{
  "id": "alonso-de-zorita",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Alonso de Zorita and the Breve y sumaria relación de los señores de la Nueva España",
  "summary": "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.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "new-spain",
    "colonial-law",
    "colonial-institutions",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "spanish-empire",
    "biography"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "encomienda"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protector-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juzgado-general-de-naturales"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cajas-de-comunidad-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "new-laws-of-1542"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "motolinia-historia-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "leon-pinelo-epitome-1629"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relaciones-geograficas-de-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "republica-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "puga-cedulario-1563"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cacicazgos-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tributos-y-tasas-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tamemes-y-el-cargar-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "personas-miserables-in-the-law-of-the-indies"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "interpretes-de-las-audiencias-de-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "abogado-y-procurador-de-pobres-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "indigenous-custom-as-law-in-the-indies"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who was Alonso de Zorita?",
    "Did any Spanish royal judge argue against the tribute system in the Indies?",
    "How was tribute assessed in Mexico before the conquest?",
    "What is the Breve y sumaria relación de los señores de la Nueva España?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The heading of the memorial states what it is and who wrote it. It is a \"Breve y sumaria relacion de los señores, y maneras y diferencias que habia de ellos en la Nueva España\", covering their provinces, usages and customs, \"y la forma que tenian en tributar á sus vasallos en tiempo de su gentilidad, y la que despues de conquistada se ha tenido y tiene en los tributos que pagan á S. M. y á otros en su real nombre\"; it asks how those tributes might be imposed and distributed so that the precept of the tithes could be met without a new imposition falling on the naturales; and it is \"dirigida á la C. R. M. del Rey D. Felipe, nuestro señor, por el Dr. Alonso de Zorita, oydor que fue de la Real Audiencia que reside en la muy insigne y gran ciudad de México de la Nueva España\".",
      "sources": [
        "zorita-breve-y-sumaria-relacion-cdi-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "Its central technical finding is about the base of assessment, not about cruelty. Zorita reports that in the pre-conquest arrangement tribute fell on lands and on labour: commoners held their own plots and there were common fields worked for the universal lord and for the temples, \"el tributo que pagaban no era por las tierras ni por las haciendas, porque eran sementeras\"; the mayeques who lived on other men's land paid rent and service to the lord of that land; and the renteros who hired land took it at a rent agreed for a year or two and owed nothing else to its owner.",
      "sources": [
        "zorita-breve-y-sumaria-relacion-cdi-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "From that he draws the sentence the memorial exists to deliver: \"No se pagaba tributo por cabeza, ni tal se usó entre ellos, como se ha dicho; y así la cuenta que de pocos años á esta parte se hace para repartir el tributo por cabezas, ha causado gran desasosiego y escándalo.\" A Spanish royal judge is telling his king that the head-count assessment introduced under Spanish rule was not a continuation of indigenous practice but a novelty, and that it was destabilising the country.",
      "sources": [
        "zorita-breve-y-sumaria-relacion-cdi-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "He also records a category of land held for public purposes. In some parts there were lands set apart whose rent met the needs of the república, and these could not be alienated - a communal endowment described as ordinary practice rather than as an exotic institution, and one that the Spanish cajas de comunidad would later imitate in law.",
      "sources": [
        "zorita-breve-y-sumaria-relacion-cdi-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "His account of indigenous government is one of functioning administration. When the señores naturales governed, he writes, they had their people subject and peaceful, ordered the tributes gathered, had the common and private fields worked, and drew from each town the labour service it could supply \"conforme á la posibilidad y calidad de cada pueblo para lo que habian de dar\"; the towns were peaceful, without entanglements and without lawsuits, and the lords held their patrimony, carrying their tributes \"conforme su antigua costumbre\".",
      "sources": [
        "zorita-breve-y-sumaria-relacion-cdi-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "He describes a negotiated reduction of tribute carried through by religious. Some of them, with holy zeal, began to treat with the caciques and lords, who came to confess to them and to declare their lordship and tributes, so that something might be taken off what they levied on their subjects, given that the subjects also paid His Majesty and, in recompense, the encomenderos who were to provide doctrine and ministers; what was agreed was put in writing and signed, \"para que se tuviere cuenta con lo que les habian de dar\", and it was approved by letrados and learned persons and taken for good.",
      "sources": [
        "zorita-breve-y-sumaria-relacion-cdi-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The cost is in the document, in its author's own words, and it is where he chooses to end. Tribute, he writes, left households pobrísimos at a stroke, \"dexando sus hijos todos paupérrimos miserables, á causa del tributo\"; these are not people to bear so great a weight of it; and \"por estos motivos hánse huido á los montes muchas gentes, dexan sus hijos y casas, y así los comen las fieras en los montes\". He breaks off rather than continue, \"porque seria proceder en infinito\".",
      "sources": [
        "zorita-breve-y-sumaria-relacion-cdi-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "What the memorial is not should be stated with it. It is an argument addressed to the crown by an interested former officer, not a survey and not a decision: it records what one oidor urged, and nothing in these pages shows the head-count assessment being abandoned. Zorita's own remedy is modest - that public works not be piled on people who are already paying, and that they continue contributing to the royal crown - which places him inside the fiscal system he is criticising rather than outside it.",
      "sources": [
        "zorita-breve-y-sumaria-relacion-cdi-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The text reaches us at several removes, and its nineteenth-century editors say so on the page. Their Advertencia states that they could not fix the date of the relación, though its passages leave no doubt it was written in the second half of the sixteenth century; that it was first copied from the original by Lorenzo Boturini and copied again afterwards; and that the copy published was collated with the one in tomo XLI of the Muñoz collection. They add that the only notice of its author they could find in the histories and bibliographies of America was the entry in León Pinelo's Biblioteca oriental y occidental, column 912.",
      "sources": [
        "zorita-breve-y-sumaria-relacion-cdi-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language treatments of Zorita, when they exist at all, present him as a sympathetic official who admired indigenous society, and quote the lament rather than the argument. The argument is the interesting part and it is fiscal: pre-conquest tribute was levied on land and on labour service, in named tenures - sementeras of the common and of the lord, mayeques, renteros, inalienable land whose rent funded the república - and assessment by head was a Spanish innovation that, in his phrase, caused great unrest and scandal. This object quotes that passage from the 1864 editio princeps, keeps the lament next to it, and prints the editors' own warning that the text descends through Boturini's copy and cannot be dated.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-09",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/alonso-de-zorita",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/alonso-de-zorita.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Alonso de Zorita and the Breve y sumaria relación de los señores de la Nueva España",
    "description": "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.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/alonso-de-zorita",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-09",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Breve y sumaria relacion de los señores... de la Nueva España, por el Dr. Alonso de Zorita, in Coleccion de documentos ineditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y colonizacion de las posesiones españolas en America y Oceania, tomo II",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=esgTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Alonso de Zorita and the Breve y sumaria relación de los señores de la Nueva España"
  }
}