegua, Ica, and Cajamarca and asked that Guirior move against the Lambayeque rebels (Campbell 1972, 147). As Leon G. Campbell has pointed out, protests against tribute collection were actually increasing throughout the viceroyalty during this time. Areche did not respond to O’Kelly’s request to offer proof of successful tribute collection in Lima to help him convince the Lambayeque militiamen, suggesting that he had been unable to do so, and there was tribute-related unrest in Parinacochas, near Cuzco (Campbell 1972, 147). If Areche was reporting accurately, the successes he listed may have been more an exception than the rule. Manuel de Guirior’s reply to Areche was ambiguous. He said that the laws regarding the tax on free Black people had not been enforced in so long and advised Areche to proceed with caution (Campbell 1972, 147). The most Guirior would do was reprimand and denounce Captain Celedonio Oliva and Lieutenant Manuel Bejarano, the leaders of the

11 I thank Tamar Herzog for pointing this out to me.

12

WE HAVE NOT BEEN TRIBUTARIES: PERU’S BLACK …

253

insurrection, though he did not even go so far as to strip them of their militia commissions. He also advised (but did not mandate) the pardos in Lambayeque to make the payments (Campbell 1972, 148). By 1780, officials had stopped trying to enforce the tax. This example illustrates that between 1631 and 1779, the tribute had transformed from an exemption for some brave limeño veterans to a privilege that could be claimed by every free person of African descent in Peru. The rebellion of Lambayeque was successful, unlike the rebellions of Túpac Amaru and Túpac Katari that would follow in the next months, in part because it was justified, reinforced, and legitimized by the predominance of the historical memory over the written word in the original decree.

The Challenge of the Constitution of Cádiz The early nineteenth century presented new challenges. On March 19, 1812, the Cortes de Cádiz proclaimed Spain’s first liberal constitution, which established a constitutional monarchy and strip all descendants of Africans in Spanish territories of their rights to citizenship. The Constitution was drafted during a time of desperation: for two years, as the delegates to the Cortes debated their decisions, Napoleon’s troops besieged them. The Constitution was also spottily implemented and short-lived—when King Ferdinand VII returned to Spain two years later, he declared it void.12 Yet it had tremendous influence on subjects in all Spanish American territories and the constitutions they would later draft with independence. Article 22 of the Constitution read: “To the Spaniards who by any lineage are reputed to have African origin, there remains open the door of virtue and merit for citizenship; and in consequence, the Cortes can concede the letter of citizenship to those who have done eminent service to the nation, or those who are distinguished by their talents, their application and their conduct” (Constitución de Cádiz 1812).13 In other words, Spaniards who were publicly believed to have 12 Widespread dissatisfaction with Ferdinand VII provoked a liberal rebellion in Spain itself, which restored the Constitution of Cádiz during the “Trienio Liberal” (1820– 1823). A French army then invaded and restored Ferdinand VII to the status of absolute monarch. 13 “A los españoles que por cualquiera línea son habidos y reputados por originaros del África, les queda abierta la puerta de la virtud y del merecimiento para ser ciudadanos: en su consecuencia las Cortes concederán carta de ciudadano a los que hicieron servicios calificados a la Patria, o a los que se distingan por su talento, aplicación y conducta…”.

254

M. HAYES

any degree of African descent would have to petition to be recognized as full citizens. There are a number of possible reasons why the Cortes included this clause. The debates over the qualifications for citizenship show that Spanish delegates were deeply concerned that if universal male suffrage prevailed, the number of citizens in the Americas would outnumber those in the peninsula. They were trying to disqualify enough colonial subjects to preserve their majority (Herzog 2003, 141–163). But why choose the Black population to exclude? Some scholars have suggested that excluding Black Spaniards from citizenship was the logical extension of a racial order that ranked them last (Feros 2017; Meléndez 2006). Or perhaps it was because of the perception that they were still “foreign.” Their ancestors had been brought to Spanish territories in chains rather than choosing to emigrate, and therefore, delegates argued they could not love Spain the same way that a native citizen or voluntary immigrant might (Herzog 2003, 159). Yet the decision was extremely controversial: among many others, some members of the free Black population of Lima vocally opposed it. A group of twenty men published a pamphlet explaining their outrage (Colección de los discursos 1812). Though some references to liberal freedoms appear, many of them, rather than demanding inclusion in the new spirit of liberalism, insisted they were fighting to maintain privileges they believed they always had. The pamphlet’s contributors declared they had both Black and Spanish ancestry, calling themselves pardos and sometimes also castas.14 They pointed out the inherent ambiguity of the racial category employed by the Constitution and asked why they were being singled out. They wrote, “In Peru [we] have not been tributaries: and maybe this is one of the reasons why [we] have always occupied politically the first rank after the Europeans and white Americans” (Colección de los discursos 1812, 9).15 They felt that the exemption they had earned placed

14 The authors referred to themselves collectively as “los españoles pardos de esta capital.” They also called themselves “castas,” which meant in most contexts a person of mixed ancestry of any kind, though in this instance the authors often used it to mean a person with some African ancestry, rhetorically opposing it to indigenous ancestry. 15 “En el Perú las castas no han sido tributarias: y tal vez ha sido esta una de las causas porque han ocupado siempre en lo político el primer rango despues de los europeos y americanos blancos.”

12

WE HAVE NOT BEEN TRIBUTARIES: PERU’S BLACK …

255

them above Indigenous people and secured their place in the sociopolitical order. They said they had always had the privileges now allotted citizens: “Those of African origin have always enjoyed these rights. He who attacked them was considered an oppressor, invader, or thief, and punished according to the laws” (Colección de los discursos 1812, 70).16

Conclusion Descendants of Africans in Peru had a strong idea of their political privileges and responsibilities. They believed that they had never had to pay tribute, and therefore, they were officially recognized as settlers of the Americas like their Spanish counterparts. They relied on the historical memory and oral transmission of that privilege in order to keep the idea of it alive and use it to defend themselves in both 1779 and 1812. The goal of the 1812 pamphlet was to convince Lima’s political authorities to intervene with the Cortes so they could participate as full citizens and vote in future elections in the new constitutional monarchy. They did not succeed. Yet the survival of the historical memory, untethered from the letter of the decree that had inspired it, over nearly two hundred years was remarkable. The community’s deployment of this memory and successful defense of the tribute exemption in 1779 was even more so, especially in light of the brutal consequences for the Tupamarista and Katarista rebellions that would follow. In some ways, it is a bitter irony that the 1812 written codification and expansion of rights for most men living in Spanish America excluded descendants of Africans, undoing via the written word nearly two centuries of powerful social mobilization. Had the community’s interpretation reigned, and resistance to authority on its basis remained an available option, the history of Afro-Peruvians since 1812 might have been quite different. I am grateful to many people and institutions for helping me develop this article. The Fulbright Commission and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University provided research funding. For their helpful attention to drafts of this article, I thank: the anonymous reviewer from Palgrave; Farah Bazzi; Mackenzie Cooley; Erica FeildMarchello; Tamar Herzog; Adrian Masters, Quentin Verreycken, and the

16 “Siempre han disfrutado los originarios de Africa de estos derechos. El que los atacaba era considerado como opresor, invasor o ladrón, y castigado conforme a las leyes.”

256

M. HAYES

other participants in the 2019 workshop “Rethinking the Practice of Petitioning in the Habsburg and Colonial Worlds”; Alejandro de la Fuente and the other participants in the 2020 Mamolen Dissertation Workshop; and most especially, Benita Herreros Cleret de Langavant, Pablo Sánchez León, and the other contributors to this volume.

Published Primary Sources Colección de los discursos que pronunciaron los señores diputados de América contra el artículo 22 del proyecto de Constitución. Ilustrados con algunas notas interesantes por los españoles pardos de esta capital. 1812. Lima: Imprenta de los Huérfanos. Constitución de Cádiz. 1812. https://www.congreso.es/docu/constituciones/ 1812/ce1812_cd.pdf. Accessed 22 May 2023. Konetzke, Richard, ed. 1955. Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810, vol. 1. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Konetzke, Richard, ed. 1958. Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810, vol. 2. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Lee, Bertram T., ed. 1935. Libros de Cabildo de Lima, vol. 1. Lima: Torres Aguirre; Sanmartí.

Secondary Sources Ares Queija, Berta. 2004. Las categorías del mestizaje: desafíos a los constreñimientos de un modelo social en el Perú colonial temprano. Historica XXVIII (1): 193–218. Ares Queija, Berta. 2006. Les milices de noirs et de mulâtres à Lima: Les débuts (XVIe–XVIIe siècles). In D’esclaves à soldats: miliciens et soldats d’origine servile, XIIIe–XXIe siècles, ed. Carmen Bernand and Alessandro Stella, 85–102. Paris: L’Harmattan. Arrelucea Barrantes, Maribel, and Jesús A. Cosamalón Aguilar. 2015. La presencia afrodescendiente en el Perú, siglos XVI–XX . Lima: Ministerio de Cultura. Bloch, Marc. 1963 [1948]. Les transformations des techniques comme problème de psychologie collective. In Mélanges historiques, 2: 791–799. Paris: Service d’Édition et de Vente des Publications de l’Éducation Nationale. Borucki, Alex. 2015. From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Río de La Plata. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bouza, Fernando. 2004 [1999]. Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

12

WE HAVE NOT BEEN TRIBUTARIES: PERU’S BLACK …

257

Bowser, Frederick. 1974. The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bradley, Peter. 1977. The Lessons of the Dutch Blockade of Callao (1624). Revista de Historia de América 83: 53–68. Bradley, Peter. 1989. The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598–1701. New York: St Martin’s Press. Campbell, Leon G. 1972. Black Power in Colonial Peru: The 1779 Tax Rebellion of Lambayeque. Phylon 33 (2): 140–172. Campbell, Leon G. 1975. The Changing Racial and Administrative Structure of the Peruvian Military under the Later Bourbons. The Americas 32 (1): 117–133. Duve, Thomas, and Otto Danwerth, eds. 2020. Knowledge of the Pragmatici: Legal and Moral Theological Literature and the Formation of Early Modern Ibero-America. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Escobedo Mansilla, Ronald. 1981. El tributo de los zambaigos, negros, y mulatos en el virreinato peruano. Revista de Indias 41 (163): 43–54. Feros, Antonio. 2017. Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gargurevich Regal, Juan. 2002. La comunicación imposible. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Gharala, Norah L. A. 2019. Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Gómez Gómez, Margarita. 2019. Escribir la norma: problemas de recepción, acatamiento y publicación de los documentos reales en las Indias durante el Antiguo Régimen. Les Cahiers de Framespa. https://journals.openedition. org/framespa/5617. Accessed 23 May 2023. Graubart, Karen. 2019. Taxation, Obligation, and Corporate Identity in 16thCentury Lima. In A Companion to Early Modern Lima, ed. Emily A. Engel, 82–102. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Herzog, Tamar. 2003. Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Herzog, Tamar. 2015. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herzog, Tamar. 2018. A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herzog, Tamar. 2021. Immemorial (and Native) Customs in Early Modernity: Europe and the Americas. Comparative Legal History 9 (1): 3–55. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lane, Kris. 2000. Captivity and Redemption: Aspects of Slave Life in Early Colonial Quito and Popayán. The Americas 57 (2): 225–246.

258

M. HAYES

Lett, Didier, and Nicolas Offenstadt, eds. 2003. Haro ! Noël ! Oyé ! Pratiques du cri au Moyen Âge. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. Lockhart, James. 1972. The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Political Study of the First Conquerors of Peru. Austin: The University of Texas at Austin Press. Lowe, Kate. 2010 [2005]. The Stereotyping of Black Africans. In Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T.F. Earle and Kate J.P. Lowe, 17–47. New York: Cambridge University Press. Masters, Adrian. 2023. We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the SixteenthCentury Spanish New World. New York: Cambridge University Press. Meléndez, Mariselle. 2006. Patria, Criollos and Blacks: Imagining the Nation in the Mercurio Peruano, 1791–1795. Colonial Latin American Review 15 (2): 207–277. Milner, Stephen J. 2013. ‘Fanno bandire, notificare, et expressamente comandare’: Town Criers and the Information Economy of Renaissance Florence. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16 (1): 107–151. Morales Moya, Antonio. 1988. Milicia y nobleza en el siglo XVIII. Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 9: 121–138. Phelan, John L. 1960. Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy. Administrative Science Quarterly 5 (1): 47–65. Prak, Maarten. 2015. Citizens, Soldiers, and Civic Militias in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Past & Present 228: 93–123. Premo, Bianca. 2017. The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire. New York: Oxford University Press. Restall, Matthew. 2000. Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America. The Americas 57 (2): 171–205. Santos, Maria J. Azevedo. 2016. Escrivães e pregoeiros dos conceilhos (séculos XIV–XVI). Revista de História da Sociedade e da Cultura 14: 119–132. Schwaller, Robert C. 2012. ‘For Honor and Defence’: Race and the Right to Bear Arms in Early Colonial Mexico. Colonial Latin American Review 21 (2): 239–266. Smail, Daniel L. 2016. Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sobrevilla Perea, Natalia. 2011. Colored by the Past: Identity and the Armed Forces in Peru, from Colonial Militias to Armies of Independence. Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina 22 (1): 57–79. Stern, Steve J. 1993 [1982]. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Vinson III, Ben. 2001 Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Walker, Tamara J. 2017. Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima. New York: Cambridge University Press. Zemon Davis, Natalie. 1987. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

PART IV

Dynamics: Resisting Iberian Imperialism Through the Eighteenth-Century Reforms

CHAPTER 13

Policy and Indigenous Policies in the Age of Enlightenment: Agreements and Resistance Between Assimilationist Ideals and the Preservation of Differences Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida

Introduction The reforms influenced by the Enlightenment and implemented in Portuguese America through the Pombaline policy had a significant impact on the numerous and diverse Indigenous populations. These populations responded to the reforms in various ways, experiencing both constraints and opportunities, as evidenced by numerous research studies

This text draws from Almeida (2005, 2007, 2015, 2017). It has received the support of the project “RESISTANCE Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, 16th-19th centuries”, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020, Research and Innovation Staff Exchange, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Grant Agreement No 778076. The research had, also, the support of the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_13

261

262

M. R. C.

DE

ALMEIDA

on the subject. Interdisciplinary approaches in current research shed light on the multiple forms of political agency exhibited by Indigenous peoples, both in the hinterlands and in the villages. While many resisted the political proposals directed at them through acts of escape, conflicts, and wars, others were able to exploit them for their own benefit by navigating the social and political norms of the colonial world. Each group acted according to their own interests and capacities, which were continually shaped by the dynamics of their encounters (Almeida 2013). In recent decades, historians and anthropologists have endeavored to identify these interests within specific historical periods and geographical contexts, while also recognizing the diverse meanings that actions and choices can hold for ethnically and socio-culturally distinct groups and individuals. This approach allows for a more nuanced comprehension of historical processes involving Indigenous peoples. Among these processes, the enlightened reforms in Portuguese and Spanish Americas have been approached with innovation, exploring various aspects of their impact (Almeida 2017; Garcia 2009; Domingues 2000; Sampaio 2012; Medeiros 2007; Silva 2005; Lopes 2005; Weber 2007; Menegus 2000, Coelho 2016). From this perspective, this chapter explores the limitations of implementing Pombal’s indigenous policy, specifically in relation to the proposal of eradicating social and ethnic distinctions between Indigenous peoples and other subjects of the king, aiming for assimilation and the discontinuation of the old colonial Indian villages (aldeias ). It is crucial to recognize that this proposal was directly linked to fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. Equality, freedom, progress, and civilization were ideals of enlightened thought that had to be adapted to local realities and were interpreted differently by various actors. By analyzing Pombal’s indigenous policy alongside the political actions of Indigenous peoples (indigenous politics), the chapter uncovers the intricate political dynamics among social agents. It exposes the constraints and contradictions associated with its implementation in Portuguese America. Here, the assimilationist discourse coexisted with the preservation of M. R. C. de Almeida (B) Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Brazil e-mail: [email protected]

13

POLICY AND INDIGENOUS POLICIES IN THE AGE …

263

differences. These differences endured between ordinary Indigenous individuals and índios principais (Indigenous chiefs or leaders) between those residing in aldeias and those in remote regions, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. Numerous contradictions within the historical records, including the laws themselves and the political speeches of the conflicting actors, provide evidence of these dynamics (Almeida 2015; Coelho 2016; Sampaio 2012; Silva 2005). This chapter focuses primarily on the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro, with a comparative perspective on other captaincies, spanning from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century. The aim was to assimilate and civilize Indigenous peoples, and this objective was pursued through diverse approaches in different regions and among various Indigenous groups, resulting in a range of reactions. While some individuals may have embraced the concept of equality and adopted a mestizo identity, others chose to assert their indigenous identities in order to reclaim their previous rights, which had been guaranteed to them as indigenous residents of aldeias (Índios aldeados )1 under earlier laws. Their actions were influenced by the political culture of the Ancien Régime, which they appropriated for their own purposes.

Laws, Resistances, and Indigenous Political Cultures The political agency of indigenous peoples in their struggles for their interests has gained increasing attention in research that incorporates the latest theoretical and conceptual perspectives of Political History and Anthropology. Since the 1970s, scholars have reexamined power relations between the metropolis and the colony, emphasizing the internal dynamics of different regions within the Portuguese empire. These analyses reveal the complex political interactions among various actors within the kingdom and the colonies, including marginalized groups (Gouvêa 2005; Fragoso et al. 2001; Xavier and Hespanha 1998). While recognizing the importance of connections with the metropolis, these studies focus on individuals, institutions, and local dynamics, highlighting the multiple and essential adaptations of norms, laws, and metropolitan

1 “Índios aldeados” refers to indigenous people who resided in colonial Indian villages under Portuguese administration. They became Christian subjects of the king with a specific legal status that entailed their own obligations and rights.

264

M. R. C.

DE

ALMEIDA

projects in the colonies based on regional specificities. The actions of Indigenous peoples are among these distinct characteristics. The concept of enforced immobility among indigenous peoples in the colony due to their acculturation and domination is no longer supported in light of current theoretical perspectives in politics and culture. Ethnicity, pact, negotiation, and political culture are categories that, when integrated into political history, challenge the notion of a rigid opposition between dominators and the dominated, where the former exercise complete control over the latter, thereby nullifying their agency (Gomes 2005). Even social groups subjected to slavery and the harshest conditions have the ability to reconstruct meanings and reinforce cultural identities (Hill 1992). The cultures of Indigenous peoples are historical, dynamic, and adaptable products that continuously evolve through contact experiences (Thompson 1987; Mintz 1982; Barth 2000). These ideas are crucial for dismantling the dualistic perspective that separates acculturated Indigenous individuals from those considered pure and for rejecting the outdated notion that certain cultural traditions confine peoples and prevent them from acting beyond them. Examined through these perspectives, the documents reveal that Indigenous peoples who became part of the colonial world did not become immobilized or vanish within the masses of enslaved or dispossessed individuals. Instead, they actively reshaped their cultures, identities, and social networks. Through struggles and negotiations with various actors, they developed diverse forms of resistance that did not necessarily involve an outright rejection of the colonial order. This can be understood as a form of adaptive resistance, as described by Steve Stern (1987). Indigenous peoples collaborated with the colonizers to secure the best opportunities for survival in the new conditions they faced. Frequently, Indigenous peoples invoked laws to defend their rights and seek potential gains, highlighting the need to deepen our understanding of the role of legislation and move away from the reductionist notion that laws are simply tools crafted by dominators to subjugate the dominated. While laws do legitimize unequal relations, they also provide opportunities for mediation, creating openings for the claims of the disadvantaged (Thompson 1981). It is within these openings that Indigenous peoples integrated into the colonial system acted between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Laws are shaped and enforced through negotiations, agreements, and conflicts among interested parties, and their effectiveness depends on the respective abilities of these parties to assert their interests.

13

POLICY AND INDIGENOUS POLICIES IN THE AGE …

265

A careful examination of the documentation reveals the active participation of Indigenous peoples in these disputes, particularly when it comes to laws and decisions that directly affect them. Inserted into the process of colonization, Indigenous peoples, notably the leaders, acquired knowledge of the new codes of the colonial world and adeptly operated within the new framework. This is evident from numerous documents in which they asserted the rights bestowed upon them by legislation as indios aldeiados, enjoying a distinct and negotiated legal status that rendered them Christian subjects of the King (Almeida 2013). Upon entering the aldeias , often through agreements with the Portuguese, they willingly accepted a range of obligations, including compulsory labor. Undoubtedly, they suffered significant losses. However, alongside their responsibilities, they also possessed certain entitlements, such as land and protection, which encompassed the guarantee of freedom from enslavement. The leaders held the right to titles, positions, salaries, and social prestige (Perrone-Moisés 1992). Despite the circumstances of limited resources, restrictions, and oppression, the índios aldeados possessed the agency to assert their minimum rights secured by the law. Their claims demonstrate their adoption of Portuguese codes and the political culture of the Ancien Régime, as they requested privileges in exchange for their services, similar to non-Indigenous subjects. Numerous examples exist of Indigenous individuals who approached the King, seeking favors in exchange for their collaboration, particularly in times of war. In their petitions, they identified themselves as indios aldeados, Christian subjects of the King, embracing the generic identity that had been assigned to them or imposed by the Portuguese Crown. Additionally, they used Portuguese baptismal names and referred to the specific Indian village where they resided. Some even made the journey to the Kingdom to present their demands (Almeida 2013). Justice and peace held great importance within the framework of the Old Regime, and it was the duty of the sovereign to maintain them by distributing them “… throughout the Kingdom through a hierarchical structure of jurisdictions” (Lara 1999: 20; Xavier and Hespanha 1998). Every subject of the Empire had the right to present petitions for justice and favor to the King, as evidenced by the consultations of the Overseas Council, which contain numerous examples of cases involving common and impoverished individuals who sought redress from His Majesty. Indigenous peoples, often supported by civil and religious authorities,

266

M. R. C.

DE

ALMEIDA

utilized the opportunities provided by legislation to assert their rights and maintain their status as residents of aldeias until the nineteenth century. If politics can be viewed as an arena of negotiations and conflicts, the same can be said about culture. According to Sider (1994), culture is not merely a web of shared meanings, but rather a constant struggle to avoid sharing meanings. The documentation concerning conflicts surrounding colonial Indigenous villages reveals the diverse meanings and functions these villages held for the various social actors involved. For the residents of these villages, they represented a potential space of freedom, safeguarding collective land, communal life, and the right to be free from enslavement, despite the imposition of compulsory labor. I firmly believe that it was through the defense of these values that they remained united until the nineteenth century, actively participating in political actions to preserve their lands and villages. In their defense, they affirmed their Indigenous identity, rejecting the notion of assimilation and civilization proposed by Pombal’s policies, which aimed to assimilate and create equality but were perceived as undermining their collective rights.

The Indian Directory and Portuguese Enlightenment: Some Considerations In the mid-eighteenth century, during the reign of King D. José I and under the government of the Marquis of Pombal, reforms based on Enlightenment ideas, adapted to the kingdom’s realities, were implemented to strengthen Portugal politically and economically. In the Americas, the objective was to increase financial revenue and expand borders by demarcating territories and combating foreign and hostile indigenous populations, particularly after the signing of the Treaty of Madrid. The disputes with the Spanish Crown over American territories gave rise to numerous conflicts and negotiations involving representatives from local and metropolitan authorities, settlers, and Indigenous peoples. The indigenous populations, especially those in border regions, were claimed by both kingdoms as subjects who could secure sovereignty over the occupied territories (Garcia 2009; Farage 1991). Consequently, special attention was given to indigenous policies that introduced the proposal of assimilation for the Indigenous peoples. Without delving into the numerous controversies surrounding Pombal’s Indigenous policies, it is worth contemplating the influence of the Enlightenment on these policies, taking into account the specificities

13

POLICY AND INDIGENOUS POLICIES IN THE AGE …

267

of Portugal and the disruptions and continuities compared to previous approaches. The enlightened politics and rhetoric of the prominent representatives of the Enlightenment in the Kingdom were marked by a fluctuation between progressive and conservative ideas. They attributed Portugal’s political and economic decline to the excessive power held by the clergy (particularly the Jesuits), the Inquisition, and the aristocratic landowners. The aim was to exert control over these sectors, rather than completely eliminating them, which was deemed an important objective (Falcon 1982; Silva 2015). The ideals of freedom, civilization, progress, and equality guided some reforms in both the metropolis and the colony, with necessary adaptations. However, when it came to the enslavement of Africans and Indigenous peoples, measures regarding freedom were highly limited. Despite being granted freedom in the Kingdom, Africans and Afro-descendants remained enslaved in the colony. On the other hand, Indigenous peoples, who were freed from slavery by the 1755 law, were regarded as inferior and incapable of self-governance according to the 1757 Diretório (Directory). This directive subjected them to compulsory labor and placed them under the guardianship of a lay official responsible for their civilization. According to Mauro Coelho (2016), the Diretório dos Índios or Pombaline Directory2 (1757), as the legislation came to be known, was the outcome of agreements and negotiations between the metropolis and the colony. Originally proposed for the Amazon region and drafted by Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, brother of the Marquis of Pombal, and appointed governor of the State of Grão-Pará and Maranhão, the new law was later extended to encompass the entire Portuguese America. Coelho argues that it emerged from conflicts among social actors who sought to adapt previous laws to regional needs, primarily ensuring the continuation of compulsory labor for Indigenous peoples. The new policy aimed to promote the assimilation of indigenous peoples by transforming the aldeias into Portuguese vilas and settlements, encouraging the presence of white settlers and promoting mixed marriages. This policy aimed to eradicate indigenous customs still present in the aldeias and discrimination against Indigenous individuals, with the 2 “Diretório que se deve observar nas Povoações dos Índios do Pará e Maranhão, enquanto Sua Majestade não mandar o contrário.” (Directory that should be observed in the Indigenous Villages of Pará and Maranhão until His Majesty orders otherwise). Pará, May 3, 1757. Reference: Beozzo (1983: 129–167).

268

M. R. C.

DE

ALMEIDA

goal of making them equal subjects of the King. The Freedom Law of 1755 explicitly prohibited the enslavement of indigenous peoples in any circumstances and prioritized them for holding official positions in the newly established indigenous towns. This law effectively abolished the blood purity statutes that had previously excluded Indigenous peoples from obtaining honorary titles and accessing public and ecclesiastical positions. Additionally, the Royal Decree of 1755 actively encouraged miscegenation, offering benefits and incentives to those who married Indigenous individuals, particularly in areas of the periphery where the presence of white settlers was limited (Rocha 2022; Sampaio 2012; Farage 1991). The Directory ratified these measures by giving priority to indigenous peoples in occupying official positions in the new vilas. However, it depicted them as being rustic, ignorant, and unsuited for governance. To address this, a Director was appointed for each of the Townships with the responsibility of supervising the officials and preventing negligence. Additionally, the Directory maintained compulsory labor for ordinary Indigenous individuals while reinforcing the privileged status of Indigenous leaders, whose privileges were upheld and even expanded. In addition to being exempt from compulsory labor, indigenous leaders had the right to have Indigenous individuals working for them. Thus, the same policy that advocated for equality between Indigenous and nonIndigenous people and aimed to combat discrimination against them ultimately resulted in their being kept in a distinct condition as índios aldeados, subjected to compulsory labor and under the tutelage of the Director, who assumed the role of administrator in the new Indian towns and parishes. Despite some significant changes, Pombal’s indigenous policy perpetuated the practices of the past by maintaining the separation of Indigenous people in designated locations. The Directory, in general terms, adhered to the old guidelines outlined in the Regimento das Missões of 16863 : the categorization of Indigenou people as docile or wild, the requirement of compulsory labor for the villagers, the provision of land for Indigenous people in the villages, and the imposition of tutelage, which the Directors now exercised. The Directory also preserved the privileges granted to Indigenous leaders. 3 The Regimento das Missões, specifically aimed at the Amazon region, also applied to the other Jesuit villages in the colony until the establishment of the Directory. Regimento das Missões do Estado do Maranhão e Pará 1/12/1686. In: Beozzo (1983: 114–120).

13

POLICY AND INDIGENOUS POLICIES IN THE AGE …

269

Therefore, there were many contradictions within the new law that aimed to assimilate Indigenous peoples and make them equal to other subjects, while simultaneously maintaining and encouraging distinctions. The implementation of the law perpetuated these differences on three levels: between common Indigenous individuals and leaders, between the so-called “docile” Indigenous people (from the Indian villages) and the “wild” Indigenous people (from the hinterlands), and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals. It is worth noting that although the authorities themselves preserved these differences, as evidenced in official documentation, Indigenous peoples also had an interest in maintaining them and knew how to use them to their advantage. In the eighteenth-century Amazon, population maps of the new towns (Indian villages and parishes) were categorized based on the residents’ ethnic backgrounds, including indigenous villagers, white residents, and enslaved Black individuals. For instance, the 1778 family map of the captaincies of Pará and Amazonas specifically differentiated between white and Indigenous residents.4 Similarly, in Rio de Janeiro, official documents distinguished between Indian parishes and villages, explicitly identifying residents and Indigenous individuals separately. For example, the “Memória de todas as freguesias do Bispado do Rio de Janeiro” (Report on the parishes of the Bishopry of Rio de Janeiro) in 1766 mentioned the aldeias of São Lourenço, São Barnabé, São Francisco Xavier de Itaguaí, Nossa Senhora da Guia de Mangaratiba, and São Pedro.5 The 1797 map of the parish of Itaguaí listed 141 heads of households, with a subdivision starting from number 87 labeled “Aldeia dos Índios de Taguaí” (Village of the Indigenous People of Taguaí). Even the 1816 map of the towns in the Rio de Janeiro district continued to reference aldeias , distinguishing them from vilas and parishes with similar names. This pattern can be observed in the captaincy of Pernambuco as well, as documented in the table on villages and Indigenous locations compiled by Medeiros (2007), and it likely occurred in various other regions of Portuguese America.

4 Map of Families, which, except for the Indigenous Villagers, existed in the majority of the Parishes in both Captaincies of the Grão-Pará State, and its feasibility and implementation in the year 1779. Ms (Manuscrito) AHU (Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino), Rio Negro, caixa 10 doc. 8. 5 Memoir of all the Parishes of this Bishopric of Rio de Janeiro, January 22, 1766. Ms AHU, RJA (Rio de Janeiro Avulsos), caixa. 84, doc. 7.

270

M. R. C.

DE

ALMEIDA

The new policy, therefore, did not prevent the Indigenous subjects of the King, who resided in the former Indian villages, from continuing to identify themselves and be identified as Indigenous for a long time after the Pombaline reforms. The land of the aldeias that were transformed into towns or parishes still belonged to the índios aldeados, and in some regions, it became even more contested, leading to various conflicts, as was the case in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro.

The Pombaline Directory in Rio de Janeiro: Assimilation Proposals, Land Disputes, and Maintenance of Indigenous Identities The information regarding the transformation of aldeias into vilas and parishes in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro is scattered and incomplete. In 1758, several royal decrees arrived in the city to instruct authorities on how to proceed with the changes established by the Pombaline Directory. Measures were taken to confiscate the assets of the Jesuits while preserving the lands of the villages for the indigenous people. The aldeias remained in their original locations and soon became parishes. Only São Barnabé was elevated to the status of a vila, still in the eighteenth century (Almeida 2013). During the mid-1700s, the land issues in the aldeias of the captaincy became more severe. The expulsion of the Jesuits further complicated the situation as the lands that had been confiscated from the priests were returned to the control of the Crown. These lands became subject to disputes and requests through land grants (sesmarias ), exacerbating the land conflicts. Additionally, the Indigenous people lost powerful allies in their conflicts with the settlers, such as were the Jesuits. This period was marked by numerous conflicts and encroachment on the lands of the aldeias . The socio-economic development of the captaincy relied on the conquest and incorporation of the hinterlands, leading to the establishment of new Indian aldeias . This expansion posed an increasing threat to Indigenous lands and assets, as the settlers sought to exploit the resources and opportunities in these territories. Despite the encouragement for non-Indigenous presence in aldeias and the permission and incentives for improvements to be made within them, the authorities were concerned with safeguarding the rights of

13

POLICY AND INDIGENOUS POLICIES IN THE AGE …

271

Indigenous people over the lands and incomes of the aldeias , as stipulated by the laws. The Indigenous villagers, in turn, leveraged these laws to preserve the assets granted to them in previous agreements. They were well aware of their rights and privileges established through agreements with the Portuguese, as well as the positions they held within the Indian villages, parishes, and towns. As a result, conflicts and resistance from the Indigenous population intensified, and in certain instances, they were successful in asserting their demands. In 1773, for instance, André Alves Pereira Vianna, a leaseholder in the aldeia of São Barnabé, which had already been elevated to the status of vila, claimed ownership of the existing port and leased lands. However, according to the documents, he only had rights to the improvements made on the land, as per the directive of the then Viceroy Marquês do Lavradio (1769–1779), which were evaluated and compensated for. The lands that did not belong to him were taken for the establishment of the vila, in accordance with the Directory’s instruction to “take lands from private individuals for the establishment of the said Indians”.6 A few years later, it was the Indigenous people themselves who resorted to legal measures to defend the territory and income of the same aldeia. In 1779, João Batista da Costa, the indigenous Captain-Major of São Barnabé, filed a petition against the Indian village’s Director, expressing his grievances regarding the “sufferings, distress, and injustices suffered by himself and the impoverished Indigenous population”.7 The document highlights his awareness of the administrative issues that arose when the aldeia was transformed into a vila and began to have a Juiz Conservador (Judge Conservator), and Director. In addition to requesting the removal of the Director from his position, João Batista da Costa raised concerns about the competence of the Judge Conservator in overseeing the Directors’ activities, the collection of aldeia income, and the indigenous people’s subsistence endeavors. He also questioned the imposition of tutelage on the Indigenous people by the Directory, as well as the diversion of their artisanal activities, crucial for their livelihoods, toward timber exploitation and other ventures favored by the Director. The Judge Conservators were also criticized for neglecting the well-being of the 6 Ofício from Marquês do Lavradio to Martinho de Melo e Castro. Rio de Janeiro, July 20, 1773. Ms. ANRJ (Arquivo Nacional) cód. 69, vol.02, fl.88. 7 Request from João Batista da Costa, Captain-Major of São Barnabé. June 6, 1779. Ms. AHU RJA cx.119, doc. 88.

272

M. R. C.

DE

ALMEIDA

Indigenous population and the aldeia, as well as for failing to provide the necessary church ornaments “despite repeated appeals”. João Batista da Costa argued that if the King’s orders were followed, the Directors “would not be allowed to misuse funds or treat the Indigenous people as slaves”.8 Additionally, he mentioned the issue of unmarked lands in the aldeia, attributing it to the authorities’ negligence. In addition to demonstrating knowledge of the division of administrative competencies among authorities, the indigenous Captain-Major also revealed awareness of his own role in the position he held and the prestige that was due to him. He complained about being imprisoned for three months and expressed disappointment that the Marquis Vice-Rei (Viceroy) did not acknowledge “…the patent he held and the honours he enjoyed, all bestowed by Your Royal Majesty…”.9 The Conselho Ultramarino (Overseas Council) issued a favorable opinion to the petitioner, concurring with the Treasury Prosecutor’s report on the abuses and irregularities committed by the Directors in the aldeias throughout the Portuguese colony. The Council’s opinion stated that these officials had become useless and no longer suited the needs of the aldeias: “it is no longer appropriate for them in this and other aldeias, as I am certain, having seen the complaints made about those in Pará and Maranhão. This pernicious officer, created for good but always turned into harm for the Indigenous people, should be abolished”.10 Furthermore, the Council suggested that the injustices against the indigenous Captain-Major should be addressed “to the extent possible, by granting him authority and ensuring his respect, and he should be allowed to take action against those who harmed him”.11 In 1799, the Indigenous people of São Barnabé once again turned to the courts to reclaim a portion of their lands that had been seized by an

8 Consultation from the Overseas Council regarding the representation of João Batista da Costa. 1780. Ms. AHU RJA,cx.22, doc.33; Documentos Históricos da Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, 95: 88–91. 9 Idem. 10 Consultation of the Overseas Council regarding the representation of João Batista

da Costa. February 22, 1780.Ms. AHU RJA, cx.122, doc. 33. 11 Idem.

13

POLICY AND INDIGENOUS POLICIES IN THE AGE …

273

ambitious captain.12 They asserted their rightful ownership of these lands, which had been granted to them through sesmarias and had been properly measured and demarcated. They explained that they did not seek the Viceroy’s intervention because those who were supposed to defend their rights had actually supported the captain’s unlawful seizure of the lands. Moreover, they expressed concerns that their petition would not be handled properly in the Secretary’s office due to the fact that “the Secretary was the defendant’s brother-in-law”.13 The Overseas Council recommended further investigations into the matter. While the ultimate outcome of the case remains unknown, it is evident that the indigenous people were deeply invested in protecting their land rights and were willing to engage in political actions by resorting to legal means. Their understanding of bureaucratic procedures, the hierarchical structure of positions, and the irregularities of those in power are also worth noting. The communal land of the Indigenous villages, despite its limitations compared to the vastness of the surrounding territories, held great value for the Indigenous inhabitants. This is evident in their persistent efforts to defend it until the early nineteenth century. The establishment of aldeias was driven by their pursuit of improved survival opportunities, and the cornerstone of this endeavor was the land itself, which provided cultivated fields and tools as promised in peace agreements with the Portuguese. Additionally, they learned to utilize and safeguard other sources of income. Through the process of settling in aldeias , they embarked on a journey of territorialization, occupying a fixed territory that had either been granted to them or imposed upon them by external political and administrative powers. Nonetheless, they embraced this territory as a space offering the potential for their survival within the colonial world (Oliveira 1999). During this process, they also redefined their relationships with the new territory, adapting to its diverse demands and requirements arising from the colonial context. Land negotiations, such as leases, sales, and timber exploitation, became integral to their practices. Despite the fact that these practices sometimes resulted in encroachments on their territories, the Indigenous people strove to maintain control over

12 Consultation of the Overseas Council regarding the petition of the Captain-Major and Indigenous people of the settlement of Vila Nova de São José d’El Rei. December 5, 1799.Ms. AHU,RJA, cx.176, doc. 9. 13 Idem.

