{ "id": "munoz-historia-del-nuevo-mundo-1793", "type": "entity", "name": "Juan Bautista Munoz, Historia del Nuevo-mundo (Madrid, 1793)", "summary": "A royal cosmographer was ordered in 1779 to write the history of America and given a cedula opening every archive in the kingdom to him. The prologue he printed fourteen years later is the report of what he found: indices that listed almost nothing from the early years, papers thrown away as worm-eaten, and at Simancas a heap of originals nobody had read. It also states, in a sentence worth the whole volume, that the crown gave him the commission and no instructions.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "archives", "historiography", "enlightenment", "spanish-empire", "books", "eighteenth-century", "science" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "leon-pinelo-epitome-1629" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "bartolome-de-las-casas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "casa-de-contratacion" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "relaciones-geograficas-de-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "bru-garriga-esqueleto-1796" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "garcia-origen-de-los-indios-1607" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mendieta-historia-eclesiastica-indiana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "ordenanzas-del-archivo-general-de-indias-1790" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "navarrete-coleccion-de-los-viages-tomo-v-1837" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "nicolas-antonio-censura-historias-fabulosas-1742" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "herrera-historia-general-decada-octava" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "tardes-americanas-1778" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "guadalupe-de-tepeyac-en-las-fuentes-coloniales" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "coronista-mayor-de-las-indias" } ], "questions": [ "Who was Juan Bautista Munoz?", "What is the Historia del Nuevo-mundo of 1793?", "What state were the Spanish archives of the Indies in before they were reorganised?", "Did the Spanish crown control what its official historian of America wrote?", "How did eighteenth-century historians of America work with archival documents?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The copy read here gives the work and its imprint on the title page: \"HISTORIA DEL NUEVO-MUNDO / ESCRIBIALA D. JUAN BAUT. MUNOZ / TOMO I. / EN MADRID POR LA VIUDA DE IBARRA MDCCXCIII.\" The sheets are therefore the first tome, printed at Madrid in 1793 by the widow of Ibarra. The copy carries a British Library stamp and shelfmark.", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.95 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The prologue opens with the commission and its dates. On 17 July 1779 a royal order was communicated to him to write the history of America, and of the same date the king commanded \"que se me franqueasen todos los papeles y documentos necesarios\". He began at once on the archives of the Indies department held in Madrid. Having represented the need to go to Simancas, Seville, Cadiz and other towns, he was authorised by a general cedula dated 27 March 1781 to make use of every sort of archive, office and library, \"asi del publico como de comunidades y particulares\".", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The sentence that matters most for what the volume is worth as evidence is on printed page II. What he was given, he writes, was \"el simple encargo de escribir la presente historia, sin jamas anadir por escrito ni de palabra la mas leve prevencion o insinuacion acerca del modo: quedando enteramente a mi arbitrio y libertad las cosas, la disposicion, el estilo\". The only pressure he records is an occasional wish to see the work published, expressed in terms he calls mild and honorific and without obliging him to hurry the enquiries.", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "His report on the archives is not flattering to the administration that employed him. Nobody could calculate the labour the work would need, \"porque era muy escaso y raro el conocimiento de nuestros archivos generales, de sus papeles, y del estado en que estos se hallaban\". The indices of the secret archive of the Council of the Indies \"apenas se indicaba papel alguno de los primeros tiempos\", when so many and such important papers ought to have been placed and kept there in fulfilment of repeated royal orders. Of the letters and relations written by discoverers, governors, captains, treasury officials and ecclesiastics who went on the voyages and entradas, he \"apenas encontraba noticia\".", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "Some of the loss was physical and is stated plainly. Of the papers of the royal casa-audiencia de la contratacion he understood from inventories and reports that a good part \"se habian arrojado por ilegibles y comidos de polilla\", and he suspected that a like fortune had befallen many of the Council of the Indies papers taken to Simancas on various occasions and in great number.", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "Simancas reversed the expectation. \"Efectivamente descubri un tesoro\", he writes: a heap of original papers of every kind, as if buried there, of which no idea was held. He measures the previous state of knowledge by naming his predecessors. Leon Pinelo had recognised a few and given an account of their titles, \"partecilla demasiado pequena para venir en conocimiento del cuerpo\"; Riol had examined at most the nine bundles titled patronato, and of the rest seems to have seen only the bulk and the labels, as much as a traveller might who visited the fortress for half an hour.", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The method is declared on page V and is the reason this volume belongs in a history of scholarship rather than only in a history of Spanish America. He resolved to do in his history what the philosophers justly called restorers had done in the natural sciences: \"Puseme en el estado de una duda universal sobre quanto se habia publicado en la materia, con firme resolucion de apurar la verdad de los hechos y sus circunstancias hasta donde fuese posible en fuerza de documentos ciertos e incontrastables.