Hispanic Legacy

comparison 11

• Cartographic extent vs effective control: auditing the size of empires

  Why "the largest empire in history" is a statement about maps, not about government. The size series behind every popular ranking are atlas reconstructions; this object audits the famous figures - Britain's 35.5 million km2, Spain's claimed 25 million, the rival "effective" estimates - and publishes the territorial audit's verdicts, including its rejection of the "Spain integrated, Britain segregated" dichotomy as a scoring device.

• Two colonial models: incorporation and settlement compared

  Academic comparison of the Spanish and British colonial models in the Americas: legal incorporation and mixture of the indigenous population under Spain, land-focused settlement and displacement in British America. Both models' costs are on the record; the comparison follows Elliott's standard study and the institutional-economics literature.

• Comparing empires: a benchmark without a moral ranking

  The hub of the empire-comparison benchmark: eleven dimensions, sixty-one operational metrics and the coding rubrics (territorial status T0-T6, administrative reach E0-E3, measurement and causal confidence) that let empires be compared claim by claim - scale, capacity, welfare, extraction, rights, coercion, violence, culture and legacy - without collapsing them into a single moral score. Includes an annex with the benchmark's base sources and its first published observations.

• Distribution and extraction under the Spanish empire: the EXT dimension

  The distribution-and-extraction dimension of the empire benchmark: what the crown actually took from the Americas and how the fiscal machine worked. Hamilton's series fix the bullion at Seville; Grafe and Irigoin's revision documents the machine - a network of quasi-autonomous treasuries, administration at 3-12 percent of revenues - against the "predatory state" caricature; the coerced labor beneath the silver stays on the ledger.

• Innovation and culture under the Atlantic empires: the CUL dimension

  The innovation-and-culture dimension of the empire benchmark loaded for the Spanish Atlantic - the 1539 press, the printed grammars and dictionaries of Quechua, Nahuatl and Guarani, the mandated chairs of indigenous languages, Tlatelolco, American nature entering European medicine and chemistry, and the Nobel line from Cajal to Ochoa - with the coercive side (censorship, the instrumental motive of the language policy) coded as harm on the same page.

• Prosperity and welfare under the Atlantic empires: the WEL dimension

  The prosperity-and-welfare dimension of the empire benchmark loaded with the Maddison Project reconstructions - GDP per capita for the viceregal cores against the metropoles, c. 1600 to 1850. The data complicate both national stories at once: New Spain around 1700 was richer per head than Spain itself, Britain was already ahead of both, and the deepest American decline in the series comes with the independence wars, not before them - published with the observed-vs- attributable rule in force.

• Institutions and public goods under the Atlantic empires: the PUB dimension

  The institutions-and-public-goods dimension of the empire benchmark loaded for the Spanish Atlantic - hospitals ordered by law for Spanish and Indian towns, Quiroga's welfare communities, community treasuries, salaried native legal aid, the 1577 statistical questionnaire and the 1573 town-planning code - against the settler-serving institutions of British America, with the funding leaks and unequal access documented from the same laws that built the architecture.

• Rights and autonomy under the Spanish and British empires: the RGT dimension

  The rights-and-autonomy dimension of the empire benchmark applied to the Spanish and British Atlantic: what legal personality, protective legislation and courts the native population held de iure in each system, and what the record says about de facto enforcement - the Spanish protective code and its documented violations side by side, the British colonial polity that never included the natives at all, and the one empire that formally debated its own legitimacy.

• Slavery and coercion under the Atlantic empires: the COE dimension

  The slavery-and-coercion dimension of the empire benchmark, loaded with the SlaveVoyages estimates - 12.5 million Africans embarked, 10.7 million landed, 1501-1866 - by carrier flag, destination and period: Spain's smaller flag total, the larger Spanish-American demand it hides, the Cuban surge after 1800; plus encomienda and mita, and the legal asymmetry by which the empire that banned enslaving Indians in 1542 kept African slavery lawful. Non-compensable by design.

• Violence and demographic catastrophe in the Americas: the VIO dimension

  The violence-and-demographic-harm dimension of the empire benchmark applied to the post-contact Americas: the catastrophic collapse driven principally by epidemic disease, compounded by war, dislocation and forced labor; the unresolved scholarly estimates published as a range; and the double correction the record requires - against minimizing the violence, and against citing Las Casas's rejected figures as statistics. Causal attribution graded, never assumed.

• The Iberian crowns, 1580-1640: juridical claim vs effective control

  A country-by-country estimate of what the Spanish and Portuguese crowns actually administered during the Iberian Union - juridical area versus effective area, and population under each crown, published as intervals with per-row confidence - with the British Empire of 1921 processed under the identical criterion as a control. Spain's effective core around 1600 comes out near 4.6 million km2 and 29 million people; the cartographic 13.7 million km2 belongs to a different question.

entity 756

• Abad y Queipo, Coleccion de los escritos mas importantes (Mexico, 1813)

  A volume printed in Mexico City in the middle of a civil war, collecting what a bishop-elect of Michoacan had written to the government since 1799. It asks the king to abolish tribute on Indians and castes, to strike the legal infamy of the castes, and to divide crown and community land among them - and argues that the protective privileges of the Indians had become the instrument of their harm. Its title page says it is published against the insurgents.

• The stingless bees of the Indies: Mesoamerican beekeeping in the Spanish record

  Oviedo opens his chapter on wasps by apologising that the bees should have come first, then reports that Hispaniola has none and Tierra Firme has many kinds. Landa found the hives already property in Yucatan, with a festival held for the abundance of their honey and a named patron. The bees were stingless Meliponini, kept for millennia; the modern literature dates their collapse not to the conquest but to 1911 and to the 1960s.

• Abogado y Procurador de Pobres of the Audiencias of the Indies

  Every Audiencia of the Indies carried on its salary roll a lawyer and a procurator for the poor, listed in the annual return of ministers the viceroys had to send the king. They were ordered to be at the Saturday jail visit with the prisoners' files in hand, on penalty of two pesos. The same code that created the office ruled that its salary was not to come from the royal treasury but from court fines — and in Mexico, in 1783, the Audiencia was still fining them for not turning up.

• Academia de Náutica del Consulado de Buenos Aires (1799-1806)

  The school of mathematics and navigation that the merchant guild of Buenos Aires paid for out of its own funds, opened under the geographer-engineer Pedro Cerviño with fifteen pupils and closed by a royal order that called such establishments mere luxury. Its 1802 public examinations ran to 407 propositions before the viceroy, and its prizes were a sextant, an octant and Jorge Juan's navigation treatise.

• The Academia de las Nobles Artes de México (Academy of San Carlos, from 1781)

  A royal academy of painting, sculpture and architecture in Mexico City whose instruction was free and whose evening rooms, lit by Argand lamps, held hundreds of pupils drawing from casts and copying designs for furniture and bronzes. The observer who described it in 1803 itemised the miners and merchants who paid for it and recorded that on its benches Indian, mestizo and white sat together in a city whose caste prejudice he called inveterate.

• Achiote, the bixa: an American pigment that Oviedo gave a chapter and the world now eats

  Oviedo gave the shrub a chapter: a plant as tall as a man and a half whose husks hold red grains the Indians worked into balls to paint face and body, and which they stirred into ground cacao so the drink turned red. A century later a Madrid printing prescribed it on the authority of "los Medicos en las Indias". It is now annatto, E160b. The chronicler's contempt is quoted here beside his description.

• José de Acosta, De procuranda Indorum salute (Salamanca, 1588)

  A Jesuit who had spent his working life in Peru printed a six-book manual telling the ministers and officers of the Indies what they might and might not do. Its most quoted page grades the peoples of the world into three classes of barbarians. Its least quoted pages rule that the Indians cannot be conquered, owe no tribute for their own soil, and must be paid for their labour — and that the encomenderos, the magistrates and the parish priests are the ones sinning against it.

• José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Seville, 1590)

  The Jesuit book that treated the Americas as a problem in natural philosophy rather than a catalogue of marvels. Printed at Seville in 1590, it argues from the distribution of wild animals that the two land masses must join somewhere unexplored and that people walked over; it gives the first sustained clinical account of altitude sickness, and gets the cause right; and it reads Andean knotted cords as a system of record.

• The Padre Tembleque aqueduct, or Arcos de Zempoala

  A sixteenth-century water conveyance built across the dry plains north-east of Mexico City by one Franciscan and the indigenous communities who supplied the labour, its central arcade still standing when a Mexican government survey reached it in 1864. This entry takes the earliest printed measurements the container could open, prints the two that disagree, and keeps the labour and the later spoliation of the structure beside the achievement.

• Cristóbal de Acuña, Nuevo descubrimiento del gran rio de las Amazonas (Madrid, 1641)

  A Jesuit sent by royal provision of the Audiencia of Quito came down the whole Amazon in 1639 with a Portuguese armada and printed the survey two years later: the tributaries, the peoples named one by one, a cold site measured against wheat-growing. The same sheets print what the voyage was also being used for. Number LXVII is Acuña's own formal protest against the slave-taking his escort intended, and number LII refuses the pretext offered for it.

• The aguacate, called palta in Peru and "perales" in Tierra Firme

  A royal chronicler files the avocado among the wild trees the Christians called "pear trees" — then reports the same trees planted by hand in Nicaraguan town squares and cultivated by the Indians, and concludes that everything was wild before human industry took it in hand. A Jesuit in Peru describes it under its Andean name, tells the hard-skinned Peruvian fruit from the thin-skinned Mexican one, and would still rather eat a European pear. Archaeobotany has dated the industry Oviedo guessed at.

• Piped water for Guadalajara (1563-1742): a levelling survey, an infiltration gallery and a decision not to tax the poor

  Guadalajara had wells in every house and spent two centuries trying to get piped water anyway. A maestro mayor levelled a spring about 1600 and reported it would arrive below the plaza; a 1641 commission lapsed; then a Franciscan lay brother founded a concrete conduit in pumice, vaulted a gallery two men could walk through and sank over a thousand wells to feed it. The judge in charge refused the levy the king had ordered because it would fall on the poor.

• Agustin de la Fuente, Nahua scribe and compositor of Tlatelolco

  The Nahua master of the college at Tlatelolco who wrote for Sahagun and for Pedro Oroz until Oroz died in 1596, then spent ten years as the hand behind another friar's press: everything that friar printed had passed through it. To see one book finished he learned to set type, and set almost all of it himself. His name is on no title page. It survives because the friar put it in a prologue, and because a bibliographer used it to identify who actually wrote out Sahagun's last work.

• El ajedrez de la dama — the recasting of chess in late fifteenth-century Spain and Lucena's Salamanca book

  The game the world plays is not the game that came out of India and Persia. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century the queen and the bishop were given the long moves they still have, and the earliest printed book on the result was written by a student at Salamanca and dated by a dedication to a prince who died in October 1497. Its author had no name for the new game but "de la Dama", and explained its moves by their difference from "el viejo".

• Al-Zahrawi and the Kitab al-Tasrif

  The surgeon of Madinat al-Zahra outside Cordoba who spent about fifty years on a thirty-book medical encyclopaedia and closed it with an illustrated treatise on operations and the roughly two hundred instruments they need. Translated at Toledo, the surgical part became a European teaching text for centuries. The reachable literature on him is admiring and short on scepticism, and the long list of firsts it credits him with should be read with that in mind.

• Bartolome de Albornoz, Arte de los contractos (1573): a jurist refuses to have a soul paid for with a body

  A Valencian law book of 1573 whose chapter on slaves argued that the presumption is always for liberty, that the buyer is accomplice to the seller who had no right, and that no one may be told the freedom of the soul is bought with the servitude of the body. The Holy Office stopped its reading and reprinting. The object prints the argument, the concessions inside it, and the traffic that went on regardless.

• Alcabala de las Indias

  The sales tax of Spanish America. An old Castilian levy extended to the Indies from 1574 in New Spain and 1592 in Peru at two per cent, its proceeds consigned to the maritime armadas. Codified in Recopilación libro VIII, título 13, it taxed merchants and encomenderos alike — but exempted, in the crown's own words, the Indians ("por ahora no la han de pagar"), staple grain sold in the markets and alhóndigas, and food sold retail for the poor.

• Oaxaca's neighbourhood magistrates, 1796: a police ordinance that tells the police to stay out of houses

  The city of Oaxaca was divided into quarters in 1795 and given unpaid neighbourhood magistrates, with a printed ordinance that sets out what they could do. It obliges them to push parents to school their children, to place orphans, to keep the streets swept — and it forbids them to pry into what passes inside houses, on the ground that general enquiries are prohibited by the laws of the kingdom and that families are not to be defamed over domestic gossip.

• Alcedo's Diccionario geográfico-histórico de las Indias Occidentales (Madrid, 1786)

  A geographical and historical dictionary of the whole of America, compiled over twenty years by a colonel of the Spanish Guards who says he was born there. Its prologue gives the motive: foreigners had made the history of the Indies their own subject, carrying out of Spain the books its own discoverers had written, until those books could barely be found in Spain at any price. In 1812 a London consortium issued the whole of it in English, with additions.

• American cotton: a Yucatán domesticate that clothes the world, and the Spanish record of the fibre it left behind

  The cotton grown almost everywhere today is Gossypium hirsutum, domesticated in the northern Yucatán some 5,500 years ago. Two Spanish witnesses show what the sixteenth century made of it: Oviedo reporting that Hispaniola's cotton went uncultivated because sugar and hides paid better, and Acosta counting 5,677 arrobas of cochineal against 64 arrobas of cotton in one fleet — the American fibre clothed America, not Europe, and did duty as money where coin was absent.

• Alhóndiga y Pósito of Mexico City: a public grain exchange with a posted price, 1583

  In 1583 the crown confirmed ordinances forcing every load of wheat, flour and barley entering Mexico City into one public hall, where the first price of the day stood all day, carriers had to produce a magistrate's certificate of what they had paid, and grain unsold in twenty days was sold by order. A levy on the same grain funded a granary that bought maize in scarcity and resold it below market. The granary was gone by 1830 and its levy paid for street lamps.

• Almadén: the mercury of the Indies, and the ledger its own state kept

  The oldest known mercury mine in the world became, after about 1550, the European supply for a Mexican invention: Bartolomé de Medina's silver amalgamation. By 1861 a Spanish government memoir could argue that almost the whole consumption of Almadén's quicksilver was the treatment of American silver ores by the patio system. The same memoir prints the miners' hospital returns for 1844–1855 and the physician's account of what mercury did to the men.

• Almanaque Náutico of the Observatorio de Marina de San Fernando (read in the volume for 1856, printed 1854)

  The Spanish navy's annual astronomical ephemeris, computed at San Fernando for the meridian of its own observatory and printed two years ahead of the year it served. The volume for 1856 calls itself number 65 of the collection, sets out the formulae it was calculated from so the navigator can judge how far to trust each table, says the figures were checked either by differencing or by being computed twice independently, and is priced on its title page in silver for the overseas provinces.

• Alonso de Zorita and the Breve y sumaria relación de los señores de la Nueva España

  A judge of the audiencia of Mexico wrote to Philip II to argue that the crown had got its own tax base wrong. Read in the 1864 first printing, his memorial turns out to be a fiscal argument before it is a moral one: tribute in pre-conquest Mexico fell on land and labour, never on heads, and the new count by heads had caused, in his words, great unrest and scandal. He ends with people fleeing to the hills and leaving their children behind.

• Altitudo divini consilii (1 June 1537): the adaptation of canon law for indigenous converts

  The day before the better-known declaration that the Indians were true men, Paul III wrote to all the bishops of the Indies to settle what missionaries should do: whether rite-less baptisms had been sins, which four ceremonies could not be dropped, which wife a polygamous convert kept, in what degrees of kinship converts might marry, and how many fasts and feast days bound them. The ordinary law of the Church, rewritten for the peoples of the Americas.

• Lighting Mexico City: the general street lighting of 1790 and how it was paid for

  In 1790 the ayuntamiento of Mexico City was ordered to find a permanent revenue for a general street lighting, and proposed three reales on each load of flour entering the capital — about 37,500 pesos a year against 35,429 pesos of lanterns already built. Its argument for the tax was arithmetic: spread over the 430 loaves a load of flour yields, the charge came to a quarter of an ounce of bread. By 1864 the city burned 1,914 lanterns of three competing designs.

• Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

  Survivor of the 1527 Narváez expedition who walked and lived for eight years (1528-1536) among the native peoples of today's Texas and northern Mexico, one of four survivors of an expedition of hundreds. His Relación is the earliest extended European description of the North American interior — and an unusual one, written by a man who survived as healer and trader rather than conqueror.

• Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc and the Cronica mexicana of about 1598

  A Mexica noble wrote the history of Tenochtitlan in Spanish about 1598, in a hundred and ten chapters built almost entirely out of speeches - the elders in council, the embassies, the demands of tribute. Two nineteenth-century authorities declared the book lost while copies of it sat in Mexican libraries; its first printing was made in London in 1848 inside a folio so costly that the work stayed effectively unpublished until a Mexico City press set it in 1878.

• Jose Antonio Alzate and the Gacetas de Literatura de Mexico (from 1788)

  A scientific journal written almost single-handed by a creole priest in Mexico City from 1788, whose title page claims corresponding membership of the Paris Academy of Sciences and two Spanish bodies. It printed a test for alum adulterated into spirits, the origin of the Mexica argued from ruins on the Gila with their latitudes, a case against Linnaean nomenclature made on pharmacological grounds, and the Academy of Lyon asking whether America should have been discovered at all.

• Anatomical theatres and the teaching of anatomy in early modern Spain

  Spain built permanent anatomical theatres from the middle of the sixteenth century: one was ordered at Salamanca in June 1552 and finished in May 1554, and Zaragoza, Barcelona and Valencia followed on a different institutional model. The building contracts survive and give measurements, seating and dissection quotas — and the same documents say whose bodies were opened: the executed, and hospital dead too poor to pay for a funeral.

• Andenes and acequias — the terrace-and-canal engineering of the Inca fields

  The stepped terraces that still contour the Andes and the long canals that fed them are described in engineering detail in book V of Garcilaso's Comentarios reales: retaining walls built three deep and battered inward, hillsides climbed terrace by terrace "á manera de escalera", canals carried fifteen and twenty leagues to water a few fanegas, and a named corps of "ingenieros de acequias de agua" whose works were still visible in his day. Read from the page.

• Andrés de Urdaneta and the tornaviaje

  The Augustinian friar and cosmographer who in 1565 sailed the San Pedro from Cebú to Acapulco by standing north into the westerlies and running east on the Kuroshio — the return passage, the tornaviaje, that turned a one-way crossing of the Pacific into a route and made the Manila-Acapulco galleon possible.

• Andrés Manuel del Río

  Mineralogist working in Mexico who in 1801 became the first discoverer of the element vanadium, in the Royal Society of Chemistry's own phrase: "Vanadium was discovered twice. The first time was in 1801 by Andrés Manuel del Rio." Paris chemists wrongly dismissed his find as chromium, and the element was rediscovered and named in Sweden three decades later.

• Indigo in New Spain: a tahona, a sowing tube and a memoir written to answer the charge that Spain only vegetates

  A first-person memoir printed in a Mexican compilation of 1855 under the head ANIL, by the eighteenth-century editor who had published a translated treatise on indigo in his periodical of 1772. It records two Mexican improvements to a Caribbean industry - a tannery mill that cut the cost of hulling indigo seed from sixteen or twenty pesos to two or three reales, and a sowing tube - and states its purpose: to answer those who say the Spanish nation only vegetates.

• The Annals of the Cakchiquels, a Kaqchikel-language history kept by the Xahila family of Guatemala (printed Philadelphia 1885)

  A history of the Kaqchikel nation written in Kaqchikel, in the Latin alphabet the missions taught, by a member of its ruling family who was already an adult when the Spaniards arrived in 1524, and continued by his kin. It records the epidemic that killed its author's grandfather and father before any Spaniard reached them, the levies of five hundred men and five hundred women for the gold washings, and the royal official whose arrival stopped the burnings.

• The anti-venereal trials at the Hospital General de San Andrés (Mexico City, 1790-1791)

  An itinerant healer from Pátzcuaro brought a plant remedy for venereal disease to the archbishop of Mexico in July 1790, and instead of being dismissed or licensed on the spot he was given wards. Sixty-odd patients were treated to his instructions, in stages, with other medicines withheld, under the Protomedicato of New Spain — and a hospital physician who thought the whole thing a fraud wrote a long report saying so, which is why the trial's failures can still be read today.

• Antoni Gaudí

  Catalan architect, dead in 1926, whose Sagrada Família — taken over in 1883, his exclusive occupation from 1914 until his death — remains under construction more than 140 years after its cornerstone, with its Nativity facade and crypt inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 2005. The building's own institution documents the chronology cited here.

• Antonio de Cabezon, organist of Philip II

  The keyboard player of Charles V and Philip II, heard at Genoa as "otro Orfeo de nuestros tiempos" and buried under a monument the king paid for. This entry reports what the nineteenth-century Spanish record holds: a compiler who searched two Madrid parishes for his birth and burial and found neither, two printings of the lost epitaph that disagree word for word, an unverified priority claim, and a Spanish historian who called his doctrine Flemish.

• Antonio de Ulloa and the European debut of platinum

  The 1748 account of the South American voyage that Antonio de Ulloa published with Jorge Juan carries the first mention and identification of platinum in European literature — a few lines about a white metal ruining the gold washings of the Chocó, from which the name platina and four decades of European chemistry followed.

• Antonio Valeriano (died 1605), Nahua Latinist and governor of Mexico-Tenochtitlan

  A Nahua from Azcapotzalco who learned Latin at the college of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, taught grammar there to Indian collegians and to young friars, and then governed the Indian parcialidad of San Juan Tenochtitlan for more than thirty-five years. The Franciscan who wrote his notice was his Nahuatl pupil and stood at his deathbed. The same chapter records that Latin teaching for Indians had by then stopped.

• Apartado de oro y plata de México

  The crown works at Mexico City that separated the gold locked inside silver bars. On a bar of 133 marcos its charge was the largest single deduction after the tithe, and the king ordered poor bars parted at the treasury's expense, at a loss, so that gold otherwise lost would circulate. A reform commission printed in 1822 records that the savings never reached the owners, and asked that its posts go to men trained in chemistry.

• Aqüeducto de San Telmo (Málaga, 1782-1804) — a city water supply owned by a nautical college

  The aqueduct that gave Málaga drinking water from 1784, built out of a bishop's estate and crown money diverted from the endowment of the Real Colegio de San Telmo, and in 1804 made over to that college as its own perpetual property. Its printed ordinance opens with a history blaming the shortage on the clearing of the hills after the conquest of 1487, and hands the works to a naval judge.

• The arancel for innkeepers: a price tariff for the road from Mexico City to Veracruz

  A schedule of maximum prices for every inn on the road between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, issued by the governor of New Spain together with the justices and aldermen of the city. It prices tortillas, wine by the league, hens, rabbits, quail, pork, venison, maize, a bed and an egg; it orders the pigs kept away from the guests' animals; it gives a third of every fine to whoever denounces the breach; and it has to be nailed up at each inn door where anybody can read it.

• Pedro de Arenas's Vocabulario manual: a layman's Spanish-Nahuatl phrasebook

  Almost every printed tool for Nahuatl was made by a friar for other friars. This one was made by a traveller who could not make himself understood on the road, found the big printed dictionary useless for his purpose, wrote out the Spanish sentences he actually needed, and handed them to an unnamed indigenous interpreter to turn into Nahuatl. Its table of contents is a map of what Spaniards and Nahuas said to each other — greetings and sickbeds in one chapter, orders to mine workers in the next.

• Areytos — the Taíno word a Spanish chronicler turned into a category for oral history, including Europe's

  Oviedo describes the sung dances of the Isla Española as a deliberate technique of memory — genealogies and defeats kept "en lugar de libros de su acuerdo" — and then does something no later account repeats: he tells the reader not to call it savagery, quotes an Italian song and a Castilian one about Pavia as areytos of his own world, counts how many years each had already lasted, and concludes the Indians do well to keep theirs.

• Juan de Arfe y Villafañe, Varia commensuración para la escultura y arquitectura (Seville, 1585-1587)

  A working silversmith's textbook of geometry, proportion, anatomy and design, privileged by Philip II in 1585 after the manuscript burned and was written again. Its argument is that antiquity knew no difference between the sculptor, the architect and the silversmith, and that the first thing needed to work silver and gold is geometry. It was still being reprinted from the author's own plates in 1795, and the 1795 printer used the book to expose an earlier editor's false claim.

• Pedro Arias de Benavides, Secretos de Chirurgia (Valladolid, 1567)

  A surgeon back from fifteen years in the Indies printed at Valladolid a book whose title page advertises "the manner in which the Indians cure sores and wounds and other afflictions in the Indies". Inside, experience beats authority: he rates maguey above the fashionable American drug wood, credits an indigenous healer with curing a viceroy his physicians had given up on, and says he kept his best remedy to himself because the physicians of Mexico had interests in the other one.

• Arte de la lengua cahita (Mexico, 1737), the only printed grammar of the language of the Yaqui and Mayo

  A grammar and vocabulary of Cahita, the language of the Yaqui and Mayo rivers, written by a Jesuit of the Sinaloa mission and printed at Mexico in 1737 with a catechism by Tomas Basilio. Its editor in 1890 could find only three copies and knew of no other grammar of the language ever published. The book refuses the Latin category of the frequentative, lists the letters Cahita lacks, and says in its dedication that it exists to make preaching quicker.

• Arte plumaria — Mesoamerican featherwork under Spanish patronage

  The Nahua amantecatl laid undyed bird feathers into pictures. After the conquest the craft was redirected rather than ended: friars and Spanish householders commissioned feather images and retablos, painters supplied the drawing and the featherworkers the colour, and Torquemada describes twenty craftsmen dividing one image between them and rejoining it seamlessly. The same chapters carry the cost, including the friar's contempt for what those makers had painted before.

• The Artificio de Juanelo: the machine that raised the Tagus to the Alcázar of Toledo (1560s–1581)

  Toledo sits on a granite hill wrapped by the Tagus far below in its gorge. Between the 1560s and 1581 Juanelo Turriano — the Cremonese clockmaker retained by Charles V and Philip II — built a self-acting machine of jointed timbers and paired brass vessels that lifted river water some hundred metres to the alcázar continuously, reckoned among the wonders of the age. It worked, and it also failed as a venture: it decayed within a few years, and its maker died with the crown owing his heir for it.

• The judge who acts de hecho is a private man: atentado, restitution and the executoria in encomienda dispossessions

  A judge who took an encomienda without citing the holder was treated, for the purpose of undoing it, as a private despoiler. The close of libro III capítulo XXX sets out the remedy: appeal coupled with the plea of atentado, heard summarily and before the merits, running against the third party who now holds the grant — and an executoria from Madrid good against whoever holds it when the paper arrives.

• The Audiencia de La Plata de los Charcas: a royal high court over Upper Peru, obeyed as the king himself

  In 1559 the crown erected at the silver city of La Plata — the Indian Chuquisaca — a Real Audiencia, an appellate court through which an Indian town or a Spanish subject of Upper Peru could reach royal justice. The Recopilación ordered its decrees obeyed "como si fueran de el Rey", and its writ reached even into Lima's district. The same court sat over 188 Indian towns and the Potosí its mita drained: its justice and its extraction stand on the same ground.

• Absent at Salamanca: whether a man could keep or claim an American encomienda while studying at a university, argued in a named suit in the Council of the Indies

  Residence in the province was a condition of holding an encomienda. The standard treatise on the government of Spanish America asks whether study at an approved university excused it, and answers from a suit brought a few months before it was written: a claimant at Salamanca sought restitution against a grant made in New Granada while he was away, and the Council refused it. The student's privilege was real, and it did not reach a grant he had not yet got.

• Religious drama in Nahuatl: the autos of New Spain, 1530s-1540s

  Within twenty years of the conquest, Nahua towns were staging full-length religious plays in Nahuatl, with indigenous actors and casts drawn from the ruling lineages. Two friars describe the productions in detail — the paradise built at a hospital door, the burning hell with a false door, the siege of Jerusalem fought by Tlaxcalan and Mexica companies — and the same pages record what the plays were for and whom they were used against.

• The Avendaño embassy to the Peten Itza (1695-1696)

  Two years before the Peten was stormed, three Franciscans and four Maya cantores walked into the capital of the last independent Maya kingdom without soldiers and argued for days out of the Itza's own katun count, read from their painted bark screenfolds. The relator of the Council of the Indies printed all of it in 1701, the lance levelled at the friar and the assault included.

• Diego de Avendano, Thesaurus Indicus (Antwerp, 1668)

  A Jesuit who had taught theology at Lima for decades printed a manual telling every officer of the Indies which of his acts were mortal sins. Tome one asks whether the Indians may be sent down the mines, and answers by recording that a Franciscan who had argued they could be went down the Huancavelica shaft himself, climbed out and recanted - and that the kings, who never lost a night's sleep over their title, could not quiet their consciences about the labour.

• Quirós's avisos for dealing with the islanders (1605-1606 voyage)

  A set of numbered standing orders written for the landing parties of the 1605-06 Pacific voyage: give gifts and good treatment, keep chiefs aboard as pledges, never turn your back, and above all avoid "daños de parte á parte". They were composed by a man who had watched the previous expedition shoot its own host, and the same voyage's acts of possession reserved encomiendas over the people the avisos protected.

• Avisos para que los Naturales de estos Reynos sean felices en lo espiritual, y temporal (Mexico, 1769)

  Fourteen instructions the archbishop of Mexico had printed in 1769 for parish priests to read out to their indigenous parishioners: raised and separated beds, a fowl for the sick neighbour, a trade for every man over twenty-five, houses built for rational creatures, quarrels settled without lawyers, a school of Castilian, and a bar on selling their own land because in law they are minors. The same list tells them to speak Castilian to superiors and to marry within their caste.

• The fast, the meat and the feast day (Quito, 1668): how the church's universal disciplinary law was bent to the diet and the working day of an Andean parish, and where it was bent the other way

  Paul III had freed the Indians of the Indies from most of the obligatory fast. A bishop of Quito tells his parish priests to lean toward dispensing rather than refusing, and that saying a man is an Indian is by itself much alleged for the dispensation - grounding it in a description of the ordinary Lenten diet and working day of his parishioners. The same treatise then authorises the priest to set the whole doctrina to work after Mass on a feast day, building his own lodging.

• Martin de Azpilcueta, Comentario resolutorio de cambios (Salamanca, 1556)

  A canon lawyer set out to explain one decretal on usury and, on printed page 85, explained inflation instead: goods and the labour of men fetched far less in Spain before the Indies covered it with gold and silver, the cause being that money is worth more where it is scarce. The quantity theory of money reaches print here, in a commentary on moneylending, twelve years before Bodin.

• Sugar and the first ingenios of Hispaniola — the transfer, its price list and its ledger

  Oviedo gives a chapter to who first made sugar in the Indies, credits a bachiller who brought the masters from the Canaries, then prints the testimony against his own award. The same pages give what a mill cost, the price of an arroba, and — as an operating requirement — the eighty to a hundred and twenty enslaved people each mill kept. Forty years on the crown's cosmographer counts thirty mills and twelve thousand enslaved.

• Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition (Balmis expedition)

  Spanish state expedition (1803-1813) that carried Jenner's smallpox vaccine to the Americas, the Philippines and China in a living arm-to-arm chain of children, and left behind trained vaccinators and vaccination boards. It is described in the medical-history literature as the world's first international immunization campaign, decades before any comparable state effort.

• Balsamo del Peru: an American remedy misnamed, and the Spanish route that carried it to China and Japan

  The resin the world still calls balsam of Peru comes from Central America, not Peru. This object records what the tree is and where it grows, the Nahuatl name hoitziloxitl, the tapping technique and its yield, the gatherers who sold the sap on, the galleon cargoes that took it across the Pacific into Chinese and Japanese medical writing, the adulteration that followed it, and what became of it: a standard allergen in the European patch-test series.

• Banco Nacional de San Carlos (1782)

  Spain's first national bank, erected by royal cédula on 2 June 1782 to rescue the vales reales — a state paper that had fallen more than twenty-two per cent against coin — and to feed and clothe the army and navy of Spain and the Indies. It worked: the paper recovered to a premium. It also depended on silver exports and share dealing, was attacked in print by Mirabeau, and ended in 1829, its forty million reales becoming the capital of the bank that became the Bank of Spain.

• The bando of 1777: treat the wounded first, tell the judge afterwards

  Surgeons in New Spain would not treat a wounded person until a magistrate authorised it, and people bled to death waiting. In May 1777 the viceroy ordered every surgeon in the kingdom to treat first, at any hour, and to notify a royal judge afterwards within eight hours at the latest, on a rising scale of fines, exile and presidio. The order had to be repeated in 1793 and renewed again in 1794, and the gazette that reprinted it said why: some practitioners still would not go out at night.

• Alvaro Alonso Barba, Arte de los metales: metallurgy written at Potosi

  The first original treatise on metals written in Spanish, composed by a parish priest in the Andes and approved at Potosi in 1637 by the guild of refiners whose losses it set out to cure. It records a hot amalgamation process its author found by accident in a copper pot, his refusal to keep it secret, the monopoly he was granted and waived, and a chapter on where the quicksilver goes. It is read here in the reprint the Peruvian mining tribunal ordered in 1817, nearly two centuries later.

• Juan de Barrios, Verdadera medicina, cirugia y astrologia (Mexico, 1607)

  A physician's manual printed in Mexico City in 1607, licensed by the protomedico of New Spain, whose stated purpose is to let people treat themselves in places that have no one to cure them. Its index of remedies is organised by complaint and prescribes Mexican plants under their Nahuatl names, priced in reales; its second book renders the herbs of Francisco Hernandez eight years before the Mexican edition usually credited with it.

• Bartolomé de las Casas

  Dominican friar (1484-1566), former encomendero turned defender of the Indians, whose campaigning shaped the New Laws of 1542 and who faced Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in the Valladolid debate of 1550-51 — the first great public controversy over the rights of colonized peoples. His polemical statistics are unreliable; his moral argument and influence on law are documented.

• Bayles, taquies and the pulque law: indigenous festivity under colonial regulation

  Two laws printed side by side in the Recopilación regulate indigenous festivity: public dances need the governor's licence and may not fall in harvest time, and pulque may hold nothing but the simple native juice of the maguey — an adulteration standard written after the drink was being cut with roots, boiling water and lime. The same law caps the capital's taverns at thirty-six and names the tax farmer of the duty on the drink it condemns.

• Pedro Beltran de Santa Rosa, Arte del idioma maya reducido a sucintas reglas (Mexico, 1746)

  A Yucatec-born Franciscan wrote a grammar of Maya in 1742 and had it printed at Mexico in 1746. Its last page is a retraction: having called an earlier friar the proto-master of the language, Beltran had since read that someone else wrote the first Maya grammar and someone else again first got one into print, and he says so in print, correcting his own title page before the word FIN.

• The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides on New Mexico (1630)

  A report on the missions of New Mexico laid before Philip IV to obtain more friars, and the earliest sustained description of the peoples of that country in print. It records the turquoise mines and painted cotton mantas of the pueblos, names the Apaches de Navajo and explains the name as great sowers of fields, and describes wars fought over an alum quarry. It is a petition, and it argues its case with admissions, ethnography and contempt in the same paragraphs.

• The beneficio de patio: silver amalgamation in New Spain

  The cold amalgamation of silver ore with mercury, salt and roasted copper pyrites, worked in open yards in New Spain from the sixteenth century and still the standard method three hundred years later. It is the process behind the silver that reached China. Two technical witnesses describe it here — a Madrid lawyer of 1761 and a German mineralogist printed in 1825 — and both record its limits: mercury lost, gold left behind, and a chemistry its own practitioners misexplained.

• Bernardo de Gálvez

  Governor of Spanish Louisiana whose Gulf coast campaign (1779-1781) — Baton Rouge, Mobile, and the two-month siege of Pensacola — stripped Britain of its Gulf of Mexico bases during the American Revolution. In 2014 the United States conferred honorary citizenship on him, an honor granted on only seven other occasions in its history. Galveston bears his name.

• Ludovico Bertonio, Vocabulario dela lengua Aymara (Juli, 1612)

  The great dictionary of Aymara, printed at the Jesuit press of Juli on Lake Titicaca, corrected on the order of an oidor of the Audiencia of Lima and priced by the crown at a real the sheet. Its prologue argues that Aymara is grammatically simpler than Latin, Italian or Spanish, counts barely twenty priests who know it against more than a thousand Aymara towns, and tells its readers that if the Indians profit little from Christian teaching the fault is not wholly theirs.

• Juan de Betanzos, Suma y narracion de los Incas (written 1551, printed Madrid 1880)

  A history of the Incas written at Cuzco in 1551 by a Spaniard who had spent six years of his youth making a Quechua doctrina and two vocabularies, who married a sister of Atahuallpa, and who says in his dedication that Spanish accounts of Peru run far from what the Indians used, because the conquistadors were less employed in knowing the country than in subjecting it. It stayed unprinted for three hundred and twenty-nine years, and what reached print in 1880 is a fragment.

• The Complutensian Polyglot Bible (Alcala de Henares, 1514-1517)

  The Bible that Cardinal Cisneros had set in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin at the new university of Alcala, and whose New Testament volume carries a printed colophon dated 10 January 1514. Read from the sheets it is less a monument than a working instrument: parallel columns keyed by superscript letters, marginal columns of Hebrew and Aramaic roots, a Greek dictionary bound in at the back, and errata leaves that correct the book in four scripts.

• The library Juan de Palafox gave to the Colegio de San Pedro of Puebla, 1646

  A bishop of Puebla endowed a Tridentine college in 1646 and gave it his books; the crown's own chronicler, writing three years later while the donor still lived, records the dowry, the date of the erection and a second library of four thousand volumes left with the episcopal house — and, in the same list of merits, the idols that bishop pulled down. Thirty years on a bishop of Antequera gave his library to the seminary of Oaxaca, which is how one gift becomes visible as a habit.

• Biblioteca Turriana (Mexico City, 1788): a cathedral chapter's public reading room, eleven years after Paris opened its own

  Three churchmen of the Torres family left their joined libraries and 20,000 pesos of silver to the cathedral of Mexico on condition it be opened to the public. The Latin inscription over the first room says what the endowment was for - ad publicam utilitatem. By 1844 it held 12,295 volumes in 88 cases; it opened three hours a day, had one attendant, and the writer who praised it in 1853 printed its defects and a table of European libraries beside it.

• Bienes de difuntos: the estates of those who died in the Indies

  The machinery by which the estate of a Spaniard who died in the Americas was inventoried, auctioned, locked in a chest with three keys and shipped to Seville with the dead man's name, surname and home town, so that heirs an ocean away could be found and paid. Its two best printed witnesses are royal orders of the 1520s and the manual of the Casa de la Contratacion of 1672, and both of them also record what the system lost, stole and lent to the Crown.

• Blas de Lezo

  Spanish naval commander who, with viceroy Sebastián de Eslava, defended Cartagena de Indias in 1741 against one of the largest amphibious expeditions assembled to that date. The British failure — documented here from British-archive scholarship, the unfriendly witness — ended the attempt on Spain's Caribbean trade centers and left the convoy-and-fortress system intact.

• The vault and the stonemason's iron: Nahua masons and the first bóvedas of New Spain

  Two Franciscan chronicles record the one building technique Mesoamerican masons had not had — the masonry vault — arriving with a mason from Castile at the old church of San Francisco in Mexico City, and indigenous masons building two vaulted chapels unaided at Tlaxcala soon after. The same pages record what the buildings cost the people who raised them: at Santiago Tlatelolco, a ninety-thousand-peso church whose masons, bricklayers and labourers worked for nothing.

• Opera medicinalia (Mexico, 1570)

  The first medical book printed anywhere in the Americas, from the press of Pedro Ocharte at Mexico in 1570. Its four parts treat the fever the country called tabardete, bleeding in pleurisy, critical days, and the root known as zarzaparrilla. The second is an argument against a named Seville authority, which makes the first medical imprint of the New World a book that disputes the Old.

• Bru and Garriga, Descripcion del esqueleto de un quadrupedo muy corpulento y raro (Madrid, 1796)

  A giant fossil skeleton dug from the banks of the river Lujan reached Madrid in seven crates in 1789, and the dissector of the Real Gabinete mounted it, drew it and described it. His description stayed unpublished until a notice by Cuvier, worked up in Paris from those same plates and a short second-hand report, arrived in Madrid. This 1796 volume prints the Spanish description and the French notice together, in that order.

• Buenaventura Suarez, the astronomer of San Cosme (Guarani missions, Paraguay)

  A Jesuit in the Guarani missions of Paraguay who taught himself mathematics and astronomy, built his own observing instruments out of forest hardwood where bronze or platinum was called for, corresponded with astronomers in Europe, and published a lunar almanac. A Buenos Aires essay of 1866 records both the achievement and the neglect - the community he served gave him no help, and his instruments ended among the lumber in mission granaries.

• The two apostolic letters of 1537 on the liberty of the Indians (Pastorale officium and Veritas ipsa / Sublimis Deus)

  Two acts of Paul III, four days apart in 1537: a brief to the Cardinal of Toledo threatening excommunication against anyone who enslaved the Indians, and the constitution declaring them "veros homines" who could not be deprived of liberty or property though they stood outside the faith. Read from a collection that prints both in Latin — including the fact usually left out, that the brief says the pope acted because the Emperor had already forbidden the same by public edict.

• Cabildos of the Indies: the elective town council and the ceiling set on it

  Every Spanish city in the Indies had a council that elected its own magistrates each year, and the code protects the freedom of that vote in detail — no oidor in the chamber, no governor soliciting votes, two senior regidores present at the count. The same code carries the ceiling: from 1620 the seats themselves were to be sold at public auction, and from 1621 no American city could send its own representative to court.

• Cabuya and henequén — the American agave fibre, described in 1535 and industrial by 1900

  The agave fibre of the Indies, set down by Oviedo in 1535 with its whole process — retted under stones like Castilian flax, scutched like hemp, coming off "like very white linen" — and used for the cords of hammocks. The same chapter records what the people in irons did with it: sawing through fetters, and through ships' anchors, with a henequén thread and fine sand. Modern botany names the plant, counts the Maya landraces, and follows it to the cordage industry that reduced them.