274

M. R. C.

DE

ALMEIDA

the land and its resources. This determination is evident in the disputes and conflicts that arose in defense of their rights (Almeida 2007). There were even attempts to extinguish and displace villages, which were sometimes thwarted by the actions of the Indigenous inhabitants themselves, who were determined to remain where they were. This was the case with the aldeia of São Francisco Xavier de Itaguaí, which was initially extinguished but later restored by order of the Queen in response to the request of the indigenous Captain-Major, José Pires Tavares, who traveled to Lisbon to defend the aldeia.14 The village was located on the lands of the prosperous Santa Cruz estate, which had previously belonged to the Jesuits. It faced numerous challenges from the new administrators who sought its extinction. Upon assuming the vice-royalty, the Marquis of Lavradio found the aldeia nearly deserted and was determined to restore it. He sought the assistance of the magistrate Manoel Francisco da Silva e Veiga Magro de Moura and Captain Ignacio de Andrade Souto Mayor Rendon, who was the Master of the Company of Militia.15 Captain Rendon recommended José Pires Tavares, a young Indigenous man who had been taken in and educated by him after deserting the aldeia. José Pires Tavares had acquired the ability to read, write and even had a basic understanding of Latin under his mentorship.16 In 1786, in response to a petition from the administrator of Santa Cruz, Manoel Joaquim da Silva Crasto, the aldeia received an eviction order and was subsequently abandoned, with only “a few miserable old and disabled” individuals remaining. They were eventually arrested and relocated to aldeia of Mangaratiba.17 However, the indigenous Captain-Major José Pires Tavares took it upon himself to travel to Lisbon and appeal to the Queen on behalf of the aldeia. His plea was successful, and in 1790, the aldeia was restored to the Indigenous people. It was stipulated that the aldeia should be separated from the Santa Cruz estate, and “the lands

14 Decree of August 6, 1790. In Silva (1854: 372). 15 Certificate from the Marquis of Lavradio, Lisbon, January 3, 1786. In Silva (1854:

358–361). 16 Certificate from Ignacio de Andrade Souto Maior Rendonn, militia colonel, Marapicú, April 10, 1804. In Silva (1854: 360; 367–369); Certificate from Dr. Francisco da Silva Veiga e Magro de Moura, Lisbon, January 7, 1786. In Silva (1854: 361–363). 17 Certificate from Francisco Dias Paes Leme da Câmara, Lisbon, January 7, 1786. In Silva (1854: 363–365).

13

POLICY AND INDIGENOUS POLICIES IN THE AGE …

275

to be returned to the Indigenous people of the Taguaí aldeia should be allocated according to the orders of the Queen”.18 The problems, however, persisted and worsened with the auctioning of the Itaguaí engenho (sugarcane mill), which encompassed the Indian village, and with the decision to elevate it to the status of a vila, contradicting the interests of the plantation’s owner, who had approved the condition that “the Royal Estate would relocate the Indigenous village to another location”.19 However, this relocation was not carried out, primarily due to the resistance of the Indigenous people. While some accepted the lands offered to them elsewhere, “…others, along with their Captain-Major, managed to deceive this royal determination and remained within the lands of the petitioner, perhaps insinuating to strengthen the vila´s claim (…)”.20 The case is complex and cannot be fully detailed here.21 However, it is crucial to highlight that arguments against maintaining the aldeia cited its decline and the dispersal of the Indigenous population. On the other hand, the Indigenous people continued to assert their rights and ultimately prevailed in the case. In this dispute, it is noteworthy that the Indigenous inhabitants allied themselves with non-Indigenous residents who were interested in transforming the Indian village/parish into a town and keeping it in the same location. They also opposed the engenho owner, who wanted to relocate it. Their arguments highlighted the benefits of creating a vila for the community’s growth, asserting that there were qualified individuals in the parish who could hold positions in the governance structure, and that there were sufficient resources to support the town hall and jail expenses.22 The ownership of the Indigenous lands was a subject of discussion, and the Treasury Attorney determined that the lands belonged 18 Certificate of Ignacio de Andrade de Souto Maior Rendon, militia colonel. Marapicu, April 10, 1804. In Silva (1854: 367–369); The Order of August 6, 1790. In Silva (1854: 372). 19 Book 2 of Terms of the Auctions of Confiscated Assets from the so-called Jesuits and Goods from the Santa Cruz Estate. Rio de Janeiro, February 11, 1805 - 22.1808. Certificate of the judgment letter of the auction of the Itaguaí plantation, October 7, 1818. In Silva (1854: 377). 20 Query from the desk of the Palace Council regarding the petition of Commander Antonio Gomes Barros. Boa Vista Palace, October 18, 1819. In Silva (1854: 382–402). 21 On this, see: Almeida (2007). 22 Consultation from the council of the royal court regarding the representation of the

judge responsible for the demarcations of the leased lands of the Santa Cruz estate, in

276

M. R. C.

DE

ALMEIDA

to the Indigenous people. There was intense debate on this matter, with several arguments favoring the petitioner and his productive engenho over the aldeia. According to the informing judge, the aldeia consisted of only 5 or 6 Indigenous huts and could potentially be relocated to Mangaratiba, as suggested by many. However, the Indigenous people did not move, and the town was established in 1818.23 Despite being described as few and mixed, the Indigenous people of Itaguaí successfully obtained the right to cultivate their lands in the claimed location. They were able to achieve this, however, by forming alliances with nonIndigenous residents who soon voiced their opposition to the Indigenous people. Once they emerged victorious in the case, they established the town and established the town council, which quickly brought about the end of the aldeia. Once again, the Indigenous people ultimately suffered a loss. However, their political activism, grounded in the law and strengthened by their temporary alliance with non-Indigenous individuals, allowed them to remain in their current location and maintain the aldeia for an extended period. It is also necessary to question the assertion made by the Câmara Municipal (Municipal Council) that the creation of the town led to the extinction of aldeia, considering subsequent documents that continued to make reference to it and to the disputes and petitions of the Indigenous people regarding their lands and rights. For example, the Royal Decree of 1824, in response to a request by Thomaz Lopes, an Indigenous individual from the aldeia of Itaguaí, granted him and the “other Indigenous people from the same village a portion of land from the royal estate of Santa Cruz that is sufficient for their cultivation….”.24 However, his request for land for cattle farming, which he also made, was denied. In that same year, an imperial decree declared them citizens and, therefore, free from guardianship, stating that the mixed-race Indigenous individuals on the imperial estate of Santa Cruz near the town of Itaguaí should

which it pointed out the need to establish a town in place of the village of Itaguaí. In: Silva (1854: 404). 23 Response of the Municipal Council of Itaguaí to the Circular from the President of the Province. April 27, 1878. Ms. APERJ (Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro), PP, Col.27. Dossiê 13. Pasta 1. 24 Royal Decree of October 24, 1824, allowing the granting of lands from the Santa Cruz estate for the cultivation by the indigenous people of the village of Itaguaí. In Silva (1854: 382).

13

POLICY AND INDIGENOUS POLICIES IN THE AGE …

277

henceforth be considered “tenants belonging to the same imperial estate (…), and as such, they will be responsible for paying appropriate rent, according to the portion of land each one possesses; and suitable land will be allocated to them”.25 As suggested by these documents, the Indigenous people of the aldeia of Itaguaí, despite staying in their original location as they had requested, obtained the right to land as individual citizens, indicating the dissolution of the aldeia and the collective land rights. Their surprising reaction, displaying an interest in embracing the proclaimed freedom and seeking individual land titles by paying for their designated portions,26 may appear contradictory to their previous efforts to preserve the aldeia and their communal status. However, this reaction becomes understandable when considering that the Indigenous people undoubtedly sought to liberate themselves from the guardianship regime imposed by the Directors. As mandated by Pombaline legislation, the Directors had caused significant dissatisfaction among the Indigenous population, as previously observed. In 1835, the Juiz de Órfãos (Judge of Orphans) in Itaguaí responded to the circular from the President of the Province, affirming that the aldeia was “extinct in name, without any property of its own, and thus, utilising and benefiting from a small portion of land granted by His Majesty as a favour…”.27 It appears that the local authorities may have deemed the aldeia extinct, but the “diminutive and mixed” Indigenous people continued to reside in the area, occupying their own lands and maintaining their distinct identity from the other subjects of the King, thereby delaying the assimilation process proposed by Pombaline legislation.

25 Order of September 9, 1824. In Silva (1854: 412). 26 Request from the Indigenous People of the Town of Itaguaí, Santa Cruz Estate,

June 19, 1837. In Silva (1854: 413–414). 27 Response from the Judge of Orphans to the President of the Province, February 28, 1835. Ms. APERJ.PP, Col.84. dossiê 205, pasta 1. Judge of Orphans (Juiz de Órfaõs) - judicial authority with the function of protecting orphaned children, including among them, since 1833, the Indians of the aldeias.

278

M. R. C.

DE

ALMEIDA

Final Considerations By examining Pombal’s indigenous policy in conjunction with indigenous politics, I have sought to demonstrate the complexity of the political game between actors and the idea that the assimilationist discourse went hand in hand with maintaining differences. This apparent contradiction is evident not only in the legislation itself but also in the political discourse of the involved agents. Civilizing and assimilating the Indigenous people of Brazil were foundational principles of Pombal’s enlightened indigenous policy, which was implemented in diverse ways. However, distinctions, inequalities, and social hierarchies persisted among the common Indigenous population and their leaders, as well as between docile and wild indigenous groups, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. These distinctions were often perpetuated due to the interests of various social actors, including the Indigenous people themselves, who adeptly navigated these dynamics to their advantage. Despite advocating for assimilation and equality, the legislation itself recognized and reinforced the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals by assigning the former a special legal status with specific obligations and rights. The contradictions and disputes surrounding ethnic classifications are evident in the documents related to land conflicts and the extinction of aldeias since the mid-eighteenth century. These can be seen as political and social disputes, as being identified as indigenous or not had political and social implications in terms of gains or losses, as highlighted by Boccara (2001). The proposals for equality signified, for them, the end of collective rights. I believe that it was primarily in the fight for these rights that the índios aldeados maintained their Indigenous identity until the nineteenth century. The process of extinction of the old colonial Indian villages was slow and gradual. In my view, it was delayed by the political actions of the índios aldeados themselves, who insisted on preserving their lands and heritage, contradicting assimilationist discourses that considered them mixed and extinct. The enlightened policy, filled with contradictions, proposed assimilation for Indigenous people but also provided them with various opportunities to engage in politics and maintain their Indigenous identities, at least for some time.

13

POLICY AND INDIGENOUS POLICIES IN THE AGE …

279

References Almeida, M. Regina Celestino de. 2005. Índios, missionários e políticos: discursos e atuações político-culturais no Rio de Janeiro oitocentista. In Culturas Políticas – ensaios de história cultural, história política e ensino de história, ed. Rachel Soihet et al., 235–255. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad. Almeida, M. Regina Celestino de. 2007. Política indigenista e etnicidade: estratégias indígenas no processo de extinção das aldeias do Rio de Janeiro-século XIX. Anuario IEHS 1: 219–233. Almeida, M. Regina Celestino de. 2013. Metamorfoses indígenas. Identidade e cultura nas aldeias coloniais do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: FGV. Almeida, M. Regina Celestino de. 2015. Política indigenista e políticas indígenas no tempo das reformas pombalinas. In A Época Pombalina no mundo luso-brasileiro, ed. Francisco Falcon and Claudia Rodrigues, 175–214. Rio de Janeiro: FGV. Almeida, M. Regina Celestino de. 2017. Portuguese Indigenous Policy and Indigenous Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: Assimilationist Ideals and the Preservation of Native Identities. In Enlightened Colonialism. Civilization Narratives and Imperial Politics in the Age of Reason, ed. Damien Tricoire, 73–92. Cham/Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Barth, Fredrick. 2000. Os grupos étnicos e suas fronteiras. In O Guru, o iniciador e outras variações antropológicas, ed. Tomke Lask, 25–67. Rio de Janeiro: ContraCapa. Beozzo, José Ó. 1983. Leis e regimentos das Missões: política indigenista no Brasil. São Paulo: Loyola. Boccara, Guillaume. 2001. Mundos nuevos en las fronteras del Nuevo Mundo: relectura de los procesos coloniales de etnogénesis, etnificacón y mestizaje en tiempos de globalización. Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. www.ehess.fr/ cerma.Revuedebates.htm Coelho, Mauro C. 2016. Do Sertão para o Mar. Um estudo sobre a experiência portuguesa na América: o caso do Diretório dos Índios. São Paulo: Livraria da Física. Domingues, Ângela. 2000. Quando os índios eram vassalos. Colonização e relações de poder no Norte do Brasil na segunda metade do século XVIII . Lisbon: CNCDP. Falcon, Francisco J. C. 1982. A época Pombalina. Política econômica e monarquia ilustrada. São Paulo: Ática. Farage, Nadia. 1991. As muralhas do Sertão: os povos indígenas no Rio Branco e a colonização. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Fragoso, João. et al. 2001. O Antigo Regime nos Trópicos: a dinâmica imperial portuguesa (séculos XVI–XVIII). Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.

280

M. R. C.

DE

ALMEIDA

Garcia, Elisa Frühauf. 2009. As diversas formas de ser índio: políticas indígenas e políticas indigenistas no extremo sul da América portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional. Gomes, Ângela de Castro. 2005. História, historiografia e cultura política no Brasil: algumas reflexões. In Culturas Políticas – Ensaios de História Cultural, História Política e Ensino de História, ed. Rachel Soihet et al., 21–44. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad. Gouvêa, Maria de Fátima Silva. 2005. Diálogos historiográficos e cultura política na formação da América Ibérica. In Culturas políticas – Ensaios de história cultural, história política e ensino de História, ed. Rachel Soihet et al., 67–84. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad. Hill, Jonathan. 1992. Contested Past and the Practise of Anthropology: Overview. American Anthropologist 94 (2): 809–815. Lara, Silvia H. ed. 1999. Ordenações Filipinas. Livro V. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Lopes, Fátima M. 2005. Em Nome da Liberdade: as vilas de índios do Rio Grande do Norte sob o Diretório Pombalino no século XVIII . PhD diss. Universidade Federal de Pernambuco https://repositorio.ufpe.br/bitstream/123456789/ 7480/1/arquivo7819_1.pdf. Acesso em 23 de março de 2023. Medeiros, Ricardo P. de. 2007. Política indigenista e seus reflexos nas Capitanias do Norte da América portuguesa. In Novos olhares sobre as Capitanias do Norte do Estado do Brasil, ed. Ricardo P. de e Oliveira Medeiros and S. Carla Mary, 125–159. João Pessoa: Editora Universitária Universidade Federal de Paraíba. Menegus, Margarita 2000. Mercados y tierras. El impacto de las reformas borbónicas en las comunidades indígenas. In Historia de América Latina. La época colonial, ed. Brian F. Connaughton, 355–396. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Mintz, Sidney W. 1982. Culture: An Anthropological View. The Yale Review 71 (4): 499–512. Oliveira, João Pacheco de. 1999. Uma etnologia dos ’índios misturados’? situação colonial, territorialização e fluxos culturais. In A Viagem da volta: etnicidades, política e reelaboração cultural no Nordeste indígena, ed. João Pcheco de Oliveira, 11–36. Rio de Janeiro: ContraCapa Livraria. Perrone-Moisés, Beatriz. 1992. Índios Livres e Índios Escravos: os princípios da legislação indigenista do período colonial (séculos XVI a XVIII). In História dos Índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 115–132. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Rocha, Rafael Ale. 2022. Os oficiais índios na Amazônia Pombalina: Sociedade, hierarquia e resistência (1751–1798). Curitiba: CRV. Sampaio, Patrícia M. Melo. 2012. Espelhos partidos. Etnia, legislação e desigualdade na Colônia. Manaus: EDUA.

13

POLICY AND INDIGENOUS POLICIES IN THE AGE …

281

Sider, Gerald. 1994. Identity as History Ethnohistory, Ethnogenesis and Ethnocide in the Southeastern United States. Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power 1 (1): 109–122. Silva, Joaquim N. de Souza. 1854. Memória histórica e documentada das Aldeias de Índios da Província do Rio de Janeiro. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Brasil, 3rd series, 17 (14–15): 110–544. Silva, Isabelle B. Peixoto da. 2005. Vilas de Índios no Ceará Grande. Dinâmicas locais sob o Diretório Pombalino. Campinas, SP: Pontes Editores. Silva, Ana R. Cloclet. 2015. O Marquês de Pombal e a formação do homempúblico no Portugal setecentista. In A época Pombalina no mundo lusobrasileiro, ed. Francisco Falcon and Claudia Rodrigues, 413–452. Rio de Janeiro: FGV. Stern, Steve. 1987. Resistance Rebellion and Consciounes in the Andean World, 18th to 20th Centuries. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Thompson, Edward P. 1981. A miséria da teoria. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. Thompson, Edward P. 1987. Senhores e Caçadores. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Weber, David J. 2007. Bárbaros. Los españoles y sus salvajes en la era de La Ilustración. Barcelona: Crítica. Xavier, Ângela Barreto, and Antonio M. Hespanha. 1998. A Representação da sociedade e do poder; As redes clientelares. In História de Portugal, ed. Antonio M. Hespanha, 113–122, 339–349. Lisbon: Estampa.

CHAPTER 14

Cross-cultural Interactions, Indigenous Agency, and Resistance in the Borderlands of the Upper Paraguay Basin Benita Herreros Cleret de Langavant

Iberian Competition and Frontiers as Spaces of Proactive Indigenous Resistance Resistance, like other forms of contestation to power, has tended to be addressed from a tectonic perspective, as a simple reaction, more or less legitimate, to the exercise of power, when considered to be imposed upon or dominant over subjects considered subaltern. However, this approach

This publication is a research outcome of the projects RESISTANCE. Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, sixteenth-nineteenth centuries (778076-H2020-MSCA-RISE-2017) and La ciudad en acción: resistencias, (re)significaciones del orden y cultura política en la Monarquía Hispánica (PID2021-124823NB-C22) funded by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/ 501100011033/ and FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa. I am very grateful to coeditor Pablo Sánchez León (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) for his encouragement and valuable input throughout the writing of this chapter.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_14

283

284

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

has been the target of criticism and has progressively been displaced by studies that underscored the mutual interaction between dominant forms of power and displays of resistance, recognizing both as forms of power (Foucault 1978; Chandra 2015, among others). Nevertheless, even within this more complex, “entangled”, focus, the implicit assumption persists that the power against which resistance arises forms an institutional, legitimate, or social unity, even though it can present itself in a multidimensional manner. This, in turn, tends to render those who resist as an equally monolithic unit. Taking this perspective as a point of departure, the forms of resistance studied over the course of this chapter highlight the fact that it was developed in a territory where two political units, the Portuguese and Hispanic Crowns, competed for control, yet it remained a frontier zone with autonomous Indigenous peoples. Therefore, the discussion that follows explores a context characterized by a structure that was at the very least triadic, given that the diversity of political initiatives undertaken by the various Indigenous groups, as well as by the different caciques who formed part of the same Indigenous group, must also be considered. In this multifaceted frontier, the proximity between the Iberian and Indigenous territories favored cultural exchanges that enabled formally subaltern Indigenous groups to gradually become familiar with the normative and value frameworks of the imperial powers. Likewise, the competition-based relationship between the Hispanic and Portuguese empires led to simultaneous efforts to attract the Indigenous groups, which placed the latter in a position with greater scope for negotiation and resistance. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the forms of resistance that emerged in frontier regions aside from violent forms of resistance, and to analyze how these engagements became more complex as a result of the combination of cultural elements and discourses that were specific to the European and Indigenous societies in contact, and likewise their concomitant normativities. It is argued that the Mbayá Indigenous groups (also referred to as the Guaycurú) strategically exploited the competition between the imperial powers in the Upper Paraguay Basin during the final B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (B) Departamento de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea, Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

285

years of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century. They appropriated the inherent significance of European cultural and legal practices, reinterpreted them and deployed them in their practices of contestation, thereby demonstrating a high degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the Iberian authorities. This chapter focuses on the strategies of resistance in which the Mbayá caciques used symbolic resources rather than direct forms of confrontation. However, to a significant extent, the Mbayá’s use of these symbolically laden means of resistance was possible because they were accompanied by the use of violent forms of resistance, which were a recurrent feature in the region. The Mbaya’s violent tactics have already been discussed at some length (Areces 1999, 2007; Vangelista 1993; Carvalho 2023; Roller 2021). Violence allowed the Mbayá to demonstrate their strength as adversaries, as the wave of raids they launched in late 1797 against the northernmost Spanish settlements in Paraguay shows. These raids culminated in a coordinated attack that led to the theft of livestock from forty ranches, which were burned to the ground; this episode illustrates the scale of violence along this frontier: the damage inflicted was a major blow for the Spanish presence in the region and served as a reminder of the importance of establishing allances with the Mbayá. Equally relevant in this period was the conflict among the Indigenous groups themselves, which shaped the definition of the Iberian frontiers and made the panorama of violent resistance still more complex (on the Mbayá-Guaycurú relations with other Indigenous groups, in general, see Santos-Granero 2009; on the conflict with the Chiquitos in particular, see Martínez 2017). The study that follows seeks to move beyond the usual model of analysis that views violent resistance as separate and incompatible with both nonviolent resistance and symbolic violence. It aims to broaden the reflection on resistance by focusing on the extent and importance of the latter. As will be demonstrated, the cultural exchanges that took place in this frontier region permitted the Mbayá caciques to deploy a symbolic language of resistance as a means of questioning the stereotypes that depicted them as savages, yet without necessarily making recourse to violence. They appropriated the European scale of civilization and its core values and deployed them by inverting and imitating them in a burlesque manner, which was also as a means of self-aggrandizing themselves to a level akin to that of the Spaniards and Portuguese. They also asserted their status and presented themselves in parity or even superiority over

286

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

the Europeans, using other resources and practices that underscored their domain over the frontier territory and its inhabitants, including the Europeans. Indeed, these forms of symbolic and discursive resistance could be amplified and become acts of defiance that were more proactive than defensive, thereby revealing the degree to which the Mbayá Indigenous groups were conscious agents capable of pursuing their own agendas. Furthermore, they demonstrate how the Mbayá were able to exploit the Hispano-Portuguese competition for control over the fluvial borderlands of the Upper Paraguay River Basin to their own advantage.

The Mbayá People as a “Barrier” or “Impregnable Castle” Between the Iberian Empires: The Mbayá’s Strategic Position on the Frontier as a Key Empowering Factor In the late eighteenth century, the Iberian monarchies did not exert effective control over the borderlands of Paraguay and Mato Grosso, which straddled the demarcation line established by the frontier treaties of Madrid (1750) and San Ildefonso (1777). Although there had been a Hispanic presence in the region from an early date—the Spaniards established a number of settlements, most notably Santiago de Jerez, during the 1580s, and the first Jesuit missions began operating in the early 1630s—the Portuguese also sought to control the territory, and above all, its Indigenous workforce, which was a target for São Paulo’s so-called bandeirantes (Portuguese slave-raiding expeditionaries). The recurring and violent attacks led by the bandeiras, which came to a head between 1628 and 1641 (Monteiro 1994), resulted in the abandonment of Jerez, the northernmost Spanish settlement, in 1632. Likewise, four Guaraní missionary villages (reducciones ) were transferred to the south as part of a more widespread Hispanic withdrawal southward (Araujo 2001, 889–891). Portugal did not resume its colonization efforts in the region until the eighteenth century, when both Iberian forces reimposed their presence. In Mato Grosso, this was prompted by the discovery of gold mines in Cuiabá, where the Portuguese founded a town in 1719. In northern Paraguay, it was the establishment of peace agreements with the Mbayá groups, who controlled the area, in 1760, which facilitated further Spanish expansion. Furthermore, they sought to open up a new

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

287

communication route linking Paraguay and Charcas via the Gran Chaco, which would cut months of the journey time off their customary route that followed the River Paraguay southward before crossing the Tucumán region on land, and continuing to Upper Peru. The possibility of the Spanish achieving this became another factor in the ongoing struggle between the Hispanic and Portuguese forces to win control over the borderlands, further boosting their broader ambition to subdue the native peoples living in Upper Paraguay. Toward the end of the century, the colonial forces seemed to be consolidating their progress: the Spanish founded Villa Real de la Concepción (1773) around 200 kilometres north of Asunción, while the Portuguese founded the fort of Nova Coimbra (1775), on the left bank of the River Paraguay. Between them ran the demarcation line established by the Treaty of San Ildefonso, which both powers had signed with the intention of settling their territorial conflicts in the Americas. The frontier’s demarcation was accompanied by the contemporary establishment of fortresses and presidios on both sides: Albuquerque (1778) and Miranda (1797) by the Portuguese, and Borbón (1792) and San Carlos del río Apa (1794) by the Spanish; however, the location of these enclaves did not necessarily respect the treaty’s stipulations (Fig. 14.1). Despite the impression of control over the territory provided by the foundation of this series of military strongholds, the Hispano-Portuguese presence on the frontier between Paraguay and Mato Grosso continued to be restricted to what Tamar Herzog has termed “islands of occupation”, European enclaves that took the form of fortresses, ranches, and missions that were “surrounded by a sea of land they considered open for their expansion” (Herzog 2015, 1). This “sea” was navigated by numerous people, including missionaries who sought to bring the Catholic religion to the native population, smugglers, soldiers, and militiamen undertaking punitive missions. In addition, there were the members of the demarcation commissions who charted the course of the region’s rivers and recorded the geographical coordinates of selected geographical features. Besides, the Indigenous living in the region’s cities and missions continued their use of this space, and its natural resources. Furthermore, this borderland was, above all, the domain of the unsubjugated Indigenous communities who set up their tolderías (mobile, temporary camps) there. These native communities visited the colonial “islands” to trade and occasionally settled there temporarily. However, they also launched swift raids on these settlements to seize goods and take captives. Their

288

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

Fig. 14.1 Map of the Upper Paraguay Basin, with indication of the main Iberian settlements and forts.

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

289

journeys and encounters provided opportunities for cultural exchange. Indeed, some historians have highlighted how these cross-cultural interactions and trans-frontier activities and mobility (voluntary or forced) were a fundamental characteristic of frontier regions more broadly, as well as in the specific case of the peripheral zones of the Iberian monarchies (White 1991; Ortelli 2007; Weber 2005; Garcia 2009; Valenzuela 2017, Ibáñez Bonillo 2023; Bastos 2024, among others). However, what has not been studied in as much depth is the degree to which the aforesaid cultural exchanges along the frontier were framed by resistance. To fully gauge this factor in the upper reaches of the River Paraguay, it is essential to consider that this region had become a “strategic frontier” (a term coined by David J. Weber to refer to regions in which various European powers competed with one another) for both the Iberian empires. Just as Weber (2005, 85) highlighted in general for Hispanic America, and as Erbig (2016, 2020) has likewise shown in his recent studies on the River Plate, the Indigenous communities who inhabited these “strategic frontiers” possessed a degree of leverage they could exploit to reinforce their position against the Europeans, as well as other Indigenous groups. Northern Paraguay was inhabited by Indigenous peoples with a range of linguistic affiliations (mainly Tupi-Guaraní, Arawak, Guaycurú, and Maskoy), some of whom were sedentary farmers, while others lived as semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers (Saeger 1999; Wright and Carneiro de Cunha 1999). Among the broad ethnic diversity that characterized this frontier, the Mbayá people, also known as Guaycurú, Mbayá-Guaycurú and—in the Portuguese sources—as índios cavaleiros (Indian horsemen), played a prominent role. They were a semi-nomadic people originally from the eastern part of the Gran Chaco, who had begun using horses from the early seventeenth century onward (Susnik 1971, 15). They were powerful groups that dominated other Indigenous peoples, such as the Guaná farmers with whom they established ties based on asymmetrical reciprocity. This reciprocity was grounded in the exogamous marriage of Mbayá caciques with Guaná women from cacique families; this enabled the bridegroom to exert some authority over his wife’s community and claim part of its agricultural produce (Susnik and Chase-Sardi 1995, 165–177). The Mbayá’s use of horses strengthened their military capacity and contributed to their territorial expansion along the section of the River Paraguay north of Asunción, toward the Pantanal in Mato Grosso and, from the 1670s onward, onto the River Paraguay’s eastern bank

290

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

(Saeger 1999, 258). Having mastered horse riding, they profitted from their enhanced mobility to develop rapid pillaging tactics, which they used against other Indigenous settlements, as well as the ranches and towns established by the Iberian powers.1 In their raids on the settlements of the sedentary farming Indigenous groups, the Mbayá seized captives, mainly children, that were integrated into their community (Santos-Granero 2021, 317–321), and they pillaged agricultural produce to supplement their customary hunter-gatherer diet. When attacking the Hispano-Portuguese enclaves, they took livestock, iron tools, and captives. They traded in both the booty they pillaged and the wares they manufactured, above all cotton textiles, creating networks of exchange with both the Indigenous and colonial settlements on either side of the frontier. Indeed, during the final quarter of the eighteenth century, the Mbayá went on to establish a complex system of multipolar interethnic relationships based on the theft and sale of livestock, whose key feature was their capacity to move between the Spanish and Portuguese enclaves (Herreros Cleret de Langavant 2012). In the Upper Paraguay borderlands, it became essential for the colonial officials to integrate the Mbayá into their efforts to exert control and try to dominate the region, and even to exploit the Mbayá’s potential for deployment as pawns in the Iberian competition to win control over the region. Turning the Mbayá into subjects of either monarchy offered imperial officials a means of extending their respective sovereignty over the extensive territory controlled by this people, as well as the communities they had subjugated. However, the competition between the imperial powers also opened up opportunities for the Mbayá to develop strategies that took advantage of the recognition bestowed upon them by the colonial powers. Contemporary archival documents acknowledge the central role played by the Mbayá, one that was exacerbated by the practical difficulties of imposing a clearly demarcated frontier between the American possessions of the Iberian Crowns in line with the terms of the Treaty of

1 The use of horses and its concomitant effect on the Mbayá’s economic and military

outlook was not exclusive to this Indigenous group, nor to Paraguay. Instead, it seems to have been a common pattern elsewhere along the early-modern American borderlands such as the northern reaches of Nueva Vizcaya (about the Apache see Ortelli 2007; Babcock 2016), the southern Chaco (see Lucaioli 2011 on the Abipón), and southern Chile (about the Mapuche see Boccara 1998).

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

291

San Ildefonso. Regarding the area between the catchment basins of the rivers Paraná and Paraguay, the treaty ruled that the frontier should run through a series of tributary rivers that proved difficult to identify on the ground, leading to recurrent disagreements between the governments of Mato Grosso and Paraguay. To address this problem, the leader of the Spanish demarcation party, the military engineer and cartographer Félix de Azara, proposed a markedly original alternative, one that also involved the Indigenous communities in a unique and highly complex manner. His proposal was a response to the Mbayá’s control of some thirty to forty leagues of territory (around 700 to 900 square kilometers) located between Paraguay’s most northerly settlements and the Portuguese fortresses in Mato Grosso, on both margins of the Paraguay River—exactly the area the frontier line was intended to pass through. He argued that “these Indians and their possessions could be declared neutral, thereby rendering impossible any communication between the vassals of both crowns in this region, which is one of the aims of the treaty”.2 Thus, Azara proposed converting the Mbayá into the solution to the difficulties caused by implementing the frontier treaty. However, Azara’s proposal was seemingly never considered to be a viable solution and, by 1784, he admitted to having ruled it out. In fact, his idea was problematic for the Iberian powers for various reasons. Not only would it have required a Hispano-Luso agreement to prevent the establishment of unilateral alliances with the Mbayá, but above all it meant that both monarchies would have had to abandon any aspiration to incorporate the Mbayá as vassals. Also, in the long term, it would have meant renouncing access to the region’s natural resources, as well as the territorial expansion required to establish a communication route with Upper Peru via the Chaco. Moreover, this proposal did not consider the Mbayá’s own initiatives, which they pursued to further their own interests. Despite having been discarded, Azara’s proposal is highly significant as it reveals how both the Portuguese in Mato Grosso and the Spanish in Paraguay considered the Mbayá to be a key element of frontier policy. Indeed, this factor shaped the dynamic of competition between the two empires. The Spaniards and Portuguese viewed the Mbayá in a similar 2 Podrían dejarse neutrales estos indios y sus posesiones, quedando de este modo imposibilitada la comunicación de los vasallos de ambas coronas por esta parte, que es uno de los fines del tratado, “Correspondencia oficial e inédita sobre la demarcación de límites entre el Paraguay y el Brasil”, published in Angelis (1836).

292

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

manner and tried to forge ties with them that would, at the very least, guarantee the consolidation of their respective colonial presence while also halting the advances of their European counterparts on the other side of the frontier. In 1795, the governor of Mato Grosso, João de Albuquerque (1789–1796), referred to the Mbayá as follows: inhabiting the river Paraguay between the current Spanish and Portuguese possessions; they are a barrier between them and us, [and] upon their amity depends not only the security and control over that borderland, but also the means of hindering the new settlements and the communication route they [the Spanish] seek to open up through the aforesaid Paraguay to the province of Chiquitos, and from there on to Peru, which they could easily obtain with the Guaycuruz [Mbayá] as guides; this is one of their motives for seeking to establish peace and amity with them at all cost”3 (AHU_ ACL_CU_010, Cx. 31, D.1696).

In reality, the aspirations underpinning the view of the Mbayá as acting as a wall or barrier (barreira) went much further than just impeding the Spanish from making a northward advance. In contrast to Azara’s idea, the Portuguese authorities wanted this Indigenous group to be neither neutral, nor remain contained in the territory it inhabited. Instead, it was hoped they would steal horses from Spanish ranches and sell them to the Portuguese fortresses, a trade that the Portuguese eagerly encouraged as it favored their territorial advance over their Spanish competitors (Herreros Cleret de Langavant 2012). On the Spanish side, a few years later, the procurator of the city council of Asunción made a similar analogy to Albuquerque’s and underscored the need to re-establish the fragile bonds of amity with the Mbayá, which had been severed shortly beforehand. He stated that “merely by pacifying the infidels in a constant manner the province will build an impregnable castle to constrain the neighbouring Lusitanians”4 (AGN, IX, 30 5 8 3 Habitando no Paraguay entre as actuaes poseçoens Espanholas e Portuguezas, são huma barreira entre nos e eles, de cuja amizade emfim não só depende a segurança e conservação daquele terreno limítrofe mais o meyo de dificultar a os mesmos Espanhoes além dos seus novos estabelecimentos, a comunicação que pertendem abrir pelo dito Paraguay para a província de Chiquitos, e della para o Peru, o que facilmente poderão conseguir guiados pelos mesmos Guaycuruz [mbayá]; sendo este hum dos motivos porque pertendem a todo o custo conciliar a sua paz e amizade. 4 Con solo pasificar los ynfieles de un modo constante se fabricará la provincia un castillo inexpugnable para contener a los lucitanos fronterizos.

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

293

exp.3). Despite the use of the defensive concept of the castle (castillo), there was room for the Mbayá to pursue more proactive actions. A common feature of the barreira and castillo metaphors was that they were accompanied by the concern to establish amity and alliances with the Mbayá. The Europeans understood that if they aspired to obtain their sought-after peace with the Mbayá, amicable relations should be fostered with care. Furthermore, any alliance had to be formalized through ceremonies that upheld the respective imperial rule of law, and these ties had to be reaffirmed on a regular basis. In European legal culture, the relationships between peace, amity, and alliance had been established long before the colonial period (in general, Brunner [1936] 1992, 14–35; during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Age, see Lesaffer 2002) and, to a considerable extent, this was revived by the policies developed as part of the eighteenth-century Bourbon and Pombaline reforms, which were intended to restructure the Spanish and Portuguese empires, respectively. Although claims to amity and alliance were often little more than purely rhetorical declarations (Devere et al. 2010), according to the European normative tradition, these were understood as a foundational dimension for pacts of all kinds in the intra—and inter— family, estate, community, and international spheres. Thereby amity and alliance implied an acknowledgment of a legal status, as well as capacities and guarantees, for the subjects involved (Brunner [1936] 1992). For the European powers in Brazil and Paraguay, this explains their preferred approach to dealing with the Mbayá: incorporating them as vassals, a status that, according to the Western tradition, entailed the possibility of establishing guarantees for solid and lasting bonds of loyalty. Yet, for the Mbayá, the meaning and significance of becoming the Europeans’ sought-after allies were understood from their own traditions of diplomacy and interaction with others. Although there is no written register of Mbayá diplomatic practices, inferences can be made from the modus operandi they deployed in the wake of the peace agreements they established with the colonial powers. In particular, major divergences from the colonial powers’ normative frameworks can be discerned. These divergences concerned the legitimacy of their Indigenous resistance, which was based on their own normative frameworks and community values. According to European legal tradition, the resort to resistance, including violence, by wronged parties was considered legitimate; however, this was only accepted after the severance of peace and amity agreements by one of the parties (Brunner [1936] 1992, 36–89). In

294

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

contrast, the values and rationale of the obligations that the Mbayá undertook in their agreements with the colonial powers were of a different order. Furthermore, they demonstrated this rationale using appropriated and re-signified European cultural and discursive elements, which reveal diverse forms of resistance, some of which were everyday forms of resistance, others had a symbolic nature, while others were openly violent. All these forms of resistance testify to the Mbayá’s capacity for autonomous action and their exploitation of the Hispano-Portuguese competition for control over the territory and its inhabitants. As a result, they were able to reinforce their position as frontline actors in this frontier space.

Frontier Ambiguity, Autonomy of Action and Movement as Keys to Culturally Hybrid Forms of Resistance In the first instance, the Mbayá’s autonomy and initiative revealed itself through their capacity to define the border on the basis of their own parameters, thereby affirming their territorial power. Thus, they established an alternative frontier to that set out in the San Ildefonso frontier treaty, which they transgressed on a daily basis through their actions and movements across the region. The corpus of documents produced by the members of the demarcation party led by Azara provides testimony for this. In particular, the diary of the pilot who guided an expedition that left Asunción in 1790. The expedition followed the River Paraguay northward toward Portuguese territory to verify reports of the construction of the new fort of Nova Coimbra, which could be a violation of the Treaty of San Ildefonso.5 In addition to recording encounters with the Indigenous communities who lived on the banks of the River Paraguay or traveled along it, the diary notes how the Mbayá had stripped the bark from a large tree on the river’s edge that was visible to anyone traveling on the river course, and they had incised its surface with “horse brands” (“Diario…”, in Angelis 1836, 31). The use of these marks has been identified as a customary practice amongst the Mbayá, who incised or drew them on diverse kinds of items,

5 “Diario de una navegación y reconocimiento del río Paraguay desde la ciudad de la Asunción hasta los presidios portugueses de Coimbra y Albuquerque por D. Ignacio”, published in Angelis (1836), 58 p.

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

295

such as metal plates or earrings, as well as horses and even women— likely captives—(ANTT, Documentos Diversos, IHGB, Microfilm 125 Doc.1018 f. 43r).6 Furthermore, as in this case, they engraved them on trees marking the perimeter of the zones they considered they had an exclusive right to use; these served as warnings to potential intruders, alerting them that they were entering Mbayá territory (Areces 2007, 110). The Mbaya’s expressions of territorial authority affirmed their control over the frontier space that the Iberian powers aspired to dominate. They used these marks to demonstrate their hold over the region to their rivals, both Indigenous and European. These actions reveal a deliberate effort to implement a boundary demarcation using their own specific cultural markers, in parallel and autonomously to the one undertaken by the Iberian monarchies to impose the Treaty of San Ildefonso. This treaty, along with the treaty of Madrid, was materialized on the terrain through the boundary markers set up by the demarcation parties, such as the large marble boundary stone placed at the confluence of the Rivers Jauru and Paraguay following the Treaty of Madrid, which was still standing in the late eighteenth century. However, the Mbayá markers did not signify a self-imposed limit on their territory, as they continued to travel beyond it and regularly circulated between the Portuguese and Spanish possessions. Their autonomy of action likewise extended to their daily engagements, both violent and peaceful, with the colonial forts and cities, and their inhabitants. Based on these experiences, the Mbayá built up a strong sense of empowerment. In their perception, they exercised control over the colonizers, thereby establishing themselves as a countera-hegemonic power. In 1803, the commandment of the fortress of Nova Coimbra, Ricardo Franco de Almeida Serra, sent a report to the governor of Mato Grosso, Caetano Pinto de Miranda Montenegro (1796–1803) expressing his indignation and bewilderment at the attitudes of equality, and even superiority, demonstrated by the Mbayá during his encounters with them.

