The municipal purse of Guadalajara (1636-1742): bulls, restitution orders and who pays for the mourning
A chapter of a 1742 chronicle walks through a century of one colonial city's accounts and finds both halves of the story on the same pages. The propios paid for bullfights, players and refreshments for the judges; and when two mining towns were made to fund a president's reception, the crown ordered the twelve hundred pesos restored out of the estates of the oidores who had levied them. The rule reached mourning too: from 1700 officials bought their own blacks.
Why this wins its question: Colonial Spanish American municipal finance reaches English-language readers as a statute summary — propios, arbitrios, an audit rule — or as a corruption anecdote, and almost never as a hundred-year file for one city with both halves in it. This object gives the ledger and the discipline together from a single eyewitness chapter: the bullfights, players and judges' refreshments charged to the propios with the cabildo autos that authorised them; two mining towns that complained of extortion and were repaid twelve hundred pesos by cedula, with the crown ordering the restitution taken from the estates of the oidores who levied it; the twenty-four-year progression by which royal mourning moved from the public purse to the individual official's own pocket, ending in an order that expressly follows Spanish practice; a judge who refused his own propinas because the junior clerks' wages had prior claim on the same fund; and, against all of it, the officials' own argument about short salaries and the three cedulas spent on whether aldermen might kneel on a carpet. It is the case file behind a statute this corpus already carries, and it names the sums.
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 chapter opens by praising expenditure that the law of the Indies forbade, and the author does not notice the contradiction. Under president Juan de Canseco y Quiñones, from about 1636 to 1640, the cabildo of Guadalajara spent "sin escasear lo precioso, ántes sí, gastaban con magnificencia, aun en lo superfluo, con tal union, que aun con ser cortos los propios, ostentaban generosidades"; the election of alcaldes was celebrated at the expense of the propios with two afternoons of bulls and a refreshment given to the president and oidores, a hundred pesos being issued to the commissioner, "consta de auto de 3 de Enero de 640"; bulls were run again at San Miguel; and two hundred pesos of propios went to the two comedies of Corpus and its octave, besides wax, fireworks, altars and dances, per autos of 20 September 1641 and 8 May 1638. A regidor was sent to Mexico to escort each incoming president with a thousand pesos of ayuda de costa, a custom the chapter says had ceased by 1742, three hundred pesos being issued instead so that one alcalde ordinario receives the president at San Pedro and the other entertains him in the city with bulls and a comedy.
The crown's answer to festival spending on visiting judges was restitution charged to the judges' own estates, and the chapter prints the sequence of orders. Dr. Geronimo de Luna, to receive president Alonso de Ceballos, arranged that the cabildos of Zacatecas and a second town contribute six hundred pesos each towards bulls; the king was informed and ordered, by cedula of 2 June 1680, "que no se hagan fiestas en tales entradas", the same being ordered to the city. The towns then complained of extortion, and a cedula of 28 June 1682 ordered the twelve hundred pesos restored, declared that neither they, nor Guadalajara, nor any other place was to contribute to such costs, and allowed only three hundred pesos from the penas de cámara. Asked out of what funds the restitution was to be made, the king ordered on 13 August 1683 "que del caudal de los oidores que hicieron contribuir á Zacatecas y á Sombrerete, se hiciese". The printed text names the second town twice as the Villa de Xerena, once as Yerena and once as Sombrerete; this entry records the discrepancy rather than resolving it, since nothing read here settles which is right.
The same chapter is the best evidence in the corpus that the general statute was not a dead letter in Nueva Galicia. Libro IIII, título XIII of the Recopilación caps extraordinary municipal spending at three thousand maravedís without royal licence, on pain of recovery from the persons and goods of those who authorised it, and separately forbids spending propios on banquets for visiting judges. What this chapter adds is a file in which that penalty was actually applied at a named place, on a named class of official, with a sum attached and a date, and in which the aggrieved parties were two mining towns who complained and were paid back. The chronicle does not report whether the oidores ever paid.
Royal mourning is the clearest case, because the crown moved from paying it out of the public purse to charging it to the individual over twenty-four years. The cabildo spent five hundred pesos of propios on mourning for its ministers at the death of Felipe III and twelve hundred at the death of queen Isabel de Borbón; the audiencia charged 19,500 pesos to the real hacienda for the same mourning, "sobre que se libró real cédula de retencion el año de 648, y se mandó que oficiales reales recaudasen de los ministros que habian hecho lutos, lo que les cupo en el repartimiento". At the death of Carlos II the queen governor ordered, on 10 November 1700, "que los lutos los costeasen los ministros, de sus caudales"; and at the death of Luis I it was provided, on 30 September 1724, that the mourning worn by ministers of audiencias, regidores of cabildos, contadores, royal officials and their dependants be at each individual's own cost, "en consecuencia de lo practicado en España". The author adds the sequence expressly so that nobody may think the rule antiquated.
The officials' counter-argument is printed too, and it is a real one about low pay. The chapter states that they founded their claim to charge mourning to the penas de cámara and the propios on "la precisa necesidad de la mayor decencia que deben ostentar por sus oficios, por no tener los regidores salario ni propinas, y los oidores los tienen cortos y las propinas muy moderadas": three thousand pesos in silver for the decency and maintenance of an oidor, in a city where many other vecinos have as much and where "en nada pueden distinguirse, salvo en los trajes". The remuneration problem and the expenses rule are set out on the same page, and the chronicle takes no side between them.
