{ "id": "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-1668", "type": "entity", "name": "Diego de Avendano, Thesaurus Indicus (Antwerp, 1668)", "summary": "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.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "peru", "lima", "mining", "labour", "law", "theology", "books", "seventeenth-century", "indigenous-peoples" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "exencion-de-los-indios-del-santo-oficio" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mita" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "encomienda" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "solorzano-politica-indiana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "valladolid-debate" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "protector-de-indios" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "reglamento-general-de-las-medidas-de-las-aguas-1761" } ], "questions": [ "What is Diego de Avendano's Thesaurus Indicus?", "Did anyone in seventeenth-century Spanish America argue against forced Indian labour in the mines?", "What did Spanish theologians say about the mita and about personal service?", "Who was Diego de Avendano?", "Did the Spanish crown know the mine draft was killing people?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The copy read here gives the work and its imprint on the title page in red and black: \"R. P. DIDACI DE AVENDANO SOCIETATIS IESU, SEGOVIENSIS, In PERVVIO iam pridem publici & primarij S. Theologiae Professoris, & in Sacro Inquisitionis Sanctae Tribunali adlecti Censoris, THESAVRVS INDICVS, SEV GENERALIS INSTRVCTOR pro regimine conscientiae, in iis quae ad INDIAS spectant. TOMVS PRIMVS, Ea continens, quae ad Ciuilem praesertim conducunt Gubernationem. ANTVERPIAE, Apud IACOBVM MEVRSIVM. Anno M. DC. LXVIII.\" The author is therefore described on his own title page as a Segovian, long since public and principal professor of theology in Peru, and a censor of the Inquisition.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.95 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The book is addressed to the body it proposes to judge. The dedication is headed \"REGIO INDIARVM CONSILIO INTER SVPREMA CATHOLICI HISPANIARVM REGIS INSIGNI\" - to the Royal Council of the Indies - and opens on the pun the title turns on: this Thesaurus Indicus is of royal right, but it is a treasure \"non e terrae visceribus extractum, sed ex Sapientiae receptaculis profundis elicitum\", not dug out of the bowels of the earth but drawn from the deep storehouses of wisdom, and sent to Spain from the Indies.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "What the book is for is set out in its first title, which runs \"De Indiarum iure, & Catholicorum Regum obligationibus circa illarum administrationem\" - on the right to the Indies and the obligations of the Catholic Kings concerning their administration - and proceeds by question. The printed index of tome one lists the chapters of that title in order, among them whether the king is bound under grave obligation of conscience to be specially informed about Indian affairs, whether he may appoint whom he pleases to Indian offices without hearing his Council, whether he may reduce the Indians to total servitude, whether the Indians may be assigned to the digging of mines, and whether the kings may permit personal service.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The opening question is the one a modern reader least expects, and the answer is the conservative one. Chapter I of title I asks \"An liceat de jure Indiarum in Catholicis Regibus dubitare\", whether it is lawful to doubt the right of the Catholic Kings to the Indies, and paragraph 1 is headed \"Negatiua Positio stabilitur\", the negative position is established. The ground is the papal donation, and the bull of Alexander VI of 4 May 1493 is quoted on the page granting the lands to the kings of Castile and Leon and their heirs in perpetuity, whence he concludes that it is not lawful for legitimate sons of the Church to doubt that right. This object records that conclusion at the same weight as the rest.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "On slavery the method is to print the strongest opposing document first. Chapter XI opens by conceding that the bull of Callixtus III, which carries an earlier one of Nicholas V inserted in it, seems openly to favour the power of reducing to servitude, and the clause is quoted at length, with its faculty of invading, conquering, subduing and reducing persons \"in perpetuam seruitutem\". Only then comes the answer, at paragraph 98: \"Dico primo, Indi generaliter non potuerunt, nec possunt in perpetuam seruitutem redigi\", the Indians generally could not and cannot be reduced to perpetual servitude.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The authority set against the earlier bulls is Paul III, quoted from the brief dated 23 May 1537 to Cardinal Tavera: the Indians, though outside the bosom of the Church, are not to be deprived of their liberty or of the ownership of their goods, and being men and therefore capable of faith and salvation are not to be destroyed by servitude but invited to life by preaching and example, whatever is done to the contrary being void. Avendano adds that the pope attached excommunication reserved to himself, and that Charles V prohibited the same by public edict.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "He then refuses to let the two sets of bulls be read as contradicting each other, and the reconciliation is an argument about what a grant can contain. Alexander VI's own bull, he points out, describes the peoples as living peaceably, going unclothed, not eating flesh, believing in one Creator God and apt enough to embrace the Catholic faith; a pope describing them so cannot have meant to concede a faculty of introducing servitude against the rights of nature. He quotes the Franciscan Juan de Silva to the same effect in Spanish - \"Ni el Papa Alexandro quando hizo a los Reyes de Castilla supremos y soberanos Monarchas de las Indias, les concedio cosa alguna en perjuicio de este derecho natural, y de las Gentes.