6 These property marks were included in the illustrations drawn by the Frenchmen Debret (1834) and Castelnau (1852) during their voyages to Brazil, the former depicted them on a horse’s rump and the latter on a woman’s chest. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Italian Guido Boggiani ([1895] 1945) compiled an extensive number of these marks among his drawings.

296

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

He labeled them as innately proud and “vain and ridiculously arrogant”7 because they considered themselves to be “a nation of heroes and noblemen ( fidalgos )” (Serra [1803] 1850, 348). Although his tone was highly contemptuous, Serra was by no means alone in finding the Mbayá’s claims of nobility beyond belief and arrogant; the hegemonic notion that the Indigenous peoples were far removed from civilized life and in need of guidance to attain it had defined the policy of the Pombaline Directorate (1757–1798), which had been abolished just a few years earlier (on this policy, see Domingues 2000, and Almeida 2017). Previous studies (Roller 2021, 74–76; Santos 2021) have underscored how the Mbayá constructed a narrative according to which they had domesticated or subjugated the Portuguese. Serra himself left a testimony of this Indigenous reading of the colonial scenario when he stated that “not deeming themselves inferior to the Spanish and Portuguese”, they boasted “daily that, despite our being highly courageous, they knew how to tame us”8 (Serra [1803] 1845: 204–205). Thus, as far as the Mbayá were concerned, they had managed to achieve with the Portuguese the same as with the wild horses that roamed their territories: they had tamed them and put them at their service. One of the realizations of this achievement was the frequent presentations of gifts by the Portuguese, intended to win the Mbayá over to their side. To date, no equivalent language has been identified in Spanish documents to that employed by the Mbayá to claim their domination over the Portuguese—unless a reference to a cacique known as “José Domador” is interpreted in this way (AHN, Estado, 3410, Exp.13). However, there are some statements indicating that the Hispano-creole population considered themselves to be at the mercy of the Mbayá, who they complained imposed various arbitrary levies and tithes. In the late eighteenth century, the residents of Villa Real de la Concepción complained that the Mbayá were accustomed to “demand tithes of livestock” and to make their way “through the valleys in squadrons armed with offensive weapons” (AGN, IX, 32–5-6 exp.10), and that they had turned the Spanish into “subordinates and tributaries to their [the Mbayá] empire” (AGI, ESTADO, 81, N.15) through repeated demands of livestock and thefts of cattle.

7 Vaidosa e ridícula soberba. 8 Não se julgando inferiores aos mesmos hespanhóes e portugueses, gabando-se

diariamente de que, apezar de sermos muito bravos, nos souberam amansar.

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

297

The Mbayá’s narrative of their domestication of the Portuguese was most certainly fostered by the latter’s presentation of small gifts as a means of rapprochement and establishing alliances. The historiography on colonial Brazil has highlighted the efforts made by the Portuguese to establish peace with Indigenous peoples (García 2009), as well as the importance of negotiation in forming such alliances, during which both natives and Europeans defended their own interests (Carvalho 2023). It has also been emphasized that rapprochement initiatives were frequently undertaken by the Indigenous peoples (Roller 2021). It is precisely in the context of these peace agreements that the contrast between the colonial and Indigenous normative frameworks emerges, and likewise the respective values of the European and Mbayá policies. It was this distinction that gave the Mbayá significant scope for maneuver, which they achieveved through the deployment of a range of forms of resistance. For the Indigenous, the peace agreements did not constitute definitive and unbreakable commitments, which fueled European criticism and the perception of the Indigenous as innately inconstant. Furthermore, the Indigenous agreements with the Europeans coexisted with other ties of kinship based on affinal, biological, and solidarity bonds. They also coincided with interethnic relations based on authority and subjugation. Occasionally, these ties were at odds with the agreements made with the Europeans, leading to further tensions and ruptures. During the period under consideration, the alliance established in 1791 between the Portuguese and two Mbayá caciques was of special relevance. The peace agreement was marked by a solemn ceremony in Vila Bela, the capital of the Captaincy General of Mato Grosso, attended by the governor and local authorities, as well as the city’s most distinguished residents, who provided lodging for the caciques and their entourage of around twenty individuals. As was customary in such ceremonies, a variety of gifts was presented to the members of the Indigenous delegation during their visit to the capital of Mato Grosso. The two caciques were feted with gifts, and during the ceremony, the Portuguese bestowed new names upon them: Paulo Joaquim José Ferreira (in honor of the commandant of Nova Coimbra) and João Queima de Albuquerque (in honor of the governor). Both caciques and their wives, as well as a captive who acted as their interpreter, received numerous gifts. Their entourage was given a more modest and humble selection of items, including axes, metal plates and cutlery, hats, textiles, as well as needles and thread for sowing new garments (AHU_ACL_CU_010, Cx. 28, D.1617). It has

298

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

been suggested that these abundant gifts could have been interpreted by the Mbayá as a display of Portuguese vassalage (Roller 2021, 93), an interpretation which was undoubtedly reinforced by the honors bestowed upon them during the two weeks they spent in Vila Bela. Once the ceremony was over, the governor issued a letter patent that referred to the caciques as captains and declared their new status as subjects of the monarch to whom they had sworn loyalty and obedience “in their names and in that of all the other leaders of their nation, their compatriots, and all their descendants”9 (AHU_ACL_CU_010, Cx. 28, D. 1617). Clearly, the ceremony was staged in a highly ritualized manner, and it was through its legal dimension and the status set out in the agreement between the two parties that the Portuguese hoped to consolidate mutually respected ties of amity and alliance with the Mbayá caciques. Indeed, the relationships between the Portuguese and the two Indigenous parcialidades seemingly remained peaceful from that point onward. However, this did not prevent Cacique Queima from exercising his autonomy and engaging in a series of actions that can be interpreted as acts of self-affirmation and resistance, intended to exploit the Hispano-Portuguese competition along this area of the frontier to his advantage. Just over a year after the peace was signed with the Portuguese, Queima visited the fortress of Borbón with its Spanish garrison. He was accompanied by an extensive entourage of 75 people, including women and children, and a cacique called Gregorio, who, according to the commandant of the Portuguese fortress of Nova Coimbra, was expected to adhere to the aforementioned peace agreement (AHU_ACL_ CU_010, Cx. 28, D.1627). It is likely that Cacique Gregorio’s visit to the Spanish fortress was prompted by a desire to explore the diverse strategic options available. In contrast, Queima’s presence was seemingly driven by more complex issues. He seemingly visited the fortress to present himself to the Spanish as a key figure on the frontier, using his new status as a Portuguese subject to do so. Indeed, he appeared before the commandant of the Spanish fortress “clad in Portuguese-style military garments”10 (AGI, ESTADO, 81, N.15), probably the yellow-lined red

9 Em seus nomes e no de todos os outros chefes da sua nação, seus compatriotas, e mais descendentes. 10 Vestido a lo militar al estilo portugués.

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

299

jackets presented to him by the commandant of Nova Coimbra (AHU_ ACL_CU_010, Cx. 29, D.1644) or the clothing given to him and cacique Paulo during the signing of the peace, which included shirts, hats, jackets, uniform coats, epaulettes, and crimson taffeta for ties (AHU_ACL_CU_ 010, Cx. 28, D.1617). Queima’s choice of garments for the meeting could be read as a display of his adhesion to the Portuguese monarchy. However, it was combined with an unusual request made to the Spanish commandant, who described the scene as follows: “he [Queima] took out a document and presented it to me stating that the governor of Mato Grosso had given it to him, and he had brought it so that I could read and explain it to him”11 (AGI, ESTADO, 81, N.15). The document was the letter patent that Queima had received in Vila Bela the previous year, in which the governor of Mato Grosso declared that the Mbayá had become vassals of the kingdom of Portugal. Although it is possible that the cacique was making an honest request for information, it is unlikely that he would have waited a year to ask for assistance in understanding it, especially since he was clearly aware of the letter’s importance and had carefully preserved it. The fact he combined this request with the use of military garments given by the Portuguese suggests another possible interpretation: his behaviour may be understood as a display of feigned ignorance, one of the many “weapons of the weak” identified by James Scott in his classic study on everyday forms of resistance (1985, 29–34). Cacique Queima used this encounter to assert his importance as a frontier agent, and likewise as a much-needed ally for the Spanish authorities. By dressing in Portuguese military garments, he used European codes to enhance his status and underscore his significance, thereby placing himself on the same level as the Spanish commandant. As a result, he was able to present a discourse that sought to exploit the Hispano-Portuguese competition for control over the frontier, where the Mbayá had become sought-after allies for both powers. Queima presumably sought to prompt the Spanish to try and outbid the Portuguese in their attempt to attract the Mbayá through the customary Iberian practice of issuing gifts to the caciques and their entourage. It is unclear whether the caciques’ efforts to engage the Spanish resulted in any direct political returns. However, they demonstrate how the Mbayá pursued their own agenda and used 11 Sacó un papel y me lo entregó diciéndome que el governador de Mato Grozo se lo havía dado y lo traýa para que lo leyese y explicase.

300

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

forms of autonomous action to reinforce their position as key figures in this frontier space; they also reveal the Mbayá capacity to challenge the empires’ local forces. Within this context of competition and alliances, there were numerous moments of tension that shattered the fragile equilibrium and the, albeit tense, periods of peace gave way to open confrontation. One such episode was prompted by an incident once again linked to clothing. In 1796, a group of Mbayá who encountered two Spanish soldiers in the forest obliged the outsiders to undress and clothe themselves in feathers before releasing them without returning their garments. As the sources that recorded the event underscore, “they [the Mbayá] had dressed them in accordance with their own custom”12 (AGN, IX, 32-5-6 exp.10), a custom that the commandant of Nova Coimbra described around this time as follows: “they adorn themselves with plumes and feathers which they wear on their heads, wrists and legs”13 (Rodrigues do Prado [1795] in Mello 1968, 123). The Mbayá’s brazen and direct mockery of the soldiers constituted an act of resistance charged with symbolic violence that was a highly effective and disruptive challenge to the normative models of Old World morality and customs. Clearly, they intended to dress the soldiers as if they were Indigenous, which the Spanish authorities in the settlement of Villa Real de la Concepción regarded as an affront of such gravity that they dispatched the urban militia to the Mbayá camp to “reprimand them once again for the thefts, killings and abuse of Spaniards, and to persuade them to remain faithful [to the Spanish] as friends and allies”14 (AGN, IX, 32-5-6. exp.10). This mockery was clearly an act of resistance based on the appropriation and inversion of the European discourse on barbarism, which identified nudity as a lack of civilization. The Mbayá most certainly knew of this discourse through their extensive contact with the settlers in the region, as well as the evangelizing secular clergy who acted in the environs of the fortresses. They had also come into contact with Jesuit missionaries at the historic mission of Belén (1760–1767), where 12 Los habían vestido al uso de ellos. 13 São os seus enfeites de plumas e de penas que trazem na cabeça, nos pulsos e nas

pernas. 14 Reconvenirles nuevamente sobre los robos, muertes, y maltratamientos de los españoles y persuadirles al mismo tiempo guardasen la buena fe de amigos y aliados.

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

301

several Mbayá parcialidades had settled. By stripping the soldiers and adorning them with feathers, the Mbayá had forcefully converted the Europeans into Indians, rendering them uncivilized barbarians in terms of the European understanding of American otherness. In doing so, they developed a discourse that inverted the cultural logic used to justifyconquest, which was based on the supposed inferiority and lack of civilization of Indigenous peoples. Their use of this tactic proved still more eloquent as it coexisted with the caciques’ use of European military clothing to present themselves on an equal level to the Spaniards and Portuguese, in accordance with the European scale of civilization. Subsequently, the language of costume took center stage at a meeting held by some of the Mbayá caciques when a Spanish squadron approached the fortress of Nova Coimbra. Various Mbayá groups had moved there following a serious conflict with the residents of Villa Real de la Concepción, and two caciques attended the meeting at which the Spanish hoped to re-establish the recently ruptured peace “with all kinds of insolence, wearing in military-style garments with captains’ insignias on their shoulders, frogs, batons and silver embroidered cuffs like commandant captain”. The caciques declared that “we could consider them vassals of that kingdom [Portugal], segregated from our past amity”15 (AGI ESTADO, 81, N.15). Nevertheless, they agreed to act as intermediaries with other Mbayá groups to facilitate their reconciliation with the Spanish, which established them as essential mediators in interethnic relations along the frontier, a status that was a culmination of an autonomy they had gained by exploiting their new position as formal subjects of the king of Portugal. Despite the Mbayá used clothing and language to communicate their new condition of subjects of the king of Portugal and that they had severed the ties that previously bounded them to the Spanish, this did not prevent them from continuing to approach the Spanish forts, where the commandant issued them with gifts in the hope of reviving their past amity. Their behavior thus constituted further practices of resistance, in this case against the Portuguese, with whom they shared a supposedly common status as subjects of the same king. 15 Con todo desahogo vestidos a lo militar, calzados con insignias de capitanes en los hombros, alamares, bastón y melindre de plata en la vuelta, como capitán comandante […] los podíamos considerar vasallos de aquél reyno [Portugal], segregados de nuestra antigua amistad.

302

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

Through their constant crossing back and forth over the porous frontier, the Mbayá provided the Portuguese and Spanish with valuable geographical and strategic information on the forces deployed in their counterpart’s territory, and they acted as informants on the advances made by the competing powers. For example, in 1798, various Mbayá caciques with whom the Spaniards had re-established peace following a period of withdrawal, provided information on the location of the fortress of Nova Coimbra on the western bank of the River Paraguay and on its date of construction, which was a significant matter, as had it been founded after 1777 it would have violated the Treaty of San Ildefonso. They also reported on the Portuguese efforts to reinforce its defences (AHN, Estado, 3410, Exp.13). Although it cannot be demonstrated that the provision of this information was part of a specific Indigenous strategy, when three caciques were asked if the Portuguese had sought to prevent them from re-establishing peace with the Spaniards, they gave a highly insightful response. Firstly, they highlighted the efforts made by the Portuguese to prevent them from re-establishing peace with the Spanish, a factor that contributed to fostering the Spaniards’ mistrust of the Portuguese. Secondly, they underscored the offers of gifts they had received, and declared that they had been offered gunpowder, bullets, and firearms, which they refused to accept. With regard to this matter, cacique Don Luis Etiganuite, also known as Zabala, stated that they had not accepted them “because their inclination was always to make peace with this province [Paraguay] and place themselves, along with the other caciques of their parcialidad and nation, under the protection and refuge of this government”16 (AHN, Estado, 3410, Exp.13). It is especially striking that the three declarations were practically identical (or else were recorded as such by the scribe), and that they emphasized what they had chosen to renounce (gifts, weapons, and training to use them) in order to revive their peace with the Spanish, as well as their sustained loyalty to the Catholic Monarchy despite the temporary alienation. This could be read as a self-interested discourse intended to gain special advantages from an agreement that was keenly sought after by the Spanish. Furthermore, aside from providing tangible short-term economic advantages, these joint declarations testify to the 16 Porque su inclinación fue siempre hacer la paz con esta provincia y ponerse con los demás caciques de su parcialidad y nación bajo de la protección y amparo de este gobierno.

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

303

Mbayá’s successful strategy of refusing to be completely subjugated by the Europeans, both the Spaniards and Portuguese. It is also significant that in 1802 the Mbayás who had settled near the Portuguese fortresses, with whom they were theoretically allied, informed the Spanish—with whom, according to the commandant of the one of the Portuguese fortresses, they maintained “toda a comunicação (full communication)”— about the location of a Spanish artillery piece that had been captured by the Portuguese during a failed assault on Nova Coimbra (BR MTAPMT, SG.CD.CA. 4693 caixa 080). This information, which led to a mission being sent from Paraguay to recover the weapon, suggests a possible intention to revive Hispano-Portuguese enmity as a tactic of resistance, perhaps in order to enhance the Mbayá’s leverage, which depended on competition between the Iberian powers in this region. Governor Miranda Montenegro’s perception of the activities of the Mbayá settled near to the Portuguese and Spanish forts (Coimbra, Albuquerque, Miranda, and Borbón) lends weight to this theory. In 1803, he acknowledged that the Mbayá repeatedly moved between the Spanish and Portuguese fortresses, and he identified them as a source of “plots, deceit and mistrust”,17 admitting that the Spanish would acquire information about any Portuguese deployment through the Mbayá (ANTT, Documentos Diversos, IHGB, Microfilm 127 Doc.1168). In sum, the Mbayá acted by challenging and questioning their subjugation by the Europeans. They avoided fully implementing their intention to break ties with the Spanish, which they had issued using both verbal and sartorial statements. In parallel, they defended their autonomy by assuming the role of mediators for the pacification of other Indigenous groups and by leveraging their capacity to move back and forth across the frontier. This enabled them to exploit—and benefit from—the Iberian competition for control over the region and its inhabitants while keeping in play the possibility of a wide range of alliances.

17 Intrigas, mentiras e desconfianças.

304

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

Conclusions: Cultural Hybridity as a Weapon of Indigenous Resistance Despite the Mbayás’ apparent acknowledgment of Iberian authority, as revealed by the foregoing examples they generally maintained a strong sense of autonomy and used it to advance their own interests. The key factor that enabled this was the competition between the European powers for control of the frontier, which the Mbayá exploited to their favor. They also took advantage of their capacity to cross the border, which was favored by their use of horses. Although the second half of the eighteenth century was a period marked by the frontier treaties of Madrid and San Ildefonso, which sought to impose a linear frontier upon the territory, the Mbayá did not serve as a means of restricting the circulation of goods, people, and information between the empires, as Azara had intended. Instead, they brought about the opposite. The Mbayá leveraged their presence in the zone that the Spanish and Portuguese sought to control, becoming the sought-after allies of both powers. It was this form of empowerment that permitted them to avoid being subjugated. Indeed, the power they attained was such that in the final year of his governorship, Miranda Montenegro bitterly lamented his inability to achieve their sedentarization and subjugation: The greatest difficulty I encountered was the zone between the Portuguese and Spanish that they [the Mbayá] inhabit, whom [the European nations] stubbornly seek to attract into amicable relations, while they [the Mbayá] exploit these [nations’] opposing aims with considerable sagacity, thereby obtaining what they want from both sides, without any effort or submission18 (Miranda Montenegro [1803] 1845, 217).

The Mbayá presence along the frontier, and their awareness of being sought-after allies by the Spanish and Portuguese, permitted them to strengthen their autonomy over both powers during the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. They grew as a counterhegemonic Indigenous force that competed for the control of the frontier (understood as both a social and physical space). They demonstrated 18 A maior dificuldade que eu encontro é a do local em que vivem entre Portuguezes e Hespanhoes, que a profia pretendem atrahil-os para a sua amizade, e eles manejando estas contrarias pretenções com bastante sagacidade, por este meio alcançam o que querem de uns e outros, sem trabalho nem sujeição.

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

305

this by demarcating their own frontier, agreeing to temporary peace agreements, which they used to strengthen their position; affirming their dominance over the colonizers through pillage, attacks, and by the use of language that referred to their “taming” of the Europeans; and of sartorial imitation and mockery to reverse power relationships and the European discourse on civilization. While they maintained their autonomy, they remained in close communication with both Iberian powers, engaging in regular interaction and trans-frontier and intercultural exchange, which added still greater complexity to their acts of resistance, that in turn acquired a hybrid character as they merged the cultural codes of the two societies they encountered. The Mbayá’s manipulation of the Iberian ambitions, as condemned by Miranda Montenegro, also involved violent resistance, which reminded the colonial powers of their capacity to wage war, which further empowered them and underscored the importance of having them as allies. Moreover, they also used original symbolic forms of resistance, sometimes staged openly and other times more subtly, but always posing a significant challenge. The eloquence of the Mbayá’s acts of resistance as part of an intercultural dialogue merits closer study. Their actions comprised a combination of Indigenous cultural frameworks and codes, as well as the appropriation (and inversion) of the normative standards and specific values of European societies. Such intercultural exchanges were highly characteristic of frontiers, and as this chapter demonstrates, they gave rise to novel forms of resistance and the construction of a counter-hegemonic Indigenous force.

References Manuscript Sources Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Lisbon, Portugal): AHU_ACL_CU_010, Cx. 28, D.1617 AHU_ACL_CU_010, Cx. 28, D.1627 AHU_ACL_CU_010, Cx. 29, D.1644 AHU_ACL_CU_010, Cx. 31, D.1696. Archivo General de Indias (Sevilla, Spain): AGI, Estado, 81, N.15. Archivo General de la Nación (Buenos Aires, Argentina): AGN, IX, 32-5-6 exp.10 AGN, IX 30 5 8 exp.3. Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo (Lisbon, Portugal): ANTT, Documentos Diversos, IHGB, Microfilm 125 Doc.1018

306

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

ANTT, Documentos Diversos, IHGB, Microfilm 127 Doc.1168 Arquivo Público de Mato Grosso (Cuiabá, Brazil): BR MTAPMT, SG.CD.CA. 4693 caixa 080 Printed Sources Boggiani, Guido. [1895] 1945. Os Caduveo. São Paulo: Martins Fontes editora. Castelnau, François de. 1852. Expédition dans les parties centrales de l’Amérique du Sud, vol. II, Paris: P. Bertrand. Angelis, Pedro de. (comp). 1836. Colección de obras y documentos relativos a la Historia Antigua y Moderna de las provincias del Río de La Plata. Tomo Cuarto. Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado. Debret, Jean B. 1834. Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, vol. I. Paris: Firmin-Didot. Miranda Montenegro, Caetano Pinto de. [1803] 1845. “Resposta a este parecer”, published in Revista Trimestral de História e Geographia ou Jornal do Instituto histórico e Geographico Brazileiro VII (26): 213–218. Rodrigues do Prado, Francisco. [1795] 1968. “História dos Índios cavaleiros ou da nação guaycuru”. In Para além dos bandeirantes, ed. Raúl Si.lveira de Mello,120–145. Rio de Janeiro, Biblioteca do Exército. Serra, Ricardo Franco de Almeida. [1803] 1845. “Parecer sobre o aldeamento dos Indios Uaicurús e Guanás, com a descripção dos seus usos, religião, estabilidade e costumes” (1803), published in Revista Trimestral de História e Geographia ou Jornal do Instituto histórico e Geographico Brazileiro VII (26): 204–213. Serra, Ricardo Franco de Almeida. [1803] 1850. “Continuação do parecer sobre os índios Uaicuru’s, Guana’s, etc.”, published in Revista Trimestral de História e Geographia ou Jornal do Instituto histórico e Geographico Brazileiro XIII (6): 348–395.

Bibliography Almeida, M. Regina Celestino de. 2017. Portuguese Indigenous Policy and Indigenous Politics in the Age of Enlightment: Assimilationist Ideals and the Preservation of Native Identities. In Enlightened Colonialism. Civilization Narratives and Imperial Politics in the Age of Reason, ed. Damien Tricoire, 73–92. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Araujo, Renata. 2001. A fronteira a ocidente: o Mato Grosso. In Actas del coloquio internacional Universo Urbanístico Portugués, coords. Renata Araujo, Helder Carita, and Walter Rossa, 887–903. Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as comemorações dos descobrimentos portugueses. Areces, Nidia. 1999. Paraguayos, portugueses y Mbayás en Concepción, 1773– 1840. Memoria Americana 8: 11–44.

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

307

Areces, Nidia. 2007. La función de 1796 y la matanza de Mbayás en Concepción, frontera norte paraguaya. Memoria Americana 15: 103–134. Babcock, Mathew. 2016. Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bastos, Carlos A. 2024. Comércio contrabando e demarcação de fronteiras na Amazónia ibérica (c.1780-c.1790). Revista de História da Sociedade e da Cultura 24 (1): 123–146. Boccara, Guillaume. 1998. Guerre et ethnogenèse mapuche Dans le Chili colonial: l’invention de soi. Paris: L’Harmattan. Brunner, Otto. [1936] 1992. Land and Lordship. Structures of Govemance in Medieval Austria (trad. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton) Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press. Carvalho, Francismar A. Lopes de. 2023. Natives, Iberians, and Imperial Loyalties in the South American Borderlands, 1750–1800. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chandra, Uday. 2015. Rethinking Subaltern Resistance. Journal of Contemporary Asia 45 (4): 563–573. Devere, Heather, Simon Mark, and Jane Verbitsky. 2010. A History of the Language of Friendship in International Treatises. International Politics 48 (1): 46–70. Domingues, Ângela. 2000. Quando os índios eram vassalos. Colonização e relações de poder no Norte do Brasil na segunda metade do século XVIII . Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses. Erbig, Jeffrey. 2016. Borderline Offerings: Tolderías and Mapmakers in the Eighteenth-Century Río de la Plata. Hispanic American Historical Review 96 (3): 445–480. Erbig, Jeffrey. 2020. Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books. Garcia, Elisa Frühauf. 2009. As diversas formas de ser índio: políticas indígenas e políticas indigenistas no extremo sul da América portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional. Herreros Cleret de Langavant, Benita. 2012. Portugueses, españoles y mbayá en el alto Paraguay. Dinámicas y estrategias de frontera en los márgenes de los imperios ibéricos (1791–1803). Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [Online], Debates. Herzog, Tamar. 2015. Frontiers of possession. Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Ibáñez Bonillo, Pablo. 2023. La odisea amazónica de José de Iturre. Agencia y fracaso en las fronteras ibéricas (1750–1770). Revista de Indias 83 (287): 175–206.

308

B. HERREROS CLERET

DE

LANGAVANT

Lesaffer, Randall C. H.. 2002. Amicitia in Renaissance Peace and Alliance Treaties (1450–1530). Journal of the History of International Law 4 (1): 77–99. Lucaioli, Carina. 2011. Abipones en las fronteras del Chaco. Una etnografía histórica sobre el siglo XVIII . Buenos Aires: Sociedad Argentina de Antropología. Martínez, Cecilia G. 2017. Cavaleiros contra flecheros. Treinta años de guerra chiquito-guaycurú en la frontera luso-española (1763–1793). Americanía Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Nueva Época 5: 328–367. Monteiro, John M. 1994. Negros da Terra: índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Ortelli, Sara. 2007. Trama de una guerra conveniente. Nueva Vizcaya y la sombra de los apaches (1748–1790). Mexico City: El Colegio de México. Roller, Heather F. 2021. Contact Strategies. Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Saeger, James S. 1999. Warfare, Reorganization, and Readaptation at the Margins of Spanish Rule—The Chaco and Paraguay (1573–1882). In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, eds. Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz, 3: 257–286. South America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santos-Granero, Gilberto Brizolla. 2021. “Amansar os portugueses”: os índios Guaicuru nas representações portuguesas coloniais. Aceno-Revista de Antropologia do Centro Oeste 8 (16): 307–340. Santos-Granero, Fernando. 2009. Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life. Austin: University of Texas Press. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Susnik, Branislava. 1971. El indio colonial del Paraguay. Vol. III-1. El chaqueño; guaycurúes y chanés-arawak. Asunción: Museo etnográfico Andrés Barbero. Susnik, Branislava, and Chase Sardi, Miguel. 1995. Los indios del Paraguay. Madrid: Mapfre. Valenzuela, Jaime. 2017. América en diásporas. Esclavitudes y migraciones forzadas en Chile y otras regiones americanas (siglos XVI–XIX). Santiago: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Vangelista, Chiara. 1993. Los guaikurú, españoles y portugueses en una región de frontera: Mato Grosso, 1770–1830. Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani” 8: 55–76. Weber, David J. 2005. Barbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press. White, Richard. 1991. The Middle Ground. Indians, Empires, & Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press.

14

CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY …

309

Wright, Robin M., and Carneiro de Cunha, Manuela. 1999. Destruction, Resistance, and Transformation—Southern, Coastal, and Northern Brazil (1580–1890). In The Cambridge history of the Native peoples of the Americas, eds. Frank Salomon, and Stuart Schwartz, 3: 287–381. South America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 15

Between Rebellion and Resistance: Guild Government, Ancient Liberty, and Plebeian Estate in the Catalonia of the Nueva Planta Carlos Garriga Acosta

On 4 May 1773 the great alvarot occurred in Barcelona [...], the ministers of these kingdoms having wanted the generous Catalans to be enlisted in the army [...], suddenly the city was in an uproar; only the young men [...]. The latter took control of the church bells and continuously rang assumatent, it seemed as if the world would end. These young men who protagonised the alvarot gathered on the plain of the Palace, all with their ganvetos and red caps, and angrily declared that they did not want quintas. The guards of the sea gate, when they saw the alvarot, wanted to use their weapons, with which they killed two and wounded eleven. When the

Research Project TRANSIDER, PID2021-128509NB-C21. C. Garriga Acosta (B) University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Leioa, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_15

311

312

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

protesters saw this, they were even more indignant [...]. The bell-ringing a ssumatén continued until two o´clock in the afternoon and the tumult until 10 at night. (“Memòries de Pere Màrtir Coll”, in Simón i Tarrés 1993, 220–21)

The traditional image of Bourbon Catalonia—summarized by its canonical historiography in “the effort to become a province” (Soldevila 1962: 1188–1230)—has for a long time blurred the so-called avalot de les quintes, which broke out in Barcelona on 4 May 1773 in opposition to the novelty of compulsory military conscription, firmly resisted by the city’s guilds. It is not that the facts were unknown (Carrera 1947: 447– 462; Carrera 1951: 69–82; Moreu-Rey 1967: 53–58), but until relatively recently their significance was undervalued, perhaps because they did not fit in with the established interpretative schemes (Santaló 1997). However, the avalot de les quintes was not so unforeseeable in Bourbon Catalonia, nor was it a fleeting and trivial episode. In the struggle for the narrative that soon unfolded, this appears to have been the discourse constructed by the guilds to favor their negotiating strategy. But what is clear is that this collective act of resistance had a great impact at the time and no small repercussion on the direction taken by the regime of the so-called Nueva Planta in the final years of the eighteenth century (Garriga Acosta 1997a, 1997b; Roura 2006a; Graui Fernández 2006: 27– 37; 2011: 150–154; Albareda 2014: 103–108). In the following pages, I will attempt to show that the resistance responded to the enormous importance of colleges and guilds in the articulation of Catalan urban society, focusing on the conflictive dynamics triggered by their institutionalization as necessary instances of popular mediation in the Catalan adaptation of the municipal reform introduced in the wake of the so-called Motín de Esquilache (Esquilache Riots), in 1766, which however did not withstand the onslaught of the local nobility and was defeated in 1770. By contrast, the complex resistance movement maintained by the guilds before and, above all, after the avalot soon attracted the support of the traditional elites of territorial government, particularly the powerful nobility of Barcelona, in opposition to the royal authorities. The organized resistance led by the guilds, with an exquisitely institutional attitude, was soon portrayed as the defense of an ancient

15

BETWEEN REBELLION AND RESISTANCE: GUILD …

313

territorial freedom against the new royal will, activating a widespread and hitherto unsuspected Catalan constitutional consciousness that caused great alarm at the Court. As well as the specific consequences that it had for Catalonia, this process led to a rethinking of what resistance should be understood to mean and how it should be sanctioned in order to safeguard the “fundamental constitution of the Spanish nation”, irreconcilable with the political vocation of the guilds. The work ends with a brief consideration of the relationship between resistance and collective memory.

I In spite of the restrictions imposed by the Nueva Planta regime, the major role played by the guilds in the articulation of the Catalan social fabric was demonstrated during the early decades of the eighteenth century by multiple acts of resistance and negotiation dynamics at a local level (Molas Ribalta 1970; Torras 1988, 2003: 125–142; Tello 1990: 181–272); but also by the ability to control exhibited in the crucial summer of 1766, when Catalonia was not affected by a chain of popular uprisings against the bad government that spread throughout much of Spain (Vicente Algueró 1987; Roura 2006b). At that time, there were almost ninety colleges and guilds in Barcelona, representing over fourfifths of the vecindario (neighborhood), with a proven capacity to deploy a common organizational structure if circumstances so required. Given the pressing nature of the problem of the legitimacy of collective political action (Sánchez León 2020: 29–55), it is no coincidence that the guilds took the opportunity to present themselves as necessary mediators of the común before the authorities, almost as a kind of natural representatives of the pueblo (Romá y Rosell 1766). In the legal discourse of those years, the dichotomy pueblo-plebe was frequently employed to designate the común (common people) in the manner that corresponded to their public behavior, orderly or disorderly (Fernández Albaladejo 1992: 432–452; Garriga Acosta 2017). Fitting perfectly into this scheme, in the crucial auto acordado of 5 May 1766— immediately qualified as “fundamental law of the State”—the exclusion of the tumultuous plebs had as a counterpoint the corporate inclusion of

314

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

the pueblo, via the new elective posts of Diputados del común (Deputies of the Commons) and Procurador Síndico Personero del Público (Syndic and Spokesperson of the Commons), elected by indirect suffrage to participate in supplying cities. The many doubts that its implementation aroused throughout the kingdom led to the Instrucción of 26 June 1766, which established “as a general rule” what was to be understood by “popular elections”, representing a departure from the traditional forms of community representation: “The Election must be carried out by the whole Pueblo divided into Parishes or Neighbourhoods, with all the secular and taxpaying Neighbours voting” (Instrucción 1766a: § I; Garriga Acosta 2021). Barcelona was one of the most singular cases, precisely because of the involvement of the guilds (Torras 2003: 155–183). Before receiving the Instrucción, the Audiencia (Court of Appeals) had not hesitated to organize the elections on the basis of these corporations, replacing neighborhood voting with the appointment of representatives by the guilds as electors. While aware of the “absolute discrepancy” in relation to the general instruction, the Audiencia argued that its solution was “adapted to the special constitution of this Pueblo and its neighbourhood, [which] appears to be ungovernable by the common rules of the others”, as was demonstrated by history: Whenever the people of Barcelona have appointed deputies to represent them, they have observed the practice of holding elections by the Colleges and Guilds, [...] with all the living representation of the people consolidated in these collegiate bodies. (12 July 1766: ACA, RA, reg. 806, f. 284v; Torras 2003: 160)

The Royal Council not only validated this electoral procedure but also extended it to the whole of Catalonia (Instrucción 1766b). Without sparing comparisons to the Roman “tribunes of the plebs”, in its report the Audiencia presented the guilds as necessary intermediaries between the public and the deputies (Real Provisión 24 July 1766: ACA, RA, reg. 561, f. 342v), reinforcing via different channels the link between the elected and the electors (Instrucción § VI).

15

BETWEEN REBELLION AND RESISTANCE: GUILD …

315

The guilds sought yet another turn of the screw. Most probably based on previous experiences of coordination (Torras 2003: 140–141, 163– 164), jurist Romà i Rossell proposed in 1767 to institutionalize in each of the provinces of the kingdom the post of “Advocate General of the Province, Public Defender and Protector of the Public”, as a sort of territorial coordinating body for all the diputados del común and síndicos personeros, empowered to make the voice of the público heard beyond their respective pueblos, and with the possibility of coordination on the scale of the “Continent of Spain” (Lluch 1970). The proposal was considered by the Court, but the Audiencia of Catalonia’s report was devastating (Real Acuerdo, 18 February 1768: ACA, RA, reg. 808, f. 113rv; Audience Consultation, 4 May 1768: ibid, ff. 120r–123v). As well as being “impracticable” and of “no use”, it considered the Project to be contrary to the “good order” of the kingdom and extremely risky for the “public cause” (f. 121v). As the same Audiencia argued barely a year later, the electors who represent the People are usually from the Third Estate, as deputies of the respective guilds or colleges, which the latter comprises, experience showing that those of the noble estate are usually reluctant to attend these assemblies, so that the republican government of the Pueblos would easily degenerate into a democratic or popular government, which would be accompanied by other greater damage. (Audiencia Consultation to the King, 10 June 1769: ACA, RA, reg. 809, f. 222r)

Seemingly clear by then was the social stamp of the new posts, monopolized by artisans. Promoting appeals and claiming new responsibilities, diputados and personeros strained old local government structures. As José de Viera y Clavijo underlined, the conflict stemmed from the 1766 reform itself, which had established a commitment to “vigorous local councils, whose mixed government of Aristocratic and Democratic, that is, of the Nobility and el Pueblo, might temper the corrupt power of the regidores (aldermen), and correct the abuses of the administration” (Viera y Clavijo 1776, XV, § LXXIX: III, 467).

316

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

In Barcelona, where the people were understood to be the guilds, the nobility’s protests were not long in coming. The Marquis of Gironella, síndico procurador general (public attourney) of the city, identified the root of the problem in an electoral system that always entrusted the new posts to artisans, people of “lower status”, unfit to govern (Barcelona, 21 July 1770: ACA, RA, reg. 565, ff. 316r-322v). Obviously, denunciatory speeches such as this one, on the part of those who believed themselves to be the “owners of power”, reflected a rejection of other ways of governing, in defense of other interests less compliant with the elites. Another conspicuous representative of the Catalan nobility, Don Francisco Novell, stated this very clearly in 1770, denouncing before the Count of Aranda, a major figure in the Court, the allegedly exorbitant jurisdictional claims of the diputados del común, “humble people of el Pueblo”: “the plebs is a monster that always tends to rebel against the nobility” (Barcelona, 24 November 1770: ACA, RA, reg. 1003, f. 63r.). Without completely sharing these judgments or agreeing to all of their claims, the Audiencia ended up yielding to nobiliary pressures, which in the end coincided with its own elitist way of conceiving municipal government as naturally characteristic of “the most important and healthiest sector of the people”. (Audiencia Consultation, 15 March 1770: ACA, RA, reg. 810, ff. 87v–89v; 18 March 1771: ibid. reg. 811, ff. 29r–31v). In order to hamper guild control, from 1771 onward, elections were held by neighborhoods (Audiencia Consultation, 5 December 1770: ACA, RA, reg. 810, ff. 349v–353r). However, this by no means put an end to the social protagonism and political weight of the guilds in a city like Barcelona.

