A prevailing idea in the scholarly literature is that the New Laws of 1542 put an end to further enslavement of indios (Indigenous people of the Spanish Indies, a category invented by Europeans) in Spanish America.Footnote 1 Many see the enactment of this legislation as emblematic of the Spanish crown's exertion of imperial authority over the conquerors who had caused irreparable damage to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Once chattel slavery ended, scholars argue, the Spanish crown exerted further control over its Indigenous vassals, and access to their labor and other labor systems came to dominate colonial production. Under the watchful gaze of the crown, adult Indigenous males worked on encomiendas (grants of Indigenous laborers under the authority of an Indigenous lord and awarded to Spaniards); as repartimiento workers (Indigenous laborers assigned to a particular task or organization, such as the Church); as laborers; as mit'a corvee laborers in the mining sector, or as personal servants called yanaconas or naborías attached to a master. Over the next three centuries, historical studies claim, slavery continued sporadically in isolated areas with little crown control, and only under exceptional circumstances.Footnote 2
The reality is that Spain's New Laws of 1542 never conferred a complete emancipation of slaves, since owners could appear before local magistrates or other authorities, provide legal documents, and retain their property.Footnote 3 Not only were the laws implemented sporadically, but they also met with tremendous resistance.Footnote 4 Attempts to free Indigenous slaves in Castile and Spanish America in the years following the passage of the New Laws occurred only intermittently and, in some cases, as feckless gestures.Footnote 5 In 1546, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who took a serious interest in the design of the New Laws, called for a special council to investigate the apathetic manner in which the 1542 reforms on slavery were being implemented and to resolve questions surrounding their interpretation.Footnote 6
Thus, in spite of limited and piecemeal efforts to end bondage, both legal and illegal Indigenous slavery and forms of temporary legal guardianship (depósito) of war captives continued throughout the Spanish empire for centuries.Footnote 7 The better-known examples of crown-sanctioned slavery include the enslavement of the Reche-Mapuche people of Chile (1608–1674), the Chiriguano (Ava Guaraní people) of southeastern Bolivia in the Audiencia of Charcas (1574–1600), and the Chichimeca of Northern New Spain (1550–1600). A panoramic view of crown-sanctioned legislation enacted after 1542, however, reveals more widespread practices that were far from exceptional.Footnote 8
This article explores how and why the Council of the Indies (the governing council of the Spanish possessions that reported directly to the king), the Spanish king, and viceroys (or audiencias with the approval of the viceroy) mandated Indigenous slavery, for life or for a temporary period, against a minimum of 15 Indigenous groups in at least ten locations throughout the Spanish-occupied Western Hemisphere in the seven decades following the passage of the New Laws (see Figure 1). For a descriptive chronology of these interventions, see the appendix.
Indigenous Groups in Spanish America Targeted for Crown-Sanctioned Slavery, 1547–1620
Source: Map designed by Iman Mansour.
I focus on this period to explain the range of rationales, conditions, legal channels, and procedures used by vassals and local and imperial authorities to authorize the enslavement of targeted Indigenous groups. Authorizations allowing for slavery did not solve problems between Indigenous polities and Spaniards or with other Indigenous polities, and often exacerbated them. Some requests took decades to resolve. A few were disallowed, but many were successful, including the first major authorization, in 1547, five years after the promulgation of the New Laws, when the crown allowed the enslavement of Carib (Kalinago) Indians of Caribbean islands. The local European inhabitants characterized the Carib as aggressive cannibals guilty of attacks on the inhabitants of Puerto Rico.Footnote 9
Following the successful petitioning by the vassals of Puerto Rico in 1547, authorizations for slavery in the following decades extended to other Lesser Antilles islands and also to women. In 1556, after reviewing the reports sent to the council by Bishop Tomás Casillas, the crown approved the enslavement and denaturalization of the Lacandón people in Guatemala.Footnote 10 Subsequent endorsements in various locations throughout the Western Hemisphere demonstrate a sustained practice across thousands of kilometers, over a prolonged period. Evidence shows that the sanctioning of slavery in one location informed the marshalling of proslavery arguments elsewhere, leading to the extension of Indigenous slavery in disparate locations. An exploration of the legal efforts to legitimize Indigenous slavery reveals that there was no seminal break in the enslavement of Indigenous people before and after 1542, even if the crown considered Indigenous people to be free Spanish vassals with their attendant privileges. Yes, the numbers of slaves taken after 1542 decreased compared to the previous 50 years, but the practice continued, and the legal channels used to enact slavery were many.Footnote 11
I draw attention to crown-authorized slavery to counter the prevailing myth that slavery continued illegally at the local level while crown authorities did their best to uphold the New Laws.Footnote 12 Unquestionably, the crown continued after 1542 to rely heavily on local leaders to do the dirty work of empire-building via authorizations of capitulaciones (contracts for military exploration, which are generally associated with the early colonial period).Footnote 13 It is important to understand, however, that the relationship between the Council of the Indies, the king, and the local authorities who resorted to violence against Indigenous inhabitants was symbiotic. The intricacies of colonial legal governance can be understood neither in terms of a top-down Eurocentric vision for implementing and promoting order, nor by assuming that municipal councils far from the “center” could maintain complete autonomy. Outside of urban areas, millions of miles of territory remained under the control of Indigenous polities, and the Spaniards knew that. Therefore, warfare was convenient for both crown and cabildo, and with military conflict came requests for slavery, which were often granted for fixed periods of time.Footnote 14
A crown-sanctioned mandate or decree to enslave a specific group of Indigenous people could be established through one of two channels, one bureaucratic and the other legalistic.Footnote 15 The first channel was based on gracia petitions, whereby the king or council allowed exceptions to legal rules by granting special considerations or mercedes.Footnote 16 The types of legal documents produced by vassals to receive exceptions to rules varied. While kings were generally not legislators, they could, as the fathers of their people, create laws as lex animata, the living law, resulting in series of ongoing and everchanging decisions, believed to emanate from God.Footnote 17 Through gracia, for example, the king could grant a license or privilege in his instructions to a viceroy or an audiencia president about to depart Spain for America. The king's mercedes also came in the form of capitulaciones, which stipulated the responsibilities of an expeditionary commander such as an adelantado, who signed a private contract with the king and who would remain under the king's direct authority and independent of viceroys.Footnote 18
The second and more commonly used channel, gobierno, was based on proposals and petitions related to administration and governmental interests that were presented to the Council of the Indies or audiencia magistrates, who then issued edicts.Footnote 19 This was by far the most frequently used method that vassals pursued to advocate for Indigenous slavery. Requests could come in the form of treatises or reports (sometimes commissioned by the council or king), letters, and petitions that included dossiers of interrogations, witness statements, and other documents. Finally, special councils or juntas assembled to debate a serious issue like Indigenous slavery could make recommendations to the king, the council, or the viceroy and audiencia. This article focuses mainly on the two channels of gracia and gobierno. Footnote 20
Gracia and gobierno petitioning could begin at the local level, with documents then moving from the cabildo to the audiencia. In the authorization of slavery of the Pijao and Páez people in the New Kingdom of Granada, petitioning efforts on a local level (from vassals or municipal councils) were sent to captains general, viceroys or the audiencia, any of which could either authorize the temporary enslavement of Indigenous people captured during entradas or allow exceptions to an existing prohibitive decree.Footnote 21 In some instances, requests for crown approval to enslave a particular group might be made multiple times, with petitions sometimes submitted several times over many years. For instance, during the 30 years between 1572 and 1602, three different royal decrees allowed the temporary enslavement of the Pijao and Páez, in the New Kingdom of Granada. Documents accumulated over this period reported many times that the area of Ibagué (to the southwest of Bogotá) was in a continual state of war, with strong Indigenous resistance to Spanish military incursions, despite valiant efforts to found towns and build roads that could reach valuable mineral deposits and enhance communication with the region of Popayán to the south.Footnote 22
Legislation and Legal Practice
Given the persistence and ubiquity of crown-sanctioned slavery and its effects on the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Indigenous people, why do we see 1542 as a watershed that defines the transition from conquest to the establishment of colonial order? Why do we explain away local (and often illegal) practices of Indigenous enslavement as either exploitation of legal loopholes or as evidence of the adage that “I obey but I do not comply”?
