The war of the Mixton (1541): a rising, a just-war consultation held at the siege, and an ending negotiated by two friars
In 1541 the peoples of the sierras of Nueva Galicia rose, killed Pedro de Alvarado's army in the field and nearly emptied Guadalajara. Mota Padilla's chronicle prints what most accounts leave out: the summons and the threat that opened it, the indigenous answers in reported speech, a formal consultation on whether the offensive war was lawful with Las Casas's doctrine on the table, five thousand taken and bodies heaped at the crags, and a surrender obtained by two friars who went up unarmed.
Why this wins its question: The Mixton war is usually reached in English through a paragraph in a survey: a rising, Alvarado's death, Mendoza's punitive campaign. This object prints the sheets themselves and they contain four things that paragraph never carries. The summons that opened the war came with an explicit threat to enslave the women and children, and the war ended with soldiers holding five captive slaves each, so the entry states the enslavement at both ends. The indigenous answer survives in the chronicle as a claim of right to their own lands, printed in the first person by a Spanish colonial lawyer who plainly thought it worth preserving. The viceroy halted before the last assault and had a named council weigh whether an offensive war was lawful, with the doctrine of Las Casas argued and rejected on the spot: the great controversy of the century happening in a camp, and going against the Indians. And the surrender was obtained not by the battery but by two missionaries who had sat on that council, went up with nothing, and brought six thousand people down under a pardon and a deadline. It is a real instance of restraint inside a colonial war, and it is set here beside the collar-chains and the heaped bodies on the same pages, because that is the only way it can be believed.
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 chronicle opens the war with a summons and a threat, and prints both. Page 116 describes the peñol of the Mixton as the most important stronghold in the whole kingdom of the Galicia, a sierra very high, rocky, of sheer rock faces, hard to pass, with a table at its summit able to hold many people, taking its name from the Nahuatl word for cat, to give to understand that only those animals could climb it. On the Saturday of Palms in 1541 the Spaniards came to the foot of that sierra and required the Indians to come down in peace; they refused, and were warned that if they did not come down of their own will they would be killed and their women and children made slaves. The chronicle then records that at dawn on Palm Sunday, with the sun in eclipse, the Indians fell on the Spanish camp with such fury that the Spaniards could barely arm themselves. The eclipse is the chronicler's detail and is reported as his.
The indigenous case is in the book, in reported speech, and it is a claim of right rather than a complaint. Page 145 sets out the answer the chronicle attributes to the cacique it calls Tenamaztle the zacateco when Miguel de Ibarra brought the viceroy's offer of peace: that he too required them to return in peace to their Castile, since we are in our own lands; and that if not, they should know that just as when we went against you at Guadalajara you defeated us, now that you attack us you will be broken. Ibarra pressed him, saying that the viceroy was in the camp in person and offered peace, and that if it were refused those left alive would be taken captive; and the chronicle has the cacique answer that they must be mad, since with nothing but their own wanting they come so that we may kill them, that we are forced to expose ourselves in defence of our lands, and, as for you, who has called you. Page 122 gives the same shape earlier, with the defenders answering an emissary that they had been called barbudos and worse, that the land would swallow the Spaniards, and calling on the zacatecos to defend our lands and avenge our wrongs. These are speeches written down two centuries after they were made and this entry treats them as the chronicle's reconstruction, not as a transcript; what they establish is that a Spanish criollo lawyer of 1742 thought the indigenous case worth printing in full and in the first person.
The most acute military analysis in the chronicle is put in the mouth of a Spaniard and it is an analysis of a society, not of a battle. Pages 123 and 124 give Cristobal de Onate telling Alvarado that in more than ten years of Nueva Galicia he had found greater difficulty in keeping what was won than in discovering lands and defeating Indians; that in Nueva Spain there were cities, towns and workshops and the Indians had goods to defend, whereas in Nueva Galicia they move their families to crags and ravines beforehand, and that when they are brought down from one sierra they climb another, make themselves strong and leave the pursuers crippled without any gain, because the waters have the land soaked and the cavalry is of no use. The conclusion he draws is that time should be allowed to pass rather than the enterprise pressed. Alvarado overrode him, was routed at Nochistlan and died of it. The passage is an admission printed inside a conquest narrative that a people with no fixed wealth cannot be conquered by taking their wealth.
Abandoning the kingdom altogether was proposed by the Spaniards themselves and the chronicle prints the argument. Page 130 records that with Guadalajara desolate and its few inhabitants quartered in the fort, a soldier raised his voice to say that in ten years no usefulness had been discovered in the kingdom of Nueva Galicia, that Nueva Spain was grand and offered so many comforts, and that its Indians were domesticated, so that it was better to leave for it than to lose health and life where nothing had prospered. The counter-argument the chronicle gives Onate is not economic: the increase of the Church, the extension of the king's dominions, the memory that will outlast the temporal, and the disgrace of being thought cowards. Whatever the speeches owe to the chronicler, the fact he chose to record is that the profitability of the enterprise was contested from inside it in its first decade.
Before the final assault the viceroy stopped and had the lawfulness of the war put to a council, and the chronicle names who sat on it. Page 148 records that Antonio de Mendoza spent the rest of a day consulting on whether the offensive war he was about to make on those Indians was justified. Page 149 names who was there: D. Pedro Gomez de Maraver, dean of the recent church of Oaxaca, whom the viceroy carried in his company for his learning, virtue and prudence, together with two religious of San Francisco and two of San Agustin, of whom the chronicle names Fr. Francisco de Villafuerte and Fr. Francisco de Salamanca, called men of the greatest name in the kingdom, and, of San Francisco, Fr. Marcos de Niza. The doctrine put before that council is Bartolome de las Casas's, and the chronicle states it in full: that the Indians were wretched people of very docile disposition whom the Spaniards tyrannically enslaved and cruelly treated, that they gave offence only when they could do nothing else, and that preaching alone was enough to reduce them. A council of war in the field in 1541, weighing a doctrine of just war against a bishop's brief for the defendants, is the Valladolid controversy happening eight years early and at a siege.