• Cacao as money — the currency two Spanish chroniclers counted, priced and watched being forged

  Oviedo's chapter on the cacao tree carries money in its own heading, and the pages under it give a working price list for Nicaragua, the tribute paid in beans, and the trick used to forge them along with the way to detect it by touch. Acosta, half a century later, finds the same currency still buying at five, thirty and a hundred beans and given as alms. Both are read here from the sheets, with what the same pages say a hundred beans could buy.

• Cacao out of the Americas: an Amazonian tree, a Mesoamerican currency, and the price of the first chocolate boom

  Archaeogenomics has moved cacao's homeland: the tree originated in the upper Amazon and was already being carried and crossed across South America five thousand years ago, so Mesoamerica received it rather than gave it. What Mesoamerica made of it was money, reckoned in cargas of twenty-four thousand beans; what the Spanish Atlantic added was a hot drink, a European market, and a price rise a Franciscan blamed on the emptying of the growing country.

• Cacicazgos — the indigenous lordships recognised in the law of the Indies

  Spanish law kept the pre-conquest indigenous lordships in being as heritable offices. A whole title of the Recopilación orders the Audiencias to hear Indians suing over cacicazgos, to restore those unjustly dispossessed, and to leave the succession to "el antiguo derecho, y costumbre". The same title bars mestizos from holding one, forbids caciques to call themselves lords, and records that caciques were overworking and overtaxing their own people.

• Cajas de comunidad: the corporate treasuries of the Indian towns

  Indian towns in the Spanish Indies held property in common — land worked collectively, rents, and capital lent at interest — kept in a locked chest whose keys were divided, audited by a judge of the Audiencia and legally shielded from the crown's own emergencies. Thirty-seven laws in the code govern it. They also record the corregidores robbing it, and make that theft a capital crime.

• Calabazas de las Indias — American squash in the 1590 record, and a word that names two plants

  Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 separates the squashes "proprias de la tierra, que alla llaman Çapallos" from gourds in general, gives their food and vessel uses, and in the same paragraph records European vegetables taking hold in the Indies. Modern genetics confirms the split he sensed: Cucurbita is American and ten thousand years old, the bottle gourd is Asian. The book also contradicts itself, and that page is here too.

• Caldas's barometric-botanical levellings: a plan to give every plant an altitude (Quito, 1801)

  In a memoir addressed to Mutis and printed among the unpublished pieces of the 1849 Paris edition of the Semanario, Francisco José de Caldas proposed cutting the vegetated part of the earth into twelve zones one barometric inch wide and assigning each plant its zones, so that a flora would say not "habita en Quito" but "á tantas toesas de elevacion sobre el mar". The same letter calls the Indians of Yaruquí lazy barbarians. Both are quoted here.

• Camilo José Cela

  Spanish novelist (1916-2002), awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability". His La familia de Pascual Duarte and La colmena are landmark novels of postwar Spain.

• Camino de Santiago

  The medieval pilgrimage network converging on the shrine of the Apostle James at Compostela, still walked in the hundreds of thousands each year, and in 1987 the first route declared a European Cultural Route by the Council of Europe. The cathedral's own Pilgrim's Office continues the certification tradition with the Compostela and the stamped credencial.

• The road from Yucatan to Guatemala through the Peten (1695-1697)

  Between 1695 and 1697 gangs of Maya axemen cut the first land route across the base of the Yucatan peninsula, linking Campeche to the Vera Paz through the Peten forest. The 1701 history prints its itinerary of named waterholes and distances, so that later travellers in either direction could measure their stages and not run out of water. The same road carried the army.

• The caminos reales of New Spain — a wheeled road to Santa Fe, and no wheeled freight on it

  Humboldt's chapter on the roads of New Spain, read from the page, describes a system: four principal roads out of the capital, a spine called el camino de tierra adentro running 440 leagues to Santa Fe, longitudinal roads easy to keep and arduous transversal ones to the coasts, community inns in the middle of the pueblos — and, beside a carriage route longer than the Alps, the admission that goods still moved on mules driven by mestizos and Indians because no wheeled freight existed.

• Bells of New Spain: the large bronze casting and the founders who already cast metal

  A Franciscan chronicle records bell-founding as one of the first European trades indigenous craftsmen took over completely — the proportions of waist, crown and lip, the alloy, and bells "chicas y grandes, muy limpias y de buena voz y sonido". Archaeology has since shown they were not beginners at casting: copper bells were being made in Mesoamerica by remelting, open-mould and lost-wax work centuries before. What was new was the scale, the alloy and the tuning.

• Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América (written 1743, printed Madrid 1789)

  A book printed under royal licence in Madrid in 1789 tells the crown that the conquest's rigour was carried on "hasta aniquilar á los infelices Indios", that the Recopilación's protections are dead letters because "la práctica es contra la ley", that denying the Indians reason is ignorance or malice, and that the land should be given to them in ownership. Its argument for that is utility, and it says so on the same page.

• La canela de Quito — the Amazonian spice the Spanish record described by its cupules

  In the 1530s Spanish witnesses in Peru reported a cinnamon that was not cinnamon: an aromatic traded down to Quito that came not as bark but as the cup of a fruit, "unos vassillos como de bellotas". Oviedo printed that testimony three times. Modern chemistry of Ocotea quixos, the Amazonian ishpingo whose dried cupules are still its commercial product, matches the description — and the same pages carry the killing at Cajamarca and the nine hundred Andean dead on one crossing to Quito.

• The canoa and the piragua — the hull the Spanish Caribbean ran on

  The dugout of the Antilles, measured against European boats by a Spanish official in 1535: no keel, one tree, forty or fifty men in the largest, faster under eight paddles than a ship's boat under twelve, and unable to sink because it swamps instead. Oviedo also records the dependence — the Christians could not work their coastal and riverside estates without them. By 1611 canoa was a Castilian headword, generalised, the dictionary says, from what the craft was called in Santo Domingo.

• Cantores de los pueblos de indios

  Spanish law gave every Indian town of more than a hundred Indians two or three salaried-by-exemption singers and every reducción a sacristan, all of them free of tribute assessment and personal service. A Franciscan who saw the result reports village choirs singing polyphony on locally made instruments and Nahua composers whose four-voice works Spanish singers refused to believe were theirs. The Mexican council of 1585 declared that no stipend was owed them.

• Capellanías and obras pías: the mortgage credit and pious funds of the Indies, and the crown's rules over them

  A capellanía was an endowment whose capital sat as a censo on somebody else's farm, paying a rent to a chaplain — in substance a mortgage book, and multiplied across Spanish America it made the Church its lender. The printed law shows the crown regulating it: royal judges, not censures, against lay debtors; bishops ordered in 1776 off the rents of vacant chaplaincies; a five per cent ceiling in 1786; the alcabala charged to churches from 1770.

• Capsicum out of the Americas: the pepper's route east and the Iberian sweet pepper

  The chilli is a Mesoamerican domesticate whose worldwide career began in Iberian ships. Genetics corrects the usual telling on three points: C. annuum won the world probably by arriving first rather than by being better; the Iberian Peninsula became a secondary centre of diversity where farmers bred the pungency out and produced the sweet pepper and pimenton; and much of the dispersal ran on Portuguese routes and on the triangular Atlantic slave trade rather than Spanish ones.

• Caramuel's arithmetics of any base (Mathesis biceps, 1670): a printed binary table, and a Guarani counting system defended against its own missionary

  A Spanish mathematician printed, on an episcopal press in 1670, a table of the numbers 0 to 32 written with two characters, alongside articles on arithmetic by threes, fours, fives, nines and sixties. His argument was that the base is arbitrary - chosen by the inventor, not by nature. He then applied it to a missionary's report that the Guarani could not count past four, and answered that having a different arithmetic is not the same as having none.

• Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias (Mexico, 1591)

  A physician's book of questions about America, printed at Mexico in 1591 and written before its author was thirty. It asks why the Indies shake, why quicksilver is lost in the silver works, what chocolate and tobacco do to the body, and whether people born in the Indies differ from people born in Europe — answering the ancient doctrine that the torrid zone was uninhabitable with an argument from altitude, rainfall and snow.

• The duty to reside: an encomendero had to live in the province, marry and build — and was barred from the Indian towns he held

  The third charge of the encomienda was personal residence. A Provisión of Charles V of 13 November 1535, printed verbatim in the standard treatise, forbids an encomendero to leave New Spain without licence on pain of losing his Indians; other orders required him to marry within three years and build in stone. But the residence owed was in the Spanish provincial capital: by cédulas ending in one of 6 June 1609 he was barred from living in, or even entering, the Indian towns he held.

• Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700)

  The comet of 1680 frightened Mexico, and the royal cosmographer printed a pamphlet arguing that it portended nothing. Three men answered him in print; one was the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino. His reply, the Libra astronómica, lay in a friend's chest for eight years and was printed in 1690 at that friend's expense. The same man read Mexican painted books as astronomical records, and foretold that his work on them would be buried with him.

• Carlos Juan Finlay (1833-1915) and the mosquito theory of yellow fever

  On 14 August 1881 a physician in Spanish Havana read a paper to the Academy of Sciences proposing that yellow fever passed from person to person inside a mosquito. The room said nothing — no objection, no agreement — and nineteen years passed before an American army board in occupied Cuba acted on the idea and took the credit. Finlay was right about the vector and incomplete about the mechanism: it needed a second discovery, the extrinsic incubation period, that was not his.

• Horacio Carochi's Arte de la lengua mexicana (Mexico, 1645)

  The Nahuatl grammar printed at Mexico City by Juan Ruyz in 1645, whose author added to it "vna cosa singular" — a four-accent notation that writes vowel length and the glottal stop the Nahua called saltillo, the two contrasts every earlier grammar had left off the page. It is also the book that records a difference between how Nahua men and Nahua women pronounced one consonant, and that tells the learner the decisive sound cannot be conveyed in writing at all.

• The letter of D. Pasqual Angeles de los Reyes (Mexico, 22 November 1772): an Indian town officer criticising the first medical periodical of the Americas, and the editor's own note that he suspects a hoax

  Six pages of the Mercurio volante of 1772 carry a letter signed by an Indian described as a cacique - a village schoolmaster, notary, alcalde, gobernador and fiscal who bought the paper in Mexico City and had his student son post him each sheet - going through its numbers one by one. He answers the paper's own excuse for American ignorance and defends the herbs of indigenous medicine. The editor printed it, then printed below the signature that he suspected a hoax.

• The 1688 letter of the Timucua caciques to the king, written in Timucua

  A letter written in the Timucua language at San Mateo in Florida on 28 January 1688, signed by Timucua chiefs, addressed to the king of Spain, and translated into Castilian by a Franciscan interpreter under notarial certification at San Agustín three weeks later. It asks the crown to keep the governor they have; it is the surviving example of the alphabetic literacy the missions introduced being turned by its own users into a political instrument directed at Madrid.

• Casa de Contratación

  The crown agency founded in Seville in 1503 to register, license and control all trade and navigation with the Indies. Beyond customs work it functioned as an early state hydrographic and navigation school — examining pilots and maintaining the master chart of the known Atlantic — decades before comparable institutions elsewhere.

• Las Amparadas de la Purisima Concepcion: the house of recogidas of Lima

  A viceroy of Peru spent close to fifty thousand pesos on a house for women in Lima, put it under royal patronage, and left it with no income at all. His successor's relacion prints both halves: the chapel and the jewels, then the two royal alms of which only one was ever paid, the coarse sackcloth, the enclosure without communication, and the sentence that the women who enter are Spanish. A bishop of Quito shows the other face of the word, applying recogimiento to indigenous noblewomen.

• The foundling house of Mexico City, 1774: a rulebook that describes the blanket a child arrived in

  Mexico City's Casa de Niños Expósitos was given printed constitutions in 1774, approved by the king and published the next year. They order the chaplain to write down the day a child was left, the clothes it came wrapped in with their colours, any mark on its body and any paper found with it, copied word for word; they fix what wet nurses were paid and how the children were inspected; and they keep the house responsible for a child until it could earn a living.

• The law of the casados: married men in the Indies ordered home to their wives

  A whole título of the Recopilación de leyes de las Indias exists to force men who crossed the Atlantic to return to the wives they left behind: audiencias to find them and ship them home with their goods, licences refused to married men, no bail for those jailed for it, and from 1578 the same rigour inside the Indies. The crown states its reason — "remediar el daño, que las mugeres padecen en ausencia de sus maridos" — and the laws record how the rule was evaded.

• The mint law of the Indies (Recopilación, libro IV, títulos 23 and 24)

  The law that put mints in Mexico City, Santa Fe de Bogotá and Potosí and then bound their output to a single standard: the same fineness, value, weight, dies and punches as the coin of Castile. It names every office in a mint, halves the Castilian seigniorage as a relief to the Indies, gates coining behind proof that the royal fifth was paid, and — in the next título — forbids anyone at all to trade in unassayed metal.

• Juan de Castellanos, Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias (first part, 1589)

  A verse history of the Indies written by a beneficed priest of Tunja who had spent his life in them, first printed in 1589 and reprinted here from the Madrid edition of 1852. Its royal censor licensed it and praised it for carrying an abundance of Indian names into Castilian metre without breaking the metre. Its first canto refuses mythology and promises only things the author saw; the same canto calls the peoples cruel barbarians and says they were forced to take new customs.

• The Castilian question: whether the Indians should be made to speak Spanish

  Whether to compel the peoples of the Indies to abandon their languages for Castilian was argued in the Council of the Indies. The compiled law settled it on the side of persuasion: masters for those "que voluntariamente la quisieren aprender", at no cost to them, while parishes went only to priests who knew the Indian language well. Solórzano prints the rule and dissents, reaching for Rome and for the ban on Arabic imposed on the Moriscos of Spain.

• Castillo de Bovadilla, Politica para corregidores: the manual behind the office

  The Castilian handbook that told magistrates what their office was for, read on the sheets of the Antwerp printing of 1704. Men chose a keeper of the common life and fed him so he need not feed himself; a republic with a useless corregidor is called a widow; the judge must supply in law and in fact what the poor lack; a salary kills the appetite for another man's goods. It also bars any officer from governing his home town, and a practitioner's manual of the Indies cites it by book and number.

• Cataract surgery in Spanish America, 1611-1830

  Eye surgery reached the Americas with the Spanish medical system and was regulated by it: oculists were examined and priced by the protomedicato, couching is documented in Mexico City by 1611, and lens extraction — the modern operation — was advertised in Havana and performed in Guatemala City by 1797. The same record shows how thin the provision was: a handful of practitioners, and patients blind for years before anyone could operate on them.

• Chairs of indigenous languages in the universities of the Indies (from 1580)

  From 1580 the crown ordered salaried, competitively filled chairs of the lengua general at the universities of Lima and Mexico and in every city with an audiencia, and forbade bishops in the Indies to ordain any priest who did not hold a certificate from the professor of that language. The motive stated in the law is the teaching of Christian doctrine. The same code records the arrangement failing at Quito.

• Chairs, becas and the colegio de San Juan Bautista at Guadalajara (1688-1742): endowed teaching in a provincial capital, and a scholarship awarded by public competition

  A bishop of Guadalajara found that local talent was wasted for want of teachers and that only those who could keep themselves in Mexico City studied at all. He offered nine hundred pesos a year for three lecturers, saying openly that the money was needed by the poor but that learning was needed more. A legacy of fourteen thousand pesos endowed the chairs in 1688; a college followed, then two scholarships, one of them filled by competitive examination.

• The taking of pieces in Sucumbios and Mocoa (Quito, 1668): a bishop's ruling that slave raiding was mortal sin, that the sale was void, and that the captive and his children could lawfully run

  On the eastern frontier of Quito, parties of Spaniards and Christian Indians went into unconquered country to take pieces - people to work their land. The bishop's manual for confessors names the two provinces where it happened, holds the raid mortal sin and the sale void, and rules that anyone enslaved on such a title, and the children born to him in that slavery, may run without sin and owe nothing. It also prints the three titles on which war could still be made.

• Cazabe: the Taíno bread of a poisonous root, and the press a Spanish official wrote down in 1535

  Bitter cassava kills unless its juice is pressed out and the pulp heated. Oviedo set down the whole Taíno sequence - the grater, the woven çibucan press, the clay burén - along with the market price of a carga in Santo Domingo, the year the bread keeps at sea, and the remark that few Indians still knew the trick because the old ones were dead. Modern neurology confirms what the process is for.

• Burial outside the town: the cemetery reform in the Spanish Indies, 1787-1833

  From 1787 the Spanish crown worked to move burial out of the churches of its American cities into ventilated cemeteries beyond the built-up area: asking the bishops what it would cost, sending a standard design in 1804, approving Havana's in 1807, authorising expropriation of land by 1833. Revillagigedo carried it into Veracruz and Puebla against what the compilation calls the ancient preoccupation and practice. Nuns kept the right to burial at home.

• Cempoalxochitl: the Mexican flower the world calls African

  The marigold of Mexican gardens and Mexican graves was described as a medicinal herb of New Spain in the Mexican imprint of 1615 that carries Francisco Hernández's survey, reached Europe in the sixteenth century out of Mexico, and is now grown on thousands of hectares worldwide as the industrial source of lutein. It travelled under names — African marigold, cravo de defuntos — that record everything about its later career and nothing about where it came from.

• Cepeda and Carrillo, Relacion universal del desague (Mexico, 1637)

  An official dossier on the draining of the Valley of Mexico, printed in Mexico City in 1637 by order of the viceroy Marques de Cadereita and compiled by the Audiencia's relator Fernando de Cepeda with the city's chief notary. It sets out the lakes, the floods, the cut at Huehuetoca and what the work cost — including the crown attorney's printed objection that the labour draft would kill the men sent down the trench, and an inquiry that counted more than sixty thousand Indian workers.

• Chia — an oil trade printed in Nahuatl in 1571, and the crop that nearly disappeared

  Molina's 1571 dictionary gives chia its own vocabulary: the seed, the oil, the verb for pressing it, the presser, the maker, the seller, and the verb for varnishing an object with it. The 1615 Quatro libros describes the toasted seed kept a whole year and stirred into water. A 2019 genome paper reports that after the conquest the crop was "almost eradicated" — and that its seed carries more alpha-linolenic acid than almost any food known.

• Chickens in the Americas: the Spanish introduction, and the one bone that disputes it

  Eighty-four per cent of native chickens sampled across mainland South America carry mitochondrial haplogroup E, the lineage that dominates Europe, and the Pacific lineage is absent from the continent altogether - which makes the Iberian introduction of the sixteenth century the measurable origin of the American farmyard bird. One directly dated bone from Arauco in Chile has been argued since 2007 to be older than that, and the argument is still running in print.

• Chimalpahin's sixth and seventh relations: a Nahua lord's annals of Chalco Amaquemecan, 1258-1612

  Chimalpahin, born at Amaquemecan in 1579 and descended from its rulers, wrote his own altepetl's history in Nahuatl, in the alphabet the friars had brought, keeping the Nahua year count and the Christian year in one line: year 6 rabbit, 1550, the viceroy arrives, the Amaquemeque dance for him, people die of quinsy, the Dominicans come. Almost nothing is known of his life, and the annals were first printed in 1889 — in Paris, in French, from a manuscript by then in a French private collection.

• The chinampas of the Valley of Mexico, as printed in 1806 and as worked in 2026

  The lake gardens that fed Tenochtitlan were still being planted and rowed to market when a Mexican Jesuit in Italian exile described them - plaited willow frames, lake mud, plots about eight perches by three, a hut and a tree on the larger ones, canoes of flowers reaching the capital at sunrise. Two centuries on, the same system is the last lacustrine remnant of Mexico City, still supplying its markets, under pressure from contamination and the city.

• Chirimoya: the fruit Acosta called Manjar Blanco, whose homeland its own geneticists still dispute, and whose largest producer today is Spain

  Acosta in 1590 calls the anona soft and white as butter and, to some, the best fruit of the Indies — without once writing chirimoya. Where the tree came from is still disputed: a 1,504-tree survey puts the highest diversity in Cajamarca, in northern Peru, while marker work summarised by a 2024 genome paper points to Mesoamerica. The last leg is not disputed: the fruit reached Spain between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and Spain now grows more of it than anywhere.

• Chuño: the freeze-dried potato of the Collao in the first printed accounts, and its trade to Potosi

  The potato entered print in 1553 not as a curiosity but as a food security system. Cieza describes the Collao drying papas in the sun and keeping them from one harvest to the next as chuño, the reserve that stands between an unirrigated highland and famine - and reports that Spaniards grew rich carrying it to sell at the mines of Potosi. Acosta confirms the trade in 1590 and adds the harvest failures. The plant Europe later grew came mostly from elsewhere in the Andes.

• Pedro de Cieza de León, Parte primera de la chronica del Peru (Seville, 1553)

  A soldier who left Spain before he was thirteen and spent seventeen years marching through the Indies wrote down what he saw, and the first part was printed at Seville in 1553 under royal privilege. It surveys Peru province by province, and carries the Inca road, the four-league relay of storehouses and the quipu as a working audit — set beside the wars, the burnings, and the reason the Andean peoples gave for rising.

• Diego Cisneros, Sitio, naturaleza y propriedades de la ciudad de Mexico (Mexico, 1618)

  A medical topography of Mexico City printed there in 1618 by a Complutense physician incorporated in its university: the site, the waters, the winds and the seasons, read as the causes of the diseases of one city. Its seventeenth chapter argues on Galenic grounds that the Indians of Mexico are not phlegmatic but sanguine, naming the arts they practise as the evidence, and refutes by name the planetary attribution printed by Enrico Martinez twelve years earlier.

• Forfeiture was not automatic: an absent encomendero had to be cited, warned and tried before he lost his grant, and his tributes went into a chest of three keys meanwhile

  Cédulas said an absent encomendero lost his grant ipso jure. The crown's own jurist argues that even so he must be cited, warned and tried: a Cédula Real of 1592 on the absentees of Santa Marta requires that they be summoned and given four months first, and a letter to the Audiencia of Lima of 1555 puts the absentee's tributes into a chest of three keys in the meantime. The chapter's worked case, the Pizarro encomiendas, was decided against the crown's own prosecutor.

• Clara Campoamor

  Spanish lawyer and deputy who won the constitutional battle for women's suffrage in Spain. As the only woman on the 1931 drafting committee she defended immediate, unconditional votes for women — against Victoria Kent's postponement position — and on 1 October 1931 the Cortes approved equal suffrage by 161 votes to 121. Spanish women first voted in 1933.

• Francisco Javier Clavijero, Disertaciones on the land, the animals and the inhabitants of Mexico (1780)

  Nine dissertations printed with a Mexican Jesuit's history of his country, written in exile to answer Cornelius de Pauw's thesis that in America nature had degenerated entirely - in the elements, the plants, the animals and the men. Clavijero sets a witness standard against a philosopher who never crossed the Atlantic, declares he has no Indian ancestry before choosing to plead the Indian case, and is himself a polemicist. Read here in the 1826 Spanish translation.

• Coartación — buying freedom in instalments under Spanish law

  The Spanish-American right by which an enslaved person could pay part of their own price, have the rest fixed by valuers one of whom spoke for them, and never again be sold above that ceiling — opened in Cuba by fifty pesos, and declared strictly personal so that no child inherited it. Read from a Cuban treatise of 1866 and from the Spanish government inquiry of 1867 that proposed counting freedom in fifths.

• Bernabe Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo: a book finished in 1653 and first printed in 1892

  A Jesuit who had spent most of his adult life between Peru and Mexico finished, in 1653, a survey of the Americas that runs from the cosmography down to how Andean farmers measured a short interval of time - the while it takes a pot of potatoes to cook. The manuscript went unprinted for nearly two and a half centuries. This entry reads the third tome of the first printing, Seville 1892.

• Coca in the Spanish record: the earliest printed descriptions of an eight-thousand-year-old crop, and the trade they priced

  Monardes in 1580 and Acosta in 1590 printed the first detailed European accounts of coca: how it is sown, dried, chewed with lime, and what it did for people who walked on it. Acosta also priced the Potosí trade at over half a million pesos a year and wrote that the traffic cost the Indians "no poco trabajo, ni aun pocas vidas". Museum genomics has since shown the crop was domesticated two or three times from a wild Amazonian progenitor.

• The cocoliztli epidemic of 1576 and the record kept of it

  The epidemic that halved what was left of the indigenous population of central Mexico in two years, and the paper trail it left. The crown's protomédico wrote down the clinical picture; bodies were opened and the organ findings written up; tribute counts were taken in 1570 and 1580 on either side of it. Modern epidemiology still works from those documents and still cannot say what the disease was. The record is the contribution; the thing recorded is the catastrophe.

• The coconut on two American coasts: what the Manila galleon carried, and what was already there

  America has three coconut populations with three histories: the Pacific coast of Mexico, Philippine and stocked by repeated Spanish shipments after the conquest; the Caribbean and Atlantic, Indian and Portuguese; and the palms of Pacific Panama, descended from perhaps two to five Philippine founders on a date still disputed. The documents in that dispute are Spanish chronicles, and the charge that Oviedo could not tell a coconut from another palm traces to an 1851 engraver.

• The Codice Ramirez - an anonymous Nahua history recovered in 1856, printed in 1878

  A sixteenth-century manuscript written in two columns with the right-hand column left blank, which its finder read as a Spanish translation of a Nahuatl original by an indigenous layman. It was pulled out of a Mexico City convent being demolished on a September night in 1856, and when it was printed in 1878 the editor showed that it is the core of Diego Duran's famous history, copied almost word for word, and behind the passages of Acosta that made his reputation.

• Cofradías de indios (Indian confraternities)

  Lay religious brotherhoods that became the one corporate purse most Spanish-American Indian towns controlled themselves: they held cattle, land and cash, elected their own stewards, and paid for burials and feasts. By 1787 the archbishopric of Guatemala alone reported 1,982 of them across 419 churches. Church and crown spent two centuries auditing them, capping them and licensing them — and repeatedly finding that the clergy, not the brothers, were the leak.

• The girls' school of Ana de Jesus at Guadalajara: a school for the poor that its own chronicler insisted must not become a convent

  A poor woman of Guadalajara took in girls whose parents could not keep them, taught them to read, write and sew, and paid for it by contracting out their needlework. A donated mill, a bishop, a canon who spent his rents on them for twenty-six years and a 12,000-peso legacy turned the house into an endowed college. Writing in 1742, a lawyer of the audiencia argued it must never be turned into a nunnery: the girls need no dowries and are trained for any state they choose.

• The Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola of Mexico City, whose constitutions barred the Church and barred Indian girls

  A college for women founded in Mexico City by Basque merchants, approved by Carlos III in 1753, and governed - unusually for its century - entirely by laymen, with no vows, women officers elected each year, and total inhibition of ecclesiastical authority. The same constitutions required its pupils to be legitimate Spanish daughters and not Indians or other castes. Both sentences come from the same page, and both are quoted here.

• The Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola of Mexico City (1767): a school for women that fought sixteen years to stay out of the Church's hands

  A Basque merchants' confraternity in Mexico City spent thirty-five years and its own money building a school for orphan girls and poor widows, and then spent sixteen of them in Madrid and Rome to obtain what it actually wanted: a constitution the clergy could not administer and that could never be turned into a convent. It opened on 9 September 1767 under a Rectora, a Vice-Rectora and a Secretaria elected by ballot. Its founding statute also barred married women and illegitimate daughters.

• Colegio de San Juan de Letran, Mexico City — the crown's schools for mestizo children

  A school opened in Mexico City around 1547 for the mestizo sons of Spaniards, with a parallel house for mestiza girls, both under royal patronage and both still being inspected and audited by law two centuries later. The viceroy who reports the foundation states its motive in the same sentence as its charity: the emperor and empress had ordered many times that these children be gathered in, "porque andaban muchos dellos perdidos entre los indios".

• Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo (Pátzcuaro 1540, Valladolid de Michoacán 1580)

  The college Vasco de Quiroga founded in Pátzcuaro to train clergy who could preach in Tarascan. A royal patent of 1543 describes its intake in its own words — sons of legitimate Spaniards, mestizos, and some Indians admitted because they were "Lenguas". Its collegians elected their own rector. It moved to Valladolid with the cathedral chapter and absorbed a Franciscan college in 1580, and it closed for thirty-seven years after 1810.

• The Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo (Pátzcuaro 1540, Valladolid 1580)

  A bishop's college in Michoacán whose royal patent of 1543 states in the crown's own words that it took the sons of legitimate Spaniards, mestizos, and some Indians "por ser Lenguas" so that its students might learn grammar with them and the Indians learn Castilian. Read here from the 1766 printing made by the college itself: free tuition, lectures owed to the Indians who had built the fabric, a rector its own students elected — and a footnote admitting Indians were not ordained for a century.

• The Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo of Michoacán (Pátzcuaro, 1540)

  A college founded by Vasco de Quiroga at Pátzcuaro about 1540 and taken under royal patronage in 1543, whose charter describes Spaniards, mestizos and some Indians studying grammar together — the last admitted, in the Crown's own words, "por ser Lenguas" and so that they should learn Castilian. Its collegians elected their rector. Its celebrated priority over Trent is its own claim, and its continuity was broken for a generation after 1810.

• Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (founded 1536)

  The college a Spanish viceroy built and endowed at his own cost in an Indian quarter of Mexico City so that the sons of Nahua lords could be taught Latin, rhetoric, logic and philosophy. Its collegians became the translators without whom the friars' books could not have been made, and one of them governed Mexico City for nearly thirty years. The Franciscan who describes it also records who opposed it, and why the teaching had stopped by the time he wrote.

• Colegios de caciques — the schools founded in Peru for the sons of Andean lords

  Schools founded by royal order for the sons of Andean caciques, because, the law says, those boys "han de gobernar á los Indios". Read from the printed law that ordered more of them and from the relación of the viceroy who founded the Lima one: he leaves it in the same sentence as a house of confinement for native religious specialists, in the charge of the same Jesuits who ran the visitations of idolatry, and paid for out of the censos of the Indians' own communities.

• The seminaries for the sons of the caciques (Lima, Cuzco, Chuquisaca)

  Crown-ordered boarding colleges in Peru where the sons of indigenous lords were schooled at royal insistence and paid for out of the Indians' own community funds. Two witnesses who were there describe them: the viceroy who founded them and the judge who advised on who should run them. The same viceregal paragraph that reports the seminary reports the house of confinement for indigenous religious specialists founded beside it, under the same order of priests.

• The Coliseo of Mexico City: a public theatre owned by the Indians' hospital, and the accounts that prove it

  Mexico City had a purpose-built, permanently roofed public theatre standing in the cloister of the Hospital Real de Naturales before 1673, roughly seventy years before Madrid roofed its own corrales. It was not merely near the hospital: it was the hospital's property and one of its largest revenues, judged by an oidor who sat as judge of hospitals, and its actors' contracts obliged them to play free performances for the hospital's altar wax and for burying their own dead.

• The Colliget of Averroes and the Theizir of Avenzoar, Venice 1542

  A Venetian folio of 1542 that prints, as one book, the medical encyclopaedia of Ibn Rushd of Cordoba and the therapeutic manual of Ibn Zuhr of Seville — the two Andalusi physicians Latin Europe read together for four centuries. The Colliget's own prologue says who commissioned it, what it was for, and where its author claimed nothing new. A Renaissance editor added the marginal index and the doubts. It is the transmission, not the Arabic text, that this volume witnesses.

• Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, Curioso tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del chocolate (Madrid, 1631)

  The first printed monograph on chocolate: a quarto by a physician and surgeon of Écija, arguing against a colleague that the American drink was good for you, and printing the compound recipe, four kinds of chile by their Nahuatl names, and the shade-tree method of growing cacao. It also tells a European cook what to use when the American ingredients cannot be had, which is how a Mesoamerican preparation became a European one — over five thousand years after Amerindians first cultivated the tree.

• The Spanish American record as a climate archive

  Three centuries of Spanish record-keeping in the Americas are now read as data by climate science. Over 300,000 early instrumental weather observations have been recovered from twenty countries, beginning with Lima in 1754, and 656 Spanish Caribbean shipwrecks, normalised against fleet departures counted in the Archivo General de Indias, have been used to reconstruct hurricane activity back to 1495. The same literature states what the archive cannot do.

• Del comercio, mantenimientos y frutos de las Indias — the provisioning title of the code

  Titulo XVIII of libro IIII is the food-supply law of the Indies: provisions may be carried freely through every province, corregidores may not corner the wheat trade, Castilian weights and measures are imposed, a baker may not also keep a store, and wine is sold in sealed barrels at a capped price. A law of 1601 lets Indian cochineal producers ship to Castile on their own account because dealers bought cheap. The same title doubles every penalty if the seller is black.

• The common bean out of the Americas — two crops, one Iberian doorway

  Phaseolus vulgaris was domesticated twice, in Mesoamerica and in the Andes, from wild pools that had parted about 165,000 years earlier. Both reached Europe through Iberia in the sixteenth century, and there they did something they had not done at home: they interbred. European landraces carry three to four times the inter-pool hybrids of American ones - on one count. A second study of 782 accessions puts the figure far lower, and both numbers are here.

• Community acequias and the pueblo water right: what survived of Spanish and Mexican water law in the United States

  Two Spanish-Mexican water institutions outlived the cession of 1848 into American law, and the standard United States treatise on western water rights shows how unevenly. New Mexico's community acequias were carried into territorial statute and are governed by it still. The pueblo water right, by which American cities claimed the water of the Spanish pueblos they succeeded, rests on meagre Spanish authority and a judicial presumption - and irrigation in New Mexico is older than Spain there.

• Concepción Arenal

  Spanish penal reformer and writer (1820-1893), a founder of prison reform advocacy in Spain. She attended university law lectures dressed as a man in the 1840s when women were barred, won an academy prize in 1860 under her young son's name, and was appointed Visitor of Women's Prisons in 1864 — turning direct observation into a body of reformist writing.

• The first Mexican provincial council (Mexico City, 1555)

  The first church council of the Americas, held at Mexico City in 1555 under archbishop Montufar. Its chapters fix what a parish priest among Indians may and may not do: no charging for the sacraments, no lodging Spaniards at the town's expense, a weekly visit to the jail, a hospital in every town, a rotating market day so that no town loses more than another. The same code forbids the Indians to keep sermons in their own language. Read in the Mexico 1769 edition.

• The third Mexican provincial council (Mexico, 1585) and its printed decrees

  The church legislation that governed New Spain for two and a half centuries. Held at Mexico in 1585, confirmed at Rome in 1589, printed in 1622 and again in 1770, it ordered a school in every Indian town, catechism in the Indians' own language, and the protection of Indians by bishops and governors alike - and it records, in its own decrees, the abuses that made each order necessary.

• Confirmation of encomiendas at the Council of the Indies: every grant made in America had to be brought to Madrid for review, on pain of losing it

  From a cédula of Valladolid of 20 September 1608 every encomienda granted in the Indies had to be brought to the Council of the Indies for confirmation within a fixed term, on pain of losing its fruits and then the grant itself. The standard treatise of the law of the Indies sets out how the charge spread province by province, what happened to the fruits when confirmation was refused, and, in its author's own words, that defects were dispensed for money because of the wars the monarchy was in.

• A royal confirmation obtained behind a pending lawsuit: the Council of the Indies rules against an encomendero of Cartagena

  An encomendero of Cartagena lost his encomienda to a rival who appealed the governor's grant to the Council of the Indies and won twice over. He then produced a royal confirmation of the same encomienda, obtained from that Council while the suit was running. The Council held it worthless: it gave him no new right and was void as subreptitious, because it never mentioned the pending suit or the third party's claim. The treatise prints the rule and the opposite case with it.

• The law of the Council of the Indies (Recopilación, libro II, títulos I to III)

  The council that governed Spanish America is written down here from its own rulebook: the hours it sat and the rule that no session ended until every petition had been answered, the standing order to keep a complete description of the Indies and update it yearly, the charge to put conversion and good treatment before royal profit, the ban on its judges holding encomiendas, and the recusal of relatives.

• The Consolidacion de Vales Reales in New Spain (from 1804)

  A royal cedula of 26 December 1804 carried to the Americas an operation already running in Spain: the sale of the real estate of chantries and pious foundations and the calling in of the capital they had lent, to be paid into the royal treasury against the paper currency. In New Spain that capital was the mortgage credit of agriculture and mining. The petition against it counted 44.5 million pesos of pious capital against 59 million of working capital.

• The Constitution of 1812 as an American document

  The constitution promulgated at Cádiz on 19 March 1812 defined the Spanish nation as all Spaniards of both hemispheres, listed the American and Asian provinces among its territories, made citizens of all descended by both lines from the Spanish dominions of either hemisphere, and ordered schools in every town of the monarchy. It left Spaniards reputed to be of African origin outside citizenship by birth, admitting them only by a grant of the Cortes under five conditions.

• Constituciones sinodales de Guamanga (1672, printed Lima 1677)

  A provincial bishop's rulebook for an Andean diocese, printed with the abuses it was written against still legible in it: parish priests fined ten pesos a year for not auditing each confraternity, mayordomos who claimed their houses had burned with the account books, curas forbidden to take wine or sheep from the brotherhoods on pain of fourfold restitution — and a chapter arguing for Spanish that first prints Acosta's and Garcilaso's case against it.

• Constituciones sinodales del Arzobispado de Lima (1613 and 1636)

  The synodal code of the largest archdiocese in South America, given by Lobo Guerrero in 1613 and completed by Arias de Ugarte in 1636. It bars church visitors and their notaries from charging Indians anything at all, binds those who overcharge to restore double within a month, orders edicts published in the Indians' own language — and orders the same Indians to be catechised in Quechua rather than their mother tongues. Reprinted at Lima in 1864 because it was still in force.

• The Spanish Constitution of 1978

  The constitution of the consensus: approved by the Cortes on 31 October 1978, ratified by referendum on 6 December, in force from 29 December. Drafted across the parties after four decades of dictatorship, it made Spain a social and democratic state of law through legal continuity rather than rupture — the parliament's own account of the transition is the registered source.

• The consulados of Lima and Mexico, merchant courts of the Indies

  Two American cities were given self-governing merchant tribunals whose judges were elected by the merchants themselves under a title of the law of the Indies. This entry reads that title in the 1681 folio and reports what it actually prescribes - the electorate, the ballot, the tie broken by lot, the chest of three keys kept outside the prior's house - and who it shuts out.

• The contrahierba de Julimes: an arrow poison and the antidote an Indian gave for it

  Arlegui's chronicle of Zacatecas records that the Tarahumara poisoned their arrowheads with a herb so strong that in the rising of 1690 the scratched died without remedy, because the Spaniards "ignoraban la qualidad de la herida". The antidote was not found by the missionaries: a reduced Indian showed them a root, kneaded and laid on the wound. The same chronicle credits divine mercy for it in the next clause.

• Fear, wages and recompense (Quito, 1668): a confessional rule that contracts made with Indians out of fear were void, that an underpaid Indian could take back what he was owed, and that one real stolen from a poor Indian was mortal sin

  A bishop of Quito gave nine sessions of his manual for parish clergy to what is owed in conscience when Spaniards trade with, employ and tax Indians. Fear of a priest, corregidor or cacique voids the sale in the internal forum; a man paid two reales for eight days' work may take back the difference; one real stolen from a poor Indian is mortal sin where the same sum from a Spaniard is not. The reasoning that protects is also demeaning, and both are printed here.

• Copal and anime — the incense of the Mexican temples in the European pharmacy

  Copalli, the aromatic resin the Nahua burned before their gods and carried in braziers to meet the first Spaniards, entered European medicine as a fumigant and ointment base. Monardes published it to Europe from Seville in 1580 as one of two New Spain resins, copal and anime; Ximénez's 1615 Mexican imprint of Hernández names it in Nahuatl as copalquahuitl, records copalli as the Indians' general word for any gum, and separates several copal-bearing species. Both read from the page.

• Juan de Córdova's Zapotec grammar and dictionary (Mexico, 1578)

  The first printed grammar of Zapotec and the dictionary printed beside it, both from Pedro Balli's shop at Mexico City in 1578. Their author had marched to Cíbola with Vázquez de Coronado before he took the Dominican habit, and finished the two books in a poor convent after the order deposed him from its highest office. The grammar ends in a treatise on Zapotec omens and marriage — recorded in detail, and then used to argue that Zapotec marriages had not been marriages at all.

• The Coronista mayor de las Indias — a salaried royal historian, with a natural-history brief and a censor

  A state post whose job description was printed in the law code: write the general history of every province of the Indies from the papers sent to the Council, and compile the natural history of its plants, animals and minerals as well. The same four laws that command truth also give the Council a veto on printing, bind the historian to secrecy, and hold back the last third of his salary each year until he shows what he has written.

• The corregidor de indios: a salaried crown magistrate, and the trade that broke him

  The district magistrate the Spanish crown put over indigenous pueblos in place of the encomendero: appointed from Madrid, paid a published salary, required to tour his district and forbidden to trade in it. The 1791 impression of the Recopilación prints the salary of every corregimiento by name. Two naval officers reporting in secret from Peru in the 1740s describe the forced sale of goods that turned the same office into what they call the most horrible tyranny that could be invented.

• The royal mail of the Indies: a law of inviolable letters and a service bought back from its owner

  A title of the Recopilación makes letters between Spain and the Indies free and inviolable, and orders the Indian foot-couriers paid into their own hands. Two centuries later the crown bought the post office of New Spain back from its private owner, joined it to the new maritime packets, and opened offices in towns where the traffic did not pay. The report saying so also records the villages hurt by furnishing horses, and proposes saving money on Indian runners who earned less.

• The cabo de corrientes and the Bahama Channel: the current the Spanish carrera sailed on

  Off the Florida cape in May of Juan Ponce de León's first voyage the ships met water running harder than the wind, and the crown's chronicle records that the cape was named for it. Four years later the pilot of that voyage argued the short Florida-to-Havana crossing as the better and safer route home, and the Bahama Channel became the return leg of the Indies run. Three centuries later the Spanish hydrographic office catalogued the same current under its English name.

• The timber cuts of Cuba: two centuries of arguing about who owned the trees

  Havana built warships because Cuba had cedar and mahogany, and the state kept trying to reserve them. A cedula of 1622, another forbidding cuts near the capital after a private yard stripped the nearest woods, a jurisdictional quarrel in 1774 settled by giving cedar to the navy and mahogany to the sugar crates, a joint board of naval officers and planters in 1800, and in 1805 a royal order handing landowners absolute freedom over their own trees.

