{
  "id": "relaciones-de-gobierno-de-los-virreyes",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The relación de gobierno: the viceroy's handover report to his successor",
  "summary": "A standing royal order required each viceroy of the Indies to leave his successor a written account of the state in which he left the kingdom. The result is a long series of self-audits by the men in charge — and one of them, handing Peru over in 1615, wrote down that few of the Indians sent to the Potosí mita ever returned home, and called it the principal cause of their total ruin. The independent Peruvian republic printed the series at state expense in 1859.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "colonial-institutions",
    "colonial-law",
    "accountability",
    "administration",
    "peru",
    "americas",
    "spanish-empire",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "archives"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juicio-de-residencia"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mita"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mercurio-peruano-1791"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relaciones-geograficas-de-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "noticias-secretas-de-america"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "correos-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "experiencias-del-beneficio-de-juan-del-corro"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "casa-de-las-amparadas-de-lima"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegios-de-caciques-del-peru"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-san-juan-de-letran"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "estanco-de-la-nieve-de-nueva-espana"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was a relación de gobierno or memoria de virrey?",
    "Did Spanish viceroys have to report on their own administration?",
    "What did the viceroys of Peru say about the Potosí mita?",
    "Who printed the memorias de los vireyes and why?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The series exists in print as a state publication of the Peruvian republic. The title page reads \"Memorias de los vireyes que han gobernado el Perú, durante el tiempo del coloniaje español\", \"impresas de órden suprema\", tomo primero, Lima, Librería Central de Felipe Bailly, editor, 1859. The first volume carries the relaciones of Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna, marqués de Montesclaros; Don Francisco de Borja y Aragón, príncipe de Esquilache; Don Baltasar de la Cueva, conde de Castellar; and the Ilustrísimo Don Melchor de Liñán y Cisneros.",
      "sources": [
        "memorias-vireyes-peru-1859-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The obligation is stated by the reporting viceroy himself, in the first line of the first document, with the date of the order that reached him. Montesclaros opens his relacion to Esquilache \"Es órden de S. M. que los Vireyes de estos Reinos adviertan al sucesor del estado en que los dejan: mandómelo á mí en persona de V. E. por carta de 8 de Noviembre de 1614 años.\" He then says he will aim the account at those things his successor would first need to be informed of, leaving the other particulars of the provinces to the curiosity of a cosmography.",
      "sources": [
        "memorias-vireyes-peru-1859-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The nineteenth-century editor states what he takes the genre to be, and it is a claim about administration rather than about literature. The relaciones of the viceroys \"no son una simple enumeracion de medidas gubernativas\": the viceroys had not only to govern but to go on organising peoples that after the violent crises of the conquest had to enter a new kind of political life; hence the abundant material deposited in the numerous relaciones some of them left to their successors, indicating the progress and state of each of the branches of public administration and of the measures issued both by them and by the King of Spain.",
      "sources": [
        "fuentes-1859-prologo-memorias"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The printing was ordered by an independent republic about its own colonial administrators, and the prologue records the chain. The relacion that Viceroy Teodoro de Croix made to his successor reached the hands of General Ramón Castilla, who saw the importance of a document holding so many data on the state and progress of the peoples that made up the viceroyalty and formed the idea of giving it publicity; the Minister of Hacienda, Colonel Juan José Salcedo, charged the editor with the printing and correction; the editor argued for printing all the memorias held in the national library and in private hands, and notes that publications of this class cannot be undertaken by private persons for the great expense they require.",
      "sources": [
        "fuentes-1859-prologo-memorias"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The same prologue records what had already been lost, which is the measure of how much of the series is missing. It is very grievous, the editor writes, that the fires, sackings and disorders of the public archives have made the copies of some relaciones disappear, and that these can now be obtained only by resorting to the libraries or archives of Madrid, which he hopes to receive in order to complete the collection; the scattering of the relaciones among different private hands, and the haste with which he wished to proceed, obliged him to interrupt the strict order of dates.",