II In application of the Royal Ordinance for the annual replacement of the army (1770), in September 1772, the Court decreed that the corresponding compulsory recruitment be carried out in Catalonia by lottery, entrusted to the local authorities. The order, which was contested in many places, led to the convening of a meeting of deputies from the twelve Catalan corregimientos, seemingly on Barcelona’s initiative. We know that this was not unprecedented, but it is nevertheless extraordinary that, following the abolition in 1716 of any form of feudo-corporate representation of the territory, the voice of the “Principality of Catalonia, through its commissioners”, was heard again. We do not know how

15

BETWEEN REBELLION AND RESISTANCE: GUILD …

317

they were appointed, but in mid-January 1773, these “representatives of the province” submitted to the king a lengthy and well-founded representation, requesting the exemption of quintas on the double basis of the “genio de los naturales ” (nature of the locals), averse to any type of “forced service”, and of the utility or expediency of farming, commerce, the arts, and factories (Barcelona, 17 January 1773: BC, ms. 3668, ff. 122r–129v; BPR, ms. II/1276, ff. 414r–428r; Ephemérides: 32– 45). As an alternative, they proposed the commutation of the service to be provided by the province according to a detailed plan, which included the constitution of a representative Board for its management. The king’s repeated refusal, precisely in order not to make distinctions between his kingdoms, led to the dissolution of the Junta in March 1773 (Ephemérides: 45–49). However, this document already articulated the two main arguments—historical and economic-political—that the guilds would bring into play to oppose conscription. As soon as recruitment began to be planned, the local authorities responsible had to surrender to the evidence that the simple “enlistment of this neighborhood” was virtually impracticable without the help of the guilds. According to the detailed “Diario de lo ocurrido en esta capital sobre las diligencias ” of the conscription, kept by the Captaincy General, once the word got out, “some seditious pamphlets began to appear demonstrating the aversion of these locals to service by lottery” (ACA, RA, reg. 1004, f. 76r). Given the situation, in mid-April, the governor requested and obtained the collaboration of the guild prohombres in order to discover “such disruptors of public peace” (ibidem), but failed to involve them in the enlistment of the eligible young men, despite concurrent pressure from the local and military authorities. The latter then decided to entrust the recruitment to the regidores with the assistance of the alcaldes de barrio. Operations began on 4 May 1773 at eight o’clock in the morning, “but with such limited success, that at the first step the commissioners encountered the obstacle of a large number of people who opposed the intended enlistment”, without their immediate suspension dissuading “the rioters [from] their idea of running through the streets and squares, ringing the church bells a rebato until midday, which was mitigated by the persuasions of the Lord Commander General, the bishop and the rest of the distinguished people dedicated to this” (ibid., f. 78r.). The facts evoked therein are well established in substance by various more or less contemporary sources (Garriga Acosta 1997b; Roura 2006a).

318

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

In addition to the reports produced by the protagonists and the relevant local authorities, with their divergent narratives (BPR, ms. II/1276, ff. 414r-467v; BUB, ms. 3668, ff. 122r–151v, and ms. 4538, ff. 1v–3r), the avalots gave rise to two detailed accounts of clearly military origin (Lucuce 2002; Ephemérides 2015), to different evocations and multiple references in the writings of memorialists, local diaries, or the chronicles of travelers through Catalonia during those years (Lumen domus o Annals del convent de Santa Caterina de Barcelona, vol. 3, BUB, ms. 1007, 459– 466; Sagarriga 1907: 100–104 y 106–107; Swinburne 1779: 14–15), and a number of more or less popular couplets or songs that were not always favorable to the guilds (BNE, ms. 1595; Cahner 1998: 11–28; Moran 2002). In other words, it was such an event that it immediately became part of the collective memory of the Catalans. Apart from their differing assessments of the event, the following are substantially constant elements in the accounts: the spontaneous or unplanned origin of the riot; the youth of the rioters, who would have acted as a crowd without visible or identifiable heads; the ringing of the bells a somatén as the climax of the riot; the violent reaction of the barracked troops, which caused a certain number of deaths and injuries; and the pacification work carried out by the local social authorities, such as the bishop and the guild leaders…. It was from that moment onwards, and with the probable intention of reversing the predictably disastrous consequences of the riot, that a real guild network of resistance to conscription was created, which maintained this position for more than a year, articulating an ad hoc discourse and adopting the necessary measures to manage it. Taken as a whole, resistance is undoubtedly the word that best qualifies the prolonged and intense agency of the guilds, especially if it is understood in its strictest legal sense, as equivalent to disobedience and at the same time opposed to rebellion, in full coherence with the conception of law as a declarative order based on religious principles defining justice and politically unavailable. In this key, far from being defined as an attack on order, resistance is an act or (collective) movement in defense of order against arbitrary or illegitimate decisions, immediately raising the problem of legitimacy, which depends on the cause invoked and is by definition controversial (Laudani 2010: 30–61). Certainly, from the late Middle Ages onward, a powerful line of jurisprudence progressed that made resistere and rebellare equivalent (Quaglioni 1999), in response to the growing absolutization of monarchies, which tended to include any

15

BETWEEN REBELLION AND RESISTANCE: GUILD …

319

act of contestation as a crime laesae maiestatis. But the original meaning remained alive and operative throughout the European Modern Age, asserting itself in multiple disturbances led by people who, without questioning their loyalty to the king, remained firm in their disobedience to certain acts of imperative will that they considered contrary to their right (De Benedictis 2013: chap. 2). This was precisely the case in 1773, well condensed in the slogan that the crowd apparently shouted on 4 May: “Viva lo rey, no volem quintas” (Long live the king, we don’t want quintas ). Resistance and not rebellion, then, as the city expressly argued before the captain general (Pi i Arimón 1854, 664–666). Of course, a substantial element of resistance lies in the legitimacy that can be invoked to justify it. As Thompson reminds us, “it is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action some legitimizing notion”, which referred to “traditional rights or customs” and was supported by “the wider consensus of the community” (Thompson 1993, 188). In Barcelona, the sustained agency of the guilds followed three main guidelines: institutionalization, justification, and territorialization.1 Institutionalization. The guilds explicitly stated their willingness to act at all times in an orderly manner and in accordance with the established formal rules. On the same day, 5 May, they requested and eventually obtained permission from the Captain General and the Audiencia for “an individual from each guild to meet as was tradition in the Convent of San Francisco de Paula”, presided over by an alcalde mayor and attended by a public notary, “in order to be able to deal in a calm and mature manner with the general subject matter of the issue” (Consulta 1774, s. f.). The Board of Priors, Consuls, and prohombres of the respective guilds met on the 6th and elected, by plurality vote, twelve persons of their confidence, granting them “the necessary powers so that, in the name of all, they could present to Your Majesty what they considered most convenient for the good of the country and the service of your royal crown”. The socalled Diputación was comprised of a silk twister, a confectioner, a printer,

1 The majority of my information comes from the extensive Consulta del Consejo Pleno

al rey, 18 November 1774 (AHN, Consejos, leg. 6863, exp. 30, 176 ff., s.f., where I quote; recorded ibid., lib. 1944, ff. 380v-485v), drawn from the documentation seized from the “Diputación gremial”, which it uses and quotes profusely; hereafter, Consulta 1774, s. f. This is the source of all the s.f. quotations that follow in the text. For more details, Garriga Acosta, 1997a: n53; 1997b: n20.

320

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

two shopkeepers, a lantern-maker, a dyer, a sword-maker, a public notary, a tailor, a mason, and a cloth-worker. Assembled on the 7th, they waited until their designation had been notified to them by the corregidor in the “stylized” form before considering themselves constituted. From then on, the Diputación took the lead in all opposition to conscription, demonstrating a remarkable organizational capacity. To this end, they appointed four of their members to set up a more operational committee, the so-called Diputación subalterna (formed by Francisco Generas, printer; Segismundo Llobet, public notary; Bartolomé Amat and Pedro Serra, shopkeepers) “not only to attend meetings and sessions with the lawyers and consultants, but also to sign the letters of office, letters of service and letters of agency”. And the entire Diputación met for months on an almost daily basis, as recorded in a libro de acuerdos (book of agreements) “in which the meetings of the Diputación of the Colleges and Guilds were recorded”, often in Catalan (ibid). We know from this record that they immediately set up an effective fund-raising system to cover their expenses; that they regularly turned to their lawyers and consultants, among whom doctors Camps, Abella, Prat, and Vall·llosera; that they counted on and communicated with Don Gabriel Garriga as their agent or solicitor in the Corte… None of this seems to have been improvised: it is clear that diputados were following their own established practices of community functioning. From August 1773 onward, the corresponding book of agreements was not kept or could not be found, but the investigation ordered by the Council afterward revealed that the Diputación continued to hold meetings for at least another year, until 19 July 1774. Perhaps by then, the Council’s prosecutors deduced, “vigilance had been intensified to conceal what was being discussed against the royal service” (ibid.). Or perhaps they simply understood the risks of public discourse and chose to keep secret their intent: “Freedom—they wrote at the end of 1773—is what we have set out to achieve, and we will strive for it with every last effort” (apud Garriga Acosta 1997b, 721). Justification. The Diputación soon became convinced that its strategy necessarily involved controlling the narrative and employed lawyers and consultants to construct a narration of the events with a clearly exculpatory purpose. The meeting of 15 May decided that Dr. Camps, lawyer for

15

BETWEEN REBELLION AND RESISTANCE: GUILD …

321

the Diputación, “should work on an impartial, truthful and circumstantial report with the necessary documents and justifications of the events that took place in the city of Barcelona on the 4th of May […], in order to submit it to the Court, especially to the senior ministers of the latter” (Consulta 1774, s. f.). Three days later, at the meeting of the 18th, “this impartial notice was read and approved by a plurality of votes, and it was decided that it would be passed on to Dr. Buenaventura Vall·llosera, consultant to the Diputación, as he was the personero del Común, for him to review it”. Although the different narratives coincide substantially in the facts, the intentionality of their respective authors greatly determined what they predicted of the agents, the qualification that they and their actions deserved, and therefore the overall meaning attributed to the avalot de les quintes. The guilds’ version differs from other contemporary versions precisely on these substantial points, especially in the narration of the culminating moment of the riot—the tolling of the bells a somatén—with very marked discrepancies regarding the circumstances of the initiative and the identity of the protagonists. Of course, all the accounts presuppose the significance of the bells in terms of community and the transcendence of their popular use in times of disturbance, which the law had always been very reluctant to contemplate and which the royal laws expressly prohibited, in order to avoid and sanction collective actions. Often baptized with their own names and always marked by the events in which they had been involved, bells were not only indispensable instruments of popular mobilization, but also objects of memory and catalysts of collective identity (Corbin 2013; Arnold and Goodson 2012: 100, 124–128). At least since the medieval centuries, the ringing of bells a rebato, according to the Castilian expression, appears throughout Europe as an almost unavoidable component of any popular revolt (Zemon Davis 1975: 161, 168, 171; Perez Zagorin 1982: 94, 219, 228, 245). Like the French or the English, which shared the Provençal name tocsin, Catalan history had forged its own tradition in the ringing of bells a somatén (Elliott 1984: 165–166, 292, 296, 418–451; Corteguera 2002: 19, 75, 80–90, 97–99, 160). This had been precisely the argument invoked by Philip V (1700–1746) to stop the local attempts to “melt and make the bell of the main clock of this city, which broke a bomb in the last siege”,

322

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

popularly called the Honorata, for having been “the one that rang in all the movements of the seditions”, ordering “that at no time should this bell be built again” (Real Orden Madrid, 12 February 1718: ACA, RA, reg. 6, ff. 93v-94r; AHB, Polític, reial, decrets, vol. 4 [1718], ff. 65r66v). However, repeated requests from the town and church councils led Charles III (1759–1788) to authorize its construction. The new bell was installed at the beginning of the 1760s and popularly kept the same name: “nostra Onorata” (Moran 2002: 183; cf. Lucuce 2002: 168). In a world where bells marked the rhythms of community life with their regular and predictable ringing, the frenetic irruption of the “tolling bell” opened an extraordinary moment characterized above all by the politicization of the people (Hamon 2019). Everything matters at this moment: who is ringing, which bell, for how long, with what ringing, for what purpose; and it matters prima facie for the penal purposes of qualifying the popular action and determining the collective responsibility that could correspond. Attentive to the practical problems that the recurrence of popular tumults posed, jurisprudence debated the issue at length, above all to define the collective subject and determine the punishable actions, with two general tendencies that were clearly discernible as early as the late Middle Ages: one aimed at restricting the possibility of punishing the community as such for the actions of an indeterminate crowd; and the other that broadened the assumptions of community resistance to the authorities considered legally legitimate (Quaglioni 2002; De Benedictis 2013: Chaps. 2 and 3). Both trends converged in the modern dissemination of a sort of “culture of rebellion”, which was incompatible with the more royalist positions and strongly strained the discourses on the people and their agency. It was not in vain that Romà i Rosell contested as politically misguided “the maxim of abolishing Colleges and Guilds when there are suspicions of conspiracies and riots” (Romà i Rossell 1766: Chap. II, § 6: 28–30). Against this background, the considerable discrepancies between the various accounts of the avalots of 4 May, more or less contemporaneous with the events, make perfect sense, precisely with regard to the identity of the actors and the qualification of their actions.

15

BETWEEN REBELLION AND RESISTANCE: GUILD …

323

Guild Deputation

Lumen Domus

Ephemérides

Lucuce, Precauciones

“When the Capitulars and the Justices put it into effect, the unmarried young men were startled, and determined to flee and abandon their homes and jobs at the same time as the young boys were running through the streets and squares, and meeting up by chance they formed quadrillas (groups). Some of them took refuge in the church and the others at the city gates to escape from the enlistment, but they found them closed, which made the youths increasingly frightened, some of them gathered in the Llano del Palacio and others went to the Cathedral. And Finding two French amoladores (knife-grinders) they forced them to seize and ring the bells ” (Garriga Acosta [1997b] 727)

“The fadrins (young men) were moved by this and began to throw stones. * They rang the big bell of the cathedral in a rapturous manner which is to say ringing a somatent and the regidores all fled in terror […]. The fadrins and lads armed with batons walked through the streets and shouted: Long live the King, we don’t want quintas ! Many hundreds of fadrins and youths marched straight to the new gate for no other reason than to get out of the city so that they would not be enlisted […]” * [separately:] “the bell of the cathedral was rung by an estranger who went about the city making a bear dance, and this was, it is to be believed, with mischief and caution” (459)

“The seditious people spread throughout the city, […] very early on they gathered from all sides and in considerable numbers in the cathedral, where, profaning the sacredness of the sanctuary and running over the chapter and clergy […],they took possession of the towers and began to ring arrebato or somatén, before nine o’clock, with all the bells, including that of the Relox, which was the largest called Honorata, […] the sound of which reached all the places in the countryside, […]. This bell of the Relox […] was granted by the king […], as a proof of being satisfied with the fidelity of this pueblo, because another one like it that it had in times past was torn to pieces by formal sentence in the year 1714, imposing on it the name of the Rebel” (57)

“The crowd was divided into several pelotones (platoons) that roamed the streets, armed with sticks, mallets and other offensive instruments, which they took from their homes and from those of the carters, turners and carpenters they passed. […] At nine o’clock in the morning, a large group of rioters went to the cathedral and, desecrating the temple and trampling on the clergy, took possession of the bells, ringing a rebato or somatén with all of them (including the big clock bell, which can be heard from the immediate countryside) Other cuadrillas (gangs) headed for the parish churches and convents to ring the bells a rebato at all of them. In many of them they succeeded, but not in all of them, because some clerics and religious were able to hinder them with great effort.” (108)

324

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

It does not seem that the guild’s accusation against French knifegrinders—or other non-residents, such as the estranger of the Lumen Domus—who were strangers to the community, was casual or innocent, but deliberate and highly functional to the objective of avoiding the possible accusation of a crime committed ut universi, which the most royalist jurisprudence—opposed to the “culture of rebellion”—continued to contemplate very broadly. In the same vein, but in the opposite sense, the qualifications used in the military accounts, and their insistence on the circumstances surrounding the ringing of the bells, are clearly aimed at highlighting the political gravity of these seditious episodes. There was no hesitation at Court in this regard. In a customary reaction against “guilty bells”, on 2 July 1773, the king ordered that the Honorata “be dismantled, and no other now nor at any other time be put in place, removing at once this unfortunate example that stirs the memory of such deeds” (Tort 1978: 354n25). Territorialization. Along with its exculpatory version of the avalot, this was the main strategy of the guilds in the conflict. In such a society, hierarchized according to status, the Diputación did not primarily invoke their status as artisans or artisan laborers, much less their plebeian status or even their status as pueblo, but rather their status as Catalans, defined by their membership of a territorially based political body—the Principality or province. This necessarily had to be a deliberated decision: at their first meeting, the deputies agreed to petition the king for pardon for the excesses of the 4th and for the exemption of quintas throughout the Principality, “to which end they resolved that the lawyers Drs. Vall·llosera, Garzoy, Camps and Sicard would work separately on the representation, and that they would then come together to review and choose from the four the one that seemed best suited to the public’s wishes”. This approach determined the axis of the guilds’ argument, rooting it in the traditions and interests of the Principality, in order to present compulsory conscription as an attack on an ancient freedom, which was also opposed to the welfare and usefulness of the public. A discourse of “national” legitimization was thus articulated, which facilitated the adherence of social sectors not personally affected because of their status—the nobility and the clergy—but concerned by their membership of a political body whose traditional liberties and economic interests were at stake. Regardless of the spontaneous adherents that might have been present— such as Bishop Climent (Tort 1978: 348–361)—it seems reasonable to think that their support for the cause also responded to a deliberate

15

BETWEEN REBELLION AND RESISTANCE: GUILD …

325

strategy of the guilds, which at each moment weighed up from whom and how to obtain support. In this respect, the support of the nobility is particularly significant: traditionally opposed to the guilds in local government, on this occasion, they supported the popular cause from the outset. Three of its most prominent representatives—the Marquis de la Manresana and the Barcelona regidores Don Ramón Ponsich and Don Francisco Novell, deputies of the Catalan nobility commissioned at the Court—were sent to Barcelona by the Count of Aranda with the task of contributing to a negotiated solution to the conflict, which in the end consisted of organizing a sorteo fingido o formulario (sham lottery) on 11 June 1773, with the sole participation of the young men previously arranged and paid for by the guilds. The Guild Deputation saw this solution as purely provisional and unsatisfactory and agreed to pursue its request for the exemption of quintas, “for which purpose a report and representation was drawn up setting out the harm that would be caused to the Arts and Crafts, together with others” (ibid.), which was sent to various influential figures at the Court, such as Don Ricardo Wall (Garriga Acosta 1997b: 730–731). But that solution, which in the end consisted of voluntary recruitment by means of a stipend, was the one that was de facto consolidated, with the argument, subscribed by Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes himself, prosecutor of the Royal Council, that “prudence dictates to let run what without harming the service is executed by agreement of the common, tacit or express” (apud Carrera 1947: 460; cfr. 459–462).

III The opposition of the people of Barcelona to compulsory military conscription took place between the explosive rebellion that broke out on 4 May 1773 and the tenacious resistance that lasted until July 1774, if these terms can be used to express the different concepts to which the two movements responded. Separated by the threshold of the bell tolling a somatén, the ultimate expression of the turbulent action, both moments were obviously part of the same process, but they had a complex and controversial relationship. It cannot be said that the initial collective action was a purely spontaneous and sudden episode, because it was preceded by petitions for exemption and protest leaflets, but it is quite remarkable that the rebellion was not a result but a presupposition and

326

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

in a certain way, a cause of the subsequent resistance, paradoxically legitimized by their guild leaders in rejecting any connivance with the revolt, which they did not hesitate to attribute to the ínfima plebs or to the unwitting muchachada. It is precisely the relationship between rebellion and resistance that separates the exculpatory narrative of the Guild Deputation from the inculpatory discourse that was written confidentially to oppose this movement. The strategy deployed by the Barcelona guilds to resist the royal order of compulsory conscription led to the constitutionalization of the conflict, in an identity-based way. As well as constructing a narrative explicitly aimed at claiming themselves as instances of order, they argued that it was contrary to the constitution of Catalonia, defined on the basis of history and political economy—in other words, in traditional but also novel terms. That institutional attitude and these constitutional arguments facilitated the support of Barcelona’s privileged classes and their defense before the Court. The Diputación did not speak only for the plebeian estate, which was directly affected by conscription, but in defense of an ancient liberty and for the public benefit of the province, appealing to the community identity or collective memory of the Catalans. A “class” conflict—if I am allowed the presentist licence—was transmuted into a constitutional conflict, although this does not mean that there were no notable disagreements ad intra, as was seen as soon as the problem of the quintas was deactivated. Placing the conflict at this constitutional level, we can say that the Court’s response was up to the task. The Royal Council was alarmed when it discovered, late and almost by chance, the existence of the Guild Deputation—which it defined as “a republican body incompatible with sovereignty”—and the web of complicity at the highest level that it had been weaving, under which would be hidden, in the words of the prosecutors, the project to “establish in Barcelona a democracy contrary to the laws and the constitution established by Philip V in the nueva planta of 1716”. In his analysis of the situation, he concluded that Catalonia was suffering from a “political illness”, as it revealed the proud spirit that rekindles and dominates in the hearts of the Catalans to return to the freedom of the ancient fueros , which for just and serious reasons have been revoked, and the desire that they very clearly manifest to be governed by different rules and laws than those common to the whole Nation, as if Catalonia were some other distinct Principality

15

BETWEEN REBELLION AND RESISTANCE: GUILD …

327

independent of the many that together make up the whole of this Great Monarchy, in which it can be seen that the Clergy, the Nobility and the People of Catalonia think in the same way, believing themselves entitled to enjoy more distinctions than the other Provinces. (Consultation of the Sala Primera de Gobierno of the Council, 18 November 1774: AHN, Consejos, leg. 6863, exp. 31, s. f.; registered ibid., lib. 1944, ff. 485v-512v; cfr. Garriga Acosta 1997a: n64)

However exaggerated or misguided it may seem today, the royal response was consistent with this diagnosis, which was more attentive to questions of principle than to pragmatic details. As was to be expected, the Council’s prosecutors made no secret of their repulsion toward this “despicable deputation of artisans” and defended a strongly repressive policy, which would have turned Barcelona into a theater of punishment (Garriga Acosta 1997a: 501–504). But the Court, displaying greater political sense, renounced personal sanctions and settled for the exemplary destruction of the rebel bell Honorata, which was never to be replaced, as well as severe admonitions and other reprisals against those most implicated (Tort 1978: 362–383). The three dispositions that officially brought this process to an end in early 1775 concentrated on declaring the guild Diputación and everything it had done null and void, canceling any acts granted by its deputies—“so that they are considered of no value or effect and cannot be alleged or taken as exemplary at any time”—and prohibiting them from mixing in any way “in public business of any quality whatsoever” (Reales Cédulas El Pardo, 8 January 1775: AHN, Consejos, lib. 3406, ff. 141r-149v; Sanmartí 5–15; Garriga Acosta 1997a: 507–509). For the rest, the nueva planta was restored, complemented by the adoption of some general government measures—mainly the creation of a Junta de gobierno del Principado, of course not at all “representative”—(Roura 2006a: 219–241; Garriga Acosta 2010). In short, the Crown was interested above all in short-circuiting the constitutional development that was underway in Catalonia, erasing the traces that the whole process had left in the collective memory of the Catalans and adopting measures to prevent its reproduction. In the course of the debate on collective political action that took place at Court in the wake of these events, a “fundamental constitution of the Spanish nation” was invoked to argue that the vassals had only the “glory of obeying” the dictates of the prince, with no other alternative but to represent in humble supplication. The pragmática on “turmoils,

328

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

or popular disturbances” that resulted from this in 1774, came to equate resistance and rebellion, considering any collective action as tumult and imposing unconditional obedience to the royal dispositions as a presupposition of any complaint, as well as prohibiting anyone from assuming representation that did not legally correspond to them (Garriga Acosta 2017). Was it enough? For the most radical, or maybe lucid, it was not enough to exclude the demands of constitutional significance, but it was imperative to eradicate their conditions of possibility, which they located in the economic vocation of the Catalans and which had an unmistakable social stamp. Some of the secret memoirs of military origin that chronicled the events found an inversely proportional relationship between well-being or material wealth and obedience, directly linking economic progress and a tendency toward “democratic government”. And there were those who, going a step further, placed the origin of the evils in the new industrial forms of production, arguing that the factories (especially of indianas — dyed fabrics), with their hundreds of workers, were a focus of subversion, from which the earlier riots and even the pamphlets that preceded them had originated (Grau i Fernández 2006: 80–84; 2011: 154–158). It is probably in these spheres of artisans and laborers, gente humilde del pueblo (humble and common people), where traces of a social memory (Wood 2013: 22–29) of the avalot and the whole subsequent process of resistance could be found, which the constitutional strategy of the Guild Deputation surely overshadowed and I understand resonates in the immediate debate on the guilds, animated on the Catalan side by the purpose of giving “political existence to a new order of members of the republic”, the plebeian estate (Garriga Acosta 1997b: 745–746). Be that as it may, I have the impression that, in the end, the constitutional conflict, functional to the “process of construction of political identity” (Benigno 1999: 196), prevailed in the protean collective memory—and in Catalan historiography.

Abbreviations ACA AHN AHB BC BNE

Archivo de la Corona de Aragón Archivo Histórico Nacional Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona Biblioteca de Catalunya Biblioteca Nacional de España

15

BPR BUB RA

BETWEEN REBELLION AND RESISTANCE: GUILD …

329

Biblioteca del Palacio Real Biblioteca de la Universidad de Barcelona Real Audiencia

Bibliography Albareda i Salvadó, Joaquim. 2014. De la resistència armada a la reivindicació política. In Catalunya, nació d’Europa, 1714–2014, vol. I De la fi de l’Estat a l’arrencada industrial, 1714–1814, dir,. Joaquim Albareda i Salvadó, 72–119. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana. Arnold, John H., and Caroline Goodson. 2012. Resounding Community: The History and Meaning of Medieval Church Bells. Viator 43 (1): 99–130. Auto-acordado. 1766. Auto-acordado de los señores del Consejo, consultado con Su Magestad, por el qual se anulan las Bajas de Abastos hechas ó que se hicieren en los diferentes Pueblos del Reyno por asonada, ó alboroto; [...] y se prescribe tambien la intervencion, que el Comun debe tener por medio de sus Diputados y su Síndico Personero en el manejo de Abastos, para facilitar su tráfico, y comercio, á fin de que por medios legales se pueda precaver con tiempo todo desorden de los Concejales. Madrid: Oficina de Don Antonio Sanz. Benigno, Francesco. 1999. Specchi della rivoluzione. Conflitto e identità política nell’Europa moderna. Rome: Donzelli. Cahner, Max. 1998. Literatura de la revolució i la contrarevolució (1789–1849). Notes d’història de la llengua i de la literatura catalanes, vol. I. Barcelona: Curial. Carrera i Pujal, Jaume. 1947. Historia política y económica de Cataluña. Siglos XVI al XVIII . Vol. II. Barcelona: Bosch. Carrera i Pujal, Jaume. 1951. La Barcelona del segle XVIII . Vol. I. Barcelona: Bosch. Corbin, Alain. 2013. Les Cloches de la Terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIX e siècle [1994]. Paris: Champs histoire. Corteguera, Luis R. 2002. For the Common Good. Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580–1640. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. De Benedictis, Angela. 2013. Tumulti. Moltitudini ribelli in età moderna. Bologna: Il Mulino. Elliott, John H. 1984. The Revolt of the Catalans. A Study in the Decline of Spain (1598–1640). [1963]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ephemérides. 2015. Treure’s el jou del damunt. La revolta de les Quintes (1773– 1774). Critical edition of the manuscript entitled Ephemérides comentáreas de la Quinta del Principado de Cataluña, de 1773, ed., Lluís Roura i Aulinas.

330

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya − Centre d’Història Contemporània de Catalunya. Fernández Albaladejo, Pablo. 1992. Fragmentos de monarquía. Trabajos de historia política. Madrid: Alianza. Garriga Acosta, Carlos. 1997a. Despotismo ilustrado y desorden social: la restauración de la Nueva Planta de la Audiencia de Cataluña (1775). Initium. Revista catalana d’història del dret 2: 485–516. Garriga Acosta, Carlos. 1997b. La enfermedad política de Cataluña: en torno a la Diputación de los Colegios y Gremios de Barcelona (1773–1775). Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 67: 721–748. Garriga Acosta, Carlos. 2010. Sobre el gobierno de Cataluña bajo el régimen de la Nueva Planta. Ensayo historiográfico. Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 80: 715–765. Garriga Acosta, Carlos. 2017. La constitución fundamental de la nación española. En torno a la Pragmática preventiva de bullicios y conmociones populares de 1774. In Historia en fragmentos. Estudios en homenaje a Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, ed. Julio A. Pardos et al., 737–746. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Garriga Acosta, Carlos. 2021. Députés du commun. Représentation et gouvernement des pueblos en Espagne (1766–1812). In Raison administrative et logiques d’empire (XVIe−XIXe siècle), ed. François Godicheau and Mathieu Grenet, 117–146. Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome. Grau i Fernández, Ramon. 2006. Antoni de Capmany i la renovació de l’historicisme polític català. Barcelona: Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat. Grau i Fernández, Ramon. 2011. Indústria urbana o indústria dispersa? El rerefons polític d’una polémica, 1773–1778. Barcelona quaderns d’història 17: 147–195. Hamon, Philippe. 2019. Le tocsin de la révolte: comment l’entendre? (France, XIVe −début XIXe siècle). Histoire, Économie & Société 38 (1): 101–117. Instrucción. 1766a. Instrucción que se debe observar en la Eleccion de Diputados, y Personero del Comun, y en el uso y prerrogativas de estos Oficios, que se forma de orden del Consejo, para la resolución de las dudas ocurrentes, con presencia de las que hasta aquí se han decidido. Madrid (printed). Instrucción. 1766b. Instrucción que se debe observar en la eleccion de Diputados y Personero del Comun y en el uso y prerrogativas de estos Oficios en el Principado de Cataluña, formada de Orden de su Exc. y Real Audiencia con arreglo à lo mandado por el Real Consejo. Barcelona, 9.VIII.1766 (printed). Laudani, Raffaele. 2010. Disobbedienza. Bologna: Il Mulino. Lluch, Ernest. 1970. La Catalunya del segle XVIII i la lluita contra l’absolutisme centralista. El «Proyecto del Abogado General del Público» de Francesc Romà i Rossell. Recerques. Història, Economia, Cultura 1: 33–50.

15

BETWEEN REBELLION AND RESISTANCE: GUILD …

331

Lucuce, Pedro de. 2002. Precauciones contra alborotos, motines y rebeliones en la plaza de Barcelona, ed. Lluís Roura i Aulinas. Vic and Barcelona: Eumo − Institut Universitari d’Història Jaume Vicens i Vives. Molas Ribalta, Pere. 1970. Los gremios barceloneses del siglo XVIII. La estructura corporativa ante el comienzo de la revolución industrial. Madrid: Confederación Española de Cajas de Ahorros. Moran i Ocerinjauregui, Josep. 2002. Cançó de L’avalot de les quintes (1773). Barcelona quaderns d’història 7: 177–190. Moreu-Rey, Enric. 1967. Revolució a Barcelona el 1789. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Pi y Arimon, Andrés Avelino. 1854. Barcelona antigua y moderna, ó descripción é historia de esta ciudad desde su fundación hasta nuestros días. Vol. I. Barcelona: Tomás Gorchs. Quaglioni, Diego. 1999. “Rebellare idem est quam resistere”. Obéissance et résistance dans les gloses de Bartolo à la constitution “Quoniam nuper” d’Henri VII (1355). In Le Droit de résistance, XIIe-XXe siècle, ed. JeanClaude Zancarini, 35–46. Fontenay-aux-Roses: ENS. Quaglioni, Diego. 2002. “Universi consentire non possunt”. La punibilità dei corpi nella dottrina del diritto comune. In Suppliche e “gravamina”. Politica, amministrazione, giustizia in Europa (secoli XIV-XVIII), ed., Cecilia Nubola and Andreas Würgler, 409–425. Bologna: Il Mulino. Romà y Rossell, Francisco. 1766. Disertación histórico-político-legal por los Colegios, y Gremios de la ciudad de Barcelona, y sus privativas. Barcelona: Thomas Piferrer. Roura i Aulinas, Lluís. 2006a. Subjecció i revolta en el segle de la Nova Planta. Vic: Eumo. Roura i Aulinas, Lluís. 2006b. Conspiració, fidelitat o utilitat pública? Notes sobre la crisi de 1766, a la ciutat de Barcelona. In Miscel·lània Ernest Lluch i Martín, I, 497–509. Vilassar de Mar: Fundació Ernest Lluch. Sagarriga, Juan. 1907. Dietario de Barcelona en la década de 1767 á 1777 según un manuscrito inédito de D. Juan Sagarriga, Conde Creixell, d., Cosme Parpal y Marqués. Barcelona: Publicaciones de la Academia Calasancia. Sánchez Léon, Pablo. 2020. Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain. From Crowd to People, 1766–1868. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sanmartí, Antonio. (n.d.). Colección de ordenes, relativas à la nueva planta de la Real Audiencia de Cataluña; [...]. Lérida: Viuda e hija de Escuder. Santaló i Peix, Jaume. 1997. L’avalot de les quintes de 1773, um exemple de resistència popular. In Moviments de protesta i resistència a la fi de l’antic règim, ed. Ramon Arnabat, 81–92. Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat.

332

C. GARRIGA ACOSTA

Simon i Tarrés, Antoni (1993). Pagesos, capellans i industrials de la marina de la Selva. Barcelona: Curial. Soldevila, Ferrán. 1962. Història de Catalunya, III . 2ª. Barcelona: Alpha. Swinburne, Henry. 1779. Travels Through Spain, in the Years 1775 and 1776. […]. London: Printed for P. Elmsly, in the Strand. Tello, Enric. 1990. Visca el rei i les calces d’estopa! Reialistes i botiflers a la Cervera set-centista. Barcelona: Crítica. Thompson, E. P. 1993. The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century. Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136. In Customs in Common, 185–258. London: Penguin. Torras i Ribé, Josep M. 1988. Protesta popular i associacionisme gremial com a precedents de la reforma municipal de Carles III a Catalunya (1728–1771). Pedralbes: revista d’història moderna 8: 13–25. Torras Ribé, Josep M. 2003. Los mecanismos del poder. Los ayuntamientos catalanes durante el siglo XVIII. Barcelona: Crítica. Tort Mitjans, Francesc. 1978. El obispo de Barcelona Josep Climent i Avinent (1706–1781). Contribución a la historia de la teología pastoral tarraconense en el siglo XVIII . Barcelona: Balmes. Vicente Algueró, Felipe J. de. 1987. El motín contra Squilace en Cataluña. Pedralbes: revista d’història moderna 7: 187–203. Viera y Clavijo, Joseph de. 1776. Noticias de la Historia General de las Islas de Canaria. […]. Vol. III. Madrid: Imprenta de Blas Román. Wood, Andy. 2013. The Memory of the People. Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zagorin, Perez. 1982. Rebels and rulers, 1500–1660. Vol. 1. Society, states, and early modern revolution. Agrarian and urban rebellions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zemon Davis, Natalie. 1975. The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in SixteenthCentury France. Past and Present 59 (1973): 53–91. In Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 152–187. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 16

Political Conflict in the Indigenous and Urban Worlds in the Late Colonial Andes Sergio Serulnikov

This chapter deals with social conflicts in Upper Peru, present-day Bolivia, during the second half of the eighteenth century. It aims to provide a general overview of the political processes that occurred within the indigenous communities and the urban world following the implementation of the major fiscal and political-administrative changes promoted by Charles III and his ministers.

This chapter has received support from the project “RESISTANCE Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, sixteenth-nineteenth centuries,” funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020, Research and Innovation Staff Exchange, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Grant Agreement No 778076. S. Serulnikov (B) Universidad de San Andrés-CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_16

333

334

S. SERULNIKOV

It is well known that in the case of the Andean peoples, resistance to imperial policies reached its peak with the massive rebellions led by Tupac Amaru in Cuzco, Tupac Katari in the highland provinces around La Paz, and the Katari brothers in the Charcas region. It was the most radical challenge to the colonial order since the Spanish conquest. Yet, the 1780–1782 uprising was not an isolated outbreak of violence but the culmination of long-term disputes between the Indian population and ruling groups at the local, regional, and imperial levels. These conflicts revolved around key issues for the social reproduction of the Andean community, such as the inner workings of the tribute system, parish fees, the selection and treatment of mita workers, the distribution of land among peasant families, and the legitimacy of ethnic chiefs. The protests tended to spread from village to village, combining calculated displays of force with complex processes of legal appeal. Although less spectacular than the Tupac Amaru revolution, which was essentially rural and indigenous in scope, the imperial programs also faced formidable challenges in the urban world, which in its own way would ultimately become a turning point in the region’s political history. As a result of the increasing marginalization of creoles in public office, the successive increases in the alcabala (sales tax) and other taxes, the state monopoly on tobacco sales, and the encroachment of the royal administration on the prerogatives of the cabildos (town councils), social groups in cities such as Las Paz, Cochabamba, and Oruro engaged in violent protests, all of which had a number of significant common features. Firstly, they were interconnected, so that what happened in one place had major repercussions elsewhere. There was no overarching protest movement in the sense that there was no central coordination or leadership, but there were widespread protests. Secondly, all the disturbances were prompted by the core policies of Charles III’s imperial administration rather than by specific abuses committed by colonial officials. Finally, although the main acts of violence were perpetrated by artisans, small merchants, and laborers, there was an obvious complicity between them and the patrician elites represented in the town councils. These were not revolts of a particular social sector or occupational group; instead, they involved the entire community. Taken as a whole, the processes of rural and urban social mobilization in the second half of the eighteenth century shed light on the relationship between the two aspects of the concept of resistance that motivate this volume. On the one hand, there is the repertoire of collective actions

16

POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE INDIGENOUS AND URBAN …

335

aimed at securing the material living conditions of the local population, their access to state institutions, and the recognition of their social status. These are the kinds of phenomena discussed in the seminal studies of James C. Scott (1985), Charles Tilly (1978), or Ranajit Guha (1983). On the other hand, there is the appropriation of a language of rights, such as the right to petition the king or, eventually, the right to resist the tyranny of the kings themselves, which was widespread in Old Regime societies. This has been the focus of studies by Arlette Farge (1992), Edward Thompson (1975), or David Zaret (1996), among others. I will argue that popular politics developed at the intersection of these two contentious practices. In line with one of the definitions offered in the introduction to this volume, resistance here refers to “forms of protest that blur the frontiers between the agency deployed from outside an institutional framework and the practices developed within this same framework.”1 Equally important, collective actions were not simply a reactive response to the imposition of the Bourbon absolutist model, aimed at preserving a certain traditional political order. Instead, they represented a radical subversion of the principles of legitimacy and operating rules of the government. The unidirectional, essentially non-dialogical nature of the colonial administrative apparatus was disrupted by longstanding and vigorous processes of politicization of power relations and a growing culture of popular contestation and dissent. Shifts in the ways of doing politics were coupled with a redefinition of the time-honored forms of social belonging. To fully understand this phenomenon, we must set aside rigid and reified images of identity in favor of relational concepts. The protests and collective practices that set the stage for the two major seismic movements in the late colonial Andean world (the Indigenous uprisings of the 1780s and the creole uprisings of the early nineteenth century) were not strictly speaking acts of identity expression that is the demonstration of the values specific to a group. Instead, they were what Jacques Rancière would describe as processes of subjectivation: the affirmation of the prerogatives of these groups to participate fully in the civilization to which they belonged, to participate fully in the category of human beings. Rancière states: “The logical schema of social protest, generally speaking, may be summed up as follows: Do we or do we not

1 This volume’s Introduction, p. 8.

336

S. SERULNIKOV

belong to the category of men or citizens or human beings, and what follows from this? The universality is not enclosed in citizen or human being; it is involved in the “what follows”, in its discursive and practical enactment” (Rancière 1992: 60). Resistance, once again, does not denote an autonomous or secluded sphere of beliefs, values, and social organization, much less “actions that were frequently invisible, individual and disorganized”—a kind of “infrapolitics” that James Scott described as the “hidden transcripts” of power relations—but rather a culture of popular contestation and dissent that was part and parcel of the political culture of society at large.2 As might be expected in a society structured around two complementary and yet contradictory cleavages—geopolitical colonialism and ethno-cultural colonialism—the specific modalities of this process of subjectivation were by no means uniform. In the case of indigenous communities, far from embodying a set of atavistic beliefs or a longing for an idealized golden age, political practices—both localized protests and the mass uprisings led by Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari—challenged what Indian historian Partha Chatterjee (1993: 18) has defined as the foundation of Western colonialism, what he calls “the rule of colonial difference:” “a modern regime of power destined never to fulfill its normalizing mission because the premise of its power was the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group.” In the cities, on the other hand, a mutation of the binary structure of the Spanish American baroque society began to take shape. Given the widespread cross-class opposition to the Bourbon imperial designs, the traditional division between the patriciate (composed of peninsular Spaniards and American Spaniards) and the plebeian sectors would give way to the emergence of more complex identity formations characterized by a greater degree of vertical integration of urban social groups, at the expense of the horizontal integration of white elites. At stake, therefore, was the Creole elites’ sense of belonging to the putative universal Spanish nation, not certainly in cultural and historical terms but rather as a community of equal rights. It is a phenomenon that unfolds in public debates about imperial policies, popular mobilization, ceremonial representations, and modes of social distinction. It helps to explain the fact that during the crisis of the colonial order, as the

2 See this volume’s Introduction, p. 6.

16

POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE INDIGENOUS AND URBAN …

337

historical literature has shown, it was the cities and their municipal councils (the most emblematic Hispanic institution of self-government) that emerged as the primary political units, representing the most tangible human communities forged by centuries of Spanish rule, especially when compared to the artificial nature of administrative districts such as viceroyalties or intendancies (Guerra 1992; Annino et al. 1994; Chiaramonte 2004).