• Cosme Bueno (1711-1798), cosmógrafo mayor of Peru

  An Aragonese who reached Lima at nineteen, took a medical doctorate there, won a chair by competitive examination and held the office of chief cosmographer of the kingdom for forty years. His annual almanacs carried two things: physico-mathematical dissertations, and a province-by-province description of the viceroyalty that he assembled from the reports of corregidores. His eulogist is a disciple, and prints his faults too.

• The Descripción de las provincias del virreinato del Perú, printed a few provinces a year in an almanac

  A survey of ninety-six provinces of a South American viceroyalty, issued serially in the annual almanac of the chief cosmographer of Peru and arranged by bishopric. Each entry gives bounds in leagues, climate, crops and yields, mines, rivers and parishes, and sometimes a population figure. Its closing paragraph says how it was made and why it took so long: the corregidores were slow, and many returns came back too thin to use.

• The Disertación sobre el arte de volar, a Lima referee's report on a proposal to carry the mail by air

  When a man of no standing offered the government of Peru to keep despatches moving through the air during a war with Britain, the chief cosmographer was ordered to report, and then wrote a dissertation to settle the public argument. It contains a wing-loading calculation, a muscle-mass argument, an account of the tail as a control surface and a description of clothing acting as a parachute - and it concludes that flight is providentially impossible, and would be wicked if it were not.

• The Cosmographer and Chair of Mathematics of the Council of the Indies, with the three-year syllabus printed in the law

  One salaried post in Madrid held two jobs: keep the crown's map and sailing-route archive of the Americas, and teach mathematics an hour a day beside the Council of the Indies. The code prints the whole three-year course — Sacrobosco, arithmetic, Peurbach, the Alfonsine tables, Euclid, trigonometry, Regiomontanus, Ptolemy, cosmography, navigation, the astrolabe — fills the post by public edict, and withholds a third of the salary until the year's work is shown.

• Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid, 1611)

  The folio dictionary printed at Madrid by Luis Sanchez in 1611 in which Castilian is explained in Castilian, with an etymology attached to almost every headword. Covarrubias worked alone, named the living Arabic scholars he leaned on, alphabetised by sound rather than by spelling, and warned his reader that some etymologies he prints are false ones he recorded because they were current. Arabic had reached his alphabet; at the opening checked here, the American loan-words had not.

• Criollo cattle: the Iberian founding herd of the Americas (1493- )

  The cattle loaded at La Gomera in the Canaries on Columbus's second voyage of 1493 founded every American Criollo breed. Genomics of Colombian, Venezuelan and Caribbean herds now reads the crossing out of the animals: a European taurine base, African taurine and indicine admixture layered on after, and tropical selection strong enough to leave signatures in the prolactin receptor gene. The breeds carrying that record are being replaced by imported commercial stock.

• Criollo goats of the Americas: an Iberian herd left to five centuries of local selection

  The goats the Spanish landed in the sixteenth century were never bred back to a standard, and the populations that came out the other end are now the animal of the driest, poorest ground in Latin America. Microsatellite work across 43 goat populations places the Ecuadorian criollo with the Iberian and Creole cluster with no detectable crossing to modern commercial breeds; genome-wide work in Peru finds low inbreeding, regional structure — and effective population sizes that are falling.

• Criollo pigs of the Americas: a Canary Islands cargo of 1493 and its Iberian signature

  The first pigs in the Americas were loaded in the Canary Islands on Columbus's second voyage of 1493. The largest survey of their descendants - 1,715 animals across 46 populations - finds Criollo pigs still closest to Iberian breeds, the Iberian contribution coming mainly from the northern Celtic-type breeds rather than the famous Mediterranean ones, and no trace of the supposed colonial-era Chinese introduction. Several of these breeds now have double-digit censuses.

• Criollo sheep of the Americas: the Churra flock and what it cost the maize fields

  Merino wool was too valuable to export, so the sheep Spain shipped west was the coarse-wooled Churra - and five centuries later the Navajo-Churro is still genetically indistinguishable from it. The same flocks ate the fields of the Indian towns, and the law of the Indies answers with a measured distance, a forfeiture, and the right of any Indian to kill livestock found on his land without penalty.

• Criollos in the law of the Indies: the degeneration charge and the answer to it

  Spaniards born in the Americas were said by learned men to degenerate under American skies, and a bishop of Mexico doubted whether they could be ordained at all. The Council of the Indies told him to ordain them. The crown's leading jurist printed the charge, named the friars who pressed it, and answered that no nation exists to which some vice has not been imputed and that criollos may not be weighed all in one balance.

• Cristobal de Molina, An Account of the Fables and Rites of the Yncas (Cuzco, c. 1575; first printed in English, London 1873)

  A report on Inca religion written at Cuzco by the priest of the hospital parish for natives, who says on his first page how he got it: he assembled aged people who had themselves taken part in the rites under Huayna Ccapac, Huascar and Manco. It is the fullest surviving description of the Inca ritual year and it carries, in the same manuscript, the earliest close account of the huaca revival that swept the Andes after 1560 - written by a man whose office was to end it.

• Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (Cruz-Badiano codex, 1552)

  A herbal of Nahua medicine finished at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco on 22 July 1552, dictated in Nahuatl by the indigenous physician Martin de la Cruz and put into Latin by the indigenous Latinist Juan Badiano. It is the earliest book of medicinal plants of the native peoples of the Americas, painted by Nahua scribes, and it was made to raise money to keep the college that produced it open.

• Two encomiendas in one hand: the rule against accumulation, the reason given for it, and the routine dispensation that defeated it

  Spanish law in the Indies forbade granting a second encomienda to a man who already held one, from a cédula of 1528 onwards, and voided a second grant made without telling the crown of the first. The reason printed for the rule is that one man should not take the rewards that could remunerate many. The same chapter reports that viceroys granted two anyway once encomiendas had shrunk in value, and that the Council passed over their explanations as a matter of course.

• Curare — the Orinoco arrow poison, described in 1745 and used in surgery from 1942

  The fullest early account of curare is chapter XII of the second tome of Gumilla's Orinoco ilustrado (Madrid, 1745). It records what the poison did, how it was made and what it was made at: a monopoly held by one nation, a test on a shot monkey with the body opened afterwards, the fact that meat killed with it was eaten without harm, and old women set to the pots until the vapour killed them. Two centuries later the same substance became the first surgical muscle relaxant.

• The cuy: an Andean domesticate described in 1590, renamed conejo de Indias, and traced by ancient DNA

  Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 describes the guinea pig on the page — a common little animal of the Peruvian sierra called cuy, held for very good eating and offered most frequently in sacrifices — and Alcedo in 1786 records the Spanish name conejo de Indias and a Quito lake named for it. A 2020 study of forty-six ancient mitogenomes dates and routes the animal: a probable second domestication centre in Colombia, Caribbean voyages from about AD 600, one European specimen of 1550–1640.

• De curandis hominum morbis: a household prescription for smallpox and measles in the Nuevo Reino de Granada

  An anonymous eighteenth-century manuscript from the Nuevo Reino de Granada setting out, day by day, what to do for a patient with smallpox or measles. Its author bleeds and cups in the first days, then argues that the cure is mostly water — "qué cosa más común que curarse con solo agua" — and cites a 1753 outbreak in which he says he prescribed no more than this and one or two people died. The modern editors publish it and decline to vouch for it.

• The Decreta of León of 1188

  The documents issued by the curia that Alfonso IX of León convoked in 1188, inscribed by UNESCO in 2013 as the oldest documentary manifestation of the European parliamentary system — the earliest surviving written record of townspeople sitting, through elected representatives, alongside king, church and nobility.

• The American decrees of the Cortes of Cádiz, 1810-1811

  In its first year the besieged parliament at Cádiz declared the dominions of both hemispheres one nation whose overseas natives held rights equal to peninsulars', forbade anyone in ecclesiastical, civil or military authority to afflict an Indian in person or property, and extended exemption from tribute to the indios and castas of all America. The same decrees excluded the castas from the land of the pueblos de indios and drew Indian community funds into a war loan.

• Antonio del Rio's report on the ruins near Palenque (1787), printed at London in 1822

  A royal order of 1786 sent an artillery captain into the forest of Chiapa to examine a ruined city, with a draughtsman, a requisition of Indian labourers and instructions to dig. He cleared it by felling and burning, broke open every chamber, crated the finds and wrote a numbered report. Printed in English thirty-five years later, it put a Maya city into European print - and wrapped the correct inference about Yucatan in a conjecture about the Phoenicians.

• Demencia en militares: the royal orders on insane soldiers sent to the Indies, 1791-1819

  Royal orders of 1791 to 1819, communicated to the viceroyalty of Mexico, told commanders what to do with soldiers who showed signs of madness: confine them safely, try them but with medical examination of whether they acted without deliberation or judgement, send them to the nearest asylum at the treasury's charge, take them back on certified cure. In 1802 every asylum in the monarchy was ordered to admit them even when full.

• The alhondijaje of Guadalajara (1662-1742): a grain duty that exempted subsistence, and a city too poor to fill its own council

  Guadalajara charged half a real on every fanega of maize entering its grain market, except from the clergy, the tithes, the Indians and any vecino bringing maize to eat. Ninety thousand fanegas came in each year and the duty yielded about 1,200 pesos. The 1742 chronicler who prints those figures prints what followed too: a council chamber in the ruins of the palace, aldermanships knocked down at a hundred pesos, and his plan to elect regidores instead.

• Derrotero de las islas Antillas (Direccion de Hidrografia, third edition, Madrid 1837)

  The Spanish state hydrographic office's sailing directions for the Antilles, the coasts of Tierra Firme and the Gulf of Mexico, printed at Madrid in 1837 as companion to its own charts. Its opening notice states what an official publication need not state: that the elements used do not all merit equal confidence, that reports of the same place disagree, and that the book is far from perfect - and it puts every Spanish pilot under standing order to send the errors back.

• The first descent of the Amazon, read from both sides: Carvajal's relación and Gonzalo Pizarro's letter of accusation

  The first navigation of the Amazon is usually told as Orellana's adventure. Two documents printed together in 1894 let it be read from both sides: the Dominican Gaspar de Carvajal's eyewitness relación, which describes riverbanks so densely settled that the boats could not land, and Gonzalo Pizarro's letter to the King of 3 September 1542, which calls the same voyage a desertion. This object quotes both, and says what neither of them settles.

• Diario de México, 1805: a daily sold for half a real, with a locked box at every stall for anyone to post copy into

  A daily paper began in Mexico City in 1805, half a sheet, sold from early morning at half a real at twelve named stalls. At each stall stood a box locked with a key and slotted at the top: anyone could drop in a notice, a piece of news or a composition, free of charge, and the papers were collected every afternoon. Its prospectus set out what it would print and one thing it would not — matters of high politics and government.

• Diario de México (Mexico City, run of 1806)

  A daily newspaper printed in Mexico City, read here in its bound second tomo for 1806, from the press of a woman, Doña María Fernández de Jáuregui, under licence of the superior government. It is made largely out of its subscribers' letters: verse and the criticism of that verse, a standing notice of where children were being vaccinated and how many were done last time, lost dogs and found earrings, and an essay against grain hoarders who starve the Indian poor.

• Diccionario de autoridades, tomo primero (Real Academia Española, Madrid, 1726)

  The first dictionary of Spanish to prove every word with a quotation from a named book, begun by an academy founded in 1713 and printed at the king's expense. Its list of vouching authors is where the American connection is visible: Acosta on the Indies is the second entry in the whole list, beside Bernal Díaz, Oviedo, Ovalle's Chile and a nautical manual printed at Mexico. Its limit is visible on the same sheets — "aguacate" in 1726 means an inferior emerald.

• Diego Muñoz Camargo's Historia de Tlaxcala (late sixteenth century)

  A chronicle of the Tlaxcalan republic written in Tlaxcala by Diego Muñoz Camargo, a mestizo interpreter of the second generation. He tells the succession of the four cabeceras of the confederation and the moment Cortés entered them — the story of the Spanish–Tlaxcalan alliance from the side that made it and outlived it — and prints the names, lineages and boundaries that later Tlaxcalan lawsuits before the crown would cite. Every line is a witness's and a partisan's, and the sheets say so.

• Diego Velázquez

  Spanish painter (1599-1660), court painter to Philip IV from 1623 — after one portrait, the king would allow no one else to paint him. Las Meninas, with the painter's self-portrait wearing the cross of Santiago he received in 1658, stands at the center of European painting's history; the claims here follow the National Gallery's account.

• Sumario compendioso (Mexico, 1556)

  The first book of mathematics printed anywhere in the Americas, issued at Mexico in 1556 — seventeen years after the press arrived and eighty-five before one reached British North America. It is not a schoolbook: it is a working table-book for the silver trade of Peru and New Spain, with assay-reduction tables, interest tables, an exchange table for transatlantic remittances, and a closing set of algebra problems.

• The tithe law of the Indies (Recopilación, libro I, título 16)

  The tithe of the Indies belonged to the crown by papal grant. The título extends a Castilian tariff of 1501 to America and amends it crop by crop — rice, cacao — abolishes personal and double tithes, strips the military orders of their exemption, taxes the king's own farms, forbids making Indians carry the tithe on their backs, and gives three ninths of half the yield to the cathedral fabric and the hospital. Gold and silver are exempt.

• The division of Mexico City into quarteles and the alcaldes de barrio (1782)

  In December 1782 Mexico City was cut into 8 major and 32 minor quarters, each minor one given an unpaid resident magistrate who had to keep a street book, take a house-by-house register of every inhabitant "sin reserva de sexo ni edad", procure a physician, midwife and apothecary for his quarter and a school for its boys and girls, and keep the paving, sweeping and lighting up. The same ordinance ordered Indians out of the centre.

• A royal instruction not to let the vassals know the request was royal: the donativo protocol of 1574 and what the same emergency also sold

  Asked to raise a loan at Guadalajara after the naval battle, the crown in 1574 told its own president to state the need, to remember that a superior's plea is commonly taken for a command, to proceed so as not to let the vassals understand it was a royal order, and to drop the effort if they did not give freely. Royal officials were to repay at the agreed terms. The same wars were financed by selling renounceable offices and legitimations, which the crown later had to undo.

• Drought institutions of colonial Mexico: water turns, water judges and the public granary

  Colonial Mexico met an unreliable climate with institutions. Water was divided among landowners by the tanda, a system of turns counted in days, with water judges to adjudicate; grain was held against failed harvests in the posito and the Real alhondiga; disputes over water and flood damage went to court, and indigenous communities used those courts. The archives show the arrangements holding against ordinary variability, failing against sustained crisis, and they show who paid.

• Diego Duran, Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España (written 1579-1581, printed 1867)

  A Dominican's history of the Mexica, built from their own painted books and from old men who remembered, finished in 1581 and left unprinted for nearly three centuries. When it was finally set in type in Mexico City in 1867 the authorship line of the manuscript had been scratched out by someone trying to pass the work off as his own, and the editor who recovered the name was himself being driven out of the country as the sheets went through the press.

• Frederic Duran Jorda and the Barcelona blood transfusion service (1936-1939)

  From July 1936 a Barcelona haematologist collected blood from civilian donors, preserved it with citrate under refrigeration and sent it to fronts 200 kilometres away, drawing 4,000 litres from eleven thousand extractions in eighteen months. It was the first stored-blood service to supply a war, and it reached Prague and London in the luggage of its exiles rather than through the journals: the international congress of 1937 was still giving priority to arm-to-arm transfusion while it ran.

• Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren, Bibliotheca Mexicana (1755)

  In 1735 the dean of Alicante told a young man not to sail for the Indies: where would he turn, among the Indians, in so vast a solitude of letters? Twenty years later a Mexican theologian answered him with a folio — a catalogue of everyone born in North America, or drawn into it, who had written anything in any language — printed at Mexico on a press set up in the author's own house. One volume appeared, letters A to C.

• El Greco

  Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614), Cretan by birth, Venetian by training, and Spanish by everything that made him El Greco: settled in Toledo by 1577, he fused Byzantine formation with Venetian color into a style with no successor until the moderns claimed him. Spain did not produce him — it received, kept and transformed him, and this object says exactly that.

• The Elhuyar brothers and the isolation of tungsten (1783)

  On 28 September 1783 Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar reduced the acid of wolframite with charcoal and obtained a new metal, which they called volfram — the isolation of the element the periodic table lists as tungsten, symbol W, done in the laboratories the Real Sociedad Bascongada had set up at Bergara.

• Emilia Pardo Bazán

  Spanish novelist and critic (1851-1921) who introduced the debate on literary naturalism to Spain with La cuestión palpitante (1882-83) and wrote its major Spanish novels, Los pazos de Ulloa (1886) among them. In 1916 she became professor of contemporary literature at the Universidad Central in Madrid — a chair created for her by ministerial appointment.

• Los enfermos en las armadas y flotas de Indias

  What the Laws of the Indies required for the sick on the Atlantic crossing: a physician and a chief surgeon on the same salary, an apothecary, barbers, hospital brothers clothed at the crown's cost, the sick lodged in the ship's alcázar with people assigned to nurse them, diets and fowl that could be spent on nothing else, a two-key medicine chest with its own account book, and cure ashore in the hospitals of the ports. The medicines the sick took were charged against their wages.

• The assay ordinances of the Indies: one standard of fineness, instruments and marking across a continent

  Libro IIII título XXII of the Recopilación prints the ordinances of the ensayadores mayores of Peru: assay by fire and cupel only, never by colour or hammer-blow; a register of everyone examined; standard weights, a standard furnace and checked balances; the fineness in dineros and grains with new punches; and every bar stamped with the assayer's name, year and place. The purpose was the royal fifth, and unmarked silver was a crime for Indian and Spaniard alike.

• With the noise of arms or apostolically without them (Quito, 1668): the question a bishop put to the parish clergy of the Indies about how the Gospel should enter unconquered country

  A manual printed for the parish clergy of Spanish America devotes a session to a single question: should preachers enter the lands of unconquered peoples with soldiers or without them? It prints more than forty authorities for the no, two royal cedulas of 1609 ordering entradas made without men of war, and the counter-evidence of missionaries killed. The bishop concludes that war to make Christians is never lawful, and that an armed escort for the missionary's own defence is.

• The Revillagigedo enumeration, 1790-1794: the first general count of New Spain

  Before 1794 the archives of the viceroyalty of Mexico held no enumeration — the 1742 operation had estimated families, not persons. The count ordered by the second Count of Revillagigedo returned 3,865,529 souls in the jurisdictions finished by 1793 and about 4,483,529 with the three unfinished ones estimated. It was also an undercount, for a reason its own critic states: households shrank their lists for fear of a new tax.

• The written epidemic record of Spanish America, and what modern science reads from it

  Almanacs, diaries, cabildo minutes, parish burial books and hospital and cemetery ledgers kept across Spanish America are the reason a 2014 study could assemble 22 typhus epidemics in central Mexico between 1655 and 1918 and set them against tree-ring drought, and a 2024 review could follow a plague along the road between Buenos Aires and Lima month by month. The same researchers say plainly what the record cannot do.

• Alonso de Ercilla, La Araucana

  The epic of the Spanish war in Chile, written by a soldier who fought in it and often drafted on leather for want of paper. Its declared subject is Spanish valour; its argument is that the Mapuche chose their leaders by merit, had never been ruled by any king, and were defending their liberty against enemies the poet calls fierce and Spanish. It also states, from inside the army, that the war exceeded the laws of war.

• Gaspar de Escalona Aguero, Gazophilacium regium Perubicum

  The systematic manual of the royal treasury of Peru, by a jurist of the Indies who had been corregidor of Jauja, inspector of the royal chests, procurator of Cusco and judge in Chile. It explains where every real came from, and in doing so prints what the revenue cost: the mita at a seventh of the villages, the protective decrees "nowhere well observed", priests certifying living Indians as dead to get them off the rolls, and a viceroy calling Potosi the ivy that eats the wall and holds it up.

• Escribanos and the public record of the Indies

  The notaries of Spanish America were licensed from Madrid, examined, required to keep their registers sewn and signed and to write out names and sums in full without abbreviations, and forbidden by law to charge an Indian who came to court as plaintiff or defendant. Their offices could be bought and sold; their protocols could not leave with the buyer. That rule is why the archives exist.

• Serving by escudero: only the King could licence an encomendero out of the Indies, and whoever named a substitute answered for what that substitute did to the Indians

  Spanish colonial law would not let an encomendero discharge his obligations by deputy as of right. Licence to leave for Spain belonged to the King alone, the cédulas of 1570 and 1571 barring viceroys from granting it; the reason given for refusing substitution was that a hired deputy would be a new scourge of the Indians; and where a substitute was allowed, the crown's jurist holds the encomendero surety for the extortions that deputy committed, with the Twelve Tables cited for the rule.

• Escuela gratuita de dibujo del Consulado de Buenos Aires (1799-1823)

  A free drawing school costing twenty pesos a month, opened by the merchant guild of Buenos Aires in March 1799 and refused royal funding a year later because the Crown had graver urgencies. It was revived in 1815 by a friar whose printed sermon paid for it, taught at night to a hall of two hundred, and ended as the preparatory drawing class of the university.

• Escuela de medicina y cirugía de Buenos Aires (1799-1823)

  The chairs of medicine and surgery created alongside the Buenos Aires protomedicato, opened in 1801 with nine pupils and no anatomical theatre, no chemistry laboratory and no dissecting instruments — the surgery professor bought those himself. Reorganised in 1813 as a military Instituto Médico, it was still short a surgery chair in the first provincial budget after 1820.

• The parish schools of the pueblos de indios (New Spain, sixteenth century)

  A school built beside the church in every Indian town of New Spain, where the choir met each working day and the boys were taught. Who learned to read was decided by rank: sons of the principales in a room of their own, sons of commoners the doctrine in the open patio and then out to work. The Franciscan who describes the rule also records what happened where it was not kept — commoners came to be elected to municipal office because they could read.

• Schools for Indian girls in New Spain and the indigenous matronas (1530–c.1596)

  In 1530 the Empress Isabel sent six beatas to New Spain and ordered the Audiencia to build houses out of royal revenue where the daughters of Indian principals and commoners would be taught. The chronicler who records the order also records that it "no duró muchos años" — and that the women who came out of it, called beatas, went on to teach doctrine, run confraternities and serve hospitals for two generations, until depopulation and tribute ended that too.

• Cuba's free schools counted by their own advocates: 285 schools, 82 for girls, and 127 girls of colour in the whole island

  The Havana Economic Society's own journal printed a campaign for free primary schools that counted what the campaign had not achieved. Of some 150,000 children of school age on the island, 17,459 were being taught; 285 free or public schools existed, 82 of them for girls; and the girls enrolled in the whole island were 5,294 white and 127 of colour. The figures are the institution's own, published in its own organ, against its own record.

• Schools, hospitals and choirs of the Zacatecas frontier: what one province reported it was running in 1737

  Arlegui's 1737 inventory of the Franciscan province of Zacatecas — thirty-six houses, a hundred and sixty pueblos, over a hundred thousand administered adults — lists what those houses had to keep: a school teaching reading, writing and Castilian, a hospital in every pueblo however small, an organ chapel whose musicians trained the next cohort, cofradías endowed in livestock. It also prints the enforced attendance and the funding quarrel.

• Eugenio Espejo, Reflexiones acerca de las viruelas (Quito, 1785)

  A Quito physician's argument, first printed in 1785, that a town can be preserved from smallpox by deliberate inoculation, and that doing so is a patriotic and a Christian act rather than a presumption against providence. The Spanish physician Francisco Gil, whose own dissertation on the same problem had appeared the year before, printed Espejo's text as an appendix to his second edition.

• The ramo de la nieve: the snow monopoly of New Spain

  Snow cut on the Sierra Nevada and carried through Chalco to Mexico City was a farmed royal revenue. The treasury history of 1792 prints the auction conditions - a fixed price of one real the pound, selling hours, guards, house searches - and the yield, 632,171 pesos between 1765 and 1790. An auto acordado of 1656 bars drafted Indian labour from the snow contract on the ground that men paid well and punctually come of their own accord.

• One hundred and fifteen marks for every hundred pounds: the mercury correspondido and the discoverers who could not afford the minimum issue

  Mercury was rationed by the crown and priced by what it should yield: a miner drawing a hundred pounds was charged with manifesting a hundred and fifteen marks of silver. Mota Padilla, a lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, argued in 1742 that cheaper mercury would raise both output and revenue, and recorded what the minimum issue of a whole quintal did to poor discoverers who needed eight pounds: forced partnerships, dispossession, lawsuits, and mines abandoned.

• The mescal wine estanco of Guadalajara (c. 1640-1742): a monopoly argued on medical grounds and spent on public fountains

  Nueva Galicia drank palm and agave spirits, and a president decided the way to stop the worse home brews was to license the better one and tax it. A royal fiscal told the Council that prohibiting Indians the mescal and coco wines drove them to drinks that harmed them and into the hills, and that physicians had certified the wines healthful. The proceeds built the city's hot baths and then its public fountains, 1,200 pesos a year for twelve years.

• Juan de Esteyneffer, Florilegio medicinal (Mexico, 1712)

  A medical handbook printed at Mexico City in 1712 by a Jesuit lay brother from Silesia, written for the mission provinces of Topia, Sinaloa, the Tepehuanes, the Tarahumara, Sonora and California, which had, in its own words, no recourse to any physician or apothecary. It teaches the reader to substitute what is at hand, and prints American drugs under the names the peoples of the north-west used for them - beside a frank statement that the man dispensing them was also the confessor.

• Guano — the Andean seabird manure the Inca state rationed by law

  Centuries before Europe fought over cargoes of it, the fertiliser later called guano was a regulated Andean resource. Garcilaso describes seabird-dung islands off the Peruvian coast allotted province by province, bounded with markers, and worked under a fixed quota enforced on pain of death, with the nesting birds protected the same way; Acosta gives the white dung-hills seen from the sea, the boats that went out for nothing else, and the word Guano itself. Read from the page.

• Foreigners and absentees barred from the encomiendas: the rule that a province's rewards belong to the people who live in it

  A royal cédula of 1549 shut foreigners out of the encomiendas of the Indies, and the doctrine built on it went further: not even Spaniards could receive one unless they were present and resident in the province, and in a contested succession a resident beat an absentee of higher degree or older age. The crown's own jurist reports that the rule was broken constantly, that the viceroys said so to the king, and that the king acknowledged the harm and promised restraint.

• Admission and conduct of lawyers in the Spanish Indies

  A licensed legal profession with an entrance examination behind closed doors, four years of certified apprenticeship, a professional college, a fee, a dress mark and a written ethics code carrying ten-year suspension for changing sides and permanent disbarment for betraying a client. The same two compilations that print all of it print, as the first article of the New Spain series, the rule that no one could sit the examination without proving Spanish descent and legitimate birth.

• The alcabala that stopped at the frontier: how Nueva Vizcaya argued its way out of the sales tax, and why its Indians paid no tribute

  The sales tax of the Indies ran from two per cent in 1575 to six by 1640. It never reached Nueva Vizcaya. A governor's report of 1672, recited in a royal cedula of 1678, told the crown that more than eight hundred thousand pesos had been traded there in forty-two years without alcabala, that the province held over seventy thousand Indians paying no tribute, and that the settlers bore the cost of discovery and defence themselves. The exemption held as custom into the 1730s.

• The exclusion of the Indians from the Inquisition of the Indies

  The tribunals of the Holy Office founded in the Indies in 1569-70 were barred from proceeding against Indians. The Recopilación prints the bar twice and names the courts that took the jurisdiction instead: the ecclesiastical ordinaries for causes of faith, the royal justices for sorcerers who killed by spells. Exemption was not immunity: a bishop of Quito's manual shows the other court at work, with three admonitions and the diocesan punishing "con el rigor del Derecho".

• Show your title, and who had to be heard: proof and citation before an encomienda could be taken away

  The crown could summon every encomendero in a province by public proclamation to produce his title, and possession without one was worth nothing. But a coloured title was enough to keep the grant until the property suit was lost, and no old possession could be taken without citation and hearing. The Indians of the encomienda, says §32, did not have to be cited at all.

• The Lima trials of Juan del Corro's new silver process (viceroyalty of Peru, 1670s)

  A Potosi refiner promised half again as much silver and half the quicksilver. The viceroy paid the reward and let Lima ring its bells — then withheld the report to the king until the trials could be repeated. They were, and the men who had applauded wrote back with total desengaño. So the same ores were carried to Lima and both processes were run side by side, equal in weight and measure, before the audiencia and both cabildos. The difference was very small or none, and he told the king so.

• Burial outside the walls — the royal cedula of 3 April 1787 and its extension to the Indies in 1819

  A public-health law that moved burial out of parish churches and into ventilated ground beyond the towns, written after an epidemic traced to the corpses under a church floor. It required a medical survey of the soil before a site could be chosen and sized the ground by the five-year death rate. It reached Spanish America unevenly, was resisted where it touched burial fees and rank, and was not circulated generally to the Indies until 1819.

• The household constitution of the pueblos-hospital of Santa Fe: an elective head of family, usufruct that could not be sold, and children taught to farm as a game

  Under the ordinances printed in 1766 the unit of Santa Fe was the extended household. Each of four quadrillas named a head of family whom its members could replace; house, orchard and plot were held in usufruct only, passing to married poor sons by seniority and failing them to the town's oldest married poor, inalienable for ever. Children learned letters, doctrine and farming, the last as play two days a week. The same pages fix the eldest grandfather over the household and expel the idle.

• Tractado brebe de medicina (Mexico, 1579 and 1592)

  A doctor turned Augustinian friar wrote a home-medicine book for people the medical profession did not reach — "la gente pobre y ausente que carece de socorro de médicos", in Indian villages and country estates. The viceroy's privilege of 1592 says so in as many words. Four editions in thirty-one years, five books ending in anatomy, and a materia medica that a later bibliographer found to be almost entirely Mexican plants.

• Feijoo's Defensa de las mugeres (Teatro critico, discourse XVI, 1726)

  The longest discourse of the first tome of the Teatro critico argued that women are equal to men in understanding, and its author later said in print that this equality was its primary and almost total subject. Two pamphlets answered it within five months of publication. Read here in the 1863 collected edition, with the author's own 1730 reply and the dated chronology of the paper war it started.

• Feijoo's Españoles Americanos (Teatro critico, tome IV, discourse VI)

  A discourse written because a reader told the author he had printed a common error. Feijoo had reported that Spaniards born in America ripen early and decay early; corrected, he devoted a whole discourse to destroying the second half, answering a saying with named living men and explaining the criollos' early degrees by their method of study rather than by their climate. Read in the Madrid 1773 printing of the fourth tome.

• Feijoo's Mapa intelectual y cotejo de naciones (Teatro critico, discourse XV)

  The discourse in which a Benedictine in Oviedo argues that no nation holds a monopoly on intelligence — and devotes its American section to demolishing the idea that the Indians were governed by instinct rather than reason. Its sharpest line answers the story of gold traded for glass beads: whoever judges them coarse for that is coarser than they are. Read here in the Madrid 1765 printing of the second tome, whose censura is dated 1728.

• Félix de Azara

  Spanish military engineer turned naturalist who spent twenty years (1781-1801) in the Río de la Plata, producing systematic natural histories of the quadrupeds (1802) and birds (1802-05) of Paraguay — work whose accuracy Darwin repeatedly praised and cited in the Journal of Researches and the Zoology of the Beagle.

• Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and the Obras historicas

  A descendant of the ruling house of Texcoco, schooled at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco and in his last years interpreter of the viceregal Indian court, who wrote the Nahua past in Spanish from hieroglyphic paintings and from songs and papers he produced before the town council of Otumba. His work circulated in manuscript for nearly three centuries and was printed at Mexico only in 1891 and 1892, in a state centenary edition whose editor argues with his author in the footnotes.

• Fernando de Castro (1896-1967) and the discovery of the arterial chemoreceptors

  The last of Cajal's direct disciples cut the glossopharyngeal roots inside the skull of seventeen cats and three dogs, found the carotid body still innervated, and concluded in 1928 that it was a sensory organ built to taste the blood. That is the invention of chemoreception. The Nobel Prize for the reflex went to Ghent ten years later, while its author spent the war guarding the Cajal Institute.

• Ferran's anti-choleraic inoculations (Valencia, 1885)

  In the cholera summer of 1885 a physician at Tortosa injected more than thirty thousand people in the villages of Valencia with a broth culture of Koch's comma bacillus. A French commission declared the results worthless; the American investigator sent three years later arrived expecting a charlatan, went to Tortosa to see for himself, and printed the Spanish official figures in English so his readers could judge. Both halves of that record are here.

• The Havana–Güines railway (1834-1842), the first railway built in the Spanish world

  A forty-five-mile line from Havana to the sugar town of Güines, ordered by the crown in 1834, paid for with a two-million-peso loan raised in London by a colonial development board, opened in sections from 1837 and sold to a private company in 1842. The board's own printed accounts carry both columns: the school, the chemistry chair and the railway on one side; the hunting of runaway slaves, and 3,744 day-wages of its own enslaved men left out of the road's cost, on the other.

• Fidel Pagés and the first description of epidural anaesthesia (1921)

  A Spanish military surgeon published in 1921, in a Spanish journal, the first description of human thoracolumbar epidural anaesthesia — anatomy, technique, a case series and complications — and named it anestesia metamérica for the segmental block it produced. He was killed in a road accident two years later at thirty-seven, an Italian surgeon's version of the technique carried the field through the 1930s without crediting him, and the correction came from Argentina.

• La Fiel Executoría of Mexico City — posted prices, sealed weights, and the indigenous sellers exempted from both

  The market magistracy of Mexico City: the corregidor and the regidores fieles executores, on a perpetual grant from Charles V and Juana, under ordinances of 1718 confirmed in 1724. By the viceregal ordinance of 1619 they posted fruit prices weekly and grocery prices monthly on a board in the plaza, priced bread alike for bakers and shopkeepers, and allowed the seller a profit "moderada" for his work and risk — while leaving indigenous vendors outside the price regime altogether.

• The reduced feast calendar of the Indians, and whether Spaniards could make them work on the days they were not bound to keep

  A papal brief cut the Indians' days of obligation to about a dozen. That relief immediately became a labour question - if they need not keep the other feasts, may they be compelled to work them, so the mines yield more? The standard treatise on the government of the Indies records the question as one the author saw disputed many times, reports the answer that they may not be compelled, and states plainly that viceroys and governors were the ones asking.

• The first colonial horses of the Americas: the Iberian founding stock and what a 16th-century tooth from Haiti shows

  Horses re-entered the Americas on Columbus's second voyage, landing at La Isabela on Hispaniola on 28 November 1493. The Caribbean became the breeding reservoir from which horses reached Mexico, Peru and Florida, and from which feral herds spread to the Great Plains. A tooth from Puerto Real in Haiti, from a layer laid down when the town was abandoned in 1578, has yielded the first complete mitochondrial genome of a post-Columbian horse in the hemisphere, and it reads as Iberian.

• The first printing press in the Americas (Mexico City, 1539)

  Printing reached the western hemisphere in 1539, when the Seville printing house of Cromberger — under royal permission obtained in 1537 — established a press in Mexico City run by Juan Pablos, almost a century before the first press of English America. The earliest American imprints were bilingual doctrinal books in Spanish and Nahuatl.

• Flora Peruviana, et Chilensis (Madrid, 1798) and the royal expedition behind it

  The first tome of the flora of Peru and Chile, printed at Madrid in 1798. Its preface states the rule the work was written to: with every species, the soil where it grows wild, the month it was seen in flower, the vernacular name its inhabitants use, and its medical virtues - the last learned, the authors say, from the mouths of the Indians as well as from professors of medicine. The same preface records eight hundred drawings lost in a shipwreck.

• Ildefonso Joseph Flores's Arte de la lengua cakchiquel (Guatemala, 1753)

  The first grammar of a Mayan language of Guatemala to reach a printing press, made in Guatemala City in 1753 by a Franciscan parish priest. Its title promises not one language but a parallel of three — Kiche, Cakchiquel and Çutuhil — and its own approbations print the complaint that answers the obvious question: two centuries of friars had written grammars of these languages and not one of them had ever been printed.

• Flotas y galeones — the escorted convoy of the Carrera de Indias

  The scheduled Atlantic convoy of the Indies trade: two fleets a year, each sailing in company with warships, paid for by a levy prorated over every cargo aboard — the king's own silver included — and kept in a chest with three keys. The treasurer of the Casa de la Contratación printed its founding cédulas in 1672, and on the same pages the losses the escort did not prevent.

• Focos seismicos del Archipielago Filipino (1900): the Manila Observatory's seismic zonation of the Philippines

  A treatise printed in 1900 by the Jesuits of the Manila Observatory that divides the Philippines into three seismic zones by parallels of latitude, names the epicentral foci in each, tabulates their tremors, and prints a colour map of them. It reasons from Lyell and Lapparent, defines epicentre as the "foco aparente", and reaches across the Pacific for its example of an earthquake that arrived in complete silence: Riobamba, 4 February 1797.

• The Fondo Piadoso de las Californias — a private endowment that paid for a royal frontier

  A charitable fund built from private Mexican donations that financed the settlement of the Californias from 1697, at a moment when the royal treasury had given up paying for it. It carried the missions, the soldiers and the ships; it was expropriated in administration when the Jesuits were expelled in 1767, with its purpose preserved in the decree that took it; and it ended as the first case decided at The Hague in 1902.

• Juan Fragoso, Discursos de las cosas aromáticas (Madrid, 1572)

  A royal physician's book on the drugs of the East Indies whose title misdescribes it. The American materia medica keeps breaking into chapters named for Asian drugs — guayacán inside the chapter on China root, the Peruvian sunflower inside asafoetida, tobacco inside bangue — making the 1572 Madrid printing an early comparative pharmacopoeia of the two Indies. It also prints one of the plainer sixteenth-century sentences about what enslaved people in the Indies used tobacco for.

• Francisco de Goya

  Spanish painter and etcher (1746-1828), court painter to three kings, whose career runs from Rococo tapestry cartoons to the war reportage of the 3rd of May 1808 and the black paintings of his own walls — the documented arc from old-regime court art into modern painting. Deaf from 1792, exiled to Bordeaux in 1824, he died there in 1828.

• Francisco José de Caldas (1768-1816): the creole who ran the Bogotá observatory and printed its numbers

  A creole from Popayan who held three crown scientific posts at once - member of the Royal Botanical Expedition, keeper of the Bogota observatory, professor of mathematics at the Colegio del Rosario - and who used a weekly paper to print barometric altitudes, a lunar eclipse and monthly weather tables for the viceroyalty. A Spanish general had him shot in 1816. The volume argued from here is the Paris edition of 1849 that his countrymen printed to recover him.

• Francisco Tito Yupanqui and the image of Copacabana

  The most venerated image in the colonial Andes was carved by an Aymara-speaking Indian of Copacabana who had no training and no licence to practise the art. An Augustinian printed at Lima in 1621 what it cost him: the bishop's circle laughed at the piece, a man told him to leave that art to the Spaniards, and the rival moiety of his own pueblo demanded a Spaniard's work instead.

• Fray Juan de San Miguel and the founding of Uruapan (1540)

  A Franciscan who learned Tarascan in 1536, founded a string of towns in the sierra of Michoacán with a church and a hospital in each, and in 1540 laid out Uruapan himself — site, plaza, streets, orchards, schools of letters and of music, and a chapel at the end of every street, nine of which still stood in 1862. The people he gathered were in the sierra because Nuño de Guzmán had killed their king, and the same source that praises him says so.

• Freedom of indigenous marriage in the Laws of the Indies (libro VI, título IX)

  A law of 1618, compiled into the code of the Indies, strips an encomendero of his encomienda if he obstructs the marriage of any Indian man or woman held in it, and orders parish priests not to marry couples an owner brings in without first finding out whether the women come frightened or in full liberty. It sits in a title whose other laws forbid him to live in the town, keep Indian women in his house, run an obraje there or send anyone to the mines.

• Frisoles and pallares — the two American beans, named in 1590, resolved by genome in 2014

  Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 names two pulses the Indians grew for themselves, frisoles and pallares, and states that the European chickpea, broad bean and lentil were not there before the Spaniards. Molina's 1571 dictionary prints a whole bean economy in one column of Nahuatl: the field, the sowing verb, the harvester's name, the boiled bean, the stew, the dough. Modern genomics finds two independent domestications — and measures what breeding since has cost.

• A judgment in Lima that restored the encomienda and said nothing about the tribute

  A final judgment ordered an encomienda restored and never mentioned the fruits that had also been claimed. Was the defendant absolved of them, or could a fresh suit be brought? Libro III capítulo XXXI of the Política Indiana puts the question from a Lima case the author says he watched, sets out six arguments for reopening, and then holds the opposite: silence is refusal, and new suits must not be born of the ending of old ones.

• Whoever is eating the fruits is presumed to possess: title, good faith and the tribute of an encomienda

  Who kept the tribute of an encomienda while its title was in dispute turned on possession, title and good faith. Libro III capítulo XXXI of the Política Indiana sets out the rules: perception of the fruits proves possession, a royal title beats a viceroy's, an unjust title makes a holder liable even for tribute he failed to collect, a holder in good faith keeps what he took even if he loses the case, and service of the claim ends his good faith.

• The 600-varas land base of the pueblos de indios (New Spain, 1567-1695)

  Every indigenous town in New Spain was entitled by law to a square of land measured outward for each cardinal point, and the size of that square and the point it was measured from were fought over for 130 years. A viceregal ordinance of 1567 set 500 varas; a royal cedula of 1687 raised it to 600 and moved the origin to the last house; a cedula of 1695, obtained by the Spanish farmers, moved the origin back to the church, which swallowed the town itself into the grant.

• Francisco Xavier de Gamboa, Comentarios a las ordenanzas de minas (Madrid, 1761)

  The commentary on mining law written by a Mexican-born lawyer acting as the Mexico City merchants' deputy at the court of Madrid, and printed there in 1761. It is law and metallurgy in one book: alongside the ordinances it explains the working vocabulary of the mines, some of it borrowed from indigenous languages, records who invented which method of extracting silver and in what year, and reprints in full the harshest contemporary indictment of the Indies mines before answering it.

• Livestock of Castile in Peru: the dates, the prices and who was kept off the horse

  The animal chapters of libro nono of the Comentarios Reales carry something no later account reproduces: a running price series for Old World livestock in Peru between 1544 and 1590, taken down by a witness who was in Cuzco. Cattle fall from 120 ducats a head to six or seven. A donkey worth six ducats in Spain fetches 480 at Huamanga. And the same chapters record that no Indian rode, and what the Indians said when they first saw a plough.

