{
  "id": "colegios-de-hijos-de-caciques",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The seminaries for the sons of the caciques (Lima, Cuzco, Chuquisaca)",
  "summary": "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.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "education",
    "colonial-institutions",
    "colonial-law",
    "peru",
    "andes",
    "americas",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "spanish-empire",
    "seventeenth-century"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "republica-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cajas-de-comunidad-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "solorzano-politica-indiana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "personas-miserables-in-the-law-of-the-indies"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-santa-cruz-de-tlatelolco"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "universities-of-lima-and-mexico"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tercero-catecismo-de-lima-1583"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "catedras-de-lenguas-indigenas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protector-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mita"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Were there schools for indigenous nobility in colonial Peru?",
    "What were the colegios de caciques and who paid for them?",
    "Why did the Spanish crown want the sons of caciques educated?",
    "Who ran the seminaries for caciques' sons in Lima and Cuzco?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The policy is stated as a standing royal order, not an initiative of the religious orders. Solórzano writes that \"por lo que importa tener ganados para con Dios, y para nuestros Reyes estos Caciques, se ha mandado por muchas Cedulas Reales, que se funden, y doten Colegios, donde sus hijos desde sus tiernos años sean instruidos con mucha enseñanza, y fundamento en nuestra Santa Fé Catholica, y en costumbres politicas, y en la lengua Española, y comunicacion de los Españoles\", so that as grown men they would be better Christians and \"mas entendidos\" and could in turn instruct and order their own subjects. He cites L. 11, tít. 23, lib. 1 and l. 18, tít. 1, lib. 6 of the Recopilación.",
      "sources": [
        "solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-caciques"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The motive is stated by the same page and it is instrumental, not charitable. The passage sits inside an argument that the caciques must be won over because the commons follow them; Solórzano quotes José de Acosta to the effect that \"estos Caciques para lo bueno, y para lo malo tienen absolutamente en su mano la voluntad de los Indios comunes, y que ganados aquellos, lo estarán estos\", and grounds the whole policy in a law of the Partidas holding that preaching should be aimed at the greater and better-understood, since once amended they can more easily bring the rest to amendment. The schools were an instrument of government, and their advocate says so.",
      "sources": [
        "solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-caciques"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Solórzano is a first-person witness to the decision about who should run them. He writes: \"Por lo qual Yo, quando estuve en Lima, haviendose erigido allí un Colegio para estos hijos de Caciques, y otro en la Ciudad de Cuzco, fui de parecer, que se les encargasse, y assí se hizo, y se vá continuando, segun entiendo, con buenos efectos.\" The recommendation he had just reported — that the charge be given to the Society of Jesus as the institute best suited to it — he attributes to a modern author he names as Francisco Cipeo.",
      "sources": [
        "solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-caciques"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The founding viceroy describes the same foundations independently, in the memoria he left for his successor. Under the running head \"DON FRANCISCO DE BORJA\", he records that he leaves founded at Santiago del Cercado of Lima \"un Seminario para hijos de Caciques de este Arzobispado, á cargo de los Padres de la Compañia de Jesus\", and that two more seminaries are being founded by his order, \"el uno en la ciudad del Cuzco y el otro en la de Chuquisaca\", all of them likewise entrusted to the Society. Solórzano, writing later, knew of two; the viceroy's own account names three.",
      "sources": [
        "memorias-vireyes-peru-1859-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "They were endowed from indigenous money, and the memoria says which. The viceroy records that ordinances were made for all of them and their maintenance assigned \"de lo procedido de los censos de sus comunidades\" — the income of the Indians' own community funds — and that the crown had declared this assignment not merely lawful but protected, since \"no se puede gastar este género de hacienda en otro ministerio que de tanta utilidad sea\". The schooling of the caciques' sons was thus a charge on the communities the caciques governed, not on the royal treasury.",
      "sources": [
        "memorias-vireyes-peru-1859-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The cost is in the same paragraph as the achievement, written by the founder. The sentence that announces the Lima seminary continues, \"y así mismo una Casa de Reclusion para los Dogmatizadores y Ministros de sus idolatrías y errores, y á vueltas de estos se traen tambien algunos hechiceros\"; and the two provincial seminaries were entrusted to the Society \"juntamente con la visita de las idolatrías, en compañía de los Visitadores Eclesiásticos\". The school for the sons of the indigenous lords and the prison for indigenous religious specialists were founded together, funded from the same policy, and handed to the same order.",
      "sources": [
        "memorias-vireyes-peru-1859-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The confinement was rationed by what the treasuries could bear, not by principle. The memoria adds that because the treasuries of Cuzco and Chuquisaca had as much substance as that of Lima, \"no fundé en ellas Casas de Reclusion\" — the reason given for not building the other two houses of confinement being fiscal, in a passage that then turns to how the harm of the idolaters was to be remedied instead.",
      "sources": [
        "memorias-vireyes-peru-1859-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The class the schools were built to win is described on the same Solórzano pages as one that preyed on its own. Within a few paragraphs of the passage on the colleges he records that caciques commonly compel their Indians to work their estates and pay them badly, that the Audiencias are charged to stop it, and that caciques who take their Indians' daughters to serve them are punished by removal of the cacicazgo and perpetual banishment — \"y aun algunas veces los han hecho esclavos\". The crown's instrument of indirect rule and the crown's grievance were the same men.",
      "sources": [
        "solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-caciques"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The chain of royal orders is reported here at one remove and dated with a printer's error worth naming. Solórzano says the cédulas may be seen in the first and fourth printed tomes of the Recopilación and that they were pressed again by later ones \"de San Lorenzo de 22. de Julio de 1595. y de Madrid 17. de Marzo de 1919. y de 28. de Marzo de 1620\". The third date as printed, 1919, is impossible in a 1736 volume and is on its face a transposition for 1619; this object reports what the page prints and does not correct it silently. None of these cédulas was read in its own text for this entry.",
      "sources": [
        "solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-caciques"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "What these two documents can and cannot show should be stated. Both are official and both are self-reporting: a viceroy's account of his own government, written to be judged on it, and a judge's treatise recommending a policy he had advised on. Together they establish that the seminaries were ordered, founded, endowed from community censos and given to the Jesuits, and that a house of reclusion was founded alongside. They are not evidence of how many boys attended, of what was taught, of whether the censos were actually paid over, or of what the caciques and their communities made of any of it.",
      "sources": [
        "solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-caciques",
        "memorias-vireyes-peru-1859-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of colonial Peru mention the \"colegios de caciques\" in passing, usually as a Jesuit initiative and usually without a document behind them. Here two participants speak in their own words from pages opened one by one: the viceroy Don Francisco de Borja naming the three foundations, the archdiocese they served, the order that got them and the community censos that paid for them; and the Lima judge Solórzano recording that he personally advised entrusting them to the Society and that this was done. The same pages carry what a defensive telling would leave out — the frankly instrumental motive, the house of confinement for indigenous religious specialists founded in the same sentence, and the abuses of the very cacique class the schools existed to cultivate.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-13",
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    "name": "The seminaries for the sons of the caciques (Lima, Cuzco, Chuquisaca)",
    "description": "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.",
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    "dateModified": "2026-08-13",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Memorias de los vireyes que han gobernado el Perú, durante el tiempo del coloniaje español — Tomo primero",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=oxwXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Política Indiana, libro II — the closing sections (§§35-51) of the chapter on the caciques, on the royal orders to found colleges for their sons and on the legal position of the cacicazgo",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=huEykw_YtzYC&pg=PA202"
      }
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    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "The seminaries for the sons of the caciques (Lima, Cuzco, Chuquisaca)"
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}