First, we must understand that the creation of legislative decrees in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries occurred organically, evolving in both local and imperial contexts as additional knowledge was accumulated. This “additional knowledge,” which councilors used in reviewing petitioners’ requests, included facts about local exigencies that were considered along with the tried-and-true accusations of cannibalism and the taking of vassals as captives or killing them. This patchwork accumulation, over space and time, explains the apparently contradictory nature of the legislation, which we call “law.”Footnote 23 In other words, council magistrates issuing ordinances or decrees based on new or newly available information could bend existing legislation without going so far as to formulate a guiding principle that would influence future deliberations.Footnote 24 Ordinances and general and specific decrees that fell under the rubric of gobierno administration thus did not serve as precedents.Footnote 25 In fact, officials engaged in very little comparative research on prior cases to render judgment. For instance, when the Council of the Indies authorized the enslavement of the Lacandón people of Guatemala in 1556, based on reports from local secular and ecclesiastical authorities of cannibalism and brutal killings, council members insisted that the change did not “alter or revoke the [New Laws of 1542] which the Council had passed, with so much consideration.”Footnote 26
Second, legal mandates could be interpreted in multiple ways. Because many laws related to Indigenous slavery applied to a specific locale or Indigenous polity or were to be in effect for only a specific period, government officials in Spanish America could consider a law that was responsive to the demands of specific circumstances, without affecting the broader existing law. In 1573–74, a formal inquisition and junta of secular and religious authorities was held in Chuquisaca, Bolivia, to determine whether war and slavery were justified against the Chiriguano people of the eastern slopes of Bolivia. Two participants in the junta, Francisco de Quiñones, president of the Audiencia of La Plata, and Manuel Barros de San Millán, were aware of the authorization of slavery against the Lacandón people, both having previously served as oidores in Guatemala. Quiñones and Barros based their objections to the enslavement of the Chiriguanos on a 1530 law abolishing all Indigenous slavery, even in cases where slaves had rebelled against the crown.Footnote 27 According to eyewitness Reginaldo Lizárraga (later archbishop of Santiago, and a proponent of war and enslavement against the Reche-Mapuche), Toledo responded to Quiñones and Barros's protestations by stating that the 1530 law was not applicable to the Chiriguanos: “never having [before] seen such a decree nor understanding that it applied to kingdoms other than [to] Mexico and Guatemala.”Footnote 28
The fact that the viceroyalty of Peru did not even exist in 1530 when the law was enacted convinced Quiñones, Barros, and all but one member of the junta's ad hoc committee of the inapplicability of the 1530 “Guatemala law” to the Chiriguano situation. They approved the punishment of the Chiriguano as both just and necessary.Footnote 29 In 1583, after a second junta, at which the Audiencia of Charcas gathered testimonies from local authorities in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a region of recent Spanish settlement with an active Chiriguano presence, the oidores approved the enslavement for life of the Chiriguano and of the Chanés, an Indigenous group whom the Chiriguano had captured.Footnote 30
Third, local authorities in Spanish America could overrule laws or bend them. In deciding how (or whether) to implement ordinances, render long-time customs as binding, enact procedures, and other such matters, administrators could rely on the precept of just determination or conscience, based on local exigencies and judicial discretion.Footnote 31 Brian Owensby's research shows that pragmatic judgment was key to understanding the relationship between the king's royal officers of the law—viceroys, oidores, corregidores, alcaldes, and notaries—and the crown and, ultimately, God.Footnote 32 In making decisions to uphold laws, royal officers were meant to follow their conscience, and by extension God's will.
Early seventeenth-century Chile provides a good example of pragmatic ethics in action. In 1608, after long deliberation, King Philip III decided that aggressive warfare and slavery against the Reche-Mapuche were justified, but by 1612, intensive lobbying had led the king to reverse his decision. He declared an end to the four-year “offensive” war (guerra de sangre y fuego, war of blood and fire) that would have allowed the enslavement of all captives. From this point forward, the king argued, Spaniards could react only “defensively” to Reche-Mapuche attacks. No longer could they cross an established border at the Bío-Bío River separating Reche-Mapuche and Spanish territory, nor could they take slaves, especially males over ten and a half years old and females over nine and a half years old. Because travel was difficult, and delays in notifications were common, news of the change did not reach La Concepción in southern Chile, close to the border established with the Reche-Mapuche, until some time had passed.Footnote 33 The king's decision received a lukewarm reception, but the slowness in communication is only partially to blame for it. Soldiers, townspeople, and even the members of the city council of La Concepción found it difficult to accept that they would now have to free the slaves they had taken in malocas (raids) after 1612, but before word of the king's mandate had reached them.Footnote 34
To enforce the royal mandate, Fernando Machado, prosecuting attorney (fiscal) for the crown, traveled in 1615 to the estates and encomiendas near La Concepción, intent on freeing those slaves taken unjustly and now being called “free servants” (criados libres).Footnote 35 The cabildo of La Concepción warned Machado that he had “[taken] more into his hands than the King gave him, giving freedom to those who were not free, because so many [Indigenous people] fall under the category of personal servants.” A frustrated Machado tried arresting recalcitrant city officials, but they blockaded themselves in the house of the maestro de campo (military chief of staff). To de-escalate tensions and keep the public peace, procurador Juan de Contreras convinced Machado that he had exceeded the power of his office and must accept local interpretations of the law, thus allowing alienable “servitude” to continue.Footnote 36
Slavery's Legal Archive
The Council of the Indies in Spain needed considerable amounts of information to render decisions that could lead to degrees and mandates. We often assume that council members in Spain, and local authorities in Spanish America, not only tracked accumulated legislation, ordinances, and decrees, but could retrieve them easily.Footnote 37 But written documents issued by the king and his council provided no sure way for the center to have control over the periphery. In fact, the Spanish imperial center continually suffered from information overload. Historian Arndt Brendecke has considered the epistemic settings or conditions under which a high-level Castilian governmental official could know something.Footnote 38 He shows the difficulty that members of the council had in keeping track of their own deliberations, reports, and decrees. Papers circulated freely in the sixteenth century, but there was no centralized repository where all documents related to Spanish possessions were stored.Footnote 39 The Council of the Indies had its own internal archive, but the storage of papers was uneven.Footnote 40 More commonly, the presidents, secretaries, scribes, and chroniclers of the Council of the Indies maintained their own personal archivillos (little archives) at their homes and accumulated information related to their decisions only in fits and starts.