• Ganancial property in United States law: the Castilian community of gains as printed in Philadelphia in 1839 and in Texas in 1866

  Castilian law treated marriage as a partnership whose gains belong equally to both spouses, with the wife's own property staying hers. American lawyers printed that doctrine in English in 1839, and in 1866 the official digest of Texas law recorded a court holding that the marital-rights law of the state was a continuation of Spanish jurisprudence. The regime gave the wife an ownership share without control, and in Texas it counted enslaved people among the property it divided.

• Regimiento de navegacion (Madrid, 1606): a state-ordered rewrite of the Atlantic chart, instruments and pilots' examination

  In 1599 the crown told the Casa de la Contratacion its sea charts were wrong. Andres Garcia de Cespedes, Cosmografo Mayor de las Indias, sat at Seville with its officers, cosmographers and pilots and brought back a new master chart and reformed instruments. The royal cedula that followed ordered charts made to the new padron, the regimiento printed, a practical version put in the pilots' hands, and the whole checked at their examination. The 1606 book is that standard.

• Diego García de Palacio's Instrucción náutica (Mexico, 1587)

  A treatise on the use, building and government of ships, printed at Mexico City by Pedro Ocharte in 1587 and written by a judge of the Audiencia who had already tested American timbers, cotton canvas and henequen rigging and directed the building of two galleons of a thousand tons. Its last twenty-eight folios are a nautical vocabulary, and the Real Academia later used the book to authenticate the words of its first dictionary.

• Diego García de Palacio's relación of 1576 and the first description of Copán

  The report an oidor of the Audiencia of Guatemala sent to Philip II on 8 March 1576, out of an inspection tour the crown had ordered for the redress of injustices done to the Indians. Inside it is the earliest known European description of the Maya ruins of Copán — the eagle-shaped stone, the stepped plaza its author compared to the Roman Colosseum, the sacrificial basins — by a man who says he could not find out what any of it was for.

• Gregorio Garcia, Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo (1607)

  A Dominican who had lived nine years in Peru and afterwards in New Spain took one question — where the peoples of the Americas came from — and answered it by a method rather than a thesis. He collected every opinion he could find, argued each in the voice of its own author, printed the objections against it, and for a long time refused to give a verdict of his own. Pressed by learned readers, he gave one that no single-origin theory allowed: many nations, many routes, many arrivals, many times.

• Gardoqui and Sons of Bilbao: the Spanish supply line to the Continental Army, 1777-1778

  While refusing both alliance and recognition, the Spanish crown routed material aid to the Continental Army through a Bilbao merchant house. Arthur Lee's papers, printed by resolution of Congress in 1829, carry the terms Spain offered at Vitoria in 1777, the order to ship naval stores from Bilbao the moment the Court of Spain furnished the money, an invoice for 1,926 Palencia blankets sent to Cape Ann in 1778, and the price Spain later named for a loan: Florida and ship timber.

• What the genomes record of Iberian settlement in the Americas

  Population genomics has given the mestizaje argument an evidentiary base that neither chronicles nor polemic could supply: Native American ancestry that tracks pre-Columbian population density, admixture dated six to fourteen generations back, a repeated sex asymmetry with European ancestry weighted to the male line, and a widespread Sephardic component. The genomes record that mixture happened and cannot settle the terms on which it did.

• Maturino Gilberti, Arte de la lengua de Michuacan (Mexico, 1558)

  The grammar of Purepecha printed at Mexico by Juan Pablos in 1558, sixteen years before the better-known Lagunas Arte and surviving in a single incomplete copy that left the country. Its opening warning is that it would be a very great danger to say this language can be written with whatever letters one likes, and it proves the point with minimal pairs. Its closing folios are model sentences for giving orders in the house, so the book states its own use.

• Antonio de Gimbernat's method for the strangulated femoral hernia (read 1788, London edition 1795)

  A Spanish operation for one of the deadliest emergencies in eighteenth-century surgery. Instead of cutting upward and outward across dangerous vessels, Gimbernat divided the constricting structure inward at the crural ring, guided on a grooved sound. He read the method at the first public assembly of the Real Colegio de Cirugía de San Carlos in October 1788; it was in English, printed in London, by 1795, in a translation whose preface complains that Englishmen undervalue foreign surgery.

• The municipal purse of Guadalajara (1636-1742): bulls, restitution orders and who pays for the mourning

  A chapter of a 1742 chronicle walks through a century of one colonial city's accounts and finds both halves of the story on the same pages. The propios paid for bullfights, players and refreshments for the judges; and when two mining towns were made to fund a president's reception, the crown ordered the twelve hundred pesos restored out of the estates of the oidores who had levied them. The rule reached mourning too: from 1700 officials bought their own blacks.

• Gomez Ortega, Instruccion sobre el modo mas seguro y economico de transportar plantas vivas (Madrid, 1779)

  The printed manual by which the Spanish crown tried to keep a living plant alive across an ocean. Written by the first professor of the Madrid botanical garden and sent out with a royal circular to the officers of the American dominions, it specifies the cases, the seed handling, a want list of American plants under the names used in America, and how to dry a plant for a herbarium - and states in its own words that the aim is to make Spain owner of the vegetable riches of Spanish America.

• Gil González Dávila, Teatro eclesiástico de la primitiva iglesia de las Indias Occidentales (Madrid, 1649)

  The crown chronicler's see-by-see inventory of the American church, printed at Madrid in 1649. Its dedication counts what the monarchy had founded overseas - sees, prebends, convents, universities, colleges, hospitals - and its pages carry the same institutions again city by city with dates, endowments and staff. The counts sit beside an epidemic that the same pages say killed five of every six Indians.

• The arancel of the gracias al sacar (royal cedula of 10 February 1795)

  A royal cedula of 1795 approved a printed price list for the favours the Camara de Indias could grant. It charged 500 reales to dispense a man from the legal quality of pardo and 800 from that of quinteron — against 1,000 for the style of Don, 8,000 for the right to hang chains at your door, and 80,000 for a patent of nobility. Read from the tariff itself, printed in 1797, where the price of ceasing to be pardo sits in the same column as the price of enclosing a field.

• Grana cochinilla: the Oaxacan dye insect, its husbandry, and who actually produced it

  The scarlet dyestuff of Oaxaca was bred on nopal plots under a husbandry that a Mexican compilation of 1855 describes down to the basket journeys carrying the mother insects nine leagues into the sierra to escape the rains. The same account states that the greater part of the cochineal entering commerce came not from the estates with sixty thousand nopal plants but from the small plots of the Indians.

• The artisan guilds of New Spain and the opening of the trades to women (1546-1800)

  Mexico City had fifty craft guilds with their own ordinances, most of them older than the eighteenth century. In 1798 the viceroy overruled the embroiderers' guild in favour of a poor widow who wanted to earn her living at their craft, and in 1800 the crown approved his order and told the guilds to reform any ordinance that shut women out. The same file carries a viceroy's judgement that the guilds had left the trades of America in the deepest backwardness.

• Guadalupe of Tepeyac in the colonial sources

  The earliest witness opened here is Sahagún, who describes Tepeyac in the 1570s as a Tonantzin pilgrimage the friars found suspect. The apparition account enters print in the next century, is cited by page and edition in 1755, is denied by the royal chronicler of the Indies, and in 1830 is printed against by an editor who says he would rather not — because a London edition was coming and a silent omission would look like a fraud.

• Guayaba: an American fruit under indigenous cultivation, described in 1535 and carried round the tropics

  Guava is a Neotropical fruit that modern work calls semi-domesticated. Oviedo's chapter on the guayabo, written in the Caribbean and printed in full in 1851, already records the two facts the genetics later supported: wild trees are smaller than cultivated ones because the Indians take care over them, and both Indians and Christians plant them in their holdings. He also records the astringent use against diarrhoea. The plant the Spanish carried outward is now invasive in much of the tropics.

• Guayaco (guaiac, the palo de las Indias)

  The first American remedy to become a European blockbuster, and the first to be discredited. Guaiac wood reached Spain by 1508 as the pox spread, was sold as lignum sanctum, was cornered by the Fuggers in return for a loan to the crown, landed at Seville by the ton — and did not work. It belongs in the record of the American materia medica beside cinchona, because the transfer that failed is what makes the transfer that succeeded measurable.

• The guerra defensiva of Chile (1612-1625)

  For thirteen years the Spanish crown tried to end the Arauco war by giving it up: a fixed frontier, no offensive campaigns, missionaries instead of soldiers, and a Jesuit granted authority equal to the governor's over pacification. A despatch of April 1625 ended it and restored the enslavement of captives of both sexes. What the other side wanted in the meantime survives in print, down to the size of the branding iron.

• The war of the Mixton (1541): a rising, a just-war consultation held at the siege, and an ending negotiated by two friars

  In 1541 the peoples of the sierras of Nueva Galicia rose, killed Pedro de Alvarado's army in the field and nearly emptied Guadalajara. Mota Padilla's chronicle prints what most accounts leave out: the summons and the threat that opened it, the indigenous answers in reported speech, a formal consultation on whether the offensive war was lawful with Las Casas's doctrine on the table, five thousand taken and bodies heaped at the crags, and a surrender obtained by two friars who went up unarmed.

• The Hiaqui wars and the peace of the Rio Hiaqui, as the Jesuit history of 1645 records them

  The wars between the Hiaqui nation of the Sinaloa frontier and the captain Diego Martinez de Hurdaide, and the peace that ended them, told by the losing side's own printed history. It records a Spanish force of twenty-two soldiers surrounded by seven thousand fighters, a tactic devised to bring down armoured horses, women sent as envoys to negotiate, and a peace whose terms included missionaries requested by the Hiaqui and two of their own leaders handed over for execution.

• The Spanish guitar — how an instrument the lexicographers despised acquired a nationality

  In 1611 Covarrubias called the guitar "no more than a cowbell", so easy to strum that "there is no stable boy who is not a guitar player", and mourned the vihuela it had displaced. In 1674 Gaspar Sanz printed at Zaragoza why Europe called the thing a Spanish guitar, and a method teaching it as literate art. Both pages are read here directly, and together they tell no triumph: the instrument became national because it was popular, and the men who wrote it down disagreed about where it came from.

• Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado — the curare chapter (Madrid, 1745)

  The natural history of the Orinoco written by the Jesuit mission superior Joseph Gumilla and printed at Madrid in a revised second edition in 1745. Its twelfth chapter is the first extended European account of curare, and it gets the decisive pharmacological point right — the poison is harmless swallowed and lethal in a wound. The same volume attributes the discovery of it to the devil, on the ground that the Indians who made it lacked the judgement to.

• The hamaca — an Antillean bed described in 1535 and recommended to European armies

  The hanging bed of the Antilles, set down in engineering detail by a Spanish royal chronicler in 1535: the netted cotton cloth, the henequén cords, the trick of lying across it rather than along it, and the argument that European armies should adopt it because fewer soldiers would sicken and die than by sleeping on the ground. By 1611 the word stood in the Castilian dictionary — with a Hebrew etymology, because the lexicographer did not know it was an American word.

• Hernán Cortés

  Spanish conqueror (1485-1547) who led the 1519-1521 campaign that brought down the Mexica (Aztec) empire and founded New Spain. The record supports both his extraordinary generalship and diplomacy and the violence of the conquest — including the Cholula killings and the destruction of Tenochtitlan — and this object states both without whitewash.

• Hernandarias de Saavedra — the governor who asked for missionaries because he had no army

  Governor of the southern provinces at the turn of the seventeenth century, beaten and taken prisoner on the way to the strait of Magellan, and the man who told Madrid he was not strong enough to impose the law on the peoples of the Guayra and proposed to send priests instead. A royal cedula of 1608 approved it; the Jesuits sailed in December 1609; the missions began in 1610. The same page of the same historian records why the reduced Indians were deserting: the tyranny of the Spaniards.

• Hernando de Ribas, Nahua translator of Tetzcuco (d. 1597)

  A Nahua from Tetzcuco, among the first pupils of the college at Tlatelolco, who translated Latin and Spanish into Nahuatl for sense rather than word by word, and who is named in print as the man with whose help Alonso de Molina composed the Nahuatl grammar and dictionary still used today, and Juan de Gaona the Dialogos de la paz. Neither title page carries his name. The attribution survives in one Franciscan's prologue of 1606, nine years after his death.

• Hernando de Soto

  Spanish explorer (c. 1500-1542) who led the 1539-1543 expedition through the interior of today's southeastern United States, the first European crossing of the Mississippi River basin. The expedition's chronicles are the earliest extended written record of the Mississippian chiefdoms — and the expedition itself was violent and, for those societies, catastrophic. Both facts are documented below.

• Antonio de Herrera, Descripción de las Indias Ocidentales (1601)

  Before the narrative of his Décadas, the crown's chronicler of the Indies put a separate book: a systematic geography of Spanish America, keyed to engraved tablas that drew the boundaries of each audiencia district. It measured the globe, timed every ocean crossing, and then listed the nine high courts in the order they were founded, with the number of judges in each. On the same page it records that the viceroy hands out the vacant repartimientos of Indians.

• Herrera, Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos, Década Octava

  The eighth and last Decade of the official history of the Indies, and the volume in which its author explains how such a history was made. Its dedication records that the king and the Council of the Indies ordered him to continue, that the Council attached one of its own members to the work as its Comissario, and that when critics attacked the geographical tables the Council convened a board of cosmographers to examine them.

• Hervás, Catálogo de las lenguas — Volume I, American languages (Madrid, 1800)

  The first volume of Lorenzo Hervás's catalogue of the world's languages, printed at Madrid in 1800 and given entirely to the Americas. Hervás classified languages by their grammatical structure rather than their word-lists, grouped maya, cakchi, poconchi, cakchiquil and pocoman into one family with maya proposed as its parent, and named the Q'eqchi' speaker he owed that grouping to. The same volume records languages already extinct and admits how much is missing.

• Comercio Naval: the working sea law of the Carrera de Indias, as a practitioner's handbook set it out

  The third book of the Curia Philipica's second tome is a working code of ships, seafarers, passengers and cargo for the Spanish Atlantic and Pacific. Seafarers count neither among the living nor the dead but between, and so among the miserable persons the laws favour: a master who withholds wages goes to prison and feeds them until he pays. Passengers are registered so their heirs can be found if they die in the Indies. No Indian may cross to Spain, willing or not.

• Fallidos: the graded law of bankruptcy in the Curia Philipica

  The chapter on failed merchants in the Curia Philipica sorts insolvency by fault before amount. The merchant broken by shipwreck, fire, war or a debtor who did not pay is blameless: no criminal process, no infamy, no prison for debt, and enough left to eat. The merchant who hides his goods or his books is prosecuted as a public robber, and the gallows is in the text, for nobles too. Between them sits fraudulent failure, proved from the books: none kept, or a leaf torn out, and fraud is presumed.

• Thesoro de la verdadera cirugía y vía particular contra la común (Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero; read in the Barcelona printing of 1624)

  A Seville surgeon's argument that head wounds should be closed and dried rather than opened with scraping-irons and trepan drills, made not only from Galen and Hippocrates but from a tally he had drawn off the register of the Hospital del Cardenal: 456 wounded admitted in 1583, 436 discharged healed, 20 dead, and a separate two-and-a-half-month run of head wounds, 57 admitted, 50 healed, 7 dead. The comparison he wanted the numbers to win is the one part he never counted.

• Hospicio de Jesús, María y José de Quito, 1785: a poorhouse and leprosarium paid for by a tax on sugar and wine

  A house taken from the expelled Jesuits became Quito's poorhouse in 1785, funded by a bishop's pastoral appeal that raised over seven thousand pesos and then by earmarked levies on sugar, wine and cloth, a ceded municipal rent and a thousand pesos on each of two bishoprics. It was planned with wards for beggars, orphans and lepers, and its leprosarium opened with five patients. The king's order to put that ward outside the town was not obeyed.

• Hospicio y Hospital Real de Huérfanos, Expósitos y Desamparados of Oviedo, 1752

  A royal poorhouse for orphans, foundlings and the destitute begun at Oviedo in 1752, whose printed ordinances carry a first-person argument for it by the minister who promoted it. The case is demographic rather than devotional — he estimates that ninety of every hundred foundlings die, and counts the survivors as future subjects and marriages — and the same pages record that those who did not enter voluntarily after the public proclamation "serian llevados con apremio".

• The hospital of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción in Mexico City: what Cortés's testament actually endowed, and how

  Clause 9 of Hernán Cortés's testament of 1547 orders the hospital he had begun in Mexico City finished at his own cost, to a plan drawn in Spain that year. The document is worth reading for the financing: not alms, but the ring-fenced rents of his own shops on the calle de Tacuba, which his heir was forbidden to spend otherwise until the building was done, under a constitution copied from a Seville hospital.

• Hospital de Jesús Nazareno (Mexico City, 1524): the hospital named after an Indian woman's image

  The hospital Hernán Cortés founded at Huitzillan appears in the city council's own books in 1524 and was still working when a government geographer surveyed the city in 1867. It was endowed and then badly run - the neglect of its patients became proverbial - and it does not carry Cortés's name: it took the name of an image of Jesus Nazareno owned by Petronila Gerónima, a wealthy Indian woman, whose bequest assigned it by lot to the hospital in 1663.

• The Hospital de Jesús Nazareno of Mexico City and the restitution clauses of Cortés's testament

  A hospital founded in Mexico City in the first years after the conquest under the advocation of la Purísima Concepción, endowed by Hernán Cortés in the same testament whose clauses 39 to 41 order his heir to find out whether the slaves, lands and personal services he had taken could be held with good conscience, and to restore what could not. The charity and the admission of doubt are in one document, and so is the hospital's own use of eight enslaved servants a century later.

• The Hospital de la Cuna at Santa Fe de México — a foundling house and why it was needed

  Two printed witnesses, a century apart, record a cradle-hospital at Quiroga's Santa Fe outside Mexico City where exposed infants were baptised, given salaried wet-nurses, clothed and raised until they joined the town's work. The 1766 account also states plainly what it was built against: Indian children found drowned at dawn in the canals of Mexico, and mothers too destitute to feed them. The relief and the cause are set down here from the same pages.

• Hospital de San Lázaro de México: three centuries of leprosy care, twice destroyed by the authorities that ran it

  A leprosarium founded at Mexico City in the first years after the conquest, pulled down within a decade by the president of the audiencia who wanted the site, refounded by a physician in 1572, made family property by his will, handed to the Order of San Juan de Dios in 1721, rebuilt at fourteen times the sum promised, secularised in 1787 and finally emptied in 1862 to save the city money. Its endowed capacity was 44 beds; a printed return of 1774 records 113 patients in five years.

• The Hospital del Amor de Dios (Mexico City, 1540), the house for the patients no hospital would take

  A hospital opened in Mexico City by the first bishop for sufferers of the venereal disease, who by his own account were received in no hospital of the city and died on the roads and in the Indian towns. Its founder's letter of 1540, the royal grant of November 1540 and the foundation instrument of 1541 are printed; so is the auction of three of its houses to pay a private debt of the same bishop. It ran for more than two centuries.

• Hospital dels Ignocents (Valencia, 1409-1410)

  The Valencia hospital founded after Father Jofré's sermon of 24 February 1409 — provoked by seeing a mentally ill man beaten in the street — and financed by eleven citizens with papal and royal backing. The psychiatric-history literature identifies it as the first hospital in the Western world built solely for the care of the mentally ill.

• The Hospital Real de San Jose de los Naturales, and the evidence in its graves

  A royal hospital in Mexico City founded to treat the indigenous population - the first in Mexico dedicated to it - whose cemetery has been excavated. Over 600 people lie in mass burials laid down in haste, the shape of an epidemic. Ancient DNA from the teeth has identified African-born people buried there and reconstructed the viruses they carried, including one that passed to an indigenous man in the same city. The institution and its cost are in the same ground.

• The Hospital Real de San Miguel of Guadalajara (1670-1742): a tithe-funded hospital, a jurisdictional lawsuit, and the handover that made it cost more

  Guadalajara's royal hospital lived on a ninth and a half of the tithes of a whole bishopric. The cathedral chapter ran it until a crown attorney won it for the royal patronage in 1683; the audiencia then ran it through a salaried lay steward, with enslaved people nursing, five or six patients, and surpluses diverted to a college. In 1704 the city handed it to the Bethlemites: occupancy passed eighty and the surpluses vanished — which the chronicler argues measures improvement, not waste.

• Hospitals that printed their own numbers: New Spain and Cadiz, 1787-1794

  Every January the gazette of Mexico City printed how many patients each hospital had taken in the year before, how many had left, how many had died and how many were still in bed, and once worked out the death rate itself. The returns cover a general hospital in the capital, the naval port hospital at Veracruz, the poorhouse, and a hospital in Cadiz. They record a good deal the government would have had no reason to advertise, including where the money for an Indian hospital came from.

• Hospitals for Indians in the colonial Andes (1548-1666)

  The Peruvian viceroyalty built hospitals reserved for indigenous people from 1548, and paid for them with a levy on indigenous tribute, the tomin de hospital - so the charity came from the pockets of the poor it was for. An inspection in 1619 found hospitals in 74 of 152 places visited and 63 of those 74 deserted. The people they were built for called them the house of the dead, and the version that worked was the one indigenous authorities ran themselves.

• A hospital in every pueblo: the parish-level health institution of Nueva Galicia and the livestock that paid for it (1542-1742)

  A lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, writing in 1742, records that after a general pestilence the religious arbitrated that every pueblo have a hospital, and that in his day no pueblo lacked one — served by deputies named annually, beside a church the pueblo built, paid for from confraternity capitals held in livestock. He also reads the epidemic as divine correction and complains that those pueblos would not let Spaniards build houses among them.

• The hospitals Guadalajara did not have (1742): a colonial lawyer's case for an asylum and a women's hospital

  In the middle of a chronicle of conquest, a lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara stops reporting what exists and argues for what does not: a hospital for the mentally ill of both sexes, whom the hospitals turn away for disturbing other patients and one of whom is in the city jail for a killing; and one for women, whose ward at the royal hospital is staffed by hired attendants with no stake in them. His model is San Hipolito.

• The hospitals and confraternities of Guadalajara (1551-1606): lay charity, a royal order, and the contract that handed a hospital to a religious order without losing it

  Guadalajara's first hospital was not founded by the crown or by an order. A lay confraternity established in 1551 added hospitality to its chapel and took a licence in 1557; a second hospital followed at San Miguel. In 1606, when the first Hospitallers of San Juan de Dios reached New Spain, the confraternity handed its hospital to them under written conditions that kept its property, its title and a reversion clause, approved by the audiencia without prejudice to the royal patronage.

• The hospital law of the Indies (Recopilación, libro I, título 4)

  A 1541 order that hospitals be founded in every town of the Indies, Spanish and Indian alike, codified with twelve further laws into the título "De los Hospitales, y Cofradías". It fixes where a hospital may stand relative to the town, who audits it, which brotherhoods run it, and — in Peru — the head levy indigenous tributaries paid for their own hospitals. The law that governs that levy exists because the officials collecting it were taking it.

• Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (Madrid, 1668 printing of the author's revised text)

  A physician's proposal, addressed to Philip II, that the state appoint deputies to test every child's aptitude and assign him the science he is fit for. Huarte grounds ability in the temperament of the brain, argues no one can master two arts at once, and asks for examiners of ingenio alongside the existing examiners of Latin. The same pages carry what the proposal costs: the child is to be made to study "por fuerça", and women's brains are declared incapable of much wisdom.

• Huauhtli, the grain the Spaniards catalogued as "bledos"

  Amaranth is best known for a story — that Spain banned it — repeated everywhere and sourced nowhere. A dictionary printed at Mexico in 1571 lists nine kinds of the grain by colour under their Nahuatl names and gives it its own harvest verb beside those for maize, chia, chilli and beans. A friar's ethnography records both uses: the dough shield made for a newborn, and the honeyed sops fed to slaves the night before they died. Between them lies the friars' motive — and no decree against the crop.

• Hule (olli, ulli) — the American elastomer described in Spanish print before Europe had a word for it

  Long before Europe had a word for an elastic solid, Spanish books described one. Oviedo wrote in the 1530s that these balls bounce, again and again, by themselves; Molina's 1571 Mexico vocabulary glosses Nahuatl ulli with a Taino word for the game; Ximénez's 1615 Mexico imprint gives the tree, the cut in the bark and the Spanish corruption "vle", ancestor of hule. Excavation dates the game to 1374 BCE. The cost stands in the same chapters.

• Huracán: a Taino word, two storms dated in Santo Domingo, and a dictionary that lost the etymology

  The word hurricane entered European languages from the Caribbean, and the earliest detailed European account of a hurricane says so: Oviedo's chapter of 1535 defines huracán as a word of the island's own language, dates two storms at Santo Domingo to 1508 and 1509, and records the wind reversing from north to south. Two centuries later the Spanish Academy's dictionary printed the word with a Latin etymology instead.

• The Iberian fruit trees of the Argentine subtropics (1493-1767)

  Citrus seeds taken on at Gomera on Columbus's second voyage, and peaches brought from Chile by Nunez de Prado in the 1550s, became naturalised populations that Andean and Guarani communities took over and put to medical uses no European pharmacopoeia had recorded. The Jesuit missions grew oranges in the communal Tupambae until the expulsion of 1767 inventoried them. The peaches of the Quebrada are now named as a marker of local identity.

• The languages of the Zacatecas frontier: a Franciscan province's language rule, printed in 1737

  Arlegui's 1737 chronicle states a standing rule of the Franciscan custody of Zacatecas — every newly arrived friar was to be taught the language of the nation he was posted to — and prints what it produced: fifteen qualified lenguaraces, a minister credited with five languages, Indian interpreters at the first entradas, Nahuatl as the teaching medium. The same pages carry the coercion, the contempt, and the order's admission of what it lost.

• Illegitimacy, dispensation and the parishes of the Indies (Pius V, 1571; Quito, 1668): a canonical bar to the priesthood, and the one qualification that could override it

  Illegitimate birth barred a man from holy orders and from any benefice with cure of souls. The bishop of Quito's manual asks whether bishops in the Indies could dispense that bar, and answers that they probably could - more safely for a parish of Indians than for a parish of Spaniards. Solorzano is quoted giving the ground on which they did it: the title of language, and the better conversion of the Indians. The distance of the Americas from Rome is argued as a reason to read the faculty widely.

• Antonio Ricardo and the first printing press in South America (Lima, 1584)

  A Piedmontese printer who had worked three years in Mexico moved his shop to Lima and in 1584 produced the first book printed in South America: the trilingual Doctrina christiana of the Third Council of Lima, in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara. The licence that admitted the press says why it was wanted - the correctors of Quechua and Aymara could not sail to Castile. The same document names him alone as printer and lets nobody hold the books until the audiencia had examined them.

• The presses of Havana, the cedula that banned them, and the apprentices two public bodies paid for in 1800

  A press was licensed in Havana in 1735; a royal cedula of 1774 refused a second one and forbade any press but the government's; the Captains General did not enforce it and four offices were working by 1800. The trade had no compositors, so the economic society and the Real Consulado advertised paid apprenticeships - ten pesos a month, clothing and keep, three years, an examination every six months. Of five candidates, none met the conditions.

• The printing press of the Guaraní missions (Paraguay, 1721–1727)

  Books printed not in a viceregal capital but in Indian towns: a ritual manual "Laureti typis" in 1721, Montoya's Guaraní grammar reissued at Santa María la Mayor in 1724, and two devotional works whose title pages name a Guaraní author, Nicolás Yapuguay. The standard bibliography records all of them — and also states flatly that a Jesuit wrote the Yapuguay books and hid behind the name. Both the imprints and that verdict are on the record here.

• The Real Imprenta de Niños Expósitos of Buenos Aires (1780)

  The first printing press of Buenos Aires was not owned by a printer, a university or the crown's treasury: it was assigned to the city's foundling home, which took its profits. The types were the disused Jesuit press of Córdoba, transferred under the rule that expelled Jesuit property must go to schooling and charity, and for thirty years every book, bando and newspaper printed in the Río de la Plata carried the foundlings' name in its imprint.

• Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and the Comentarios Reales

  The author of the Comentarios Reales de los Incas (first part, 1609) called himself an Inca and a native of Cuzco, wrote from Spain, and set out to correct Spanish historians of Peru on the ground that they had mistranslated the language. He claims the right to spell Quechua correctly in print "pues soy indio"; the same book carries the providential frame of a Catholic subject, and the elder whose testimony it transmits ends by saying the empire was taken by Garcilaso's own father.

• The conflict-of-interest code for the judges of the Indies (Recopilación, libro II, título XVI)

  A judge of an American Audiencia could not marry in his district, nor let his children marry there; could not buy land or houses, sow wheat or maize, lend at interest, hold a pearl canoe, work a mine, take a present, take a loan, or keep close friendships with the people he judged; and had to pay Indians the city price for an egg. The same título prints the evasions the crown had found, and one prejudicial preamble it never removed.

• Indigenous custom as law in the Indies

  A law of 1555, printed as libro II título I ley iiij of the Recopilación, orders that the laws and good customs the Indians had anciently for their government be kept and executed — while conditioning them on Christianity and on the crown's own code, and reserving the right to add. Título XV binds the Audiencias to decide Indian suits summarily "guardando sus usos y costumbres, no siendo claramente injustos", leaving to Spanish judges which customs were clearly unjust.

• Indians outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition (Recopilación, libro I título 19 ley 17 and libro VI título 1 ley 35)

  Two cross-referenced laws of the Recopilación keep the indigenous population out of the tribunals of the Holy Office: because proceeding against Indians is prohibited to the inquisitors, faith cases go to the ecclesiastical ordinary and lethal sorcery to the royal courts. The exemption is real and narrow. The same code hands indigenous religion to other judges, charges the extirpation of idolatry to the Indians' own community chest, and there predicts accusations manufactured for money.

• Indians imprisoned for debt and the law of service in payment (1567)

  A law of 20 June 1567, printed in the title on jail visits, regulates what happens to an Indian jailed for a debt he cannot pay. He may be handed to his own creditor to work it off — never sold to a third party — at a wage the judge must fix after asking what men of that trade earn, entered by name in the jail-visit book. Drunkenness and concubinage may not be punished with service at all. The law's own recital says why: the practice had already run past every limit.

• The sugar ingenios of Hispaniola (1510s–1530s) — the first plantation complex of the Americas

  The water-powered sugar mill reached Hispaniola in the 1510s and by the 1530s the island had twenty of them and four horse-driven trapiches. Oviedo, a royal official resident there, priced one at ten to twelve thousand ducats and specified that it needed eighty to a hundred and twenty enslaved Africans working continuously. The same book records what that produced: the first slave revolt in the Americas, at Christmas 1521, and the gibbets set along the road afterwards.

• The water engine of Potosí: the reservoirs and the ingenios de la ribera

  Potosí gets rain three or four months a year, so its silver industry ran on stored water. Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 counts the plant: seven gated reservoirs of about 1,700 varas round and three estados deep, feeding forty-eight water-driven stamp mills on the ribera, four at Tanacoñuño, twenty-two at Tarapaya and thirty horse mills. The mercury and the forced labour are here too, and so is the sediment core.

• Why the Audiencias of the Indies were inhibited from encomienda suits, and whether the royal treasury had to sue in the same court as a private man

  Why did the crown take encomienda suits away from courts that tried murder? Libro III capítulo XXX answers at §14: the revolts the encomiendas caused, the ill treatment of the Indians they occasioned, the power of the claimants, and the friendships judges living in the Indies had with them. The same chapter then holds that the royal Fisco must sue a holder with a coloured title in the same forum as anyone else.

• The 1714 inspection of bishop Mendiola's body at Guadalajara: a controlled observation, a comparative argument from Egyptian mummies, and a conclusion outside nature

  On 9 July 1714 a chest was opened at Guadalajara before physicians, surgeons, notaries and two royal scribes sent by the audiencia. They closed the doors to exclude a draught, used two neighbouring bishops' hats as controls, measured the arc, and reasoned from the chemistry of balsams, from Egyptian mummies and from the mineral ground of Zacatecas that the body had never been embalmed. Then they concluded the incorruption was outside the natural order, and a Tridentine junta was convened on it.

• Instruccion for collecting natural productions for the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural

  A royal instruction sent to viceroys, governors, corregidores, alcaldes mayores and intendants telling them how to choose, prepare and ship the natural productions of their districts to Madrid. It drops European nomenclature on purpose, lists the animals of the Americas under the names used there, and then teaches the practical trade - three pounds of each coloured earth, polished stone tablets, plants pressed one to a leaf, spirits changed after a fortnight, a lead tag tied to each animal.

• The Instrucción on the education, treatment and occupations of slaves (1789)

  A royal code for the Spanish Indies that fined owners for underfeeding or abandoning the people they held, ordered every death or absence reported to a judge within three days, prosecuted anyone but the owner who wounded a slave under the penalties for wounding a free person — and in the same document authorised the stocks, the chain and twenty-five lashes. The planters of Havana petitioned against it in 1790; twenty years later the Cuban authorities could not say when it had ever been in force.

• Instruccion sobre las ventas y enagenaciones de tierra de indios (Mexico, 23 February 1781)

  A general order of the audiencia of Mexico voiding every sale, loan, pledge or lease of indigenous land made without licence, including sales between Indians and sales of land held by private inheritance rather than by community grant. Notaries and district justices who drew such instruments faced a 500-peso fine and loss of office, buyers lost the purchase price, and the order was to be cried by bando in Castilian and in the language of each district.

• The lunar-eclipse instructions of 1577 and the longitude of the Indies

  In the same packet as the famous 1577 questionnaire, Spain sent the Americas a second printed sheet almost nobody reads: instructions for observing eclipses of the moon in order to fix latitude and longitude. It was reprinted for each eclipse year, and it worked at least well enough that by February 1578 a cosmographer was asking the Council of the Indies for the observations that had come in from New Spain "porque hace mucho al caso para las longitudes".

• Los intérpretes — the sworn court interpreters of the Audiencias of the Indies

  A salaried, sworn interpreting service attached to every royal court in Spanish America: an oath to add and conceal nothing, a ban on taking so much as food from a litigant, a printed fee of one or two tomines a witness — and two rules that concede the problem, the Indian litigant's right from 1537 to bring a bilingual man of his own to check the official version, and the Indian cabildo's vote, from 1630, on who the interpreter would be. Still being commanded on the justices of Mexico in 1768.

• Isaac Peral

  Spanish naval officer who designed and built the Peral submarine — launched at La Carraca on 8 September 1888, electrically propelled and torpedo-armed — which in trials fired the first torpedo launched underwater by the Spanish navy. The technical board rejected the project despite the trials, Peral left the navy, and the boat survives in the Cartagena Naval Museum.

• Isabel Barreto

  The woman who inherited command of a Pacific expedition by testament. Dying at Santa Cruz in October 1595, the adelantado Álvaro de Mendaña left doña Isabel Barreto universal heir and named her governor, using a royal cédula that let him name whomever he wished; she brought the one surviving ship to the Philippines. Almost everything known about how she exercised that command comes from the party of the chief pilot who quarrelled with her.

• Isabel I of Castile

  Queen of Castile (r. 1474-1504) whose marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon created the dynastic union behind early modern Spain. She financed the 1492 Columbus voyage, and her testament instructed just treatment of the peoples of the Indies. Her reign also created the Spanish Inquisition and expelled the Jews in 1492 — achievement and severity documented side by side.

• Isabel Zendal

  Rectress of the Corunna Foundling Home and the only woman on the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition (1803-1813), responsible for the care of the foundling boys whose arms carried the smallpox vaccine across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Her surname appears in the documents in several variants (Zendala, Sendales, Cendales); she remained in Mexico, where her final whereabouts are unrecorded.

• Jacinto Benavente

  Spanish dramatist (1866-1954), awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the happy manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama". His best-known play, Los intereses creados (1907), reworks commedia dell'arte into a satire of social hypocrisy.

• The botanical garden of the Havana Economic Society, reported month by month for 1862

  The Havana Economic Society's botanical garden published an annual return in its own journal: what was sown and weeded month by month, four cases of classified Cuban plants sent to the botanical garden of Madrid and acknowledged there, ornamental trees despatched to two Cuban ports — and to the captain general's private estate in Spain — new scientific labelling in glass-fronted tin, medicinal plants given free to the public, and the university's botany class supplied from the beds.

• Joaquín Velázquez de León (1732-1786), astronomer of New Spain

  A Mexican-born astronomer who taught himself mathematics after finding neither professor nor books nor instruments at his college, learned indigenous languages and the reading of Aztec glyphs from an Indian teacher before he read Newton, built his own telescopes, corrected an error of longitude that had misplaced California for centuries, observed the transit of Venus of 1769 from a plank observatory, and drew the plans that created the mining tribunal and school of Mexico.

• Jorge Juan

  Spanish naval officer and scientist (1713-1773) who, with Antonio de Ulloa, served on the Franco-Spanish geodesic mission to Quito (1735-1744) that measured a degree of the meridian at the equator and helped settle the shape of the Earth. Their published account was translated across Europe; their confidential report on colonial abuses is part of the record too.

• The jornal of the Indian day-labourer: wages in coin, into his own hand

  A wage clause in the personal-service laws of the Recopilación de leyes de las Indias that is rarely quoted: the day-wage of Indians is what they themselves will take, no tariff imposed, and paid "en propia mano cada dia, ó semana, á voluntad de los Indios". A second law voids payment in wine, chicha, honey or yerba. The same títulos print the crown's contrary reasoning for the drafts, and a law clearing Indians out of the obrajes by telling owners to use enslaved Africans.

• José Echegaray

  Spanish dramatist, civil engineer and statesman (1832-1916), the first Spaniard to win a Nobel Prize. He shared the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature with the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, cited for reviving the great traditions of Spanish drama — after an earlier career as an engineering professor, Minister of Public Works and Finance Minister.

• Jose Manuel Davalos: a Lima physician barred by blood law, and the quinoa memoir Paris turned down

  Son of a freed Black woman and shut out of Lima's university by the purity-of-blood statutes, Davalos took his medical degree at Montpellier and in 1787 offered the Societe Royale de Medecine of Paris a memoir on the heroic virtues of quinoa. Paris refused him. Lima's own journal granted that Europe esteemed his work and accused him of dishonouring his country by printing what its physicians got wrong.

• Josep Trueta and the closed treatment of war fractures (1936-1939)

  A Barcelona surgeon who, treating the wounded of a bombed city, standardised a handling of compound fractures that broke with the reflexes of the last war: excise early, do not suture, do not drain, seal the limb in unsplit plaster, leave it alone. His published series was 1,073 patients with six deaths. He carried it to England in February 1939 with the Barcelona transfusion service, and read it to British surgeons before their cities were bombed. He did not invent it, and who did is contested.

• The prologue to Fray Juan Bautista's Sermonario (Mexico, 1606)

  A Franciscan who had not wanted to learn Nahuatl, and who published eleven books in it, opened his last big one by naming the eight Nahua scholars who had made them: where each was born, what he could do, when he died, and which famous friar's dictionary he had actually helped compose. It is the fullest attribution of indigenous authorship printed in sixteenth-century New Spain, and it survives because a nineteenth-century bibliographer copied it out of a book already almost impossible to find.

• Juan de la Cierva

  Spanish aeronautical engineer whose autogiro C.4, flown at Getafe on 17 January 1923, was the first successful rotary-wing aircraft of any kind. His articulated rotor with flapping hinges solved the problem of asymmetric lift — the Smithsonian's own record calls it necessary for the development of the practical helicopter.

• Fray Juan de San Miguel, founder of Uruapan

  The Franciscan who learned Tarascan in 1536 and spent the next decades gathering people the Spanish conquest had driven into the sierra back into towns he laid out himself — plaza, streets, orchards, a chapel per barrio, schools of letters and of music, a hospital in each. Romero reports that he defended the indigenous against the conquistadors, and that the statue they raised to him was the only memorial anyone kept.

• Juan de Zumarraga, first bishop of Mexico - the press, the hospital, the schools, and the burnings

  The Franciscan sent to Mexico as bishop-elect and Protector of the Indians, who quarrelled with the first Audiencia over that office, brought the first printing press of the Americas with the viceroy, built a hospital for patients no other house would take, and pressed for schools for indigenous girls. He also held the title of apostolic inquisitor, tried and burned an Indian lord, and was reprimanded for it in writing. Both halves come from a biographer who admired him.

• Jorge Juan, Examen marítimo theórico práctico (Madrid, 1771)

  A Spanish naval officer set out to take shipbuilding out of the hands of carpenters and put it on mechanics. The 1771 treatise reviews the European literature by name, rejects Bouguer's masting rules and the pendulum theory of rolling, and builds a theory of fluid resistance — then prints, in a scholium, the objection that might overturn it. Its 1793 Spanish editor records both the Paris-privileged French translation of 1783 and the slips he found in the text.

• Juan Ignacio Molina, the natural and civil history of Chile (Bologna, 1782 and 1787)

  Two essays by a Chilean-born Jesuit expelled with his order and writing in Italy: a natural history that carried Chilean species into the Linnaean system, and a civil history whose second book treats the Araucanians as a constituted state with tetrarchates, provinces and counties, and devotes chapters to their rhetoric, astronomy and medicine. Read here in the 1808 American translation, whose reviewer showed the translator had worked from the French.

• Fray Juan Ramírez, fourth bishop of Guatemala (died 1609)

  A Dominican bishop of Guatemala who made the wage and the forced service of Indians a matter of the confessional: he refused absolution to anyone holding an Indian in service or repartimiento until the man was let go free, took the argument to the Synod of Mexico, was ordered to stop preaching it, and asked licence to ride the whole province recording how judges and townsmen used their Indians and whether they paid them. The only account of him read here is his own order's.

• Juan Ramón Jiménez

  Spanish poet (1881-1958), awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which in Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistical purity". Author of Platero y yo, he died in exile in Puerto Rico two years after the award.

• Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza (Taxco, New Spain - Madrid, 1639), the American dramatist of the Spanish stage

  The one first-rank dramatist of the Golden Age born in the Americas, printed in Madrid in 1628 and Barcelona in 1634 while he held office as relator of the Council of the Indies. His nineteenth-century editor calls him "the distinguished American writer", quotes the verse in which he put the drainage works of the valley of Mexico on a Madrid stage, prints the lampoons on his crooked back, and doubts in the same volume whether he ever saw Mexico.

