Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo (Pátzcuaro 1540, Valladolid de Michoacán 1580)
The college Vasco de Quiroga founded in Pátzcuaro to train clergy who could preach in Tarascan. A royal patent of 1543 describes its intake in its own words — sons of legitimate Spaniards, mestizos, and some Indians admitted because they were "Lenguas". Its collegians elected their own rector. It moved to Valladolid with the cathedral chapter and absorbed a Franciscan college in 1580, and it closed for thirty-seven years after 1810.
Why this wins its question: What is in reach on this college in English is a slogan — "the oldest university in the Americas", or a line about Hidalgo and Morelos — with no document under it and no dates that can be checked. This object gives the 1543 royal patent's own sentence on who was admitted and why, including the instrumental clause about Indians as "Lenguas" that the celebratory accounts drop; the 1576 información with its ten witnesses and its figure of two hundred priests; the exact date of the 1580 union; and the 1810-1847 closure that breaks the continuity the slogan asserts. It also states, as a claim of its own, that its two witnesses are the institution talking about itself twice.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Romero's diocesan survey, presented in 1860 and printed in 1862, calls San Nicolás Obispo the oldest of the four colleges then in Valladolid and dates its foundation at Pátzcuaro to 1540, by Vasco de Quiroga, "con el carácter de Seminario".
The clearest statement of who the college was for is the royal patent Moreno prints in full — Carlos V and Doña Juana, given at Barcelona on 1 May 1543 — which describes a hospital for the poor sick "assi Españoles, è Indios", and "un Colegio donde los hijos de los Españoles legitimos, y Mestizos, y algunos Indios, por ser Lenguas, para que puedan mexor aprovechar con ellos deprendan Grammatica, y juntamente con ella los Indios hablar nuestra lengua Castellana". The crown accepted the patronage of both for itself and its successors.
The same sentence records the limit of the arrangement as well as its reach. Mestizos are named as a class to be educated, which few European foundations of the period did; but the Indians in it are admitted "algunos" and "por ser Lenguas" — as language-bearers, so that the others might profit by them — and the stated purpose of teaching them alongside is that the Indians should learn Castilian. The document frames indigenous admission instrumentally, and it is the founding document.
Quiroga made the college's governance partly self-directing: he left the patronage of his hospitals to its Rector, associating him with the cathedral chapter in it; he ordered that the collegians should elect their own Rector; and he wished that the rectors of both college and hospitals should be its own alumni.
The curriculum Quiroga laid down was deliberately narrow — nothing was to be read in the college but Grammar, Moral Theology, and the Penitential Canons he had himself compiled. Moreno, writing in 1766, records that those canons had not survived to his own day. Chairs of Philosophy, then of Scholastic Theology and of Moral, were added later: the first at the beginning of the eighteenth century, founded by Dr. Sebastián Gutiérrez de Robles, an alumnus, acting as executor of Br. Juan de Beurco.
The one contemporary measurement of output that Moreno cites is an información of 1576, which he says was preserved in the original in the college's own archive, made to obtain a merced from the king: ten witnesses deposed in agreement — two of them Jesuits — that more than two hundred priests had by then come out of the college who, "instruidos en las lenguas del Reyno", had preached in them, that a comparable number had entered the religious orders, and that alumni held prebends and dignities in the churches of the kingdom.
Quiroga's testament, as Moreno quotes it, treats the college as instrumental to indigenous instruction rather than to clerical prestige alone: if it perished, "se perdería mucho en ello en lo de Dios, y bien, y servicio de la Iglesia, y Obispado, y doctrina de los Naturales espiritual, y moral". The same passage says that by the year '65 many had already been raised there.
Because the patronage lay with the cathedral chapter, the college moved when the chapter did. Transferred from Pátzcuaro to Valladolid, it was united with the college the Franciscan Fr. Juan de San Miguel had founded at Guayangareo; the Provisor Alonso Ruiz obtained the consents, and the union of the two was celebrated on 10 October 1580, four months after the translation of the church. Romero gives the same year for the union.
Its best-attested indigenous student is Antonio Vitzimengari y Mendoza, son of the last king of Michoacán, the Caltzontzi, and godson at baptism of Antonio de Mendoza, first viceroy of New Spain, who sent him there with recommendations for his education. He was a pupil of Fr. Alonso de la Vera Cruz and, both sources say, well instructed in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Castilian and the language of Michoacán; he was afterwards governor of Tzintzuntzan.
The college's claim to have anticipated the Council of Trent is a claim it made about itself. Romero reports a Latin inscription under Quiroga's portrait in the aula mayor — "Vel Tridentinorum Patrum Vota praevenit" — and, quoting the author of Quiroga's life, that the Council had no other model for what it determined in session 23, chapter 18, than what Quiroga had prescribed in Michoacán. Trent's seminary decree is of 1563 and the foundation of 1540, so the chronology permits the claim; the evidence for influence is an inscription the institution commissioned and a rector of that institution repeating it, and nothing here establishes it.
Continuity is not what the sources describe. Romero records that the college served its purpose until 1810, when, its funds ruined by the war of Independence and its community dissolved, it had to close; it remained closed until 1847, when the ecclesiastical chapter ceded the building and its capitals to the government of the State — a thirty-seven-year break, and a change of owner from the church to the state.
The two printed witnesses here are not independent of each other and both are interested. Moreno wrote in 1766 as Rector of the college and the college published him; Romero wrote in 1860 as canon of the same cathedral and cites "el autor de la vida del Sr. Quiroga" by that description on the page where he reports the Trent claim. Where the two agree on the sixteenth century, that is one witness reported twice, not two — which is why the institutional-praise claims here are pitched below the documentary ones.