Put simply, it was patently difficult in the sixteenth century for the secretaries of the Council of the Indies in Castile and for audiencia and city council authorities in Spanish America to be aware of the numbing number of leyes (laws), cédulas (decrees), ordenanzas (ordinances), and provisiones (provisions) enacted and kept in registers.Footnote 41 At the council, register books (cedularios) were organized by province and maintained by regional secretaries. The crown mandated that all legal dispositions (disposiciones) dispatched to the Indies—provisions, decrees, ordinances, instructions, and recommendations—were to be recorded verbatim, and chronologically.Footnote 42 Such was the enormous quantity and variety of legislation that by the mid sixteenth century, it was impossible to know which decisions had been made and where to find them, unless the interested party knew the exact date.Footnote 43
In 1563, when council secretary Juan López de Velasco began revising the registry books that contained all of the legislation mandated by the Council of the Indies from the time of discoveries to the present, he found 200 volumes containing over 10,000 legal provisions.Footnote 44 Following in the footsteps of López de Velasco, Juan de Ovando lamented in 1571 that it was impossible for council members to have any clear sense of the plethora of ordinances and decrees recorded.Footnote 45 He attempted to organize some of the laws and ordinances but was unable to complete them by 1575, when he died.Footnote 46 Adrian Masters calculates that by 1598, the year of King Philip II's death, more than 110,000 pages of decrees and dispositions had been archived in 300 massive tomes.Footnote 47 Although there were further efforts to compile and publish the laws and ordinances, no one of these was ever comprehensive.Footnote 48
It is therefore a mistake to think that the administrative center in Spain had an omniscient view of where Indigenous slavery was being practiced or promulgated in the different areas of its empire. The same can be said of administrative centers in Spanish America, where even a general knowledge of royal pragmatics, decrees, and ordinances was uncommon. Crucial laws, pragmatics, and ordinances such as the New Laws of 1542 were printed and sent to the various authorities in Spanish America, but legal decrees often traveled to their destinations with the person overseeing their implementation.Footnote 49 Nor did important legal decrees always circulate widely. In Paraguay, for example, it was not until after 1558 that a member of the clergy insisted on circulating a copy of the 1542 New Laws, in Asunción.Footnote 50
Recognizing its lack of control over its own legal instruments, the crown attempted to organize access to legal codes in the 1560s. Audiencias and town councils were mandated to keep an up-to-date copy of legal codes in a cedulario and to preserve all originals, with an alphabetical and chronological index.Footnote 51 The truth is, however, that each viceroyalty, audiencia district, or city council generally received only the dispositions related to its own interests, and even these were not always read out in a public setting to make them legally binding.
Petitioning and Legal Slavery
If the channels by which administrators in Spain could access information in the sixteenth century were labyrinthine, the means by which vassals could access the Council of the Indies in person or in writing— what Brendecke calls the “communicative settings”—were varied and effective. Vassals had a number of channels at their disposal to request that legislation be passed and to influence crown officials in policymaking. These channels were active and expanding, especially as demands for new “discoveries and conquests” continued to beset the Council of the Indies and the crown throughout the sixteenth century.
As recent research shows, the issuing of thousands of royal pragmatics, ordinances, and other legislative documents came as a result of petitioning efforts from non-elite vassals, important elites, local municipal council members, and the audiencia.Footnote 52 Adrian Masters's important research on the mechanism of the petition process indicates that individual and local interests drove the legislative agenda in the sixteenth century.Footnote 53 The passage of decrees, he argues, resulted from the efforts of “a thousand invisible architects” seeking to influence policies both large and small.Footnote 54 A close look at the petitions and petitioning process to promote Indigenous slavery reveals what Víctor Tau Anzoátegui calls the “socio-legal experiences” of colonists, rather than the power of an all-seeing king and council.Footnote 55
Although petitions advocating for Indigenous slavery existed before the 1542 New Laws, petitions made after 1542 became more elaborate and generally took longer to receive royal approval.Footnote 56 Priests and friars, merchants, local administrators—city council and audiencia members, governors and captains general, and viceroys—used the petition process to request that the crown make war on and enslave certain groups of Indigenous people, despite the New Laws.Footnote 57 To inform and persuade, there arose a practice of conducting public relations campaigns, in which “petitions” (requests for favors of justice) were crafted under a broad documentary rubric that included memoriales (reports), informaciones (accounts) and cartas (letters). Often, these accounts also included probanzas, or notarized interrogations in which witnesses answered a set of predetermined questions, to prove the need for Indigenous slavery.Footnote 58 Together, the documents were meant to persuade king and council that certain actions were good practice.Footnote 59 The organization and presentation of the packet of documents to support a petition (probanzas, interrogatories, and other documents) was formulaic, but the content within each document could vary considerably.Footnote 60
Thus, both flexibility in interpreting laws and the role of vassals in driving the legislative agenda in the sixteenth century are important in explaining why Indigenous slavery continued. But petitioning efforts after 1542 took place in a different imperial context, one in which warfare against recalcitrant Indigenous people no longer meant that captives could automatically be taken as slaves based on principles of just war, as was laid out in medieval canon law. Enslavement was now a matter of debate, and a topic given serious consideration in juntas, in treatises, and at council meetings.Footnote 61 Prior to 1542 laws allowing slavery carte blanche in multiple locations existed, petitions now had to be presented to the crown on a case-by-case basis.