Repertories of Political Contention in the Andean Villages The last century of colonial rule saw the steady erosion of the living standards of large segments of the Andean population. Beginning in the 1750s, King Charles III’s ministers had implemented a program of reforms aimed at transforming their overseas kingdoms into full colonial possessions. A series of measures were introduced that led to growing discontent among various social groups. These measures included increased Indian tribute quotas and alcabalas (sales taxes), a tax on liquor, the establishment of a monopoly on the retail sale of tobacco, and other exactions that affected indigenous communities as well as artisans, merchants, small landowners, and mestizo and creole tenants. Similarly, the repartimiento forzoso de mercancías, or forced distribution of goods, experienced a sustained expansion after its legalization in 1756. This was a commercial monopoly that forced indigenous peoples to purchase goods (mules, iron, rope, coca, and other items) from the Spanish provincial governors (corregidores ) at above-market prices. Although its rationale was to promote the commercialization of the peasant economy, indigenous communities were already deeply involved in Andean marketplaces. The dilemma for them was not a monetary versus natural economy, but a monopoly versus a free market. Demands for the abolition of this system grew increasingly louder, culminating in the great pan-Andean rebellion. The caciques, who acted as intermediaries in the distribution and collection of goods, were under immense pressure from both sides of the system, the Spanish provincial governors and the Indigenous communities. The legitimacy of many native chiefs, both those appointed directly by the corregidores and those who had hereditary rights, was severely questioned by the members of their communities. In addition to the effects of the Bourbon reforms, other economic phenomena would contribute to the erosion of the local population’s

338

S. SERULNIKOV

livelihood. During the eighteenth century, the prices of the agricultural products that the natives sold in the cities to pay tributes, repartimientos, and church dues dropped significantly. The portion of the harvests they could save to feed themselves became smaller each year. The slow but steady demographic growth made the communal lands seem less and less sufficient with each passing season, and land disputes with landowners, Andean noble families, and neighboring communities began to increase. The geographical epicenter of the social unrest coincided with the core area of the Potosi mita. By the time that Tupac Amaru had proclaimed himself the new Inca king, the great mining center of Potosí had entered a new cycle of growth. But the driving force was not the introduction of technological innovations or improvements in the supply of mercury and other materials, as was happening in the Mexican mining industry during this period, but rather more brutal and sophisticated forms of forced labor. In the Cuzco region, the transfer of Upper Peru to the jurisdiction of the newly created Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata in 1776 and the subsequent connection of the silver mines to the Atlantic Ocean disrupted the traditional trade routes that had linked Lima to the sierras of southern Peru and Potosí for centuries. The channeling of imports and exports through the port of Buenos Aires meant that the goods produced in Cuzco (sugar, coca, textiles) were less and less competitive in the Andean markets. The growing antagonism between the chorrillos (small-scale textile mills attached to communal lands controlled by the Indians themselves) and the obrajes (textile mills usually attached to Spanish haciendas and employing mostly semi-slave labor) was one of the results. Not surprisingly, some of Tupac Amaru’s first actions were to abolish the forced distribution of goods and the mita, and to “destroy the obrajes.”3 In short, the Andean communities found it increasingly difficult to cope with the burdens imposed on them. The corregidores, priests, and especially the caciques (whether hereditary or temporary) became the main targets of resentment. To make matters worse, class struggles were compounded by intense confrontations over the appropriation of peasant resources among the colonial elites. The crown, eager to increase revenues 3 Cited in Lewin (1957), p. 453. Some of the most influential books on regional and economic history include Glave and Remy (1983), Larson (1988), Moreno Cebrián (1977), Sánchez-Albornoz (1978), Escandell-Tur (1997), Spalding (1984), Tandeter (1992), Tandeter and Wachtel (1989).

16

POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE INDIGENOUS AND URBAN …

339

from its overseas possessions, sought to curb both the customary embezzlement of tribute by provincial governors and native chiefs and the traditional economic levies of the church on the Andean peasantry. This policy created a profound rift in the rural structures of government. Andean peasants knew very well how to exploit this conflict of interests in order to resist the abuses of power of their Spanish and ethnic authorities as well as the extravagant costs of the sacraments, patron saint celebrations, and parish offerings (the so-called ricuchicus ). Faced with mounting pressure from above, the corregidores, rural clergy, treasury officials, and high colonial magistrates did not hesitate to foment any indigenous grievance against the forced sale of goods, ecclesiastical dues, tribute collection, and the mining mita that might limit their opponents’ access to peasant surpluses. The combination of inter- and intra-class struggles over Indian labor and agricultural production led to a wave of social unrest that grew as the years of the pan-Andean rebellion approached. It is estimated that between the 1750s and the late 1770s, there were about one hundred local revolts throughout Peru.4 Yet it is the nature of these conflicts, not their number, that tells us most about the political culture of the colonial Andes. Far from being spontaneous outbursts of violence, popular uprisings were part of larger patterns of political action. Firstly, indigenous communities framed their demands in terms of general rights, since their grievances usually stemmed not from particularly abusive individuals but from state policies and broad socioeconomic trends. They were prone to believe that their causes of distress were shared by all others of their same social condition—and more often than not, they were right. Secondly, even the most confined protest could ignite a process of politicization because virtually, every social conflict in the eighteenth-century Andes forced the Indians to deal with various government agencies, confronted them with the gap between norms and power, and tested the balance of forces between themselves and their local rulers. In other words, there was no peasant uprising that was not preceded by lengthy legal appeals, and there was seldom a collective process of legal appeals that did not result in some form of collective violence. (Stavig 1999; Thomson 2002; Serulnikov 2003). If the legal battles tended to revolve around larger issues of political and economic rights, the process of enforcing the law was less about state 4 On the impact that the Bourbon fiscal reforms had on social conflict, see O’Phelan Godoy (1988), Golte (1980), Fisher et al. (1990).

340

S. SERULNIKOV

coercion than about local balances of power. In the Spanish colonial rural world, the intervention of the courts did not entail the renunciation of the use of force. On the one hand, the Indian appeals to the regional courts were perceived by all parties involved as an open act of defiance against the power of the rural authorities, that is, as an unmistakable sign of disobedience. As judicial procedures, on the other hand, did not provide for the use of independent law enforcement officers (the Indian plaintiffs themselves had to submit court orders to commissioned judges, who usually resided in the province), court battles to obtain legal redress (involving clerks, lawyers, and translators) were often followed by battles in Andean villages to obtain their enforcement.5 The appeal to Spanish justice, in short, was not motivated by, nor did it lead to, the peaceful resolution of social conflicts. In many ways, it amounted to a public declaration of war, the initiation of an open process of confrontation, or at least its continuation by other means. Finally, migratory movements between valleys and highlands, coresidence in Potosí while serving mita turns, community gatherings in rural villages to celebrate Catholic feasts, participation in urban markets and regional trade routes, and collective journeys to the cities to pursue lawsuits against local power groups all fostered lively channels of shared communication among native peoples. Social interaction helped spread information, grievances, and ultimately political unrest from one place to another. Thus, the Andean colonial system itself prevented the emergence of a localized worldview among the Indians, which has been defined for the peasantry in general as the “parish pump,” or, in reference to colonial Mexico, as campanillismo: “the tendency of villagers to see the social and political horizon as extending metaphorically only as far as the view from their church bell tower” (Hobsbawm, 1973, 8, Van Young, 2001, 483). To change their small world, the Andean peoples needed to engage with the world at large. What happened in 1780 is that they thought it was the world at large that needed to be changed.

5 On the specific operation of the colonial justice system in Mexico and Peru, see Borah (1983), Stern (1982), Walker (1999: 69–83), Serulnikov (2003).

16

POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE INDIGENOUS AND URBAN …

341

The Urban World and the Crisis of the Colonial Order By the late eighteenth century, the urban world underwent significant transformations. While these changes were not as overtly seditious as the indigenous movements, they nevertheless had a profound impact on the crisis of colonial rule and the subsequent transition to a republican order. This process, as has been mentioned in the introduction, interrelated various aspects. The first was the change in the way politics was conducted within the relationship between society and the public sphere. The second aspect was the erosion of the old division between the urban patriciate, the so-called “decent people” or “gente de razón,” people of Spanish descent, both peninsular and creole, eligible for town council offices, and the plebeian sectors, manual workers and petty traders, who were referred to, depending on their circumstances, as the populace, the plebeians, the bajo pueblo (lower classes), the cholaje (brown underclass) or, in reference to their presumed skin color, the castas (mestizos, pardos , blacks). Due to spatial constraints, I will focus on three cities of particular importance for the political history of the region: Oruro, the only urban center to join the Tupac Amaru movement; La Plata, the site of the first uprising within the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata against the established authorities after the abdications of Bayonne in 1808; and La Paz, the location of the most radical Creole insurrection of the time, the Junta Tuitiva of July 1809. In the case of Oruro, Fernando Cajías de la Vega’s studies have underscored the progressive breakdown of the binary model of Indian society based on the increasingly intense hostility between Creoles and foreigners. This hostility was expressed in constant struggles for economic resources, local power, and honor. Oruro’s main productive activity, silver mining, was dominated by local families. The great merchants and moneylenders, on the other hand, tended to be Peninsulars. They were the ones who financed the mining activities, extended credit to mine owners to purchase mercury (an essential material for extracting silver from raw ore), and controlled the long-distance trade with other Andean cities and the viceregal capitals—first Lima, later Buenos Aires. Mining could sometimes be very profitable, but it was subject to steep fluctuations. When the mining sector entered a phase of acute stagnation in the 1770s, the owners of the mines and mills were increasingly left at the mercy of the large moneylenders. They began to dub these moneylenders advenedizos

342

S. SERULNIKOV

(upstarts, foreigners) and judíos (Jews). Hence, in the collective imaginary (though not necessarily in practice), occupational differences and the resulting conflicts of interest became associated with people’s places of birth. The exclusion of the local elites from the office of corregidor in Oruro and the surrounding provinces, along with the increasing influence of the royal administration and its allies over positions in the city council, exacerbated the antagonism. Besides, the antagonism between creoles, or “fellow countrymen” (that is, people born in the town or assimilated into local society), on the one hand, and Peninsulars, or chapetones (outsiders, regardless of where they were born), on the other, was reflected in disputes over ethnic adscription and honor. Oruro was a town of about six thousand people, roughly one-third the size of Chuquisaca, where patricians and plebeians shared public spaces and daily life. Here, to a greater extent than in other colonial cities, the inhabitants had developed common cultural codes of dress and speech, the widespread use of the Quechua language, the celebration of Carnival, and the forms of entertainment and sociability. The long process of mestizaje affected both the phenotypic traits and the cultural practices of the local population. For the urban patriciate, this meant a growing identification with Oruro, their birthplace, their patria chica, their homeland; for the plebeians, a sense of connection with their superiors. To Europeans and creoles from elsewhere, Oruro’s elites were lowborn. One Creole from Lima, for example, was disturbed by the fact that one of the most distinguished patricians in Oruro would “show signs of recurring life with the uncouth Indians” and would drink and dance “with them wearing their own dress” (Cajías de la Vega 2004: 472). The history of this mining village at the time of the Tupac Amaru uprisings clearly illustrates these trends. As noted above, Oruro was the only area under the control of rebel forces where the creole groups had firm control of the insurgency and where the indigenous communities explicitly supported a coalition with white elites. Led by the Rodríguez brothers, wealthy miners and local landowners, the city’s residents (both patricians and plebeians) joined the indigenous communities to rise up in the name of Tupac Amaru against the royal authorities and the Spaniards in general. Unlike in other places, the Indians made a concerted effort to differentiate the Creoles from the Europeans, while the elite of Oruro treated the indigenous communities as formal allies.

16

POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE INDIGENOUS AND URBAN …

343

But while the alliance with the Andean communities and support for Tupac Amaru’s cause lasted only a few days, the alliance with the miners, artisans, and small merchants proved to be much more solid. Although there were tensions over the use of violence or the appropriation of the enemy’s expropriated property, the urban lower classes stood by the patricians of Oruro, first in the uprising against the colonial authorities and then in the war against the insurgent indigenous communities. Thus, in 1784, when the town council elites who had participated in the rebellion, and soon after rejoined the royalist faction were finally arrested and deported to Buenos Aires, some four thousand people—according to the estimate of a captain of the peninsular troops stationed in the city—immediately gathered at the door of the house of the main leader, Juan de Dios Rodríguez, “expressing great sorrow for the imprisonment of those men;” such was the turmoil that “the witness even feared a possible uprising:” “Father of the poor,” they called Rodríguez. The case of Oruro may be extreme, but it is not unique. In La Plata, a city with a very different socioeconomic structure from the mining town, there were also noticeable processes of vertical social integration. La Plata was a relatively small city (18,000 inhabitants at the end of the century) with limited economic development. However, it wielded vast political and intellectual sway due to the presence of the three main colonial institutions in the southern Andes: the audiencia, the university, and the archbishopric. As Ángel Rama has rightly pointed out, it was this type of urban center—the historic capitals of the viceroyalties and locations of the audiencias —that established the model for the Latin American baroque colonial city: urban communities based on the adoption of aristocratic codes of behavior and social dualism that mimicked the courtly lifestyle of their Iberian counterparts (Rama 1995: 32; Romero 1976: 85–91; Bridikhina 2007). In particular, the ministers of the royal audiencia of Charcas, the most powerful tribunal in the region, in addition to their broad judicial and administrative authority, enjoyed ostentatious ceremonial privileges, elaborate forms of etiquette, the public use of the robe, and other symbols of social distinction. Beginning in the early 1780s, the city experienced a series of political conflicts that led to an increasingly intense involvement of the urban population, including the lower classes, in state affairs (Serulnikov 2009, 2022). Unlike in other cities, the root cause of these confrontations was not fiscal pressure or the exclusion of creoles from public office, but

344

S. SERULNIKOV

another key aspect of Bourbon policy: the deployment of companies of peninsular soldiers in the major Andean cities following the Tupac Amaru revolution.6 Given that in Chuquisaca it was the militias, made up of both patricians and plebeians, that bore the brunt of the war effort, especially during the siege of the city by thousands of Indian peasants in February 1781, the decision to establish a permanent garrison a few meters from the Plaza Mayor for the first time since the sixteenth century was seen as an affront to the city’s ancient and recent services to the Crown. The arrival of regular Spanish troops in mid-1781 was followed by the spread of rumors and anonymous pasquinades about an impending popular uprising. As a result, a series of joint accusations were made by patricians and plebeians against army officers, ministers of the audiencia, and other royal officials. Several cabildos abiertos, open town meetings attended by patricians and artisan guilds, were convened. Cabildos abiertos embodied ideas of corporate representation and self-government like no other institution. Public ceremonies were held that emphasized the importance of the active consensus of the local population on government policies and the symbolic construction of the city as a subject of history and a collective political actor. All of these phenomena were in open contradiction with Charles III’s monistic conception of the monarchy and his ministers’ constant attempts to curtail the autonomy and prerogatives of the city council. In the years that followed, daily interaction with the Spanish troops led to confrontations of such magnitude that even in the mid-nineteenth century, elderly people in Chuquisaca referred to this period as a “before” and “after” in the city’s history (Gabriel-René Moreno 1996: 113–114). It is worth noting that the conflicts arose over seemingly mundane matters, such as affronts to the honor and masculinity of the inhabitants. These affronts included acts of violence perpetrated by the troops in the streets and taverns, their unrestrained advances toward the wives and daughters of patricians and plebeians alike, and other challenges to the patriarchal authority of the urban population. But it was not long before the close connection between the culture of honor and the system 6 I deal extensively with the late colonial history of the city of La Plata (also known as Chuquisaca) in El poder del disenso: Cultura política urbana y crisis del gobierno español, Chuquisaca, 1777–1809 (2022). An English version of this book is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. See also Serulnikov (2009).

16

POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE INDIGENOUS AND URBAN …

345

of government became evident. Grievances against the Spanish garrison quickly became a matter of political contention, mainly because it replaced the urban militias that had effectively fought against the indigenous rebel forces. In addition, soldiers openly carried weapons in public areas and enjoyed immunity from ordinary jurisdiction ( fueros militares ). Most significantly, their presence in the city was the outcome of a deliberate crown policy rather than a temporary response to a specific situation. The resentment was sufficiently intense to spark not just one but two popular uprisings against the military garrison, in 1782 and 1785, the first riots in Charcas since the time of the conquest. And, likewise, it was sufficiently widespread for the city council to become the institutional expression of the popular revolt, the voice of opposition for the entire community against the army, the ministers of the audiencia, and even the viceroy of Buenos Aires himself. As a result of these confrontations, numerous cabildos abiertos were convened, with the active participation of artisans and merchants. Town council officials were formally charged with the “atrocious crime of sedition” for attempting to “impose abominable ideas against the government in the minds of these unsuspecting and ignorant neighbors.” By order of the viceroy, the most prominent member of the Chuquisaca creole elite was taken prisoner to Buenos Aires. It could be argued that during this period, the cabildo ceased to function as a municipal administrative body monopolized by a group of notable families in a symbiotic relationship with the royal bureaucracy. Instead, it became a platform for political representation of the population, both the elites and the lower classes, in open opposition to the colonial authorities. With regard to disputes over gender and honor, it is crucial to emphasize that violations of patriarchal rights and the reputation of the urban population took on a double connotation: raising the question of whether low-class Peninsulars (such as the rank-and-file soldiers) could take over from the local aristocracy and place the defense of patrician and plebeian masculinity on the same footing. Hence, it could be contended that there was a relative democratization of honor as a result of the relative democratization of dishonor. More generally, the attacks on the honorability of the vecinos, both the elites and the popular groups, contributed to undermine the self-representation of the city as a hildago, courtly society, divided into Hispanic and non-Hispanic sectors: a kingdom among other kingdoms. Without losing their distinct group identities, Chuquisaca residents began to regard themselves as members of the same polity defined in opposition

346

S. SERULNIKOV

to peninsular policies and those who implemented, defended, and benefited from them. In short, they saw themselves as part of a full-fledged colonial society. There are few in-depth studies of the social structure of La Paz, the fastest growing urban and commercial center in the Andean region. It seems clear, however, that from the second half of the eighteenth century onward, a pronounced division emerged at the heart of the urban elite, based on their varying degrees of integration into local society. In her study of collective identities and political conflicts in this city, Rossana Barragán has shown that during this period, clashes between “peninsular Spaniards” and “patrician Spaniards” over public offices, economic resources, participation in militias, and ceremonial preeminence proliferated (Barragán 1995: 113–171). The first group consisted mainly of large merchants of goods from Spain (the so-called efectos de Castilla) linked to commercial houses in Lima and Buenos Aires; the second group was made up of merchants who sold imported goods in the regional markets and, above all, of hacienda owners dedicated to the cultivation and commercialization of coca. What separated them was not necessarily their geographical origin (there were Peninsulars and creoles on both sides), but rather their assimilation into the local community as expressed in kinship and social networks, economic activities, and their involvement in public affairs. It was the condition of settler, of “patrician” in the sense of belonging to the homeland (patria chica), that mattered. In the course of the mounting disputes that took place between the 1770s and the juntero movement of 1809, the cabildo became the main means of political representation for the patrician Spaniards. The lower classes were no strangers to this process. Their presence would be felt with special intensity following the establishment of the custom house, the increase in the rate of the alcabala from 4 to 6%, and the expansion of the coca tax. In March 1780, there was a violent popular revolt against these fiscal policies. The main protagonists of the riots were, as usual, the urban plebeian groups, along with itinerant indigenous and mestizo traders. However, as in similar cases, broad segments of society were involved in the protest. In fact, the urban elites, far from repudiating the motives of the uprising, called an extraordinary session of the town council, which ordered the closure of the custom house and returned the alcabala to 4%. The Visitador General del Peru and chief advocate of Bourbon policy in the region, José Antonio de Areche, condemned the actions of the town council and demanded that the measures be

16

POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE INDIGENOUS AND URBAN …

347

reversed. The council officials refused to back down (O’Phelan Godoy 1988: 195–201). One might think that the bloody siege of La Paz carried out a year later by thousands of indigenous rebels led by Tupac Katari would have quelled the internal dissension. It did not. Even under such dire circumstances, royal magistrates and residents clashed over their roles in organizing the city’s defense. The confrontation was epitomized by the two main figures of the time: the army commander of La Paz, Sebastián de Segurola, and the wealthy creole landowner, merchant, and future judge of the Audiencia de Chile, Francisco Tadeo Diez de Medina. The former denigrated the city’s prominent families as “insubordinate, insolent, haughty, affected, ignorant, and meddlesome;” the latter stirred up the local residents with expressions such as, “countrymen! The cause is ours, and must be defended as such” (cited in Barragán 1995: 144–145). The violent harassment by the rebel armies of Tupac Katari and the relatives of Tupac Amaru, as well as the terrible famines and epidemics that decimated the population of La Paz during more than three months of total isolation, did not prevent the underlying tensions in the city from coming back to the surface. It is possible to affirm that in Oruro, La Plata, and La Paz, a growing strife developed between the patrician elites and sectors aligned with metropolitan interests, including royal magistrates, large import merchants and moneylenders, treasury officials, etc. It is important to note, however, that the conflicts that arose involved more than just disputes over economic resources or competition for government positions. They extended into several other areas, such as political symbolism, notions of honor, militarization, collective identities, cultural practices, and the right to engage in public discourse about state affairs. It is in this context that the rising political engagement of the urban lower classes should be placed. Much remains unknown about the extent to which these realignments were accompanied by a process of social differentiation within the popular sectors in terms of occupational structure (guilds of artisans and merchants vs. unskilled workers) and ethno-cultural traits (mestizos vs. cholos, whose linguistic or phenotypic characteristics assimilated them to the indigenous world). However, it is worth noting that it was at this time, and throughout the nineteenth century, that the generic condition of mestizo seemed to begin to lose the purely pejorative connotations that had characterized it since the conquest. Mestizos ceased to be marked by the affirmation of what they were not—full members of neither

348

S. SERULNIKOV

the Republic of Spaniards nor the Republic of Indians —and by the negativity of what they were deemed to be—the anomalous, undesirable racial, and cultural by-product of the interaction between colonizers and colonized. Rossana Barragán has pointed out that for the urban indigenous groups, the category of mestizo began to appear as a means of social advancement and a symbol of status, while for the white creole elites, it took on “more neutral, less disparaging, and derogatory” undertones in line with their quest for new sources of political validation (Barragán 1996; Rivera 1996). It seems evident, at any rate, that the rise of new forms of collective identities and imaginaries was closely linked to the rapid expansion of politics, both elite and plebeian. The riot was its most dramatic, and therefore most documented, manifestation, but perhaps not the most significant. Looking at the full spectrum of practices and discourses, one notices the existence of a sustained critical reflection on the status of the republic, of the body politic of the city, within the framework of the monarchy. In other words, we find the emergence of a public political sphere, or, to avoid confusion with nineteenth-century European bourgeois society, of various domains of public life in which issues of common interest were discussed outside of royal and ecclesiastical supervision and control. Needless to say, this ideal was far removed from political practice— ancient imperial traditions remained vibrant and operative until the very end of Spanish rule. But it did reflect an organizing vision of power. As Gabriel Paquette has pointed out, “regalism’s emphasis on the subordination of all institutions to the Crown dovetailed with the Bourbon policy elite’s geopolitical and fiscal-military ambitions. It thus provided the overarching framework within which reform was contemplated. It structured debates on political affairs far beyond Church-State relations, catalysing the inaugural phases of government reform and decisively determining its subsequent trajectory, preoccupations, and rhetorical structures.” Bourbon regalism, the author concludes, evolved “into a multi-faceted, flexible ideology of governance which justified the extirpation of all obstacles, ecclesiastical and otherwise, which impeded the expansion of monarchical power and infringed on its unencumbered exercise” (Paquette 2008: 6–7). It was a concept eloquently articulated by the Viceroy of Mexico, the Marquis de Croix, in 1767, when he pronounced that “the subjects of the great monarch who occupies the throne of Spain should know once and for all that they were born to be silent and obedient, and not to discuss or

16

POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE INDIGENOUS AND URBAN …

349

express their opinions concerning the lofty affairs of government.”7 Two decades later, the viceroy of the Río de la Plata, the Marquis of Loreto, put it even more succinctly. Faced with the constant complaints and protests of La Plata residents, he instructed a new Intendant of Charcas to dismiss any kind of claim out of hand: “The government is not there to please these kinds of people,” he sternly reminded him (quoted in Serulnikov 2022: 32). In short, this was a vision of social order in which dissent had no place and, when it did emerge, it could do so only as an object of contempt. In counterpoint to this doctrine, a contentious political culture began to take shape. It questioned first the legitimacy of the Crown’s magistrates and then, after the imperial crisis caused by the fall of the Spanish monarchy in 1808, the legitimacy of the Crown itself.

References Annino, Antonio, Luis Castroleiva, and François-Xavier Guerra. 1994. De los imperios a las naciones: Iberoamérica. Saragossa: Ibercaja. Barragán, Rossana. 1995. Españoles patricios y españoles europeos: conflictos intra-elites e identidades en la ciudad de La Paz en vísperas de la independencia 1770–1809. In Entre la retórica y la insurgencia: las ideas y los movimientos sociales en los Andes, Siglo XVIII , ed. Charles Walker, 113–171. Cusco: Centro Bartolomé de las Casas. Barragán, Rossana. 1996. Los múltiples rostros y disputas por el ser mestizo. In Seminario Mestizaje: ilusiones y realidades, 63-106. La Paz: MUSEF. Borah, Woodrow. 1983. Justice by Insurance. The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bridikhina, Eugenia. 2007. Theatrum Mundi. Entramados del poder en Charcas colonial. La Paz: Plural Ediciones. Cajías de la Vega, Fernando. 2004. Oruro 1781: Sublevación de indios y rebelión criolla. Lima: IFEA-IEB. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chiaramonte, José C. 2004. Nación y estado en Iberoamérica. El lenguaje político en tiempos de las independencias. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Escandell-Tur, Neus. 1997. Producción y comercio de tejidos coloniales: los obrajes y chorrillos del Cuzco 1570–1820. Cusco: Centro Bartolomé de las Casas. 7 “1767 Bando del marqués de Croix, México, 25 de junio de 1767,” Memoria política de México, Doralicia Carmona Dávila, accessed 20 Jan. 2023, www.memoriapoliticadem exico.org/Textos/1Independencia/1767BMC.html.

350

S. SERULNIKOV

Farge, Arlette. 1992. Subversive Words. Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Fisher, John, Allan Kuethe, and Anthony McFarlane, eds. 1990. Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Glave Luis Miguel, and María I. Remy. 1983. Estructura agraria y vida rural en una región andina: Ollantaytambo entre los siglos XVI y XIX . Cusco: Centro de Estudios Bartolomé de las Casas. Golte, Jürgen, 1980. Repartos y rebeliones: Túpac Amaru y las contradicciones de la economía colonial. Lima: IEP. Guerra, François-Xavier. 1992. Modernidad e independencias. Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas. Mexico City: MAPFRE. Guha, Ranajit. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Larson, Brooke. 1988. Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia. Cochabamba, 1550–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lewin, Boleslao. 1957. La rebelión de Túpac Amaru y los orígenes de la emancipación americana. Buenos Aires: Hachette. Moreno Cebrián, Alfredo. 1977. El Corregidor de Indios y la economía peruana del siglo XVIII (Los repartos forzosos de mercancías). Madrid: Instituto González Fernández de Oviedo. O’Phelan Godoy, Scarlett. 1988. Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales. Perú y Bolivia 1700–1783. Cusco: Centro Bartolomé de las Casas. Paquette, Gabriel B.. 2008. Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759–1808, 2008. Cambridge: Palgrave Macmillan. Rama, Ángel. 1995. La ciudad letrada. Montevideo: Arca. Rancière, Jacques. 1992. Politics, Identification, and Subjectivation. October 61: 58-64. René-Moreno, Gabriel. 1996. Biblioteca peruana. Notas bibliográficas. La Paz: Biblioteca Fundación Humberto Vázquez-Machicado. Rivera, Silvia. 1996. En defensa de mi hipótesis sobre el mestizaje colonial andino. In Seminario Mestizaje: ilusiones y realidades, 45-62. La Paz: MUSEF. Romero, José L. 1976. Latinoamérica, las ciudades y las ideas. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores. Sánchez-Albornoz, Nicolás. 1978. Indios y tributos en el Alto Perú. Lima: IEP. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Serulnikov, Sergio. 2003. Subverting Colonial Authority. Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes. Durham: Duke University Press. Serulnikov, Sergio. 2009. Patricians and Plebeians in Late Colonial Charcas: Identity, Representation, and Colonialism. In Imperial Subjects: Race and

16

POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE INDIGENOUS AND URBAN …

351

Identity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara, 167–196. Durham: Duke University Press. Serulnikov, Sergio. 2022. El poder del disenso. Cultura política urbana y crisis del gobierno español, Chuquisaca 1777–1809. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. Spalding, Karen. 1984. Huarochirí: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stavig, Ward. 1999. The World of Túpac Amaru. Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru. Lincoln: University de Nebraska Press. Stern, Steve. 1982. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest. Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Tandeter. Enrique. 1992. Coacción y mercado. La minería de la plata en el Potosí colonial, 1692–1826. Cusco: Centro Bartolomé de las Casas. Tandeter, Enrique, and Nathan Wachtel. 1989. Price and Agricultural Production: Potosí and Charcas in the Eighteenth Century. In Essays on the price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America, eds. Lyman Johnson and Enrique Tandeter. 201-276. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press. Thompson, Edward P. 1975. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon Books. Thomson, Sinclair. 2002. We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. New York: Random House. Van Young, Eric. 2001. The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–1821. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Walker, Charles. 1999. Smoldering Ashes. Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840. Durham: Duke University Press. Zaret, David. 1996. Petitions and the ‘Invention’ of Public Opinion in the English Revolution. American Journal of Sociology 101 (6): 1497-1555.

CHAPTER 17

Precarious Freedoms: Slaves in Cuba Between the Late Eighteenth and the Early Nineteenth Centuries Claudia Varella Fernández

Even though its evolution was not entirely foreign to the Bourbon Reforms of the mid-eighteenth century, the Hispanic Caribbean is going to join the progressive collapse of the Spanish colonial system in America

The present text is part of the Project “Trafficking, class, and race” (AICO/ 2021/270) of the Valencian Government and I+D+i PID2021-128935NB-I00 by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ & “FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa”. It has also received support from the project “RESISTANCE Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, 16th-19th centuries”, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020, Research and Innovation Staff Exchange, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Grant Agreement No 778076. C. Varella Fernández (B) Departamento de Familia, Escuela y Sociedad, International University of La Rioja, Logroño, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_17

353

354

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

in a different manner. The War of the Seven Years set the precedent. Nevertheless, this evolution must be integrated into the Reforms equally. The important possessions of Cuba and Puerto Rico were kept separate from the movements of the rest of the continental possessions, which progressively reached independence with different national temporalities. The reason for this difference was largely due to the weight of slave property and its relation to the economy of the plantation. This work focuses on the complaint as a means of slave resistance in the Largest of the Antilles, within a context where Atlantic slavery was closely linked to the domination of industrial capital. The combative complaint, as an available resource for the enslaved person, who was a living commodity with agency, becomes significant within the perspective of a world system that explains the second slavery in terms of a rupture in historical change, and not only as a means of labor control in a global capitalist system (Tomich 1988, 103–117; 2003, 4–28; 2004, 2018, 149–164; Tomich and Zeuske 2009). The period under analysis is that of the transition from the Ancien Régime to Modernity in Cuba, which, together with Brazil, benefited the most economically from the slave trade for the exploitation of tropical crops. As a result, the Spanish Crown ensured the loyalty of the Cuban oligarchy by preserving slavery and tolerating the massive illegal trafficking of Africans as slaves until at least 1867. In this interstitial situation of the Hispanic Caribbean, the special conditions of illegality from 1820 not only guaranteed the supply of enslaved people for the cultivation of sugar and the preservation of plantations, but also increased it (Barcia Zequeira 2021, 271). Although enslaved persons imported from Africa should have been declared free from that year onwards, those born in Cuba or brought there continued to be subject to control that intensified depending on their stance on manumission, often leading them to resist despite significant hardships and having to use their own savings. These were times when Royal Decrees arrived by sea, and the commercial agriculture of the island was beginning to expand.

I Am Looking for a Master: The Immediate (or Never-Ending) Step Toward Freedom The legal disputes of enslaved people increased at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and this was linked to coartación, which essentially involved purchasing freedom in installments. Elsa Goveia (1969, 116) and

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

355

David B. Davis (1970, 294) proposed that coartación spread throughout the “Spanish islands” of America in the eighteenth century. Thomas Ingersoll (1991) noted the existence of specific enclaves in which the category of the coartado became relevant, such as “Cuba, Louisiana, and other underdeveloped places, the same colonies that were subject to an increase in the importation of slaves” (p. 181). To begin with, it is necessary to examine the functioning of the Cuban administration regarding manumissions, as this is where we can locate the field of forces in which slave resistance was contested. The concept of resistance used here follows J. C. Scott’s (1985) understanding, who based himself heavily on E.P. Thompson, including simple individual interest in meeting material needs as resistance. The fight for self-manumission was real and not a secondary form of resistance, as it challenged the dominant structure of domination: if slaves complained about their master and wished to leave them, it was an action with clear ideological implications about which rights were being consolidated, recognized, or rejected. Regardless of how individually disorganized, local, or unmethodical this resistance was, it clearly opposed slavery because, in terms of interest, it was a systematic resistance. Using this analytical tool of resistance, it is easy to see that enslaved people seeking coartación expressed the intention or will that their condition should be that of free men and women. For the study of this period, the reports given by slaves to their public defender, the city’s syndic, who was instituted for that function since the end of the eighteenth century, are crucial. In this first form of resistance allowed by justice, the depersonalization of the enslaved was absolute. However, it is possible to keep track of the complex intentions of the enslaved by focusing on the pattern followed by each of these individual actions of clear opposition by the oppressed. These texts, in which the protection of the authority is requested (an institution of repression as valid as that of the owner), begin with episodes of abuse that repeat themselves: trunks violently opened by the owners, saved money of the enslaved disappeared, demands for justice when they are sold without mentioning a previous lowering of their price, protests for having been asked for a manumission price higher than that of the buy…1 From the position of power, the argument is repeated that, in the absence of evident 1 Archivo Nacional de Cuba (ANC), Gobierno Superior Civil (GSC), Correspondencia sobre esclavitud. Años 1834–1842, legajo (leg.) 937, expediente (exp.) 33052.