\"", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The exception he allows is real and belongs on the record beside the rule. Paragraph 103 opens the second section, headed how the servitude of Indians is sometimes lawful, with \"Dico secundo. Aliquando Indi redigi in perpetuam seruitutem tuta conscientia possunt\", and the justification is just war: those who may lawfully be killed may lawfully be enslaved, servitude being commuted for death. The instance named is not hypothetical - it is the kingdom of Chile, where such a war is said to have been experienced for many years past against a stock the text calls hard, faithless and refractory.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "Having granted the title, he then convicts its practice, and the sentence is his own rather than a citation. Paragraph 105 adds of that law of servitude that it furnished an unspeakable occasion for the ruin of that kingdom, since while the prefects of the army pressed immoderately after this profitable plunder the business ceased to be God's and the public cause, the limits of justice were not observed, and all was seen to fall away backwards; peace pleased some men little, because there was little booty in it, and so a barely extinguished war was easily kindled again.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "Two further limits are drawn on the same pages. Paragraph 106 holds it neither reasonable nor consonant with piety that boys or girls be included under that law of servitude, arguing from the precedent that Philip II did not permit the sons of the Moors in the Granada rebellion to be made slaves, and asking why what was done for the Moors should not be done for the Indians. In support Avendano offers his own testimony, writing that of Indians brought up among Spaniards and separated from their parents he can judge \"propriae experientiae suffragio\", by the vote of his own experience, that Christian conduct is found in very many of them.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "Chapter XII puts the mine question in the crown's own terms: \"Minerisne effodiendis possint Indi, talem non meriti poenam, sine labe culpae lethalis addici\" - whether the Indians, who have not deserved such a penalty, may be assigned to the digging of mines without the stain of mortal guilt. The opening paragraph states why it is the hardest case in the book: after the liberty of the Indians, nothing seems so able to work upon the anxious consciences of the Catholic Kings, since this compulsion to the mines looks like a kind of servitude and a hard enough one, so much so that among the Romans it was not counted among the offices of slaves at all.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "He gives the strength of the other side before answering it, and the count is precise. The Franciscan Miguel de Agia had undertaken professedly to prove the compulsion lawful, interpreting a royal rescript of Philip III of 1601; a great many learned men at Lima subscribed to that opinion - twelve theologians and professors of both laws, and besides them ten colleagues of the college of St Philip. Against it Avendano sets Juan de Silva, whose words he declines to transcribe as too bitter, a second friar of the same order named Antonio Martinez, commended on the page for probity and learning, and a manuscript treatise by Francisco Coello of the Society, once a royal senator in the court of Lima, which he says he holds in his own hands and which demonstrates Agia's grounds to be light and in part openly false.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "The evidence he treats as decisive is the crown's own admission, quoted in Spanish from a royal rescript sent to New Spain on 22 February 1549 and ordered extended to Peru by Philip II on 30 November 1568: great drawbacks follow, \"especialmente que como van muchos tales Indios a servir fuera de su tierra y naturaleza, cinquenta, y otras mas leguas, a donde estan las minas, e ir cargados con sus comidas, mantas, y camas, adolecen algunos de ellos, y mueren\", and the Christian teaching that ought to be given them is impeded. Avendano's comment is that against such harms not piety alone but justice compels, whose property it is to render each his own.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c14", "text": "He then states, in one sentence, why a century of rescripts had changed nothing. The said drawbacks are no smaller now than formerly, except that, the number of the Indians being greatly diminished, the burden is reduced upon fewer and so is necessarily made more insupportable; whence the kings, anxious to remove it, seek a way and do not find one, content somehow with putting it off - \"modum quaerunt, sed non inueniunt, procrastinatione utcumque contenti\".", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c15", "text": "The argument he builds on that is unusual enough to be worth quoting in substance. A merely probable opinion suffices to quiet a conscience, he observes, and by that standard the kings' consciences were entirely quiet about the title to the Indies even while many denied its lawfulness on no light grounds. Their consciences are not quiet about the burden laid on the Indians. That difference, he concludes, is a sign that the opinion permitting it does not enjoy the probability the other enjoys, and is not proved on solid foundations.