The hospital of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción in Mexico City: what Cortés's testament actually endowed, and how

Clause 9 of Hernán Cortés's testament of 1547 orders the hospital he had begun in Mexico City finished at his own cost, to a plan drawn in Spain that year. The document is worth reading for the financing: not alms, but the ring-fenced rents of his own shops on the calle de Tacuba, which his heir was forbidden to spend otherwise until the building was done, under a constitution copied from a Seville hospital.