356

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

abuse or excessive violence, there are no grounds for forcing a master to sell the slave. The complaints about lottery prices that were not claimed because of obstacles raised by the masters are abundant. Enslaved women who have been abused raise their voices, particularly those who ask for papel (license) to look for a new master… In this manner, as the pressure for abolitionism augmented, as did the illegal transatlantic trade, the extrajudicial disputes and attempts at conciliation also increased. The analysis of these texts reveals that the enslaved and their descendants were not always the agents of their own freedom: it was the master who fully appropriated them as merchandise and sold them or granted them freedom, which, if graciously done as a gift, was interpreted by both parties as an act of generosity. Therefore, it is important to isolate the role played by each one of the two actors in the structure of domination, as it was within this structure where the main conflict of interest arose: each party presented a discourse exposing their experience in relation to the case while unequally arguing/pleading to obtain fair compensation for the value of the enslaved person, using the laws that allowed, or at least did not impede, emancipation through payment or suffering it. The focus is not on settling the dispute about how much legislation protected the freedom of enslaved individuals or the degree to which they were aware of these protections, but rather on addressing the effective implementation of these laws and their limitations (Schmidt-Nowara 2004, 377–282). It is important to note the existence of institutions of justice for enslaved individuals (Amores 2009), as they provided some autonomy of action and negotiation around their freedom, allowing them to limit the abuses committed against them. Recent research has shown how enslaved individuals in East Cuba attempted to expand the legal category of “sevicia” (brutality) during the nineteenth century (Chira, 2021). A similar trend was observed in the case of coartación on the island, although the concepts of manumission and coartación are not entirely equivalent or synonymous. Coartados who gained their freedom were rare exceptions, as they often remained enslaved or only partially free, with their freedom not guaranteed after gradual emancipation (Varella and Barcia 2020). By the late eighteenth century, it had become customary for slaves in Cuba to search for work independently in the fields, towns, or villages. It was not always their masters who controlled their job searches, so they had a certain degree of autonomy in seeking employment independently. Despite the high demand for labor on sugar plantations and in related

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

357

services, there were still “negros de campo”, or rural Black workers. This was especially true after the decree of 1789 that allowed for free and direct trade with Africa and the introduction of the Código Negro or Instruction on the Education, Treatment and Occupation of Slaves that same year, which aimed to regulate the treatment of slaves and the practice of domestic slavery. However, this legal code was difficult to implement due to the ongoing Haitian Revolution since 1791 and pressure from Caribbean slavers. In fact, the regulations were only in effect for five years (Lucena 1996). Nonetheless, during this period, people of African descent in Cuba made significant progress in both becoming accustomed to filing lawsuits and realizing their right to do so. Employers had good reasons to prefer acquiring over buying a coartado slave, because there were also risks in this possession, in the acquisition of a partial slave: the owner had to deal with the slave’s will on the issue of claiming his rights. This implied less subjection to the master’s dominion, less obedience and greater need to deal with problems of effort, greater incompatibility with seamless forced labor as there was a possible demand on working conditions, salary deductions, recourse to legal sanctions, etc. In fact, the figure of the syndic makes sense also because masters could not always enforce (verbal) contracts with their slaves. Acquiring an enslaved person who was under coartación would entail contractual recourses for him/her, since they could look for new buyers if they were not satisfied with their occupations or with the treatment received in the context of these occupations. Job rotation could be very high in this group. Historically, enslaved people who were able to do so would rent themselves out, a practice that Spanish slavery had known and allowed since the sixteenth century with the support of the ordinances of Alonso de Cáceres (1574). In contrast, in Brazil, day laborer slaves had no institutional support. They were actually illegal until 1871, according to the Alphonsine ordinances of the thirteenth century that remained in force for so long. Despite this, the echados a ganar slaves (the expression in use) filled the streets with their boiling mobility, as these were the scenario of their lives. They even became the protagonists of very forceful explosions of resistance against the attempts to expel them from public spaces, such as the one staged by the Salvador de Bahia slaves who earned a daily wage and organized an important strike in the middle of the nineteenth century against the measures that constrained them (Reis 2019). The same happened in the southern United States, not only in cities: despite

358

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

being forbidden, especially in the nineteenth century, slaves rented themselves out frequently, sometimes answering to more than one master at a time (Morris 1954, 230; Turner 1995; Martin 2004, 161). The origins of the system of slave rental in Cuba had its roots in the defensive role played by the colony from the beginning of the colonial period. Thus, slaves were rented from very early dates, especially for constructing military works and developing shipyards. Renting themselves out to obtain a wage necessarily generated a space of negotiation that was by no means free of conflict. Anglophone historiography on the purchase of freedom among slaves who had access to enough money is based on the work of Aimes (1909), who established that in the Greater of the Antilles, the practice of manumission by payment and coartación were exactly the same, reconciling freedom with the conditions of the plantation system’s labor market by assuming that a coartado was free. This author pointed out that coartación was previously unknown in the Spanish legal framework because it emerged under the specific conditions of the island, with a developed legal culture supported by natural law influenced by the Church, and was later exported to other Spanish American colonies, associated with the right to seek a new master if the slave was mistreated. The practice of coartación emerged before the mid-eighteenth century, but according to Aimes, this occurred exclusively in Cuba. However, in reality, the cortes of slaves existed in the Iberian Peninsula since the Middle Ages and was later exported to the colonized American lands. Bernard Vincent (1987) notes the practice of coartación among unskilled rented slaves who often lived outside their master’s house and shared their earnings with them in Malaga during the Modern Age. The practice of self-purchase was recognized even in the diverse system of medieval slavery, although not mentioned in the thirteenth-century legal code Siete Partidas. These regulations specified how a person could be reduced to slavery and how freedom could be achieved, basing manumission on Roman Law. Andrés Díaz Borrás (2001) notes that slavery was a social category, while captivity implied an ideological nature (p. 19). In the Late Middle Ages, there were “tallats”, or enslaved people who were gradually emancipated through a written contract with guarantors. They committed to paying a weekly amount until the agreed value was completed, at which point they were free. These types of slaves rented themselves out to support their upkeep and fulfill their agreement. In the sixteenth century, the Llibre del mostassaf d’Eivissa (fol. 21r)

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

359

recorded fines and even imprisonment for the coartados who breached their contract (Ferrer 1995, 22). In such cases, they had to rely on their guarantors and be sold again for the same value as the first “corte”. This shows that the transitional situation between slavery and freedom, known as in statu libero in Roman Law, in the former Crown of Aragon included the strategy of paid gradual emancipation. The scheme shows similarities in nineteenth-century Nigeria: in the West African Fulani empire, negotiations called “murgu” took place, in which a slave paid fractions of money to their master with different periodicity depending on the agreement in exchange for future manumission. The system implied a kind of co-responsibility between masters and slaves, as the latter had to take care of themselves with the money they earned, an opportunity that was mainly given during the dry season when the slave’s work in agriculture slowed down. Paul Lovejoy (2011, 263) argues that under British colonialism, the “murgu” institution was essential in allowing for the transition to wage labor. In Cuba, the gradual dismantling of slavery would also involve coartación for the same reason, as it maximized the enslaved people’s money. As a system of manumission, the practice of coartación began to be seen as “a hindrance” as control over slaves was modernized.2 Being a coartado was not a prerequisite for being employed for wages. However, coartados who rented themselves out always aimed to reduce their coartación since the lower the cutting price, the less they had to pay the master. Under the still unofficial legal figure of coartación, a proportion of how much a wage slave could be demanded was recognized: one real per day for every 100 pesos paid on account of their value. Following this premise, a coartado had to pay 39% of their value per year (52 Sundays a year were not included in the calculation, only 26 days per month; one peso was worth eight reales). The majority of constrained slaves were domestic servants, earning wages while working in homes without this

2 The verb estorbar precisely describes the situation faced by the mother of Eusebia

(Claudia Méndez), a slave who belonged to the assets of a deceased person. In 1863, Claudia Méndez, who had already gained her freedom, paid 50 pesos for her daughter to request “coartación y depósito”, but her daughter was sent to a rural area to minimize her chances of becoming free: ANC, GSC, leg. 55, exp. 33822. Claudia Méndez por su hija Eusebia pidiendo coartación. 1863.

360

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

affecting their purchasing power, as the home and the street were compatible and intertwined work environments.3 Moreover, the urban and rural worlds were not compartmentalized. The links between domestic labor performed by slaves and capitalism have been noted in the case of American slavery (Finley 2020). By 1800, the Havana region hosted more than half of the island’s population, and within it, domestic slaves were commonly integrated into the slave system, as in other major slave societies of the Americas, where even the humblest individuals attempted to own slaves (Reis 2016; Schwartz 1974; Nishida 1993; Fuente 1990; Diaz 2000; Díaz 2001, 164–169; Rosal 2001, 500–508; Frank 2004, 18; Hünefeldt 1992). In Cuba, free women of color of childbearing age outnumbered white and slave women: masters emancipated more women than men, tipping the balance toward the natural increase of the free Black community, at least in the first half of the nineteenth century (Paquette 1988, 121). Concubinage contributed significantly to opening up the community of free people of color. During that period, women of color stood out as owners of enslaved Mulattoes and Blacks, particularly in Havana. It is also noteworthy that women were more inclined than their male counterparts to claim poverty to have fines waived for evading taxes on their slaves (Varella 2012). These were small-scale owners, also in British colonies, who declared themselves poor to reduce the tax pressure on their profitable domestic servants (Draper 2010, 207–208, 230). Significant historiographical gaps exist regarding the introduction of female slaves destined for the urban world in Cuba in the late eighteenth century. According to the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database, between 1790 and 1800, there were 26% of imported women compared to 74% of forcibly disembarked men on the island.4 Female slavery, with scarce supply, was concentrated in the domestic sphere but not exclusively; hence their possibilities of manumission depended on their employability as rented slaves capable of earning wages (Joda 2014). The leading role of female slaves in manumission strategies is well-documented in historiography (Cowling 2013; Schwartz 1992; Hünefeldt 1994; Aguirre 1995). 3 Archivo Histórico Provincial de Matanzas, Gobierno Provincial de Matanzas, Esclavos, leg. 38. Coartaciones (1818–1879). Box with uncatalogued records. 4 Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database, in https://www.slavevoyages.org/ Beginning in 1815, the importation of African female slaves increased due to rising demand.

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

361

In places where there was strong permeability between the countryside and the city, such as Santiago de Cuba, manumission data show no significant gender differences, as enslaved men were more likely to have greater purchasing power than in other regions (Belmonte 2005). Paid manumission prevailed over gracious manumission, which had a higher incidence of enslaved women as beneficiaries. However, donation-based manumission, as a grace from the master, was heavily conditioned for the future. This type of attainment of freedom was not easier when slave replacement options improved in a particular region, and it usually included a clause of subordination after freedom that guaranteed the continuity of the domination relationship. Despite this, this path was less used than remunerative manumission. The story of slave Hilario is a fragment of history that shows one of the earliest expressions of resistance, which was far from passive, although it was very different from strikes and rebellions.5 Hilario was a Mulatto, a climber of palm trees, and had his own “conuco” or small farm. Although he was a coartado, he did not refer to himself as such: the only marker he used to refer to himself was “brown slave”. Despite being rented, he was prevented from self-renting, which led him to experience “many hardships” in Santa María de Puerto Príncipe, now Camagüey. In 1761, he demanded a change of ownership and that he be sold at a fair price, not an arbitrary one, supervised by the institutions of justice, to another owner with whom he had previously negotiated the conditions for purchasing his freedom. The fair price for him was not the 400 pesos—which he considered excessive—that his owner had valued him at, but rather his “market price”, according to age, aptitude, and ability. He argued that his “precio practicado de mi persona” (actual price) should deduct “the wages that are commanded” of him. His owner, who had inherited him from his mother-in-law, had the main complaint that Hilario had been absent from the plantation for four years. The appraisal of slaves was a battlefield when it came to disputes with the rights of waged slavery, including the possibility of gradual manumission. The incidence of the claims was concentrated in Havana, although it radiated throughout the island where, unlike in other Latin American territories, authorities were created to deal with them. The syndics 5 ANC, Intendencia General de Hacienda, legajo 508, nº 21. Don José de la Concepción y Cisneros promueve justificación sobre el valor del esclavo nombrado Hilario por haberse dispuesto se le diera la libertad. 1762–1763.

362

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

dynamically mediated between the masters and their enslaved property. The coartados could work for themselves at least two days a week, in addition to Sunday if they wanted; while a day laborer slave, who earned a daily wage, could only work for his/her own benefit one day a week. Thanks to the right of coartación, the cohesion of the enslaved population grew and some of the basis of their dependent labor relations were undermined as a result of the rebellious actions involved, both directly and indirectly. Even in Andalusian societies, during the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, enslaved individuals went to court to avoid remaining in bondage when they became part of an inheritance that impeded their freedom (Franco Silva 2000, 58). In the notarial records of Seville, it is notable how frequently the manumitted slave was neither entirely free nor entirely enslaved, as they remained legally bound to inheritances and subjected to the service of the heirs. This manumitted slave closely resembles the coartado of colonial Cuba, whose owner was required to honor the price agreed upon with the slave for their manumission, which, in turn, compelled the owner not to alter that agreed sum when selling the slave. From those inheritances in which enslaved people became a part of an embargoes property or the unexpected property of an intestate, disputes began. An example of this pattern of conflict derived from intestates is highly representative: in a particular case from 1782, it was discussed whether an enslaved woman named Rosa, who had been in the service of the family even before the deceased father’s passing, belonged to the family’s orphan.6 The minor’s guardian, who is their grandfather, speaks of the malicious intentions of the deceased brother, who intends to subrogate the captive by exchanging her for another. The truth is that Rosa cooked, washed, and ironed for the family, and those domestic functions with which she assisted were precisely what the ward needed. However, Rosa was entitled to be free because she had managed to obtain her freedom by presenting the amount of 300 pesos at this juncture, which appears to be a double-edged sword for her. After all, she could gain her freedom but could also easily lose it.

6 Audiencia de Santo Domingo, leg. 109, exp. 3. Cuaderno relativo a los incidentes del intestado de Bartolomé Gavilán seguidos sobre la libertad de una negra llamada Rosa (1782–1783).

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

363

The question was not whether the servant Rosa was entitled to her rights or not, but rather whether any other slave from the estate could perform the same functions to resolve the dispute. This is where the family discussion over the replacement of Rosa began. The plaintiffs claimed to have very specific needs that Rosa fulfilled, even if they were apparently basic, as expressed in the legal records by the legal guardian, The scarcity of clean clothes, not having someone to cook their meals, and having no one to attend to their personal hygiene: would it be tolerable to see them dirty and unkempt because they do not have a slave to wash their clothes at night? Would it be bearable to hear them cry because they do not have a slave to prepare their meals on time and beg to get all of this done?7

A clear explanation of what it meant to lack assistance demonstrates how coartados were an important labor force. Like male captives, enslaved women strongly asserted their desire for freedom. Rosa is a miniscule example of the multiple experiences of resistance that delineate the survival strategies of enslaved people. The way for these subjects to avoid being socially excluded in their non-conformity with inheriting the legal status of slaves followed the cultural step of conquering greater levels of dominion over themselves. This was gaining more and more momentum. In early nineteenth-century Havana, Creole enslaved women became the most involved in coartación processes. It was not by chance that laundresses, seamstresses, cooks, and wet nurses were prominent in this movement. The gender dimension is essential because the productive and reproductive spheres were interconnected and because racialized work perpetuates in women tasks that were “feminized” in colonial contexts. Concepción Borrego, an African slave, considered herself a paid slave and was motivated to demand reimbursement for her son’s food expenses in the capital of a colony that was the richest in the world during the nineteenth century. She argued that when she was in servitude to Don Tomás Osorio, she gave birth to a child whom she breastfed, even though she was officially sold without her son when he was only nine months 7 Las escaseces del vestido limpio, de no tener quien le guise la comida, y que le atienda en todo lo que concierne a su aseo: ¿será tolerable verle susio (sic) y desaseado por no tener una esclava que le lave por la noche la ropa? ¿Será sufrible oírle llorar por no tener una esclava que a su tiempo le componga la comida y que mendigue para conseguir todo esto? Ibidem.

364

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

old.8 This act by the master, a sergeant in the military hospital of San Ambrosio, was an act of interested condescension. When Concepcion’s son turned two years and five months old, “he was violently snatched away and sold for 4 ounces of gold, ignoring the very just claims of the applicant about the two years and five months that she fed [the slave of another]”. In 1835, Concepción gathered her strength and anger, and calculated the total cost of maintaining her son, claiming 18 ounces of gold. Osorio, who may have been the child’s father, rejected her demand and asked her to provide a witness of her expenses. Concepción replied to the syndic, José Guerrero, that no one could know. As usual, the proceedings were archived in favor of the master, and the syndic concluded that it was “an unproven and implausible action”. Nevertheless, “out of pure consideration”, José Guerrero, leading her defense, managed to force Osorio to give the slave a total of 25 pesos, which was equivalent to half an ounce of gold for each month of breastfeeding until the sale. This amount represented only 6.12% of what Concepción had requested.9 Initially, institutional consideration for the slave was backed by the guiding ideology of that society, based on inveterate custom, a concept that was extrajudicial. In the legal and intellectual framework of the Ancien Régime, custom was a source of law, referring to social practices and usages recognized by most of the population that had a continuous duration in time (at least twenty years) and space, particularly at the local level (Muñoz 2015, 76–77). When faced with the requests made by the slaves, recognition of their dignity followed a protocol and was given. However, what was repeated in the courts could create jurisprudence, but outside the courts, the repetitive custom, both of coartación and of paying wages to the captives, was colliding with a new ideology and a new reality. It is important to frame the emergence of policies for judicial protection of slaves in the late eighteenth century, as it was during this time that the colonial state placed emphasis on blurring the private sphere of slavery in order to facilitate greater productive flexibility for enslaved individuals.

8 A scribe named Rafael Almeyda signed on behalf of the petitioner: ANC, GSC, leg. 937, exp. 33052. Correspondencia sobre esclavitud. Años 1834–1842. 9 Ibidem.

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

365

Peculiar Like the Peculium Coartación and the funds required for it were predicated on the attributes of the fragile legal personality of the slave, which was illuminated by customary law. Although dominica potestas prevailed by law, the social practice of slaves obtaining freedom, presenting petitions, and ultimately navigating the laws by seeking the aid of representatives of justice to claim their rights was accepted by custom. Therefore, custom was an anchor of rights (Belmonte 2013, 65–92). Medieval Castilian laws were so favorable to freedom that they stated: “it will be achieved by any (sic) serf who presents to his lord the just price for it, for which purpose our laws have provided some means” (Álvarez 2008, 101–102). One of those means sought to be made universal in Spanish America in 1789 was not coartación, but rather “two free hours a day to be used in manufacturing that yields personal benefit and usefulness [to the slave]”, as it was believed that they had a right to “some truly personal peculium”(Dougnac 2008, 117). Among purely American legal codes, the French Code of 1685 was a forerunner in limiting the master’s power to manumit slaves without prior consultation with official bodies (Hall 1996, 122). In Cuba, the law eventually recognized the forced expropriation of a coartado from a master who met certain requirements. This issue first arose in 1768, when sales of coartados in Cuba were subject to taxation for the first time (Lucena 1999). After the British conquest of Havana (1762–1763), concerns about the economic exploitation of the colony grew, leading to many doubts about how to apply the alcabala (sales tax), an indirect tax on sales and purchases introduced in Hispanic America at the late sixteenth century, to the exercise of coartación. As coartación implied the right to change ownership on the part of coartados, a problem arose because, theoretically, the seller, who was still the owner of the slave, should have paid the alcabala. Colonial authorities were disoriented because requiring an involuntary seller to pay the tax seemed unfair.10 10 Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Cuba, 1049, carta nº 167. Carta del Gobernador de Santiago de Cuba, Marqués de Casa Cagigal, al Capitán General de Cuba, Antonio Mª Bucarely, acusando recibo sobre lo que debe obrarse en la exacción de derecho de los negros coartados. 28th of October, 1768; ANC, Correspondencia de los Capitanes generales, leg. 16, exp. 56. Carta de Antonio Ceferino Paumier al Marqués de Casa Cagigal, relacionada con la observancia para la exacción del derecho de alcabala para la venta de esclavos coartados. 21st of December, 1768.

366

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

The legal context was influenced by the experience of the British siege and the need to promote a vibrant urban economy with a large number of free people of color. By the end of the eighteenth century, the practice of changing ownership was widespread in Cuba and all colonies with a strong wage-based economy (Petit et al. 1947, 228–229). In 1818, the municipality of Havana even requested the Spanish Crown to abolish the lottery game to prevent fortune from continuing to favor free people of color. Contrary to this demand, the director of the Royal Lottery pointed out that its main benefit was “the emancipation of slaves”.11 Certifications of freed slaves were requested from all public notaries of governance and war to report on the “savings or freedoms of slaves” in the biennia 1809– 1811 and 1814–1816, and to make a comparison. The notaries’ delay in submitting the documentation was notable, and the legal proceedings subsequently stopped. The notaries used the pretext of needing to know the actual number of African landings that occurred after the slave trade boom between 1809 and 1811, probably because those figures were also missing. Under the guise of smuggling, they wanted to argue that the proportion of manumissions in relation to the total number of slaves was not as significant. Around 1800, Cuba was estimated to have had 212,000 slaves compared to 114,000 free people of color (Reid 2004, 41). Slave owners sought to establish themselves from the beginning with the argument of preventing racial conflicts. However, the primary motivation became fiscal: the alcabala had to apply to the coartado in the sales phase. In contrast, the coartado in the process of purchasing their freedom was exempt from the tax. Exempting purchases of freedom from the alcabala amounted to exempting a small segment of the slave population from paying. This gratification, like the exemption from the alcabala tax for the first purchases of slaves, encouraged a thriving slave trade. Ultimately, exempting the payment of the alcabala tax was a way to stimulate the sale and circulation of slaves.12

11 ANC, Intendencia General de Hacienda, leg. 967, exp. 28. Expediente promovido por el señor juez conservador Director de la Real Lotería sobre que los escribanos públicos faciliten con el fin que expresa certificaciones de los esclavos libertados en los años que menciona. 1819. 12 In 1800, the Royal Philippine Company was also exempted from the alcabala tax for the slaves it introduced into the Viceroyalty of Peru and the Kingdom of Chile. R. C. prorrogando el comercio libre de esclavos y eximiendo a la compañía de Filipinas del pago de alcabalas por vender negros, 4 de septiembre de 1800 (Lucena 2005, 279).

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

367

In Cuba, therefore, the payment was preserved for the majority of cases, which were the sales of coartados. In practice, there was an express agreement that this taxation would fall on the slave himself, which is why the Royal Decree of 27 October 1790 was issued to eliminate this obstacle to freedom, declaring that no manumission would be subject to the payment of the alcabala tax in any dominion of the Indies (Mejía and Córdoba 2017). There is no evidence to suggest that the alcabala on coartados was regulated outside of Cuba. In Peru, for example, no legal stipulation obliged the master to sell a slave: the right to claim to be bought by another master was decreed by Bolívar in 1824. It remained the subject of debate until its repeal in 1831. (Remember that slavery was not abolished there until 1854) (Aguirre 1995, 189, 230). María Elena Díaz traces the origins of coartación in Cuba to a royal edict of 1673 (Díaz 2000, 75). This edict offered slaves of the king from the community of El Cobre, located in the eastern mining region, “the possibility to purchase their freedom in instalments after an initial payment of 25% of their value”, or to be taken to Havana to work on the construction of the city’s walls. According to Díaz, these unique serfs, who were vassals of the king, were given a choice between a right to self-purchase recognized by tradition or being transferred to the capital for defense works (p. 256). However, none of these slaves chose the first option. In the community of El Cobre, free and slave labor were intertwined and confused, and gradual emancipation played a role in shaping the profile of slavery in the mines of Santiago del Prado. It is relevant to connect the “slaves of the king” with the privilege of coartación. These slaves had already been working on the fortifications of Havana since very early times, during the reign of Philip II (Marrero 1987, 155). At the end of the eighteenth century, many royal slaves were still working diligently on the secular continuation of those fortifications, which became much more urgent due to the British invasions and the reactivated war in 1796, thanks to the Royal Company of Commerce of Havana.13 In this context, María Elena Díaz raised the need to investigate the plea of the cobrero slaves (slaves who worked in the copper mines of El Cobre) to be allowed to stay in the village even if they paid 13 AGI, Cuba, 1152, carta nº 212. Relación de personas trabajando en las fortificaciones. 1774, The slaves or the king are, by far, the most numerous in comparison to those who were banished from other parts of the Americas, free Mulattoes and Blacks, and privately-owned slaves: Ibidem, years 1779 y 1780: AGI, Cuba, 1239, carta nº 128.

368

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

tribute, especially since there was a letter in which they asked for the right of coartación (Díaz 2000, 362). Was it not their choice to either buy their freedom or be sent to build walls? Díaz added that only since the 1740s did they start significantly buying their freedom, especially the men. The mobilization of the Crown slaves through the courts made the content of that documentation very disturbing. Upon analysis, the error was revealed, as will be seen in the following transcription. The decree was to come to the knowledge of Francisco Rodríguez de Ledesma, then Captain General of the island, and the judges and officials of the Royal Treasury. Carlos II determined that it was best to sell the mines, and if there was no one to buy them. Grant them for ten or twelve years to some neighbour to benefit them on their behalf, with the condition that after another time, they will return to run them on behalf of the royal treasury [illegible] to all the people who have had other mines under their responsibility and that while they adjust the two hundred and seventy-five slaves that were purchased for their labour, they should be cut even if they pay the price in instalments (...) Given that the slaves in these mines belong to the royal treasury, it will be more useful and convenient for those who do not want to be cut and buy themselves to be applied and transported to work in said enclosure, avoiding selling them, which will save the wages of the labourers. This must be considered as long as they are not needed for defence.14

If there was an unequivocal tradition in the seventeenth century, as has been pointed out, it was that of the slave who se corta. Mining work came to a halt for a span of three years after the edict of 1673. This stagnation was not due to a collective liberation, but the damage was of the same magnitude, as copper metal was essential for smelting—artillery and currency depended on it. It was warned that the few slaves who were 14 La de por diez o doze años a algun vecino para beneficarlas por su quenta con calidad de que passado otro tiempo buelban acorrer porquenta dela real hacienda [ilegible] a todas las personas que antenido a su cargo otras minas y que enquanto a los doscientos y setentaycinco esclavos que se compraron parala labor deellas los benda ajustando con ellos que se corten aunque sea pagando el precio aplassos (…). Supuesto que los esclavos que ay en dichas minas pertenecen a la real hazienda sera mas util y conveniente que los que no se quisieren cortar y comprar ellos mismos se apliquen y conduzcan para que trabajen en dicha cerca evitando venderlos con lo cual se ahorrara el jornal de los peones y questo a de ser atendiendo a que no hagan falta para la defensa.The italics are mine; the original spelling has been kept: AGI, Santo Domingo, 1631, fol. 279.

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

369

still there, who had not been sold or were not in Havana, were “like pigs without working in the service of the mines or in any other ministry”, but the king did not want them to be disturbed.15 The triad of the origin of gradual emancipation arises from the pressure that could be exerted by slaves who belonged to the king when Cuba was not yet a slave-holding economy: cuts, royal gifts, and “siervos horros”. Slavery in Cuba as a variant of non-free labor compatible with wage labor is representative of the evolution of slavery in the Antilles after Cuba replaced Saint Domingue in the world market. There is a common denominator throughout Latin America in the affirmation that the narrative of a benign slavery cannot be argued by wielding the protagonism of manumission. The enslaved people, in the immense heterogeneity of their experiences, made use of their right to claim pragmatically without the results always being optimal for them. It should also be noted that the efficiency of the plantation regime in Cuba made manumission a more complex strategy of resistance. The singularity of the search for freedom as a mechanism of resistance both in the Hispanic Antilles and in Latin America in general, has been endorsed by historians such as Herbert S. Klein (2013). Yet, everywhere, manumission had been designed to reinforce slavery (Blackburn 2009, 11). On the other hand, the degree of knowledge of the legislation on the part of enslaved persons was as high in Cuba as in the rest of Iberian America, such as Argentina, as Magdalena Candioti (2021) has recently demonstrated. Can it be considered that enslaved people with coartado status were treated well? The casuistry is multiple, I insist, but in general there was coercion and abuse. A further proof is that, at the end of the colonial period, there are cases of enslaved people who denied coartación so as not to spoil a possible manumission. The key issue that all records point to is the contradiction created by the convergence of a colonial policy of good treatment of slaves with, at the same time, an escalation of the progressive concentration of slaves in plantations. With the increase in slave prices after 1844, and after the impact of the slave rebellions in that period, good treatment was put as a premise by the slaveholders themselves to lengthen the life of the slaves on the plantations and avoid further disorders against the status quo (Sanjuan-Marroquin and RodrigoAlharilla 2023, 16). Meanwhile, the incidence of punishing the urban

15 Ibidem.

370

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

slaves by sending them to the fields increased exponentially. Not surprisingly, the problem of coartación in the fields reached its greatest heights after 1859. In the relations between masters and slaves, freedom played the most prominent role, but not all enslaved persons had the purchase of their freedom at the forefront of their goals. From a certain period on, coinciding with the prelude to the civil war in the United States, the fundamental goal of a slave with mobility in Havana was to avoid being sent to a sugar plantation by activating the coartación process. Manumission has been universalized as the fundamental goal of any person subjected to the legal status of slave. However, with the rise of the sugar industry, far-reaching changes occurred in the conception of freedom on the part of Afro-descendants that contradict the leitmotiv of manumission as their only desire and motivation. Ensuring control of wages, personal well-being, or avoiding being transferred to the countryside were also among the main motivations of the enslaved population, without the objective being, therefore, to buy their own (or their loved ones’) freedom.

Conclusions By the end of the eighteenth century, as the concern for promoting economic activity and improving public finances grew, the definition of the coartado emerged and spread. The coartado was a slave who could not be sold without their own consent to another owner, having delivered a sum of money as a down payment for their purchase of freedom in installments. However, formal access to freedom in the colony was not regulated until 1842, when another prerogative was added to the previously mentioned one, as it was already consolidated: coartados had the right to change their owner at their own will, regardless of their owner’s will. This right to change ownership, to obtain “paper” to seek a new owner, was conquered from below through lawsuits, legitimization, and self-definition. Additionally, urban coartados were subsumed into the sphere of day labor slavery, where manumission could be accelerated, and changes of ownership were frequent without any promise of freedom. The owner’s incentive to improve their material condition through their slaves’ income also played a role. The expectation of freedom created by the process of coartación was less precarious than the actual freedoms obtained through it. The petitions expressing the complaints of the slaves

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

371

demonstrate that freedom was not the rigid antithesis of slavery, as there was a great diversity in the ways of being free if one was of African descent. Institutional support was key. Not being coartado when one could be so symbolized resistance to the potential loss of savings, to the possibility of wasting them. Why were not all day laborer slaves, “thrown to earn”, coartados ? Sometimes, the captives themselves were not interested in having to beg for a reduction in the amounts in which they were gradually emancipated or recoartados: it was common for owners to increase their value by at least a third at the moment the self-purchase process was activated. Such was the imposed subjection on them that, even bordering on legal personhood, urban slaves as a whole did not want to expose themselves to something that represented a great risk: either spoiling their relationship with their owner or being subjected to an excessively high appraisal as a result of the former. To formalize the act of coartación, as the phenomenon multiplied, two appraisers began to be assigned, one on the owner’s side and the other on the slave’s side, since it was extraordinary for them to agree. In fact, as it was usual for them to disagree with each other, the intervention of a third expert appraiser was regulated. The logic of litigation was primarily assumed by individuals with wellestablished socio-economic positions. In the first half of the nineteenth century, conflicts between syndics, defenders of slaves, and mayors were symptomatic of the fact that there were very diverse and conflicting orders regarding coartación, since the primary contents of customary law had not yet been codified. This codification, which involved a plurinormativity, served as the differentiating factor during the turn of the century. Solutions could no longer be specific but rather generalizable and have a social impact. The syndic was a municipal authority responsible for ensuring that the rights of the slaves were respected. Progressively, there was a growing feeling on the part of the syndics that the defense of the slaves was being unjustly hindered. What tended to be recognized was the social acknowledgment that a slave could find coartación as a means to make their servitude less oppressive. If impartial, the syndic could become a defender of freedom, as freedom was “protected by all rights” and was “an

372

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

invaluable asset”, a “sacred object”.16 However, only in the second half of the nineteenth century did the requirements provided by coartación laws crystallize. From a systemic perspective, it is observed that the practice of manumission changed with the intensive exploitation of slave labor, and those enslaved had to adapt to these changes, facing masters who were defensive due to the existence of legislators that protected slaves. This confrontation through the justice institutions is a good example of peaceful rebellion, a resistance from within, that is remarkable and unique in Atlantic slavery.

REFERENCES Aguirre, Carlos. 1995. Agentes de su propia libertad. Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud, 1821–1854. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Perú. Aimes, Hubert H. S. 1909. Coartación: A Spanish Institution for the Advancement of Slaves into Freedom. Yale Review 27: 412–431. Álvarez, José M. 2008. Instituciones de derecho real de Castilla y de Indias. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, UNAM. Amores Carredano, Juan B. 2009. Justicia y esclavitud en Cuba, 1800–1820. Anuario De Estudios Americanos 66 (1): 79–101. Barcia Zequeira, María C. 2021. Condiciones, maneras y peculiaridades del comercio de esclavos en Cuba. In Sometidos a esclavitud. Los africanos y sus descendientes en el Caribe hispano, ed. C. Naranjo. 271–297. Santa Marta: Universidad del Magdalena. Belmonte Postigo, José L. 2005. Con la plata ganada y su propio esfuerzo. Los mecanismos de manumisión en Santiago de Cuba, 1780–1803, Estudios Afroamericanos Virtual 3: 1-33. Belmonte Postigo, José L. 2013. De cómo la costumbre articula derechos. Esclavos en Santo Domingo a fines del periodo colonial. In Afroamérica. Espacios e identidades, ed. Javier Laviña, Ricardo Piqueras, and Cristina Mondéjar, 65-92. Barcelona: Icaria. Blackburn, Robin. 2009. Introduction. In Paths to Freedom. Manumission in the Atlantic World, ed. Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks, 2–15. Chapel Hill: The University of South Carolina Press. Candioti, Magdalena. 2021. Una historia de la emancipación negra. Esclavitud y abolición en la Argentina, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. 16 ANC, GSC, leg. 938, exp. 33094. Expediente en que el Síndico Procurador General se queja de la determinación dada por el Alcalde 1º en la demanda sobre la libertad de la morena Jacinta esclava de D. Francisco Ferrer. 1837.

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

373

Chira, Adriana. 2021. Ampliando los significados de Sevicia: Los reclamos de protección corporal de los esclavos en Santiago de Cuba (1810–1870). Revista Páginas 33. https://doi.org/10.35305/rp.vi33.546 Cowling, Camillia. 2013. Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Davis, David B. 1970. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. London: Pelican Books. Diaz, María E. 2000. The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Díaz Borrás, Andrés. 2001. El miedo al Mediterráneo. La caridad popular valenciana y la redención de cautivos bajo poder musulmán, 1323–1539. Barcelona: Institución Milá y Fontanals, CSIC. Díaz Díaz, Rafael A. 2001. Esclavitud, región y ciudad. El sistema esclavista urbano-regional en Santafé de Bogotá, 1700–1750. Bogotá: Centro Editorial Javeriano. Dougnac Rodríguez, Antonio. 2008. Manual de Historia del Derecho Indiano, vol. 1. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, UNAM. Draper, Nicholas. 2010. The Price of Emancipation. Slave-ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferrer Abárzuza, Antoni. 1995. Captius, sarraïns, batejats, persones de talla…Sobre l’esclavitud a l’Eivissa Medieval. Eivissa: Institut d’Estudis Eivissencs. Finley, Alexandra J. 2020. An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. de la Fuente, Alejandro. 1990. A alforria de escravos em Havana, 1601–1610: Primeiras conclusoes. Revista De Estudos Económicos 1 (20): 139–159. González Pacciotti, Margarita. 1984. Ensayos de Historia colonial colombiana. Bogotá: El Ancora Editores, Bogotá. Goveia, Elsa V. 1969. The West Indian Slave Laws of the Eighteenth Century. In Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative Perspective, ed. Forner L. y Genovese, E. 113-137. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Hall, Gwendoline M. 1996. Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies, a Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press/Lousiana State University Press. Hünefeldt, Christine. 1992. Lasmanuelos. Vida cotidiana de una familia negra en la Lima del siglo XIX. Una reflexión histórica sobre la esclavitud urbana. Lima: IEP Ediciones.

374

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

Hünefeldt, Christine. 1994. Lasmanuelos. Paying the Price of Freedom. Family and Labor Among Lima’s Slaves, 1800–1854. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ingersoll, Thomas N. 1991. Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleáns, 1718– 1812. The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 48 (2): 173–200. Joda, Beatriz. 2014. Mujer y esclavitud doméstica: La Habana (1790–1844), Doctoral thesis, Universitat Jaume I. Klein, Herbert S. and Ben Vinson III. 2013. La esclavitud en América Latina y el Caribe. Historia Mínima de la esclavitud, 2nd ed. Mexico City: El Colegio de México. Lovejoy, Paul E. 2011. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Lucena, Manuel. 1996. La instrucción sobre educación, trato y ocupaciones de los esclavos de 1789. Una prueba del poder de los amos de esclavos frente a la debilidad de la Corona Española, Estudios De Historia Social y Económica De América 13: 155–178. Lucena, Manuel. 1999. El derecho de coartación del esclavo en la América española. Revista De Indias 216 (59): 357–374. Lucena, Manuel. 2005. Regulación de la esclavitud negra en las colonias de América española (1503–1886). Documentos para su estudio. Mucia and Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá/Universidad de Murcia. Marrero, Leví. 1987. Cuba: economía y sociedad. Azúcar, ilustración y conciencia (1763–1868). Barcelona: Player. Martin, Jonathan D. 2004. Divided Mastery, Slave Hiring in the American South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mejía, Karen and Luis M. Córdoba. 2017. La manumisión de esclavos por compra y gracia en la Provincia de Antioquia, 1780–1830, HistoRelo. Revista de Historia regional y local, 9 (17): 250-292. Mena, Luis M. 2007. Raza, género y espacio: las mujeres negras y mulatas negocian su lugar en La Habana durante la década de 1830. Revista de Estudios Sociales (26): 73-85. Morris, Richard B. 1954. The Measure of Bondage in the Slave Status. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41 (2): 219–240. Muñoz Machado, Santiago. 2015. Tratado de Derecho administrativo y Derecho público general, vol. IV. Madrid: Agencia estatal del Boletín Oficial del Estado. Nishida, Mieko. 1993. Manumission and Ethnicity in Urban Slavery: Salvador, Brazil, 1808–1888. Hispanic American Historical Review 3 (73): 361–391. Ogass, Claudio M. 2009. Por mi precio o mi buen comportamiento: Oportunidades y estrategias de manumisión de los esclavos negros y mulatos en Santiago de Chile, 1698–1750. Historia 1 (42): 141–184.

17

PRECARIOUS FREEDOMS: SLAVES IN CUBA BETWEEN …

375

Paquette, Robert L. 1988. Sugar is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Petit Muñoz, Eugenio, Edmundo Narancio, y José M. Traibel. 1947. La condición jurídica social, económica y política de los negros durante el coloniaje en la Banda Oriental, vol. 1. Montvideo: Publicaciones oficiales de la Facultad de derecho y ciencias sociales. Reid Andrews, George. 2004. Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reis, João J. 2016. De escravo rico a liberto: A trajetória do africano Manoel Joaquim Ricardo Na Bahia Oitocentista. Revista De História 174: 14–67. Reis, João J. 2019. Ganhadores: A greve negra de 1857 na Bahia. Sâo Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Rosal, Miguel A. 2001. Negros y pardos propietarios de bienes raíces y de esclavos en el Buenos Aires de fines del período hispánico. Anuario De Estudios Americanos 58 (2): 495–512. Sanjuan-Marroquin, José M., and Martín Rodrigo-Alharilla. 2023. ‘No commercial activity leaves greater benefit’: The profitability of the Cuban-based slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Economic History Review 77 (1): 268–287. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. 2004. Still Continents (And an Island) with Two Histories? Law and History Review 22 (2): 377–382. Schwartz, Stuart B. 1974. The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684–1745. Hispanic American Historical Review 4 (54): 603–635. Schwartz, S. 1992. Slaves. Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Franco Silva, Alfonso. 2000. Los negros libertos en las sociedades andaluzas entre los siglos XV al XVI. In Los marginados en el mundo medieval y moderno: Almería, 5 a 7 de noviembre de 1998, ed. Martínez, Mª D., 51–64. Almería: Intituto de Estudios Almerienses. Tomich, Dale. 2018. La segunda esclavitud y el capitalismo mundial: Una perspectiva para la investigación histórica. Historia Social 90: 149–164. Tomich, Dale. 2003. The Wealth of the Empire: Francisco de Arango y Parreño, Political Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba. Comparative Studies in Society and History 1: 4–28. Tomich, Dale. 2004. Through the Prism of Slavery. Labor, Capital, and World Economy. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield. Tomich, Dale. 1988. The Second Slavery: Bonded Labor and the Transformations of the Nineteenth-century World Economy. In Rethinking the

376

C. VARELLA FERNÁNDEZ

Nineteenth Century: Contradictions and Movement, ed. Francisco O. Ramírez, 103–117. New York: Greenwood Press. Tomich, Dale and Michael Zeuske (eds.) 2009. The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-Economy, and Comparative Microhistories, 2 vols., Binghamton: Binghamton University Press. Turner, Mary (ed.) 1995. From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves. The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Varella, Claudia and Barcia, Manuel. 2020. Wage-earning Slaves. Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Varella, Claudia. 2012. Tributos por la posesión. Pequeños propietarios de esclavos. In La reinvención colonial de Cuba. Escenas de la vida social del siglo XIX , ed. I. Balboa. 209-258. Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Ediciones Idea. Vincent, Bernard. 1987. Minorías y marginados en la España del siglo XVI . Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada. Frank, Zephyr L. 2004. Dutra’s World. Wealth and Family in NineteenthCentury Rio de Janeiro. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

CHAPTER 18

Everyday Resistance in Late Colonial Buenos Aires: A View from Judicial Sources Emir Reitano and Jacqueline Sarmiento

Daily resistance reveals how individuals act in their daily lives by adopting attitudes that could potentially undermine power. It is not as recognizable as public and collective resistance, rebellions, or open demonstrations since it is typically concealed or disguised and is characterized by its individual nature rather than political articulation. Daily resistances present a specific challenge for research, and judicial archives and sources are suitable for exploring them (Scott 2000; Vinthagen et al. 2013, 4).

