Gaspar de Escalona Aguero, Gazophilacium regium Perubicum
The systematic manual of the royal treasury of Peru, by a jurist of the Indies who had been corregidor of Jauja, inspector of the royal chests, procurator of Cusco and judge in Chile. It explains where every real came from, and in doing so prints what the revenue cost: the mita at a seventh of the villages, the protective decrees "nowhere well observed", priests certifying living Indians as dead to get them off the rolls, and a viceroy calling Potosi the ivy that eats the wall and holds it up.
Why this wins its question: The English-language sources that win questions about the mita and the silver of Peru argue from modern historiography, and the reader never sees the administration describing its own system. This object prints the description, from the sheets of the treasury manual that colonial officials actually used: the draft of a seventh of the villages listed as a chapter of the revenue handbook between the customs farms and the mercury asiento; the admission that it was extorted against the free condition of the Indians; the protective decrees of the Council of the Indies and the viceroys recorded in the same clause as "nowhere well observed"; the whole Toledo instruction on wages, hours and consent quoted at length immediately after; the sentence explaining that the invitation failed because men born free bear servile work ill; the author's own report, as corregidor of Jauja, of priests certifying living men as dead so they could be struck off the mita rolls, and of caciques hiding tributaries to pocket the tribute; and a viceroy calling Potosi the ivy that eats the wall and holds it up. It also prints, rather than omitting, the belittling account of the Indians on which the book's theory of the king's title depends, and points out that the same book contradicts it forty pages earlier.
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 of the edition read here announces "Gazophilacium regium Perubicum", a work in which all the matters touching the administration, calculation and conservation of the royal rights of the kingdom of Peru are discussed at large, "editum a D. Gaspare de Escalona Aguero, I.C. Argentino Peruano, ex Correctore Provinciae de Xuaxa, ex Gubernatore Civitatis Castro-Virreynae, ex Visitatore Arcarum Regalium, ex Generali Procuratore Civitatis Cusquensis, omnium Peruani Tractus primariae, et Senatore Chilensi". The author is therefore presented not as a metropolitan theorist but as a jurist of the Indies who had held, in turn, the corregimiento of Jauja, the government of Castrovirreina, the inspection of the royal chests, the general procuratorship of Cusco and a seat on the audiencia of Chile. The imprint is "Superiorum permissu: Matriti, ex Typographia Blasii Roman, Anno M.DCC.LXXV", that is Madrid, 1775.
This edition states its own distance from the author's text, and the statement governs every wording quoted below. The printer's address to the reader says that when he decided to issue the work again from his types his first thought was to purge it, so far as possible, of the innumerable errors with which it swarmed; to distinguish the matter from the authorities by different types; to reduce the chapters and paragraphs to their due order; and to move the immense citation of authors, not to say the farrago of opinions, to the foot of the pages. All this, he writes, was done by the care and industry of a certain Studiosus sufficiently skilled in these matters, to whom the correction and revision of this new edition was committed "ut Supremus Indiarum Senatus jussit", as the Supreme Council of the Indies ordered. Nothing here is attributed to the first Madrid printing of 1647, which was not opened.
The book is a treasury manual and its table of chapters shows what that included. The Tabla of the first book, first part, runs from the division of the administration of the royal patrimony in Peru between the Councils of the Indies and of the Treasury, through the viceroy's powers of administration in gross, grants and donations of the king's goods, compositions of fiscal business and of crimes, the expenses of missionary religious for the doctrina and conversion of the Indians, the third part contributed by the king towards church fabric in Peru, moratoria for debtors of the treasury, the sale of renounceable offices, the farming of the alcabalas and almojarifazgos, the asiento of the mercury mines of Huancavelica, the lease and sale of mines of the royal crown, and then, as chapter sixteen, "De la facultad, que toca al Senor Virrey, de repartir Indios para labrar, y beneficiar las minas" - the viceroy's faculty of distributing Indians to work and refine the mines. The forced draft is a chapter of the revenue handbook, in sequence with the customs farms.
