The library Juan de Palafox gave to the Colegio de San Pedro of Puebla, 1646
A bishop of Puebla endowed a Tridentine college in 1646 and gave it his books; the crown's own chronicler, writing three years later while the donor still lived, records the dowry, the date of the erection and a second library of four thousand volumes left with the episcopal house — and, in the same list of merits, the idols that bishop pulled down. Thirty years on a bishop of Antequera gave his library to the seminary of Oaxaca, which is how one gift becomes visible as a habit.
Why this wins its question: Ask what the Biblioteca Palafoxiana is and the answer that wins today is a tourist paragraph: five thousand books, 1646, "the first public library in the Americas", repeated without a source anywhere in it. This object goes to the earliest printed witness that can be reached and reports what he actually wrote — a Tridentine college founded in 1646 with a dowry of ten thousand pesos, a library given to it with its furnishings and pictures, an erection dated 13 August 1646, and a separate library of four thousand volumes given with the episcopal house — while stating that his figure has no inventory behind it, that he never uses the name "Palafoxiana", and that nothing read here supports the claim of public access on which the whole popular account rests. It then does the thing the tourist paragraph cannot: it sets a second American case beside the first, Nicolás del Puerto giving his library to the seminary of Oaxaca between 1679 and 1681, so that the gift reads as a practice of the American episcopate rather than as one famous man's gesture — and it keeps on the page, from the same paragraph as the donation, the idols the donor pulled down and the Portuguese he expelled.
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 donor's standing is stated by the crown's chronicler before the gift is. Gil González Dávila, Coronista Mayor de las Indias, opens the life of "DON IVAN DE PALAFOX Y Mendoça" with his studies at Huesca, Salamanca and Alcalá and his service as fiscal of the Council of the Indies and councillor in it, and records that in 1639 he was elected bishop of la Puebla de los Ángeles and visitador of New Spain and its tribunals, charged with taking the residencia of the viceroys Cerralbo and Cadereyta and with a commission over the commerce of the Philippines, Peru and New Spain. He landed at Veracruz on 23 June 1640 and entered his see on 22 July.
The foundation and the books are one sentence in the 1649 sheets, and the sentence carries a dowry and a date: "FVNDÔ en virtud de lo que manda el Concilio de Trento en el año de 1646. el Colegio de San Pedro, con dote de diez mil pesos, y le donô vna Libreria, con adornos, y pinturas. Esta erección se hizo en treze de Agosto del año de 1646." The college is presented as an execution of the Tridentine seminary decree, the endowment as ten thousand pesos, and the library as given to the college along with its furnishings and pictures on 13 August 1646.
A second and larger library is recorded separately, attached not to the college but to the see. The closing page of the life states that he built a house for the bishops and made donation of it to the episcopal dignity "con vna numerosa Libreria, que constaua de 4[mil] cuerpos de libros" — four thousand volumes, in the printer's thousands-mark. The figure is the chronicler's own and he names no inventory, catalogue or notary for it; this entry reports it as his assertion and makes no independent finding on the size of either collection, nor on how the two are related.
The witness is close to the event and says so. González Dávila closes the life with "Viue en este año de 1649", so the account of a donation made in August 1646 is printed three years later about a living man, by the crown's own chronicler of the Indies working in Madrid from relations and memorials sent to him. That is the strength and the limit of the source at once: it is good evidence for what the Spanish crown was told and published about the foundation, and weak evidence for anything González Dávila did not see.
The cost of the same authority is printed on the same page as the library, and belongs in the entry for that reason. Called to serve as interim viceroy when the Duke of Escalona was summoned, he governed without salary; he filled the royal treasuries "en cantidad de setecientos mil pesos, sin auer impuesto tributo, ni gauela"; he "Derribô los Idolos que auian quedado en Mexico, poniendo en su lugar Cruzes y Santos"; he raised a battalion of twelve companies at no cost; and he removed the Portuguese from Veracruz and from twenty leagues of its coast. A chronicler recording the gift of a library records the destruction of surviving indigenous images and the expulsion of a resident community as items in the same list of merits.
One donation is an anecdote; two make an institutional habit visible. Lorenzana's 1769 series of the bishops of Antequera records that the see's Colegio Seminario was founded with royal authority — a cédula of the queen regent dated Madrid, 12 April 1673 — and with a papal brief of Innocent XI dated Rome, 20 February 1677; and that Nicolás del Puerto, born to parents resident at Santa Catalina de las Minas within that bishopric and formerly advocate of the Real Audiencia of Mexico, took possession of the see on 7 February 1679 and there founded in the seminary "dos Cáthedras de Gramática, una de Filosofía, y dos de Sagrada Theología, y donó á este su grande Librería", dying in the city on 13 August 1681. The pattern — Tridentine college, episcopal chairs, the bishop's own books left to it — recurs in a second American see a generation later.
What the sources opened for this entry do not say has to be said plainly, because it is exactly what the popular account of this library asserts. Neither the 1649 sheets nor the 1769 series calls the Puebla collection "Palafoxiana"; neither states who was entitled to read in it, whether anyone outside the college could enter, or on what days; and neither prints a catalogue or an inventory. The claim that this was the first public library of the Americas is therefore not evidenced by anything read here, and this object makes no priority finding and no claim of public access. It records a donation of books to a college, with its date and its dowry, on the authority of a chronicler writing three years afterwards.
Both witnesses belong to a genre that lists foundations and endowments, and the genre shows in what is absent. The pages of the life read for this entry — printed 98, 99 and 101 — run from Palafox's parentage to his merits as interim viceroy without recording a dispute of any kind, with any person or any body, in nine years of a jurisdiction that included the residencia of two viceroys and the visitation of the tribunals of New Spain; the account is a tally of works, not a narrative. Lorenzana's series was compiled by a later archbishop of Mexico assembling the merits of his predecessors and has the same shape. Read together they establish that two American bishops gave their books to two seminary colleges; they are not a history of either institution, and neither should be used as one.