An Armory of Rationales
Responding to blistering criticism and the realities of demographic decline in various locations, crown authorities in the post-1542 world emphasized evangelization and buen policia (good governance) toward Indigenous subjects. The 1549 royal decree on “discoveries” specified that war on Indigenous peoples could be made only after other options to reducirlos (subject them) to Spanish obedience were exhausted. Instead, evangelization and “pacification” were now to be the primary motivation and means of contact with Indigenous people.Footnote 62 The exhaust-other-options rationale was enshrined some years later in the Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación (ordinances on discoveries, new settlements, and pacification) for the Spanish Indies, composed principally by Juan de Ovando, head of the Council of the Indies, and issued by Philip II in 1573.Footnote 63 Providing a new legalistic framework, the ordinances iterated the crown's evangelizing role and authorities’ need to find a balance between violent conquest (the word “descubrimiento” was to replace “conquista”) and the peaceful integration of Indigenous subjects under Spanish rule.Footnote 64
It was now strictly forbidden to encourage Indigenous allies of the Spanish to make war on a resistant group, nor could slaves exchanged through rescate (exchange or ransom) be denaturalized and transported outside their territories.Footnote 65 Whereas, in the past, use of the purposefully vague verb ‘castigar’ (to punish) in the authorization of military expeditions generally involved enslavement, that was no longer assumed to be the case.Footnote 66 Only after all attempts to pacify or persuade (allanar) had failed could slavery be authorized, and then on a case-by-case basis.Footnote 67 Another important effect of the 1573 Ordinances is that the crown would no longer finance exploratory missions, which meant that the financial burden of “pacifying” Indigenous populations by military action now fell on local governments and Spanish encomenderos.Footnote 68
Efforts to evangelize, found towns, and conduct warfare now worked in tandem.Footnote 69 King and council advocated warfare to bring about peace and the incorporation of “recalcitrant” Indigenous subjects. In practice, authorizations to make war and enslave specific Indigenous groups sometimes came directly from the king in the form of gracia privileges granted in instructions to new viceroys or governors.Footnote 70 In 1588, King Philip II authorized Antonio González, newly named as president of the Real Audiencia of Santa Fé (in modern-day Colombia, with its seat in Bogotá) and about to cross the ocean to assume his post, to appoint an appropriate person to organize a capitulación. González chose Bernardino de Mújica [also spelled Mojica] to make war on the Pijao and take slaves.Footnote 71 Reports to Philip from the Audiencia of Santa Fé and town councils make it clear that slaves could serve as a reward to those encomenderos who would participate voluntarily in these military ventures.Footnote 72 In other instances, the king's merced was more specific. In Philip II's 1568 instructions to the new viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, the king authorized making war on the Chiriguano but did not mention slavery. That would come six years later, in 1574.Footnote 73
Given the 1573 guidelines on new discoveries, no one reason was persuasive enough to convince royal authorities of the need for slavery.Footnote 74 Rather, petitions made to the audiencias and the council to address an extreme need for a just war and enslavement often grouped multiple rationales in several ways. For one, petitions and reports would request authorization to act against groups of non-subjugated people—often unrelated polities that the Spaniards lumped together as targets specifically for this purpose. They might define a targeted group composed of different Indigenous ethnicities and then collapse them into an ethnonym (“Carib,” “Chichimeca,” “Chiriguano,” “Lacandón,” or “Pijao”), or even create one in order to legitimize warfare and enslavement against those they had defined as part of the targeted group. Petitions emphasized the barbaric behavior and resistance to pacification efforts of ethnic groups inhabiting vaguely demarcated territories that were considered barbarous “frontier” arenas.Footnote 75 Requests also proposed that Indigenous groups who had engaged in prolonged and unprovoked warfare against defenseless Spaniards or indios amigos (Indigenous allies) should be taken captive and enslaved.Footnote 76 Targeted groups, petitioners argued, served as bad examples for the Christianized Indigenous peoples who had already been baptized and “reduced” (reducidos), inducing them to rebel against Europeans.
In addition to creating new ethnic groupings and collapsing - disparate Indigenous peoples into them, petitions also arbitrarily distinguished enemies from indios amigos.Footnote 77 The purposeful classification of Indigenous peoples into new ethnic groups allowed Spaniards to target certain ethnicities as dangerous to Spanish settlement, but it also had the effect of creating an archival repository based on new ethnic distinctions. With that repository there arose a new and powerful vocabulary that not only equated enslaveability with certain targeted bellicose groups but distinguished the enslaveable from the unenslaveable.Footnote 78 In addition to ethnonyms, certain undefined territories could be desginated as places where enslaveable Indigenous people lived, for example “Sierra Cruz de la Sierra” in southeastern Bolivia or the “lands of the Chichimeca” in northern New Spain.Footnote 79
Petitions for warfare and enslavement could also claim the vulnerability of Indigenous people to Spain's enemies–whether they be “Turks” or the Dutch, English, or French. By the late sixteenth century, areas considered vulnerable to attack by foreigners included the Lesser Antilles and the southern coast of Chile, among other locations. There were even reports of ships off the coast of Mexico purportedly filled with Ottomans.Footnote 80 Most notably, written rationales encouraging the enslavement of captured enemies emphasized their engagement in cannibalism, a barbaric, inhumane (read: non-human) practice, long considered to be outside of natural or God's law.Footnote 81 Europeans had been labeling Indigenous peoples of the Americas as cannibals regularly since the 1490s, and this well-worn justification continued as a rationalization for slavery well into the seventeenth century.Footnote 82
Petitioners in the post-1542 world were, in fact, often putting old wine in new bottles. Petitions and treatises justifying enslavement pointed to the long-standing Indigenous practice of making slaves out of enemies, as in the case of the Philippines, which had been “conquered” by the Spanish in the late 1560s.Footnote 83 Or, they maintained that because the conquest had been going on for 60 years or more, Indigenous peoples designated as enemies were in fact apostates who had not only been introduced to the Christian faith years before but had rejected it.Footnote 84 Evidence of this dereliction might include the killing of priests or Christianized Indigenous subjects, blatant iconoclasm, or more spectacular examples, like tearing out the hearts of captured children on Church altars.Footnote 85 Some of the strongest advocates for both warfare and Indigenous slavery on religious grounds were clergymen. Tomás Casillas, the Dominican bishop of Chiapas who replaced Bartolomé de las Casas, had initially supported the Lascasian vision of denouncing slavery but then departed from it in his ministrations to the Indigenous people under his watch.
In a 1553 report to the Audiencia of Los Confines (Guatemala), Casillas declared the Lacandón people from the Chiapas area enslaveable based on their heretical and apostatic practices, thus implicitly comparing them to people of the Islamic faith who had rejected Christianity.Footnote 86 The Council of the Indies approved his request in 1556, but stated that the license thus granted did not signify a revocation of the New Laws, but rather an exception.Footnote 87 In the decades that followed, authors of treatises and petitions claimed that certain Indigenous peoples were “returning to Islam” to justify their enslavement. In two juntas that took place in different hemispheres, participating authorities made ethnological comparisons between the nomadic customs of the Chichimeca (northern Mexico) and the Pijao (New Kingdom of Granada, in the Audiencia of Santa Fé) and the Arabs (or Moors), thus implying that both the Chichimeca and Pijao had apostatic tendencies.Footnote 88
The killing of a high-ranking military authority or priest was also grounds for serious concern and a catalyst for more decisive action.Footnote 89 Below the surface of such outrage, however, other interests prevailed. Mandates to conduct warfare against people obstructing “progress” gave entrepreneurs a cover for encroaching on Indigenous territories that they coveted.Footnote 90 They would whisper alarming news into the ears of town magistrates in the hope of establishing a town or building a road through ‘enemy-occupied’ territories, especially if that town or road would help to open up a newly discovered mining area, or provided a way to funnel laborers to encomiendas or estates.Footnote 91 They also hoped to convince the crown to assume the costs of these military operations, especially where the discovery of new mines was involved.Footnote 92 Garnering slaves could also bring profit.
