The Audiencia de La Plata de los Charcas: a royal high court over Upper Peru, obeyed as the king himself
In 1559 the crown erected at the silver city of La Plata — the Indian Chuquisaca — a Real Audiencia, an appellate court through which an Indian town or a Spanish subject of Upper Peru could reach royal justice. The Recopilación ordered its decrees obeyed "como si fueran de el Rey", and its writ reached even into Lima's district. The same court sat over 188 Indian towns and the Potosí its mita drained: its justice and its extraction stand on the same ground.
Why this wins its question: English-language reference works name the Audiencia de Charcas, where they name it at all, as a colonial administrative boundary on a map. Here is what it was as an institution, quoted from the 1681 first edition of the Recopilación opened page by page and from Alcedo's dictionary: a royal appellate court erected in 1559 at the silver city of La Plata, whose mandates the code ordered every official of the Indies to obey "como si fueran de el Rey", whose writ reached even into the neighbouring district of Lima to command the corregidor of Arica, and whose jurisdiction covered 188 Indian towns and some 100,000 tributaries from Upper Peru down to Buenos Aires. And, from the same dictionary and given equal weight, the valorous resistance of the Chuquisacas the court was built over and the Porco silver that gave its capital a Spanish name.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The code used here is the first edition of the Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, Madrid, Julián de Paredes, 1681, tomo primero, Libro II, título XV "De las Audiencias y Chancillerías Reales de las Indias". The two leaves read for this object, printed pages 190 and 191, each carry that título's running head "De las Audiencias y Chancillerias Reales", and the laws quoted below stand on them under it.
The district the código draws for the Audiencia de los Charcas is a territory, not a city. Its bounds run from the Collao inclusive towards the Ciudad de la Plata — beginning at the pueblo of Ayavire by the Urcosuyo road, from the pueblo of Asillo by the Umasuyo road, and from Atuncana by the Arequipa road towards the part of the Charcas — and take in the provinces of Sagavana and, entire, Carabaya, the law being careful not to prejudice the terms the Ciudad del Cuzco held in those confines.
What the court was, in the code's own words, is a delegation of the king's own authority. Law xvj of the título, given by the Emperor Charles and the Empress governor at Madrid on 13 July 1530, orders all concejos, justicias, regidores, caballeros, escuderos, oficiales and hombres buenos of the cities, villas and lugares of the Indies that whenever they are called and required, in peace or in war, by the presidente and oidores of the Real Audiencia of their district, they obey and carry out everything the audiencia commands and provides "como buenos y leales vasallos", giving it all the favour and aid it asks, under the penalty of those who do not obey their kings and natural lords.
The reach of the Charcas court crossed even the line of a neighbouring audiencia. Law xv, given by Philip II at Tordesillas on 22 June 1592, orders that although the city and port of Arica lie in the district of the Real Audiencia de los Reyes (Lima), its corregidor is to obey the mandates of the Real Audiencia de los Charcas and to receive and pass on the persons it sends into banishment; and the Charcas audiencia is to do justice against the corregidor who fails to comply.
The bench such a court carried is set out in the same título's laws for the sister audiencias read on the facing leaf. The Audiencia y Chancillería of Manila (established 1583, re-founded 1596) and that of Santiago de Chile (Philip III, Madrid, 17 February 1609) were each to have a presidente who was also governor and captain general, four oidores who were also alcaldes del crimen, one fiscal, one alguacil mayor, a teniente de gran canciller, and the other necessary ministers and officers — the standard on which the frontier audiencias, Charcas among them, were constituted.
The dictionary of Antonio de Alcedo (Madrid, Benito Cano, 1786), in its Adiciones y Correcciones, dates the court and names its first judges: the Real Audiencia de Charcas was erected in the year 1559, its first presidente being the licenciado Pedro Ramírez de Quiñones in that year, and its second, in 1580, the licenciado Juan de Matienzo, "célebre Jurisconsulto" — the same Matienzo whose Gobierno del Perú was a leading theory of the reducción of the Indians into towns. Alcedo is a late-eighteenth-century compilation whose author warns of his own sources' inexactitude, so its figures are given at this confidence.
Alcedo measures the jurisdiction the same page. The archbishopric of Charcas held as suffragans the bishoprics of La Paz, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Tucumán, Paraguay and Buenos Aires — the last the viceroyalty to which the province came to belong; and the audiencia's district comprised the provinces and corregimientos of Tomina, Oruro, Paria, Porco, Pilaya, Carangas, Tarija, Cochabamba, Cicasica, Lipes, Chayanta, Atacama and Amparaez, "en que se contienen 188 Pueblos y Curatos, en que había el año de 1651 cerca de 100 [mil] Indios", the capital of the whole being the Ciudad de Chuquisaca or la Plata.
The seat of that justice was raised over a defeat and a mine, and Alcedo records both without softening them. The city was founded as the Villa de la Plata in 1539 by the captain Pedro Anzures at the site of the pueblo of Chuquisaca, the year after Gonzalo Pizarro's 1538 campaign in which — the article says — "los Chuquisacas … sostuvieron su libertad valerosamente en muchos reencuentros" and pressed the Spanish force so hard that it would have perished but for a strong relief sent by Francisco Pizarro from Cuzco. Its Spanish name, la Plata, came from the silver of the nearby cerro de Porco worked since the Inca emperors, while the native name Choquezaca or Choquechaca — glossed as "montes de oro" — survived under the mispronounced Chuquisaca.
What these two sources are is worth stating at the end. They are a printed royal code and a printed geographical dictionary: strong evidence of how the court was designed, how far its writ ran, and that the crown ordered its decrees obeyed as the king's own, and no evidence at all of how any particular Indian suit or appeal actually fared before its oidores. The Audiencia de La Plata was at once the highest royal court an indigenous community of Upper Peru could reach and the apex of the government that ran the Potosí mita in its district.