The hospital of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción in Mexico City: what Cortés's testament actually endowed, and how
Clause 9 of Hernán Cortés's testament of 1547 orders the hospital he had begun in Mexico City finished at his own cost, to a plan drawn in Spain that year. The document is worth reading for the financing: not alms, but the ring-fenced rents of his own shops on the calle de Tacuba, which his heir was forbidden to spend otherwise until the building was done, under a constitution copied from a Seville hospital.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the Hospital de Jesús give a founder, a date and the claim that it is the oldest hospital still working in the Americas, and stop. None of them prints the financing, which is the part that explains why a private hospital in a colonial capital survived at all. This entry works from the testament itself as printed in 1871 and gives the mechanism: a named stream of commercial rent from shops on the calle de Tacuba, ring-fenced against the heir's other uses until the building was finished and then rolled into the endowment; two named solares to be built on rather than a cash legacy; a wooden model and a written traza by a named draughtsman shipped from Spain in 1547; the constitution of the Cinco Llagas of Seville adopted as the default rulebook; and hereditary lay patronage vested in the holder of the entailed estate. It sets beside that the clause ordering a college at Coyoacán whose declared purpose was to instruct the naturales in the conquerors' religion, and it says plainly that the rents endowing the hospital were the urban rents of an estate granted for the conquest. Every quotation is given in the Spanish the volume prints, and the object states on its face that the printing is of manuscript copies which its own editors report as differing.
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 hospital is ordered by name in the ninth clause of the testament, and it was already under construction when the will was made. The text reads: "Item: mando, que la obra del hospital de nuestra Señora de la Concepcion, que yo mando hacer en la ciudad de México, en la Nueva España, se acabe á mi costa, segun y de la manera que está trazada; é la capilla mayor de la iglesia de él, se acabe conforme á la muestra de madera que está hecha". The clause is a completion order, not a foundation charter: the house existed and the will exists to finish it.
The design was drawn in Spain and sent across the Atlantic in the year the will was signed. The same clause continues that the work is to follow the wooden model "hecha é hizo Pedro Vazquez Jumétrico, é á la traza que dijere el escrito que yo envié á la Nueva España este presente año de mil é quinientos é cuarenta é siete". A named draughtsman, a physical model and a written specification crossing the ocean is a more concrete account of architectural transfer than most narrative sources supply.
The financing is the part worth reading twice, because it is a ring-fence, not a bequest. "Para los gastos de la obra del dicho hospital señalo especialmente la renta de las tiendas é casas que yo tengo en la dicha ciudad de México, en la plaza é calle de Tacuba, é San Francisco, é la que atraviesa de la una á la otra; la cual dicha renta mando que se gaste en la dicha obra é no en otra cosa hasta tanto que sea acabada, y que el sucesor de mi casa no la pueda ocupar en otra cosa". A named stream of urban commercial rent is tied to the building, and the heir is expressly forbidden to divert it. After completion the same rents pass to "las obras é dotaciones de que yuso será declarado".
Its constitution was to be an existing Spanish one, named and copied. If the separate institution he meant to leave before a notary were not completed, the testament orders that the hospital keep "la forma é manera de administracion que se guarda é tiene en el hospital de las Cinco Plagas de esta ciudad de Sevilla, que fundó la señora Dª Catalina de Rivero, que haya gloria, para en lo que toca á los administradores é capellanes, é los demás oficiales é servidores que han de servir en el dicho hospital". This is institutional transfer stated as a fallback clause: a Seville hospital's rulebook was to govern a Mexican one by default.
The endowment proper was land in the centre of the city, described by its neighbours. Clause 14 recites "que porque yo señalé para la dotacion del dicho hospital de nuestra Señora de la Concepcion que yo hago en México, dos solares fronteros de las casas de Jorge Alvarado, é del tesorero Juan Alonso de Sosa, entre mi casa é la acequia que pasa por ella á las casas de D. Luis Saavedra, que sea en feria, é me obligue á facer en ellas unas casas". The endowment is thus rent-producing property to be built, not a cash legacy that could be spent once.
The hospital was one item in a package, and the next item states its purpose towards the indigenous population explicitly. Clause 13 orders that at Coyoacán "se edifique y haya un colegio, para estudiantes que estudien teología é derecho canónico; é para que haya personas doctas en la dicha Nueva España, que rijan las iglesias é informen é instruyan á los naturales de ella en las cosas tocantes á nuestra fe católica", to be governed by the statutes of the colegio de Santa María de Jesús of Seville. Read next to the hospital clause, the two together are a testamentary programme of transplanted institutions - one for bodies, one for clergy - and the stated object of the second is the instruction of the naturales in the religion of the conquerors.
Patronage was made hereditary and private rather than royal or episcopal. The building rent is to be spent "á disposicion y órden del dicho mi sucesor, como patron del dicho hospital", and the parallel clause on the family chapel at Medellín names the heir patron and lets him and his successors delegate and revoke the office at will. A hospital whose patron is the holder of an entailed estate depends for its survival on that estate surviving, which is a structural weakness and a structural strength at once: it cannot be dissolved by a bishop, and it cannot outlive its endowment.
That the house did outlive him by three centuries is shown in this volume sideways, through an archivist's note rather than a history. The Ordenanzas of 1524 printed in the same book carry the head-note "Sacadas del archivo del Excmo. Sr. Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, en el hospital de Jesus. - Partida cuarta del legajo número 19 del segundo inventario": in the nineteenth century the archive of the Cortés estate was still kept in the hospital, and the hospital was by then called de Jesús. The volume nowhere states when or why the dedication changed, and the identification of the Concepción of the testament with the hospital de Jesús of the head-note is the volume's own usage rather than a statement it makes, so it is carried here at reduced confidence.
What paid for it should be stated with the same precision as what it bought. The rents assigned are commercial rents from shops and houses on the main square and the calle de Tacuba of a city whose siege the testator had commanded twenty-six years earlier, held as part of an entailed estate granted for that campaign; the will assigns them without a word about how the properties were acquired. A charitable foundation financed out of the proceeds of conquest is still a charitable foundation, and it is still financed out of the proceeds of conquest; this object declines to print either half without the other.
The limits of this evidence are worth stating before the story is repeated. Everything above comes from one nineteenth-century printing of manuscript copies, and the editors themselves record in a footnote to the preceding clause that "la copia manuscrita que se ha seguido" differs from the copy used by Dr Mora and that they have corrected the clause against the latter. No original instrument was opened here. Nothing in these pages evidences a bed, a patient, a physician, an admission rule or an outcome; they evidence an intention, a plan, a rent and a rulebook.