{ "id": "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-1649", "type": "entity", "name": "Gil González Dávila, Teatro eclesiástico de la primitiva iglesia de las Indias Occidentales (Madrid, 1649)", "summary": "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.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "spanish-empire", "colonial-institutions", "books", "historiography", "education", "medicine", "seventeenth-century" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "vetancurt-teatro-mexicano-1698" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "leon-pinelo-epitome-1629" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "concilio-provincial-mexicano-i-1555" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hospitals-of-the-indies" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "universities-of-lima-and-mexico" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "new-laws-of-1542" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "alvar-nunez-cabeza-de-vaca" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "biblioteca-palafoxiana-de-puebla" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "colegio-de-san-nicolas-obispo" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hospital-de-la-cuna-de-santa-fe" } ], "questions": [ "What is Gil González Dávila's Teatro eclesiástico de las Indias Occidentales?", "How many universities, colleges and hospitals did Spain claim to have founded in the Americas?", "What did the crown's own chronicler print about the epidemics in New Spain?", "How did colonial settlers react to the visitador sent to enforce the New Laws?", "Where can one find a seventeenth-century list of every diocese in Spanish America?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The title page of the copy read here reads \"TEATRO ECLESIASTICO DE LA PRIMITIVA IGLESIA DE LAS INDIAS OCCIDENTALES, VIDAS DE SVS ARZOBISPOS, OBISPOS, Y COSAS MEMORABLES DE SVS SEDES\", dedicated to \"DON FILIPE QVARTO DE LAS ESPAÑAS, Y NVEVO MVNDO\", and identifies the author by office: \"DEDICASELE SV CORONISTA Mayor de las Indias, y de los Reynos de las dos Castillas EL MAESTRO GIL GONZALEZ DAVILA. TOMO PRIMERO.\" The imprint is \"CON PRIVILEGIO. En Madrid, por Diego Diaz de la Carrera, Año M.DC.XLIX.\" The book is the work of the crown's own chronicler of the Indies, and says so.", "sources": [ "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-madrid-1649" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The dedication carries the aggregate the rest of the book itemises. Leaf a3 states that the king and his progenitors \"han fundado en aquel Orbe vn Patriarcato, seis Arçobispados, treinta y dos Obispados, trecientas y quarenta y seis Prebendas, dos Abadias, cinco Capellanias Reales\"; that \"Hanse fundado para el aumento de la Fè Catolica ochocientos y quarenta Conuentos; y para defensa della tres Inquisiciones, cinco Vniuersidades: y para enseñança de los naturales muchos Colegios y Estudios; y para la cura de sus enfermos infinitos Hospitales\"; and that \"Hanse fundado en el Pirù ciento y diez Ciudades, y sesenta y siete Villas\". The tally is only partly a count: the sees, prebends, convents and universities carry numbers, while the colleges for the instruction of the natives are \"muchos\" and the hospitals for their sick are \"infinitos\".", "sources": [ "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-madrid-1649" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The same leaf prices two of the crown's commitments and dates a third. It says the king had spent on carrying missionaries to the Philippines, in his reign, \"ciento y setenta mil ducados\"; that \"en diez y seis de Otubre del año de mil y seiscientos y treinta y nueue mandò publicar vna Cedula a fauor de la libertad de los Indios\"; and that the tithes he held by particular grace of the Apostolic See \"se desapropiò dellos, y voluntariamente se los donò a las Iglesias\". These are a court chronicler's assertions about his own patron, and the decree of 1639 is cited here by date alone, with no text quoted.", "sources": [ "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-madrid-1649" ], "confidence": 0.7 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The book states its interpretive frame on its own first folio, and it is not a modest one: \"Todo lo que se escriue de los nueuos descubrimientos de las Indias, son milagros notorios: en que la prudencia humana no tuuo mas mano, que poner de su parte el confessar, que todo venia del cielo.\" It then contrasts Alexander's million soldiers with \"nouecientos hombres Españoles\" who won empires by \"la fuerça de las luzes, y verdades Euangelicas\", and refers the reader for miracles worked by settlers to \"los Comentarios de Aluar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca, en los Capitulos 15. y 22.\" Any figure taken from this volume has to be read against that opening.", "sources": [ "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-madrid-1649" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The archbishopric of Mexico is given with its suffragans and with a statistical snapshot. Printed folio 30 lists the bishoprics under Mexico as \"Guatemala, Mechoacan, Puebla de los Angeles, Yucatan, Guaxaca, Nicaragua, Nueua Galicia, Chapa, Verapaz, y Nueua Vizcaya\", and states that \"El Arçobispado de Mexico en el año de 1633. tenia ciento y quarenta y vna Parroquias, o Doctrinas, como allà las llaman; y almas de Confession, y Comunion 36U296. y docientos y setenta y cinco Clerigos.\" The figure for communicants is printed with the calderón thousands mark and reads 36,296, which is low for the archbishopric and may be a compositor's error or a count of a narrower category; the parish and clergy figures are unambiguous.", "sources": [ "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-madrid-1649" ], "confidence": 0.7 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The demographic catastrophe is on the same page as the institutional count, not held back for a later chapter: \"En el año 1543. dize Grijalua en su historia: q en Nueua-España huuo vna tan grande peste, q de seis partes de los Indios murieron las cinco, y q en el cielo, tierra, y agua se vieron extraordinarios prodigios, que anunciauan muertes, y acabamiento de gente.