The third Mexican provincial council (Mexico, 1585) and its printed decrees
The church legislation that governed New Spain for two and a half centuries. Held at Mexico in 1585, confirmed at Rome in 1589, printed in 1622 and again in 1770, it ordered a school in every Indian town, catechism in the Indians' own language, and the protection of Indians by bishops and governors alike - and it records, in its own decrees, the abuses that made each order necessary.
Why this wins its question: The third Mexican council is usually met as a date in a list of church councils, or through the single fact that it stayed in force until the nineteenth century. What it actually legislated is not summarised anywhere in English at claim level, and the interesting part is that the protective decrees and the evidence of abuse are the same sentences. This object quotes the pages: doctrine in the Indians' own mother tongue while Spaniards, Africans and Chichimecs get Castilian; a school in every Indian town, with the warning in the next clause that priests use the school as a pretext to take unpaid labour and must restore the just wage; men held in iron chains in the mines, recorded by the council itself; bishops and royal governors ordered to see that the Indians are held not slaves but free; confessors told to refuse absolution to Spaniards who will not make restitution; every fine in the book disapplied to Indians for poverty; two horses and no hunting dogs for a parish priest, lest he be burdensome to the town. And beside them, the reasoning the council gave - that the Indians are timid, faint-hearted, and useful to the Spaniards - which is the honest counterpoint and comes from the same page rather than from a critic.
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 title page states the document's whole career in six lines: CONCILIUM MEXICANUM PROVINCIALE III, celebratum Mexici anno MDLXXXV, under the presidency of Pedro Moya de Contreras, archbishop of that city; confirmed at Rome on 27 October 1589; afterwards published at Mexico by royal order in 1622 at the expense of Archbishop Juan Perez de la Serna; and finally committed to the press at the care and expense of Archbishop Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana, Mexico 1770, from the press of Jose Antonio de Hogal. A council of 1585 was still worth reprinting for working use in 1770.
The council set the language of religious instruction by population, and the Indians are the exception it makes deliberately. Christian doctrine is to be delivered to Spaniards, to enslaved Africans, to those born of one African parent and to Chichimecs "lingua Hispanica" - in the Spanish language - and to the Indians "propria sua materna", in their own mother tongue. The rule stands at the head of the book, in the first title of the first of its five parts.
It ordered a school in every Indian settlement. Under the rubric "Parochi Scholarum erectionem promoveant", curates of Indians, secular and regular alike, are to procure with all diligence that in the towns, villages or hamlets where they reside schools be established where Indian boys may learn to read and write, receive the documents of Christian doctrine, and be taught the Spanish language as well - "Id enim maxime conveniens est ad Christianam, ac civilem eorum institutionem", most fitting, the decree says, to their Christian and their civil formation. The preceding section binds schoolmasters to have the boys recite the articles of faith aloud daily, on pain of a two-pound fine divided between the hospital, the church fabric and the informer.
The same decree prints the abuse it expects. Curates are warned not to misuse the pretext of erecting these schools to take Indian labour for carrying wood and for their own other purposes; if they do, they are to be punished by the prelate and compelled "ad restituendam Indis justam laborum suorum mercedem" - to restore to the Indians the just wage of their labours. The council legislates the school and the theft of labour under the school's name in a single paragraph.
What the council says about the mines is the least quoted thing in it, and it is said in the council's own voice rather than a critic's. There are many places in this province, the decree reads, in which very many slaves bound with iron chains, and very many Indians, are held shut up in the mines and in the ergastula, deprived of the doctrine necessary to salvation - "non sine magno conscientiae eorum, qui eos sic constrictos tenent, detrimento". It orders bishops to bring these people spiritual help and commands the owners of the mines and workhouses not to deprive of spiritual good those whom they hold "ad temporalem tantum utilitatem", for temporal profit alone.
The general protective clause is a command to the civil power as much as to the church. Under the heading "Indos Episcopi, & Laici Gubernatores protegant", the council declares that bishops and governors should reckon nothing more committed to their care by God than to protect and defend the Indians newly born into the faith; grieves "vehementer" that piety and humanity are absent in those who ought to have most of it; and exhorts the governors and royal magistrates to repress the insolence of their own ministers and of all by whom the Indians are burdened, "ut ab his Indi non servi, sed liberi existimentur" - so that by these men the Indians may be held not slaves but free. The vexations, injuries and violences are described as daily and as coming from every kind of person.
It attached a sanction that bore on Spaniards where it hurt. Governors and magistrates are to consult learned men about the restitution and satisfaction owed in the forum of conscience for the damages so far inflicted on the Indians, and confessors are not to absolve those found contumacious and unwilling to make satisfaction. On all of it the council states that it burdens consciences and threatens transgressors with the wrath of Almighty God on the day of judgement. Denial of absolution was the enforcement mechanism a church court actually possessed.
Its own penal tariff was written not to apply to Indians. The title on penalties opens with the rubric that Indians are not to be punished with fines or pecuniary penalties except by leave of the bishop, and reasons that penalties are framed to coerce faults and so must be fitted to the persons the laws speak of; therefore, following what the royal majesty had established, no pecuniary penalty is to be imposed on Indians for any offence whatever, and Indians are not to be understood as included in the money penalties contained in these decrees. Every fine in the book - and the book is full of them - is thereby disapplied to the population it spends most of its pages on.
The parish rules are small, concrete and aimed at the cost a priest imposes on the town that feeds him. He may sell nothing to his own parishioners, in person or through another, for church ornament or divine worship, on pain of forfeiting what he sold. He may keep two horses and no more, expressly "ne, si plures habuerint, Indis onerosi sint" - lest, having more, he be burdensome to the Indians and troublesome by the cost of feeding them - unless the bishop allows otherwise for the region. He may not keep hunting dogs, nor turn a journey between towns into a hunt. He may not lodge vagabonds, gamblers or men of suspect repute, "hi enim Indis perniciosi sunt", though ordinary hospitality to travellers is not forbidden where it costs the Indians nothing.
One clause reaches the children of the enslaved. Where a cleric is found to have lived incontinently with his own female slave, the synod declares him ipso facto to have lost ownership of her, orders the bishop to apply her price to pious works, has the cleric punished by the rigour of the law, and adds that if he has fathered children by her, "ipso facto ab omni servitute liberi sint" - by that very fact they are free of all servitude. The freedom is a by-product of a disciplinary rule about priests rather than a statement about slavery, and it is worth reading as both.
The counterpoint is in the wording of the protections themselves, and it is not incidental. The reason the council gives for ordering priests to deal gently is that "Indi timidi sunt, & pusillanimes" - the Indians are timid and faint-hearted; the reason it gives for exempting them from fines is their poverty and their pusillanimity; the reason it gives for expecting Spaniards to defend them is their innate mildness, submissiveness and assiduous labour, "quibus Hispanorum utilitati deserviunt", by which they serve the Spaniards' advantage. This is protection argued from incapacity and from usefulness, by an institution that was itself part of the colonial order, and the protections it grants are inseparable from that framing.
The limits of this document as evidence should be stated plainly. It is legislation, and legislation records what was commanded, not what happened; the council's own admissions - that priests took Indian labour under the cover of schools, that men were held chained in mines, that injuries were inflicted daily by every kind of person - are the only evidence inside it of the gap between the decrees and the country. The volume read here is also the 1770 Mexico printing made by Archbishop Lorenzana, not the manuscript acts of 1585 nor the 1622 first edition, so it is a witness to the text as the eighteenth-century church published and used it.