The Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo of Michoacán (Pátzcuaro, 1540)
A college founded by Vasco de Quiroga at Pátzcuaro about 1540 and taken under royal patronage in 1543, whose charter describes Spaniards, mestizos and some Indians studying grammar together — the last admitted, in the Crown's own words, "por ser Lenguas" and so that they should learn Castilian. Its collegians elected their rector. Its celebrated priority over Trent is its own claim, and its continuity was broken for a generation after 1810.
Why this wins its question: The college is normally met in one of two forms: a Mexican civic boast ("the oldest university in the Americas still in operation") or a devotional one ("Quiroga's seminary, which Trent copied"). Both are repeated without a document. This object puts the 1543 royal patent on the page instead, and that charter says something neither version mentions — that Spaniards, mestizos and some Indians studied grammar in the same college, and that the Crown's stated reason for admitting the Indians was that they served as "Lenguas" and would learn Castilian. Then it does the two subtractions the boasts require: the Trent priority is shown to rest on the college's own portrait inscription and on its own historian, and the unbroken-continuity claim is contradicted from the diocesan survey of 1862, which says the house was closed from 1810 until the chapter handed it to the State in 1847.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
A royal patent given at Barcelona on 1 May 1543 in the names of Charles V and Doña Juana recites that Vasco de Quiroga, bishop of the province of Michoacán, "aveis comenzado en la Ciudad de Michoacàn un Hospital, para que se acoxan los Pobres enfermos, assi Españoles, è Indios, y un Colegio", and accepts, at Quiroga's own petition, the patronage of both for the Crown and for the kings who should succeed it.
The same patent describes who was to study in the college, and why. It is for "los hijos de los Españoles legitimos, y Mestizos, y algunos Indios, por ser Lenguas, para que puedan mejor aprovechar con ellos deprendan Grammatica, y juntamente con ella los Indios hablar nuestra lengua Castellana, cosa mui util, y necessaria". A 1543 charter therefore has Spaniards, mestizos and indigenous students in one house — and states an instrumental motive for the last group: they are there as interpreters, so that the others profit, and so that they themselves learn Castilian.
The reason the Crown gives for accepting the patronage is protective and practical: standing in the king's name, hospital and college "serán mas mirados, y favorecidos, y los pobres Estudiantes mas bien aprovechados", and the Crown reserves to itself and its successors the power to provide what is fitting for the good of the hospital and of the poor of the said college.
Quiroga tied the college to his hospitals and gave it an elective head. The 1766 life reports that he left the patronage of the hospitals to the college's Rector, associating him in it with the cathedral chapter; that he ordered the collegians themselves to elect their Rector; and that he wished the rectors both of the college and of the hospitals to be its own alumni.
When the cathedral moved from Pátzcuaro to Valladolid the college followed, and absorbed the Franciscan college already standing there. The union of the Colegio de San Miguel of Valladolid with that of San Nicolás Obispo of Pátzcuaro was celebrated "en 10 de Octubre de 1580 años, quatro meses despues de la translacion de la Iglesia", after the consent of the Franciscan provincial Fr. Juan de Cerpa and of bishop Fr. Juan de Medina Rincón and a petition laid before the city council. The diocesan survey of 1862 gives the same year and names the provisor Alonso Ruiz as the man who made the union.
The 1862 diocesan survey calls San Nicolás Obispo the oldest of the four colleges of the episcopal capital and dates it "fundado en Pátzcuaro el año de 1540 por el Sr. Quiroga, con el carácter de Seminario". The 1543 patent is the earlier of the two documents read here and puts the foundation before that date without fixing it; 1540 rests on the diocesan historian, not on a charter.
The college's famous claim to have anticipated the Council of Trent is a claim made by the college and by its diocesan historian, and should be reported as such. Romero quotes "el autor de la vida del Sr. Quiroga" for the proposition that the Council "no tuvo otro modelo para lo que determinó en el cap. 18 ses. 23, que lo que en Michoacan habia prescrito su prelado", and records that the portrait of Quiroga in the college's great hall carried the verses "Vel Tridentinorum Patrum / Vota prævenit. / Nempe, ante Hic Collegium extruxit, / Quam juvérent illi". Both witnesses are interested; no conciliar record is cited by either; and a foundation earlier than 1563 establishes precedence in time, not influence.
One named indigenous student is recorded. Antonio Vitzimengari y Mendoza — Huitziméngari — son of the last king of Michoacán and baptismal godson of viceroy Mendoza, who had him educated in this house by Fr. Alonso de la Veracruz, was "muy instruido en los idiomas Hebreo, Griego, Latino, Castellano y Tarasco" and afterwards governor of Tzintzuntzan. His portrait was kept in the college until shortly before 1862.
The continuity usually asserted for this college is not what its warmest nineteenth-century advocate describes. Romero writes that from 1580 the united establishment served its purpose until 1810, when, "arruinados sus fondos por la guerra de Independencia, y disuelta la comunidad", it had to close, and that it stayed shut until 1847, when the ecclesiastical chapter ceded the building and its capitals to the government of the State. Confidence is held below 0.8 because the same page runs a parallel account of the later Colegio Seminario of 1770, and the two threads are adjacent in the text.
Its alumni are the reason the house is remembered in Mexican national history rather than in church history: Romero lists among "los hijos de esta casa" the bishops Ángel Mariano Morales, Clemente de Jesús Munguía and Pelagio Antonio Labastida, "el libertador de México D. Agustin de Iturbide", general Mariano Michelena, and the naturalist Juan Martínez de Lejarza.