The tithe law of the Indies (Recopilación, libro I, título 16)
The tithe of the Indies belonged to the crown by papal grant. The título extends a Castilian tariff of 1501 to America and amends it crop by crop — rice, cacao — abolishes personal and double tithes, strips the military orders of their exemption, taxes the king's own farms, forbids making Indians carry the tithe on their backs, and gives three ninths of half the yield to the cathedral fabric and the hospital. Gold and silver are exempt.
Why this wins its question: The tithe in Spanish America is normally handled in a clause — "the Church took a tenth" — or reduced to the novenos reales in a fiscal table, and the text is almost never quoted. This object gives the whole título from a digitised printing read page by page: the papal grant that made the tenth a royal revenue with an earmark for the churches; the 1501 Granada tariff extended to America and then amended by inserting rice and, on a line of its own, cacao; the abolition of personal tithes and of double tithes; the exemption of fishing, hunting and the chase; the king tithing his own estates and the knights of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcántara losing theirs; the order that Indians not be made to carry the tithe on their backs even willingly, with the crown's stated reason; the seventy-year holding order that never settled whether Indians owed the tithe at all; the three ninths assigned to the cathedral fabric and the hospital, which is where a real part of colonial hospital income came from; and the one line exempting gold, silver, pearls and metals, which is the clause that decides how generous the rest of it looks.
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 título opens at page 143 of the first tome of the 1791 printing, headed "TÍTULO DIEZ Y SEIS. DE LOS DIEZMOS". Ley j, margined "El Emperador D. Cárlos en Pamplona á 22 de Octubre de 1523. D. Felipe II en Madrid á 16 de Junio de 1572", states the constitutional fact the rest of the título rests on: "Por quanto pertenecen á Nos los Diezmos Eclesiásticos de las Indias por concesiones Apostólicas de los Sumos Pontífices", the officials of the royal treasury of those provinces are to have all the tithes collected — and from them the churches are to be provided with persons of good life and fit to serve them, and with all ornaments and things necessary for divine worship, "de forma que estén muy bien servidas y proveidas". The Church's tenth in America is a royal revenue with an earmark.
Ley ij is not a law of the Indies at all but a Castilian tariff carried across: "Arancel de los Diezmos y Primicias", margined "Don Fernando y Doña Isabel en Granada á 5 de Octubre de 1501", ordering that in all "our Indies, Islands and Tierra firme del Mar Océano" tithes and first fruits be paid on the fruits and in the form following. Whoever harvests "trigo, ó cebada, ó centeno, ó mijo, ó maiz, ó panizo, ó escanda, ó avena, ó garbanzos, ó lentejas, ó garrobas, ó yerbas, ó qualquiera otro pan, ó legumbres, ó semillas" pays one measure in ten, and pays it whole, "sin sacar primero la simiente, ni la renta, ni otro gasto alguno" — no deduction for seed, rent or any cost. What can be established from this printing is that the text as compiled in 1680 and reprinted in 1791 contains maize inside a tariff dated 1501; whether that word stood in the Granada original cannot be settled from the sheets read here, and no claim is made that it did.
The tariff was then amended for an American economy, and the amendments are visible as insertions in the list. Page 144: "Otrosí se pague Diezmo del arroz, despues de puesto en su perfeccion, y vaya por él el que lo ha de haber en casa del que lo debe." Then, on a line of its own, four words: "Páguese Diezmo del cacao." Around them stands the unaltered Castilian countryside — lambs, kids, piglets, chickens, geese, ducklings and pigeons; sheep that pasture from one parish to another, with the lambs divided between the parish of the owner and the parish of the grazing, and the whole tithe going to the parish where the flock has stood a year; milk, butter, cheese and wool; calves, colts, mules and donkeys tithed at branding; the fruit of any trees "aunque se coma en casa del que lo cogiere, excepto de las piñas y bellotas, de que no se ha de pagar Diezmo"; grapes; olives at ten measures one and at the mill of five a half; garden produce; honey, wax and swarms; and silk "de diez capullos uno, segun y como se paga en el Arzobispado de Granada". A Mediterranean tithe schedule with rice and cacao written into it.
Four laws on page 148 define what the tithe does not reach, and they are not small. Ley xviij: "No se pague Diezmo de la pesquería, montería y caza, porque no se debe Diezmo de las dichas cosas." Ley xviiij abolishes rediezmos — on the rents of ingenios and other heredamientos on which the tithe has once been paid by the people who work them, nothing further is to be asked or taken, "habiéndose diezmado una vez enteramente". Ley xx, margined 1530 and Talavera 22 June 1541, declares that personal tithes are not owed and are not to be paid in the Indies, "como no se llevan, ni pagan en el Arzobispado de Sevilla", and charges the prelates that if they have provided anything to the contrary or issued censures, they revoke them, "porque de lo contrario nos tendrémos por deservido". The crown is instructing bishops to withdraw their own censures.