Perquisites were audited on the same principle, and one judge refused his. A cedula of 1 June 1682 told the audiencia the king was informed that presidents anciently took twenty pesos of propinas from the penas de cámara and oidores ten, only at the Easters and Corpus, and that the president had introduced sixty pesos, the escribano de cámara thirty, and on further days besides — Candelaria, San Miguel and others — "con lo que se consumian las penas de cámara, y los ministros inferiores carecian de sus salarios", and it demanded a report. The audiencia answered with its own auto of 22 September 1678 setting propinas at sixty for presidents, thirty for oidores and fifteen for the escribano de cámara on the three Easters, Corpus, the Assumption, the Purification and the king's birthday, because salaries did not suffice; the custom was allowed to stand by cedula of 29 September 1685. The chapter then records that the oidor José Miranda Villazán "escrupulizaba en la percepcion de tales propinas por parecerle debian solo tener lugar pagados los créditos de justicia, cuales son los salarios de los ministros" — a judge declining a perquisite because the wages of the junior staff had first claim on the same fund.
The public-good half of the chapter is small, early and cooperative rather than institutional. Because there were then fewer vecinos and no physician, and the propios were too small to carry a competent stipend, "con toda union entre oidores, canónigos, regidores y demas vecinos, igualaron al Dr. D. Juan de Vera", who came in 1643 in the company of president Pedro Fernández de Baeza, the subscribers together giving him fifteen hundred pesos. A city too poor to fund a salaried doctor from its own revenue got one by a joint subscription of the judges, the chapter, the aldermen and the townsmen; this is a century before the medical institutions the corpus records for Guadalajara, and the arrangement rests on personal contribution rather than on any endowed office.
The city also built and ran a public medicinal bath out of the propios, and told the king about it. A hot spring judged medicinal was found a league and a half from the city, and "á costa de propios, se fabricó baño de piedra y cal y oficina competente, y en los libros de cabildo constan las cantidades libradas"; account was given to the king, "como se percibe de la real cédula (fecha 4 de Agosto de 640), en que se anuncia lo provechoso de dicho baño". The same establishment reappears in the next chapter of the chronicle as the object on which the first proceeds of the mescal wine estanco were spent, which is the point at which this municipal purse and the drink monopoly become one file. Neither the cabildo books nor the cedula was seen for this entry.
The propios also carried the cost of the audiencia's own housing, and the city was still paying for it a century later. The palace of the audiencia was found ruined in 1644, so the cabildo determined to buy the houses of Martin Casillas, where the palace stood in 1742; "aunque ya deteriorada, y quedó la ciudad gravada en tres mil pesos de una capellanía, cuyos réditos se pagan de propios", with a further fifteen hundred pesos given in 1665 towards the same costs. The cabildo also repaired at the cost of the propios the paved street called San Agustín, which was being undermined by a barranco and endangered the church of that convent. A municipality endowing the royal court's building out of its own revenue, and servicing the mortgage on it in perpetuity, is the opposite of the extraction picture and is worth stating with the same flatness as the bullfights.
Much of the chapter is precedence litigation, and it is recorded here because leaving it out would flatter the institution. On St Francis's day 1685 the president left the secular cabildo in the procession and joined the ecclesiastical one, "por parecerle llevaban mejor lugar"; the king resolved, on 9 October 1686, that prebendaries walking as private persons without surplice do not take precedence of the secular cabildo, and that bishops are to bring only three of their household, "conforme á la ley". The ecclesiastical cabildo then objected that the secular one laid carpets at its feet with its maces on them, and asked that the carpet be set apart with the maces; the king ordered the audiencia to report on 26 February 1688; in the interval the ecclesiastical cabildo tried to have the carpets removed during the rogation days, the two secular members present walked out of the church to avoid dispossession, and the audiencia issued a real provisión de amparo, then a sobrecarta under penalty of five hundred pesos, then a third order levying the fine when the chapter refused a second time and further demanded that the wives of the oidores be barred carpet and cushion in the capilla mayor. The audiencia declared they might have both; the king approved its determination on 12 June 1689, ordered the fine restored, and as to the ladies declared they might put a carpet — "y nada se dice de almohada". Three royal cedulas, a real provisión, two sobrecartas and a five-hundred-peso fine, spent on where people might kneel.
The limits of this entry. All of it is read from pages 329 to 333 of the 1870 Mexico printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742 by a lawyer of the audiencia whose own city's government he is describing, from cabildo books and archival copies he cites in footnotes but does not reproduce. No cedula, auto or account was seen here; every date and every figure is his. Nothing establishes whether the oidores ever paid the restitution of 1683, whether the mourning orders of 1700 and 1724 were obeyed, what the bath cost or how long it ran, or how Dr. Juan de Vera's subscription was renewed after the first year. The author is not a neutral witness to the office of oidor: he is a criollo advocate practising before that court, and the chapter both praises the magnificence of the spending and prints the orders forbidding it without ever setting the two against each other.