Franciscans and the Bishop

Franciscans were not beyond Bourbon reforms that emphasized accountability and metrics for measuring success. Along with financial support came audits and inspections to verify report accuracy.

Ferdinand of Aragon had negotiated control of church moneys in 1502 when pope Alexander VI "conferred the tithes of all the Indies on the king on condition that he should endow the churches and provide an adequate maintenance for their ministers." This bull coincided with the onset of Columbus’s fourth voyage, and ensured the church’s standing in the New World.

He already had been granted the power to nominate high ecclesiastical leaders during the conquest of Granada in 1486. Julian II extended patronato to the New World in 1508. The two agreed any proposal for a new mission would be reviewed by the audiencia, the viceroy, and the bishop before being presented to the Consejo de Indias. In return, the Vatican gained control of the Papal States on the Italian peninsula.

Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV of France, used patronato real to nominate religious leaders in the New World who appreciated the need for centralized secular power. He appointed Juan de Vizarrón arzobispo de México in 1730. The Andalusian had studied in Rome at the College of San Clemente before serving in Seville where he was Philip’s chaplain.

In 1734, Vizarrón renewed the church’s efforts to collect diezmo from Jesuit haciendas. The order proposed a "temporary arrangement" to the audiencia, who rejected it. The members felt both they and the archbishop/viceroy had been "insulted." They ordered full payment of tithes from 1734, and forwarded the paperwork to Madrid. According to Hubert Howe Bancroft, the "king’s council" ordered payment and demanded "sworn statements" declaring the value of the order’s estates.

In Nuevo México, subordination of religious orders to secular clergy was more important than tithes. The mere fact the obispo de Durango visited Santa Fé in 1730 was seen as an affront. Benito Crespo’s ensconcement of Santiago de Roybal as Vicario y Juez Esclesiástico was taken as provocation. The Franciscan’s local custodio, Andrés Varo, considered himself to be the legitimate local vicar.

Philip had appointed Crespo in 1722. Born in a small village in Castile near the border with Estremadura, he had trained at San Marcos de León in Salamanca and was a knight of Santiago. That military order had been under crown control since Ferdinand asserted his authority in 1499.

Roybal had been ordained in México by Crespo. He, no doubt, was selected because he was the son of Francesca de Gómez Robledo and Ignacio de Roybal. They had sent the boy to Mexico City for his education.

On his way back to Durango Crespo wrote the viceroy that the Franciscans were collecting fees for 40 friars, but only had deployed 33. The Santa Cruz parish was included in the endowment for Santa Clara, "where he has never resided." He recommended transferring Santa Cruz, along with the other Spanish-speaking parishes, to his jurisdiction, and consolidating Santa Clara and San Juan de Caballeros into the mission at San Ildefonso.

The Franciscan’s immediate response was to send Juan Miguel Menchero north in 1731 to develop a counterstrategy. Soon after, Santa Cruz began keeping better baptismal records that would prove they were serving the villa and would document the numbers of souls brought into the church. They had kept reasonably complete records from 1710 to 1714. After that only chance notes survived.

In a separate letter to the viceroy, Crespo criticized the fees charged by friars for baptisms, burials and other sacraments because they were "so high and exorbitant that there were no fixed schedule except the will of the father missionaries." To encourage more participation by parishioners and natives, he fixed price schedules. He cited a royal order from 1725 as his justification.

Menchero countered with an order that "no friar was to charge an Indian any fee whatsoever for administering the sacraments."

Year	Baptisms	DM's	Marriages
1710	2	1
1711	8	1
1712	8	1
1713	43
1714	12	5
1715	3	3
1716		4
1717		4
1718		8
1719		5
1720	2	5
1721	27	1
1722		2
1723		6
1724
1725		4
1726	1	3	4
1727		6	6
1728		3	7
1729			1
1730		1	12
1731	3		4
1732	50		1
1733	35		16
1734	62		7
1735	38		6
1736	26		9
1737	2		15
1738	48		8
1739	19		10
Santa Cruz de la Cañada

Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and San Juan de los Caballeros were given bound books in 1726 for recording baptisms, marriages, and deaths. They’re our only detailed record of the population between then and 1760. The diligencias matrimoniales are missing. Angélico Chávez believed Roybal, "kept or removed only the DMs pertaining to his term," but suggested no motive. It also may be the Franciscans refused to forward them to him, and they subsequently were lost.

