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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Many studies have been written concerning the mission. Generally, these choose the areas where the mission was relatively successful. This article is interested in one area, where the mission was not successful: eastern Peru. Neither Spain nor the Catholic Church was able to gain the permanent allegiance of the natives of that region. Certainly the failure cannot be totally ascribed to a lack of effort. Members of every religious order, Augustinian, Dominican, Franciscan, Jesuit, and Mercedarian, were employed by the crown. None reported more than the most modest and temporary successes. The Franciscans tried most of all and lost more than seventy-eight priests at the hands of the natives. For that reason, they are singled out in this study. Failures sometimes can teach as much as successes.
1 The area east of the Andes of Peru is called the montaña. Some of this territory is jungle but much of it, because it lies at an altitude of 2,000 feet or more, is not. Background material for the activity of the Franciscans in the area may be found in Tibesar, Antonine, Franciscan Beginnings in Colonial Peru (Washington, D. C, 1953)Google Scholar.
2 I have presented here a great simplification of the encomienda, which was a very complicated system. However, I feel that the basic objectives of the encomienda have not been distorted in the simplified version given in the text.
3 See, for instance, the testimony of Fray Francisco Morales given to the Visitador Licenciado Juan de Ovando in Madrid on January 2, 1568, British Museum, Additional MSS. 33983, folios 252–266. Morales had been one of the most prominent Franciscans in early Peru. He testified that he had spent twenty-one years in that area and served in all the countries from modern Ecuador to modern Bolivia. He had been provincial of Lima for three years, served six years as custodio or vice-provincial, and five years as comisario. Perhaps his most famous monument was the Colegio de San Andrés which he had helped to found in Quito on the model of the more famous Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco of Mexico. The bitterness of his testimony against the Spaniards of Peru outrivals that of Las Casas.
4 “Ordenanzas sobre descubrimientos y poblaciones,” Bosque de Segovia, 13 de Julio de 1573, Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, VIII (Madrid, 1842–1895), 484–537.
5 For a classic description of the mission system, see Bolton, Herbert Eugene, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colonies,” American Historical Review, XXIII (1917), 42–61 Google Scholar. However, Bolton does not attempt in this article to compare the efficiency of the mission system with that of the encomienda-doctrina system. For such a comparison, see de Gandía, Enrique, Francisco de Alfaro y la condición social de los Indios (Buenos Aires, 1939), pp. 89 ffGoogle Scholar. Gandía thinks that the encomienda system was superior to the mission. Obregón, Toribio Esquivel, Apuntes para la historia del derecho en México, III (México, 1943), 127 ff.Google Scholar, furnishes a severe criticism of the royal ordinances of 1573.
6 The objection may be raised that the comparison between the two systems is not just because the encomienda was applied for the most part to Indians of a much higher culture and thus had an advantage over the mission, which dealt on the whole with natives of a lower culture. This is, of course, true and undoubtedly did play a part in the substantial success of the encomienda-doctrina system. However, it should be recalled that the encomienda had been applied in Peru before 1573 to some of the same natives of the jungle with whom the missions were later to deal, notably near Guánuco, Chachapoyas, and Moyobamba. For the official record of an encomienda established among the Chupachos, a tribe of jungle natives living near Guánuco, see, “Visita del Repartimiento de Indios encomendado en Gómez Arias Dávila, vecino de Huánuco, hecha por Iñigo Ortiz de Zúñiga, año de 1562,” Revista del Archivo Nacional del Perú, I (1920), 5–48; 156–266; 373–400; II (1921), 1–36; 203–230; 463–498; III (1925), 1–34; 219- 254. The Indians enumerated in this report have been integrated into the national life of Peru. For another report on the encomienda established among Indians of a relatively low culture, see Service, Elman R., “The Encomienda in Paraguay,” Hispanic American Historical Review, XXXI (1951), 230–252 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Though the Recopilación de leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (1681 edition), Libro I, Título XIII, Ley xxvi, states that each religious missionary was to receive 50,000 maravedis, this does not seem to have been carried out at any time in Peru. Instead, the custom seems to have grown up that each group of missions and not the individual missionaries received 2,000 pesos per annum. At the time of the founding of a mission the government also furnished a grant which was supposed to defray the initial expenses, called ayuda de costa. One reason perhaps why the missionaries in Peru experienced difficulty in persuading the royal officials to furnish the money prescribed by law was the fact that the missions of that country were not required to defend the frontier from the danger of foreign encroachments. In Peru the danger of foreign invasion sprang rather from the sea than from the jungle.