The council decided for war, and the decisive voice was a man who had changed sides. Page 149 describes Fr. Marcos de Niza as one of those who had earlier promoted the opinions of Las Casas, and then says that the bishop had said this from his cell, turning over books and speculating, and dealing with Indians already subject in Mexico and in the other Spanish settlements, among whom they showed themselves obedient, pusillanimous and subjugated; but that after Niza had set foot in the unpeopled country of Cibola and seen how little effect preaching had, and had experienced their small constancy, and had come to know them for more barbarous, as he saw with his own eyes at Coynan and Nochistlan, he was of the opinion that the war was just and that it was well to subject them, since otherwise they were not easily reduced. The rest conformed to that opinion, including the two resident missionaries of those peoples, Fr. Antonio de Segovia and Fr. Miguel de Bolonia, who had made several formal requirements of peace and offered pardon for the rising. All were refused, and the battery began the next day. The procedure was real and the answer went against the Indians; this entry states both, because an object that printed only the consultation would be a false advertisement for it.
Not every people joined, and the chronicle records one of them stating its own position. Page 149 says that although the Indians of the Teul had been called to the rising, they held themselves neutral, so that the Spaniards sent them an embassy full of reproofs, treating them as cowards; and that they answered that they had never wished to take arms against the Spaniards because they are our friends, that although some of theirs had gone over it had been without the determination of their caciques, and that if they had wished to fail the friendship they professed to the Spaniards a better fortress was their own, from which they would defend themselves only with stones. The passage records indigenous polities choosing sides as polities, and it records that their caciques did not command every man in them.
The cost is on the sheets, in the chronicle's own numbers and images. Page 151 records that when the fighting stopped five thousand Indians were seized among the crags and ravines that afternoon, and that at the foot of the sheer rocks the bodies lay heaped, both of those who had thrown themselves down of their own will and of those who had remained at the summit and were thrown down by the Indians in the night to clear the ground. The same page records that the viceroy, impatient at the constancy of the resistance and grieved at the many who were dying, came near to abandoning the enterprise. Page 147 records that a thousand captive Indians had earlier been put in collar-chains. Page 154 records that the soldiers were content with the five captive slaves each already held. Page 116 had recorded the threat of enslavement made before the first shot. The war ended with people enslaved, and this entry says so in the same voice in which it reports the consultation that preceded it.
The viceroy's own argument for restraint, as the chronicle gives it, is an argument about capital. Page 147 has Antonio de Mendoza tell the Mexican and Tlaxcalteca auxiliaries who were pressing to kill and take more, with prudence, that these gentlemen of the Galicia have no other capital and have prospered by their labour and spilled blood with nothing but the Indians of their encomiendas; that if some of them have been killed, others have taken their own lives, and many have fled carrying off captives, the land will be left depopulated. The sentence is printed without embarrassment two hundred years later and it states the economics of the encomienda more plainly than a critic could: the encomendero's estate was people, and a war that killed them destroyed it.
The war was ended by two friars going up unarmed, and the chronicle gives the terms of the offer. Page 151 records Fr. Antonio de Segovia speaking to the viceroy in favour of the Indians: that justice had now run its course, that it was good to give place to mercy, and that he bound himself to go out and promised with the grace of God a good effect in bringing those poor people down reduced. The viceroy suspended the action, finding it not fitting to expose the friar's life to so manifest a danger; Segovia, full of fervour, offered himself as surety with his own life, and Fr. Miguel de Bolonia joined the undertaking. With nothing but their crucifixes, breviaries and staves they went up, and in a day and a half six thousand Indians came down, made peace and were pardoned. Page 151 adds, on the authority of Fr. Antonio Tello, that Segovia built a chapel on that peñol dedicated to Santiago. Page 153 records what the alternative was as it was put to the people of Juchipila: come down, or by the next day be dead or carried captive to Mexico by the viceroy's soldiers. The mercy was real, it was preached by men who had voted for the war six pages earlier, and it was offered under a deadline.
One encomendero was sentenced to death for taking the side of his own Indians. Page 153 carries the heading of the chapter that says it: that because Cristobal Romero made a shield for the Indians of his encomienda of San Cristobal who were on the peñol, the viceroy condemned him to death, and that he obtained a pardon. The narrative gives the mechanism: Romero went up under orders, persuaded the cacique of Tecuistitlan to come down, entered at night to find no one there because the Indians had got away, and Onate, judging that under so tight a siege they could not have passed unless someone gave them free passage, investigated the blame and found Romero. Page 154 records the intercession that saved him, made on the strength of his services in the campaign and of his having been the first to climb the Mixton. The episode is printed as a scandal about an encomendero rather than as an argument against the war, which is precisely what makes it usable evidence.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 116 to 154 of the Mexico 1870 printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742; the manuscript was not seen, no other account of the war was opened, and nothing here is checked against the Archivo General de Indias or against the surviving process papers, none of which are reachable from this container. The speeches are the chronicle's and are reported as such. The name Tenamaztle is given here as the chronicle spells it and no claim is made about the later suit that the cacique of that name is known to have brought in Spain. No figure for the total dead is asserted, because the chronicle gives none; the five thousand of page 151 are those seized, not those killed. Nothing here establishes what became of the enslaved, whether the New Laws of the following year reached them, how the surrendered pueblos were resettled, or how the modern literature reads any of it. The refusal of the Nayarit to come down, which page 151 dates as lasting until 1722, is mentioned by the chronicle and is not investigated here.