Emphasizing the continual attacks on Spanish settlements also had strategic legal ramifications for Indigenous enslavement. The establishment of cities and pueblos (European settlements) in remote areas carried with it the necessity for military protection against enemies. The 1573 Ordinances emphasized and supported the foundation of towns because those towns could boost the crown's evangelizing mission. The towns also expanded juridical and economic control over Indigenous-controlled areas where, from a Spanish perspective, civitas (community) did not yet exist. Once established, a new town would serve as a base for future expeditions of pacification (read: expansion).Footnote 93 After the 1570s, hundreds of cities and towns sprang up in remote areas, chartered with crown privileges (fueros), and staffed by governors or adelantados and other local officials. These towns were effectively “political organs of the monarchy.”Footnote 94
Municipal councils were among the many polycentric legal entities that reported to higher crown authorities, but they also had considerable latitude and leverage of their own in regulating and implementing customary laws and practices.Footnote 95 They had the power to make decisions about war, which were approved or denied through petitioning efforts to the audiencia.Footnote 96 Although we generally associate entradas and capitulaciones with the sixteenth century, they continued to be a major means of conducting warfare and engaging in violence and slavery throughout South and North America in the seventeenth century and beyond.Footnote 97 Efforts to expand Spanish control into more remote areas (so-called “new discoveries”) remained privatized endeavors well into the seventeenth century. Dozens of armed expeditions called entradas, popular in the interior of Spanish South America, resulted in the enslavement of hundreds if not thousands of Indigenous people of different ethnicities over vast territories. Entradas could be sanctioned by the governor of an area in accordance with its cabildo and did not require crown approval.Footnote 98 The governor of a region assumed the title of captain general and oversaw recruitment of a military force, leaning mainly on encomenderos, who were required to provide manpower and resources and recruit commoner males and Indigenous allies; the latter were critical to the success of these military ventures. The governor could also award encomiendas to men serving as soldiers. This meant that Indigenous war captives became “encomienda” Indians or personal retainers called yanaconas, and that Indigenous captives taken by Indigenous allies were either sold to Spaniards or incorporated into the allied Indigenous community.Footnote 99
Regional Momentum
Although the petition process involving the creation of associated documents often began at the local level, communications between Madrid and diverse locales generated both archival momentum and documentary density across broad geographical areas. Council of the Indies members may not have known which decrees were issued and when, but interested petitioners often kept track of documents authorizing slavery and used them to great effect. This is particularly evident in the Greater and Lesser Antilles where interest in slavery against the Kalinago people (called Caribs by the Spanish) was high.Footnote 100 Over the decades, reports, investigations, and petitions demonstrating threats that merited attention from the council and the crown copied the wording from previous archived legal decrees. Copies of documents shared among the vecinos of various Caribbean islands and with their legal advocates in Spain also created a documentary blueprint that facilitated future petitioning.Footnote 101
In issuing the 1547 royal provision allowing the vecinos of San Juan, Puerto Rico, to make war on and enslave invading Kalinago people, the Council of the Indies noted that it had reviewed the documentary corpus, including the account (relación) written by the vecinos of San Juan of “damage done by the Carib Indians,” and their attacks on Puerto Rico.Footnote 102 The dossier included an interrogatorio, or legal questioning of authoritative witnesses, and a parecer (informed opinion).Footnote 103 Vested with legal authority to represent the interests of the city council of San Juan, legal advocates Diego Ramos and Sebastián Rodríguez crossed the ocean in 1546 to present the petitions from the vecinos of San Juan to the Council of the Indies.Footnote 104 In granting the request for a merced (privilege or right) the following year, the council noted that the arguments in the documents were well founded and that it would therefore make an exception to the New Laws.Footnote 105
However, vecinos (and the procurators who represented them at court) sometimes wanted more, and they drew on legislative precedents established in documents stored in their own archival dossiers to help their cause. The council had on occasion allowed the vecinos of Puerto Rico to make occasional war on certain Caribs, but only with the permission of the governor; however, the vecinos of several islands in the Lesser Antilles went further. In 1554, they secured the help of legal advocate Baltasar García, who represented the interests of the island of Hispaniola at court between 1554 to 1561, to draft a series of petitions requesting an expansion of the areas where Spaniards could make war on and enslave Kalinago people.Footnote 106 Residents of the islands of Dominica and Guadalupe collected testimonies (probanzas), based on responses to questions compiled by the cabildo of Santo Domingo, detailing atrocities and attacks they had faced. This paperwork constituted the petition “archive” that traveled to the Council of the Indies with García after the oidores of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo had approved the contents of the dossier.Footnote 107
The resulting 1558 decree was worded similarly to the 1547 royal provision granted to the vecinos of San Juan.Footnote 108 The council then determined, in May of 1558, to authorize both war and the enslavement of war captives, under the condition that the slaves be brought before the Real Audiencia and questioned properly. No females or boys under the age of 14 could be enslaved, nor could they be taken from the island of Trinidad.Footnote 109 Despite the prohibition on taking Indigenous slaves included in the New Laws of 1542, the Council of the Indies allowed the taking of captives from the Lesser Antilles “Carib” islands of Guadalupe and Deseada and from the mainland of Tierra Firme (coastal Venezuela) who were attacking the Spanish settlers living on the island of Margarita.Footnote 110 This provision was then stored in the cedulario for the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, and served as a blueprint for subsequent requests, including one from the European residents of the island of Margarita to make war on and enslave Kalinago Indians in 1564.Footnote 111
The 1560s saw efforts by vecinos in the Caribbean to amend previous crown mandates. After being granted the right to temporarily enslave Carib captives in 1547, the cabildo of San Juan compiled a petition ten years later, complete with probanzas and relaciones. The dossier was hand- carried to Madrid by the cabildo's legal representative, Francisco Alegre. The vecinos wanted a rectification to the 1547 provision, arguing that they had diligently obeyed the 1547 decree but now wanted permission to arm themselves and attack the Caribs of Trinidad.Footnote 112 Thus, we see several authorizations in 1557, 1567, and 1580 that allowed for alterations to previous decrees and authorized the enslavement of Carib women and of the inhabitants of Trinidad.Footnote 113 Ironically, as crown approvals of petitions allowing the enslavement of Kalinago of different genders and on different islands increased, retributive Kalinago raids against Spanish settlements and the taking of captives became more effective and regular.Footnote 114 Crown efforts to curtail raids included issuing a capitulación to Captain Thomé Cano in 1608 (the same year war was authorized against the Mapuche), giving him broad authority to launch a war “of fire and blood” against the Kalinago and take male and female captives on numerous Lesser Antilles islands.Footnote 115 But these efforts only served to escalate violence and acts of Kalinago retribution.
Analogy as Power
As crown authorizations for Indigenous slavery increased after 1547, petitioners and writers of relaciones and treatises began to cross-reference slavery authorizations occurring elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere and in Europe. Information about crown approvals became more widely available in several ways. High-ranking oidores, viceroys, and male religious who promoted slavery had read circulating manuscript treatises, or they had served in multiple locations where they experienced ongoing conflicts with Indigenous subjects, or they had spent time in the hub of Madrid, where crown administrators and military figures could share news from different parts of the empire. They recognized that petitioning efforts could be successful and learned how to marshal arguments effectively. Apart from these verbal communications, a common vocabulary and semiotics were emerging in requests for enslavement in the 1560s. As crown authorizations for slavery gradually became more common, petitions began using analogy, precedent, normative practice, and similitude in various locales to argue for it in others.
In the late 1560s, it was easier for vassals to look to Spain for analogies to support slavery than to the Americas where new enslavement would take place. In the War of the Alpujarras (1568–71), in which the Crown of Castile was pitted against the “rebellious” moriscos of Granada (the Mudéjars, people living in Spain who were forced to convert from Islam to Christianity in 1502), Spanish soldiers removed 80,000 moriscos from Granada and enslaved thousands of them. In 1573, King Philip legalized the ongoing dispersal and selective enslavement of captives on the grounds that they had rebelled against the Crown of Castile and God.Footnote 116 The mandate exempted boys under the age of ten and a half and girls under the age of nine and a half from slavery but required them to live in depósito with Christians and remain in their service until the age of 20.Footnote 117
The “local” nature of the war and the specificity of the resulting mandate only encouraged comparisons between the enslavement of the moriscos of Spain and the need to adopt the same practice against “rebellious” Indigenous peoples of the Americas who refused to become reducidos.Footnote 118 Treatises in support of the enslavement of the Chichimeca looked for commonalities between the so-called barbaric customs of the “moriscos” in Granada and those of the “Chichimecas.”Footnote 119 So great was the impact of the crown's responses to the Alpujarras rebels that 30 years later treatises in Lima and Chile promoting warfare and the enslavement of the Reche-Mapuche referred to Philip II's “recent” decision to enslave the moriscos of Granada for their crimes of apostasy, rebellion, and murder.Footnote 120 Dominican cleric Reginaldo Lizárraga's 1599 exposition not only supported the enslavement of the Reche-Mapuche, but also drew on historical precedent in suggesting that Philip II's order for morisco children to be raised with Christians be applied to captive Reche-Mapuche children.Footnote 121
Lizárraga was not alone in creating a campaign to promote crown endorsements based on both analogy and precedent. The previous year Melchor Calderón, treasurer of the Church of Santiago, wrote a treatise that would eventually reach the chambers of the Council of the Indies. It checked all the appropriate boxes for why enslavement of the Reche-Mapuche (who were also called Aucaes) was justified. To Calderón, they were indeed apostates and carnivores, but worse, they had attacked and killed high-ranking Spaniards, including two governors. They enslaved indios amigos and allied with European enemies who were intent on making inroads on the west coast of South America. To persuade council and king, Calderón added to his analogies between the moriscos of Spain and the Reche-Mapuche arguments pointing to legal enslavement practices occurring elsewhere in North and South America at the time. He wrote, “So, if his majesty has declared slaves in Brazil, the Chiriguanaes in Peru, and the Chichimecas in Mexico, as well as in other places, it seems that these [Aucaes] could be made slaves, even if for [only] ten or twenty years to punish them, end this war, and inspire the soldiers outside and within this province [of Chile].”Footnote 122
According to historian Álvaro Jara, Calderón's arguments were encapsulated in a 1607 report that was reviewed by the Council of the Indies just before Philip III concurred with enslaving the Reche-Mapuche in 1608. Apparently, Calderón's treatise had a greater impact than all previous efforts.Footnote 123 His carefully laid out logic also influenced simultaneous (though ultimately unsuccessful) efforts led by Juan Buenaventura de Borja y Armendia, captain general and governor of the New Kingdom of Granada, who wanted to extend the 1602 royal order allowing what was then the temporary enslavement of captured Pijao to be extended to them and their descendants for life.Footnote 124
References to legally sanctioned slavery occurring in East Asia also became increasingly common after the discovery of the Legazpi Current opened up trade with East Asia.Footnote 125 In theological juntas in New Spain that took place between 1569 and 1575 to determine whether to enslave the Chichimeca or place them in temporary bondage, slavery opponents compared abuses against the Chichimeca to what was occurring in the Philippines, called the Islas Ponientes.Footnote 126 Not only were religious sending accounts to the members of their orders, but slaves called chinos from South and East Asia were beginning to appear in small numbers in New Spain, arriving through the port of Acapulco. The presence of East and South Asians on North American soil alerted vassals and authorities to the practice of slavery in other parts of the world.Footnote 127 Although he was unable to garner crown authorization in 1574 for a complete war of fuego y sangre against the Chichimeca (which would have translated into extermination practices and perpetual enslavement for captives), Viceroy Martín Enríquez did allow their temporary enslavement.
In fact, the enslavement had actually begun years earlier, after a 1569 junta on the matter. The 1569 agreement was that captives would undergo a trial to prove that they had committed or abetted a crime of robbery or murder. If they were found to have done so, they were to be held in legal depósito, as slaves, for 13 years.Footnote 128 Children were exempt.Footnote 129 In 1574, Enríquez convened another junta, which concluded that a war of fire and blood was now warranted.Footnote 130 When yet another council of jurists and regular clergy members requested permission in 1585 from the Council of the Indies to engage in total war, they drew on the common toolbox of rationales. But the Council of the Indies rejected their request, finding their “imagined grievances” to be unconvincing.Footnote 131
Reports of slavery and arguments for advocating it also spread by means of communication networks established by crown authorities serving in different imperial locations.Footnote 132 As officials assumed posts and administered justice in the Philippines, Spain, Mexico, and South America, they learned how to draw comparisons between so-called bellicose Indigenous cultures and others they were considering whether to enslave, and comparison became a highly effective tool of persuasion.Footnote 133 These officials, considered men of authority, were often called as expert witnesses by the Council of the Indies. In 1563, King Philip II issued his instructions to the head of the Audiencia of La Plata (in Bolivia), Pedro Ramírez de Quiñones, authorizing him to make war on whatever rebels he found there, based on Ramírez's previous experiences in Central America.Footnote 134
Four years prior, Ramírez had served as an oidor in the Audiencia of the Confines (Guatemala), where he was responsible for organizing the armed expedition against the Lacandón in the area of Verapaz (Guatemala) that resulted in enslaving them and removing them from their homelands.Footnote 135 Ramírez de Quiñones was also aware of actions in northern New Spain against the Chichimeca and efforts there to ramp up legal slavery. In testimony he gave during a 1573 royal inspection of the Audiencia of La Plata, where he advocated for the enslavement of the Chiriguano of southeastern Bolivia, Ramírez de Quiñones described his earlier encounters in Guatemala in the 1550s with “a perverse nation of indios called Lacandón[es] y Pochutla[s]” who were “worse than the Chichimecas,” because they continually waged assaults and robberies in the frontier area of Guatemala and Chiapas. Conveniently, while Ramírez and his men were already on the road to conduct the military operation against the Lacandón and the Pochutla, a royal provision arrived, “ordering them to make war upon and punish them and make slaves out of the evildoers.”Footnote 136 After a successful attack by boat, hundreds of captives were immediately denaturalized from their homelands and bound, with collars around their necks. Ramírez de Quiñones thought that a similar treatment of the Chiriguano (despite geographical differences) would benefit the European inhabitants of the Audiencia of La Plata.
