{
  "id": "milicia-y-descripcion-de-las-indias-1599",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Milicia y descripción de las Indias (1599) — a frontier captain's manual, and the licence that limited it",
  "summary": "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.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "spanish-empire",
    "conquest",
    "military",
    "censorship",
    "new-granada",
    "chichimeca",
    "books",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "indigenous-peoples"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ordenanzas-de-poblacion-1573"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "bartolome-de-las-casas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "valladolid-debate"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "new-laws-of-1542"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ercilla-la-araucana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protector-de-indios"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was Vargas Machuca's Milicia y descripción de las Indias?",
    "Who paid for a Spanish entrada in the Indies?",
    "What did the censors say when licensing a book about war in the Indies?",
    "Who were the Chichimecas in sixteenth-century Spanish accounts?",
    "Was there a Spanish manual of frontier warfare in the Americas?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The book was printed in Madrid \"en casa de Pedro Madrigal\" in 1599 as \"Milicia y descripcion de las Indias, por el Capitan don Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, cauallero castellano, natural de la villa de Simancas\", and its title page directs it to the licenciado Paulo de Laguna, \"Presidente del Consejo Real de las Indias\" — that is, to the head of the tribunal that governed the Indies and licensed entradas.",
      "sources": [
        "vargas-machuca-milicia-descripcion-1599"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "Its first book is announced on its opening folio as \"Libro primero de la milicia Indiana, en que se tratan las partes de que ha de ser compuesto vn buen caudillo\" — the subject of the work is not a campaign but the making of a frontier commander, and the phrase \"milicia Indiana\", running as the head of the pages, names a distinct American art of war.",
      "sources": [
        "vargas-machuca-milicia-descripcion-1599"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The censor's parecer bound in front of the text sorts the Indians into kinds before it will license a book about fighting them. Of one kind it says they have given obedience neither to the king nor to the Church and attack Spaniards unprovoked, and it names cases: bands of two and three hundred called Chichimecos who rob and kill on the road from Mexico to the Zacatecas mines, \"que es la mayor grossedad que ay en la nueua España, que es como el cerro de Potosi en el Piru\"; the killing of a friar tied to a tree and shot with arrows at a place it calls Chapuluacan; and similar peoples in Luzon, Peru, Chile and the New Kingdom of Granada.",
      "sources": [
        "vargas-machuca-milicia-descripcion-1599"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The same parecer then sets a limit that cuts against the book it is licensing: the first kind of Indians \"los han de apaziguar y conquistar los ministros Euangelicos con las armas del Euangelio, y palabras diuinas, procurando con toda mansedumbre y buenas obras traerlos con paz y amor al gremio de la Yglesia\"; and if they will not receive the peace and friendship offered them, the order is to leave them alone —\"dexarlos sin hazerles guerra, ni hazerles ningun mal ni daño\"— since God knows how and when to bring any of them He has predestined. Refusal of Spanish peace is expressly not made a ground for war.",
      "sources": [
        "vargas-machuca-milicia-descripcion-1599"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The licence is granted on the strength of that partition: because \"el autor deste libro no lo ha compuesto ni ordenado para estos Indios, sino para los otros dos generos que se han referido\", the censor finds nothing in it against the faith or good custom, but rather much good example and matter \"prouechoso para guerras justas\", and holds the author worthy of reward for his service in those parts. It is signed by Fray Francisco de Ortega at San Filipe de Madrid on 14 December 1597, two years before the book appeared.",
      "sources": [
        "vargas-machuca-milicia-descripcion-1599"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "On the finances of an entrada the captain is explicit, and this is the passage that explains most about how the conquest of the American interior actually worked. No soldier, he writes, is compelled by necessity to go on any jornada, since even the poorest has horse, saddle, a suit, a blanket to sleep in and someone to feed him; the caudillo must therefore bind them by affability and love. Caudillos spend much equipping them, but nothing compared with what they would spend \"si huuieran de pagar enteramente a su gente, como lo hazen en Italia\": a hundred soldiers in the Indies cost more than a thousand in Italy and even so \"no se les paga enteramente\", and the caudillo \"ni es ayudado de la caxa Real, ni tiene recompensa que suelde el gasto que haze\". What is lacking in pay, the book concludes, must be made up in good treatment.",
      "sources": [
        "vargas-machuca-milicia-descripcion-1599"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The witness is an interested one and the object says so rather than discounting the book for it. Vargas Machuca is a frontier captain publishing under the eye of the tribunal that dispensed rewards, dedicating the work to its president, and the same author later wrote an apology against Las Casas; the pages read here are his own account of his profession and the licensers' account of when that profession may be used. Nothing in them is evidence for what the peoples named in c3 did or intended, and the entry makes no claim on that.",
      "sources": [
        "vargas-machuca-milicia-descripcion-1599"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "What was not read is stated. The claims here rest on the title page, three leaves of the licensing apparatus, the opening folio of book one and folio 24; the volume's body — the avisos to the caudillo, the arquebusier and the soldiers, and the geographical descripción that gives the work half its title — was not opened for this entry, and no claim is made about its contents. The volume's own search index was tested and found to return the same pages for a nonsense word as for a real one, so nothing here rests on a search result.",
      "sources": [
        "vargas-machuca-milicia-descripcion-1599"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Vargas Machuca reaches English readers, when he reaches them at all, as the man who answered Las Casas — a foil in the debate literature, quoted from a modern translation of his apology. The 1599 manual itself is rarely opened, and its preliminaries almost never. This object prints what the licensing apparatus says in front of a war manual: a Spanish censor in 1597 sorting the peoples of the Indies into kinds, naming the Chichimeca raids on the Zacatecas road and a friar killed at Chapuluacan, and then forbidding war on the kind who merely decline Spanish peace — the Valladolid arguments applied, at the desk, to the question of whether a book may be printed. Beside it stands the captain's own arithmetic of an entrada: unpaid volunteers, no help from the royal treasury, a hundred men costing more than a thousand in Italy, pay made up in good treatment. The contribution and the cost are the same paragraph here, and neither has to be inferred.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-17",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/milicia-y-descripcion-de-las-indias-1599",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/milicia-y-descripcion-de-las-indias-1599.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Milicia y descripción de las Indias (1599) — a frontier captain's manual, and the licence that limited it",
    "description": "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.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/milicia-y-descripcion-de-las-indias-1599",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-17",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Milicia y descripcion de las Indias, por el capitan don Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, cauallero castellano, natural de la villa de Simancas",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=QwX4t_x6i3EC&pg=PP5"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Milicia y descripción de las Indias (1599) — a frontier captain's manual, and the licence that limited it"
  }
}