This chapter has received support from the project “RESISTANCE Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, 16th-19th centuries”, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020, Research and Innovation Staff Exchange, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Grant Agreement No 778076. Besides, this chapter is part of the Interinstitutional Program on Atlantic History in Early Modern History at FaHCE-UNLP. E. Reitano · J. Sarmiento (B) Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_18

377

378

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

Judicial sources provide access to the thematic study of daily resistance and facilitate reflection on unique forms of specific resistance inherent to subordinate sectors. These sources help assist in defining both expected and penalized behaviors. Judicial sources evoke conflict, making them highly effective in describing the values that underlie the social fabric of the colonial world: “By airing their disagreements before the courts, litigants or their lawyers indirectly expose the fractured normative framework, the desired order, and the principles of lost balance and consensus. Pathology serves as a means to understand normality” (Mayo et al. 1993, 47). Furthermore, judicial sources enable us to visualize the lower strata, the socially disadvantaged majority lacking wealth, power, and property. The individuals who participate in judicial proceedings and populate colonial prisons predominantly belong to these lower social sectors. As a result, judicial sources largely represent the voices of these defiant individuals who challenge societal norms, allowing us to reconstruct their lives through their testimonies. Raúl Fradkin has noted that in recent decades law and justice have ceased to be exclusively studied by institutional historians or legal experts, becoming vital areas increasingly explored by social historians (Fradkin 2007, 11). Specifically, criminal records have become highly regarded sources for social history. Their value lies in their provision of a substantial amount of documentary evidence to examine the intricate mosaic that constituted late colonial Río de la Plata society—a nameless and perplexing realm shared by slaves, Indigenous peoples, mestizos, and impoverished Europeans within a burgeoning society like late colonial Buenos Aires. It allowed them to navigate their everyday lives within the so-called rural and urban plebeian class. It is within this plebeian class that daily resistances emerge, become visible, and reflect a world that, until a few decades ago, remained concealed within these sources and archives.

E. Reitano e-mail: [email protected]

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

379

Society and Justice In late colonial Buenos Aires, turning to the justice system as a means of seeking redress was a viable option for the lower classes, representing an adaptation to a system that had replaced other forms of protest or resistance. In this context, the Defenders of the Poor played a crucial role as a conduit through which the subaltern sectors could navigate the justice system for their own benefit, albeit within a complex and perpetually tense process. A substantial amount of the history pertaining to the lower classes during the colonial period is documented in judicial records. Although other sources such as registers, censuses, and parish archives provide additional information, it is the judicial sources, specifically, that contain the bulk of the content that is of interest to historians. Although it may seem obvious, it is important to clarify some fundamental aspects of the dynamics of colonial justice. The judicial function in the colonies was carried out by the Alcaldes de Primer y Segundo voto, named so based on their voting position, as well as the Real Audiencia Pretorial. The Real Audiencia was composed of a President, a Regent, four Oidores (judges), and a Prosecutor. The Alcaldes conducted the legal proceedings and pronounced judgments, which could be appealed before the Real Audiencia, where they were decided by majority vote. The Real Audiencia was established in Buenos Aires in 1785. The President was the Viceroy, who, due to the lack of legal training, did not intervene in the resolution of legal disputes (Jofre 1919, 76). During the late colonial period, the relationship and mode of interaction among individuals from different social groups and their engagement with the government were represented by an official known as the Alcalde. These Alcaldes were drawn from the same neighborhood over which they wielded their authority. Two Alcaldes, namely the Alcalde de Primer y Segundo voto, were elected annually from the members of the local Cabildo. They held responsibility for delivering justice in the city in the initial stages and also had police duties. Their tasks included conducting investigations, rendering judgments, and reviewing cases referred by one of the “special officials,” the Alcaldes de Santa Hermandad, who had jurisdiction and acted in rural areas (Mallo 2004, 89). Some authors argue that when discussing the rural world of the Río de la Plata region, it is appropriate to refer to “justices” in the plural form. According to Raúl Fradkin, this usage is not merely a linguistic

380

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

ambiguity of the era but reflects the fact that “from the rural perspective, ‘justices’ were multiple, different and often overlapping” (Fradkin 2007, 11). These “justices” encompassed various entities, including Alcaldes de Hermandad and their assistants, the Alcaldes Ordinarios of the Cabildos, the Oidores of the Real Audiencia, as well as the Commanders of militias, the Gobernadores Intendentes, members of the Tribunal del Consulado, and even the Viceroys, priests, and bishops (Fradkin 2007, 11). The individuals responsible for documenting judicial complaints, defenses, testimonies, or basic information were generally not legal experts. In many cases, those who administered justice relied on practical knowledge and writing proficiency, performing various roles such as Alcaldes, Judges, and occasionally Oidores. According to the laws of Castile and those applicable to the Spanish colonies, Alcaldes were required to have the ability to “read and write.” However, in the outskirts of the empire, extreme cases arose, such as that of Mateo Gil, Alcalde in the city of Santa Fe in 1576, who signed documents with a marked cross or with the assistance of others (Barriera 2008, 351). This situation appears to have persisted throughout the entire colonial period in the Río de la Plata region. In 1801, at the onset of the nineteenth century, the Cabildo de Villa de Luján had to renew the appointment of the Alcalde de Hermandad of Navarro because suitable individuals who knew how to read and write could not be found. In 1803, the Cabildo was once again compelled to renew the appointment for the same reason (Fradkin 2007, 10). These Alcaldes originated from lower or intermediate social strata, and many of them expressed dissatisfaction with the disdainful treatment they received. Operating within a fragile administrative framework that subjected them to constant scrutiny, particularly in rural areas, they frequently found themselves negotiating with local power holders, their social peers, and marginalized groups. These interactions took place within the boundaries of their limited authorities (Mallo 2004, 93). In the process, they documented and preserved the voices of the illiterate and the lower social classes. They often included their own sensations, opinions, and viewpoints, becoming the sole testimonial evidence for those individuals who did not leave records due to their lack of property. In many cases, history lost sight of them.

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

381

Judicial Sources: Scope and Limits As we have already mentioned, judicial sources primarily offer significant data for the history of the most vulnerable sectors. In his work on medieval feudalism, Marc Bloch asserted that studying the way in which people were judged is the best perspective to comprehend a society (Bloch 1968 [1939], 348). This maxim has been widely embraced by historians, who have applied it from various angles. The work with sources presents certain theoretical and methodological limitations. Firstly, when sources reflect conflict, they have a tendency to overshadow the consensual aspects of a generally stable society, including the case of colonial society. Secondly, as sources often focus on deviant behaviors, they depict a social reality that may not be fully representative. Another limitation is the reliability of the narrative recorded in the sources (Mayo et al. 1993, 48). However, these limitations do not significantly impact the analysis when the sources are compared and correlated, allowing for the contrasting of information they provide with other documents from the same time period. This approach helps to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the lower sectors we have been discussing. Beyond the truthfulness of a declarant’s account in the context of the justice system, what holds significance is its perceived credibility, serving as a “historically valid” alibi. Irrespective of whether the declarant speaks the truth or falsehood, their testimony had to be convincing to the judges and prosecutors involved in the case. Through the lens of a judicial process, we can observe the administration of justice, specifically in the late colonial era, and gain insights into the understanding of justice among the middle and lower classes of society (Mallo et al. 1993, 49). By virtue of an alleged crime and the workings of the colonial justice system, which documented and preserved peculiarities from the life of the accused, we can uncover glimpses of the lives of the many anonymous and uneducated individuals from our past who lived in poverty. Once these observations are made, it is indeed possible to find cases of everyday resistance in judicial sources. It is well-known that not all cases within the realm of criminal jurisdiction can be classified as instances of everyday resistance; there are certainly some records that clearly align with this type of practice.

382

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

Women: Between Resistance to Passions and the Necessary Response To analyze the connection between gender and resistance, it is necessary to delve into the concept of gender, which enables us to differentiate between biology and social construction in relation to the dynamics between men and women. Gender has been conceptualized as a category that reflects the unequal power relations between men and women (Scott 1986). Consequently, as every society has its own mechanisms of control and oppression, specific forms of resistance also emerge within this context. For women in American societies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this encompassed a pattern of behavior, the delineation of roles, distinct forms of punishment, and the establishment of an intricate hierarchy that dictated relationships characterized by inequality. The degree of inequality varied depending on whether these women were enslaved, Indigenous, Mulatto, mestizo, or Spanish (Stolcke 2006). In essence, gender is not an abstract condition, but rather it manifests in specific ways that vary based on the social status of women within society. Focusing on the forms of control implemented during the viceroyalty, Jaqueline Vassallo (2006) has analyzed cases involving women in the judicial system of Córdoba in the context of the Bourbon reforms. During this time of intensified control mechanisms and institutional renewal, the Casa de Recogidas (Women’s House of Detention) was established in Buenos Aires and began operating in 1777. Vasallo examines the reasons that led women to face the justice system and the functioning of judicial mechanisms that culminated in confinement as a means of controlling inappropriate behavior. This could take various forms, ranging from imprisonment in local jails to confinement in private homes or through the widespread practice of placement in designated facilities. Such strategies were linked to the distinction between public and private spaces and the application of the notion of the “scandalous woman” to those who publicly exhibited behaviors deemed inappropriate for women. Crime, sin, and honor intertwined within a framework aimed at containing women within acceptable boundaries. In this narrative, enslaved women occupied a significant position, as their peril was heightened, as we will see (Mallo 2003; Vasallo 2012). However, even amidst their multiple subjections, women were not merely passive victims of a controlling society. This is exemplified by the case of María Josefa Cortés,

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

383

a mid-eighteenth-century Indigenous woman who fatally assaulted her husband in Buenos Aires. This case analyzes the prevailing notions concerning women and their specific circumstances while also highlighting two distinct conceptions of resistance presented in the courtroom arguments: resistance as just opposition to oppressive actions and resistance as the capacity to endure. As the evening fell on January 5, 1759, Pablo Morillo and his wife, María Josefa arrived near the city’s fortress. They were returning on horseback from the countryside to spend the night in a riverside shack. Once there, they had dinner, shared some honey with the people of the house, and settled in the courtyard to sleep. During the night, at cockcrow, María Josefa woke up and, in an unforeseen and brutal manner, attacked her husband, stabbing him in the abdomen with a knife. Pablo died a few days later due to the sustained injuries. Throughout the proceedings, the arguments presented by the Protector of Natives and the prosecutor sought to interpret María Josefa’s impulsive behavior, aiming to either condemn or justify it. There is no doubt about the attack or María Josefa’s responsibility, so the investigations focused on the underlying causes. Pablo declared that “the reason why his wife wounded him is presumed to be because she was running away, and he brought her from the Island of Todos los Santos, where he punished her yesterday morning against her will” (AHPBA, 1759. 34–1–5–1, f. 2).1 María Josefa made her statement in the presence of the Protector of Natives, Juan Gregorio de Zamudio. She claimed to be from the Auca nation, baptized in the reservation of Quilmes and raised on a ranch in the Pago de la Magdalena by a woman named Doña María, who was the “widow of a certain Cortés.” She married Pablo Morillo the previous year at the Chapel of La Calera. She confessed the following about that night: She had been dreaming and had dreams that her husband wanted to kill her, and upon awakening from this dream, she began to get dressed. Believing that her husband wanted to kill her, she went to relieve herself nearby while he was still sleeping. Then she returned and lay down next to him, fully dressed. He was sleeping on his back and did not make any movement. After thinking for a while, she confessed that her husband

1 El motibo deque su muger le hubiese herido le presume fue porque handava huida, y la trajo de la Isla de todos los Santos donde la castigó ayer por la mañana contra su gusto.

384

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

wanted to take her to his land to kill her based on what he had said. He referred to her as a “baguala” [a wild or untamed animal], wishing that she would be taken away by the devil, saying that he had enough women and that the devil would take her away on the journey. While contemplating these thoughts, she grabbed a knife and attacked him with it. The reason for injuring him was because he had punished her two days ago at Doña María’s farm, hitting her with his fists and mistreating her, and the bad life due to his jealousy and wanted to take her to his land where minerals, specifically silver, were extracted. She always rejected him. She mentioned that he brought five of his horses and a small sum of money to this city (AHPBA. 1759. 34–1–5–1, ff. 6–7).2

The prosecuting attorney, Josef Arroyo requested the death penalty and characterized María Josefa as “a treacherous murderer of someone so close.”3 On the other hand, the Protector of Natives requested her acquittal. In his argument, he presented reasons based on María Josefa’s specific circumstances, stating: But above all, two particularities must be considered, which are of the utmost importance. Firstly, she is a poor woman of young age, in whom the weakness of her sex and the lack of maturity due to her age necessitated the contemplation of the extreme violence imposed upon her by her husband, thereby depriving her of the free use of reason (AHPBA. 1759. 34–1–5–1, f. 13).4

2 Estubo soñando y tubo sueños de que su marido la quería matar, y con este sueño dispertó, y se comenzó a vestir, y considerando que su marido la quería matar se fue a hacer aguas allí serca estando siempre durmiendo su marido, y se volvió a hechar con él vestida, que estaba durmiendo boca arriba, que no hizo movimiento ninguno; y pensando grande rato la que confiesa que su marido la quería llevar a su tierra para matarla, por lo que había dho, que era una baguala [ganado cimarrón o feral], que ojalá se la llevara el diablo, que no le faltaban mujeres, y en el camino se la habia de llevar el diablo, y estando en estos pensamientos le cogió el cuchillo y le dio con él (…) que el motivo de haberle herido fue por haberla castigado antes de ayer de mañana en la chacra de Doña María golpes de manos que la maltrató malamente y la mala vida por ser muy celoso, y quererla llevar a su tierra lugar de minerales donde se saca plata, y siempre lo repugnó y con este ánimo la trajo a esta ciudad trayendo cinco caballos suyos y unos cortos reales. 3 En la clase de alevosa homicida de una persona tan inmediata. 4 Pero sobre todo deben considerarse las dos particularidades que son de la maior entida

de ser esta Pobre, una mujer de menor edad, en quien por la imbecilidad de su sexo; y la falta de reflexión de su edad, es preciso huviese echo la contemplación en que le puso el rigor de su marido, la maior violencia, privándola del uso libre de la razón.

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

385

The main argument presented here revolves around the inherent weakness of women, as expressed by the phrase “the imbecility of the sex.”5 This argument suggests the necessity for women to be under guardianship (whether by the state, father, or husband) and justifies the corrective measures that could be applied to them, as long as they were not excessive. Additionally, it is pointed out that in the case of barbaric nations (referring to Indigenous peoples), the level of rigor is excessive as they act as “absolute and despotic owners of the lives of their women” (Sarmiento 2015, 47). Another argument raised relates to the lack of resistance exhibited by younger individuals, asserting that “the same applies to young people, who, due to their lack of full judgment, are unable to demonstrate the same level of resistance as older individuals in times of tribulation” (AHPBA, 34–1–5–1, f. 13). This concept is also referred to as “resistance to passions” or “tolerance.” It is connected to the Latin meaning of the word “resistere” as “to remain in the same place” (f. 11). Furthermore, María Josefa’s dreams are used to support the arguments presented. This aspect, which raises doubts about the Indigenous woman’s state of consciousness at the time of the incident, is repeatedly addressed throughout the two-year duration of the legal proceedings. Interestingly, this judicial case raises questions about the reality attributed to dreams. The Protector of Natives acknowledged that the dream had disturbed María Josefa’s state of mind and emphasized that it is impossible to determine whether the dream had concluded definitely. Apart from this, who can guarantee that this young woman was fully awake? In many cases, men perform actions while asleep that they cannot discern when awake, except through conjecture. It has been seen not long ago in this city that a man threw himself from a balcony and was on the verge of losing his life while asleep (AHPBA, 34–1–5–1, f. 13v).6

5 In this case, the term “imbecility” should be understood within the context of Roman law, particularly in relation to the concept of “imbecilitas sexus,” which refers to the inherent debility or weakness associated with a particular gender. 6 Fuera de esto, quién puede asegurar que esta joven se hubiese hallado en el todo despierta, muchos casos suceden en que los hombres obran dormidos lo que no saben discernir despiertos, sino por conjeturas, se ha visto no ha mucho tiempo en esta ciudad arrojarse un hombre por un balcón, y ponerse en términos de perder la vida estando dormido.

386

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

According to the Protector of Natives, in this particular situation, the dream would have placed María Josefa in the dire circumstances she was facing. He argued that her response was “casi necesaria [almost necessary],” indicating that she “could not resist this passion involuntarily and threw herself into committing it… She found no other recourse because, having already tried the option of escape, she experienced it as unsafe and more likely to shorten her days” (AHPBA, 34–1–5–1, f. 12).7 In his initial response, the prosecutor invoked the concept of resistance as an active response, although he declined to interpret the attack in that manner, instead emphasizing its treacherous nature: The arguments used by her Protector are not sufficient since the natural right to repel force with force does not imply that a dreamed injury or a future and distant harm can be resisted with a present and true blow, intentionally causing death (AHPBA, 34–1–5–1, f. 15).8

The concept of resistance as necessary and just opposition (force with force, an injury with another) is presented here quite clearly. If the case is accepted, it exempts the person who exercises it from punishment for responding in self-defense and with a similar action. Finally, the Protector of Natives presented a discussion directly related to everyday resistance. He stated that “there is no doubt that the actions, by their nature, are reprehensible, but the investigation of these actions is not solely for the purpose of punishment. Prudence dictates that we examine the causes that promote such actions” (AHPBA, 34–1–5–1, f. 12).9 He described María Josefa’s situation as one of excessive harshness and recounted various attitudes the Indigenous women had adopted leading up to the attack. Thus, while we witness the final moment, we must delve into the past to fully comprehend the context.

7 No pudiendo resistir a esta pasión indeliberadamente, se arrojó a cometerla… no hallaba otro recurso, porque habiendo probado ya el de la fuga, lo experimentó no seguro, y antes más propio para abreviar sus días. 8 Aquellas de que se vale su Protector desde luego no son bastantes, porque el derecho natural de propulsar la fuerza con la fuerza no se entiende de modo que a una injuria soñada, o lesión futura y distante, se pueda resistir con un golpe presente y verdadero, y a propósito causar la muerte. 9 No se duda que los hechos por su naturaleza son malos, pero no solo se investigan estos por el castigo, sino que la prudencia pide se especulen las causas que los promueven.

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

387

Despite the Protector of Natives determined efforts, who appealed the sentence twice, María Josefa was condemned to death by hanging. However, she passed away before her sentence could be carried out, just over two years after the night she woke up from a dream in which she believed her husband wanted to kill her, “due to a prolonged feverish illness she had been suffering from for many days” (AHPBA, 34–1–5–1, f. 12v). This case illuminates three modes of resistance that become comprehensible due to the enduring nature of oppression: resistance to passions as the initial form, followed by escape as the second, and ultimately, resistance as an active response involving the use of force to counter force and responding to injury with another injury.

Slaves: Resistance and Defenders of the Poor Slaves were involved in the justice system as both plaintiffs and defendants during the late colonial period. To appear before the court, they required their master’s authorization. However, if the claim was against the master or if the master did not grant authorization, slaves had to seek assistance from the Public Defender of the Poor. Often, slaves initiated lawsuits not with the intention of winning the case, but as a strategic means to pressure their owners and improve their own circumstances, or even to facilitate their sale to another owner. Particularly among urban slaves, there is evidence of a strong understanding of the laws that governed their status, which they used in their daily acts of resistance (Perri 2009, 52). Interpersonal relationships between owners and slaves could be ambivalent in late colonial Buenos Aires. Some owners established positive relationships with their slaves, while others treated them harshly. Faced with mistreatment from their masters, slaves often resorted to fleeing and becoming fugitives, while in other instances, they exhibited resistance. An illustratie case is when the Real Audiencia addressed Viceroy Joaquín del Pino, “seeking his approval of the death sentence imposed on the Blacks Simón Álvarez and Joaquín Antonio Pedroso, who were responsible for the deaths of their owners Domingo García, Manuel Correa, and other

388

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

individuals in the house” (AHPBA-JC. 1803. 3–3–10–9).10 In this particular case, it appears that the condemned slaves, exhausted by abuse and ill-treatment, plotted an extreme act of revenge without fully considering the consequences. In some instances, slaves would engage in subtle acts of resistance to mock their owners in their daily lives. However, when their actions were discovered, they faced the serious risks of severe punishment. In such cases, personal vengeance could escalate to extreme violence upon uncovering hidden acts of resistance. This is exactly what occurred in the house of Joseph Pintos, who took the life of one of his slaves: He violently beat his slave, María Rosa, in the kitchen with a stick. The reason for this was that while she was going to heat water for mate, as is customary, he heard that she had urinated in the kettle the night before. Indeed, she heated the water to make the mate, and seeing that it was more of a mockery than fulfilling her duty, he felt compelled to punish her, especially considering her other misdeeds, including occasional attempts to escape. Furthermore, she had the habit of using indecent language (AHPBA–JC. 1758. 34–1–4, f. 6).11

The colonial justice system and the Public Defender of the Poor acted swiftly, ordering the arrest of Pintos based on testimonies from other servants that revealed frequent instances of cruel punishment. Pintos, along with his wife and father-in-law, claimed that the Black woman María was excessively rebellious, frequently ran away and remained absent for several days, used vulgar language, and “fled with men.” Despite the involvement of the Public Defender of the Poor and a lengthy legal process, Pintos received a punishment that did not go beyond a few days in prison. He was admonished “que en adelante proseda con sus

10 Solicitándole la aprobación de la sentencia de muerte dictada contra los negros Simón Álvarez y Joaquín Antonio Pedroso, autores de la muerte de sus amos Domingo García, Manuel Correa y demás personas de la casa de éste. 11 La molió a palos en la cocina con una guasca a la esclava suia María Rosa…. el

motibo para ello fue yendo a calentar agua para mate como es costumbre tuvo noticia que se havía meado en la caldera la noche antes y en efecto la calentó para dar dicho mate y viendo que era más hacer burla que cumplir con su obligación se vió presisado a castigarla y mas cuando tenía otras maldades y entre ellas el de huirse algunas veses y así mismo tenía la costumbre o habito de hablar palavras poco desentes.

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

389

esclavos con la piedad cristiana pertinente [to treat his slaves with appropriate Christian mercy in the future]” (AHPBA–JC. 1758. 34–1–4., f. 24). There were also other forms of resistance to the abuses committed by masters, which included working reluctantly, mocking, or even fleeing. However, within the intricate colonial world, seeking justice was supported by legislation, enabling slaves to actively participate in improving their living conditions (Perri 2009, 54). As for the protection of slaves, the colonial justice system was generally marked by its inefficiency, and the contradictions are most evident in the interpretation of these rights. However, toward the end of the colonial period, there were exceptions where the Public Defenders of the Poor acted responsibly in their role, an attitude that the slaves clearly appreciated. A notable example is the case of Esteban García de Zuñiga, who was charged with mistreating his slave Feliciano García, following the initiation of proceedings by the Public Defender of the Poor. Feliciano sought justice, making the following allegations: He inflicts upon me cruel punishments, locking me up in a dungeon to deprive me of freedom. His cruelty has reached such an extent that he ordered a large whip to be made for us wretched slaves (...) And since Your Excellency is the father of miserable, poor people, I humbly ask and request that you be pleased to order my sale at a fair price (AHPBA–JC. 1799. 34–2–24–21).12

Feliciano García’s request demonstrates his awareness of his situation and a clear understanding of the limitations of his appeal to the Public Defender. He acknowledges that he can potentially be sold at a fair price: “make the contents of this document known to the Regidor Defender of the Poor so that he may take the cited person who made this statement under his patronage” (AHPBA–JC. 1799. 34–2–24–21, f. 4).13 The severe punishment inflicted on Feliciano García resulted from his owner, Esteban García, accusing him of stealing a herd of horses. 12 Me hace sufrir crueles castigos encerrando en un calaboso para privarnos. Llegando su crueldad a tanto que ha mandado hacer un gran sepo para nosotros los infelices esclavos (…) y siendo VE padre de pobres miserables le pido y digo se digne mandarme vender en equitativo presio. 13 Hagase notorio el contenido de este escrito al Regidor Defensor de pobres para que tome bajo su patrocinio al sitado que hizo la presente declaración.

390

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

In response, Feliciano accused a “peón named Alarcón” of committing the theft. The details of the actual theft remain unclear. However, upon receiving the request, the Public Defender took action by placing the “Negro” under the custody of Don Gregorio Ramos until the trial was resolved. Eventually, the trial concluded with a verdict in favor of the slave. The request of the Negro was to be granted a sale document so that he could find a master to his satisfaction. The owner, apprehensive that the said slave, once granted the freedom to seek a master, might find a household and sale worth 350 pesos (AHPBA–JC. 1799. 34–2–24–21, f. 16).14

We do not know the fate of Feliciano García, but his plea to the justice system at least enabled him to liberate himself from his abusive owner. Another enslaved Black woman, named María Jacinta, experienced a similar situation and sought assistance from the Public Defender of the Poor and the Alcalde del Primer voto. María Jacinta, a slave owned by Don Juan Gutiérrez y Galbes, respectfully states to Your Excellency that due to the inhumane treatment she received from her unfaithful master, she endured severe beatings and was confined in a room with shackles for more than fifteen days (AHPBA–JC.1777. 34–1–9–31, f. 5).15

Due to all these reasons, Jacinta requested the bill of sale from her owner, and although he granted it, he set an exorbitant price of 280 pesos, which was considered excessively high given her age. In this case, the Public Defender of the Poor emphasized that “in reality, it appears that he seeks to seek revenge against her for using her, as he himself claims that she will serve him and that there is no justice other than his and his own hands, spreading vices that she may not possess in order to further 14 Que siendo la solicitud del Negro salir de su poder le diese papel de venta para que buscase amo a su satisfacción que receloso el amo de este de que el precitado esclavo con la libertad de buscar amo se le procurase una casa y venta a 350 pesos. 15 MaríA Jacinta, esclava de Don Juan Gutiérrez y Galbes ante V.E. y con el debido respeto dice que con el motivo de experimentar en su amo el trato de in humano de un infiel sufriendo muchos palos y encerrarla en un cuarto y después con grillos mas de quinze días.

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

391

hinder her sale” (AHPBA–JC. 1777. 34–1–9–31, f. 7v), and allowed the claim to proceed: I say that the reasons I allege are known... Providing a foundation for the complaint that supports her and warrants her owner giving her the bill of sale so she can seek another owner to her liking (AHPBA–JC.1777. 34–1–9–31, f. 8).16

Don Manuel Gutierrez Galbes, dissatisfied with the verdict, presented his statement, arguing: “I request and plead that the Constable promptly remove this slave from the possession of the current holder and place her in the mentioned residence, as otherwise there is a risk of escape and other potential transgressions due to lack of security.” The reference is to the house of confinement where condemned women, Indian women, and women who had to pay for their disobedience to their husbands or fathers were taken. Gutierrez Galbes did not want to risk losing his investment; thus, he sought a secure place for his slave until her subsequent sale. Another remarkable case was that of Manuel Castro. Manuel, a Mulatto slave who had escaped from his owner in Buenos Aires, was discovered in the town of Villa de Luján while looking for work and riding a horse that did not belong to him. After being betrayed and pursued, and with no viable means of escape, he chose to inflict a mortal wound upon himself to avoid capture and being forced back into a life of slavery in the city. “The aforementioned Mulatto was found severely injured, to the extent that his intestines were exposed (…), the wound being inflicted with a sharp and pointed object… His statement was taken in a similar manner. He himself declared that ‘no one had wounded him but himself in order to prevent his capture, which was the sole reason that led him to take such action against himself’” (AHPBA–JC. 1796. 34–2–21–18, f. 2). In what category of resistance should this attitude be classified? Undoubtedly, it is not invisible: it opposes the potential punishment for his escape, and when faced with being cornered, he makes such a heroic and selfless decision as a last resort.

16 Digo que se conocían las razones que alego…. Poniendo fundamento a la denuncia que le asiste y merecedora para que su amo le dé el papel de venta y buscase otro a su gusto.

392

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

The case against Fernando Rodríguez, a Galician caulker who declared himself poor, reveals the story of a Black woman named María who hanged herself in the courtyard of their house. When questioned about the incident, the caulker’s wife made the following statement: When asked about the reasons why the Black María hanged herself, she said that she was unaware of them. She mentioned that on the previous day, she had sent María to the kitchen to prepare food, and when she noticed her being unusually silent, she went to the kitchen. There, she found María, who had fallen asleep while cutting onions for the meal, lying on the stove. I scolded her and, as she had a fiery temperament, María began to grumble, prompting me to give her two blows with a whip to silence her. Afterwards, María seemed content for the rest of the day, as if nothing had happened. The following morning, she got up to heat water for her master’s mate, as she usually did before leaving for work. However, when she took longer than expected, I, partially dressed, got out of bed and went to the door, only to find María hanging in the courtyard (AHPBA–JC.1796. 34–2–21–18, f. 6).17

When questioned about any personal animosity, she explained that as a newcomer (“medio bozal ”), she had limited social interactions and rarely communicated with other slaves and servants. Nevertheless, the Alcalde de Primer voto decided to conduct a further investigation into the incident. The case was eventually closed without determining whether María had faced prior punishment, and the reasons behind her suicide remained undisclosed. It is possible that her status as a newcomer and her melancholic state contributed to the tragic outcome. In cases like this, the recurring question emerges: Can we interpret this as an act of resistance? As we can observe, colonial justice revealed numerous legal loopholes through which slaves were able to navigate and exploit in their efforts to address instances of injustice beyond their pursuit of personal freedom. 17 Preguntado los motivos que haya por su parte para que la Negra María ahorcarse dijo, que ella los ignoraba, solo que el día antecedente la mandó a la cosina a que hiciese de comer y viendo que estaba tan en silencio fue a la cosina donde a la negra que cortando cebolla para la comida se había quedado dormida sobre el fogón en donde la reté y como era medio bosal comenzó a gruñirme y le dí dos azotes, guascazos para que callase y después todo el día se mantuvo contenta como si tal cosa hubiese pasado y a la mañana siguiente se levantó a calentar agua para dar mate a su amo como acostumbraba antes de hirse al trabajo y al ver que tardaba me baje de la cama medio vestida y asomandome a la puerta a lo primero que me hallé fue con ella que estaba en el patio ahorcada.

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

393

Furthermore, we can witness how they employed their own strategies of resistance to improve their living conditions by reinterpreting the prevailing legal framework, both independently and with the assistance of their advocates (Perri 2009, 63).

Subaltern Sectors: Militias, Gambling, and Forms of Resistance Judicial sources provide a more direct connection to subaltern sectors. Witnesses, defendants, and accusers in legal cases reflect the words of the predominantly illiterate lower classes, which are not found in other documents. However, we must acknowledge that this testimonial wealth needs to be assessed carefully, considering that the declarants were often in those circumstances involuntarily or, at the very least, in a tense situation, vulnerable to the power of authorities. This requires caution when using these sources (Di Meglio 2006, 23). In many cases, the declarant does not tell the truth, but the false alibi they present can still hold historical validity (Mayo et al. 1993, 48): what a colonial examining magistrate dismissed as testimony can be valuable for contemporary historians, offering insights into these forms of modest resistance. Let’s explore some cases. Domingo Ramirez, a Judge and Commissioner of Santa Fe and a cattle owner, was not fortunate in his resistance. Despite his position as a rancher and official, he did not enjoy wealth or membership in any elite group. Instead, he occupied a modest position within the predominantly poor rural world of the region. When he received an order from the Governor to comply and notify regarding the herding and branding of cattle, he refused to obey, stating: “After being informed of its content, he declared that he would not obey because the Governor was misinformed and unaware of what he was ordering, and that I had no need to follow such nonsense” (AHPBA–JC.1758.34–1–4–38, f. 2).18 Despite the persistent attempts of the notifier to enforce the mandate from Buenos Aires, Ramirez maintained his stance. In response to his defiance, Alonso de la Vega, the acting Governor of Buenos Aires, ordered his immediate

18 Y habiendo quedado enterado de su contexto dijo que no obedecía porque dicho Señor gobernador estaba mal informado y no sabía lo que mandaba, que poca necesidad tenía yo de seguir a su causa con semejante friolera.

394

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

arrest and confinement in the Royal Prison. Ramirez remained imprisoned for a couple of years before eventually being released. In the rural context, and particularly within the military environment, gambling and leisure provided a temporary escape from the hierarchical structure of a stratified society, allowing men to interact on equal terms. It was in this context that resistance manifested in a distinct manner. During a card game, Soldier Blandengue Nicolás Garay engaged in an argument with his corporal, who held a higher rank in the hierarchy. Garay boldly declared, “In the game, everyone is equal.” He then physically confronted the corporal, pushing him and attacking him with a knife. In response, the corporal ordered Garay to return to the fort, to which Garay defiantly retorted, “that he did not recognise him at all, he was just a lousy corporal” (AGN IX. 12–7–2. Sumarios Militares, in Mayo and Latrubesse 1998, 78). In another case, Soldier Casimiro Sorayre argued that his duty to obey his superiors began and ended within the fort, and that outside of it, no one had the authority to give him orders. Sorayre refused to comply with an order issued by his company’s corporal, shouting that “no one could command him in the field, and that he was free to do as he pleased, and if the difficulty persisted, he would attack him with a lance” (AGN IX. 12–7–7. Sumarios Militares, in Mayo and Latrubesse 1998, 78). As evident, the soldiers in the rural campaign, who were poorly paid and indebted to shopkeepers and peddlers, were not particularly known for their discipline, and complaints from frontier commanders were frequent. Desertion was also a common occurrence and served as another visible form of resistance. Gambling, in its various forms, was a common and widespread activity in colonial society in the Río de la Plata region. Its development, customs, and regulation posed a significant concern for both the people of the time and the authorities who aimed to regulate and control society. However, the regulatory measures taken by the authorities were often met with non-compliant responses from the patrons, as exemplified by the case of Tadeo Salazar at Antonio Rodríguez’s tavern and general store in Cañada de Morón. When confronted by the Alcalde for not adhering to the prohibition of gambling on holidays, the accused acknowledged his awareness of the rule but casually replied, “Nevertheless, we were playing” (AHPBA-RA. 1792–5–5–68–21, in Duart 1998, 142). On many occasions, ordinary people disregarded hierarchies and ignored administrative formalities when engaging in gambling. This

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

395

straightforward yet sincere response symbolizes the defiance of prohibitions, reflecting an attitude unaffected by the gaze and the moralizing attempts of the crown (Duart 1998) and a progressively weakened state that, having been unable to exert significant control during its peak, would be even less effective in its decline.

Conclusions Some judicial cases enable us to delve deeper into the colonial society of Buenos Aires, broadening our comprehension of forgotten aspects of the past. This exploration allows us to forge new pathways in colonial history and attain a more comprehensive understanding of its intricate details. We did not aim to establish a typology or fully explore the topic through the study of a few judicial cases. To achieve a more comprehensive understanding, it would be necessary to compare the selected examples with other cases and utilize various sources, including censuses, statistics, wills, successions, and travel accounts, among others. Nevertheless, these examples provide valuable insights into the everyday resistance of lower social sectors in the late colonial society of the Río de la Plata, allowing us to capture and appreciate the significance of their struggles. Our work is not an isolated case; other authors have developed similar studies using judicial sources to address various aspects of the late colonial world in Mexico with relevant results. Teresa Lozano Armendares carried out a revealing work on crime in Mexico City at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Analyzing the criminal cases conserved in the General Archive of the Nation of Mexico, she focused on common crimes, delving into other daily aspects of the New Spain subaltern sectors in the framework of the crisis of the colonial order (1987). Eric Van Young (2006), some years later and with a judicial documentary corpus, was able to learn about the deepest aspects of a failed revolution—small revolutionary attempts—also focusing on the Mexican colonial crisis and the Revolution of Independence. Its foundations were the deep-rooted New Spain agrarian structures that strained social relations throughout the region for a long time, and William Taylor also did so for the peasant communities of Colonial Mexico. Through criminal proceedings, Taylor did not limit his work to observing the “pathological” aspects of peasant history; instead, he highlighted how violent processes can reveal patterns of social behavior and thus observe the behavior that emerges from the analysis of criminal cases (Taylor 1987, 22). These authors marked a path in the

396

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

use of this type of historical sources in social history and are important methodological references. We acknowledge that not all cases within the judicial domain can be categorized as examples of “everyday resistance.” This phenomenon is intricately connected to power dynamics and exhibits significant heterogeneity. However, there are specific legal cases that undeniably align with this intricate analytical model. The colonial world, in general, was shaped by the clash of domination strategies across various facets of daily life. Tensions and distinct rules of social organization characterized this society. Nevertheless, these rules did not guarantee complete control over the population, leading to the emergence of everyday behaviors that challenged the established order, even within a seemingly stable society. The voices of the lower sectors, which can be discerned through judicial sources, offer a compelling illustration of this phenomenon. Tovar Pinzón (2005) underscores the value of empiricism in gaining a deeper understanding of colonial society compared to relying solely on theory. This empirical approach provides a clearer lens through which to study the lower strata of colonial society in the Río de la Plata region and their small acts of resistance in everyday life. We acknowledge that certain aspects of the human experience remain hidden from our perspective, making them difficult to reconstruct and trace. There are hidden gazes, silent voices, and countless invisible acts of resistance that were marginalized by their own societies and are even more challenging for present-day historians to uncover. However, these limitations should not discourage us; instead, they should serve as motivation. As Robert Darnton pointed out, “Stepping off the beaten path may not be a methodology, but it offers the possibility of gaining unusual insights that can greatly enhance our understanding of the past” (Darnton 1994, 12–13). We can gain profound insights into history by meticulously examining the remarkable experiences of ordinary and rebellious individuals. However, it may be challenging to bring these narratives to the forefront of historical discourse. To do so, we must go beyond the conventional realms of political, institutional, economic, and social history and delve deeper into the underlying layers. Through careful analysis and interpretation, we can shed light on the alternative history within, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of the past. The archive and its records await us.