With a forgivable bias towards the Franciscans, Chávez believed Roybal, "with the brashness of youth, had continued enraging some of his adversaries," and was moved to El Paso in 1733.

That didn’t relieve Menchero of secular oversight. Crespo sent Juan Bustamante in his place.

He was another second generation migrant from northern Spain who had ties with the local elite. Chávez believed he was the son, nephew or brother of the earlier governor from El Paso, Juan Domingo de Bustamante.

Notes: The New Mexico Genealogical Society began transcribing and translating the sacramental books in 1976. They’ve published their extracts for Santa Cruz baptisms and marriages, and for Santa Clara and Juan de los Caballeros marriages. Microfilms of the originals are available.

Adams, Eleanor B. Bishop Tamarón’s Visitation of New Mexico, 1760, 1954.

Archdiocese of Puebla. "Excmo. Sr. Don Benito Crespo (1734-1737)," their website.

Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of Mexico, Volume III, 1600-1803, 1883.

Chávez, Angélico. "El Vicario Don Santiago Roybal," El Palacio 65:231-252:1948.

_____. New Mexico Roots, Ltd, 1982; on missing diligencias matrimoniales.

_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition; on Bustamante.

Crespo y Monroy, Benito. Letter to the viceroy, Juan Vásquez de Acuña, 8 September 1730; translation in Adams; recommended consolidating missions.

_____. Letter to the viceroy, Juan Vásquez de Acuña, 25 September 1730; translation in Adams; on fees for services.

Crivelli, Camillus. "Mexico," The Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 10, 1911; quotation summarizing bull of Alexander VI.

Kessell, John L. Kiva, Cross and Crown, 1995; Menchero quotation.

Traboulay, David M. Columbus and Las Casas: The Conquest and Christianization of America, 1492-1566, 1994.

Wikipedia. Entry for Juan Antonio de Vizarrón y Eguiarreta."

Table: Data from New Mexico Genealogical Society.

New Mexico Baptisms, Santa Cruz de la Cañada Church, Volume I, 1710 to 1794, transcribed by Virginia Langham Olmstead and compiled by Margaret Leonard Windham and Evelyn Luján Baca, 1994.

100 Years of Marriages, 1726-1826, Santa Cruz de la Cañada, New Mexico, extracted and compiled by Henrietta Martinez Christmas and Patricia Sánchez Rau.

A number of Apaches were baptized in 1713.

Financing Spain’s Debt

Philip V’s wars not only sapped Spain’s treasury, but created a large cadre of military officers who needed to be kept loyal between conflicts. After the War of Spanish Succession, he had stopped selling strategic commands in the Indies, and given the positions to seasoned men.

All five of his appointed viceroys and five of the governors who served Nueva México between 1733 and 1760 had military backgrounds. One man who served as an interim head of Nueva España was the archbishop; the other two came from the audiencia. The one civilian governor, Francisco Marín, had been involved with mining in Potosí and was a merchant in México.

The promotion of military officers not only provided an avenue for upward mobility for men from the minor nobility, but it also removed the ambitious from the neighborhood of the court. Francisco Eissa-Barroso found Philip only reverted to auctioning governorships a few times to finance his Italian campaigns: twice in 1728, once in 1731, three times in 1733-3. With the War of Austrian Succession, he sold one incumbency in 1739 and four in 1741. None were in Nuevo México.

Unfortunately, Philip’s deployment of talented soldiers meant lost revenues. Men serving defense functions were exempt from many taxes and fees. Before his death in July of 1746, he issued three decrees regarding the collection of media anata. This fee dated back to Philip II. When facing bankruptcy, the Hapsburg ruler had demanded each person appointed to office remit half his first year’s salary. Military men later were exempted.

The then governor, Joaquín Codallos, responded he hadn’t paid because he had a military appointment. Authorities in Mexico City agreed, but asked for more detail on the functions his predecessors had performed. His witnesses all testified no governor ever paid the media anata and "the poverty of the province was such that none of the inhabitants paid any fees or tribute." Lest any one of them be found liable, they added "the seven alcaldes mayores received no pay and very little fees."

Philip turned his economic problems over to Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea in 1743. His minister for the treasury, defense and the Indies had begun as a navy clerk in 1720, then been promoted on merit to supervise a naval arsenal in 1731. For services rendered, Philip’s son Charles made him Marqués de la Ensenada in Naples in 1736.

