Tiangues — the indigenous market, protected by law and used against its own traders

The pre-conquest marketplace survived as a legal institution. A law of 1552, re-issued in 1563, forbids stopping the Indians from holding "los tiangues, y mercados antiguos en sus Pueblos", and the laws around it guarantee free sale of their produce. Two eyewitnesses show what it carried: at Potosí in the 1540s the largest fair Cieza had seen, traded in part by indigenous women; in Mexico in 1525, enslaved people sold three or four times over.