• Juan Sebastián Elcano

  Basque mariner (c. 1487-1526) who commanded the ship Victoria on the final leg of the Magellan expedition and completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth, returning to Spain in September 1522 with a handful of survivors. The voyage proved in practice that the world's oceans are connected and laid the route knowledge for a Spanish trans-Pacific link.

• Gaming in the Indies: the Third Council of Lima's excommunication, and the manual that says the winnings need not be given back

  A bishop of Quito devotes a treatise of his manual for parish priests to gambling, and defends play as morally neutral before regulating it. The disciplinary canon he then quotes in full is aimed not at the Indians but at the clergy of the Indies, excommunicating any cleric who stakes more than fifty gold pieces at dice or cards. Its first session then concludes that the excommunicated cleric keeps what he won - the game being an illicit contract and not a void one.

• El juicio de amparo — a rights remedy wider than habeas corpus

  The Mexican constitutional action that lets any inhabitant ask a federal judge to protect any right the constitution grants — not only personal liberty — against a law or an act of any authority, and that pays for that breadth with a rule its own drafters wrote in: the judgment protects the complainant and says nothing about the law. Read from the 1881 essay by the president of the Mexican Supreme Court and from the text of the 1857 constitution reprinted in its appendix.

• The juicio de residencia in the Indies

  Every royal officer in the Spanish Indies, from a village corregidor to the viceroy of Peru, had to stand a public audit when his term ended, and could not be appointed to anything else without the certificate of it. One law of 1556 orders that the edicts opening a residencia be published so as to come to the notice of the Indians, so that they may demand justice for their grievances in full liberty. Two naval officers reporting in secret in the 1740s describe how the audit was bought.

• The Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos (Spanish Indies, 1526-1821)

  A standing court in every American Audiencia, staffed by a rotating oidor, whose business was to find the estate of anyone who died in the Indies, inventory it, auction it, ship the proceeds to Seville and hand them to heirs who had never crossed the ocean. Its founding law admits, in the sentence that creates it, that officials had been spending the money — which is why the office was made temporary, unsalaried and removable.

• Juzgado General de Naturales (the General Indian Court of New Spain)

  A standing court in Mexico City for the lawsuits of indigenous litigants, still being regulated in 1784 by a printed cartel that gave it two salaried advocates, two solicitors, a general interpreter, fixed office hours, and a fee schedule posted in the public part of the building so that the Indians themselves could read it. Tributaries and the poor paid nothing. Its own rules exist because its officers had been overcharging.

• Keeping the vaccine alive: vaccine boards, conservators and human reservoirs in Spanish America, 1805-1815

  The royal expedition delivered cowpox to America in 1804; the harder problem was keeping a living fluid alive afterwards, year on year, in cities without refrigeration. Two theatres show how it was done and what it cost - Santa Fé de Bogotá, whose vaccine board published a count of 1532 vaccinations in three years, and Buenos Aires, where a priest kept the fluid at his own house and the arms it passed through were those of enslaved men and foundling children.

• Andrés Laguna's Castilian Dioscorides (Antwerp, 1555) and the witch-ointment he tested on a living patient

  In 1555 the Segovian physician Andrés Laguna printed at Antwerp the first Castilian translation of Dioscorides, with his own commentary and plant figures. In the nightshade annotation he set down something rarer: as city physician of Metz he had obtained the green flying-ointment found in an accused couple's hut, had it rubbed over a sleepless woman, and revived her from a long narcotic sleep of vivid pleasures — concluding the witches' Sabbath was a drug-dream, not a flight.

• Juan Baptista de Lagunas, Arte y dictionario en lengua Michuacana (Mexico, 1574)

  The grammar and dictionary of the language of Michoacan printed at Mexico in 1574, four years after a Franciscan working out of Tarecuato and Guayangareo submitted it for approval. Page one announces the book in that language rather than in Spanish; the dictionary quotes sentences collected in the field; and the modern edition that reproduces it opens by admitting that the very name of the language - tarasco or purepecha - carries a colonial episode its speakers were ashamed of.

• Diego de Landa, Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan (c. 1566, first printed 1864)

  The Franciscan who burned the Maya books wrote, in the same account, the list of Maya day signs and sound signs that became the first key anyone had to reading them. Both sentences sit on facing pages of the edition that finally printed him in 1864, three centuries after he wrote, from a copy found in the archives of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid. The destruction and the record of what was destroyed have the same author, and neither can be reported without the other.

• Rafael Landivar's Rusticatio Mexicana (Bologna, 1782)

  A Guatemalan Jesuit, expelled from America with his order in 1767, spent his Italian exile writing fifteen books of Latin hexameters about the country he would not see again: the lakes of Mexico and their floating gardens, the new volcano of Jorullo, cochineal and indigo, the silver works, the sugar mills, the herds, the beavers, the games. Menendez y Pelayo called it the Georgics transferred to American nature. The poem exists because a Spanish king deported its author.

• Las Siete Partidas — a thirteenth-century Castilian code still cited in 1820 Louisiana

  The law book compiled at the court of Alfonso X from 23 June 1256, which Castile never let go: pushed to last place in the order of authorities in 1348 and kept there for five centuries, taught as derecho patrio in the universities, carried to the Indies as the residual law behind every American code, and translated into English at the expense of the state of Louisiana in 1820 because its courts still had to apply it — slave law and all.

• El Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes desde Buenos-Ayres hasta Lima (1773)

  The road book of the royal post inspection that laid out the stages between Buenos Aires and Lima, published in 1773 over the name of a Cuzco-born narrator who calls himself Concolorcorvo. It is a working document of an administrative reform - where the posts were sited, and why - and it prints the abuse the reform replaced: mules taken by force from the poorest muleteers, which the book itself calls a tyranny no words can explain.

• Restitution by will: the encomendero's legacy to his Indians treated as a debt, not a pious work

  The last charge of the encomienda was to restore everything wrongly taken: to the injured Indians or their heirs, and failing them to their communities, churches and hospitals. Restitution was commonly made by legacy in a will, and the standard treatise holds such legacies "no merecen el nombre de Legados; sino de confession de la dicha deuda" — debt, not charity. A cédula of 1568 ordered them enforced; the same jurist then reads it down against the heirs.

• Antonio de León Pinelo, Epítome de la Biblioteca Oriental i Occidental (1629)

  The first systematic bibliography of the Americas, printed at Madrid in 1629 by a jurist raised in Lima and employed as relator of the Council of the Indies. Its catalogue is indexed by the language a book was written in, so Quichua stands as a column beside Greek, English and Catalan; and its section on the languages of the Indies lists, title by title, the grammars and dictionaries made for a dozen American tongues.

• Tratado de confirmaciones reales (Madrid, 1630): the first printed monograph on the law of the Indies, written while its author was compiling the Recopilacion

  A book on a narrow question - which grants in the Americas need the king's confirmation - that became the first systematic treatment of the royal law of the Indies. Leon Pinelo, raised in Lima, had spent seven years compiling the Recopilacion; his margins cite it by book, title and law fifty years before it was printed. His prologue gives the reason: the naturales have no protection when judged but the laws, and are wronged when judges do not know the cedulas.

• Antonio de León y Gama, Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras (Mexico, 1792)

  The book a criollo astronomer of Mexico City wrote about two Mexica monuments dug out of the main square in 1790, arguing from Nahuatl manuscripts and codices in his own hands that their makers had geometry, mechanics and a corrected luni-solar calendar. It records the viceregal order that preserved one stone, the informal handover of the other, and the reason its censor wanted the argument made.

• Leonardo Torres Quevedo

  Spanish engineer (1852-1936) who built the Telekino — recognized by an IEEE Milestone as a pioneer of wireless remote control — designed the Whirlpool Aero Car still operating over the Niagara gorge since 1916, built a chess-playing automaton, and is treated by the history of computing as a key figure between Babbage's Analytical Engine and the electronic digital computer.

• The ley de Malinas and its declaratorias: where a suit over an encomienda had to be tried, 1545-1610

  A Provisión issued at Malines on 20 October 1545 took every suit over an encomienda away from the governors and Audiencias of the Indies and reserved it privatively to the king. Libro III capítulo XXX of the Política Indiana narrates what followed: declaratorias across sixty-five years that handed back first the dispossessions, then every suit worth a thousand ducados of rent or less.

• The Chile slavery laws of the Recopilación (libro VI, título II)

  The título of the Indies code headed "De la libertad de los Indios" is where Spanish law made exceptions to its own principle, and where it took one back. Its laws forbid selling an Indian "porque son de su naturaleza libres", licence the enslavement of Carib and Mindanao captives, recite the case for enslaving the Mapuche — then revoke it, order those already sold out of Chile brought home, name the three devices that kept the trade alive, and record that Chile's governor had suspended it.

• The book law of the Indies (Recopilación, libro I, título 24)

  Fourteen laws on what could be printed about the Indies, what could be shipped there and who checked it. The título forbids novels in 1543, sends grammars of indigenous languages to a local examiner rather than to Madrid, hands the liturgical trade to the Escorial as a monopoly, and orders that every permitted book be entered in the register one by one, "y no se registren por mayor" — the clause that created the shipping lists historians still count.

• The cleaning and paving programme of Mexico City (1769-1782)

  A bando of 1769 required every house in Mexico City to build a covered refuse pit and a masonry cesspit vented to the roof, banned tipping into the streets and acequias, and set convict carts to empty the pits; a later plan flagged the pavements and covered the house drains, charged to the owners. Four convents sued to be excused. A royal cedula of 1782 refused them, on the ground that paving keeps epidemics out of crowded places.

• Liquidámbar — the Nahua xochiocotzotl that New Spain exported as a perfume and medicine

  Hernández's remedies, printed by Ximénez in Mexico in 1615, describe a great tree the Nahua call xochiocotzotl whose incised bark yields the liquor Spaniards named liquidámbar yndiana, and record it packed with tobacco in the smoking canes of the Indies. Acosta in 1590 rates it an esteemed medicinal perfume-resin and says New Spain surpasses all provinces in these gums. Each claim is bound to the page that carries it, with the indigenous origin and the modern identity kept honest.

• Domingo Royo, Llave de albeyteria (Zaragoza, 1734): an Aragonese farrier argues against the lancet

  A village animal-doctor of Aragon printed, in 1734, a case against bleeding as a routine. He complains that masters open a vein because the authors order it and not because the case indicates it, surveys the centuries and the nations that never adopted the remedy, says that it reigns in Spain alone with a sceptre nobody contests, and reports that the carcasses on the dung heaps were what made him give it up. The copy read was kept in the library of the Madrid veterinary school.

• Lope de Vega

  The dramatist who gave the Spanish stage its repertoire and who is quoted for a number he never verified: 1,500 plays by his own count, 1,800 by his first biographer's. Twentieth-century attribution study put 316 comedias beyond doubt — still, by a distance, the largest dramatic corpus of the Siglo de Oro.

• Diego López de Arenas, Breve compendio de la carpintería de lo blanco (Seville, 1727 impression)

  A working Seville master carpenter put the geometry of the Andalusian timber roof into print — thirty-two chapters of template-squares, muqarnas clusters, land valuation, artillery calibre and sundials, written because disputes over measurement filled the courts. Its last table gives the pole altitudes of Mexico, Havana, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Guatemala and a dozen more American places, and the author says why: the fleets carried carpenters, masons and gunners who might need them.

• Alonso López de Hinojosos, Suma y recopilación de cirugía (Mexico, 1578)

  A surgical manual printed at Mexico City by Antonio Ricardo in 1578, written by the surgeon and nurse of the hospital for Indians of that city — a man with no medical degree, who signed himself by his hospital post. Its author had spent fourteen years at the Hospital Real de indios and had opened bodies there with the protomédico Francisco Hernández during the epidemic of 1576, looking for the cause of a disease that was emptying New Spain.

• Juan Lopez de Velasco, Descripcion universal de las Indias (1571-1574)

  The first attempt to describe every part of the Spanish Indies in one book, compiled by the cosmographer-chronicler of the Council of the Indies between 1571 and 1574 and left in manuscript for three hundred years. It counts towns, households, encomenderos and tributary Indians; it fixes the longitude of Mexico from a lunar eclipse; and it rejects Atlantis and the ten tribes to argue that the New World must join the Old somewhere in the north.

• Gregorio López, Tesoro de medicinas — a layman's remedy book vetted in print by physicians

  A remedy book put together in New Spain by a hermit who was not a physician, its cures tried at the hospital of Huaxtepec and keyed to Nahuatl plant and bird names. The Madrid 1708 printing read here carries something rarer than the remedies: printed notes in which two licensed physicians qualify the hermit's prescriptions and, in places, refuse to approve them at all — inside an edition openly published to advance his canonisation.

• Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Memoria sobre las serpientes — an American snakebite programme that prints its own negative result

  The zoologist of the Royal Botanical Expedition of New Granada published in the Semanario a memoir on the snakes of the kingdom and on the remedies for their bites. It sorts the remedies by how they are supposed to act, sets out three experiments to settle what venom is for, asks observers in every province to use Linnaean names — and records that the celebrated guaco failed: a woman bitten on an estate was dosed heavily inside and out and died thirty hours later.

• Fray Bernardo de Lugo, Gramática en la lengua general del Nuevo Reyno, llamada mosca (Madrid, 1619)

  The only grammar of Muisca ever printed, by a Dominican born in Bogotá who held the chair of the language there, set in Madrid in 1619 with a character not in the Spanish alphabet because the language has a vowel Spanish does not. Its front matter lets the language speak in a sonnet; its last pages are a confession manual, which is what the grammar was for; and the editor who reprinted it in 1871 says the printing is too full of errors to be a secure text.

• Luisa Roldán (La Roldana)

  Spanish Baroque sculptor (1652-1706), trained in her father Pedro Roldán's Seville workshop, who rose to escultora de cámara — sculptor to the royal chamber — under Charles II in 1692: a woman holding the crown's sculpture office in a profession otherwise closed to women. Her polychrome Saint Ginés stands in the Getty Museum.

• Antonio Machoni, Arte y vocabulario de la lengua lule y tonocoté (Madrid, 1732)

  The only printed grammar and dictionary of Lule and Tonocoté, two Chaco languages that no longer have speakers. A Sardinian Jesuit working on the Tucumán frontier put the languages into rules and got them through a Madrid press in 1732 — a hundred years after an earlier grammar of the same speech was written and lost for want of a printer. The same preliminaries record why the Lules were exempted from encomienda, what they owed instead, and the epidemic that met the mission on arrival.

• Metl, the maguey: the plant a 1615 Mexican pharmacopoeia said could supply almost everything, and the drink the same monarchy taxed and policed

  A Mexican imprint of 1615 counts the uses of the agave the Nahua called metl one by one and says the plant alone could supply almost everything human life needs. A creole naturalist of 1788 claimed more than thirty uses obtained by the Indians; a physician printed a chemical study of pulque in December 1772. The cost is in the same record: the drink was a crown monopoly, and a royal order of 1778 proposed administering the taverns to reduce the drunkenness.

• American maize in the Canary Islands: the Columbian exchange measured in bone chemistry

  The Canaries are usually a waypoint in this story - the last watering stop before the Atlantic. Isotopes in 66 skeletons from Gran Canaria turn the islands into the measuring instrument instead. Before the conquest the diet was Mediterranean barley and wheat; by the eighteenth century American maize supplied about two thirds of the carbon in island childhoods, and the granary returns agree. The same record holds the people the change was built on.

• Malaspina expedition (1789-1794)

  Spain's great Enlightenment scientific circumnavigation: five years, the corvettes Descubierta and Atrevida, hydrographic surveys and natural-history collections from the Americas to the Philippines and the Pacific. Its results went largely unpublished for a century after its commander fell to court politics and prison — the reason the expedition is under-told, stated on the record.

• Manatí: an animal outside the authorities, described from the Caribbean in the 1520s

  Oviedo opens his manatee chapter by saying that neither Pliny nor Albertus Magnus wrote of this animal and that Spain has none. He then records flippers in place of arms, hide without scales, grazing at the river bank, two teats on the chest of the female with young suckled at them, and the remora fishery that took the animal, along with the meat trade, the medicinal ear-stones, and a past tense about the Indians of Hispaniola.

• Maní: a crop domesticated in southeastern Bolivia, listed as mission food in 1786, and now grown on 28 million hectares

  The peanut is an American domesticate the Spanish world moved rather than made. Genetics and biogeography place its origin in southeastern Bolivia, where both wild progenitors still grow near Villa Montes, and its main landraces had spread across South America before 1492; Peruvian archaeology carries its use back thousands of years. Alcedo's dictionary of 1786 lists maní among the ordinary foods of the Apolobamba missions, beside American yuca and maize and Old World rice.

• Manuel Bastos Ansart and the closed method before the Civil War (1909-1924)

  A Spanish army surgeon who, between a colonial war in Morocco and a children's ward in Madrid, was treating open fractures by excision and sealed plaster fifteen years before the Civil War made the technique famous under another man's name. His route into it ran through Paris and Buenos Aires rather than the American literature: the Argentine surgeon Pedro Chutró taught it in Madrid in 1921. The historians who recovered him do not claim he invented the method - their argument is that nobody did.

• Manuel de Falla

  Spanish composer (1876-1946), in the state archives' own description the most important and universal Spanish composer of the twentieth century. Formed by Pedrell in Madrid and by the Paris of Debussy and Ravel, he wrote El amor brujo, El sombrero de tres picos and Noches en los jardines de España, and died in Argentine exile with his Atlántida unfinished.

• Mapa geográfico de América Meridional (Madrid, 1775) — the Spanish line that the world's atlases went on printing

  In 1775 the royal geographer Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla issued at Madrid a large map of South America compiled, its own title says, from original maps and reports adjusted to astronomical observations. Its London reissue of 1799 called the original "un Mapa español mui raro", and the boundary engraved on it was still copied by Philadelphia and Paris publishers sixty years later as "the Cruz Cano line". The sources read are papers of a party to the dispute, and the claims say so.

• Maravilla americana (Mexico, 1756): painters called as expert witnesses

  On 30 April 1751 the collegiate chapter of the Guadalupe sanctuary outside Mexico City assembled the most credited painters of the city, took the glass off an image, and asked them to judge by the rules of their art whether it could be human work. Miguel Cabrera printed his report in 1756 with the signed statements of three of the men who were there. The same pages that record the examination record who convened it and what they wanted from it.

• Pedro Marbán, Arte de la lengua moxa (Lima, licensed December 1701)

  The first printed description of an Amazonian language of the Bolivian lowlands, licensed at Lima in December 1701 and printed there with a vocabulary, a catechism and a confessionary bound in. Its opening chapter records what Latin grammar could not hold: a sound system missing four Spanish letters, an aspiration that distinguishes words, nouns with no gender and no case, and possession carried by prefixes that the grammarian describes exactly and then apologises for.

• Margarita Salas

  Spanish molecular biologist (1938-2019), formed in Severo Ochoa's New York laboratory, who introduced molecular biology to Spain and whose phage phi29 research yielded the phi29 DNA polymerase — a highly processive, strand-displacing enzyme whose amplification applications became the most profitable patent in the history of the CSIC. European Inventor Award (lifetime achievement), 2019.

• María Zambrano

  Spanish philosopher (1904-1991), formed in the Madrid of Ortega y Gasset, who spent forty-five years in exile after the Civil War — Paris, New York, Havana, Mexico — and received, after her return, the Premio Príncipe de Asturias (1981) and the Premio Cervantes (1988), the Spanish language's highest literary honor.

• Juan de Mariana, De monetæ mutatione (1609)

  The thirteen-chapter treatise in which a Jesuit historian argued that debasing the coinage is a tax levied without consent, and therefore theft; that money has two values which a well-ordered commonwealth must keep equal; and that prices rise by as much as is taken out of the coin. He argued it from Castilian statute and from a price history of four earlier debasements, refused the same reasoning's application to the American silver, and printed the case against himself in his own chapter IX.

• Mario Vargas Llosa

  Peruvian-born writer (1936-2025), Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". A Spanish national by royal naturalization decree since 1993, he belongs to both literatures: the Nobel Foundation lists him under Peru, and Spanish accounts count him among Spain's laureates — both facts are stated here.

• Due antichi monumenti di architettura messicana (Rome, 1804): an expelled Mexican Jesuit puts El Tajin and Xochicalco before the architects of Europe

  In 1804 a Jesuit expelled from New Spain published in Rome, in Italian and with plates, the first European book devoted to two Mesoamerican buildings. Pedro Jose Marquez worked at one remove, from two Mexico City printed reports of 1785 and 1791, converting American varas into Roman palms so that architects could compare. He argued from the fabric that the builders had science, and printed, as a Jesuit, that the burning of the indigenous books had destroyed the evidence.

• Martín de Rada: the Augustinian who led the first Spanish mission into Ming China, 1575

  A friar from Pamplona who offered to be carried into China as a slave if that was the only way in, and who went instead as an envoy from Manila in 1575 with a friar born in Mexico. He came back with printed Chinese books, a Chinese vocabulary he had compiled, a bilingual copy of the Lord's Prayer and a written account of the journey. The vocabulary is lost; the account became the spine of the book that told Europe what China was.

• Enrico Martinez, Reportorio de los tiempos y historia natural desta Nueva Espana (Mexico, 1606)

  An almanac, cosmography and natural history computed for the sky over Mexico rather than shipped from Spain, printed in 1606 by its author, the crown's cosmographer. Its prologue says why: books brought from the kingdoms of Spain do not agree with the meridian and climate of this land. Its chapter on the lake of Mexico blames Spanish ploughs and cattle for loosening the hillsides, reasons that the silt is raising the lake bed while the city sinks, and warns the city may suffer for it.

• Maize bread, cabuya wine and small hosts (Quito, 1668): what a parish two hundred leagues from the port could lawfully put on the altar

  In pueblos where no grain but maize grew and the nearest wine landed two hundred leagues away, mass was sometimes simply not said. The bishop of Quito's manual works the problem as canon law - and refuses maize bread and the wine drawn from cabuya, on a definition of grain taken from Pliny. What it allows instead is a tiny host rather than none, an interrupted sacrifice when a raid is coming, and a papal dispensation, argued for, to consecrate under bread alone where there is no wine.

• Matlatzinca (Pirinda) missionary philology — five described works, none printed

  Five friars are recorded as having written grammars, dictionaries, sermons and catechisms in Matlatzinca; not one was printed. By 1862 only two of the bodies of work could be found, both in manuscript and one of them truncated, and the language itself survived in a single town. Beristáin records how the fullest of them was made: an Augustinian past sixty gathered the ablest Matlatzinca speakers and composed it with them.

• The Maya chronicles of Yucatan: the books of Chilan Balam and the town chronicles kept in the Latin alphabet (printed Philadelphia 1882)

  After the hieroglyphic books were burned, Maya towns went on keeping their own histories in Maya, in the alphabet the missions had taught them, and went on copying them into the eighteenth century. The chronicles that survive are the work of Maya writers, not of Spaniards; one of them records both the burnings and the royal auditor who came from Castile to stop them.

• Medical services of the Spanish armed forces, c.1665-1700

  Under the reign usually written off as the nadir of Spanish power, the monarchy ran standing military hospitals from Mechelen to Cartagena, put a surgeon in every regiment and a physician, surgeon and pharmacist in every galleon, and contracted the Hospitallers of St John of God to nurse them. It also paid for almost none of it on time. The same archival study establishes both, and rates the result better than England's and worse than the Dutch Republic's.

• The world trade in medicinal plants from Spanish America, 1717-1815

  Between 1717 and 1778 the American medicinal plants landed legally in Spain tripled, from 45 tonnes a year to 155 - cinchona, jalap, sarsaparilla, ipecacuanha, guaiacum, the balsams. The knowledge that identified them was Andean, Tupi-Guarani and Araucanian; the trade that carried them was largely not Spanish, and by 1774 Spanish officials reckoned their own merchants handled a sixth of the traffic in a bark that grew nowhere but in their king's dominions.

• Medicinal plants in the California missions, and the 1812 survey that counted them

  In 1812 the Alta California missions were asked, among much else, what plants the Indians used as medicine. Thirteen of eighteen answered that they used them; between them they named sixteen species. Native Californians had used around two hundred and sixty-five. The gap, and the eight reasons a modern study gives for it, are the most exact measure available of how much medical knowledge the mission system actually took in — and of how much it refused.

• The legal measures of land and water of New Spain

  Spanish America measured water as an aperture, not a volume: a buey was a hole one vara square, subdivided into surcos, naranjas, reales and pajas, so that a grant was a fixed share of a moving stream. The same formulary fixes the caballeria at 1,104 by 552 varas and prints the cedulas on the 600 varas owed to every Indian pueblo - together with the landowners' brief against them. Its fifth edition appeared in 1868, still in force.

• Cartilla nueva para las matronas (Madrid, 1750): the examination manual for midwives

  In 1750 the Real Tribunal del Protomedicato had a manual written for the women it was about to begin examining again. The prologue says why: the examination of midwives had been suspended in Castile alone by a royal pragmática, and study had stopped with it. The King, on the Council of Castile's advice, ordered every woman living by the office examined in theory and practice — and a cartilla made so that they could prepare for it.

• Juan de Medina, De la orden que en algunos pueblos de Espana se ha puesto en la limosna (1545)

  The printed defence of the Castilian towns that had replaced street begging with a municipal alms fund. Its author advised the reform at Zamora, was ordered to set down his grounds, and answers the theologians who attacked it: nobody should need to beg, and freedoms held by natural right may be withdrawn for the public good. He also reports asking the city's poor, on two Saturdays in February, whether they preferred the ration to begging - and records what happened to the two who said no.

• The memorials of Pedro Fernández de Quirós to Philip III

  A campaign of petitions, some of them made public, by which a pilot tried for a decade to get a fleet sent back to the South Sea. The crown treated his written memorial as an asset transmissible to a successor, then paid him an allowance to keep him quiet, and the Council of State advised the king that the danger in refusing was that the man would carry his proposals to other princes.

• Gerónimo de Mendieta's Historia eclesiástica indiana (written by 1596, first printed Mexico, 1870)

  A Franciscan history of New Spain written under a written order from Rome, dedicated to a superior in 1611, and not printed until 1870 — 259 years between the dedication and the press. Its second book describes Nahua religion, law, schooling and marriage before any account of the conversion, and its index names the harm Spaniards did to the Indians in the same column as the favours of Charles V and Philip II.

• Juan González de Mendoza, Historia del gran reyno de la China (Rome, 1585)

  The book that told early modern Europe what China was. Compiled at Rome in 1585 by an Augustinian who never entered China, out of the reports of friars who had, it was reprinted and translated across the continent within four years, carried an itinerary of the New World bound in with it, and argued in print — with a printed Chinese specimen to hand — that printing had reached Europe from China rather than beginning there.

• Mendoza Rios's Tables for Navigation (London, 1805): a Spanish computer's tables, subsidised by the Board of Longitude to reach poor navigators

  In 1805 a Spaniard published in London a complete collection of tables for finding longitude by lunar distance. The Commissioners of Longitude and the East India Company each voted money to cut its price, and the author gave up his profit, so it would not be confined to navigators "in easy circumstances". Sixty-eight years later the British Association's committee on mathematical tables was still using his terminology and recording other men's tables copied from his.

• Tomas de Mercado, Summa de tratos y contratos: a confessor audits the Seville slave trade

  A Dominican manual of commercial morality written for the merchants who dealt on the steps of Seville cathedral, and the place where one of them set down what the Cape Verde traffic actually was: manufactured titles, ambushes, five hundred people in one hold, a hundred and twenty dead by morning. It ends in two propositions that do not agree with each other, and the object prints both.

• Huancavelica: the American mercury that refined American silver

  The cinnabar of Huancavelica, worked from 1564, gave Peru its own supply of the mercury that silver amalgamation consumed. The achievement has a measured price: an estimated 56,000 tons of mercury vapour, a labour draft that named the men it took, a disease the sixteenth century already called the illness of Huancavelica, and adobe walls contaminated still. And a counterpoint — a lake beside Potosí records more mercury from pre-Hispanic smelting than from the colonial process that replaced it.

• The Mercurio Peruano and the Sociedad Académica de Amantes del País (Lima, 1791)

  A paper printed at Lima from January 1791 by men writing under Greek pseudonyms, whose stated purpose was to dispel the prejudices by which less instructed pens had degraded Peru and its wits from the place they occupy on the map of the universe. Its third tome carries a prize competition judged by thirteen elected voters with the losing papers burnt unread, a subscriber list running from Quito to Potosi, and a discourse about itself reprinted from the newspaper of Bogota.

• The Mercurio Volante (Mexico City, 1772): a weekly of physics and medicine written for the people who were not supposed to read it

  A paper begun at Mexico City on 17 October 1772 by Josef Ignacio Bartolache, doctor of the Real Universidad, appearing every Wednesday because that is the day the posts of the kingdom left the capital. Its second number says it is written for those who are not sujetos de carrera and for the vulgo, and that women are a sex unjustly despised as useless for the sciences only because men have wanted it so. The same pages call the sciences successors to the ignorance of the Indians.

• The Mesta of New Spain: the stock-raisers' court that wrote the first brand law of the Americas

  Mexico City's cabildo drew up ordinances for the herds around 1540; the crown confirmed them in 1542 and ordered the institution introduced wherever the same reason held. What it produced is a working range code for a hemisphere: elected alcaldes de mesta with a staff of justice, four ten-day round-ups a year at named towns, compulsory membership above three hundred head, strays cried and returned, and a rule that no two owners may use the same brand.

• Mestizos in the law of the Indies: the bar on office, and the crown jurist's argument against it

  Spanish American law barred people of mixed descent from notaryships, from the protectorship of the Indians, from holy orders and from encomiendas — and the crown's own leading jurist printed, in the same chapter, that to exclude them "solo por la sangre mezclada" would be a hard and inhuman thing. Both halves are on one page of the Política Indiana, with the hostile stereotype, the tribute rule and its perverse family effects beside them.

• The method of the Querétaro missions: a mission rule the friars wrote themselves, printed with its own indictment

  The apostolic college of the Santa Cruz de Querétaro governed its mission pueblos by a method its own missionaries agreed among themselves in 1767 and reported to the viceroy in 1772: bells at sunrise, doctrine in Castilian, the friar as physician and as advocate against the Spaniards who lived in the pueblo, and an annual election of the pueblo's governor by consultation of all. The same reports say the Indians were badly instructed and the individual sowings barely helped them.

• Miguel de Cervantes

  Author of Don Quixote (two parts, 1605 and 1615), baptized in Alcalá de Henares on 9 October 1547 and dead in Madrid in 1616. Soldier at Lepanto — where he lost the use of his left hand — five years a captive in Algiers, later a tax collector and jailed for his accounts: the biography behind the novel is itself the story of imperial Spain from below.

• Miguel Servet (Michael Servetus)

  Spanish physician and theologian (c. 1511-1553) whose Christianismi Restitutio (1553) contains a description of the pulmonary transit of blood — against Galen's doctrine of pores in the heart's septum, which he could not find in dissection. Burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553 for his anti-trinitarian theology; only three copies of the book survived.

• Milicia y descripción de las Indias (1599) — a frontier captain's manual, and the licence that limited it

  Bernardo de Vargas Machuca printed in 1599 the first practical manual of American frontier soldiering, dedicated to the president of the Council of the Indies. Its own censor's parecer, printed in front of it, divides the Indians into kinds and orders that one kind be left in peace even if they refuse it, saying the book was not composed for them. Inside, the captain explains that nobody paid for these expeditions — which is the beginning of an answer to what the men expected instead.

• The militias of free pardos and morenos and the fuero militar

  Free men of colour in the Spanish Caribbean served in battalions of their own with commissioned officers of their own colour. The Cuban militia rulebook gave every militiaman the fuero militar, exemption from municipal burdens and hospital care on veteran terms, and ordered that officers of the pardo and moreno battalions never be insulted. The same law barred them from the cadet route, paid moreno officers less than pardo officers, and shut them out of the military widows' fund.

• The free pardo and moreno battalions of the Cuban militia (reglamento of 1769)

  The reglamento that reorganised the Cuban militia in January 1769 put two battalions of free pardos and one of free morenos on the same establishment as five battalions of white infantry, and gave every militiaman the fuero militar: his civil and criminal causes removed from the ordinary courts, exemption from municipal offices and guardianships imposed against his will, hospital treatment as for veteran troops, no jail fees, and the fuero for life after twenty years or a disabling wound.

• The Guarani militia of the Paraguay reductions (from 1639)

  In 1638 the mission Indians of the Parana and the Uruguay asked to be given firearms, and the Crown broke its own standing rule and agreed. Within a year the raiders out of Sao Paulo had been beaten in the field; a century later the order's historian called the result the greatest military resource the king had in that part of South America, and one costing him "not a single farthing". The same troops deposed a bishop in 1644, and their weapons stayed locked in the missionaries' stores.

• The conflict-of-interest bar on the crown's own ministers: why councillors, viceroys and judges could not receive encomiendas

  From an ordinance of the Council of the Indies of 1571 and a chapter of the New Laws of 1542, the men who distributed encomiendas were forbidden to receive them: councillors, viceroys, presidents, oidores, fiscales, royal officials and governors. A cédula of 1619 extended the bar to kin within the fourth degree and to household servants. The same pages record the crown dispensing for its own ministers, the 1619 rule moderated in 1623, and two cases the author saw himself.

• The two pueblos on the Colorado, 1780-1781: a settlement founded without congregación, and why it ended

  In 1780 Spain founded two pueblos among the Quechan at the Colorado crossing on a formula it had not used in the Indies: no congregación, no mission regime, Indians free to join if the settlers' example attracted them, friars present only to teach and give the sacraments. The friars objected that this was cheapness dressed as policy, and warned that the fifty-three men sent were too few. On 17 July 1781 the Quechan rose at Mass and killed the four friars, the soldiers and the settlers.

• The mission oases of arid northern Mexico: a water technology that outlived the missions by two and a half centuries

  In the deserts of Baja California and Sonora the Jesuit missions laid a system of water retention and conduction onto relict wetlands already there, and planted them in layered orchards. The missions went in 1767; the plots did not. Ranchero families still work up to forty-two species around missionary olive and grape, and Tohono O'odham plots at Quitovac hold up to a hundred and thirty-nine. The same colonisation destroyed most of the peoples of the region, and the scholarship records both.

• Mixtec in print — the Reyes grammar and the Alvarado dictionary (Mexico, 1593)

  A grammar and a dictionary of Mixtec, printed by Pedro Balli at Mexico City in 1593 under a single licence. The dictionary's title page says it was made by the Dominicans of the Mixteca and only finally compiled by Francisco de Alvarado, and its prologue goes further, naming the Indians as the best masters of the work. The same prologue describes the tone and nasal sounds of Mixtec, and states that the friars came to the language having conquered an idolatry.

• How an encomienda ended: the modes of extinction, the favour of the reversion, and the refusal to widen forfeiture beyond the cases the law expresses

  Libro III capítulo XXIX of the Política Indiana asks how encomiendas end. It lists the modes — death, the lives spent, absence, renunciation, profession in religion, delict, ill-treatment of the Indians — quotes a cédula of 1552 sending them straight back to the crown, reports Acosta's two lives as the first pact settled with the conquistadores, and then refuses to widen forfeiture past the cases the law expresses.

• Alonso de Molina's Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana (Mexico, 1571)

  The two-way Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary printed at Mexico City by Antonio de Spinosa in 1571 — an enlarged second edition of Molina's 1555 vocabulary, with a wholly new Nahuatl-to-Spanish half added. Its alphabet is Nahuatl's, not Castilian's: the letters the language does not use are simply absent from the order. It exists because missionaries had decided they could not do their work through interpreters, and Molina says so on the page.

• Molle — the Andean mulli that the sources call a tree of much virtue

  Acosta in 1590 calls the molle a tree of much virtue whose little clusters the Indians ferment into wine, and records that Mexico named it árbol del Perú because it came from there. Garcilaso, an Inca-descended author, credits Andean knowledge of its wound-healing resin; Cobo lists molle-berry chicha among Peru's drinks. Each fact is bound to the page that states it, the indigenous origin foregrounded, and the modern identity — Schinus molle, today's pink peppercorn — flagged as modern.

• Nicolás Monardes, Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (Seville, 1565-1580)

  The book that carried American pharmacy into European medicine, written by a physician who never crossed the Atlantic and who interrogated in Seville the men who had. It names the Indian healers who taught the remedies, records the author's own refusal to believe in them, and ends by indicting his countrymen for buying the drugs of New Spain as merchandise without troubling to find out what they were.

• The Mondones petroleum case (Valladolid, 1585)

  A documented Castilian lawsuit in which the medical claims of an imported oil were put to a court. An Italian merchant selling petroleum as medicine was ordered to stop on the ground that it was "fake and false"; two university physicians were appointed to examine the substance and reported on it in writing. The case shows early modern Spain running a real adjudicative procedure over a drug — and shows exactly what that procedure tested, which was the printed authorities and not the patients.

• Sacro y Real Monte de Piedad de Ánimas: pledge credit for the poor of Mexico City, 1775

  A silver magnate gave 300,000 pesos to open a pawn bank in Mexico City in February 1775 that lent against clothes and jewels and charged nothing, asking only whatever alms the borrower chose to leave. Its own printed returns count 755,191 loans and 13.5 million pesos advanced in the first twenty-two years. The same returns record the alms turning into a fixed three per cent, and a later compendium records the fund collapsing to 105,809 pesos by 1814.

• The montepío in the Indies: a contributory survivors' pension carried to America, 1761-1786

  Spain built a survivors' pension fund for the widows and orphaned daughters of its officers and officials, paid for by a standing deduction from serving salaries, and extended it across the Atlantic with a declaration for America in 1773 and quarterly returns of the deductions from every accounting office in the viceroyalty. The price of the pension was written into the same rules: an officer needed royal licence to marry, and a widow who remarried kept half.

• Antonio de Montesinos's Advent sermon (Santo Domingo, 1511)

  The sermon a Dominican preached on Hispaniola in 1511 against the men who held Indians in repartimiento, and the chain it set off: a second sermon that refused to retract, a friar sent across the Atlantic to put the case to Ferdinand in person, and a junta of jurists and theologians whose members are named. Read from the chronicle of the crown's own chief chronicler of the Indies, which also records what the protest failed to change.

• Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's Conquista espiritual (Madrid, 1639)

  The account the Jesuit superior of the Paraguay missions wrote at court in 1639, best known for the flight of Guairá: seven hundred rafts and canoes carrying more than twelve thousand people down the Paraná away from slave raiders out of São Paulo. The same book indicts Spanish labour demands: a yerba trade that had "consumed many thousands of Indians", tribute discharged in two months of unpaid service, an encomendero taking six months a year of every man he held.

• Montoya's Guaraní corpus — Tesoro, Arte, Bocabulario and Catecismo (Madrid, 1639–1640)

  The four books with which Antonio Ruiz de Montoya fixed Guaraní in print: a grammar, a Spanish-to-Guaraní vocabulary, an 800-page Tesoro running the other way, and a catechism, all examined by the Council of the Indies and printed at Madrid in 1639 and 1640. They gave the language an orthography for sounds Castilian does not have — a mark for nasal vowels, another for guttural ones — and were reissued unaltered at Leipzig in 1876. Guaraní is today a co-official language of Paraguay.

• A Michoacan historian's prologue of 1766: Tarascan annals by an anonymous Indian author, a residencia with folios missing, and a stated reason why Indians would not lend their papers

  The prologue to the 1766 life of Vasco de Quiroga lists what its author read: five printed authorities, the title deeds of Patzcuaro and Tzintzuntzan, a testament, a damaged residencia file, a dean's manuscripts, and annals in the Tarascan language by an anonymous Indian author. It also says why such material was hard to get: the Indians were almost its only custodians, they held that tracing antiquities preceded the loss of their lands, and - his words - the distrust was not ill founded.

• The case for the armed frontier (1742): Mota Padilla's chapter arguing that force pacifies where preaching alone does not

  A criollo lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara gave a chapter of his history to arguing that the mission-only frontier policy of California, Texas, Sonora and Nayarit had failed and that arms, presidios and settler families should replace it. He argues it with dates, costs and a casualty comparison, and concedes in passing that converts were told they were free to accept the faith but not to leave it. The argument is printed here because hiding it proves nothing.

• Motolinía's Historia de los indios de la Nueva España (1541)

  The account finished at Tehuacán in 1541 by fray Toribio de Benavente, one of the twelve Franciscans sent to Mexico in 1523, who signed himself with the Nahuatl word for "poor". Its first chapter catalogues ten plagues: smallpox, the war dead, famine, the overseers, the tributes, the gold mines, the rebuilding of Mexico City, the branding of slaves, the road to the mines, and the Spaniards' own factions — an accounting of the cost of the conquest, by a member of the mission that followed it.

• The government of the Moxos and Chiquitos missions after the Jesuit expulsion

  When the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 the Crown had to decide who would run thirty-odd Amazonian mission towns. It tried parish priests under a reglamento of 1762, then secular administrators under a plan approved by the Audiencia de Charcas about 1789. Spanish officials fought the question out on paper, and the losing brief survives: it reports fifteen Moxos towns reduced to eleven and Indians who owned nothing of what they made.

• Both litigants die at sea's distance: whether a suit over encomienda tribute survives them

  An encomienda suit had been sent from the Indies to the Council in Madrid when both parties died, leaving heirs who could not inherit the grant but claimed the tribute already litigated. Send the case back across the Atlantic to start again, or finish it where it stood? Libro III capítulo XXXI of the Política Indiana argues both sides and lands on finishing it, on grounds of equity and the speed of justice.

• Women and the encomiendas: a bar that feudal law required, a succession law that broke with it, and a practice that ignored both

  Feudal law admitted no women, and a provision of 1546 revoking grants made against the New Laws gave as one ground that women were "not capable" of holding Indians. The same crown had already broken with feudal law to let daughters, granddaughters and widows succeed, in order to settle the land; and by the seventeenth century viceroys were granting encomiendas to women outright. The costs are on the record too: a daughter had to marry within the year, and the title issued in the husband's name.

• The women of the Cajal school (1911-1945) — two names on the list, three signatures on the drawings

  When Cajal printed the roll of his School in 1922 it carried two women: a Sydney-born physician who spent months at the bench, and his laboratory preparator, who published a paper alone and then vanished so completely that no archive holds her dates or her photograph. Behind them are three signatures on more than half the plates of one disciple's work, one of which may not be a woman's. This entry gives what is documented and what the archives could not answer.

