Colegios de caciques — the schools founded in Peru for the sons of Andean lords
Schools founded by royal order for the sons of Andean caciques, because, the law says, those boys "han de gobernar á los Indios". Read from the printed law that ordered more of them and from the relación of the viceroy who founded the Lima one: he leaves it in the same sentence as a house of confinement for native religious specialists, in the charge of the same Jesuits who ran the visitations of idolatry, and paid for out of the censos of the Indians' own communities.
Why this wins its question: In English the colegios de caciques are usually a half-sentence — "the Spanish also educated the sons of native lords" — with no text under it. This entry puts the two documents side by side: the printed law with its rubric, its full text and the six margin authorities that reissued it between 1535 and 1620, and the founding viceroy's own relación, which supplies the three things a summary always drops — that the money came from the censos of the Indian communities themselves, that the Lima seminary was founded in the same sentence as a house of confinement for Andean religious specialists, and that the order running the school also ran the visitations of idolatry. It also states plainly what neither document shows: how the schools actually worked.
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 standing law is ley xj of título XXIII of the first book of the Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, rubricked "Que sean favorecidos los Colegios fundados para criar hijos de Caciques, y se funden otros en las Ciudades principales". Its text opens by stating both the reason and the fact: "Para que los hijos de Caciques, que han de gobernar á los Indios, sean desde niños instruidos en nuestra Santa Fe Católica, se fundáron por nuestro órden algunos Colegios en las Provincias del Perú, dotados con renta, que para este efecto se consignó."
The same law orders the viceroys to hold those colleges "por muy encomendados" and to procure their conservation and increase, and to found others in the principal cities of Peru and New Spain, "donde sean llevados los hijos de Caciques de pequeña edad, y encargados á personas Religiosas y diligentes, que los enseñen, y doctrinen en Christiandad, buenas costumbres, policía y lengua Castellana, y se les consigne renta competente á su crianza y educacion". The curriculum named in the law is therefore religion, conduct, civic order and Castilian — not the Andean languages the same crown was paying university chairs to teach its priests.
The margin of the law stacks six authorities over eighty-five years: the Emperor and the Empress Governor at Madrid, 8 December 1535; the Cardinal Governor there, 19 June 1540; the Princess Governor at Valladolid, 27 April 1554; Felipe II at San Lorenzo, 22 July 1579, and the Instrucción de Vireyes of that year, cap. 59; and Felipe III at Madrid, 17 March 1619 and 20 March 1620. A rule reissued that often is evidence of intent repeated, and also of a policy that kept needing to be ordered again.
The viceroy who executed the last two of those orders reports the foundation himself. Francisco de Borja y Aragón, príncipe de Esquilache, governing Peru from 1615 to 1621, tells his successor in his relación de gobierno that he leaves founded at Santiago del Cercado, the Indian parish of Lima, "un Seminario para hijos de Caciques de este Arzobispado, á cargo de los Padres de la Compañia de Jesus" — the school later known as the Colegio del Príncipe — and that two more seminaries were being founded by his order, one at Cuzco and one at Chuquisaca, with ordinances made for all of them.
Who paid is stated in the same sentence: the maintenance of all of them was assigned "de lo procedido de los censos de sus comunidades" — the income of the Indian communities' own censo capital — and the viceroy adds that His Majesty had declared this assignment not only a lawful means but one that could not be spent on any ministry of such utility. The schooling of the native nobility was funded from indigenous community money, not from the royal treasury.
The counterpoint is not an outside objection; it is in the founder's own sentence. Esquilache reports leaving at the Cercado, together with the seminary, "una Casa de Reclusion para los Dogmatizadores y Ministros de sus idolatrías y errores, y á vueltas de estos se traen tambien algunos hechiceros" — a house of confinement for Andean religious specialists. The two foundations are announced in one breath, and the same Jesuits were charged with the seminaries "juntamente con la visita de las idolatrías, en compañía de los Visitadores Eclesiásticos".
He urges his successor to continue the coercive half with the same words he uses for the school. He had charged the prelates to send continuous visitadores for idolatries, calls this "el único remedio de este mal", asks that the culpable be shut up in convents of religious for as long as their guilt deserved, and says he founded no Casas de Reclusión at Cuzco and Chuquisaca only because those treasuries lacked substance. On the next page he recommends the Compañía to his successor as of the greatest use "así para la extirpacion de las Idolatrías, como para la enseñanza de los Indios".
The dates of the two sources converge. Felipe III's orders of 17 March 1619 and 20 March 1620, carried in the margin of the law, fall inside Esquilache's government, and the law's past tense — colleges "se fundáron por nuestro órden" in the provinces of Peru — reads as the compilers' summary of foundations of exactly this kind. That the two documents describe the same programme is an inference from their dates and wording, not a statement either of them makes, and is carried here at that strength.
The same título shows the range of what the crown had taken under its patronage in the Indies, which is the context these cacique schools belong to: ley xij declares the Colegio de Españoles, Mestizos é Indios founded for the study of grammar, and the hospital for the sick poor, of the city of Michoacán to belong to the Royal Patronage, accepting the cession its founder made; and ley xiiij orders the viceroys of New Spain to keep the ordinances given in 1557 to the college of Mexico City "donde se recogen muchos niños pobres Mestizos", to report on its state, and to gather in all the mestizo children there were.
What this object cannot show. Both witnesses are interested parties: a royal code printing the rule as it wished it observed, and the outgoing viceroy reporting his own works to his successor. No register of pupils, no account by a colegial, and no later report on whether the three seminaries survived or how many boys passed through them was reachable for this entry, and neither source says whether attendance was voluntary. A reader should treat the foundations as documented and their working as unexamined here.