War of Spanish Succession

1713 marks the end of the War of Spanish Succession. The war began when Charles II of Spain died in 1700, leaving no direct heir. His will and rules of seniority favored Philip V of the Bourbon House of France. Austria protested with war, and England seconded.

Among its many provocations was the monopoly for trade in Spanish ports. Portugal had returned the asiento in 1701, and Philip reawarded it to the Louis XIV. He, in turn, granted it to Jean-Baptiste Ducasse, then governor of a sugar colony, Saint-Dominique. The three, Ducasse, Louis and Philip, were to split the profits.

The asiento included the right to deliver African slaves to Veracruz for the lowland sugar plantations. The Council of the Indies thought France dangerous and impeded its implementation. Natives made no protest; they didn’t want that work. The new viceroy, the Duque de Albuquerque, signed off when he arrived in 1702. The Portuguese buttressed England and Austria in the war.

This time, the Iroquois, temporarily weakened by smallpox, declared themselves neutral. Native groups moved back into lands they’d been forced to abandon. The Tamora left the Peoria to live with the Cahokia in 1699. The next year, Rouensa and the Kaskaskia left Pimitéoui.

The French had two goals: securing control of the Mississippi river and gaining access to Spain’s silver mines in northern México. They still thought the Missouri river would take them to Santa Fé. It empties into the Mississippi between the Illinois and Kaskaskia rivers that come from the left bank. Cahokia lies between the confluence and the Kaskaskia.

The French minster for colonial affairs dispatched Pierre Le Moyne to resume La Salle’s search for the mouth of the Mississippi in 1698. Le Moyne had been born in Québec, worked as an independent fur trader, and fought the English at Hudson’s Bay. He built his first gulf fort, Maurepas, on Biloxi Bay in 1699. His second was Fort Louis de la Louisiane on the Mobile river.

At the same time, 1698, the Séminaire des Missions Étrangères sent priests into Illinois country from Québec The Jesuits had already organized a mission at Starved Rock under Jacques Gravier. They assigned Pierre-Gabriel Marest to him that year. After some jurisdictional spatting, the first group left François Buisson de Saint Cosme with the Cahokia and directed the rest of their men south towards Le Moyne.

Marest followed Rouensa and the Kaskaskia. He had been the Jesuit chaplain for Le Moyne’s Hudson’s Bay expedition. Rouensa later said he had moved his band at the request of the Louisiana governor.

Gravier joined Henri de Tonti’s delegation of Cahokia coureurs de bois going to Fort Maurepas in 1701 with a load of beaver pelts. Soon after, the Illinois settlements was sending dried bison ribs south.

Nearly simultaneously, Charles Juchereau was in Paris lobbying the French ministry for a concession to develop a tannery in Illinois country. He argued he could provide an alternative for coureurs then selling furs to the English. He left Montréal in 1702 with some thirty men to build a fort near the mouth of the Ohio river. After he died in the 1703 smallpox epidemic, the Cherokee attacked. Some survivors went to Fort Louis. Others became coureurs.

Canadian authorities complained about his activities, as did Père Marest. Le Moyne supported the concession. His wife was the daughter of Marie-Anne Juchereau. Jucheareau’s family had begun lending money to coureurs in Montreal in the 1690s. Tonti was a client in 1693.

Le Moyne died in 1706. France tried to regularize the gulf region with a proprietary grant to Antoine Crozat in 1712. He, the Spanish and the English all had to handle the consequences of Le Moyne’s policy of encouraging young men to learn native languages and explore the country.

The El Cuartelejo Apache killed a white man and his Pawnee wife in 1706. The booty included a French gun and powder, a kettle, coat, and red-lined cap. Four days later, Juan de Ulibarrí arrived from Santa Fé on another matter. It was the first Spanish expedition onto the plains and Le Moyne’s coureurs were already on the upper reaches of the Arkansas and Missouri rivers.

In Europe, each state maneuvered to capture territory from one of its enemies. The Treaty of Utrecht awarded the throne of Spain to the House of Bourbon and adjudicated land claims. Spain kept its colonies in the new world, but lost its non-peninsular territory in Europe.

France was not allowed to profit from its influence in Spain. The treaty stipulated the two crowns could not be consolidated as the Austrian and Spanish had been under the Hapsburg Charles V. It eliminated the French monopoly in the fur trade, and mandated it be opened in western Canada (Rupert’s Land) to Hudson’s Bay Company. England also won the monopoly for importing slaves to México. All commerce between Nuevo México and the French became illegal again.

Notes: The French minster for colonial affairs was Louis Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain. Pierre Le Moyne was the Sieur d'Iberville. Charles Juchereau was the Sieur de Saint Denis. Cairo, Illinois, is near his tannery. The War of Spanish Succession is called Queen Anne’s War in American history textbooks.

Caldwell, Norman W. "Charles Juchereau de St. Denys: A French Pioneer in the Mississippi Valley," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 28:563-579:1942.

Fortier, John. "Juchereau de Saint-Denys, Charles," in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, volume 2, 1982 revision.