• Mules and the arriería — the freight system of Spanish South America, costed by a 1773 road book

  Everything moving inland in Spanish South America moved on mules, and a book printed in 1773 describes the industry from inside: the trick that made a mare raise a donkey foal, the price of a mule at each stage out of the pampas, the six-hundred-head droves assembled at Salta, and the finding that a well-fed coastal mule worked twenty years where a sierra mule worked five.

• Diego Munoz Camargo and the Historia de Tlaxcala

  A Tlaxcalan mestizo who served the Spaniards as interpreter and wrote, in Castilian, the only surviving monograph on his own city and its people. Torquemada quarried the manuscript for the Monarquia Indiana; the text itself circulated for three centuries as a Pedazo de Historia because it had lost its opening, reached print in full only in 1892 as a Mexican state gift to the Chicago Exposition, and carries an annotator who contradicts the author in the footnotes.

• Juan Bautista Munoz, Historia del Nuevo-mundo (Madrid, 1793)

  A royal cosmographer was ordered in 1779 to write the history of America and given a cedula opening every archive in the kingdom to him. The prologue he printed fourteen years later is the report of what he found: indices that listed almost nothing from the early years, papers thrown away as worm-eaten, and at Simancas a heap of originals nobody had read. It also states, in a sentence worth the whole volume, that the crown gave him the commission and no instructions.

• El arcano de la quina (José Celestino Mutis, printed Madrid 1828)

  The medical doctrine of cinchona written by José Celestino Mutis at Santa Fé de Bogotá, serialised in the city's newspaper from May 1793, and printed as a book at Madrid only in 1828, twenty years after his death. It sorts the bark into four official species with distinct uses, attacks the European habit of swallowing the crude bark, and arrives wrapped in an editor's prologue that dates the whole story and in notes that answer it with the new chemistry of quinine.

• Royal Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada (Mutis)

  Crown-funded scientific expedition (1783-1816) directed by José Celestino Mutis that documented the flora of present-day Colombia for more than three decades, producing one of the most important collections of 18th-century American botanical art — over 7,100 drawings now digitized and freely accessible at the Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid.

• The nations and languages of Nueva Galicia as a chronicler of 1742 found them: an indigenous migration tradition preserved at four removes, a list of tongues that had stopped being spoken, and the numbers behind the silence

  Mota Padilla opens his history of western Mexico with the diversity of languages, prints a Mexica migration tradition traced back to a cacique's grandfather, names the cocas, tequexes, choras, tecualmes and nayaritas, and then records that by 1742 those tongues had ceased to be spoken and nearly all spoke one. His own figures say what happened to the speakers: thirty thousand reduced to about fifteen hundred in one alcaldia mayor, eight thousand to three thousand in another.

• What a title of encomienda had to disclose: the merits of the rival candidates, the edicts that called them, and the reasons for preferring the man chosen

  Because every encomienda had to be confirmed in Madrid, the viceroy or governor who granted one had to state in the title what it was worth, how it fell vacant, what the grantee had done, what he already held, that edicts had been posted calling all other claimants, and why this man was judged worthier. The stated reason was that favour and undue respects can decide such grants. Any omission made the confirmation void as subreptitious.

• Martín Fernández de Navarrete, Colección de los viages y descubrimientos, tomo V (Madrid, 1837)

  The volume of Spain's official documentary edition that prints the papers of the Loaísa and Saavedra voyages to the Moluccas, each with the shelfmark it was copied from. It is the working end of a nineteenth-century decision that is rarely credited: a state printing the archive of its own empire at its own press, so that anyone could check the history against the documents rather than against the chronicles.

• Nebrija's Gramática castellana (Salamanca, 1492)

  The grammar of Castilian that Antonio de Nebrija finished printing in Salamanca on 18 August 1492 — described by the library that holds it as the first European grammar of a Romance language, and built, unusually, with a closing book on teaching the language to foreigners.

• "Que gocen de libertad": the Spanish rule that slaves fleeing foreign colonies became free (1773-1789)

  A circular royal cédula of 14 April 1789 ordered that enslaved people who escaped from foreign colonies into Spanish territory were not to be given back and kept the liberty they acquired by taking refuge. It was decided on the case of a free mulata of Trinidad who offered to buy her mother and six siblings out of English Grenada, and it reversed an instruction of 1783 ordering such fugitives returned. Weeks earlier the same crown had opened the slave trade to its subjects.

• Luis de Neve y Molina, Reglas de orthographia, diccionario y arte del idioma othomi (Mexico, 1767)

  The Otomi grammar printed at Mexico in 1767 by the holder of the Otomi chair at the Real y Pontificio Colegio Seminario, and by his own account the first arte of the language to reach a press. It writes a nasal vowel and a throat vowel, marks a saltillo inside the word, separates three sibilant series, proves a length contrast that turns a needle into a muleteer, counts in twenties, and denies Otomi a participle because its speakers do not use one.

• New Laws of the Indies (1542)

  Ordinances promulgated by Charles V on 20 November 1542 (extended 4 June 1543) that prohibited the enslavement of the Indians, ordered their good treatment as free persons, and moved to extinguish the encomienda — an imperial power legislating against its own colonists' interests. Settler resistance forced partial revocation in 1545-46, a failure this object keeps on the record.

• Nicolás Achúcarro (1880-1918), and the neuropathology laboratory he built in Washington

  The Spanish neurohistologist who spent 1908 to 1910 at the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, organised one of the earliest laboratories for systematic neuropathology inside an American psychiatric institution, and went home to invent the tannin and ammoniacal silver method of 1911. He did not name microglia and did not define oligodendrocytes - his pupil Río-Hortega did both - and he was dead at thirty-seven.

• Nicolas Antonio, Censura de historias fabulosas (Valencia, 1742)

  The book in which a Spanish canon and royal fiscal took apart the most successful forgeries in Spanish history - the chronicles fathered on Flavio Dextro, Marco Maximo, Luitprando and Julian Perez - by tracing their provenance to one man, weighing testimony by quality rather than number, and catching them contradicting each other on dates. Begun in 1652 and never finished, it was printed in 1742, fifty-eight years after his death.

• Nixtamalization and the maize that crossed without it

  Mesoamerica did not merely domesticate maize; it invented the alkaline cooking that makes maize a safe staple, releasing bound niacin and tryptophan, multiplying its calcium and destroying most of its fungal toxins. The grain crossed the Atlantic in Spanish ships. The chemistry did not. Pellagra was first recognised as a clinical problem in eighteenth-century Spain and Italy, and the deficiency behind it was not identified until the 1920s and 1930s.

• The Noceda–Sanlúcar Vocabulario de la lengua tagala (Manila, licensed 1753–54)

  The Jesuit dictionary of Tagalog, licensed at Manila in 1753 and 1754 and reprinted at Valladolid in 1832 and Manila in 1860. Its prologue states the evidentiary rule the work was built on: Juan de Noceda spent thirty years checking roots word by word and would not fix the meaning of one until twelve fluent Tagalog speakers agreed on its pronunciation, accent and sense — and it states, on the same pages, that the whole apparatus exists for the parish priests of "nuestros indios tagalos".

• The names of the new generations: Garcilaso's 1609 lexicon of criollo, mestizo, mulato and cholo

  One chapter of the Comentarios Reales defines the words colonial Spanish America invented for its own children, and it was written by one of the people the words named. It gives criollo an African origin, cholo a Caribbean one, says mestizo was imposed by the first Spanish fathers and taken as an insult in the Indies, and answers that with a sentence its author put in print about himself: he calls himself mestizo openly and is honoured by it.

• Noticias secretas de America (Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa; printed London, 1826)

  The confidential report two Spanish naval officers wrote for the crown on what they had seen in Peru and Quito, and which the crown kept unpublished until a British editor printed it in London in 1826. It is the empire auditing itself: named mechanisms of extortion, the gap between the law and what happened in the provinces, and the authors' insistence that the crown's own tribute would have been a light burden if it had been the only one.

• Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Cautiverio feliz (Chile, 1673)

  A Spanish captain taken by the Mapuche in 1629 and released alive later wrote the book arguing that his captors had treated him better than his countrymen treated them. It is an officer's brief against the war he served in: unjust because greed is its object, endless because slavery is its instrument. The assembly that deliberated over his life is described from inside, with its procedure and vocabulary. Written 1673, printed for the first time in 1863.

• The obrajes — a colonial textile mill, the law that regulated it, and the report that says the law was never kept

  The cloth mills of Spanish America were governed by a title of the code that required a royal licence to found one, forbade any mita or repartimiento of Indians for it, and ordered the mill kept "continuamente abierto, para que entren, y salgan los Indios á su voluntad". A naval officers' secret report on Peru of the 1740s describes the master locking the door and leaving the workers "encarcelados" — and says the government's provisions were serious and never observed.

• The obrajes of New Spain and the law that tried to open their doors

  The cloth workshops of colonial Mexico were the hardest labour regime the viceroyalty tolerated, and the fullest account of what happened inside them is the government's own. This entry reads the law of the Indies that barred Indians from obrajes outright and the viceregal regulation of 1767, reissued in 1781, that instead regulated them - and prints what each one concedes.

• The unprinted half: manuscript and lost works on the indigenous languages of America

  The Spanish philology of America's languages is remembered through the books that were printed. The standard Spanish bibliography of the field, Viñaza's of 1892, is built in two parts precisely because that is the smaller half of what he could find: of 1,188 numbered items, 694 carry a date of impression, composition or copy, and the remaining 494 are undated manuscripts or works known only because a chronicler recorded that somebody wrote them.

• Obras públicas de las Indias

  How roads, bridges, drains and fountains were paid for in Spanish America. A título of the Recopilación orders works apportioned among those who receive the benefit; a companion law caps the Indians' share of a bridge at a sixth of its cost; a city excise on wine funded the drainage of Mexico City. The same opening shows a levy on every enslaved African entering Lima paying the police, and corregidores ordered to make Indians work.

• Observatorio Astronómico de Santa Fe de Bogotá (begun 1802, finished 1803), described by Francisco José de Caldas

  An octagonal tower raised in the garden of the Real Expedición Botánica at Mutis's expense, begun 24 May 1802 and finished 20 August 1803, with a meridian line on the floor of its main room and a gnomon of 37 feet 7 inches. Caldas, who took charge in December 1805, printed its position in his own weekly along with the reasons it was not yet certain: cloud at three December solstices, and no European observatory had sent back a single corresponding observation of Jupiter's satellites.

• Observatorio Meteorologico de Manila and the first typhoon warnings in the Far East (1865-1899)

  A Jesuit observatory founded at Manila in 1865 to find the laws of the typhoons and announce them in advance. Its first public warning went out on 7 July 1879; by 1880 the warnings were on the Hongkong cable, by 1884 they were an official state service with fourteen stations, and by 1898 a Royal Navy officer was telling Admiral Dewey to restore the cut cable or answer for the lives lost without them.

• Old World plants in Andean healing, and the colonial survey that lets it be measured

  The plant traffic between Spain and the Andes ran both ways. Surveys of the medicinal plants sold and used today in northern Peru and southern Ecuador find 17% of them to be Old World introductions, many carried in during the colonial centuries, and a bishop's eighteenth-century inventory is still the baseline against which two hundred years of change is counted. The same surveys record the cost: healers persecuted, and traditional medicine illegal in Ecuador until 1998.

• Olive groves in the Indies: a tree that took, an oil that did not, and the labour law that named it

  By 1590 the olive was growing in Mexico and Peru and there was still not one oil mill in either: the fruit was cured and eaten, and all the oil came from Spain. The law of the Indies nevertheless made the olive grove a named workplace, and then in 1601 and 1609 forbade allotting Indians to work in one — giving its own reason. The Recopilación prints both that ban and the rule that no wage be paid in drink.

• Andrés de Olmos, Arte de la lengua mexicana (1547)

  The grammar of Nahuatl that a Franciscan finished in 1547 at the convent of Hueytlalpan, twenty-five years before the oldest Nahuatl grammar that reached print. It stayed in manuscript for 328 years — no press, a dead printer, a dead patron — and was published at last in Paris in 1875 from two surviving copies. Its author says on the first page why he wrote it: charity, his prelate's order, and the salvation of the souls of "estos naturales indios".

• The Omnimoda of Adrian VI (Zaragoza, 9 May 1522) and its extension by Paul III in 1535

  The brief that chartered the missionary church of Spanish America. Adrian VI, writing from Zaragoza before he had reached Rome, let mendicant friars cross to the Indies, elect their own prelates there, and gave those prelates "omnimodam auctoritatem nostram in utroque foro" over friars and converted Indians wherever no bishop could be found within two days' journey — while handing the crown the power to fix how many friars went.

• The 1772 circular ordering the caesarean operation in New Spain

  In November 1772 the viceroy of New Spain circulated to every district subdelegate an order that the caesarean operation be practised throughout the viceroyalty: official assistance on pain of five hundred pesos, physicians compellable to perform it, relatives punishable for opposing it or for not reporting the need in time. The operation was on women already dead, and its declared end was the child's baptism.

• The Hipólitos: a hospitaller order founded in Mexico (1566) and destroyed by decree in 1821

  In 1566 a layman of Mexico City opened a hospital outside the walls and then turned it over to the many demented people of the city who had nowhere to be cared for. The brotherhood that grew out of it took two papal briefs, a bull and a hundred and thirty-four years to become a religious order, ran houses from Havana to Oaxaca, and was suppressed by the Spanish Cortes. Its nineteenth-century Mexican chronicler calls it exclusively Mexican - and says it made little progress.

• The Bethlemite hospital rule (1672): a nursing order written in Guatemala and confirmed at Rome

  A hospital rule that began in Santiago de Guatemala and was confirmed by Clement X on 2 May 1672, printed with the rest of the order's papal documentation at Rome in 1773. Its statutes admit convalescents, incurables and poor travellers, forbid excluding any kind of person - free, enslaved, Moors, Gentiles - require the brothers to carry the sick to the hospital themselves, and bar women from the building. Indians and Blacks were admitted to a separate infirmary.

• The Hospitaller Order of San Juan de Dios (Granada, 1537-1572) and its houses in the Indies

  A hospital opened in Granada in 1537 by a layman, made a religious institute after his death and confirmed by papal bull in 1572, which wrote its bedside practice into binding constitutions and carried it to Cartagena de Indias, Mexico City and Manila. The constitutions are the interesting part: they make attendance on the dying and the shrouding of the dead duties of the house rather than private charity. What those houses delivered in the Indies is another question, answered in part.

• Ordenanza de quarteles de Santiago de Queretaro (1796)

  A 24-page printed rulebook that cut Queretaro into nine wards, put an unpaid neighbourhood magistrate over each, and told him what he might and might not do. It orders schools, medical relief for the destitute sick and street lighting; it also orders a house-by-house census, servant papers and night rounds against the idle. Its article 14 forbids the same magistrates to make general inquisitions or to meddle inside a household.

• Ordenanzas de Alfaro (1612) — the abolition of personal service in Paraguay, Tucuman and the Rio de la Plata

  The ordinances a crown judge sent from Charcas laid on the southern provinces in 1612, ending the personal service of Indians and cutting the encomienda back to the tribute owed to the crown. Read from two historians who agree on the year and on what was abolished, and from the argument against it that one of them prints at length: the reform, wrote a naturalist of the Enlightenment, was politically absurd and stopped the conquest dead.

• The Ordenanzas de Bilbao of 1737

  A merchant corporation wrote its own commercial law, the crown confirmed it, and the result was the most complete commercial code in Europe seventy years before the French one. Its court decided cases "la verdad sabida, y la buena fe guardada por estilo de Mercaderes" and refused to admit papers drawn by lawyers; its chapters cover general average and marine insurance; and one clause writes a separate, higher allowance for the trade to the Indies.

• The ordinances of 20 March 1524: Cortés legislates for New Spain

  In March 1524 the governor of New Spain issued a code for the Spaniards living in it, and it stayed in a private family archive until a Mexican historian printed it in 1844. It arms every householder in proportion to the Indians he holds, orders Castilian vines grafted and wheat sown in the Indian towns, requires a church and a priest in each, and forbids anyone to press the Indians for gold or to strike them — on a ground the text states plainly, that they would otherwise rise.

• Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación (1573)

  The 148 ordinances Philip II signed at the Bosque de Segovia on 13 July 1573, which struck the word "conquista" out of every future contract with the crown, replaced it with "pacificación" and "población", and set down in advance how an American town was to be sited and laid out. They arrived after Mexico and Peru had already fallen, and the prohibitions in them had to be reissued for a century afterwards — both facts are on the record here.

• Ordenanzas para el Archivo General de Indias (Madrid, 1790)

  Ninety-four chapters that turned a building full of transferred paper into an institution: salaried archivist and officials, a class called Historia for the relations, antiquities and customs that fitted no administrative heading, master copies of the oldest documents on large paper, and a library of geography and law beside the archivist's desk. The same code shuts the door - no one outside the named offices could be given a copy, or even told that a paper existed.

• The ordinances of 1525 for the villas of Honduras: a municipal constitution for towns not yet built

  Written for two towns just founded in Honduras and declared to bind every town settled afterwards, these ordinances fix what a Spanish municipality in the Indies was to be: two alcaldes, four regidores, a procurador and a notary, renewed each new year; an inspector of weights, measures and food prices; marked refuse grounds; a bar on buying to resell; a third of every fine to the town hospital's poor. They fix the limit too — no council may meet without the governor's lieutenant present.

• The first royal ordinances for the treatment of the Indians (1513)

  The first body of royal law written specifically about how the indigenous people of the Americas were to be housed, fed, taught, worked and rested — thirty-two chapters despatched after the Dominican protest on Hispaniola. Read from the crown's own chronicle, the code turns out to contain both a forty-day rest and an order to burn the houses people were being moved out of, and to be followed at once by large repartimientos to the King's own courtiers.

• Wayfinding, tracking and weather-reading on the northern frontier, as a Franciscan chronicle records them

  Arlegui's 1737 chronicle sets out, chapter by chapter, what the peoples of the northern missions could do that the Spaniards could not: forecast rain and frost from birds and stars "con mas verdad, que los reportorios", hold a course over hundreds of leagues where Spaniards died of thirst on the royal roads, and follow a trail over grass and stone. The proof he offers is captive children walking home.

• Orozco y Berra, Geografía de las lenguas y carta etnográfica de México (1864)

  The first attempt to map and classify all the languages of Mexico, printed at Mexico City in 1864. Its author states in the introduction that he knows none of the languages he classifies and has proceeded "siguiendo única y exclusivamente la autoridad" — the authority being the grammars written by Spanish missionaries over three centuries. It is therefore a measurement of what that philological corpus made possible, and, in the same pages, of what had already been lost.

• Alonso de Ovalle, Historica relacion del Reyno de Chile (Rome, 1648)

  The first substantial book about Chile printed in Europe, written by a Jesuit born in Santiago who found that in much of Europe people did not even know the country's name. It credits the Mapuche resistance with the valour that made the war long, reports women who refused Spanish dress after a lifetime among Spaniards, describes knotted cords kept as books of account, and carries the map and engravings that gave Europe its first look at the place.

• Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias (Seville, 1535; complete edition Madrid, 1851-1855)

  The first natural history of the Americas, and for three centuries the least read of them. Oviedo printed nineteen books at Seville in 1535 and left fifty; the rest stayed in manuscript until the Real Academia de la Historia hunted down the codices and printed the whole between 1851 and 1855. The 1535 books describe American plants from direct observation, organised by what each sense can report, and record the indigenous names first.

• Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti-yamqui Salcamayhua, An Account of the Antiquities of Peru (c. 1613; first printed in English, London 1873)

  An Andean nobleman from between the Canas and the Canches wrote the history of his own people in Spanish, signing it with five generations of his ancestors and opening with a full profession of the Christian creed - including the statement that the natives of Ttahuantin-suyu descend from Adam like every other nation on earth, white and black alike. The orthodoxy is the condition of the record: it is what allowed an Andean chronology, in Quechua terms, to be written down at all.

• Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, Virtudes del Indio

  A memorial to the king of Spain by the man whose principal office had been Protector de los Indios, arguing that the Indians of New Spain are not what the ministers say they are. It credits the resistance to the conquest, reads drunkenness as a national vice comparable to European ones, names the officials who tax the drink they condemn, and itemises what the poorest vassals of the monarchy were paying to keep the colony running.

• Palo de Campeche — the Yucatán dyewood that became the world's nuclear stain

  A tree of the flooded lowlands of Yucatán gave a Spanish American port its export and its name, and gave modern pathology haematoxylin, still the standard nuclear stain. Alcedo's 1786 dictionary, read from the scan, records the palo de tinte trade, the raids that wrecked it and the parish for enslaved people in the same article. Modern papers carry the chemistry and the range. The cost is on the record beside the contribution, each bound to what says it.

• Fray Ramon Pane's Relacion de las antiguedades de los indios (c. 1498)

  The earliest surviving description of an American people written by a European, made on Hispaniola in the 1490s by a Hieronymite hermit ordered to learn the language. It preserves Taino cosmology by name, and survives only inside the biography of Columbus written by his son, as a single chapter. What makes it usable as evidence is that the friar keeps saying what he does not know — and, on the same pages, that the mission needs force and punishment and that the first man he baptised was killed.

• Papa and chuño — the Andean tuber and its freeze-dried form in the Spanish record

  Three printings read here — Seville 1553, Seville 1590 and the Madrid reissue of Garcilaso — describe the papa, the frost-and-tread process that turns it into chuño, and the trade in that chuño which supplied the mines of Potosí. The technology recorded is Andean, not Spanish; what is Spanish is that it was set in type in Europe within twenty years of the conquest of Peru. Modern literature supplies the route out of the Andes and the famine at the far end of it.

• Papaya: a named man, a named route, and the first recorded colonial transfer of an American fruit

  Oviedo's chapter on the papaya gives the fruit three names and then does something rarer: it names the man who moved it. A hidalgo called Alonso de Valverde carried the fruit from the country of the cacique Quebore, whom he held in encomienda, to Darién, where the Spaniards sowed the seed and passed it to Hispaniola and the other islands. The plant was already a Mesoamerican domesticate; what the Spanish added was transport, and the document records the coercion in the same sentence.

• The Papel Periodico de la Havana, 1790, and the public library its subscriptions paid for

  A twice-weekly half-sheet begun in Havana on 31 October 1790, edited first by the Captain General himself and then by a committee of the economic society. Its editors printed a wholesale price list, ship movements and a daily meteorological table, and put the residue of the subscription money into a fund that opened a public library in July 1793. The same sheet carried advertisements for enslaved barbers and closed its notices "with permission of the Superior Government".

• Pareja's Arte de la lengua timuquana (Mexico, 1614)

  The grammar of Timucua, a language of the Florida peninsula, written by the Franciscan Francisco Pareja and printed at Mexico by Juan Ruyz in 1614. It is the earliest printed grammar of any language of what is now the United States, and for a language with no living speakers it is the principal record that exists. Its own title page hints that an earlier edition has been lost; its editors state that within a century of its printing the people who spoke the language had all but disappeared.

• The Timucua catechism reprinted at Mexico in 1627, and the licences bound in front of it

  A Timucua–Castilian catechism printed at Mexico by Juan Ruyz in 1627, whose preliminary leaves are the paper trail of a mission publishing programme: a provincial licence signed at San Agustín de la Florida in January 1625, an archbishopric licence of May 1626, and a viceregal privilege reciting that the first ten-year licence had expired and granting eight years more. Those licences name the works together — three catechisms, a confessionario, an Arte and a Vocabulario in Timucua.

• The parlamentos of the Chilean frontier

  On the Chilean frontier the Spanish crown negotiated with an unconquered indigenous people in general assembly, at a place the Mapuche named, in a form the Mapuche already used. This object holds only what two reachable witnesses establish — an eyewitness account of a Mapuche parlamento in 1629, with its procedure and vocabulary, and the dated record of the first two parlamentos at Quillín in 1641 and 1647 — and states which widely repeated claims about them it cannot support.

• Pastos, montes y aguas comunes: the common-use rule of the Laws of the Indies

  One título of the Recopilación made the pastures, woods and waters of the Indies common by law, capped how much range one stockman could hold, turned harvested fields back into common pasture, freed the wild fruit woods to all from 1510, kept livestock out of Indian tilled land, and let Indians cut timber provided the woods could still grow. It also ordered that the order of water distribution the Indians had used be kept among the Spaniards, with the same natives taking part in it.

• Pato criollo: an American domesticate that European shipping turned into a world poultry species, and that Fujian re-domesticated after 1743

  The Muscovy duck — pato criollo in Spanish America, Cairina moschata in zoology — was domesticated in Central or South America before any European arrived, and Cabeza de Vaca found Guaraní farmers breeding ducks in quantity. Genome papers of 2021 and 2024 carry it onward: European colonists spread the bird worldwide, a Chinese gazetteer of 1743 records its arrival in Fujian through the Europe–China trade, and in 1996 a French company sold a commercial Muscovy breed back into China.

• Real Patronato de las Indias

  The crown's patronage over the Church in Spanish America: the inalienable right to present every bishop and parish priest, to license every church, monastery and hospital, and to govern the American Church in place of Rome. Codified in Recopilación libro I, título 6, it is the instrument that built and paid for the missions, hospitals and universities — and, in the same clauses, the regalist control that tied clerical advancement to the "extirpación de idolatrías" of the Indians.

• The Chichimeca peace and the Tlaxcalan settlements of the north (1590-1591)

  New Spain stopped buying soldiers for the Zacatecas road and started buying peace: capitulaciones negotiated by a mestizo captain who spoke Guachichil, four hundred married Tlaxcalan households moved north at the treasury's cost to live beside the people they had fought, and a crown allowance of meat and cloth. The Franciscan who records the policy records its price: the persecutions that helped bring the Chichimecas in, the refusal to intermarry, and seventy Tlaxcalans killed.

• Pedro de Gante and the chapel-school of San José de los Naturales

  The Flemish lay brother who reached Mexico in 1523, a year before the twelve Franciscans, and who built beside the church of San Francisco a chapel, a school and a row of workshops. Mendieta calls it the first and only seminary in New Spain for every kind of trade. A stammerer his own friars could barely follow, he taught in Nahuatl, put a doctrina into print in it, and would not be ordained priest or made archbishop.

• Pedro de San José Betancur (d. Santiago de Guatemala, 1667): the casita that became a school and a hospital

  A Canary Islander who died in Guatemala in 1667 and left a small house by the Calvario that had been a free schoolroom for the children of the poorest quarter and became a hospital. The life printed at Rome in 1683 to press his cause is a devotional book and is treated as one here; a papal bull of 1672 independently records that the Bethlemite constitutions were drawn in the greater part from the institute he left.

• Pedro López and the Hospital de la Epifanía (Mexico City, 1582): a physician's hospital with a crib for foundlings

  A physician of Mexico City, one of the first to profess medicine in New Spain, got the city to give him the disused public granary in 1582 and turned it into a hospital with wards for both sexes and a crib for abandoned children, run at his own cost and named Epifanía. His son resisted its transfer to the Order of San Juan de Dios until a judge delivered it in the king's name, and the date of that handover is disputed by twenty years in the chroniclers themselves.

• Pedro Mártir de Anglería, Decades of the New World (1511-1530), read in Richard Eden's English of 1555

  An Italian humanist at the Castilian court began writing down what returning captains told him about the western islands, because, as he put it, the Spaniards took care only of the general findings and the particulars would otherwise have drowned in oblivion. The result was the first history of the Americas. Its third decade also carries the earliest printed account of the demographic collapse of Hispaniola, written by a man employed by the crown that caused it.

• Pedro Vicente Maldonado (c. 1704-1748)

  A man born in Riobamba who opened at his own cost, and after a hundred and twenty years of failed royal orders, the road from Quito to the navigable Esmeraldas river; who is met on that coast in a memoir read to the Paris Academy in 1744; who descended the Amazon with La Condamine in 1743; and who died in London in November 1748 days after being received into the Royal Society, leaving two crates of machine models in Paris that he meant to carry home.

• Pelayo of Asturias

  Leader (d. 737) of the mountain polity in Asturias that resisted the Umayyad conquest of Iberia, remembered for the victory at Covadonga (c. 718-722). The earliest narrative was written about 160 years later and is heavily legendary; what is secure is that an independent Asturian kingdom formed around his line and became the nucleus of the later Christian kingdoms of Spain.

• Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, Itinerario para parochos de indios

  The working manual of the parish clergy of Spanish America, written by the bishop of Quito and reprinted commercially in Lyon in 1678. It tells a priest who cannot speak his parishioners' language that he is in mortal sin and holds no valid title; it reprints the determinations of the archbishop of Lima binding conquistadors and their heirs to restore what the conquests took; and it makes bribed judges liable to the Indians for everything a corregidor owed them.

• Andres Perez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fee (Madrid, 1645)

  The Jesuit provincial's history of the missions of Sinaloa and Sonora, printed at Madrid in 1645. Inside a triumphalist frame it carries field observations of a kind rarely met that early: that the languages of the region share their radical words with Mexican, that peoples came from the north across a narrow arm of sea, that unwritten languages keep uniform rules, and that by 1645 the Indians of Cinaloa were carrying their harvests on horses bought from the Spaniards.

• Andres Perez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fee (Madrid, 1645)

  The Jesuit provincial's folio on the missions of Sinaloa and Sonora, printed at Madrid in 1645, is the fullest seventeenth-century description of the peoples of the Mexican northwest. It admires languages it calls barbarous for keeping invariable rules, then says plainly that speaking them quiets, represses, wins and subjects. It prints an epidemic of smallpox and measles as providence, a peace sealed with Yaqui children held as hostages, and a defence of the silver mines.

• Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fee (Madrid, 1645)

  The first sustained printed account of the peoples of Sinaloa, Sonora and the sierra of Durango, published at Madrid in 1645 by a Jesuit who had spent sixteen years among them and says so on the page. Its title page also advertises armed victories, and its censor states that the book will justify the crown's right of conquest. Its chapter 20 records the author comparing the radical words of their languages with Nahuatl and concluding they had come from the north.

• Juan Pio Perez, Diccionario de la lengua maya (Merida de Yucatan, 1866-1877)

  The first large printed dictionary of a Maya language, set in Merida from types ordered in New York because the alphabet Spanish friars devised for Maya needed sorts no Yucatecan press held. Its prologue records how three centuries of missionary lexicography reached the 1830s - a 1690 vocabulary found in a parish archive, an anonymous dictionary from a Franciscan library with its first pages gone, one meagre printed book - and why little else survived.

• Personas miserables: the legal category that gave Indians privileged standing

  The doctrine that placed the Indians among the persons Roman and canon law called miserabiles, and with it a bundle of procedural privileges — the protections of minors and rustics, summary and cheap process, restitution, leniency in criminal causes — plus a royal order that Spaniards who injured an Indian be punished more severely than if they had injured a Spaniard. Its own chief expositor prints both the insulting premise the doctrine rested on and the reason it so often failed.

• The Basque Terranova fishery and the Basque words the Innu answered in

  Every spring from the sixteenth century Guipuzcoan ships sailed for the cod and whale grounds of Terranova. A Basque priest writing in 1625 set down the voyage, the rendering cauldrons, the barrel measure, and something else: the people of the shore had learned Basque from the crews, and when asked "nola zaude" answered "Apaizac obeto". By 1779 the society of Bilbao was recording that England now fished the cod that fed Spain.

• The pearl fisheries of the Indies: a title of the law written around the diver

  Book IIII, title 25 of the Recopilación de leyes de las Indias governs the Caribbean pearl fishery law by law: free access for Indians in 1578, the death penalty for forcing anyone to dive in 1585, rules against overfishing a bed, a duty to rescue a sinking canoe and to recover a drowned diver. The same title conscripts enslaved Africans in place of the Indians it protects, and orders the pursuit of any canoe whose crew escapes with it.

• Piedra bezar de las Indias — the Andean bezoar stone

  Concretions from Andean camelids entered a drug category the Old World already had, and two Seville printings record the transfer. Acosta names the animals, writes the Indians' causal theory down as theirs, then puts a counter-question to them. Monardes prints a section "Delas piedras Bezaares del Peru", a correspondent's dissection with a woodcut, a market where one Oriental stone in ten is genuine — and a four-patient comparison from a German plague hospital.

• The piedra de culebra: a Philippine artefact, its recipe printed in 1754, and the European fable it displaced

  Europe paid for snake-stones believed to grow in the heads of Oriental serpents. Section VI of Torrubia's Aparato (Madrid 1754) prints the recipe instead: deer antler cut with a bolo, calcined overnight under rice husk by the Indians of Camarines, carved, smoothed with the is-is leaf and burnished on leather. The colours the learned theorised about are uneven firing. He names the makers, prints Vallisneri's disconfirming experiments in full, and puts the imposture on the European buyer.

• Lucas Fernández de Piedrahíta, Historia general de las conquistas del Nuevo Reyno de Granada (1688)

  A history of New Granada written in Madrid by a cleric from Santa Fe de Bogotá while prosecutions kept him at court, licensed in 1688. Its two engraved plates give named medallion portraits to the zipas of Bogotá and the zaques of Tunja, and its first book is announced as the site, provinces, first inhabitants, customs, rites and laws of the country before the conquest. Its author says he supplied the motives of Indian kings and Spanish captains himself, for verisimilitude.

• The petrified crabs of Hainan and Luzon: a transpacific specimen trade described in 1754

  Section XIII of Torrubia's Aparato traces fossil crabs gathered by measure on the beaches of Aparri and Buguey in Cagayán, sent by the Dominicans to the apothecaries of Manila, carried to Madrid by a Jesuit for the Botica of the Colegio Imperial, sold in Cádiz as a remedy for the stone, and told apart from Hainan specimens by composition. A documented supply chain for scientific material, with the credulity and the commerce on the page.

• Pillars and timbering: the ground-support law of the mines of New Spain

  The mining ordinances of New Spain left standing pillars of the richest ore and forbade the owner to take them. The 1761 commentary explains why: the pillars hold the roofs, carry the ladders, catch a falling man and let the air move, and justices must inspect the timbering because neglect of it is "en perjuicio de la vida de los Operarios". The same pages record the conflict of interest — the pillars were of the best metal, and the workmen knew how to rob them.

• Piloto mayor y cosmógrafos de la Casa de la Contratación

  The state office that licensed Atlantic pilots and kept the master chart. From 1508 the Casa de la Contratación examined and graded the pilots of the Carrera de Indias, taught them in a salaried chair of cosmography, stamped their compasses and astrolabes, broke the ones that were wrong, and corrected a padrón general from what returning pilots reported. The same code fixed the syllabus, barred the examiner from teaching or selling instruments to candidates, and shut foreigners out of the chair.

• The piña of the Indies: the first European descriptions of the pineapple, and the crown that carried it

  Oviedo devoted a chapter of 1535 to the fruit the Christians called piña, and it contains the agronomy that made the plant portable: one fruit per plant, ten months to ripen, and the crown on top as the planting material. Acosta, fifty-five years later, adds what the transfer could not do — an emperor was handed a pineapple still on its plant and praised the smell without tasting it. Genomics explains why the crown mattered: the plant is self-incompatible and travels as a clone.

• Pío del Río-Hortega (1882-1945) and the transplanting of the Spanish neurohistological school to Argentina

  The man who found the cells Cajal could not stain — microglia in 1919, oligodendroglia in 1921 — and correctly guessed what both were for. Cajal expelled him from the laboratory in 1920 and never conceded the second discovery in print. The Civil War drove him to Paris, Oxford and finally Buenos Aires, where exile became transfer: a replica of his Madrid laboratory, a journal at the University of Buenos Aires, and students who carried his method into the electron microscopy of the synapse.

• Pitahaya — the fruit Oviedo described, drew, and made ink from

  Book VIII, chapter XXVI of Oviedo's Historia general is a description of the dragon fruit: fist-sized, scarlet, scaly-looking, borne on leafless four-cornered arms longer than a man's reach. Oviedo says plainly he would choose many other fruits before it, records that the red-fleshed kind turns urine the colour of blood and the yellow-skinned kind does not, notes that he drew it, and reports that he made ink from it and wrote with it. A 2021 genome paper explains the pigment he was watching.

• Plants of Castile in Peru: what Garcilaso dated, priced and counted the cost of

  Libro nono of the Comentarios Reales is a dated inventory of the Old World crops that entered Peru, written by a man who was in Cuzco while it happened: wheat carried by Maria de Escobar and shared out thirty grains at a time, a crown prize of two silver bars for the first wine or oil raised in any Spanish town, the three olive cuttings of 1560 guarded by a hundred enslaved men and thirty dogs, and the weeds that erased a valley's name.

• The native silver of the cerro de la Arizona, and how a colonial lawyer checked it

  Masses of native silver were found lying at the surface in Pima country on the last bounds of Sonora, one of them said to weigh 160 arrobas. Mota Padilla, writing at Guadalajara in 1742, reports it and then shows his work: the finder questioned before witnesses, the frontier captain's eyewitness statement, the autos of the president of the audiencia. The same page records the suits that followed, including one he argued himself for a moreno whose 22-arroba ball a partner tried to halve.

• The plantain in the Spanish Indies (from 1516)

  An Asian crop that reached the Americas because a Dominican friar carried it from Gran Canaria to Santo Domingo in 1516. Oviedo names the man and the year, says he saw the plants in the Canaries himself in 1520, identifies the fruit with the musas of Alexandria, states plainly that it is not native and that the Spanish name for it is wrong — and records the ant plague that made Santo Domingo uproot many of them.

• Coahuila, the Nueva Extremadura (1677-1742): subsidised peace-pueblos, Tlaxcaltec co-settlers, a refuge town, and a jurisdiction case the audiencia lost

  Two royal decrees of one date in 1677 record what the crown paid to settle Coahuila: four pueblos with resident clergy, each given a hundred and fifty fanegas of maize and five bullocks or ploughs for two years, and Tlaxcaltec families from Saltillo who bound themselves to live among the new settlers and teach them. Two years later the audiencia of Guadalajara lost the province to the viceroy in the Council of the Indies, and one of its own lawyers wrote up the defeat.

• Polo de Ondegardo, Report on the government of the Yncas (Peru, c. 1560s; first printed in English, London 1873)

  A corregidor of Cuzco who studied Inca law in order to govern by it, and whose working notes survive as a report that dates the empire from quipu king-lists, measures the courier relay in leagues and days, refuses informants who put the origin before the flood, and tells his own government that the wise legislation of the Yncas ought to be used and imitated. The same notes record the levy of girls that legislation also enforced.

• Ignacio Ponseti and the nonoperative treatment of clubfoot

  A doctor from Menorca who graduated at Barcelona in 1936, set fractures through the Civil War, crossed into France with a convoy of wounded in 1939 and practised two years in rural Mexico before reaching Iowa, found that clubfeet could be corrected by serial plaster casts, a small tendon cut and a brace, rather than by the surgery that left adults with stiff and painful feet. He published in 1963 and was ignored for thirty years. Evidence of the method is now recorded in 113 countries.

• The potato out of the Andes

  An Andean domesticate that reached Europe in Spanish ships in the second half of the sixteenth century, by way of Spain and the Canaries. The earliest description available here is printed in Seville in 1553 and does more than name the plant: it describes the freeze-dried chuño of the altiplano, why a rainfed people depended on it, and the Spaniards who grew rich carrying it to the silver mines of Potosí.

• Juan Alvarez Borjes, Practica y observaciones del arte de albeyteria (Madrid, 1680)

  A farrier of the royal stables, who was also the crown officer examining every farrier and animal-doctor in the monarchy, put his practice into print in 1680. Another royal farrier refereed the book before it was licensed; it argues with named predecessors over reducing a dislocation, and tells readers to flee the hot iron the most cited authority of the trade prescribed.

• The questions of the cacique Nicaragua

  A cross-examination of Europeans by an American ruler that the Spanish side put into print. Lopez de Gomara gives the questions at length — the flood, the stars, where souls go, whether the pope dies, why so few men want so much gold — and says the Spaniards stood amazed. The same pages carry the cost: an embassy offering friendship or war, a mass baptism some said was badly made, lords refusing to give up their dances, and a second cacique who raised an army instead.

• What a Cuban town budgeted for in 1863: vaccine, five teachers, a cemetery, and the capture of runaway slaves

  Pezuela's 1866 dictionary prints Cuban municipal budgets article by article. Nuevitas in 1863 owed 12,384 pesos: five primary teachers, a contribution to a teacher-training school, vaccine conservators, relief for the insane, a cemetery. On the same page, 100 pesos for the capture of runaway slaves. In Matanzas, 1,000 pesos for vaccine conservators, 204 for genuine vaccine matter, 358.50 for the runaway-slave depot. Every figure is reconciled.

• The petition for a university at Guadalajara (1700-1742): a seminary built, a royal order to report, and the case for degrees five hundred leagues from Mexico

  In 1700 Charles II ordered the audiencia of Guadalajara to report on a bishop's request to erect a university in his city, funded by the bishop himself, a three per cent levy on the rents of hospitals and confraternities, and two ninths of the tithes. Forty years later nothing had been erected, and a local lawyer set out the cost: no lawyers for the magistrates, no physicians, prisoners held ten or twelve years, and students who could not afford Mexico simply going without.

• Printed plainchant in Mexico, 1556-1589: the first music printed in the Americas

  Seventeen years after the press reached Mexico City it was printing music. A 1556 Augustinian Ordinarium carries plainchant notes in red and black; a 1568 doctrina set wholly in Mixtec carries them too; and by 1584 and 1589 the Mexican presses were making choirbooks of three hundred and of 132 folios. The purpose was liturgical and evangelising, and one book says so: Sahagún's 1583 psalmody was arranged as songs for Indians to sing in the dances held in the churches.

• Losing the encomienda for mistreating the Indians: the forfeiture rule, its theory, its relaxed standard of proof, and one case that was won

  Spanish law punished an encomendero who abused the Indians entrusted to him by taking the encomienda away. The standard treatise justifies the penalty three ways, holds that no prior warning is needed, and reports that less exacting proof was required for these complaints. It also prints the discredit the encomenderos had brought on the Spanish in every nation, the repeated proposals to abolish the institution, and one prosecution that stripped a family of its encomienda.

• Proof before deprivation, and what an inferior judge owes a superior who says the crime is proved: the close of Política Indiana libro III capítulo XXIX

  The close of libro III capítulo XXIX holds that an encomienda could not be taken on a pretext: the fault had to be proved, and neither prince nor viceroy could deprive or regrant without citation, hearing, conviction and sentence. Then a question much doubted in the cause of an encomendero of Cuzco — must an inferior judge obey a superior who asserts the crime is proved? Evident injustice must be stayed; doubt must be obeyed.

• The privileges of Tlaxcala in the law of the Indies

  Laws of the Recopilación set the Tlaxcalan republic apart from every other indigenous polity in New Spain: its own ordinances of 1545 confirmed, its Indian governors required to be natives of the province, its people freed from serving the Spaniards of Puebla, exempt from tribute, and licensed to write to the king without the viceroy stopping the letter. The same code states the crown's motive and pierces the exemption in a levy of 1591.

• A ten-year extract of four royal treasuries, and the man who published his own claim with its error bar (1730-1740)

  A viceroy of New Spain ordered every royal treasury to report what the king's dues had come to in each of the ten preceding years. Mota Padilla printed the northern returns, argued from them that mine output was near ten millions, showed why the comparison with Mexico could not be made clean, and then wrote that bold propositions discredit a history, confessed he did not know the totals to a fixed point, called his own claim a rash leap and asked someone else to test it.

• Propios y arbitrios: the audited municipal purse of the Spanish American cities

  Cities in the Indies held their own endowed revenues, and the law hedged them: no extraordinary spending above three thousand maravedís without licence, leases auctioned to the highest bidder, nothing spent on banquets for visiting judges under a thousand-ducat penalty, accounts taken yearly and reported to the Council. Two printed statements show what the rules governed — 108,669 pesos at Mexico, 13,410 at a second city — and what leaked through them.

• Protector de Indios

  The office charged with defending the Indians in the colonial courts. By 1591 every city with an Audiencia was to have a salaried lawyer and a procurator to run the Indians' lawsuits, forbidden to take a fee from them; in New Spain the service was paid for by a half-real levy. The same laws that built it also record, in the crown's own words, that the officials paid to defend the Indians were fleecing them.

• The Protomedicato of the Indies (Recopilación, libro V, título 6)

  The law that licensed medicine in Spanish America. Its opening piece is a 1570 instruction sending protomédicos across the Atlantic with orders to take the testimony of every physician, surgeon and herbalist, Spanish and Indian alike, to trial the remedies and to write the natural history of the province. The same título makes the professors of medicine at Mexico and Lima the licensing authority — and exempts Indian towns from the licensing rule.

• Which province, and who was excused: the residence duty of the encomendero closes with an exemption for the King's own councillors

  The chapter that makes residence a condition of holding an encomienda ends with two awkward questions. Where does a man with encomiendas in distant provinces live? And what of the councillors of the Council of the Indies, who were sometimes given encomiendas for their services and could not leave Madrid? The answer is that the grant itself dispenses them, because the prince who made it knew their occupation — the enforcers of the rule exempted by the act of being rewarded.

• The subaltern provinces of the audiencia of Guadalajara: a jurisdiction split between two capitals, and a lawyer of 1742 recording that Indian complainants gave up and were left without recourse

  Avalos and Colima answered to Guadalajara in justice and to Mexico in government, a hundred leagues away. Mota Padilla, a lawyer of that court, argues for joining the two, and in the middle of the argument records what the split cost: poor Indians came often to the audiencia over tribute, labour repartimientos and the rigging of their elections, were sent to Mexico so the viceroy's jurisdiction stayed intact, and commonly desisted for the difficulty and were left without remedy.

• Public provision in Spanish New Orleans: the crown school of 1772, the lepers' hospital, and the relief after the fire of 1788

  Spain sent four salaried teachers from Madrid to open a free school in a colony it had governed for three years, built a hospital for lepers at the council's expense, and after the fire of Good Friday 1788 fed about seven hundred people on the king's account. The governor's own despatch, quoted at length by a Louisiana historian in 1854, also records that almost nobody came to the school: never more than thirty pupils, often six, and not one for the Latin class.

• The bridge over the Rio Grande de Guadalajara (1560-1719): a public work that took a century and a half to finance

  A royal licence of 1560 gave 500 pesos for a bridge where people were drowning, then 400 more, then in 1563 ordered the cost apportioned with the Indians' share capped at a sixth. Nothing was built: encomenderos objected and the ferry canoes earned a thousand pesos a year. When the city finally built it in 1717-1719 its cabildo refused both the levy and the toll and raised subscriptions instead. A lawyer who sat on that cabildo wrote it down.

• Cedulario de Puga (Mexico, 1563): the law of the Indies printed in the Indies

  A book of royal law printed in Mexico City by Pedro Ocharte in 1563, gathering the cedulas and provisiones issued for New Spain from 1525 onward. The viceroy's printing order, dated 3 March 1563, names the compiler — the oidor Vasco de Puga — and the purpose: the good government of the land and the good treatment of its natives. Its folios print the 1530 prohibition of Indian slavery and, on the same leaf, the grant of twenty-three thousand vassals to Cortes.

• Quatro libros de la naturaleza (Mexico, 1615)

  The Mexican imprint of 1615 in which a Dominican lay brother put Doctor Francisco Hernández's Latin survey of New Spain's plants and animals into Spanish, for people living on estancias and in mining camps where there was neither physician nor apothecary. Its chapter headings are Nahuatl; its drugs come from the Indian markets; and its compiler states on the page that he worked from corrupt copies and had lost the hearing he needed to learn the language.

• The printed lexicography of Quechua, 1560-1754, as catalogued from outside Spain in 1858

  For nearly two centuries the general language of Peru was treated in print as a working language: a Dominican lexicon at Valladolid in 1560, a two-volume vocabulary at Lima in 1607 and 1608, a Jesuit handbook printed at Seville in 1603 that reached a third edition in 1700 and another in 1754. The enumeration here is not Spanish self-report: it is the bibliography a London publisher finished in 1858 from a dead compiler's manuscript.

• Quina (cinchona bark) and its transfer out of Peru

  Cinchona bark — quina, cascarilla — was the first specific against malaria, and the fullest Spanish account of it is the Quinología published at Madrid in 1792 by Hipólito Ruiz, first botanist of the royal expedition to Peru. He states that the Indians of Loxa knew its virtue before the Spaniards reached Peru, weighs who deserves the credit, and records what a century and a half of trade did to the forests the bark came from.

• Agustín de Quintana, Arte de la lengua mixe (Puebla, 1729; reprinted Oaxaca, 1891)

  A Dominican's grammar of Mixe, printed at Puebla in 1729 inside a bilingual devotional book of 550 pages, and reprinted at Oaxaca in 1891 by a Mexican philologist who wanted it back in circulation because the independent republic had let the study of Oaxaca's languages lapse. Quintana records vowels his alphabet could not write and sends the learner to native speakers instead; Belmar, printing him 162 years later, argues against the "gente de razón e indios" distinction.

• Quinua in the Spanish record — described in 1553, discouraged, and returned

  Cieza de León's Seville imprint of 1553 describes quinua as a staple, with its leaf, its height, its two seed colours and the two ways it was eaten; Garcilaso places it in the province where maize will not grow. The same colonial order that printed those descriptions is also, on the account of a 2020 review, what pushed the grain out of urban Andean diets — and the twenty-first-century boom that brought it back is itself contested. All three parts are here, each bound to what states it.

• Quipus in the colonial Andes

  Knotted-cord records did not stop at the conquest. Acosta's 1590 Seville printing says the quipocamayos were bound to render account like public notaries and had to be given entire credit, and he saw knotted accounts produced at a corregidor's residencia as "testigos y escritura cierta". Garcilaso, who checked curacas' tribute against their knots as a boy, calls the system perishable. Against both, Solórzano records a judge of the Audiencia of Lima refusing quipus full faith in a tribute suit.

• Rafael Lorente de Nó (1902-1990), Cajal's youngest pupil and the closed circuits American psychology built on

  Cajal's youngest direct disciple, in Madrid at eighteen, in the United States from 1931 and at the Rockefeller Institute from 1936 to 1970. He named the cortical elementary unit in 1933, two decades before electrodes could test it, and described self-reexciting closed chains of neurons that gave Donald Hebb the mechanism for the cell assembly. He was nominated for the Nobel four times and never won, and he refused to the end to accept the ionic theory of the nerve impulse.

• The raíz de Mechoacán, the "ruybarbo de las Indias"

  A purgative root from the province of Michoacán that a Purépecha healer gave to a sick Franciscan around 1550, and that within thirty years was being sold in Seville by the quintal under the borrowed name rhubarb of the Indies. The Sevillian physician who publicised it prints both halves of the story: an indigenous prescription that displaced the violent purges of European practice, and a trade so intent on its profit that nobody in Spain could describe the plant the root came from.

• The pulque revenue and the pulquerías of New Spain

  A crown compilation of 1787 states in its own words that pulque was drunk by the Mexicans before the conquest and is permitted by old laws as a regional drink beneficial to the Indians — and then prints what the treasury made of it: a monopoly branch with its own accountant, printed ordinances of 1671 reissued in 1753, over three million pesos in five years, and a penal scale that punished the same offence differently according to the colour of the offender.

• Raramuri Criollo cattle: five centuries in the Sierra Tarahumara, and a desert experiment in New Mexico

  Cattle of Spanish colonial descent that the Raramuri of the Sierra Tarahumara kept for roughly five hundred years with almost no managed breeding. In 2005 three bulls and thirty heifers went to a USDA research range in New Mexico, to test whether an unimproved landrace outperforms commercial breeds on hot arid rangeland. Genomics published in 2025 confirms the predominantly Iberian ancestry - and measures how narrow the introduced herd's base has become.

• The printed annual returns of Mexico City, 1796: marriages, births, deaths and a hospital-by-hospital account

  Anyone who bought the Mexico City almanac for 1797 got three pages of the city's own vital statistics: marriages, births and deaths in all fourteen parishes, a twelve-house hospital return with the dead in a column of their own, and a resumen adding them up. A viceregal decree of 1791 had made the returns due every December so the volume could appear in January. Every printed total balances but one row.

• Real Anfiteatro de Anatomía (Mexico City, 1768) — the dissection school inside the Indians' hospital

  A chair of practical anatomy and surgical operations created in 1768 inside the Real Hospital de Naturales of Mexico City, with a professor as director and a substitute for the dissections, bound by its charter to attend and cure the hospital's sick "for the better instruction of their disciples". A bando of 1770 made four certified courses in it the condition of being examined as a surgeon at all. The capital's annual directory prints the arrangement, unchanged, in 1792 and 1797.

• The Real Arsenal of Havana

  The dockyard that built a hundred and nine vessels for the Spanish navy in a Caribbean city, including the largest warship of the age of sail. This entry works from a Havana imprint of 1813 that prints the yard's own list of ships and, on another page, the inscription over the city gate recording the two hundred and twenty enslaved people of the king put to the royal works in 1730.

• The shipyards of Guayaquil

  The yards that built the Pacific fleet of Spanish America, described in 1741 by the governor who had administered the province: 176 vessels since the city's foundation, keels of guachapelí that resisted the shipworm, oakum spun from coconut husk, and hulls whose masts, rigging and cargo all came out of the same territory — a circumstance, he wrote, reported of no other port of Europe or of the Indies.

• The Real Audiencia of Nueva Galicia (1548-1572): a second high court built for a frontier, and what it was allowed to decide

  A royal decree of 13 February 1548 put four oidores at Compostela with first-instance jurisdiction over twelve leagues and appellate jurisdiction over a frontier kingdom. A second decree of 18 May 1572 raised the court to a chancery with its own seal, and in 1578 its authority in its district was declared equal to Mexico's in its own. Mota Padilla, a lawyer of that court, prints the decrees, the salaries, the reserved cases and the jurisdictional war with Mexico that ran for a quarter-century.

• The Real Cedula de Gracias for Puerto Rico (10 August 1815)

  Thirty-three articles that opened Puerto Rico to Catholic settlers of any nation, gave every colonist free land in perpetuity with a written title, and suspended tithes and the alcabala for fifteen years. The same sheet granted half an allotment for every enslaved person brought, gave free Blacks and pardos half a white colonist's share, made the importation of Africans permanently duty-free, and required every colonist to keep arms to hold down his own slaves. Extended to Cuba in 1817.

• The Real Colegio de Cirugía de Cádiz (1748)

  A naval surgery school approved by royal order of 11 November 1748, the first of the Spanish royal colleges of surgery and the model for Barcelona and Madrid. Its own textbook of 1763 shows how it worked — a treatise commissioned by a deliberation of the college assembly, taught in the house first and printed for beginners after — and also what it lacked: the ten plates were engraved by a student because no adequate burin could be had.

• Real Colegio de San Telmo de Málaga (nautical college founded by the Ordenanzas of 1787)

  The daughter school of Seville's San Telmo, founded at the request of the Málaga consulado and given its own code eighteen months later. A hundred and fifty boys, orphans of Málaga and Granada preferred, taught mathematics, the nautical faculties, commerce and four modern languages, funded on American silver and on the surplus of the city's own aqueduct, and bound on admission to serve in the Royal Navy or the Indies trade.

• Real Colegio de San Telmo de Sevilla (nautical college for orphan boys, refounded by the Ordenanzas of 1786)

  A boarding school in Seville that took in poor boys of eight to fourteen, orphans preferred, and taught them mathematics, the nautical faculties, commerce, drawing, French and English. Its 1786 ordinances open by admitting the place had been badly governed, endow it on one per cent of the silver arriving from the Indies, and bind every boy admitted to serve afterwards in the Royal Navy or the Indies trade.

• The Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas (1728-1785), read in its own defence brief

  A Basque chartered company took the cacao trade of Venezuela in 1728 and set out to end the Dutch contraband that carried it. Its own printed account of 1765 claims exports rose from an average 21,440 fanegas a year before 1730 to 80,661 in 1763 alone, and that the price fell twenty pesos a fanega. The same pages record what the province called it - opresión, tiranía, estanco - and dismiss the rising of Juan Francisco de León as a sedition with no popular support.

• Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain (Sessé and Mociño, 1787-1803) and its botanical chair in Mexico City

  The third and least-known of the crown's American botanical expeditions, ordered in 1787 under Martin Sesse with the charge of founding a botanical garden in Mexico City. Its teaching chair opened in the university in May 1788, its first Mexican pupils became its own botanists, and its printed public examinations record an indigenous cacique passing pharmacy in 1794. Its results were not printed until a century later, in Mexico.

• The Real Expedición de Límites al Orinoco (1754-1761)

  A boundary commission sent to fix the line with Portugal surveyed the Orinoco instead. Its cosmographer's observations of 1756 are the latitudes a Franciscan of the expedition printed in 1779; its boats passed rapids a famous Jesuit had called impassable, and it left forts, portages and towns on the Río Negro. The same book records that the people gathered into those towns fled to the forest in a single night.

• Real Fábrica de Puros y Cigarros de México, 1769: seven thousand people of both sexes in one workshop

  The crown's cigar factory in Mexico City opened in a rented house on the calle de Cadena at the end of June 1769 and grew, on the compilation's own account, to employ "siete mil personas de ambos sexos" in the barrio of Santa Catarina Mártir — one of the largest single workplaces anywhere in the eighteenth century, and among the first to put women into wage work at that scale. It existed because the independent cigar shops had been closed by decree.

• Hospicio de Pobres de México, 1774: a poorhouse built by one man and paid for by a state lottery

  A cathedral dignitary built a poorhouse in Mexico City at his own expense for people too old or too ill to work; it was approved in 1765 and opened in March 1774, and from 1783 the crown paid it a thousand pesos a month out of the royal lottery, raising the lottery's own deduction from fourteen to sixteen per cent to do it. The bando that opened it also ordered every beggar into it within eight days and set watchmen in the districts to collect those who stayed out.

• Real Instrucción de 15 de octubre de 1754 on land titles in the Indies

  A land-title statute written because smallholders could not afford Madrid. It moved the granting of crown land from the king's person to the viceroys, ordered officials to leave in quiet possession — free of charge — everyone holding land bought or composed before 1700 even if never confirmed, and took long possession itself as title where no paper survived. It also put a cultivation term on that security and rewarded denouncers of untitled ground "sin excepcion de personas ni Comunidades".

• Real Ordenanza de Intendentes de Nueva España (Madrid, 1786)

  The administrative rewrite of New Spain: twelve intendancies, the old corregimientos and alcaldías mayores extinguished, an irremissible penalty on any official who forced goods or cattle on Indians, Spaniards, mestizos or any other caste, and the annual election of Indian pueblo officers kept where the custom existed. The same code paid the new district judges not a salary but a percentage of the tribute they collected — the reform and the hole in it printed in one volume.

• The Real Pragmática on marriages extended to the Indies (1776, published there by cédula of 7 April 1778)

  Two centuries after ordering that Indians have "entera libertad para casarse con quien quisieren", the crown required parental consent before betrothal and stripped titles, arms and succession from anyone marrying with "notable desigualdad". The cédula carrying it to the Indies names its reason: the "diversidad de clases y castas". Article I exempts mulatos, negros and coyotes, then readmits those holding militia rank; article II makes the doctrina priest an absent parent's unpaid substitute.

• Real Seminario de Minería (Mexico City, founded by the Ordenanzas of 1783)

  The mining college ordered for New Spain by the royal mining code of 22 May 1783: endowed places for twenty-five boys, Spanish or noble Indian, and — in the article next to it — free entry and free tuition for any child whose parents wished to put them into the career. Its professors taught mathematics and experimental physics, owed a written dissertation every six months, and its graduates had to spend three years at the mine face before they could be examined.

• Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País (1765)

  Spain's first economic society, licensed because the law forbade forming associations and holding assemblies without one. Its printed annual proceedings show what such a body actually did: a boarding school with public examinations, a members' roll that reaches Jalapa, Havana and Manila, a smallpox inoculation treatise built on five cases observed in the Caribbean, and a schools committee that names the emigration of the province's poor boys as the reason its own plan will not work.

• Real Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País de Guatemala (1795-1800)

  A private association of a judge, a doctor, a friar and other townsmen that in five years put spinning wheels into Guatemalan hands, opened a free night school of drawing for thirty-two young men, a school of mathematics and a life class, and reported its accounts publicly every six months. The King thanked it in July 1799. In July 1800 a royal order suspended it.

• The Real Sociedad Economica de Amigos del Pais of Havana

  A subscription society of Havana that ran free primary schools, a public library, a botanical garden, an anatomy museum and a midwifery class, and printed its own accounts. Its 1834 proceedings count 6,080 children taught and 8,000 left without teaching, price the gap at 24,600 pesos a year against 4,600 spent, and count only white children. The same volume treats the cholera dead of 1833 as lost capital.

• Real Tribunal General de Minería de Nueva España (1776-1783)

  A self-governing corporation of miners in the Americas, erected by royal cédula of 1 July 1776 and codified in 1783: thirty-three territorial deputations electing the deputies who sat in Mexico City, its own court of appeal, its own development bank, and a technical school funded from a duty on its members' own silver. Humboldt thought the representative machinery its best feature; he also recorded the loans it never recovered and the war levies that broke it.

• Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias

  The code of the Spanish Indies, first printed at Madrid by Julián de Paredes in 1681 in four volumes and nine books, and still being reprinted by order of the Council of the Indies in 1791. Its distinguishing feature is the margin: every law is printed beside the monarch, place and date of the order it consolidates, which makes the compilation an audit trail of its own empire — including of the provisions that had to be issued over and over.

• The reducción of the Indians: the crown's jurist defends compulsory resettlement and records its cost

  Gathering scattered native peoples into fixed towns — reducción in Peru, congregación in New Spain — gave them self-governing towns with churches, magistrates and common land, and bound them there by force for tribute and labour. Juan de Solórzano Pereira, a judge of the Council of the Indies, gave the policy its fullest legal defence in one chapter of his Política Indiana — and there quoted a friar who wept its harm, granted the fleeing Indian was scarcely at fault, and held its land protected.

• Reglamento y aranceles reales para el comercio libre de España a Indias (1778)

  The rulebook that widened Spain's American trade beyond the old fleet system, opening thirteen ports in Spain and the islands to more than twenty in America and abolishing the shipping duties of the 1720 project outright. Read from the Madrid sheets of 1778, it also names its own limits in the same voice: every hull reserved to the king's own subjects, Venezuela left with the Caracas company, and New Spain kept outside the concession altogether.

• The Cuban Reglamento de esclavos of 1842

  The slave regulation drawn up in Havana under governor Jerónimo Valdés by a fiscal, a government assessor and a war auditor: it fixed fifty pesos as the sum an owner could not refuse for coartación, capped the resale price of a part-paid person, then made the benefit strictly personal so no child inherited it. A Cuban lawyer in 1866 ranked its authors below the royal code of 1789, and said why — the slave trade was booming.

• Real cedula of 8 April 1734: the reglamento of the Philippines trade with New Spain

  The decree that lifted the ban on Chinese silks at Acapulco and fixed the Manila permission at 500,000 pesos out and a million back, printed in full in the Mexican treasury's own compilation. The reasons the crown records for reversing itself are the interesting part: the duties on those goods paid the subsidy sent to the Philippines and the Marianas, and the poor of New Spain wore Chinese cloth because they could not afford Spanish cloth.

• Reglamento general de las medidas de las aguas (Mexico, 1761)

  The printed rulebook that turned irrigation water in New Spain into a measured, divisible quantity. It defines the buey de agua as an opening one vara square and subdivides it into surcos, naranjas, reales and pajas, so that a grant, a sale or a lawsuit could name an exact share; it states the Roman and Castilian law behind the royal claim to water; and it was still the working standard when a Mexico City publisher reprinted it eighty-eight years later, with corrections.

• Relacion de las ceremonias y ritos, poblacion y gobierno de los indios de la provincia de Mechuacan (1541, printed Madrid 1869)

  The fullest surviving account of the Tarascan state, written in Michoacan in 1541 by a friar who says on his first pages that the viceroy asked him twice or three times why he did not set down the government of these people, that he took it "por relacion de los mas viejos y antiguos desta provincia", and that he wanted the province ruled by the good it had in its own time. The same page calls that past ceremonies, drunkenness and wars.

• Relacion del ultimo viage al Estrecho de Magallanes (Madrid, 1788)

  The frigate Santa Maria de la Cabeza surveyed the Strait of Magellan in 1785-86 with marine chronometers borrowed from the Cadiz observatory, and the book published from its officers' diaries did two unusual things: it stated the expedition's motives itself, naval, scientific and fiscal in that order, and it went back to the manuscript journals of the sixteenth century to establish that the Patagonian giants were never in them.

• The relación de gobierno: the viceroy's handover report to his successor

  A standing royal order required each viceroy of the Indies to leave his successor a written account of the state in which he left the kingdom. The result is a long series of self-audits by the men in charge — and one of them, handing Peru over in 1615, wrote down that few of the Indians sent to the Potosí mita ever returned home, and called it the principal cause of their total ruin. The independent Peruvian republic printed the series at state expense in 1859.

• The Relaciones Geográficas de Indias and the printed questionnaire of 1577

  On 25 May 1577 Philip II ordered a description of the Indies to be made by the people who lived in them, and sent out a printed questionnaire of fifty numbered chapters to be distributed town by town, in Spanish and in Indian settlements alike. It asked for latitude, distances and terrain, but also for what the town's name meant in the local language, whether there were more or fewer Indians than before and why, and whom they had obeyed and paid before the Spaniards came.

• A thousand ducats, six months and a mortal sin: how encomienda suits were processed

  Libro III capítulo XXXI of the Política Indiana opens on the machinery of the suit: the rent that decided whether an Audiencia of the Indies or the Council in Madrid heard the case, a term for proofs lengthened from three months to six, an amendment making citation of the parties and publication of witnesses necessary before a process crossed the Atlantic, and a rule that litigants, judges, advocates and attorneys who spin out dilatory remedies sin mortally.

• Antonio de Remesal, Historia general de las Indias Ocidentales, y particular de la Gouernacion de Chiapa, y Guatemala (Madrid, 1620)

  The first history of Chiapas and Guatemala to reach print, built out of municipal cabildo books fetched from every city of the governorship by order of the president of the Audiencia. Its prologue states its method and its limits, it follows a royal provision of 1573 for the ordering of events, and it stops mid-narrative to argue that Las Casas was not an eyewitness to what his printed memorial describes.

• Renta de loteria de la isla de Cuba (1812-1844): a Mexican rulebook, a four-peso ticket cut into eighths, and a charity line of 3,600 pesos

  The Havana state lottery, ordered by royal order of 28 April 1810 and run from 1812 under the reglamento of the Mexico lottery of 1769 - one Indies institution governed by another's rulebook. Its ordinance of 1836 divided the four-peso ticket into eighths so that small purses could play, locked the draw behind three keys held by three officers, and left, in the accounts it prints, 3,600 pesos a year for the poorhouse.

• Renta del tabaco de Nueva España: the crown monopoly that became the largest payroll in the Americas, 1764-1790

  A royal cédula of 13 August 1764 made tobacco a crown monopoly in New Spain. Planting was banned outside three districts, the independent cigar trade was extinguished by 1775, and by 1788 the branch paid 17,256 people, 12,028 of them factory hands. Its own accounts give 110.8 million pesos gross and 52.4 million net to 1790. The republic that replaced the empire kept the monopoly: its finance minister told Congress in 1829 there was nothing to put in place of it.

• The república de indios: elected Indian magistrates and the law of the cacicazgos

  Spanish law gave every Indian town in the Americas its own indigenous alcalde, and towns above eighty households two alcaldes and two regidores, all of them Indians of that town, each year's officers electing the next. The same code ordered that pre-conquest lords keep their lordships, that towns dispossessed of the right to elect their caciques be restored to it, and that no Spaniard, black, mestizo or mulatto live in an Indian town. Every one of those rules also cost the Indians something.

• The residence duty as the compiled law left it: seven heads of the Recopilación, four of them about Chile, where a frontier war bought the only exemptions

  Closing the chapter on the encomendero's duty to reside, the editor of the 1736 Política Indiana digests leyes 27 to 33 of título 9, libro 6 of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias in seven sentences. They cover licence to come to Spain, two years for a man fetching a wife, a bar on offices outside the place, Cartagena, and then Chile — a graduated penalty for the absent, and exemptions for those serving in the army of Arauco, at Yumbel and in the frontier forts.

• Can the king take back what he has given? The argument in the Política Indiana that the crown could not revoke the encomiendas of the Indies without grave and legitimate cause

  At §13 of libro III capítulo XXIX the Política Indiana asks whether the prince may extinguish every encomienda he has granted and incorporate them all in his crown. It builds the case that he may, then argues the other way for fifteen paragraphs: a king who revokes without fault sins mortally, just cause is the urgent necessity of the kingdom and never the prince's convenience, and a taking without compensation is called diabolical power.

• Lazaro de Ribera's report to the Audiencia de Charcas on the capacity of the Moxos Indians (1788)

  In a report of 22 February 1788 the governor of Moxos told the Audiencia de Charcas that a Mojo Indian writes the annals of his town on a board or a piece of cane by means of signs, and that a critic who called that barbarous would have called Newton an idiot for writing in strokes. Claims of Indian incapacity, he added in April, are "una ficcion teatral, fabricada por la tirania o por la necedad".

• Antonio del Rincon's Arte mexicana (Mexico, 1595)

  The Nahuatl grammar printed at Mexico City by Pedro Balli in 1595, written by a Jesuit who was himself a Nahuatl speaker from Texcoco. Fifty years before Carochi's celebrated accents, it devotes a section to the saltillo, states the rules for where that glottal stop falls, describes how sounds change when words meet, and closes with a list of Nahuatl words differing in meaning only by vowel length or saltillo — the analysis Carochi said was taught there "con tanto magisterio".

• Teórica y práctica de fortificación (Madrid, 1598) — the printed course of a royal academy of mathematics

  A captain of engineers printed in 1598 the fortification lectures he had been ordered to give in the royal academy at Madrid, after a doctor there began reading Euclid to soldiers. The book asks for Euclid and arithmetic before it asks for courage, argues that shortening the defences to musket range halves the cost of a fortress and of its garrison, and devotes its third part to how contractors cheat on lime. It also says, without embarrassment, that a castle must command the town it defends.

• Suplemento á la quinología (Hipólito Ruiz and Josef Pavón, Madrid 1801)

  The 1801 continuation of the first Spanish monograph on cinchona: new species collected in the Peruvian Andes by Juan Tafalla, the first printed description and plate of the quina naranjada of Santa Fé, and an open answer to the school of Mutis arguing that the northern barks were inferior to those of Loxa and Peru. It is a botanical supplement and a priority quarrel bound together, and it prints the praise of its opponent alongside the attack on him.

• Oliva Sabuco, Nueva filosofia de la naturaleza del hombre (read in the fourth Madrid impression, 1728)

  A treatise on human nature published under the name of Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera of Alcaraz, dedicated to Philip II, still being reprinted at Madrid a century and a half later. It argues that sadness makes a juice fall from the brain and dries people up without fever, and asks the king to try its doctrine for one year against two thousand years of Hippocrates and Galen. The impression read is expurgated by order of the Holy Office.

• Whether the Indians could be priests: the argument for admission in the standard treatise on the government of the Indies

  Royal cédulas forbade ordaining Indians. The crown's own leading jurist printed, in the chapter of the Política Indiana that colonial courts used, that he could find no law excluding them from the priesthood or from any ecclesiastical dignity, and no right on which the contrary practice could rest. The counter-opinion is named on the same pages, and so is his own limit: he would not admit plebeian or tributary Indians to the Military Orders, only the descendants of Incas and Moctezumas.

• Sahagún's Relación del autor digna de ser notada

  The short appendix Bernardino de Sahagún attached to the tenth book of his Historia general, and the closest thing the sixteenth century produced to a defence of indigenous intellectual capacity written by someone who had tested it. He taught the first four years of Latin at Tlatelolco, records that Spaniards and fellow religious laughed at the attempt, sets down what the pupils could do within three years, and lists the objections raised against them once they could do it.

• Francisco de Salinas, De musica libri septem (Salamanca, 1577)

  The Salamanca professor of music who measured tuning instead of arguing about it. His 1577 folio sets out three temperaments of keyboard instruments as exact fractions of the comma, judges the third — the one that leaves the major third in its true form — easier to understand and better suited to instruments, compares two of them by dividing the comma into twenty-eight parts, and reports tuning an organ half tempered and half pure so that the difference could be settled by ear.

• San Lorenzo de los Negros — the town the viceroy of New Spain conceded to Yanga's maroons (1609)

  After a viceregal expedition failed to break them, the maroons of the mountains above Córdoba wrote to Luis de Velasco proposing terms, and the viceroy granted them a town of their own with a priest and a magistrate. The same terms bound them to hunt down future runaways and hand them back for a small payment. Read from the Jesuit chaplain's relación as Alegre printed it and from Orozco y Berra's article of 1856.

• Alonso de Sandoval, Naturaleza, policia sagrada i profana... de todos Etiopes (Seville, 1627)

  The book in which a Jesuit at Cartagena de Indias set down, in print and in Spanish, what the Atlantic slave trade did to the people carried in it: the chains, the closed hatches, one bowl of meal a day, a third dead on the crossing, twelve or fourteen shiploads a year into one port. It also prints, in full, the letter from a fellow Jesuit at Luanda telling him not to ask the captives whether they had been lawfully taken.

• The law of the Sangleyes (Recopilación, libro VI, título 18)

  Thirteen laws on the Chinese of Manila: a cap of six thousand, a court of their own with appeal to the Audiencia, a ten-year tax holiday on conversion, an itemised catalogue of the bribes and swindles Spanish officials worked on Chinese ships, and an order that they be well treated — set beside the judge Antonio de Morga's account of the persecution that preceded the killing of 1603 and the hungry city that followed it.

• Santiago Ramón y Cajal

  Spanish histologist (1852-1934) whose microscopic studies established that the nervous system is built of individual cells — the neuron doctrine at the foundation of modern neuroscience. He shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Camillo Golgi for work on the structure of the nervous system, the first Nobel science prize awarded to a Spaniard.

• Santo Domingo, the first city the Spaniards built in the Americas (moved and rebuilt in stone from 1502)

  A hurricane flattened the settlement in September 1502; the governor moved it across the Ozama and it was rebuilt in cut stone with wide, ordered streets. The crown's own chronicler, who lived there, says no town in Spain of its size was better built save Barcelona — and, two paragraphs after calling that governor a father to the Indians, records forty caciques burned in a hut and Anacaona hanged.

• Domingo de Santo Tomás, Grammatica o arte de la lengua general del Perú (1560)

  The first grammar of Quechua, finished at Valladolid in January 1560 by a Dominican who had spent fifteen years in Peru. Its prologue to Philip II turns the grammar itself into evidence: a tongue this ordered cannot be called barbarous, therefore its speakers are not barbarians, therefore the men telling the king they may be treated worse than his other vassals are lying to him out of private interest.

• Domingo de los Santos's Vocabulario de la lengua Tagala (Sampaloc reprint, 1794)

  The Franciscan dictionary of Tagalog, reprinted in 1794 at the convent press of Sampaloc by a lay brother of the order. Its opening notes are a field manual: four accents that change meaning, entries labelled for upland speech, particles that differ by the sex of the person addressed — and a warning that a Tagalog speaker will agree with whatever the priest says if he senses the priest wants agreement, so the questioner must never show displeasure.

• Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Viage al Estrecho de Magallanes (Madrid, 1768)

  The royal press at Madrid printed Sarmiento's 1579-80 journal of the Strait of Magellan in 1768, and bound in front of it a dossier of testimonies from other writers, Spanish and foreign. The journal shows what a survey looked like from inside: soundings, a stone cairn, a cross visible down the whole channel. The testimonies show what came of it: a garrison of four hundred set to close the Strait, and corpses left clothed in the houses.

• School of Salamanca

  Sixteenth-century movement of theologian-jurists at the University of Salamanca, founded by Francisco de Vitoria, that laid groundwork for modern international law — separating the law of nations from natural law and defending the property rights of non-Christian peoples — and for monetary economics, including the first formulation of the quantity theory of money.

• Silk raising in New Spain (the morales of the Mixteca and the Valle de Atlixco)

  Mulberries and silkworms reached Mexico in the 1530s and were taken up so fast that a friar writing in 1540 named growers drawing three and four hundred pounds of raw silk. The trees stood on indigenous land, which is why a law of 1549 ordered the audiencias to stop encomenderos making Indians raise silk on their own morales. By 1748 an official found the industry gone from the Oaxacan town still called La Seda: the growers had killed the mulberries themselves.

• The Second Audiencia of New Spain (1531-1535) and its junta on the treatment of the Indians

  The court sent from Spain to try the first Audiencia of Mexico and to govern until a viceroy came. Under its president, the bishop Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, twenty-five people were sentenced in 1532, the royal orders imposing death for enslaving Indians were published, and a junta cut personal service, banned carrying loads, ordered wages paid and had Indian towns elect their own alcaldes. The friar who calls the president a father to the Indians also records the towns objecting to him.

• The second charge of the encomienda: the duty to teach and protect, and what had become of it by the 1640s

  The encomienda was justified as an office: the encomendero was to be a patron and protector, charged with the instruction and defence of the Indians entrusted to him. A royal letter of 1555 says so in terms and adds that if he failed he must restore the tribute. The standard treatise then reports what happened: salaried priests took over the teaching, corregidores the protection, the encomenderos paid for both, and the reason given is that their own abuses had forced the change.

• Marine insurance on the Carrera de Indias: the underwriting code an official of the Casa de Contratación wrote down in 1672

  The 1672 manual of the Seville Indies trade describes a working insurance market: printed policy forms, a registered broker forbidden to underwrite, a cap on hull cover, general average, abandonment of a missing ship after eighteen months, a four-year long-stop. One rule computes bad faith — a policy on a ship already lost is void if news could have reached the insured at a league an hour. Its author, a judge of the Casa, records that the bar on underwriters sitting as Prior was ignored.

• The Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Santa Fé de Bogotá, 1808-1810) and its thirty-three subscribers

  A weekly printed at Santa Fé de Bogotá from 1808 under Francisco José de Caldas, carrying observatory weather tables, a memoir on snakes and antivenom by the crown's zoologist, quina export figures, the trade balances of Cartagena and Veracruz, a provincial statistical survey of Antioquia and a published count of the capital's smallpox vaccinations. It also printed the list of its own subscribers, headed by the viceroy and running to thirty-three entries.

• Jacinto de la Serna, Manual de ministros de indios

  A handbook by the parish priest of the Sagrario of Mexico City, written to help other priests recognise and stamp out Nahua ritual practice. To make it usable he printed the thing he meant to destroy: healers' testimony in their own account of it, the herbs they used, the incantations word for word. The same pages record the death sentences, the forced searches and the imprisonments that produced the testimony.

• Service in coca and indigo (Recopilación, libro VI, título 14)

  Three laws on the two American crops the crown judged most dangerous to the people who grew them. Coca is not banned — the king refuses to take from the Indians "este género de alivio para el trabajo, aunque solo consista en la imaginacion" — but is put under an ordinance of dry clothing, rations, salaried surgeons, wages paid to the worker and not the cacique, and no loads carried on backs to Potosí. Indigo work is forbidden outright, even to volunteers.

• Severo Ochoa

  Spanish-American biochemist (1905-1993) who first synthesized ribonucleic acid in the laboratory. He shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Arthur Kornberg for the discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid, work that opened the road to deciphering the genetic code.

• Silk raising in New Spain (mulberries, silkworms and the pueblo called la Seda, 1530s-1748)

  Spain moved mulberries and silkworm seed to Mexico within a decade of the conquest, and by 1541 a royal plantation in the valley of Atlixco held a hundred and ten thousand trees while a friar predicted more silk here than in all Christendom. The same records carry the cost: a law of 1549 against encomenderos who made their Indians rear it, and a 1748 survey of a pueblo actually named la Seda whose people had stopped the rearing and ruined the mulberries themselves.

• The situados of New Spain — Mexico's treasury as paymaster of Havana, San Juan, Santo Domingo, Florida, Louisiana and Manila

  Before any of its own charges were met, the treasury of New Spain paid out more than three million pesos a year to places that did not raise enough revenue to defend or govern themselves: Havana, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Florida, Louisiana, the Marianas and the Philippines. The treasury's own compilers itemised every consignment in 1791 and printed the arithmetic, including the larger sum sent the other way, to Spain.

• Vaccination in Spanish America before the Balmis expedition (1803-1805)

  The navy surgeons who had Jenner's vaccine working in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Yucatan, Guatemala, New Granada, Peru, Charcas, the River Plate and Chile before the Real Expedicion Filantropica de la Vacuna reached them, named and dated from a 2023 archival study. It records what those men did, what the expedition's director said about them, and the fact that some of the fluid travelled in the bodies of enslaved children.

• Socavones and the drainage duty in the mining law of New Spain

  Roman law made the lower ground receive the water running down from the higher. The mining ordinance of New Spain reversed it underground: the shallower mine that let its waters fall into the deeper one paid to drain them. The commentator who printed the rule at Madrid in 1761 granted it looked unjust before defending it, described the shafts, adits and horse-whims that did the work — two named from Nahuatl — and recorded the English pumping engine that cost 100,000 pesos and vanished.

• Sociedad Patriótica de Amigos del País de Quito, 1791: twenty-four members, a fortnightly paper, and a collapse inside two years

  The president of the Audiencia of Quito set up an economic society in November 1791 with twenty-four members, put the bishop at its head and made the creole physician Eugenio Espejo its secretary. Espejo drafted its statutes and announced, in its name, the fortnightly Primicias de la Cultura de Quito; a Lima periodical printed the announcement within weeks. Its four commissions planned public conferences and catechisms of agriculture. Neither appeared, and it dissolved inside two years.

• Juan de Solórzano Pereira, Política Indiana

  The systematic treatise on the law of the Spanish Indies, written by a judge who spent eighteen years on the bench in Lima under a royal order to write down what he learned there. Its second book opens by naming the charge against Spain — that it enslaved the Indians — and answers it with law. The same book defends compulsory labour for the public good, so the answer and its limit stand on the same pages.

• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

  A Hieronymite nun of Mexico City whose verse was printed in Madrid in 1689, enlarged by her own hand in Barcelona in 1693, and completed in Lisbon in 1701 with the letter in which she defends a woman's right to study. Her reply to a bishop argues from a life without masters, from a prelate who forbade her books, and from what she learned watching eggs fry and sugar thicken in a convent kitchen.

• Domingo de Soto, Deliberacion en la causa de los pobres (1545)

  A Salamanca theologian's brief to the heir to the throne against the poor laws the Castilian towns began to enforce in 1544, which licensed and confined begging. Soto concedes the whole case against able-bodied idlers, reciting the lash and banishment the kingdom's own laws impose on them, and then defends the freedom of the genuinely poor to travel and to ask: no more reason is to be demanded of a poor man than of a rich one for being outside his own land. Printed with its own reply.

• Spanish and Mexican land titles in United States law: the guarantee of 1848 and the California commission of 1851

  The treaty of 1848 bound the new sovereign to respect property "of every kind" already held in the ceded territories, and the act of 1851 ordered American commissioners and courts to decide land claims by "the laws, usages, and customs of the government from which the claim is derived" - that is, by Spanish and Mexican law. The same act put the burden on the holder: a claim not filed within two years became public domain.

• Why the 1918 pandemic is called the Spanish flu

  Spain was neutral in the First World War, so Spanish newspapers were free to report an epidemic the belligerent powers were censoring. The disease acquired the name of the only country that published it. The same openness left Spain with one of the best-documented national mortality records of the pandemic — between about 195,000 and 238,000 excess deaths, now a standard dataset for reconstructing 1918.

• The Spanish language in the world

  Spanish passed 500 million native-command speakers for the first time in 2025, reaching 520 million — the world's third mother tongue after Mandarin and Hindi — with 635 million potential users counting limited proficiency and learners, per the Instituto Cervantes yearbook. The language itself is the largest living legacy this instance documents.

• Spanish mining law in the American West: the Ordenanzas de Minería of 1783 translated for United States courts, 1851-1859

  After 1848 the United States acquired territory whose mines and land titles had been governed by Spanish and Mexican law, and American lawyers put that law into English so their own courts could apply it. Two compilations printed in New York in 1851 and San Francisco in 1859 carry the mining ordinances of New Spain of 1783 - crown ownership, grant to any subject of whatever rank, forfeiture for failing to work - along with the coerced Indian labour written into the same code.