\" The crown's chronicler prints a mortality of five in six, at second hand from Juan de Grijalva's history of the Augustinians, with no register behind it.", "sources": [ "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-madrid-1649" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The resistance of the settlers to the reform of Indian labour is reported in the same pages, from the colonists' side. Of the visitador sent by the emperor, Don Francisco Tello de Sandoval, folio 30 says that \"Los nueuos Pobladores, y Conquistadores no lo tuuieron por buena señal; y determinaron, con el parecer de algunos, de salirle à recibir vestidos todos de luto, en señal de la tristeza que lleuauan en las almas\", and that this was moderated by the viceroy and by a sermon of the archbishop, who \"prometio, que no se executaria ninguna Ordenança\" of the kind they feared. A demonstration of mourning against a royal inspection, and a promise of non-enforcement, printed by the crown's chronicler.", "sources": [ "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-madrid-1649" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "What the aggregate means on the ground can be read off the Guatemala section, whose running head is \"de la S. Iglesia de Guatimala\". Printed folio 150 records a college founded in 1553, \"el Colegio de S. Tomas de Aquino, para q se leyessen Artes, y Teologia\", endowed by its bishop and given 20,000 pesos in 1648 by the regidor and correo mayor Pedro Crespo; the first Mexican Council of 1555; a Dominican province of twelve convents and two vicarías with \"140. Religiosos, los 62. nacidos en Indias, y los demàs Españoles\", holding \"68. pueblos, que administran los Sacramentos, y enseñan el Catechismo, y Dotrina à los Indios\"; and the \"Hospital de S. Alexo, donde se cura Indios y Españoles, que oy es Hospital Real, en año 1647\". The same page endows dowries for poor girls at 7,000 tostones and alms of 500 tostones at Christmas and 500 at the Assumption.", "sources": [ "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-madrid-1649" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "Two details on folio 145 are the kind that the aggregate cannot show. The bishop's holograph memorial is quoted for a unit cost: \"el gasto de cada Religioso desde Seuilla hasta la Vera-Cruz importó 70. ducados\", for the six Franciscans he brought over in 1540 at his own charge. And of the Franciscan convent of Santiago de Guatemala the text says \"En este Conuento los Indios negros han edificado vna suntuosa capilla donde celebran las fiestas con grã deuocion, y gasto, y en ella tienen su sepoltura\" - a chapel built and paid for by black people, with their own burial place in it. The phrase \"Indios negros\" is the printed reading and is ambiguous in this period; the context of a self-funded confraternity chapel is not.", "sources": [ "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-madrid-1649" ], "confidence": 0.7 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The author occasionally shows his working, and the contrast with the rest is the point. Of the bishop of Nueva Vizcaya's visitation - five hundred leagues in eight months from April 1641, four hundred more from February 1642, five ruined churches rebuilt, more than four thousand persons confirmed, and an entry into \"Prouincias de Indios de guerra, donde no auia llegado ningun Prelado\" - folio 250 says \"De todo esto dio testimonio D. Sebastian de Lara Manrique, Notario de la visita, que yo leí original en treze de Setiembre de 1643.\" Elsewhere the authority named is another book: Grijalva for the epidemic, Gonzaga for the Franciscans of Guatemala, and \"El Licenciado Antonio de Leon en su Erudita Biblioteca Indiana\" for what an archbishop of Mexico wrote and printed. The volume is a compilation, and only sometimes an archive.", "sources": [ "gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-madrid-1649" ], "confidence": 0.85 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "When a figure is wanted for what Spain built in the Americas - how many sees, how many universities, how many hospitals - the numbers in circulation are usually modern summaries whose seventeenth-century source is never opened. This is that source, and this object quotes it directly: the 1649 Madrid folio in which the crown's Coronista Mayor de las Indias tallies one patriarchate, six archbishoprics, thirty-two bishoprics, three hundred and forty-six prebends, eight hundred and forty convents, three Inquisitions and five universities, and then repeats the same institutions city by city with their foundation dates, endowments and staffing. Quoting it exactly is also what bounds it: the colleges for the natives are \"muchos\" and the hospitals for their sick \"infinitos\", not counts; the book's first sentence calls the whole enterprise a notorious miracle; the archbishopric's communicant figure looks wrong as printed; and the same folio that counts one hundred and forty-one parishes reports, from another man's history, an epidemic in which five of every six Indians died, and settlers dressing in mourning to greet the inspector sent to enforce the New Laws.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-10", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-1649", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-1649.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Gil González Dávila, Teatro eclesiástico de la primitiva iglesia de las Indias Occidentales (Madrid, 1649)", "description": "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.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/gonzalez-davila-teatro-eclesiastico-1649", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-10", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Teatro eclesiastico de la primitiva iglesia de las Indias Occidentales, vidas de svs arzobispos, obispos, y cosas memorables de sus sedes... dedicasele su Coronista Mayor de las Indias, y de los Reynos de las dos Castillas el maestro Gil Gonzalez Davila. Tomo primero", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=g3VkAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP1" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Gil González Dávila, Teatro eclesiástico de la primitiva iglesia de las Indias Occidentales (Madrid, 1649)" } }