High-ranking military officers with war experience in New Spain were sometimes called on by the Council of the Indies or the king to offer advice or to recommend suitable tactics or strategies to use against recalcitrant Indigenous groups. As they did so, the officers were creating an archive that would become available to other petitioners interested in matters of warfare against Indigenous people in the future.Footnote 137 Domingo de Erazo [Erauso, also spelled Eraso] had not only fought and strategized in Chile, but he had provided a record of his efforts, documenting his movements from one post to another in numerous accounts and letters. He also spent crucial years in Spain, offering his expert advice to the Council of Indies. As a procurador general, Erazo acted as an intermediary and strong advocate for the enslavement of the Mapuche in the years prior to Philip III's authorization in 1608 to allow war and slavery against them.Footnote 138 His expertise in Chile led to his subsequent appointment by Juan de Borja, president of the Audiencia of Santa Fé, to serve as governor from 1605 to 1612 in the New Kingdom of Granada and to conduct a military campaign against the Pijao.Footnote 139 Given Erazo's ability to sway authorities in Spain to support slaving endeavors, Borja asked him to write a report in 1606 detailing the state of the New Kingdom of Granada as of that year. That report was then circulated by Borja to key military figures before a decisive meeting to discuss strategy.Footnote 140
Francisco de Sande y Picón (1540–1602) is also worth mentioning in regard to military and slavery matters, because his experience of governance in three locations influenced imperial policies toward Indigenous people. While serving as governor of the Philippines (1575–80), Sande drew on his firsthand experience with the Chichimeca in Mexico. Between 1567 and 1573 he had served as a legal advocate, alcalde de corte, and oidor, and for a brief period had adjudicated criminal trials against Chichimeca captives.Footnote 141 However, his refusal to turn over the trial records of captive Chichimecas to his secretary (Did he have something to hide?) infuriated Viceroy Enríquez.Footnote 142 Sande compared the ferocity of the Chichimeca to that of the Zambales people of the Philippines, whose main ambition, he claimed, was to cut off men's heads.Footnote 143
While serving as president of the Audiencia of Santa Fé from 1597 to 1602, Sande drew on his experience in both northern New Spain and the Philippines to persuade Philip II to authorize the enslavement of the Pijao and Páez. Concerned about the ineffectiveness of previous Spanish campaigns against Indigenous groups, he argued in a 1597 letter that the insistent and calculated attacks by the Pijao and Páez impeded Spaniards’ access to gold sites in the Magdalena River area. Twice Sande emphasized that war against the Pijao and the Páez was even more important economically than the war against the Chichimeca.Footnote 144 He also thought that tactics and strategies used against the Pijao could be implemented in Chile to help de-escalate tensions.Footnote 145 Here we see a man with broad influence in both Madrid and varied imperial locations whose vision and experience advocating for the enslavement of targeted Indigenous groups had a global reach.
Conclusion
Petitions were an effective means to promote royal intervention in the issue of slavery, but both the crown and Council of the Indies were also deeply involved in the continuation of Indigenous slavery. Several conditions and situations facilitated the authorization of legal slavery between 1542 and the 1620s. Foremost among these were the sharing of geographic and military knowledge and experiences with Indigenous enslavement across vastly different territorial domains and the cumulative petitioning efforts at local and imperial levels that supported the authorization of legal slavery between 1542 and the 1620s. Other methods and strategies were also effective. Applying ad hoc ethnonyms that could be collapsed or expanded to encompass different Indigenous polities living in vaguely defined geographic domains and the use of tropes for demonstrating savagery that dated back to the medieval period also fed into the decisions and decrees that allowed for the temporary enslavement of targeted groups.
Although neither the Council of the Indies nor the king had precise control of the vast legislative corpus of over 10,000 mandates, the council did actively engage with the great numbers of ongoing petitioning efforts. Sometimes the council approved slavery with a simple “probeydo” scrawled in the margins of a request. On other occasions, the council issued a more formal decree. Above all, and key to understanding the process, petitioning efforts, whether successful or unsuccessful, show a mutually beneficial system of governance that was neither rigidly authoritative nor based on complete local autonomy. There were reasons that the crown stood to benefit from warfare and enslavement just as much as vassals in North and South America and the Caribbean would. Legal mandates were an expression of normativity in pragmatic efforts to solve problems.Footnote 146
The fact that the promulgation of legislation dealing with war and enslavement came from both the top down and the bottom up, and came into being in a symbiotic manner, asks us to rethink the “I obey but do not comply” paradigm that has dominated scholarship on colonial Latin America for so long. When we think about royal mandates for governing the Spanish Indies, especially those regarding slavery, and the interlocutory relations between crown and local officials that would lead to different kinds of legislation, it is important to consider the mechanisms and channels that led to those legal declarations.Footnote 147 This perspective also gets us beyond thinking about laws like the New Laws of 1542 as decisive, hegemonic and as the ultimate signifier of colonial order. A more productive way of approaching Indigenous slavery is to consider how “hard” and “soft” laws came into being, how they changed over time, and how they supported, contradicted, or superseded each other.
In cases where petitions were partially successful (think of Juan de Borja or Martín Enríquez, for example), petitioners were forced to compromise or find other ways to put old wine in new bottles. Perhaps this has to do with the arbitrary nature of Spanish governance, who was on the council, and what they could and did know. Also, there were definite limits as to who could be enslaved and removed from their homelands. When, for instance, the Audiencia of Santo Domingo petitioned in 1569 to allow Indigenous slaves from Brazil to be sold in the Greater Antilles, Philip II denied their request.Footnote 148 This was outright slave-trafficking. Unlike the Kalinago who posed a threat to inhabitants of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, Brazilian ‘cannibals’ did not. Granting the petition would have involved overstepping imperial bounds.