Many of his suggestions for reform were opposed by the Spanish nobility. He found more cooperation from the viceroy in Nueva España. Pedro Cebrián tried to improve the collection of existing taxes, tithes, and fees. He established government monopolies, including one on salt, and banned cards and dice.

The local governor, Enrique de Olavide, dutifully issued a bando "ordering the imprisonment of citizens and soldiers found gambling with dice" in 1737, and repeated it the following year. However, salt remained an expense, not a monopoly. He provided military escorts for the trips to the salt lakes in 1738. His successor, Gaspar de Mendoza, did the same in 1739, 1740, and 1742.

In 1744, Somodevilla asked Cebrián for statistics on the viceroyalty. He, in turn, commissioned José Antonio Villaseñor to conduct the first formal census. The counts were made with taxation in mind. He listed numbers of families, not individuals. It’s not clear if he included the 80 families associated with the presidio, since they may have been exempt from taxes.

Households would be a better term, since it did not, according to Frederic Athearn, include servants or Indians living outside the pueblos. If one assumed families averaged two children and two servants, then the total population would have been about 5,500. If one assumed pueblo families also averaged two children, then their population would have been 3,680. If one assumed families were larger, then the total population number would be increased, but not the number of the enumerated.

The distribution of Spanish families was uneven. The presence of ranchos in the counts for some pueblos indicated settlers had claimed land. They may have inflated some pueblo populations, and more important, understated the tax base. Cebrián’s successor tried to rectify this in 1748. Francisco de Güemes ordered governors to count the Spaniards when they visited the pueblos.

If one adjusts for the ranchos, there may have been a thousand taxable men in the kingdom, with most in Santa Cruz, followed closely by Santa Fé. Albuquerque probably had half their numbers.

	Count	Spaniard	Pueblo	Total	% Spaniard	Notes
Central
Cochití	85					Includes ranchos
Galisteo	50					Includes ranchos
Nambé	50
Pecos	125
Pojoaque	18
Santa Fé	300
Santo Dominngo	50
Tesuque	50
		350	378	728	0.48
South
Alameda	8
Albuquerque	100					Includes Atrisco
Bocas	10
Cia	50					Includes 2 ranchos
Fuenclara	50
Isleta	80
Jémez	100
San Felipe	60					Includes ranchos
Santa Ana	50
		168	340	508	0.33
North
Chama	17
La Soledad	40
Ojo Caliente	56					Includes 4 ranchos
San Ildefonso	100					Includes Santa Clara
San Juan	60
Santa Cruz de la Cañada	260					Includes ranchos
Santa Rosa de Abiquiú	20
		393	160	553	0.71
Far West
Ácoma	110
Laguna	60					Includes 3 ranchos
Zuñi	150
Far North
Embudo	8
Picurís	80
Taos	80					Includes some ranchos
		8	160	168	0.05
Total	2,277	919	1,038	1,957	0.47

Notes: Little is known about Marín, so everyone repeats the phrase "worked in the mines." That didn’t mean he did the physical extraction; that was skilled labor done by natives. In Nueva España at the time, the term miner usually referred to prospectors or to men who financed the development and operation of mines.

Athearn, Frederic J. A Forgotten Kingdom, 1978.

Eissa-Barroso, Francisco A. "‘Having Served in the Troops’: The Appointment of Military Officers as Provincial Governors in Early Eighteenth-Century Spanish America, 1700-1746," Colonial Latin American Historical Review 1:329-359:2013.

Codallos y Rabal, Joaquín. Letter to Juez del Real Derecho regarding media anata, 2 August 1747; summarized by Twitchell.

Felipe V. Royal decree regarding media anata, 31 July 1746; summarized by Twitchell.

Güemes y Horcasitas, Francisco de. Dispatch from the supreme government regarding Spaniards in pueblos, 31 July 1748; summarized by Twitchell.

Mendoza, Gaspar Domingo de. Bandos regarding departure date for escorts to salt lakes, June 1739, July 1740, 25 May 1742; summarized by Twitchell.

Olavide y Micheleña, Enrique de. Bandos regarding gambling with dice, 21 January 1737; gambling, 24 March 1738; departure date for escort to salt lakes, 12 July 1738; by Twitchell.

Ortuño, Manuel. "Cebrián and Agustín Pedro (1687-1752)," Enciclopedia Universal Micronet website.

Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico, volume 2, 1914.

Villaseñor, José Antonio. Census; summarized by Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888, 1889.