\" Universal doubt of the printed literature, and documents as the only way out of it.", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The itinerary is given repository by repository. Simancas yielded more than he had hoped; at Seville he found beyond comparison more, in the old archive of the casa-audiencia de Indias and in those of the city, the cathedral, the charterhouse and other communities and private hands; the principal accounting office of that audiencia at Cadiz supplied much of what was missing from its Seville archive; and he made no small gathering in the general archive of Portugal at S. Benito in Lisbon, \"a quien llaman de la torre do tombo\". Manuscripts came in number from the royal libraries of Madrid and the Escorial and from a list of houses he prints by name, among them the colleges of San Bartolome and Cuenca at Salamanca, San Gregorio at Valladolid, the cathedral of Palencia and the Sacromonte of Granada.", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "He also printed his plan for the apparatus, which is a plan for making the evidence checkable by others. There was to be an appendix of proofs and historical illustrations \"para manifestar lo cierto de mis aserciones\", carrying the citations and the conjectural discussions, and stating the grounds on which he altered and corrected authors of high credit; and, separately, \"publicare una buena coleccion de documentos y escritos ineditos\". Of the printed historians he would treat in the prologue to each tome, not of all, which would be an infinite work, but of the most notable by age and by real or reputed merit.", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "One instance shows the archival method producing something a reader can see. The map of Hispaniola printed with the volume, with the divisions of its lordships and provinces at the time of the discovery, was drawn not from the printed maps of Ramusio, Porcacchi, d'Anville and Bellin, which he calls diminutive, confused and inexact, but from the detailed description in the first nine chapters of the then unpublished Apologetica historia of Bartolome de las Casas - a work, he adds, in which the bishop employed all his reading and practical knowledge of the Indies \"para ensalzar aquellas regiones y gentes\".", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "The prologue ends by asking for help and offering credit for it. He concludes by begging the bodies and persons who hold unpublished documents, relations or books on matters of the Indies to communicate their lights \"a beneficio comun\", and promises that all who have favoured or shall favour him with writings or important notices will be named in their place, \"dando publico testimonio de mi agradecimiento\".", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "What the volume promises and what it delivers are not the same thing, and the sheets say so themselves. The title page reads TOMO I; the appendix of proofs and the collection of unpublished documents are announced in the future tense on page XXVIII and are not in this volume. Nothing read here shows a second tome, and this object claims none either way.", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "The limits of the witness, stated because the object is worth less without them. This is the commissioned historian's own account of his own diligence, printed for the ministry that employed and paid him. Every statement above about the disorder of the archives, about the freedom he enjoyed and about the value of what he recovered is his, and no page read here sets an independent check against any of it. The pages also give no motive for the order of 17 July 1779 beyond the order itself, so this object asserts none; and although the same decade saw the crown gather the Indies papers into a general archive at Seville, no page opened for this object mentions it, and nothing is claimed here about that.", "sources": [ "munoz-historia-nuevo-mundo-madrid-1793" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Munoz appears in English-language reference works as a name attached to the Coleccion Munoz and to the founding of the Archivo General de Indias, and almost never as a text anyone has opened; the reader is given a characterisation of his method with nothing to check it against. This object opens the 1793 prologue and prints the record: the dates of the commission and of the general cedula, the sentence in which he states he was given the charge and never the least direction as to matter, arrangement or style, the indices that listed almost nothing from the first years despite repeated royal orders, the papers thrown away as worm-eaten, the treasure at Simancas measured against exactly how little Leon Pinelo and Riol had seen of it, the profession of universal doubt resolved only by documents, the repositories named one by one down to the torre do tombo, the promised appendix of proofs and separate document collection, and the closing appeal for papers with a promise of public credit. It then does what a promotional summary will not: it records that the promised apparatus is not in the volume, that the title page says TOMO I, and that the whole account is the paid historian's own testimony about himself with nothing set against it.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-10", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/munoz-historia-del-nuevo-mundo-1793", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/munoz-historia-del-nuevo-mundo-1793.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Juan Bautista Munoz, Historia del Nuevo-mundo (Madrid, 1793)", "description": "A royal cosmographer was ordered in 1779 to write the history of America and given a cedula opening every archive in the kingdom to him. The prologue he printed fourteen years later is the report of what he found: indices that listed almost nothing from the early years, papers thrown away as worm-eaten, and at Simancas a heap of originals nobody had read. It also states, in a sentence worth the whole volume, that the crown gave him the commission and no instructions.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/munoz-historia-del-nuevo-mundo-1793", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-10", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Historia del Nuevo-mundo, tomo I", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=3HoFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR1" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Juan Bautista Munoz, Historia del Nuevo-mundo (Madrid, 1793)" } }