Livestock of Castile in Peru: the dates, the prices and who was kept off the horse
The animal chapters of libro nono of the Comentarios Reales carry something no later account reproduces: a running price series for Old World livestock in Peru between 1544 and 1590, taken down by a witness who was in Cuzco. Cattle fall from 120 ducats a head to six or seven. A donkey worth six ducats in Spain fetches 480 at Huamanga. And the same chapters record that no Indian rode, and what the Indians said when they first saw a plough.
Why this wins its question: The livestock half of the Columbian exchange is usually told as a one-line outcome - the animals arrived, they multiplied, herds went feral. The numbers that would make it an economic history exist, and they sit in five folios of a book of 1609 that almost nothing in English quotes for them. This object extracts the series with its dates and its coinage conversions: cows at two hundred pesos, then ten for a thousand pesos in 1554, then seventeen pesos in 1559, then six or seven ducats after 1590; a donkey worth six ducats in Spain bought for four hundred and eighty at Huamanga; seven thousand pesos for seven camels; a sow and a hog for sixteen hundred pesos on Cieza's authority. It keeps the author's own explanation of those prices, which is homesickness rather than scarcity. And it keeps three things a triumphal telling would drop: that no Indian rode and none would learn to shoe a horse, what the onlookers at Cuzco said the plough was for, and the hamstringing of feral herds for hides printed three sentences from the author's description of the whole traffic as a favour repaid. Every figure is bound to the folio it stands on, and the claim that closes the object says what none of them was checked against.
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 stock is given a region, not just a country. Folio 323 says that the Spaniards brought mares and horses with them and by means of them made the conquests of the New World, and that the race of horses in every kingdom and province of the Indies discovered and won from 1492 to the time of writing "es de la Raca de las Yeguas, y Cavallos de Espana, particularmente del Andalucia"; the first were taken to Cuba and Santo Domingo and then to the other Windward Islands as these were discovered, and bred there in great abundance. That is a documentary claim of Andalusian origin made in 1609, and it sits beside the mitochondrial genome recovered from a sixteenth-century horse tooth at Puerto Real in Haiti, which reads as Iberian: two independent kinds of evidence pointing the same way.
Who was kept off the horse is stated as fact of custom, not of law, and it is stated by a man who grew up among the horsemen. On folio 325 Garcilaso describes the terror of Indians in the streets of Cuzco when a horse came running, and then writes that no Indian has dared to be a farrier: in the other trades learned from Spaniards there are very great craftsmen, but "no han querido ensenarse a herrar, por no tratar los Cavallos de tan cerca". Many Indians raised in Spanish households groomed and doctored horses, "mas no osavan subir en ellos: digo verdad, que Yo no vi Indio alguno a cavallo", and they did not dare lead one by the rein unless it was as tame as a mule. He adds that at the beginning of the conquests throughout the New World the Indians held that the horse and its rider were all one piece, "como los Centauros de los Poetas", and that by his time a few Indians did dare shoe horses, "mas que son mui pocos". The bar is reported as fear and reluctance; whether it was also enforced is not something this page can settle, and no ordinance was read here.
The first plough in the valley of Cuzco is dated and its oxen are named. Folio 325: the first oxen the author saw ploughing were in the valley of Cuzco about 1550, and they belonged to a gentleman called Juan Rodriguez de Villalobos, a native of Caceres; they were no more than three yokes, and one pair of the oxen was called Chaparro, another Naranjo, another Castillo. The ploughmen were Indians; the beasts had been broken in at a cortijo outside the city and brought in when they were trained. Folio 326 adds that the land they were ploughing was a fine Inca terrace above another, where the Franciscan convent afterwards stood, and that "creo, que los mas solennes Triunfos de la Grandeca de Roma, no fueron mas mirados, que los Bueies aquel Dia".