Nueva España Viceroys with Military Backgrounds
Juan de Acuña - captain - infantry, Perú
Pedro de Castro y Figueroa - captain general - armies
Pedro Cebrián y Agustín - army
Francisco de Guemes y Horcasitas - captain general - Cuba
Agustin Ahumada y Villalon - lieutenant colonel - royal guards, Italy

Interim Viceroys
Juan Antonio Vizarrón y Eguiarreta - archbishop
Pedro Malo de Villavicencio - audiencia, lawyer
Francisco Antonio de Echávarri - audiencia, inspector of mines

Nuevo México Governors with Military Backgrounds
Gervasio Cruzat y Góngora - colonel - army
Enrique de Olivade y Micheleña - lieutenant - navy
Gaspar Domingo de Mendoza - lieutenant colonel - infantry
Joaquín Codallos y Rabal - major - army
Tomás Vélez Cachupín - cadet - Havana

Governors with Civilian Backgrounds
Francisco Antonio Marín del Valle - mines, merchant

Note: sources often convert Spanish terms into American, so titles and branches only suggest experiences.

Spain’s Economic Problems

Philip V’s claim to the Spanish crown was confirmed by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. In return, the Bourbons ceded Sicily and parts of Milan to Savoy. Austria received the rest of Milan, Naples and Sardinia. George Louis, elector of Hanover, gained recognition for his uncle’s annexation of Saxe-Lauenberg, better known as Lower Saxony.

Philip’s wife, Maria Luisa of Savoy, died in 1714. She left two sons, Louis and Ferdinand. Soon after he married Elisabeth Farnese, daughter of the prince of Parma. She saw Spain as the treasury to finance the acquisition of fiefdoms for her children.

Spain joined with France and Prussia in the War of Polish Succession in1733. Their opponents included Upper Saxony, simply called Saxony, and Austria. By then, the earlier ruler of Lower Saxony had died as George I of Great Britain, and his son, George Augustus, was the British monarch.

Spain retook Naples and Sicily. Elisabeth’s oldest son, Charles, was made ruler of the two by the Treaty of Vienna that ended the war in 1738. The next year, Philip suspended payment of his debts, and George II declared war.

His navy attacked Spanish possessions and took Florida. Their battles extended into the War of Austrian Succession, concluded by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. Spain regained Florida in exchange for meeting demands it pay its debts to Great Britain. Louis XV and George II renewed their battle for supremacy with the Seven Year’s War in 1754.

One cause of the 1739 bankruptcy was the decline of silver production in New Spain. Mines required mercury, which was shipped from Almadén. Great Britain’s fleet and its pirates harried supply ships. When the amount of available silver declined, Spain had less money for war.

Decade	Total Peso Value	Increase	% Increase
1710-19	65,828,482
1720-29	84,151,727	18,323,245	0.28
1730-39	93,677,484	9,525,757	0.11
1740-49	108,124,854	14,447,370	0.15
1750-59	130,219,836	22,094,982	0.20
1760-69	199,556,109	69,336,273	0.53

Silver Shipments from Nueva España by Decade

Nuevo México wasn’t directly threatened by the British, but it suffered the consequences of irrelevancy.

Even before Elisabeth’s wars, Nueva España hadn’t been able to meet the costs of defending its mines and frontiers from increasingly hostile Natives. When Santa Fé asked for a presidio near the Jicarilla Apache to protect itself and northern México against the Comanche, Pedro de Rivera had suggested manning it with men taken from other presidios. He finally decided the Comanche were less a threat to the viceroyalty than the French encroaching along the Gulf of Mexico. He cut presidio forces by 20%.

Silver had been discovered in the region south of modern Arizona in 1736. Eleven years later, in 1747, the viceroy demanded the New Mexico governor send troops for his campaign against the Apache along the Gila river. Joaquín Codallos couldn’t. He had reports the Utes were attacking the Navajo, who were under protection. He had to fight the Comanche and Utes north of Abiquiú to protect settlers who were threatening to abandon the area.

The restraints of the Spanish treasury, which lead first to conserving then to diverting military sources to war threats on the coast, ultimately made it impossible for Nuevo México to send aid to protect silver which might alleviate the stress.

Notes: More on proposed Jicarilla presidio in posts for 11 October 2015.

Bakewell, P. J. Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, Zacatecas 1546-1700, 1971.

Scurlock, Dan. From the Rio to the Sierra: An Environmental History of the Middle Rio Grande Basin, 1998; summarizes and quotes other studies.

Wikipedia. Details and dates of wars.

Table: Data from Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Mexico, Volume III, 1600-1803, 1883.

Bourbon Reforms

Philip V of Anjou assumed the throne of Spain in 1700 with ambitions to reform the state in the French image. Instead, his ascension provoked the War of Spanish Succession.

The peaceful interlude that followed the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht gave him an opportunity to implement Jean Orry’s recommendations for consolidating authority in a more unified state. He replaced councils dominated by the landed nobility with ministries modeled on a French cabinet loyal to the king.

The Consejo de Indias saw most of its functions transferred to the ministry of the Navy and Indies in 1714, which began issuing the royal cédulas in the king’s name. Among the powers it lost was oversight for appointments and incomes of religious leaders from archbishops down to the men serving in the provinces. The council continued the detailed work involved in processing judicial and ecclesiastical appointments, and retained its role as court of appeal.

Internally, Spain was divided into 21 provinces. In 1715, Philip revoked the traditional rights of the historic kingdoms and placed all but Navarre and Viscaya under the code of Castile.

While he was imposing some administrative uniformity onto a patchwork of privilege, other European monarchies became less stable. Anne, the last of the Protestant Stuarts ruling Great Britain, died in 1714. A distant German-speaking relative was enthroned simply because he was a Protestant descended from Anne’s great-uncle James I.

After Anne’s mother died, James II had married Mary of Modena. Catholics agitated for installing her son, James Francis Edward Stuart, instead. The 1707 Act of Union had had the same effect as Philip’s expansion of Castilian law: it had eroded the autonomy of large provinces. Scotland no longer had a separate monarch who just happened to be the same as the king or queen of England.

A year later, Louis XIV died, leaving his five-year-old great-great-grandson next in line. Orry’s successor, Giulio Alberoni, lobbied Philip V to stake his claim as closer through a secondary line, thus provoking war with France, Great Britain and Austria.

To finance the new conflict, Alberoni sought to eliminate custom barriers within the Iberian peninsula. He moved duty collection from the Ebro river to the Pyrenees in 1718. Thirty Basque towns rebelled.

Soon after, the French deployed the Duke of Berwick in northern Spain. Three Basque provinces, Gipuzkoa, Viscaya and Álava, volunteered to accept French rule if it would honor their fueros threatened by the laws of Castile.

Berwick in fact was James FitzJames, grandson of James II and his mistress, Arabella Churchill. His loyalties lay with the Spanish, where his son was Duque de Liria. He didn’t accept Basque submission and tended to release Spanish prisoners.

Cardinal Alberoni, whose loyalties lay with the pope, sent a flotilla from Cádiz to support Jacobites trying to elevate FitzJames’s half-uncle to the throne of Great Britain in March of 1719. In September, the British destroyed ports in Galicia and laid waste to the countryside.

George I’s loyalties lay with the Hanovers.

Philip dismissed Alberoni and restored liberties to the Basques, who had supported his claim to the Spanish crown. However, his actions did little to slow emigration from the northern provinces to Nueva España.

José Manuel Azcona noted, politics rarely were the reason young men left. Unlike traditional Castilian law that divided property among all legitimate heirs, Basque inheritance laws were designed to maintain the integrity of estates. Parents selected one child as their successor. The others were given cash or other gifts when they reached maturity.

There was little they could do with their bounties. Population densities were high while investment opportunities and jobs were few. The British had destroyed the restored shipyards.

Many in Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, Navarre and the Basque lands grew up hearing success tales relayed by earlier family migrants to the New World. Some went as soldiers or clergymen. Others, like the Bustamantes, Tagles, and Valverdes, went to towns where relatives already were living, especially the commercial hub of Mexico City that lay between the ports of Acapulco and Veracruz. Still others went to the mining towns.

El Real de Minas de San Francisco de Cuéllar was founded in 1709, and elevated into the villa of San Felipe el Real de Chihuahua in 1718. The next year most of the 44 merchants serving the miners were Basques.

Notes:
Azcona Pastor, José Manuel. Possible Paradises: Basque Emigration to Latin America, 2004.

Jones, Okayh L. Junior. Nueva Vizcaya, 1988.

Kamen, Henry. Philip V of Spain, 2001.

Kuethe, Allan J. and Kenneth J. Andrien. The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century, 2014.