Two laws on the same page define who cannot escape it, and they cut upwards. Ley xvj, margined "El Emperador D. Cárlos y el Almirante y Condestable Gobernadores en Victoria á 25 de Julio de 1522. Y el mismo Emperador en Valladolid á 4 de Julio de 1523", declares it the royal will that of all the estates and grangerías "que en las Indias tenemos, y por tiempo tuviéremos", the officials pay the tithe "segun y de la forma que lo pagan los demas vecinos" — the king tithes his own farms on the same terms as his neighbours. Ley xvij orders that no knight of Santiago, Calatrava or Alcántara resident in the Indies be exempt from the ecclesiastical tithes owed on all his estates, whether already acquired or acquired hereafter, but pay "en la misma forma que los debieran dar y pagar, si no fueran Caballeros de las Órdenes, sin poner en ello excusa, ni impedimento alguno", with viceroys, presidents, oidores and justices told to provide for its execution. A privilege of the peninsular military orders is written out of American law.
The Indians appear in three consecutive laws on page 147, and what they show is a question the crown kept open rather than a settled exemption. The end of ley xj forbids prelates to press Indians into carrying on their backs the tithes belonging to them, "aunque digan que lo quieren hacer de su voluntad", or to have any other vecino do it, and gives the reason: "porque deseamos relevar á los Indios del trabajo." Ley xij puts the burden on the encomendero rather than on the tributary: Spaniards holding Indians in encomienda are to tithe on everything they receive of the tribute on which tithe is due, "de todo el maiz, cacao, axí y algodon", with cotton in mantas valued as cotton before it was worked, and with the rule that of no species is the tithe paid more than once. Ley xiij, on the tithes the Indians themselves owe — "de quales cosas, en que cantidad, sobre que hay variedad en algunas Provincias de nuestras Indias" — orders that "no se haga novedad por ahora", that each province keep its custom, and that where a change seems fitting the Real Audiencia and the diocesan prelate inform the Council of the Indies so the crown may provide "lo que mas convenga al servicio de Dios nuestro Señor y bien de los Indios". Its margin runs from Monzón 1533 through 1543, 1544, 1555, 1557, 1568, 1588, 1589, 1602, 1603 and 1605 to "D. Felipe IIII en esta Recopilacion": the same holding order re-issued for more than seventy years, which is what a contested question looks like in a compilation.
Where the money went is set out in ley xxiij, margined "El Emperador D. Cárlos, y el Cardenal Gobernador en Talavera á 3 de Febrero de 1541. Y D. Felipe IIII en esta Recopilacion", on page 149. Of the tithes of each cathedral church two of four parts are drawn for the prelate and the cabildo as each erection provides; of the other two, nine parts are made; "las dos novenas de ellas sean para Nos" — the novenos reales — "y de las otras siete, las tres sean para la fábrica de la Iglesia Catedral y Hospital, y las otras quatro novenas partes, pagado el salario de los Curas" go to the cabildo's mayordomo. Three ninths of half the tithe of every cathedral church in the Indies were assigned jointly to the fabric of the cathedral and to the hospital. The preceding law, ley xxij (Talavera, 6 July 1540), works the other way: where the bishop's quarter falls short, the officials of the royal treasury make it up to the five hundred thousand maravedís the crown has ordered be given to bishops whose tithes do not reach that sum.
The exemption that matters most is one line long. Ley xiiij, margined "El Emperador D. Cárlos en Toledo á 27 de Febrero de 1534", orders Spaniards to pay the predial tithes to those entitled by the erections of the churches, "excepto del oro, plata, perlas, piedras, metales y otras cosas reservadas en las Bulas Apostólicas". The richest export sector in the Indies is written out of the tenth while the man who harvests maize pays one measure in ten with no deduction for seed or rent. Any reading of this título as a welfare instrument has to carry that clause, and this object states it as its own claim rather than in a footnote.
What the source is and is not. This is law as compiled in 1680 and reprinted by the Viuda de Ibarra in 1791 for the Council of the Indies: it records what was ordered, by whom and on what date, and nothing about what was collected, from whom, or with what compliance. Two features of the text argue against reading it as a description of practice. Ley xx has to tell prelates to revoke censures they had already issued for a levy the crown says is not owed, and ley xiij has to be re-dated across seventy years without resolving the question it defers — both are the marks of orders that were not being kept. No figure for tithe revenue, no hospital's accounts and no case of enforcement is established here, and none is claimed.