      "sources": [
        "fuentes-1859-prologo-memorias"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The institution was already being treated as an archive to be mined before the colonial period ended. The 1859 volume reprints, ahead of the relaciones themselves, a dissertation by Don Ambrosio Cerdán de Landa Simón Pontero, oidor of the Real Audiencia of Lima, president of the Sociedad de Amantes del País and member of the Real Academia Española de la Historia, published in the Mercurio Peruano of 3 April 1794. Its heading announces historical notes on the principal acts of each of the governors, presidents and viceroys of Peru \"con produccion del extracto de sus relaciones de gobierno, y de otros documentos antiguos ineditos\", written to discharge article 16 of the plan de materias published in that periodical.",
      "sources": [
        "cerdan-de-landa-disertacion-1794"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "What the genre is worth is shown by what an outgoing viceroy put in writing about the forced mining draft. Under the heading Potosí, Montesclaros records that the labour the Indians have in the mines is great however much many royal cédulas and viceroys' ordinances moderate it; that for the mita of that camp \"el señor don Francisco, primer fundador\" assigned 13,500 Indians drawn from across the kingdom up to 150 leagues away, ordering that a third of them be changed weekly and that the obligation to serve fall in four months of a year; that this cannot be achieved as it should; and that \"la comun opinion es que pocos vuelven á los pueblos de donde salieron, causa principal de su total ruina y amenaza cierta de que la ha de haber en lo demas, pues no puede la naturaleza restaurar por generacion una saca tan numerosa y ordinaria\". Among the reasons he gives for men not returning is \"la vejacion de los Corregidores, Curas y Curacas\".",
      "sources": [
        "memorias-vireyes-peru-1859-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "What these sheets cannot establish should be stated beside what they do. They show the order, one viceroy's compliance with it, and a nineteenth-century editor's account of the collection; they do not show how many viceroys complied, whether the Council of the Indies read what was sent, or whether any of it changed a policy. The mita passage is the testimony of the officer responsible for the system he is describing, written for his successor rather than for a court, and its figure of 13,500 is his statement of what Francisco de Toledo assigned, not a count of who served. The editor is the government's appointee and writes in praise of the ministers who commissioned him.",
      "sources": [
        "memorias-vireyes-peru-1859-t1",
        "fuentes-1859-prologo-memorias"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of Spanish colonial government name the residencia and the visita and stop there; the relación de gobierno, the outgoing viceroy's own written handover, is usually absent altogether, and where it appears it is asserted rather than quoted. This object opens the printed series: the royal order in the words of the viceroy who received it and the date of the letter that carried it, the republican prologue that says why an independent Peru paid to print its former rulers' self-accounts and how many had already burned, the 1794 dissertation that was already extracting them, and — the reason the genre matters — the paragraph in which the man running Peru writes down that few of the men sent to Potosí come home and that this is the principal cause of their total ruin. The achievement and its cost are the same document.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-11",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/relaciones-de-gobierno-de-los-virreyes",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/relaciones-de-gobierno-de-los-virreyes.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "The relación de gobierno: the viceroy's handover report to his successor",
    "description": "A standing royal order required each viceroy of the Indies to leave his successor a written account of the state in which he left the kingdom. The result is a long series of self-audits by the men in charge — and one of them, handing Peru over in 1615, wrote down that few of the Indians sent to the Potosí mita ever returned home, and called it the principal cause of their total ruin. The independent Peruvian republic printed the series at state expense in 1859.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/relaciones-de-gobierno-de-los-virreyes",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-11",
    "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": "Editor's prologue to the Memorias de los vireyes que han gobernado el Perú, tomo primero",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=oxwXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR5"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Disertacion preliminar á los apuntamientos históricos de los mas principales hechos y acaecimientos de cada uno de los señores gobernadores, presidentes y vireyes del Perú, con produccion del extracto de sus relaciones de gobierno",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=oxwXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR9"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "The relación de gobierno: the viceroy's handover report to his successor"
  }
}