8 For a description of some of the economic ills of colonial Peru during the last half century of the Hapsburgs and the first decades of the Bourbons, see y Paz-Soldán, Manuel Moreyra, Estudios sobre el tráfico marítimo en la época colonial (Lima, 1944), pp. 1–49, 67–87.Google Scholar
9 Thus, in 1666 the friars at work in the Panataguas missions near Guánuco complained to the king that although there were at that time fifteen Franciscans serving in that mission, they had never been able to bring the viceroys to agree to furnish them with funds each year but that these officials gave the money at long and irregular intervals and in this way much of the benefit was lost. They had received no pecuniary aid since 1660. See, “Carta de los religiosos de San Francisco sobre las misiones Panataguas a S.M.,” Lima, November 29, 1666. AGI (Archivo General de Indias), Lima 333. were to receive no more financial aid from the viceroy until 1709. The same was true of the first decades of the next century. Fray Francisco de San Joseph received one small allotment in 1711 and had to wait until 1732 to receive the next.
10 Constituciones de la Provincia de los Doze Apostoles del Piru (Lima, 1617), folios 21 f. The provincial had to furnish one hundred and thirty friars to the convent of San Francisco in Lima, ten to Chachapoyas, sixteen to Guamanga, fourteen to Guánuco, fourteen to Jauja, and so on. By 1617 the adaptation of Franciscan life to local Peruvian conditions had become so widely accepted that they were written into the basic laws of the province. It would be extremely difficult to bring about any change after that.
11 Ibid., folios 9f.
12 This might explain why so many professors and doctors are found among the missionaries. Since the provincial retained complete jurisdiction over the studies of the province, these men were directly under his care and hence they were more readily available.
13 Thus Guánuco, Chachapoyas, and later Comas and Andamarca.
14 It should be noted that the older orders, such as the Augustinians, Dominicans, and Mercedarians, who had shared with the Franciscans in establishing the doctrina system in the Americas, also shared in some of the same handicaps which evolved from that system. The Jesuits who had little share in that earlier experience had no such difficulties in adapting themselves to the demands of the new mission system and in fact went ahead to pioneer the development of the mission. Of the older orders, only the Franciscans, after some delay, worked out a viable compromise and were able to take part in the mission epic of Spanish America. The other older orders never found such a general solution and the zeal of many of their members was doomed to the same sporadic successes as the Franciscans had experienced before they founded the mission colleges. I believe that the decline of mission activity among the Dominicans and Augustinians in the Americas should be attributed primarily not to a diminution of the zeal of their members but to the lack of an adequate adjustment of the policies of these orders to the needs of the new system. Where there was such adjustment, the old orders were able to employ the new system with a success almost equal to that which they had enjoyed with the doctrina. Thus the missions of the Franciscans in Venezuela and Spanish Florida in the seventeenth century were among the most successful in Spanish America, while at the same time the mission efforts of the Franciscans in Mexico and Peru, for the most part in that same century, were something less than a great success. However, the Franciscans in Florida and in Venezuela from their very foundation had been organized to serve in the missions and not in the doctrinas, as was the case in Peru and Mexico.
15 The most readily available source for the data on the Inca culture is by Rowe, John Howland, “Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest,” Handbook of South American Indians, II, 183–330.Google Scholar
16 Most of the data concerning the physical culture of the natives of the Peruvian montaña is taken from Steward, Julian H., “Tribes of the Montaña: an introduction,” Handbook of South American Indians, III, 507–533.Google Scholar
17 Most of the remarks concerning the mental powers of the montaña native are based on a treatise written by an unknown missionary about 1735 for the guidance of his successors. He calls his work Advertencias and it may be found in “Libro de bautismos, casamientos y entierros para este pueblo de Nuestra Señora de la Asumpcion de Yanahuarqui, alias Puzuzu,” Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Oficina de Límites del Perú. LEB-12–4, folios 112 ff.
18 For a good discussion of some of the difficulties of the missionaries, see Rippy, J. Fred and Nelson, Jean Thomas, Crusaders of the Jungle (Chapel Hill, 1936), pp. 38 ff.Google Scholar
19 “El arte de hacer cristianos es la ciencia de criar hombres.” “Relación del estado de los reynos del Perú que hace el Excmo. Señor Don José Armendaris, marqués de Castelfuerte á su successor el marqués de Villagarcía en el año de 1736,” Fuentes, Manuel A. (ed.), Memorias de los vireyes que han gobernado el Perú (6 vols.; Lima, 1859), III, 321.Google Scholar
20 Steward, op. cit., p. 508.
21 Raimondi, Antonio, El Peru, II (Lima, 1876), 208.Google Scholar
22 “Carta del Padre Fray Manuel de Biedma al M. R. P. Fray Feliz de Como,” Andamarca, March 25, 1686, Archivum Generale Ordinis Minorum (Rome), Missiones Peruviae, XI/39, fol. 140–141. Biedma had entered the montana missions in 1664. He was killed by the Indians in 1687.