Morrissey, Robert Michael. Empire by Collaboration, 2015.

Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade, 1997; on the asiento.

Thompson, Joseph J. "The Cahokia Mission Property," Illinois Catholic Historical Review 5:195-217:1922.
White, Richard. "The Louisiana Purchase and the Fictions of Empire," in Peter J. Kastor and François Weil, Empires of the Imagination, 2009.

Ulibarrí, Juan de. Diary of expedition to El Cuartelejo, 1706, in Alfred B. Thomas, After Coronado, 1935.

Map: Shannon, "Map of Mississippi River," Wikimedia Commons, 5 April 2010.

Spanish Medicine

Political conflicts between religious and secular authorities carried over to medicine. In Europe, the medical school at Salamanca in the kingdom of León had become the most prestigious in 1252. It relied upon Arab translations of newly discovered works by Greek and Roman physicians.

Hippocrates and Galen believed the body contained four fluids that must be kept in balance. Each had specific qualities. The humors were considered extensions of the natural world where each plant embodied one of the traits.

Diseases were associated with each humor and treated by stimulating the opposing traits. Phlegm was cold and moist, yellow bile hot and dry. Thus, if one caught a common cold, one kept warm and drank hot liquids to warm the interior. Chicken soup or tea and honey is used today.

Blood was hot and moist, black bile cold and dry. Rhazes associated smallpox with blood. Individuals were most vulnerable at the age when the warm blood of childhood was changing to the cool blood of adults.

Once smallpox became an established disease in Mexico, it recurred about every fifteen to twenty years. At least fourteen colonists from Mexico City had pock marked faces. Most of the seven men were over 20 years old, most of the girls younger than 13.

When medicine failed to cure, the church offered an alternative. It argued diseases were caused by some invasion engineered by Satan that had to be removed. The most famous case in the years of the Reconquest was Charles II, king of Spain.

As was mentioned in the post of 8 March 2015, his biological condition was beyond the experience of any physician. Even today, medicine could no more than use dialysis when his kidneys began failing. It couldn’t change his genetics, and probably could do nothing to improve his sperm.

By the late 1690s, his failure to produce an heir was an international concern. Madrid was split between those lobbying for collateral branches in France and in Austria. In 1698, a Dominican, Pedro Matilla, seized power from the wife of Charles, Mariana of Neuburg. The archbishop of Toledo supported the French claims, and so maneuvered his replacement with Froilan Díaz, another Dominican.

The production of an heir was placed in his hands. He assumed the king had been possessed, and asked for help from Antonio Álvarez de Argüelles. At the time Argüelles was exorcizing demons from nuns in Oviedo in Asturias. It was hoped they could tell them who had bewitched the king.

The first demon consulted through the nuns said, indeed, the king had been bewitched when he was fourteen, just at he reached the age of legal maturity. It added, the spell was prepared by his mother and given him in a cup of chocolate. The solution was to oil and purge Charles.

Consultations continued in Oviedo, but the demons gave conflicting answers. One had the audacity to blame Mariana. The Austrian emperor, Leopold, sent his own exorcist, Mauro Tenda, who worked over Charles. Mariana was the sister of his third wife, Eleonor Magdalene of Neuburg.

The treatments ended when Mariana plotted her return to power by using the Inquisition. Tenda was arrested in January of 1700, and Díaz dismissed. The king died in November.

Notes:
Lea, Henry Charles. A History of The Inquisition of Spain, volume 2, 1922, on the exorcisms of Charles.

McCaa, Robert. "The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution," in A Population History of North America, edited by Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, 2000, on status of smallpox in Mexico.

Winslow, Charles-Edward Amory. The Conquest of Epidemic Disease, 1980. Rhazes full name was Muhammad ibn Zakariy R z .

Individuals identified with pockmarked faces in a 7 September 1693 list of colonists prepared by José de Angulo, reprinted in To the Royal Crown Restored, 1995, edited by John L Kessell, Rick Hendricks and Meredith Dodge.

Simón de Molina, age 40
José Velásquez Cortés, age 36
Juan de Gamboa, age 34
Tomás Palomino, age 26
     Georgia Ruiz, age 22
Cristóbal de Góngora, age 20
Bartolomé de Luna Bautista, age 18
      Gertrudis de la Candelaria y Herrera, age 12
      Magdalena de Esquibel, age 12
      Juana Cortés, age 11
      Josefa Antonia del Aguila, age 10
      María de Anzures, age 9
Juan de Sayago, age 4
      María de la Encarnación, married, no age given

Total: 14
Females: 7
Under 18: 7, 6 females

Language of Witchcraft

During the Salem witchcraft trials, Betty Parris and the other witnesses used the conventions of witchcraft when called to testify. Mary Warren accused Ann Pudeator of "biting me, pinching me, sticking pins in me and choking me." Mary Walcott said Sarah Wilde "did most grievously torment me by pricking and pinching me and [...] almost choke me to death."

Mary Beth Norton has noted the first confessions by Abigail Hobbs didn’t use such ritualized language. Instead, she used phrases then common to describe attacks by the Abnaki. Abigail accused her mother, Deliverance, who did use the approved language of witchcraft in hopes of leniency.