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c16", "text": "The single most concrete page concerns Huancavelica, the mercury mine. What is reckoned hard in other mines, he writes, is in that quicksilver mine plainly hardest of all; and the Father Agia who had proved the Indians could be compelled to such works, when he had looked at the thing attentively with his own eyes, going down to a depth of a hundred and fifty of the unit the page calls a status and glosses in the same breath as the measure of a human body, by hanging ladders and the scant light of a lantern, sang a most attested recantation, as appears from the last clause of that work of his. Avendano adds that though the labour on that mountain is now said to be not so terrible as when Agia surveyed it, the harms persist with little difference.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c17", "text": "He records a promise made and not yet kept. Philip IV, after the last consultation held on the matter, promised with royal and Christian magnanimity that once peace was obtained the Indians should be relieved of that labour entirely, and that the necessary supply of quicksilver should be exported from Spain, Germany and other provinces at whatever great cost. The condition attached is the wars that were then dividing Europe, and Avendano's next words are a prayer that peace come.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c18", "text": "The mission argument is turned against the mines, and it is reported with an observation of practice rather than a maxim. Indians brought to the Huancavelica mountain from a region not a little distant, he relates, were caught sacrificing to the mountain as they approached it, heaping small offerings of earth's fruits and of their own food and begging it not to be deadly to them; so little, he writes, has the faith advanced among them after so long a preaching of it, since men fixed to this untimely labour can scarcely think seriously and with due pious affection of what is necessary to salvation.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c19", "text": "On personal service the hedging stops. Chapter XIII asks whether the Catholic Kings may with safe conscience allow or permit the personal service of the Indians, and paragraph 120 answers \"Dico, uti certissimum, sine graui peccato, & restitutionis onere, id non posse constare\" - I say, as most certain, that it cannot stand without grave sin and the burden of restitution. Among the authorities cited is the Mexican provincial council, which the printed page dates to 1583 and whose fathers, he reports, judged the distribution of Indians to that service iniquitous with not one dissenting.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c20", "text": "The reasoning generalises past the Indies. Kings are the tutelary angels of their subjects and are bound to defend them from injury; as they cannot subject them to total servitude, so neither to a partial one, which as a rule does not stand without vast oppression, and vast oppression is a violent diminution of liberty. Long usage is no defence: every custom in this matter is reprobated by the same laws, and even were it not expressly reprobated it could help nobody, since by reason of it the injuries multiplied over stretches of time would only oblige a greater restitution.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c21", "text": "What this volume is and is not. It is one tome of a set, the title page reading TOMVS PRIMVS and covering what pertains chiefly to civil government; no page opened here shows a later tome, and nothing is claimed about one. It is a manual of conscience, so it is evidence of what a professor of theology at Lima printed as binding on officials, not evidence that any official obeyed it, and no page read here reports a single case of restitution actually made. And its author is not a dissident: the same book forbids doubting the papal title, allows the enslavement of Chileans taken in war, and was written by a censor of the Inquisition and dedicated to the Council of the Indies.", "sources": [ "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Avendano is close to invisible in English. Where the seventeenth-century debate over the mine draft is covered at all it is through Solorzano, who was a crown lawyer, or through the modern secondary literature, and the usual verdict is that after Las Casas the Spanish moral critique went quiet. This object opens the Antwerp sheets and prints what a professor of theology at Lima published in 1668: the chapter headings framed as questions about what the king may do without mortal sin, the earlier papal grants of perpetual servitude quoted at full strength before being answered from Paul III, the royal rescript of 1549 admitting in the crown's own words that Indians walking fifty leagues to the mines with their own food on their backs sicken and die, the count of twelve Lima theologians on the other side, Agia's recantation after climbing out of the Huancavelica shaft, and the flat verdict that personal service cannot stand without grave sin and restitution. It also prints the arguments that make the author a man of his century rather than a modern one - the negative answer to whether the royal title may be doubted, and the exception carved out for Chile - and the sentence in which he says the kings look for a remedy, fail to find one, and put it off.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-10", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/avendano-thesaurus-indicus-1668", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/avendano-thesaurus-indicus-1668.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Diego de Avendano, Thesaurus Indicus (Antwerp, 1668)", "description": "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.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/avendano-thesaurus-indicus-1668", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-10", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Thesaurus Indicus, seu Generalis Instructor pro regimine conscientiae, in iis quae ad Indias spectant. Tomus primus", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=H81jAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA22" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Diego de Avendano, Thesaurus Indicus (Antwerp, 1668)" } }