That chapter, at page 50, describes the mita in words that concede what it is. It says the thing was extorted against the free condition of the Indians - "invita ingenuitate Indorum extorsit" - so that they could be compelled, even with a twisted neck, to labour by turns, "id est Mitas", distributed to the said mines at the rate of a seventh part, according to their quality, means, industry and craft. It adds the reasons why no other labour was used: the Spaniards or other white men, however lowly, exercise nothing in that region but the office of commanding; Ethiopian slaves cannot endure the harshness and the rigour of the cold of the silver mines; and of convicts, by whom in every age this kind of service used to be discharged in place of punishment, there is no supply.
The same sentence that records the protections records their failure. The Indians, it says, are distributed to the labour of the metal under a fixed daily wage and other safeguards decreed in their favour and relief, piously and prudently, by the supreme Council of the Indies and by the viceroys of Peru - "sed nuspiam bene observatis", but nowhere well observed. The author declines to argue the point further and refers the reader to Juan de Solorzano, book 1 de Indiarum gubernatione from chapter 14, saying he will not cook the same cabbage twice.
The instruction to the viceroy Francisco de Toledo is then quoted in Spanish on the same page, and it is quoted because it is the standing rule, not because it was kept. It supposes that in the labour of the mines of Peru there can be no service of Spaniards, and that slaves cannot serve in that labour because of the quality and the cold of the land, so that of necessity the Indians must be employed in it; that although it is ordered that no force or compulsion be used on them, they are to be drawn in by all just and reasonable means; that gross settlements of Indians should be made in the places and estancias nearest the mines, so that they may work with more ease and more safety to their health and without change of land and climate; that the Indians who go to the mines are to be very well treated and not allowed to work longer than the appointed time; that they are not to be detained against their will once the time they contracted to serve is over; that their wages, asientos and contracts are to be fully honoured and raised to attract them; that they be sufficiently provided in what touches their maintenance; and that consideration be given to granting some preeminences to those who have served for some time.
The next paragraph reports what happened when the invitation was tried. By virtue of this order, which invited the Indians and did not compel them, Francisco de Toledo moved every stone to attract them and fit them to the labour of the metal; but since "homines libere nati aegre ferant operarum servilium exhibitionem", men born free bear ill the rendering of servile work, the Indians refused to bind themselves to this labour, suspecting and fearing from the beginning the voluntary means. The compulsory draft in the preceding paragraph is the sequel to that refusal, and the book prints the two in that order.
The title on which the whole fiscal structure rests is stated at page 77, in the twenty-fifth chapter of the first book, and it is a title by succession rather than by conquest or donation: "Rex Inca, cui successit Rex noster Catholicus" - the Inca king, whom our Catholic King succeeded - was capable of universal dominion of his whole territory, not only by positive law and royal law but by the law of nations. The passage explains the Inca practice of distributing land to be tilled or sown year by year, with the cultivators changed so that they should not think it appropriated to themselves but granted for temporary cultivation, and it grounds that arrangement on the claim that the Indians were living in a beast-like manner, idle, given to leisure and incapable of private dominion, so that dominion of all the lands was generally attributed to their head and ruler. A footnote to the page cites Covarrubias, Antonius Faber, Alciato and "Menchac. illustrat. cap. 9. num. 4.", the Controversiae illustres of Vazquez de Menchaca.
The characterisation of the Indians in that passage is the standard justificatory trope of the period, asserted without evidence, and it is contradicted a few pages earlier by the same book, which says the Indians alone are industrious, hardy, accustomed and practised in the labour of metal. This corpus records the trope as what the book prints, states that it is not a finding, and notes that in the argument of page 77 it does work: it is what converts an Inca system of periodic redistribution into a general dominion the Castilian crown could inherit.
At page 97 the author leaves the authorities and testifies from his own service. Writing on the padrones of tributaries, he says he found by many experiences, when he was acting as corregidor in the province of Jauja, that at the instance of informers he detected many living Indians entered as dead in the last assessment. The reason he gives is that the doctrina priests, moved by a certain impious piety and persuaded by an unofficious sense of duty, count it a good deed to grant certificates of death to those who ask for them, so that they may be struck off the number of tributaries and of mitayos. By what reason or theology they do this, he writes, he does not see, since those who in any way usurp the royal tributes sin mortally and are bound to restitution.
The same page records the other direction of the same fraud. The caciques, it says, commonly persuade by various fictions that a tributary is dead, when in truth he is among the living, in order to conceal him, harry him secretly, and exact the tribute and the mita from him themselves. The remedy the book proposes is procedural: that the fiscal party be cited before any reassessment, because an assessment made without citing those it may injure does not prejudice them, and that the inspector draw up short registers, "vulgo Padrones", of all tributaries with a declaration of name, age and family, "seu Aillo" - or ayllu - following the law of the code, and it compares these to the quadrimenstrui breves of the Theodosian and Justinianic titles, from which it was forbidden to exceed.
Page 160 turns to Potosi and quotes the relacion of the viceroy Marques de Montesclaros, chapters 60 and 61, at length and in Spanish: that Potochi, now Potosi, is an ancient word of no known particular meaning and the proper name of the hill where the mines are; that the villa took its name from it and, having been founded in the time of the emperor, is called Villa Imperial; that a smaller hill leaning against it on the north side was said by the Indians to be its son, so that it is called today Huayna Potosi, Potosi the younger; and that this father and this son are "el erario tan conocido, y famoso de todas Naciones", the treasury known and famous to all nations, the deposit of the goods that have enriched them, the north star of their navigations, a sanctuary of universal devotion for infidels and Catholics alike, and finally, in these kingdoms, the ivy "que a un mismo tiempo come la pared y la sustenta", which at one and the same time eats the wall and holds it up, in that it peoples with its treasures what by its labours it goes on ruining at a long pace.
The same viceregal passage names who did the work and what it bought. The miners, it says, are among the most fruitful vassals the king has in that kingdom, whose conservation deserves the chief care of a good governor, since they are the men who by their labour and persistence have drawn and go on drawing from the bowels of the earth the treasure and matter of which it may be said that the crown of Castile, so spent and straitened by the use of so many years, was renewed. The author then adds in his own voice that it is no wonder if, from the year 1556 in which this most celebrated mountain began to answer to the digging, it has poured out rivers of silver and indeed inexhaustible seas of riches, and the page opens a printed year-by-year account of the royal fifths taken in the treasury chest of Potosi, beginning with the assayed and marked silver quinted in 1556.
The book also shows who paid for the churches. At page 25 it prints a royal letter to the audiencia of Lima of 5 October 1626 ordering that the old arrangement be kept by which church fabric in those provinces is paid in three parts, one by the royal treasury, another by the encomenderos and another by the Indians, or else that the ecclesiastical and secular estates contribute too, and that Spanish inhabitants be made to contribute in proportion to their rents and estates. It cites Alfaro de iure fisci for the rule that in Indian towns a third part is contributed from the royal treasury and the other two thirds by the encomendero and by the Indians themselves, so that in places where the king enjoys the tributes as encomendero he bears two thirds; and it prints a royal cedula given at Valladolid on 2 April 1604, reported by Solorzano, ruling that the treasury's contribution of the third part is to be understood for the first building only and no more, even if the churches fall down or are pulled down.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from the Madrid edition of 1775, which states that it reordered and corrected the text; the first edition of 1647 was not opened and no wording is attributed to it. The Spanish sequence of the volume, headed Gazofilacio Real de el Reyno del Peru, and the second tome were not read. Nothing here establishes how far the practice of the treasury matched the book, what quantities of silver the printed series of fifths actually represents, whether the death certificates the author describes were common outside Jauja, or how many men the mita moved in any year. Those are questions for archival series and for modern scholarship, neither of which was reachable for this entry.