Carlos Ginsburg has described a similar progression in language in Friuli, a region in northeast Italy. When priests first noted the existence of pagan agricultural rituals in the 1500s, the accused tried to explain what they were doing.

The priests didn’t understand them, because they had been trained to believe in different causes. From their continued questions, the Friulians realized the answers they needed to give. With time, they may even have adopted some of the practices expected by their prosecutors.

The language of witchcraft had been developing for decades. In 1425, Bernardino Albizeschi began preaching in the countryside to revive the Catholic faith. The Franciscan, now Saint Bernardino of Siena, railed against Jews and witches.

In 1487, a Dominican codified beliefs in the Malleus Maleficarum that witches were aided by Satan. Heinrich Kramer described the forms witchcraft could take. The Roman Catholic Church condemned his work because the church claimed there were no such things as witches. Belief in them was the work of the devil.

The Spanish Inquisition was still rooting out vestiges of Judaism and Islam. The Papal Inquisition was concerned with Protestants, pagans, and heresy.

Kramer’s work gained credence through the activities of Charles V, the Hapsburg grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella. He introduced uniform laws into the Holy Roman Empire of Austria in 1531. The Constitutio Criminalis Carolina defined witchcraft as a serious crime to be investigated by secular courts using torture and punished by fire.

The man most active in exorcizing demons within German-speaking lands was Francesco Maria Guazzo. In his Compendium Maleficarum of 1608 the Ambrosian brother wrote, "the attendants go riding flying goats, trample the cross, are made to be re-baptised in the name of the Devil, give their clothes to him, kiss the Devil's behind, and dance back to back forming a round."

Notes:
Essex County, Massachusetts. Records of the Salem trials are available on a University of Virginia website; spelling modernized for readability.

Ginsburg, Carlos. I Bernandanti, 1966; translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.

Guazzo, Francesco Maria. Compendium Maleficarum, 1608, quotation from Wikipedia article on "Witches' Sabbath."

Norton, Mary Beth Norton. In the Devil’s Snare, 2002, from review by Jill Lepore, The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002.

Spanish Politics

Europe's political culture returned to Santa Fé with Diego de Vargas and the Reconquest. Society was still divided into two groups fighting for supremacy, the church and the throne. Within the bureaucratic state of viceroys and governors, the natural competition between predecessors and successors was manipulated into parties who supported the friars and those who asserted civil authority.

If anything, it had gotten worse since Charles II was named king of Spain in 1665. He was the biological consequence of generations of in-breeding. All eight of his grandparents were descended from Juana, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and her Hapsburg husband, Philip.

According to the Ariel and Will Durant, Charles didn’t speak until he was four. He didn’t walk until he was ten. It’s not clear if he was ever fully competent. Most who commented had a vested interest in portraying him as non compos mentis.

His father, Philip IV, died when he was three. His mother, Philip’s sister’s daughter, was named regent. Mariana of Austria had been educated by a Jesuit priest, Juan Everardo Nithard, who took power a year later, in 1666.

Nithard was overthrow in 1669. Mariana replaced him with Fernando de Valenzuela. They both were driven from Madrid in 1674 as Charles was approaching fourteen, the age of legal maturity for males. He was immediately married to Marie Louise, granddaughter of Louis XIII of France.

The man who acceded and engineered the wedding was Juan José, the natural son of Philip IV. He had been raised anonymously in León, then recognized officially by his father in 1642 when he was thirteen. After that he was trained to military command and diplomacy.

He died in 1679 under mysterious circumstances. Control went to Marie Louise. Soon after, in 1680, Spain saw the greatest auto de fé in its history. She died in 1689, again under circumstances people at the time deemed suspicious. Most think now the cause was appendicitis.

Charles was immediately married to a Hapsburg, Mariana of Neuburg. It was imperative for the perpetuation of the monarchy that he produce an heir. The regent mother, Mariana of Austria, died in May of 1696, and his wife dominated the court.

The regent was still alive in 1693 when de Vargas wrote as if Charles II were a normal monarch. He used phrases like "at your majesty’s royal feet," "having carried out your royal will," and "to give your majesty an account."

The wife of Charles II was dominant when de Vargas notified the viceroy he was establishing the Villa Nueva de Santa Cruz del Rey Nuestro Señor Carlos II de Españoles Mexicanos in 1695. He said it was in "proper compliance to the royal will, which the most excellent lord viceroy has so often repeatedly charged me with."

The regent had recently died when de Vargas was applying for reappointment in 1696. The health of both Charles and his wife was precarious. The court in Madrid and those of France, Austria, England, and the Netherlands were preoccupied with who would succeed if died childless. Someone else got appointed governor of New Mexico.

Notes:
Durant, Ariel and Durant, Will. The Age of Louis XIV, 1963.

Vargas, Diego de. Letter to Charles II, 16 May 1693, published in To The Royal Crown Restored, 1995, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.

_____. Order, 15 March 1695, published in Blood on the Boulders, 1998, edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge.