Testamentos de indios — the will of an Indian, and the law that guarded it

An Indian in the Spanish Indies could make a will, and a law of 1580 with a rubric of its own exists because parish clergy were pressing dying Indians to leave the church everything. The code orders viceroys and audiencias to secure "entera libertad en sus disposiciones"; the bishop of Quito's manual tells the parish priest, who usually wrote the will, to take nothing from it. Both texts are the crown's and the church's own, and both describe the abuse they forbid.