What the onlookers said about it is preserved, and it is not admiration. An army of Indians came from every quarter to see the oxen, folio 325 says, "atonitos, y asombrados de una cosa tan monstruosa, y nueva para ellos, y para mi", and their verdict was that the Spaniards, out of idleness and to avoid work, were forcing those great animals to do what they themselves ought to be doing - "Decian, que los Espanoles, de haraganes, por no trabajar, forcavan a aquellos grandes Animales, a que hiciesen lo que ellos avian de hacer". Garcilaso remembers the day well because the festival of the oxen cost him two dozen lashes, half from his father for missing school and half from the schoolmaster for leaving it.
The cattle series is the most valuable thing in these chapters, because it is dated at four points by a man who saw three of them. Folio 326: when cows first began to be sold they were worth two hundred pesos, and the price fell little by little as they multiplied and then fell abruptly. At the beginning of 1554 Rodrigo de Esquivel, a vecino of Cuzco and a native of Seville whom the author knew, bought ten cows at Lima for a thousand pesos, "que son mil y docientos Ducados" - a hundred and twenty ducats a head. In 1559 Garcilaso saw cows bought at Cuzco at seventeen pesos, "que son veinte Ducados y medio, antes menos, que mas". And from 1590 onward, he says, they write to him from Peru that cows are worth six or seven ducats at Cuzco bought one or two at a time, and less bought in bulk. The last figure is correspondence rather than sight, and the claim says so.
The scale of the hide trade is given with its authority named. Cattle went feral in the Windward Islands, folio 326 says, and multiplied so far that it would be incredible if the hides brought to Spain every year did not prove it: on the authority of "el P. M. Acosta dice, Lib. 4. Cap. 33", the fleet of 1587 brought thirty-five thousand four hundred and forty-four hides from Santo Domingo and sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty cattle hides from New Spain that same year, "que por todos son Noventa y nueve mil y setecientos y noventa y quatro". The arithmetic in the printed page is correct. This corpus has Acosta's Historia natural registered but did not open book IV chapter 33 to check the figures at their source, so the claim is that Garcilaso reported them, not that they are confirmed.
How the feral cattle were killed is set down in technical detail, and it is not husbandry. Riders waited for the beasts to come out to the savannahs to graze and ran them down on horseback with lances that carried, in place of a point, half-moon blades "que llaman Desjarretaderas, tienen el filo adentro", with which they cut the hock as they came up; the rider had to strike on the side the beast was carried, or his own horse would be caught on the horns. Men so skilled at it, the page says, brought down twenty, thirty or forty head in a single run the length of two harquebus shots. So much beef was wasted in those islands that provisions might have been carried from them for the armadas of Spain, and Garcilaso says he fears salt beef cannot be made there for the damp and heat that cause it to spoil.
Beside that, the same page prints the author's own framing of the transaction, and this corpus quotes it rather than smoothing it: the islands, in the particular of the cattle, "parece que reconoscen el Beneficio que Espana les hico en embiarselas, y que en trueque, y cambio le sirven con la corambre, que cada Ano le embian en tanta abundancia". A hundred thousand hides a year are being described as a courtesy returned for a favour, three sentences after an account of hamstringing herds at a gallop and leaving the meat. The evidence for the cost and the language that hides it are on one leaf, and both belong in the record.
The smaller animals carry the same shape of price. Folios 326 and 327: camels were taken by Juan de Reinaga, a nobleman of Bilbao, and for six females and a male Don Pedro Portocarrero of Trujillo gave seven thousand pesos, "que son ocho mil y quatrocientos Ducados"; the camels "han multiplicado poco, o nada". The first donkey Garcilaso saw, in the jurisdiction of Cuzco in 1557, was bought at Huamanga for four hundred and eighty ducats of three hundred and seventy-five maravedis, and his father ordered the purchase to breed mules from his mares - "En Espana no valia seis Ducados, porque era chiquillo, y ruinejo". Another was bought afterwards by Gaspar de Sotelo, a nobleman of Zamora, for eight hundred and forty ducats. Goats sold at Cuzco in 1544 and 1545 at a hundred and a hundred and ten ducats, and few were sold even then, only by great friendship and entreaty, so that ten or twelve men would club together for a little flock; afterwards they multiplied so far that no account was made of them except for the hides.