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

397

References Primary sources Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, Argentina) APBA-JC.1758–34–1–4–38. Autos criminales de oficio contra Domingo Ramirez por desobediencia a los mandatos del Rey. AHPBA-JC. 1758–34–1–4. Autos criminales seguidos contra Joseph Pintos de Nación Portugués por haver dado muerte a una negra esclava suia a fuerza de azotes. AHPBA–JC.1759–34–1–5–1. Autos criminales seguidos contra Maria Cortes, India Auca, por la muerte alevosa que dió a Pablo Morillo Indio su marido. AHPBA–JC.1777–34–1–9–31. Causa seguida por María Jacinta, negra esclava de Dn Juan Guitierrez Galbez sobre el maltrato que este le daba. AHPBA-JC. 1796–34–2–21–18. Información practicada a fin de esclarecer la verdad referente a si el esclavo Manuel Castro se hirió a sí mismo. AHPBA–JC. 1796–34–2–21–8. Averiguaciones tendientes a esclarecer la causa cómo se ahorcó una criada de Fernando Rodríguez de nombre María. AHPBA–JC. 1799–34–2–24–21. Causa seguida contra Esteban García de Zuñiga por malos tratos a su esclavo Feliciano García. AHPBA-RA. 1792–5–5–68–21. AHPBA–RA. 1803–3–3–10–9. La Real Audiencia al Virrey Joaquín del Pino solicitándole la aprobación de la sentencia de muerte dictada contra los negros Simón Álvarez y Joaquín Antonio Pedroso, autores de la muerte de sus amos Domingo García, Manuel Correa y demás personas de la casa de éste. AHPBA–RA.1808–5–5–72–26. Luján. Margarita Ruiz de Ocaña por extracción de ganado. AHPBA–RA. 1809–5–1–19.

Archivo General de la Nación (Buenos Aires, Argentina) AGN, IX, 12–7–2–Sumarios militares. AGN, IX, 12–7–7–Sumarios Militares

Bibliography Barriera, Darío. 2008. Voces legas, letras de justicia. Las culturas jurídicas de los legos en el Río de la Plata entre los siglos XVI y XIX. In Bajtin y la historia de la cultura popular, ed. Tomás Mantecón Movellán, 347-386. Santander: Universidad de Cantabria.

398

E. REITANO AND J. SARMIENTO

Bloch, Marc. 1968 [1939]. La société féodale. La formation des liens de depéndanse. Paris: Albin Michel. Darnton, Robert. 1994. La gran matanza de gatos y otros episodios de la cultura francesa, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Di Meglio, Gabriel. 2006. ¡Viva el bajo pueblo! La plebe urbana de Buenos Aries y la política entre la Revolución de Mayo y el rosismo. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. Duart, Diana. 1998. El estado y el juego en el Buenos Aires tardo colonial (1750–1830). In Juego, Sociedad y Estado en Buenos Aires 1730–1830, ed. Carlos A. Mayo and Ángela Fernández, 130-155. La Plata: EDULP. Fradkin, Raúl. 2007. El poder y la vara. Estudios sobre la justicia y la construcción del Estado en el Buenos Aires rural. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. Jofre, Tomás. 1919. Manual de Procedimiento civil y penal. Buenos Aires: Librería Jurídica. Lozano Armendares, Teresa. 1987. La criminalidad en la ciudad de México 1810–1821. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, UNAM. Mallo, Silvia. 2004. La sociedad rioplatense ante la justicia. La transición del siglo XVIII al XIX . La Plata: Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Mallo, Silvia. 2003. El color del delito en Buenos Aires. 1750–1830. Memoria y Sociedad 7 (15): 111–123. Mayo, Carlos, Silvia Mallo, and Osvaldo Barreneche. 1993. Las fuentes Judiciales. Notas para su manejo metodológico. Estudios e Investigaciones 1: 47–53. Mayo, Carlos and Amalia Latrubesse. 1998. Terratenientes, soldados y Cautivos. La frontera, 1736–1815. Buenos Aires: Biblos. Perri, Gladys. 2009. Los esclavos frente a la justicia. Resistencia y adaptación en Buenos Aires, 1780–1830. In La ley es tela de araña. Ley, justicia y sociedad en rural en Buenos Aries. 1780–1830, ed. Raúl O. Fradkin, 51-81. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. Sarmiento, Jacqueline. 2015. Indias urbanas en Buenos Aires (1744–1820). Condiciones específicas, formas de sujeción y estrategias posibles. Master Thesis. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Scott, James C. 2000. Los dominados y el arte de la resistencia. Mexico City: Era. Scott, Joan. 1986. Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review 91 (5): 1053–1075. Socolow, Susan. 2016. La mujer y las conductas sociales anómalas: delito, brujería y rebelión. In Las mujeres en la América Latina colonial. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. Stolke, Verena. 2006. O enigma das interseções: Classe, raça, sexo, sexualidade. A formação dos impérios transatlânticos do século XVI ao XIX. Estudos Feministas 14: 15–42. Taylor, William. 1987. Embriaguez, homicidio y rebelión en las poblaciones coloniales mexicanas. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

18

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN LATE COLONIAL BUENOS AIRES …

399

Tovar Pinzón, Hermes. 2005. Resistencia y vida cotidiana en la sociedad colonial (1500–1810). In Los buenos, los malos y los feos. Poder y resistencia en América Latina,, ed. Nikolaus Bóttcher, Isabel Galaor., and Bernd Hausberger, 391415. Berlin: Bibliotheca Iberoamericana. Van Young, Eric. 2006. La otra rebelión. La lucha por la independencia de México, 1810–1821. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Vassallo, Jaqueline. 2006. Delincuentes y pecadoras en la Córdoba tardo colonial. Anuario De Estudios Americanos 63 (2): 97–116. Vassallo, Jaqueline. 2012. Esclavas peligrosas en la Córdoba tardo colonial. Dos Puntas 6: 197–216. Vinthagen, Stellan, and Anna Johanson. 2013. Everyday Resistance: Exploration of a Concept and Its Theories. Resistance Studies Magazine 1 (1): 1–46.

Afterword

CHAPTER 19

Final Thoughts on Entangled Resistances from the Early Modern Iberian Empires Pablo Sánchez León

Power must be analysed as something which circulates (…) Individuals (…) are always in a position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. (Foucault 1980: 98)

The studies gathered in this volume play different roles for historical knowledge. Firstly, they fulfill the main and most basic objective of understanding and publicizing the forms of protest widespread in the Portuguese and Hispanic monarchies throughout the Early Modern Age. Although these are specific and isolated examples, their description and analysis illuminate the general contours of the forms of imperial domination within which they developed. In addition, they contribute to understanding what were the conditions, resources, and motivations with

P. Sánchez León (B) CHAM - Center for the Humanities, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Sánchez León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2_19

403

404

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN

which subjects of very varied legal and social status, gender, identity, and ethnicity—indigenous, enslaved, or free Afro-descendants, and mestizos in the colonial environment, men and women, but also local powers, artisans, peasants, and urban lumpen of the metropolitan regions— confronted the institutional frameworks established by the Imperial forms of domination. Moreover, its importance must also be measured by what a historical and long-term perspective can contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of resistance. Resistance is arguably the most subtle form of social protest, often practiced by isolated individuals. However, its study holds significant implications for our broader understanding of social structures. Consistent with Michel Foucault’s assertion, resistance continues to be a manifestation of power, even when enacted by those who appear to be subjected to it. This necessitates a nuanced re-evaluation of our definition of power. But this is not all. Understanding the delegitimizing potential of resistance—also its limits in undermining established power—implies assuming a complex definition of the resisting subject. For even in the case of an isolated individual, the resistant needs to give meaning to his or her action, something that can only be achieved by reference to norms conventionally accepted by some group or community. It is therefore convenient to overcome the dichotomous vision that contrasts domination with resistance, as well as the partial perspective that disconnects the actions carried out by those who resist from the normative framework within which they carry them out. To do this, it is needed to contextualize the generalization made by Foucault, according to which the resister is “always” in a position of “simultaneously” suffering and exercising power. In practice, specifying in what concrete ways the “circulation” of power that unfolds ultimately involves historicizing resistance. The examples chosen by the authors brought together in this volume are representative of forms of dissent and contestation that originate and develop within institutional, cultural or community frameworks. This configuration was certainly not unique to the Iberian monarchies of the Early Modern period: these types of actions are traceable across various historical contexts, both traditional and modern, and were particularly widespread during the so-called Ancien Régime, a period characterized by the absence of a formal separation between the mechanisms of domination and an autonomous civil society. In this enduring context, resistance

19

FINAL THOUGHTS ON ENTANGLED RESISTANCES …

405

emerged as a recurring phenomenon, intricately woven into the interactions among powers, jurisdictions, subjects, and the institutions that bestowed recognition upon them. However, these monarchies stand out due to the extensive development of the justice system as a central mode of domination and the diverse, overlapping jurisdictions it encompassed. These jurisdictions affected individuals of varied ethnic backgrounds, genders, and social statuses, while maintaining connections with a wide array of other cultures and civilizations. The concluding pages of this book utilize the gathered examples and cases to delve into three thematic areas: norms, agency, and contentious collective action. Additionally, this commentary aims to identify potential future directions for historical studies on resistance.

The Plurality of Normative Frameworks and the Legitimacy of Resistance A first piece of evidence that these studies reveal is the centrality of legal language in the culture of the Iberian monarchies during the Old Regime. Its pervasive presence in diverse aspects of social life and various established fields of knowledge is illustrated by Mariana Meneses’ chapter when she defines the sacrament of penance as comparable to “a judicial act in which the priest pronounces judgment as a judge.” This centrality is substantiated by extensive judicial documentation, as emphasized by Emir Reitano and Jaqueline Sarmiento, who regard it in their contribution as an essential source for the study of resistance. The legal terminology employed to attribute significance to communal relationships also played a significant external role beyond the Iberian empires. As elucidated by José Luis Egío, the resistance of indigenous Mapuches during the conquest era was construed by conquerors using the same neo-scholastic language of delegitimization applied to those who contested the imperial order from within. Consequently, frontier regions were delineated as “lawless territories,” where it was possible to deny indigenous peoples the access to the exclusive legal safeguards granted to European colonial oppressors. Undoubtedly, these were regions considered to be under the dominion of war, an activity that, in principle, suspended the application of common law. However, in practice frontier relations were more intricate, and the focus on resistance allows to identify the proliferation of normative systems also under states of exception. This phenomenon was not

406

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN

confined solely to the colonial context but also extended to metropolitan Castile and Portugal. As demonstrated in David Martín Marcos’ chapter on the border between these two kingdoms, after Portugal’s independence in the mid-seventeenth century wartime activities gave rise to everyday practices of resistance. These were not motivated by allegiance to either of the warring factions but rather as a response to the dynamics imposed by armed conflict. Leveraging a long-standing tradition of communal practices among local groups from both monarchies, such resistances forged a local trans-border normativity. On the other hand, these contextual oscillations between order and exception force us to stop seeing resistance as a transgression of norms only on the part of the resisters. Thus, Oliva’s study demonstrated that in the early 1500s, as Castile became the head of a transatlantic empire, the established power responsible for safeguarding the regulatory frameworks was accused of failing to comply with previous agreements with its constituencies and even of suspending legal procedures. In such context, resistance toward the institutions acquired a defensive and restorative appearance that should be integrated into a widespread culture of legality. Taken together, the acts of resistance in the Portuguese and Hispanic empires during the early modern period reveal an order in which, unlike what happens in the contemporary world, the resisters did not necessarily consider themselves as external to the institutions of government (although delegitimizing campaigns showed them as such) nor passive before the established legal framework. Claudia Varella’s study on claims for freedom initiated by enslaved people in the Caribbean since the late eighteenth century highlights that resistance in the Iberian world often took advantage of opportunities provided by an all-encompassing judicial system. Consequently, these acts of resistance typically occurred within the established legal framework and did not typically involve prohibited or covert means. This presupposes a certain knowledge about formal legal norms even on the part of the lowest social strata and even among the uneducated population, who apparently became increasingly involved in litigation processes throughout the Modern Age (Premo 2017); familiarity with judicial knowledge was also reinforced by popular insertion in cultural spheres that provided resisters with resources to interpret transgressions by those in power, thus legitimizing their actions of resistance. Fabricio Lyrio Santos’ study illustrates how the Jesuits’ endeavor in

19

FINAL THOUGHTS ON ENTANGLED RESISTANCES …

407

colonial Brazil to transform the communities under their direct management into self-sufficient units of acculturation enabled the Christianized Tupinambá indians to develop dissenting discourses regarding religious orthodoxy. This led to phenomena like the so-called santidades , which delineated their own normative codes in matters of belief. Conversely, Tomás Mantecón describes how, within the formal institutions providing assistance to the poor in the major port cities of the Habsburg empire, informal yet firmly established normative mechanisms of reciprocity were replicated within popular culture. Despite their absence of recognition in formal law, these lower-tier self-regulations, often guided by tacit conventions but capable of offering incentives and imposing penalties, established an order that was autonomous yet interconnected with the formal socio-institutional framework. As Mantecón concludes, such order conferred upon the urban underclass “its own rights, laws, and way of life.” Studies like these confirm that, to comprehensively address resistance within a law-centric framework as that of the Iberian empires, it is crucial to embrace a broad definition of plurinormativity. Its definition should encompass the wide array of community or group behaviors that were socially tolerated, or at the very least not considered openly against the law. However, this approach implies examining the functioning of the legal framework not in a normative manner but as a compound of regulations that were neither systematically applied nor always prescriptive. They were rather subject to considerable discretion due to the variety of actors the established order authorized to interpret them. Such condition made the relationships between overlapping jurisdictions contingent, as exemplified in André Godinho’s study on royal entrances in Baroque Portugal. While the relationships between the king and the cities were predefined within the constitutional framework, this was so at a generic and symbolic level—the realm of the political body and the king/kingdom pact. Relationships had to be subsequently realized through practical interactions. Despite being highly ritualized, public ceremonies often ignited conflicts over precedence and hosted differing interpretations among local dominant groups that deviated from the courtly government programs. Given their political significance, in these solemn settings resistance could yield highly subversive effects. Conversely, the studies collected in this volume illustrate the extent to which the legal framework not only determined the procedures but

408

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN

also shaped the very definition of the transgression of the legal framework that resistance sought to denounce and challenge. This framework influenced the nature of the response and, to a significant extent, the potential scope of institutional action stemming from it. As Meneses demonstrates, instances of sexual abuse by priests against colonial female parishioners were of interest to the Holy Office primarily for the purpose of adjudicating deviant behaviors by the perpetrators within their pastoral role, rather than treating them as crimes against the physical and moral integrity of the victims. However, these constraints did not diminish the inherently political nature of resistance. In addition to contextualizing them within their legal frameworks, the study of resistances demands approaches that go beyond the conventional image of all-powerful authorities vs. powerless subjects, recognizing the diverse entities with legitimate agency (Koinman 1993).

The Rationalities of Resistance and the Reproduction of Collective Identities One question that arises from the discussion above is the extent to which resistance acts were defined by adherence to norms—whether established internally within subaltern groups—and to what extent they were responses to more universal mechanisms of human agency. In line with the former, María Regina Celestino de Almeida defines the attitude of Luso-Brazilian indigenous populations toward the normative changes imposed by colonial management reforms in the eighteenth century as “adaptive resistance.” On the other hand, Paulo Pinto’s study on the reactions of Asian populations to the arrival of the Portuguese identifies a wide range of positions, spanning from adaptation to armed confrontation, and encompassing resistance based on changes in the relationships between imperial powers and local actors within a complex geopolitical context. Regarding the latter, Benita Herreros’ chapter demonstrates that the growing competition between the Iberian empires on the border of Paraguay and Mato Grosso in the late eighteenth century allowed the Mbayá indigenous people to exploit these tensions. They did so by taking advantage of available resources such as trade, combined with acts of harassment against the imperial powers and the appropriation of the rhetoric of the Europeans, all of which strengthened their strategic position as necessary allies for both colonial powers.

19

FINAL THOUGHTS ON ENTANGLED RESISTANCES …

409

Processes like these reveal a tactical capacity on the part of the resisters, regardless of social or cultural contexts. What is more challenging to substantiate, however, is whether those acts reached a strategic level. In general, no isolated act of resistance is guaranteed a positive outcome in terms of cost/benefit. It is also important to avoid present-framed assumptions in relation to the Ancien Régime, whose legal framework not only prioritized obligations over freedoms but also primarily defined subjects as corporate entities, a framework favoring that all individual agency was carried out with reference to some collective entity. Such configuration, typical of the forms of social and institutional organization of the Iberian monarchies in the Early Modern period, highlights rationalities that extend beyond mere norm compliance while remaining irreducible into utilitarian assumptions. These are actions that are based on the preservation and/or expression of identity. Always linked to collective moral values, activated identity-founded actions are triggered especially when groups feel threatened from the outside. In the Iberian colonial world, this non-utilitarian yet non-acquiescent type of agency predominantly emerges through intermediary agents. These mediators are certainly acquainted for their familiarity with diverse normative systems. However, as demonstrated in Jaime Valenzuela’s study on the Ladinos of Mapuche origin—who assimilated the language and customs of Hispanic conquerors—their knowledge of colonial power norms, while undeniably advantageous for their own ascent to political and military leadership, was contingent upon their prior commitment to the value framework of their indigenous reference communities. Their tendendy to betray conquerors signifies their unscathed loyalty to the community of value references and behavioral norms. Such logic of identification with a reference group can, indeed, be extended to other agents of resistance found in the studies compiled in this volume. Given that representation was an inherent tool for any kind of agency within the Ancien Régime (Sintomer 2013), it can be posited that even individual litigants before the courts acted as representatives of specific communities or reference groups. If value-oriented rationality should be deemed a distinct form of action, it is because identity expresses the need of individuals to ensure a sense of continuity not only by reference to a group but also to time. Without this continuity, they cannot act with the prospective of enjoying the future effects of their present actions (Pizzorno 1986). The question of temporality permeates Esther Pascua Echegaray’s study on the resistance of peasant communities in medieval Castile. These communities opposed

410

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN

fines and abuses by monastic lords through a collective solidarity maintained through decades, eventually developing discourses about custom as the legitimate basis for their claims of justice. It was only upon this long-term identity foundation that the subjects of the Iberian crowns devised strategies, which could indeed persist over an extended period, even beyond a single generation. This pattern is exemplified in Marcella Hayes’ study of the eighteenth-century claim by Peruvian Mulattoes: they reclaimed an old privilege granted in the previous century to their Afrodescendant ancestors, who were once enlisted in a militia for the defense of imperial power, exempting them from certain tax burdens. Viewed from this perspective, forms of resistance in the Iberian world become significant not only for legal anthropology but also as a sociological phenomenon. They contributed to the reproduction of the reference groups of the resisters within themselves and in their relationship with power. This understanding, favored by the classification system and the legal status that memory held throughout the Early Modern period, applies to all the groups addressed in this volume—whether based on gender, lineage, ethnicity, religion, locality, or social status. Hayes, for example, demonstrates how a collective like the militarized Mulattoes, who were not strictly an ethnic minority in legal terms, acquired institutional recognition that ensured them both collective and individual identity over time. Furthermore, when successful, resistance had the potential to impact the very definition of the group. This occurred in the case studied by Celestino de Almeida through the reinterpretation subaltern groups made of the concept of civilization. Meanwhile, Herreros highlights how the status of vassals granted by Portuguese authorities to certain indigenous communities in the Upper Paraguay region was leveraged by these communities to strengthen their negotiation power with the Spanish and maintain their autonomy in the face of imperial ambitions and violence. To conclude, as crystalized in the majority of the examples gathered in this volume, resistance can be seen as a performative act in the face of established power, carried out with reference to norms and values, and reproducing collective identity. This approach highlights the communities of interpretation through which individual resistors made sense of their own and others’ norms, thus endorsing a complex understanding of the “uses of justice” (Owensby and Ross 2018; Vermeesch, van del Heijden and Zuijderjuijn 2019) by placing greater emphasis on resistance as a means of expressing identity rather than its instrumental dimension.

19

FINAL THOUGHTS ON ENTANGLED RESISTANCES …

411

Exploring the Boundaries of Resistance and Its Potential to Transcend Established Norms Resistance also has limits, which in the case of the Iberian monarchies seem to have been particularly defined by matters related to religious orthodoxy. Pascua Echegaray’s chapter meticulously describes the case of Castilian conversos accused of maintaining Jewish customs, a form of dissent for which the dominant Christian culture offered no space to construct a legitimizing discourse for resistance beyond the group experiencing oppression, ultimately leading to defeat in the face of an unrelenting power. Similarly, Pinto encounters the same reaction from the Portuguese imperial power, which was willing to engage in costly disruptive operations against the region’s Muslims in the Indian Ocean. In the Ancien Régime, religion held profound significance, as salvation was at stake. Being part of the “correct” confessional community meant excluding any normative deviation as potentially threatening to established eschatological references (Williams 1990). Moreover, since initiating a lawsuit was the basic mechanism available to aggrieved subjects or those seeking justice, resistance typically began within the judicial system and, when possible, it remained within the established legal framework. The studies by Egío, Hayes, Meneses, and Reitano and Sarmiento exemplify resistance as an activity that utilizes available legal resources, following legitimate interpretive parameters, to ensure that individuals can advance their claims or restrain impositions. However, this prescription also showed its limits: the lack of recognition caused overlapping and interrelated normative systems to fracture, leading to the breakdown of institutional loyalties and questioning the overall legitimacy of the institutional framework. When this occurred, violence erupted. In that sense, Sergio Serulnikov’s study is emblematic of how an established centuries-old order—in this case, in two different regions of the Andean colonial world—crumbled due to the institutions’ inability to address the effects of their own tax reforms in response to the demands of a population relegated to a subordinate position. However, as the studies gathered in this volume demonstrate, in the Iberian world the relationship between resistance and other forms of protest involving violence, such as revolt, was complex. Carlos Garriga’s study challenges the implicit assumption in the classic framework of social mobilizations, where more proactive, intensive, and explosive forms of conflict follow initial, more

412

P. SÁNCHEZ LEÓN

defensive and moderate resistance attempts. In the case of the Catalan guilds in the second half of the eighteenth century, resistance to the conscription of soldiers occurred after the 1766 riots that had extended throughout the peninsula. These riots were followed, and not preceded, by reforms contravening traditional procedures of local self-government that sparked the resistances. On the other hand, the chapters by Oliva, Pascua, and Pinto show that resistance was often a complex practice that combined both types of activities, legal and disruptive, at different times. One conclusion from these examples is that it is advisable to view resistance within broader cycles of conflicts that encompass various forms of action, some situated within the legal framework and others exceeding legality, creating a space of tension with the legal framework in between. The effectiveness of resistance is, on the other hand, a contextual variable. In this regard, several of the studies gathered in this volume show that, regardless of success in their claims, resistance typically led to increases in the self-organization of those involved. This effect underlies the capacity for the constant renegotiation of legitimacy by resistance actions. However, the use of resistance language available in the context, which may have played an important role in legitimizing resistance actions that we would now consider illegal, remains to be researched on more systematically. This lacuna presents a promising avenue for future exploration bridging the history of social conflicts and that of political and legal languages.

References Foucault, Michel. 1980. Two Lectures. In Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge —Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 , ed. Colin Gordon, 78– 108. New York: Pantheon Books. Koinman, Jan. 1993. Social-Political Governance: An Introduction. In Modern Governance: New Government-Society Interactions, ed. Jan Koinman, 1–8. London: Sage. Owensby, Brian P. and Richard J. Ross. 2018. “Making Law Intelligible in Comparative Context”, en Justice in a New World. Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America. ed. Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross, 1-58. New York: New York University Press. Pizzorno, Alessandro. 1986. Some Other Kind of Otherness: A Critique of Rational Choice Theories. In Development, Democracy, and the Art of Trespassing: Essays in Honor of Albert O. Hirschman, ed. Alejandro Foxley, Michael

19

FINAL THOUGHTS ON ENTANGLED RESISTANCES …

413

S. McPherson, and Guillermo O’Donnell, 355–373. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Premo, Bianca. 2017. The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sintomer, Yves. 2013. The Meanings of Political Representation: Uses and Misuses of a Notion. Raisons Politiques 50 (2): 13–34. Vermeesch, Griet, Manon van der Heijden, and Jaco Zuijderuijn, eds. 2019. The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600–1900. New York: Routledge. Williams, Robert A. 1990. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought. The Discourses of Conquest. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Index

A Accommodation, 16, 26, 135, 136, 145, 146, 201 Aceh, 144, 145, 148, 150 Afonso VI, King of Portugal, 165 Afro-descendants, 267, 370, 404 mulatos , 16, 184, 240, 242–251, 360, 361, 366, 367, 382, 391, 410 pardos , 253, 254, 341 Ahumada, Urbano de, 120, 121 Aires Varela, 116 Albuquerque, Afonso de, 140, 143 Alburquerque, 115, 119 Aldeamentos. See Indian villages (aldeias, aldeamentos, missions) Alentejo, 113, 118, 121, 124, 125 Alfonso X, King of Portugal, 49 Almagro, Diego de, 71 Almeida, 16, 117, 408, 410 Álvarez Lázaro Álvarez, 39, 40 Leonor Álvarez, 40

Andes, 70, 339, 343 Anganamón (indigenous leader), 75, 76 Angol, 74 anthropophagy, 80 António, prior of Crato, 166 Aquinas, Thomas, 48, 51, 54 Arauco, 71, 74, 80, 82, 84 Archbishop of México, 57 Aristotle, 30, 50 Aroche, 125 Assimilation, 16, 74, 81, 262, 266, 267, 277, 278, 346 Augustinian (religious order), 30, 57, 59, 60 ayllarehue, 79 Azevedo, Luís Marinho de, 118, 119

B Badajoz, 117, 128 Balboa, Juan de, 121 Barrancos, 118

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. S. León and B. Herreros Cleret de Langavant (eds.), Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63406-2

415

416

INDEX

Beira, 117, 119, 124 Berlanga de Duero, 39 Biedermann, Zoltán, 139, 140, 149 Biobío (river), 71, 74, 82, 83 Black population. See Afro-descendants Bouchon, Geneviève, 136, 137 Bourbons, 242, 293, 312, 336, 344, 348 Bourbon reforms, 337, 353 Brazil, 16, 222, 230, 231, 233, 278, 293, 297, 354, 357, 407 Buenos Aires, 338, 341, 343, 345, 346

C Calderón, Melchor, 55 Calicut, 137, 140, 141, 143, 148 Callao, 239, 240, 245 Campo de Argañán, 120 Campo Maior, 118, 169 Castelo de Vide, 124 Catholic Church, 181 Cerro de Andévalo, El, 121 Charles III, King of Spain, 322, 333, 334, 337, 344 Chile, 16, 55, 69–71, 77–82, 84, 183, 290, 347, 366 Chiloé, 81, 83 China, 143–146 citizen, citizenship, 100, 253–255, 276, 277, 336 Ciudad Rodrigo, 117, 120 civilization, 301, 305, 335, 405, 410 coartación/coartado slave, 354–359, 362–365, 367, 369–371 Codosera, La, 117 College of San Gregorio (Valladolid), 51 common good, 28, 30, 31, 51, 52, 54, 55, 98, 99, 166, 202

Comunidades (revolt), 47, 53, 91, 92, 95, 96, 100 Concepción (town, Chile), 74 Concepción or Villa Real de la Concepción (town, Paraguay), 287, 296, 300, 301 conquest, 37, 70, 78, 83, 84, 143, 144, 149, 221, 232, 270, 301, 334, 345, 347, 365, 405 Constitution of Cádiz, 240, 253 Cortes, 51, 94, 101, 253–255, 358 Council city council, 160, 161, 168, 243, 250, 292, 342, 344, 345 Council of the Indies, 55, 240, 243, 245, 247–249 Council (religion) Council of Trent, 59, 60, 179, 182, 183 First Mexican Council, 57 Court, 10, 14, 39, 84, 95, 99, 137, 145, 162, 163, 165, 201, 203, 275, 324, 340, 362, 387 covenant, 28, 32 craftsmen, 161 Creole, 16, 60, 184, 334, 335, 337, 341–343, 345, 346, 348, 363 Crime banditry, 211 contraband, 7, 126–129 gambling, 209–211, 394 kidnapping, 214 organized crime, 201 pillage, 290 piracy, 136 prostitution, 214 sexual abuse, 209, 408 smuggling, 126–128, 366 solicitation, 178–182, 184, 185, 187, 188, 192 theft, 82, 118, 123, 209, 290, 300, 390

INDEX

crowd, 167–170, 249, 318, 319, 322 Crown, 9, 98, 103, 105–107, 142, 159–161, 163, 165, 170, 171, 202, 208, 224, 240, 246, 247, 265, 266, 270, 291, 327, 338, 344, 345, 348, 349, 354, 359, 366, 368, 395, 410 Cuba, 354–356, 358–362, 365–367, 369 custom, 11, 28, 32, 34, 35, 38, 40, 75, 107, 114, 127, 128, 140, 142, 144, 162, 163, 165, 211, 225, 242, 249, 267, 300, 346, 364, 365, 394, 409–411 Cuzco, 70, 252, 334, 338

D depopulation, 117 Diplomacy, 138, 139, 144, 145, 149, 293 Dissidence, 26, 38

E Encinasola, 125 encomienda, 70, 82, 190 Enlightenment, 17, 203, 261, 262, 266 Ercilla, Alonso de, 71 Ethnicity ethnogenesis, 81 Everyday forms of resistance, 8, 129, 294, 299 Évora, 48, 163, 164 Extremadura, 117, 119, 212

F factions, 205, 209, 210, 406 Fernández de Buenrostro, Alonso, 69 Fernández de Madrigal, Alonso (‘El Tostado’), 50

417

Flanders, 79, 80, 83 Flores, Jorge, 135 Foucault, Michel, 6, 8, 26, 92, 115, 284, 403, 404 Franciscan (religious order), 147, 186 frontier, 9, 15–17, 37, 55, 83, 114–123 Fueros , 35, 36, 326

G Gama, Vasco da, 137 Gender, 15, 77, 180–182, 184, 191, 198, 212, 214, 345, 361, 363, 382, 404, 405, 410 González de Nájera, Alonso, 75, 79–81, 84 Gregory XV (Pope), 178 Guadiana River, 114, 121, 122, 128

H Herzog, Tamar, 4, 10, 126, 241, 242, 248, 249, 254, 255, 287 Hormuz, 136, 140–143

I Idlers, 211 immigrants, 196, 197, 211 Inca, 70, 79, 81 Inca nobility, 57 India, 134, 137, 138, 140, 142, 147 Estado da Índia, 135, 137, 139, 142, 143, 146, 148 Indian Ocean, 135–137, 139, 141, 142, 145, 148, 149, 411 Indian villages (aldeias, aldeamentos, missions), 262, 263, 265–267, 269–273 Indigenous communities, 15, 16, 287, 289, 291, 333, 336, 337, 339, 342, 343, 410

418

INDEX

Indigenous forms of leadership boquivoye, 78 cacique, 289, 297–299, 302, 337, 338 lonko, 71 toqui, 75, 78 ulmen, 78 Indigenous peoples Aauca, 71, 82 Guaycurú. See mbayá Huilliche, 77, 83 Mapuche, 55, 75, 77–81, 84, 409 Mbayá, 284, 286, 408 Potiguara, 231–234 Tupinambá, 225, 232–234, 407 Indigenous policy, 262, 268, 278 Indigents, 54, 200 Iniaoba (indigenous leader), 231, 232, 234, 235 Inquisition, 16, 38–40, 53, 177–179, 184, 190, 191, 226, 267

J Jews, 38, 342 aljama, 37, 38 John III, King of Portugal, 53 John IV, King of Portugal, 121, 169, 170 John of Bragança, Duke. See King John IV of Portugal Johor, 144, 145, 150 jurisdiction, 10, 14, 27, 31, 39, 49, 56, 58, 107, 140, 184, 190, 210, 248, 250, 338, 345, 379, 381, 405, 407

K Kerala, 137, 143, 148, 149 Kochi, 137, 140, 141, 143

L La Coruña, 51 Ladino, 76, 409 Lambayeque, 251–253 La Paz, 334, 341, 346, 347 La Plata, 341, 343, 347, 349 Lautaro (indigenous leader), 71, 74, 75, 80 Law canon law, 49, 56 natural law, 29, 57, 358 plurinormativity, 371, 407 Lawsuit, 30, 32, 94, 105, 113, 340, 357, 370, 387, 411 Lima, 16, 179, 181, 183, 188, 189, 239, 240, 242–247, 249–252, 254, 255, 338, 341, 342, 346 Lisbon, 114, 120, 122, 143, 159–170, 196, 197, 226, 274 Lombard, Denys, 136 Lombard, Peter, 52 Lumpenproletariat, 196, 197, 199, 200, 204, 205, 207–210, 213, 215 M Macau, 146 Madrid, 58, 95, 120, 122, 180, 197, 201, 266, 286, 304 Malacca, 134, 136, 143–145, 148, 150 Mamluk, 140–143, 149 Manuel I, King of Portugal, 142 manumission, 354–356, 358–362, 369, 370, 372 Mapocho (river), 70 Maria Francisca of Savoy (Queen of Portugal), 160, 161, 164, 165 Maria Sophia of Neuburg (Queen of Portugal), 159, 160, 167 Martínez de Osma, Pedro, 50 martyrdom, 77

INDEX

Mato Grosso, 17, 286, 287, 289, 291, 292, 295, 297, 299, 408 Maule (river), 70, 74 Medina Sidonia, House of, 121 merchants, 143–145, 160, 166, 334, 337, 341, 343, 345–347 Mértola, 113 Mexico City, 57, 177, 395 militia, 170, 242, 243, 246–248, 250, 253, 300, 344, 346, 410 Montúfar, Alonso de, 60 Monzón, Francisco de, 53 Moura, 125 mulato. See Afro-descendants N Nambiar, O.K., 134 negotiation, 9, 14, 98, 105, 140, 159, 170, 264, 284, 297, 313, 356, 358, 410 New Spain (Mexico), 58, 242, 251, 395 Niebla, County of, 121, 122 Noudar, 124, 125 Nova Coimbra (fort), 287, 294, 295, 297–303 O Ocaña, Diego de, 75, 80 Oñez de Loyola, Martín García, 75, 78, 83 Ordines , 27 Oruro, 334, 341–343, 347 Osorno (Chile), 76, 81 Ottoman empire, 141, 145, 148, 149 outlaws, 115, 205, 208, 209, 211, 212 P Paraguay, 17, 284–295, 302, 303, 408, 410

419

pardos. . See afro-descendants Paymogo, 122 Peasant community, 26, 395, 409 Pelantaro (indigenous leader), 75 Peru, 239, 240, 242, 247, 249–251, 253–255, 292, 338, 339, 367 petition, 7, 16, 99, 171, 240–243, 245–248, 251, 252, 254, 265, 271, 273, 274, 276, 324, 325, 335, 365, 370 Phelan, John Leddy, 241 Philip II, King of Spain, 61, 161, 162, 166–170, 244, 367 Philip III, King of Spain, 160–164, 169 Pius V (Pope), 60 Plebeian culture, 16, 199, 203, 204, 213, 215 Political participation, 93 popular politics, 335 Pombal, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello (Marquês de Pombal), 16, 266, 267 pontifical bull, 57, 58, 60, 61 potestas , 48, 53, 61 Potosí, 239, 338, 340 Procuradores , 51, 55, 97–99, 101 Purén, 74–76, 82 Q Quilacura, 71 Quiñelob, 77, 78 Quiroga, Vasco de, 60 R Raya, 115, 116, 118–120, 122, 124–129 Religion, 37, 41, 137, 224, 228, 235, 410, 411 French Wars of Religion, 49 Reloncaví (gulf), 82

420

INDEX

remonstrance, 49 resilience, 9, 82, 129, 143, 165, 199, 213, 214 revolution, 5, 6, 9, 56, 334, 344, 357, 395 Ribera, Alonso de, 80, 203 ritual, 74, 76, 77, 80, 104, 157–159, 162, 163, 167, 168, 170, 171, 178, 233, 298 Roa, Fernando de, 50 robbery, 102, 209 Roman Curia, 60 Rome, 57, 58, 141, 147, 166 royal authority (limits), 48, 49, 52, 54, 60, 248 ruca, 77 rumours, 27, 97, 191 S sabotage, 7, 27, 32, 33, 35, 41, 82 Sahagún, 33, 34 Salamanca, 48, 52, 53, 55 Salvador, Vicente do (franciscan friar), 222, 223, 226, 229, 231, 232 Salvaterra do Extremo, 119 San Millán de la Cogolla, 32 Santarém (town, Portugal), 165, 169 Santiago (city, Chile), 51, 55, 81, 183 Santiago de Compostela, 91 santidade (indigenous political movement), 224, 226, 407 scholasticism, 54–56 Scott, James C., 6, 7, 12, 26, 41, 92, 105, 115, 180, 181, 191, 299, 335, 336, 355, 377 Sebastian I, King of Portugal, 165, 169, 170 Serpa, 122, 125 servicios extraordinarios . See taxation Seville (city, Spain), 125, 197, 204, 205, 210, 214 Sintra (town, Portugal), 170

slavery, 84, 206, 207, 244, 264, 267, 354, 355, 357–361, 364, 367, 369, 370, 372, 391 slaves. See slavery Soajo, 123 Society of Jesus, 147, 223, 233 solidarity, 28, 36, 40, 116, 148, 199, 211, 410 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 4, 139 T Tavira (town, Portugal), 165 Tawantinsuyu, 70 taxation, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 99, 244, 365, 367 taxes. See taxation Ternate, 148 Thompson, Edward P., 127, 181, 264, 319, 335, 355 tierra adentro, 76 tolderías , 287 Tomar (city, Portugal), 166, 167 (town) crier, 249, 250 tribute. See taxation Tucapel, 74 Tupac Amaru (indigenous leader), 83, 334, 336, 338, 341, 342, 344, 347 tyranny, 30, 48, 50, 51, 55, 335 U University Alcalá, 53, 59 Coimbra, Mexico, 53 Coimbra, Portugal, 303 Salamanca, 47, 48, 50–52 Valladolid, 51 Upper Peru, 17, 287, 291, 333, 338 uprising, 5, 74–76, 80, 83, 114, 148, 334, 339, 341, 343, 344, 346 utilitarianism, 55

INDEX

V vagabonds, 212 Valdivia (city in Chile), 70, 71, 81 Valdivia, Pedro de, 70, 79 Valladolid, 91, 97, 105 vassal. See vassalage vassalage, 140, 244, 247, 298 Vera Cruz, Alonso de la, 54, 57, 60, 61 Villalba de los Barros, 117 Vitoria, Francisco de, 48, 53–55

Vivar, Jerónimo de, 80 vutanmapu, 80

Y yanacona, 75

Z Zain al-Din Ma’bari, 134, 138 Zarza la Mayor, 119, 124

421