• The Spanish Model of organ donation: an organisational answer, not a legal one

  Since dedicated institutions were created in 1989, Spain has led the world in deceased organ donation - 114.8 transplants per million people before the pandemic, against 7.6 in the lowest-ranked EU country - while spending below the EU average on health. The exportable part is administrative: three tiers of coordination and a trained coordinator inside every procuring hospital. The presumed-consent law usually credited for it was passed a decade before the rise began.

• Spanish navigation manuals and the English art of navigation

  For most of the sixteenth century the books that taught England to navigate were Spanish: Enciso, Pedro de Medina and Martín Cortés in translation, behind them a Casa de Contratación that examined pilots and kept a master chart. The assessment used here is a British naval historian's — Cortés in Richard Eden's version was, on his reading, the most influential book after the Bible in English. The same paper insists the underlying invention was Portuguese and Spanish together.

• The Spanish origins of deaf education: Ponce de Leon, Bonet and a disputed authorship

  The first printed book on teaching deaf people to speak came out of Madrid in 1620, written by the secretary of the Constable of Castile. It was not the first method: a Benedictine at Ona had taught deaf pupils Spanish, Latin and Greek two generations earlier, and by the eighteenth century reference works were flatly asserting that the monk, not the secretary, was the true author of the book. This object sets out what the printed record supports, what it only reports, and who was left out of it.

• The Spanish silver real as the first global money

  The silver peso of eight reales, minted from American silver, became the first currency used on every inhabited continent. After Manila's founding in 1571 linked American mines to Chinese demand for silver, a Spanish-carried monetary circuit joined the Americas, Europe and Asia — the birth of sustained global trade in the account of Flynn and Giráldez.

• The Spanish voyages to the Northwest Coast, 1774-1779: Perez at Nootka, Heceta at the Columbia, Bodega y Quadra in Alaska

  Three expeditions sailed from San Blas under the viceroy of Mexico and examined the American coast from Monterey to beyond the 58th parallel - reaching Nootka four years before Cook and the mouth of the Columbia seventeen years before the Boston ship that named it. Spain published nothing until 1802, so the priority was conceded late and by an unfriendly witness: the librarian of the United States Department of State, writing to support the American claim to Oregon.

• The sunflower in sixteenth-century Spain — a staked garden giant and a salad herb

  Two Spanish printings eight years apart describe the sunflower as it actually was in Spain: a plant grown for the garden and for the pot, carrying seven competing names and a Peruvian provenance that modern genetics rejects. Fragoso in 1572 gives a recipe for eating its leaves; Monardes in 1580 says it must be staked or it will lie down, and refuses to be impressed by its turning to the sun. Neither mentions oil.

• The sweet potato and the Manila galleon: the camote line

  Sweet potato left the Americas three separate times and genetics can tell the lines apart: a pre-Columbian Polynesian crossing, dated in southern New Zealand to 1430-1460 CE; a Portuguese line west from the Caribbean to Africa, India and the Moluccas; and the camote line, Mexican clones carried into Asia on the Acapulco-Manila galleons. The Spanish leg is a hypothesis stated in conditional verbs by the geneticists who proposed it, and this object keeps it in those terms.

• Picietl into tabaco — how an American plant entered European medicine

  The plant Nahuatl speakers called picietl entered European practice as a wound dressing that Spanish soldiers were taught by indigenous healers, was published to Europe from Seville as a cure for dozens of complaints, and is now the leading preventable cause of death in the world. The two sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printings read here name the indigenous origin plainly; a modern review supplies what they could not know and what the transfer eventually cost.

• Tambos: the Andean roadside station under the law of the Indies

  The Inca road carried lodgings and stores at intervals; the Spanish crown kept them running and then spent half a century legislating about who paid for what in them. Three laws of 1563, 1595-96 and 1609, printed together in the Recopilación, forbid compelling Indians to serve travellers in person, forbid taking food or fodder without paying its just price, and split the traffic across several roads so carriers are less time from home.

• Tamemes: the prohibition of human porterage in New Spain, 1528-1549

  Mesoamerica moved its freight on people's backs, and the Spaniards who arrived kept the system running. Between 1528 and 1549 the crown banned it outright, was lobbied into licensing it under conditions, and then banned it again — this time even where the carrier said he was willing. A Franciscan chronicler prints the sequence with its dates and penalties, and in the same chapter says the orders were not kept. A judge of the audiencia of Mexico describes what continued anyway.

• Carlos de Tapia Zenteno, Noticia de la lengua huasteca (Mexico, 1767)

  The only printed grammar, catechism and dictionary of Huastec to come out of colonial Mexico, and a book that dates its own delay: written more than forty years before it appeared, licensed more than twenty, held back by what printing cost until an archbishop paid. It describes four sibilants by where the tongue goes, records a dialect split around Tampico, and ends in confession questions written for native officials about beating people for tribute.

• Tardes americanas (Mexico, 1778): a history of the Indies argued between an Indian and a Spaniard

  A Franciscan printed a history of Mexico in Mexico in 1778 and put it in the mouth of two speakers, an Indio and an Espanol, credited on the title page as its authors. The Indian holds the position, presses for the source and refuses an argument he has not read; the Spaniard quotes the bibliography. The prologue mocks curates who sit before Indians like the Sultan, and the hospitals of Michoacan become a dispute about evidence. It is also a friar's ventriloquism.

• The temazcalli in New Spain's printed medicine: an indigenous sweat bath recorded as therapy in 1615 and proposed for the thermometer in 1772

  The Nahua vapour bath appears in the printed medicine of New Spain as a step in treatment. The Mexican pharmacopoeia of 1615 records it twice as the close of indigenous protocols - after bone-setting with resin, feathers and splints, and a day after purging in the cure of the mal frances - and a Mexico City weekly of 1772 prints a correspondent who rents two of them out, has seen miracles in them, admits patients sometimes come out worse, and wants a thermometer taken inside.

• Tercero catecismo y exposición de la doctrina cristiana por sermones (Third Provincial Council of Lima, 1583; approved 1584)

  A council of the Peruvian church commissioned thirty-one model sermons for parish priests and had them translated into the general language of Cuzco. Its preface is a manual of how to preach to Andean congregations — plain style, short clauses, no rhetoric borrowed from the court — and it says, without embarrassment, that the book exists because many doctrina priests lacked the language, or theology, or both. It also tells them to study Andean religion thoroughly in order to discredit it.

• The tercia parte: from 1610 the crown kept a third of every encomienda falling vacant in Peru, and printed its own justification for doing so

  From a cédula of Aranda of 14 August 1610 the crown began reserving to its treasury a third of every encomienda that fell vacant in Peru. One viceroy refused to apply it, the next promulgated it at Lima in 1616, and when the debts it was raised for were paid the deduction was continued anyway. The crown's own reasoning is quoted verbatim in the standard treatise, and the holders' petition won a limit: no encomienda could be terciada more than once.

• Earthquakes and sea-withdrawals in the Indies: what two Jesuit naturalists put on the page, 1590-1646

  Two centuries before Lisbon 1755, a Jesuit in Peru wrote a chapter on earthquakes that separates them from volcanoes, places them on coasts, reports the great ones running in order from Chile to Quito, and describes the sea coming ashore twice. He also records why Lima's dead were counted in tens rather than thousands. A second Jesuit, in Chile, argues the opposite about volcanoes. Both are printed here with their hedges.

• Testamentos de indios — the will of an Indian, and the law that guarded it

  An Indian in the Spanish Indies could make a will, and a law of 1580 with a rubric of its own exists because parish clergy were pressing dying Indians to leave the church everything. The code orders viceroys and audiencias to secure "entera libertad en sus disposiciones"; the bishop of Quito's manual tells the parish priest, who usually wrote the will, to take nothing from it. Both texts are the crown's and the church's own, and both describe the abuse they forbid.

• Tiangues — the indigenous market, protected by law and used against its own traders

  The pre-conquest marketplace survived as a legal institution. A law of 1552, re-issued in 1563, forbids stopping the Indians from holding "los tiangues, y mercados antiguos en sus Pueblos", and the laws around it guarantee free sale of their produce. Two eyewitnesses show what it carried: at Potosí in the 1540s the largest fair Cieza had seen, traded in part by indigenous women; in Mexico in 1525, enslaved people sold three or four times over.

• Timucua in print — the Florida books of Francisco Pareja (1612-1627)

  Between 1612 and 1627 the presses of Mexico City printed catechisms, two confessionals, a grammar and a catechism for communicants in Timucua, the language of northern Florida, written by the Franciscan Francisco Pareja. Two independent bibliographies, one Spanish and one compiled in New York, record them. The licence quotes Pareja's own account of sixteen years of work, and the approbations were signed in the Florida mission houses.

• Vicente Tofiño's Atlas Marítimo de España and its Derrotero (1787-1789)

  A survey of Spain's coasts built, on the certifying board's own account, as one unbroken chain of astronomical and geometric operations — sextant latitudes taken by several observers at once and separately, theodolite bearings from fixed points ashore, and chronometer longitudes cross-checked against eclipses of Jupiter's satellites observed at Paris at the same instant. Its stated purpose, quoted here from the 1787 derrotero, was that navigators everywhere should run fewer risks.

• Toledo school of translators

  The 12th-century translation movement centered on Toledo through which Arabic science and philosophy — and with it much of Greek learning — passed into Latin Europe. Gerard of Cremona and Dominicus Gundissalinus led complementary translation programs; modern scholarship treats "school" as a label for this coherent activity, not a formal institution.

• Tomás Luis de Victoria

  Spanish composer (c. 1548-1611), in the reference literature arguably the most famous Spanish composer of all time and the peer of Palestrina and Lasso in late Renaissance polyphony. Trained in Rome at the Collegium Germanicum, chaplain to the Dowager Empress María in Madrid, he closed his work with the Officium Defunctorum of 1605, regarded as his masterpiece.

• The tomato's first fifty years in Europe: ten herbarium sheets, thirteen pictures and one sequenced leaf

  The tomato crossed the Atlantic in Spanish hands and nobody wrote it down. Seville was the port of entry for American plants, and there is no record of the tomato arriving there. What survives instead is on the far side: a description of 1544, ten sixteenth-century herbarium specimens, thirteen drawings, and a leaf from about 1558 whose DNA has been read. It is a domesticated Mesoamerican tomato, and its European names still argue about whether it came from Mexico or Peru.

• Juan de Torquemada, Monarquia Indiana, book seventeen (Madrid printing of 1723)

  A Franciscan provincial in Mexico devoted a whole book of his chronicle to the proposition that the Indians were skilled before anyone taught them. He put the evidence in: goldsmiths who beat the Spaniards at casting, a named Indian sculptor whose work sold above Spanish work, apprentices who reverse-engineered a guarded trade by counting hammer blows. He also printed the papal letter of 1537 declaring them rational men, and the sentence in which Spaniards had denied it.

• Torrubia on the shells of the mountains (1754): an empire-wide evidence base and an arithmetical refutation

  The dissertations that give Torrubia's Aparato its title argue that fossil shells found far inland and high above the sea are real marine bodies. The argument rests on a stated rule — only petrifactions seen by Spanish observers inside Spanish dominions — putting Ulloa's Chilean shell terraces, Philippine quarries, Tuxpan and Molina de Aragón on one footing. It refutes the Crusader-pilgrim hypothesis by arithmetic, and ends in theology.

• Torrubia on the American bones (1754): a wrong conclusion reached by a working method

  The first Spanish printed treatise on fossils argues, from teeth found in the Campos de Toluca, that a race of giants once lived in America. The conclusion is false. The reasoning is not: comparative anatomy against Sloane's figured elephant teeth, distance from the sea as an objection to a marine origin, Nahuatl lexicography as evidence of what the country held, and a field visit to a Spanish cave that Torrubia printed as a failure.

• How Quiroga's Reglas y Ordenanzas de Santa Fe survived: a will, a notebook without beginning or end in Legajo 69, and an editor who said they were never put into observance

  Quiroga's ordinances are cited as the constitution the Santa Fe towns lived under. Their 1766 prologue says less: a draft found in a cathedral archive as a notebook without beginning or end, identified partly by marginal corrections its editor took for Quiroga's hand, written near the end of his life, never copied fair and - the editor's words - never put into observance. Two ordinances are marked missing, one of them the ordinance that fixed the six-hour day.

• The translation of the city of Guatemala (1773-1779)

  After the earthquake of 29 July 1773 the capital of the Kingdom of Guatemala was not rebuilt but moved. The decision was taken by two open assemblies, the second voting by plurality for the Valle de las Vacas; the Crown confirmed it and assigned ten years of one tax to pay for it; and a bando of 1777 ordered the old city emptied within a year. It is one of the few relocations of a capital in the Americas that can be followed decision by decision.

• The transfer of the city of Guatemala after the earthquake of 1773

  After the earthquake of 29 July 1773 the capital of the kingdom of Guatemala was surveyed, argued over in open assembly, and moved to another valley at royal expense — one of the earliest documented cases of a state relocating a capital as seismic risk management. The dissenting party is on the record too, and so is the proclamation that ordered the old ground left empty — which seven or eight thousand people, mostly mulatos, did not obey.

• When the galleons failed: a Philippine remedy manufactured in Mexico by Francisco Ponong-Banua

  For several consecutive years the Manila galleons did not reach Acapulco and New Spain ran out of the Philippine snake-stone. Torrubia's Aparato (Madrid 1754) records what was done instead: he gathered the materials and Francisco Ponong-Banua, an Indio cacique of Nabua in Camarines, made them at Mexico by his own country's method, a luted pot in a slow oven replacing the rice-husk kiln. A named technician, a documented process adaptation, and cases the entry reads against the author.

• The Real Tribunal de la Acordada of New Spain

  A road and street police court for northern New Spain, whose name records the moment its sentences stopped being reviewed. The crown's 1787 compilation prints the file: the 1710 restoration of the Santa Hermandad under the Sala del Crimen, the 1719 exemption from reporting to it, the ranks of criminal it was told to exterminate, the flogging it carried out, and the road service the villages paid for it. A directory of 1797 adds the staff, a salaried defence counsel among them.

• Tribunales de Cuentas de las Indias (1605)

  In 1605 the crown planted three standing audit courts in the Americas — at Lima, Santa Fe de Bogotá and Mexico City — with the rank, hours and ceremony of an Audiencia, sole power to close the accounts of anyone who had handled royal money, four prescribed registers and a duty to send every account to Madrid in duplicate. The same code records what the audit could not reach and how far behind it fell.

• What an encomendero could lawfully demand — and whether his Indians could sue him for the rest

  The standard treatise lists what an encomendero may not take: nothing above the assessed tasa, no bargains with his Indians because such bargains are presumed harmful, no rustic work, no personal service, no boys to serve his wife at sewing, weaving, washing or cooking, no hens and no eggs, with restitution of double. The feudal duty to maintain an impoverished vassal is refused him, and the chapter concludes that the Indians could sue him, and testify against him, without leave.

• Tributos y tasas — the assessed ceiling on Indian tribute

  Indian tribute was not what a lord could extract but what an assessment said. Título V of libro VI of the Recopilación sets the rules of the tasa: half rates for two years after resettlement, ten years free for voluntary converts, liability from eighteen, a written separation of the shares of caciques, communities and doctrina, nothing levied above it, and a crown attorney bound to argue for reductions. It also records collection from the dead, and a war surcharge above the tasa.

• Trigo castellano — wheat in sixteenth-century New Spain

  The Old World grain that went the other way across the Columbian exchange, and what happened to it when it did: hundredfold yields on the plain of Puebla, unmanured land sown every year, wheat planted by hand in ridges two or three grains to the hole in the manner of maize, and a valley at Atlixco where one field was being sown while another was ready to cut. Read in the eyewitness of a Franciscan writing in 1541 — who also records who was working the first wheat fields, and for whom.

• Tunas and the nopal — the cactus described in the Indies and now farmed in the dry half of the world

  Oviedo devotes a chapter of book VIII to the tunas: the fruit sold daily in the plaza of Santo Domingo, the pads used to top the walls of yards and orchards, and the day in 1515 when he ate them and believed he was passing blood. Acosta separates the tunal grown for fruit from the tunal grown for cochineal. Both are read here from the page, next to the modern agronomy that made the plant a dryland crop — and the invasion record that puts Spain among the three countries worst overrun by cacti.

• The turkey out of Mesoamerica: the one American livestock animal Spanish ships carried east

  Almost every animal in the Columbian exchange moved west. The turkey went the other way. Penned and maize-fed in Mesoamerica long before contact, it was carried to Europe on Spanish ships in the early sixteenth century, bred into European varieties, and returned across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century as the forerunner of the commercial bird. Genetics puts the founding maternal lines in central Mexico.

• The turkey out of the Americas: two indigenous domestications, one of which fed the world

  The only large livestock animal the Americas domesticated was domesticated twice, independently, by indigenous peoples - once in Mesoamerica and once in the US Southwest - and ancient DNA says the two stocks never mixed. The bird Spaniards carried to Europe in the early sixteenth century, and which came back to North America as the commercial turkey, is the Mesoamerican one. The earliest Spanish page describing it records it being handed over on Cozumel in 1518.

• Ulli: the first European accounts of rubber, from Oviedo's batey chapter to the holquahuitl of the Mexican materia medica

  Two Spanish books describe an elastic solid Europe had no word for. Oviedo, on Hispaniola, watches balls of boiled roots and juices bounce higher than Spain's air-filled balls, and reasons from the bounce why players strike with hip and shoulder, not hand. Hernández's Mexican materia medica of 1615 names the tree and the word — holli, corrupted to ule — and files the gum under medicine. Neither turns it into anything, and the chapter praising the players is written when almost none are left.

• Antonio de Ulloa, Noticias americanas (Madrid, 1772)

  The book a Spanish naval officer wrote after two decades in the Americas: a comparison of the territories, climates and productions of both hemispheres, a treatise on fossil shells found petrified in the Andean heights, an argument for Andean civility read off ruins and tools, and a flat rejection of the climatic explanation of human skin colour - printed in 1772, and carrying, on the page after that rejection, a racial typology of its own.

• Hipólito Unanue's Guía política, eclesiástica y militar del Vireynato del Perú para el año de 1793

  An annual directory of a South American viceroyalty, opening with a quantitative sketch of Peru measured from the Meridian of Cádiz, listing officials by name with their street addresses, and printing what each office cost. The same pages record that the corregidor system had degenerated into despotism, and that the kingdom's information had until then been a labyrinth. Five appeared, 1793 to 1797.

• Hipolito Unanue, Observaciones sobre el clima de Lima (1806)

  The medical topography of a South American capital, by the professor of prime medicine at San Marcos, printed at Lima in 1806 and reissued at Madrid in 1815. It carries barometer readings kept in the city, four fossil molars sorted between mammoth and Cuvier's mastodon, rules for vaccinating an infant, and an argument that the artists of Mexico, Quito and Cuzco could match the best of Europe. It also carries a table of the castes of Lima headed by the word degradations.

• The university of Córdoba del Tucumán — degrees on the far edge of the Indies

  A cattle-and-mule town founded in 1573 in Comechingón country carried, within fifty years, higher studies open to poor clerics and laymen without inheritance and a house authorised to confer degrees. Alcedo's 1786 dictionary records two colegios "con título de Universidad"; Concolorcorvo in 1773 finds Franciscans running it and issuing degrees to the three provinces of Tucumán. Both pages are read from the scans, and the sources' own frame is printed with them.

• Universidad de los Mareantes de Sevilla

  The seamen's corporation of the Carrera de Indias. Begun as a Triana confraternity, it founded a house and hospital in 1569, ran a mutual fund out of a levy on every ship's freight that cured sick sailors, ransomed captives and relieved the imprisoned and the orphaned, won the crown's order that a dead sailor's wages go straight to his widow, sat and voted at the pilots' examinations — and gave no vote to the sailors whose wages paid for it.

• Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (1676)

  The third university of Spanish America, ordered instituted by cédula of 31 January 1676 after a century of refused petitions and one merchant's legacy of 20,000 pesos. Eight chairs were filled by competition on 6 December 1678, and one of them was Cakchiquel — a Maya language endowed on the same day as canon law and medicine. It read nothing but scholastic method until 1768.

• The university of San Geronimo de la Habana, founded on a bull of 1721 because degrees cost a voyage

  Havana's university was asked for by its town council on the ground that its young men had to sail to Salamanca, Mexico or Santo Domingo to take a degree. A papal bull of 1721 and a royal pase of 1728 authorised a Dominican convent to found it "ad instar" of Santo Domingo - whose rulebook, when sought, could not be found, so the doctors had to write their own. Chairs went by public competition, except the first ones.

• Universities of Lima and Mexico (1551)

  By royal decrees of 1551, the Spanish crown founded universities in Lima (San Marcos) and Mexico City — the first universities established by royal authority in the Americas, teaching by 1553, modeled on Salamanca, and older than any university in the future United States by more than eight decades. Santo Domingo's earlier papal claim (1538) is noted and its disputed status stated.

• Tlilxochitl into vainilla — how a Mesoamerican orchid pod got its world name

  A Mexico imprint of 1615 describes the vine the Nahua called tlilxochitl and says the plant takes its name from its pods, the "vainillas"; a Madrid treatise of 1631 prints the chocolate recipe that puts three of those pods into the drink, and reports that everyone used them. Both are read from the page. A 2024 review supplies why the plant would not fruit elsewhere for two more centuries, and why the history of the fix is disputed.

• Diego Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana

  A Franciscan rhetoric printed in Europe by a friar who had spent some thirty years in New Spain, and who put the pictorial writing of the Nahua into a European art of memory as a working system rather than a curiosity. Its engraved plates set Mesoamerican images against the Latin alphabet; its twelfth chapter is a defence of the sincerity of Indian Christianity against the charge that it was imitation and compulsion.

• Luis de Valdivia, Arte y gramatica general de la lengua que corre en todo el Reyno de Chile (Lima 1606; Seville 1684)

  The first printed grammar of Mapudungun, read here in its Seville 1684 reprint. Its preface argues that one language runs four hundred leagues from Coquimbo to Chiloe, that it has almost no irregular verb, and that it exceeds Latin in the abundance of its tenses. Chapter one gives a repeatable articulatory procedure for a sixth vowel Spanish and Latin do not have. The same book is dedicated to a cavalry commander of the war against its speakers.

• The Valladolid debate (1550-1551)

  Formal disputation convoked by the Spanish crown at Valladolid in 1550-51, in which Bartolomé de las Casas confronted Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda over the justice of the conquests and the rational capacity of the American Indians — while new conquests stood officially suspended. Hanke's scholarship presents it as the first great public controversy over the rights of colonized peoples.

• Vanilla out of Mesoamerica: a Totonac crop, a Spanish distribution network, and three centuries of Mexican monopoly

  Vanilla was domesticated and cured in Mesoamerica long before Europeans saw it, and Spain's contribution was distribution rather than invention: by 1631 a Madrid monograph on chocolate treats the pods of Campeche as the best and says everyone puts them in. Cultivation outside the native range began only in 1832, and genomics now finds at least two hybridisation-based domestication events in Mexico behind a crop whose clonal propagation has left it genetically thin.

• Nordestear y noruestear — the compass variation in the carrera de Indias

  By 1590 the fact that a magnetic needle does not point true north everywhere had a Spanish sailors' vocabulary — nordestear, noruestear — a rule about where the error vanished, and a printed warning that a navigator ignoring it will make landfall somewhere other than intended. The book recording all three is a Jesuit natural history: it adds that no philosopher or cosmographer could explain the effect, that the pilots knew it anyway, and that the informant was Portuguese.

• Vasco de Quiroga's pueblos-hospitales of Santa Fe (New Spain, 1530s)

  Two settlements founded near Mexico City and in Michoacán by a judge of the second Audiencia who paid for them out of his own salary, governed by written ordinances that fixed a six-hour common working day, distributed the product by household need, elected their own officers by annual rotation, and kept a salaried physician, surgeon and apothecary. The ordinances survive because the college Quiroga founded printed them in 1766 — a partisan publisher, and that is stated here.

• Fernando Vazquez de Menchaca, Controversiarum illustrium libri tres

  A judge in Philip II's service printed, in a book of forensic controversies, the propositions that neither pope nor emperor is lord of the world, that all men are equally free, that legitimate rule comes from the consent of the citizens, and that no nation has ever acquired the sea. He then applied the last of these to his own crown: the belief that only Spaniards and Portuguese may sail the ocean to the Indies he calls insane, and a dream. Read here from a sixteenth-century printing.

• Jose de Veitia Linage, Norte de la contratacion de las Indias Occidentales (Seville, 1672)

  The working manual of the Casa de la Contratacion, written by its treasurer and judge and printed at Seville in 1672: the offices, the courts, the fleets, the duties, the registers, the seamen's corporation. Thirty years later it was translated into English and sold in Cornhill, whose translator opened by denying that Spain kept the Indies trade a secret - his evidence being the book in his hands.

• Juan de Velasco's Historia del Reino de Quito (written 1789, printed Quito 1841): the exile's book that carried lost manuscripts into print, and the corrections its readers had to make

  A Jesuit born in Riobamba, expelled to Italy in 1767, wrote there a history of his own country and dated it 1789. Quito's government press printed the ancient part in 1841, its editor admitting he had rewritten the language. Velasco opens by disclaiming warranty for the ancient chronology. Ecuador's first modern historian later corrected his conquest dates and still called the book uniquely valuable, because manuscripts it cites are lost.

• Noticia de la California (Madrid, 1757), from the manuscript of Miguel Venegas

  The three-volume Madrid printing of 1757 that first put California before a European reading public, edited from a manuscript history written in Mexico in 1739 and from other relations. Its ethnographic pages map the peninsula's languages with unusual care about what a name means, and print, inside quotation marks, the cosmology of the Perícues and of the Loreto nation in their own terms - including a spirit who sends the epidemics.

• Mine ventilation in New Spain: foul air, a furnace draught and a royal article

  A law book printed at Madrid in 1761 for the mines of New Spain turns from drainage to a second killer: the corrupt vapours the operarios must flee to avoid suffocating. It prints, with two figures, a furnace ventilator drawing the underground air out by a chimney, recommended because it spares the workmen the labour of bellows — and claims none of the invention as its own. In 1783 the crown made free ventilation a condition of every drainage adit.

• Alonso de la Vera Cruz, Recognitio Summularum and Dialectica Resolutio (Mexico, 1554)

  In the spring and summer of 1554 a press in Mexico City printed two folio volumes of logic by an Augustinian who had spent years teaching it in New Spain. They were the first books of philosophy printed anywhere in the Americas. Their author's stated purpose was to cut away what he called the useless subtleties he had himself wasted years learning — an aim his nineteenth-century cataloguer judged he pursued with far too much timidity.

• Alonso de la Vera Cruz, Speculum coniugiorum (third edition, Alcalá 1572)

  The marriage treatise written in Mexico by the first holder of the prime chair of theology in the university there, and the earliest sustained attempt to work out what canon law should do about the marriages of people it had never contemplated. Its practical conclusion is procedural: with the natives of the new world, drop the notary, the sworn witnesses and the forms, because the forms cost more than the people have and the truth is reachable without them.

• La verdadera destreza — the Spanish attempt to make swordsmanship a demonstrable science

  From Jerónimo de Carranza's book of 1569 the Spanish masters tried to replace the secret thrust sold by a guild master with something argued from causes: a geometry of the imagined circle between two bodies, published so a reader could learn without a master. The same pages carry a method for separating two men already fighting. It was mocked in its own century — Quevedo made the scientific swordsman ridiculous — and it lost at home to the French foil, and both belong on the record beside it.

• Agustín de Vetancurt, Teatro mexicano (Mexico, 1698)

  A natural history of the New World written by a Mexican-born Franciscan who called himself "Mexicano" on his own title page, printed in Mexico City by a woman, and built around Nahuatl names. Its first part opens by refuting the ancient doctrine that the torrid zone could not sustain life, prints a ledger of what Spain brought and what the land already had, and stops in the middle of a chapter on pearls to record a Spanish soldier tearing an ornament from an Indian woman's face.

• Vicente Aleixandre

  Spanish poet (1898-1984) of the interwar generation, awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Literature "for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars". He stayed in Spain after the Civil War, silenced by the new authorities for four years.

• Vicuñas, pacos and guanacos — the Andean camelids in the Spanish printed record

  Two Spanish books describe the only large herd animals the Americas domesticated. Acosta's Seville sheets of 1590 give the llama as the greatest wealth of Peru — sheep and pack-beast in one, feeding itself on the hillside — and beside it the wild vicuña and its silk-fine undyed fleece. Garcilaso prints the Inca rule for the hunt: one district every fourth year, three years' rest, the animals sheared and released. Both also record that the herds fell after 1532.

• Francisco de Viedma, Descripcion geografica y estadistica de la provincia de Santa Cruz de la Sierra

  The report of a serving Spanish intendant governor that ends by attacking the plan of government his own colleague had obtained for the ex-Jesuit missions of Moxos and Chiquitos. It argues from the Laws of the Indies that nothing is more precious to man than liberty, calls the mission regime "un cruel pupilage", and asks for a new intendancy. In the same pages it defends yanaconaje. First printed in Buenos Aires in 1836.

• Gaspar de Villagra, Historia de la Nueva Mexico (Alcala, 1610)

  An epic poem, printed at Alcala in 1610 and dedicated to Philip III, written in Virgilian verse by a captain who marched with the 1598 expedition to New Mexico. It is the earliest printed book devoted to that country, it stages the defenders of Acoma as a deliberating council with named speakers, and in the middle of a canto it stops the verse to print, in prose, the friars' written opinion on what makes a war just. The same sheets carry the cost and the poet's own bid for payment.

• Villalba, Epidemiología española (Madrid, 1803)

  A Spanish army surgeon's chronological history of every plague, contagion, epidemic and epizootic recorded in Spain from the arrival of the Carthaginians to 1801, printed at Madrid in two volumes. It is the book that put the word "epidemiología" on a title page in a modern sense — and it names the older Sardinian tract that had used it first. Its American pages record both the smallpox Spain carried to Mexico and the yellow fever the Indies sent back to Cádiz.

• Villancicos in the cathedrals of New Spain: Nahuatl and African voices in the matins of a feast

  Cathedral chapters in New Spain commissioned complete cycles of villancicos for the matins of a feast and printed them in the year they were sung. The printed cycles close with an ensaladilla, a deliberate miscellany of voices: a Black singer who says that although they call them horses they are people, a Latin- spouting student, and an Indian who answers in a tocotín — one of them printed entirely in Nahuatl in the cathedral of Mexico in 1687.

• Villaseñor y Sánchez, Theatro Americano, Parte Segunda (Mexico, 1748)

  A royal order of 19 July 1741 told the viceroyalty to describe itself. The crown's accountant for quicksilver, working from returns sent in by local officials, produced a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction survey of New Spain, printed in Mexico by a widow's press. Its second volume counts the republic of Spaniards and the republic of Indians separately, names the language each town spoke, and records where the conquest was accepted and at what cost.

• Vineyards of Spanish America: one black grape, and the law that tried to stop it

  Spain planted essentially one black grape in the Americas - Listan Prieto, called Criolla Chica in South America and Mission in California - and it carried American wine for three centuries. Acosta in 1590 measured the boom by the tithes of Peru, five or six times what they had been twenty years before. The Crown's own law concedes that planting vines in the Indies was forbidden, that Peru planted anyway, and settles for two per cent of the fruit.

• The visita de cárcel of the Audiencias of the Indies

  A whole title of the Laws of the Indies orders judges into the jails. Two oidores every Saturday afternoon, three in Lima and Mexico, the whole court at the three Pascuas, and in Mexico City two oidores each Saturday in the two jails of the Indians. The visit could free, but not sentence. Its stated reason is that many prisoners "son forasteros, y no tienen quien los defienda" — and its printed limits are as revealing as its reach.

• The visita de la tierra — the circuit-riding oidor of the Spanish Indies

  Every three years each American Audiencia had to send one of its own judges out to ride his district in person: to hear what the Indian towns had suffered and from whom, whether tribute exceeded the assessment, whether men were used as carriers, whether the apothecaries held spoiled drugs, whether the inns posted tariffs — and he was not paid until he proved it. The same laws policed indigenous religion on the way, and capped the tour's frequency because the tour itself cost the towns.

• Francisco de Vitoria, relectio De Indis insulanis (Lyon, 1557)

  A Salamanca professor took the question nobody at court wanted reopened — by what right the Indians had come under Spanish rule — and answered it in two halves. The first demolished every title then in use: unbelief takes away no man's property, the emperor is not lord of the world, the pope had no power to give those provinces away. The second supplied new titles, one of which licensed the conquest it had just delegitimised. Both halves are printed here from the sheets of 1557.

• Juan Luis Vives, De subventione pauperum (1526), read in the Valencia translation of 1781

  The Valencian humanist's scheme for public poor relief, written for the magistrates of Bruges in 1526 and read here in the Castilian version printed at Valencia in 1781. It puts every charitable endowment in the town under the inspection of the magistrates, pays for schoolmasters for poor children, and strips the hospital servants who have grown rich on the poor. It also compels the able-bodied to work and sends healthy outsiders home, with a travel allowance so they need not rob.

• The volcano of Jorullo (1759) and the official record made of its birth

  A volcano broke out of flat sugar-cane country in Michoacan on 29 September 1759. Within a fortnight the alcalde mayor had reported it to the viceroy and required the administrator of the ruined estate to keep a daily narrative; the viceroy asked whether lava had run, and a pound of the affected sand was collected and sent up. The eruption also destroyed a hacienda and emptied a pueblo de indios. Both halves are in the same file.

• After the two lives: the rule that an encomienda reverted to the crown and could not be regranted to the last holder's son or widow

  An encomienda ran for two lives. A cédula of 1552 ordered that when they were spent the Indians returned to the crown at once and were not to be granted again to the son, the daughter or the wife of the first holder. The reason given is that they should not come to look hereditary, so that the reward could reach everyone who deserved it. The Council refused confirmations on that ground in the Nuevo Reino de Granada - and the crown's own jurist closes the chapter arguing that the rule is wrong.

• Xicotencatl Axayacatzin, the Tlaxcalan lord executed by Cortés

  Son of Xicotencatl the elder of Tepeticpac, Tlaxcalan war-leader at Spanish contact and principal Tlaxcalan opponent of the alliance with Cortés. After the alliance was made he was executed at Texcoco during the march on Tenochtitlan for turning back from the campaign. Diego Muñoz Camargo, writing from inside the confederation, records the Tlaxcalan lords themselves ruling their captain to death under their own war law, and names the succession his line kept afterwards.

• Francisco Ximénez, Las historias del origen de los indios de esta provincia de Guatemala (written c. 1701–1722; first printed 1857)

  A Dominican parish priest in the K'iche' town of Chichicastenango copied out, word for word, the book his parishioners kept, and put a Spanish translation beside it. He did it to expose their errors, and says so in his prologue. The manuscript sat unread in Guatemala for 130 years; a passing Austrian naturalist found it in the university library in June 1854 and printed the Spanish text in London in 1857. It is the only reason the text survives at all.

• Yanaconas: the Indians attached to Spanish estates, and the law that refused to call them serfs

  In Charcas and across Peru, Indians settled on Spanish chacras came to be held as yanaconas — transferred with the estate when it was sold, unable to leave it. A law of 1618 ordered that they not be detained by force and never be reputed yanaconas, even where the contrary was established. Solórzano, the crown's own jurist, printed the whole defence of the practice and then voted against it: perpetual attachment to a place, he wrote, had in antiquity been imposed only on slaves and condemned men.

• Manuel de Yangües, Principios y reglas de la lengua cummanagota (Burgos, 1683)

  The printed grammar of Cumanagoto, a Cariban language of the Venezuelan coast, issued at Burgos in 1683 with a dictionary by Matías Ruiz Blanco bound in behind it. It describes a language with no case endings through the categories of Nebrija's Latin Arte, admits at the outset that the pronouns are the hardest part of the book, and exists so that a missionary could preach. A century later the language it fixed was the general tongue of thirty-four mission towns.

• The mission yerbales - planting Ilex paraguariensis instead of harvesting it wild

  Yerba mate was gathered wild, in forests weeks from anywhere, by conscripted carriers, and the death toll was notorious enough that the order profiting from the trade wrote it down. The reduction towns of Paraguay answered by planting the tree, with stock carried from the Maracayu hills, in what modern agronomy calls the first domestication of the species. The plantations went wild after the expulsion and the art was not recovered until the twentieth century.

• Yuca and cazabi: a poisonous root, an indigenous detoxification press, and the bread that kept a year at sea

  Bitter cassava kills whoever eats it raw. The Taíno of Hispaniola had a processing chain that made it the bread of the Caribbean, and Oviedo, a royal official on the island, printed the whole procedure in 1535 — the grater, the woven çibucan press, the hanging stones, the burén griddle, the poisonous juice poured on the ground — with the price of a load in Santo Domingo and the note that cazabi kept a year at sea. Modern genetics places the domesticate on the southern rim of the Amazon.

• Zambrano Bonilla, Arte de lengua totonaca (1752) — the only Totonac grammar that reached a press

  A parish priest's grammar of Totonac, printed in 1752 with a doctrina in the Naolingo dialect bound in, and the only one of at least seven described Totonac works to be printed at all. Its author says he knew two earlier grammars and chose not to follow them. It carries a 1752 articulatory description of the Totonac lateral fricative, and a nineteenth-century grammarian's audit of its self-contradictions.

• Compendio del arte de navegar (Seville, 1588): Copernicus cited in the pilots' textbook of the Indies run

  The textbook that trained and examined the pilots of the Indies run, by the holder of the chair of cosmography at the Casa de la Contratacion, styled piloto mayor on this title page too. Its address to the reader declares the solar declination table of every earlier manual wrong, gives two reasons, names Peurbach, Regiomontanus, Werner, Copernicus and Reinhold for the second, and reports the author's own measurement at Seville.

• Zarabanda and chacona — two Spanish dances as Covarrubias recorded them in 1611

  The two dances European art music kept as the sarabande and the chaconne are described in Spain's first monolingual dictionary while they were still street repertoire. Covarrubias's Tesoro of 1611 gives the zarabanda a full entry, records that the chacona had already displaced it, traces both to the dancing women of Gades and to Martial's Rome, and derives the name from Hebrew. Its two entries disagree about how the chacona is related to the zarabanda.

• Zarzaparrilla, the American sarsaparilla in Spanish medicine

  An American climbing root taken from indigenous practice in New Spain, shipped to Seville from about 1560 and made the standard treatment for the pox after guaiac failed. Two printings read here — Seville 1580 and a Dominican apothecary's book printed at Mexico in 1615 — give the punishing sweating regimen, the milder Mexican version of it, the indigenous names of its species, and a friar's complaint that the fashionable import was worth less than plants at his own door.

faq 1

• Common misconceptions about the Spanish empire

  Sourced answers to recurring questions about the Spanish empire — whether Spain only extracted bullion, whether the Inquisition matched its legend, where the Black Legend framing comes from, and whether anyone at the time questioned the conquest. Each answer states the corrective evidence and the genuine dark side in the same breath.

glossary 3

• Encomienda

  Institution of early Spanish America by which the crown entrusted a group of Indians to a colonist (the encomendero), entitling him to their tribute and, in practice, labor, in exchange for obligations of protection and religious instruction. It was not a land grant and not formally slavery — and it was the main target of the protective legislation of 1542.

• Manila galleon

  The annual sailing link between Acapulco and Manila that from 1571 to 1815 carried American silver west and Asian goods east — the first sustained trade route connecting the Americas with Asia, and in the economic-history account registered here, the closing link of the first global trade system.

• Mita

  Andean system of rotational draft labor, pre-Hispanic in origin, adapted by the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru from the 1570s to supply workers — most notoriously to the silver mines of Potosí. It kept the silver economy running and imposed heavy, well-documented human costs on the communities subject to it.

guide 5

• Firsts and their rivals: an adjudicated registry

  A registry of "first in history" claims connected to Spain - the first international vaccination campaign, the first circumnavigation, the first universities and printing press of the Americas, the nearest thing to a world currency, the oldest documented parliamentarism - each entry stating its criterion, its rival claim where one exists, and its confidence, because a "first" without a stated criterion is a slogan, not a fact.

• The Columbian Exchange: what actually moved and why it mattered

  Guide to the two-way transfer of plants, animals, people, silver and disease that followed 1492 — the process Alfred Crosby named the Columbian Exchange. Covers what moved in each direction, the demographic catastrophe in the Americas, the Old World population gains from American crops, and the silver circuit that tied the exchange into the first global economy.

• The Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro): a sourced tour

  Guide to Spain's Golden Age — the flowering of letters, painting and music from the mid-16th to the late 17th century, when Cervantes wrote while Velázquez painted at court and Victoria's polyphony matched Palestrina's. The paradox the survey literature insists on is kept in view: the cultural summit coincided with fiscal exhaustion and imperial strain.

• Spain's Nobel laureates: the complete, sourced list

  Index of the Nobel Prizes awarded to Spaniards — two in medicine (Ramón y Cajal 1906, Ochoa 1959) and six in literature (Echegaray 1904, Benavente 1922, Juan Ramón Jiménez 1956, Aleixandre 1977, Cela 1989, and Vargas Llosa 2010 with his dual-nationality status stated precisely). Every entry links to a claim-bound object citing the official Nobel record.

• Hispanic legacy, start here: a map of this knowledge base

  Orientation guide to the instance: what it covers (Spain's contributions to science, exploration and culture, rigorously sourced), how it works (every assertion is a claim bound to registered sources, with honest evidence tiers), and where to start — science, exploration, institutions and ideas, culture, and the myths corrected.

Machine surfaces

Everything a human can read here, an agent can read as data. Each link below is a real file served from this origin.

• /llms.txt llms-index
• /llms-full.txt llms-full
• /llms-full/index.json llms-full-shards
• /sitemap.xml sitemap
• /robots.txt robots
• /feed.json feed-json
• /feed.xml feed-rss
• /graph.json graph
• /api/index.json entity-index
• /api/sources.json source-registry
• /openapi.json openapi
• /status.json status
• /.well-known/mcp/server.json mcp-manifest
• /skill.json skill-manifest
• /skill/SKILL.txt skill
• /skill/SKILL.md skill-alias

Agents can also query this corpus over MCP — see the agent interface.