For pigs the source cites another chronicler by book and chapter, which is worth noting because it shows a colonial author checking his prices against a printed one. Folio 327 reports that Pedro de Cieza de Leon, a native of Seville, in the demarcation he makes of the provinces of Peru, chapter twenty-six, says that Marshal Don Jorge Robledo bought out of the goods of Cristobal de Ayala, whom the Indians had killed, a sow and a hog for sixteen hundred pesos, "que son mil y novecientos y veinte Ducados"; that the same sow was eaten a few days later at a banquet in the city of Cali at which Cieza was present; and that piglets were bought in the mothers' bellies at a hundred pesos apiece and more. Cieza's Cronica of 1553 is registered in this corpus, but the chapter Garcilaso cites was not opened here, so this claim reports a citation rather than verifying it.
The author's own explanation of the prices is not scarcity but homesickness, and he says it in as many words. Whoever wants to see excessive prices should read that chapter of Cieza, folio 327 says, "y vera en quan poco tenian entonces el Oro, y la Plata por las cosas de Espana. Estos excesos, y otros semejantes han hecho los Espanoles con el Amor de su Patria en el Nuevo Mundo, en sus principios, que como fuesen cosas llevadas de Espana, no paravan en el precio, para las comprar, y criar, que les parescia, que no podian vivir sin ellas."
One line in the sheep chapter is a lexical complaint rather than an agricultural note, and it matters for how the sources read. Cap. XX opens: "Las Ovejas de Castilla, que las llamamos asi, a diferencia de las del Peru, pues los Espanoles con tanta impropriedad las quisieron llamar Ovejas, no asemejandoles en cosa alguna" - the llama had been named sheep by Spaniards who saw no resemblance in it, and the imported animal now needed a qualifier to be told from the misnamed native one. Of the real sheep Garcilaso professes ignorance where he has it: he does not know when the first passed, nor what they cost, nor who took them, and the first he saw were in the district of Cuzco in 1556, sold in bulk at forty pesos a head and the picked ones at fifty.
The transfer had an unbooked passenger, and it gets a chapter of its own. Cap. XXII, folio 329: "Resta decir de las Ratas, que tambien pasaron con los Espanoles, que antes dellos no las avia." Garcilaso corrects Lopez de Gomara, who had written that there were no rats in Peru until the time of Blasco Nunez Vela: small mice there had always been, called ucucha, and what was new was the large rat of Spain. They are now on the coast in great quantity and so large that no cat dares look at them, he writes, and they have not climbed to the towns of the sierra, nor is it feared that they will, for the snows and the cold in between. At Nombre de Dios, Panama and other coast cities the remedy was a public proclamation at certain seasons for every household to put out rejalgar, food and water being locked away first; walking the shore at Panama the author found dead rats lying over a stretch more than a hundred paces long and three or four wide, with nowhere to set his feet.
The chapters end on the arc that makes the price series legible. A Spaniard, folio 329 says, carried a mastiff puppy barely a month and a half old from Cuzco to Lima, a hundred and twenty leagues of most rugged road, in a saddlebag hung from the front of the saddle, and had fresh trouble at every stage finding milk for it, meaning to present it as a highly prized jewel to his father-in-law, a lord of livestock who lived fifty or sixty leagues further on; Garcilaso travelled with him and saw it. Then the sentence that closes the subject: "Estos trabajos, y otros maiores costaron a los principios las cosas de Espana a los Espanoles, para aborrecerlas despues, como han aborrecido muchas dellas."
The limits are the same as for anything drawn from this book and should travel with the figures. Every price here is one man's, printed at Madrid in 1723 from a Lisbon edition of 1609 that the title page calls a corrected second impression; none was checked against a notarial protocol, a fiscal account or a second chronicler. Garcilaso left Peru in 1560, so the 1590 cattle price and the reports of feral herds are correspondence, and he marks them as such. Where he cites Acosta and Cieza the citation was read but the cited chapters were not opened here. What the series is worth is not any single number but the shape it makes: a collapse of about ninety-five per cent in the price of a cow in thirty-six years, recorded while it was happening.