Just as some petitions for enslavement were unsuccessful or had only a limited effect, calculated and protracted efforts could also result in a renunciation of slavery, or a rethinking of the terms under which it could be practiced.Footnote 149 Even if slavery was allowed in certain areas, governors could modify certain practices.Footnote 150 A newly arrived viceroy could reverse a previous policy.Footnote 151 In some instances, the crown authorized “softer” forms of temporary servitude such as the depósito, not going so far as to mandate slavery.Footnote 152 Those presenting petitions or treatises protesting the targeting and enslavement of designated Indigenous people might also achieve success.Footnote 153
Decrees promoting legal slavery were not necessarily effective as means of “punishing” groups against whom the Spaniards conducted lengthy wars. Many military ventures initiated by Spaniards were not successful in the short or long run. Although documents are often not explicit, mandating slavery was often a means to pay soldiers, or to exact a profit from the sale of a captive. The enslavement of war captives did not, with a few exceptions, resolve problems in Indigenous-Spanish relations. In many cases, slavery further exacerbated tensions and resulted in the taking of European, African-descendent, and Indigenous allies as captives by Indigenous polities in acts of retribution. Some groups, like the (ethnonymically created) “Chiriguano,” the “Chichimeca,” or the Kalinago benefited greatly by taking hundreds of captives and incorporating weaker indigenous groups into their kinship systems. Captive-taking enabled macro-polities like the Chiriguano to offset population losses from ongoing military excursions, thus ensuring their ethnic survival.Footnote 154
Finally, it is time to stop thinking of Indigenous slavery after the New Laws of 1542 as an exceptional and mostly illegal practice in Spanish America. Enslavement continued in many areas and circumstances and remained coterminous with other practices of managing Indigenous labor, such as the encomienda, repartimiento, or mit'a service. These practices also fed one another. Unfree labor relations involved a continuum of practices related to personal servitude such as yanaconaje and the use of naborias (Indigenous servants attached for life to a master) in addition to legal and illegal captive-taking that prevailed into the late-colonial period.Footnote 155 Although the authorization of Indigenous slavery was often a short-term solution, it remained within the legislative toolbox of colonial administrators and vassals long after the signing of the New Laws of 1542.
Appendix: Crown Authorizations of Enslavement and Conduct of War (1547–1618)
Between 1547 and 1618, there were numerous authorizations to enslave or make war on Indigenous peoples of Spanish America. The following is a selected list.
1547 Petitions from the vecinos of San Juan de Puerto Rico claim that “Caribs” (Kalinagos) are attacking their island. The crown authorizes their enslavement. Authorities are required to verify the island of origin of the captives.Footnote a
1556 Following reports from the Bishop of Chiapas, the Audiencia of Guatemala receives a royal license authorizing the enslavement of Lacandón and Puchutla people.Footnote b
1557 Royal authorization is given to enslave the Kalinagos who are attacking the residents of the island of Dominica.Footnote c
1558 The Council of the Indies authorizes the vecinos of Santo Domingo to enslave “Carib” invaders from the islands of Guadalupe, Matinino, and La Deseada, but excludes the Indigenous inhabitants of Trinidad.Footnote d
1560 The Council of Quito authorizes the enslavement of the Quijo of eastern Ecuador (Napo province) during the entrada of Rodrigo Núñez de Bonilla, based on understandings that the cacique Jumandy and his people have “resisted” incursions and the Spaniards’ founding of the town of Baeza. This authorization lasts until 1578.Footnote e
1560 Viceroy Velasco of New Spain gives the alcalde mayor of Zacatecas the authority to take Chichimeca captives, and to deposit them with their captors for a period of six years, or a longer period as designated by the Audiencia of Nueva Galicia.Footnote f
1564 A royal decree authorizes the enslavement of Kalinago people who have attacked the residents of the island of Margarita. The decree is based on the 1558 provision, mentioned above.Footnote g
1569 Philip II authorizes the vecinos of the “islands of Barlovento” (the Lesser Antilles) to make war on and enslave the Carib Indians of those regions, if the prisoners are not under 14 years old or female.Footnote h
1570 Philip II writes to Miguel López de Legazpi, governor of the Philippines, allowing the enslavement of the moros (narrowly, Islamic people, but term is also associated with apostasy) from nearby islands who are attacking Spaniards.Footnote i
1574 After a junta, the Audiencia of Charcas, in accord with Viceroy Francisco Toledo, allows the enslavement of the Chiriguano people.Footnote j
1574 The Real Audiencia of Santa Fé authorizes Diego de Bocanegra and Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada to make war on the Gualíes Indians, who have rebelled for the second time.Footnote k
1574 In authorizing a “war of fire and blood” (guerra de fuego y sangre) Viceroy Enríquez allows the enslavement of Chichimecas for a period of 13 years, except for children. They are to be held in legal depósito, although proof of captivity will be necessary.Footnote l
1574 Appointed by King Philip II as adelantado, governor and captain general of Florida, Pedro Menéndez de Ávila draws up a report on damages inflicted by the Tocobaga (an ethnonym that encompasses a variety of chiefdoms of Gulf Coast Florida). Earlier, in 1564, the magistrate of the cabildo of Havana, with whom Menéndez had close ties, ordered Ávila to conduct a formal investigation of the matter, complete with informaciones recommending that the Tocobagas be enslaved, including children. Eventually the compiled petitions and reports reach the Council of the Indies and, in 1574, the king approves the enslavement of the Tocobagas for a period of 12 years. Menéndez will profit directly from this trade.Footnote m
1577 On June 3, the Royal Audiencia of Santa Fé allows Captain Bartolomé Talaverano, vecino of Ibagué to conduct a military expedition (jornada) to take Pijao captives, who will remain slaves for 20 years. They are to be marked with a brand on the hand and can be sold. It is required that they be registered before a captain, notary, or town magistrate.Footnote n
1580 In 1580, King Philip II and the Council review a compilation of documents sent by the Audiencia of Santa Fé (including a letter written in 1577), citing numerous references to cannibalism, attacks on newly authorized towns, and the blocking of the road to Popayán by the Pijao and Páez. Their short-term enslavement is authorized in a royal decree.Footnote o
1580 A royal decree allows for the temporary servitude—but not slavery—of captured Chontales. The king defers to the Audiencia of Guatemala to decide on the conditions under which the Chontales will be held.Footnote p
1583 The Audiencia of Charcas (again) allows for the enslavement of Chiriguano captives.Footnote q
1588 King Philip II authorizes Antonio González, who is about to cross the ocean to assume the post of president of the Royal Audiencia of Santa Fé, to name an appropriate person to conduct a capitulación against the Pijao. After the capitulación, they will be kept as slaves for a limited period.Footnote r
1602 The Audiencia of Santa Fé declares the enslavement of the Pijao for 10 years.
1604 The crown names Juan de Borja president of the Audiencia of Santa Fé and charges him with “pacifying” the Pijao, Cararé, and Yararguí people.
1608 A royal decree authorizes a “war of fire and blood” against the Caribs of Dominica, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Grenada, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia.Footnote s
1608 A royal decree authorizes a war of fire and blood against the Reche-Mapuche people of Chile. A royal mandate prohibiting slavery will come in 1674, but it will not be applied in Chile until 1679.Footnote t
1609 A royal decree issued to the governor of the island of Margarita states that indios from Guyana may be kept as slaves.Footnote u
1618 A royal decree gives the governor of the Rio de la Plata and Guayrá the authority to make war on the Payaguá and Guaicurú Indigenous nations living to the north of Asunción, Paraguay, and allows for their capture and servitude.Footnote v
1620 A royal decree authorizes the Audiencia of Panama to make a war of fire and blood against the “rebellious” Indigenous people of the Darién.Footnote w
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