The Hospital de Jesús Nazareno of Mexico City and the restitution clauses of Cortés's testament
A hospital founded in Mexico City in the first years after the conquest under the advocation of la Purísima Concepción, endowed by Hernán Cortés in the same testament whose clauses 39 to 41 order his heir to find out whether the slaves, lands and personal services he had taken could be held with good conscience, and to restore what could not. The charity and the admission of doubt are in one document, and so is the hospital's own use of eight enslaved servants a century later.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the Hospital de Jesús stop at "the oldest hospital in the Americas, founded by Cortés" and cite nothing; accounts of Cortés's will quote clause 39 on the slaves as a gotcha or as a defence, usually at second hand and usually alone. This object opens the 1844 printing of the testament itself and reads the clauses in sequence, so the hospital endowment (clause 9), the stated motive (clause 11) and the three restitution orders (clauses 39, 40, 41) can be seen to be one continuous act of estate planning — and then says plainly what the same document does not show, that anything was actually restored. The counterweights come from the same pages rather than from an opposing polemic: the Seville model the hospital copied, the indigenous woman whose bequest renamed it, and Sigüenza's staffing list with its eight enslaved servants and its rotating Indian cleaners from Coyoacán.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Clause 9 of Cortés's testament orders that the work of "el hospital de Nuestra Señora de la Concepcion, que yo mando hacer en la ciudad de Mégico, en la Nueva-España" be finished at his cost, the main chapel of its church following the wooden model made by Pedro Vázquez Jumétrico and the plan he had sent to New Spain "este presente año de mil é quinientos é cuarenta y siete". For the costs he assigns the rents of the shops and houses he owned in Mexico City on the plaza and on the streets of Tacuba and San Francisco, and forbids his successor to spend that rent on anything else until the building is finished.
The same clause fixes how the hospital is to be run if he dies before leaving its constitution before a notary: it is to 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 Doña Catalina de Rivero", as regards administrators, chaplains and the other officers and servants. The model for a hospital in the Indies is a named hospital in Seville founded by a woman.
The endowment is framed as expiation, in the testator's own words. Clause 11 says that in recognition of the favours received in the discovery and conquest of New Spain, "é para en descargacion é satisfaccion de cualquiera culpa é cargo que pudiese agraviar mi conciencia, de que no me acuerde, para mandallo satisfacer particularmente, mando que se hagan las obras siguientes" — the hospital, and after it a Franciscan convent of la Concepción at Coyoacán that was to hold his own burial.
Clause 39 puts the conquest's slaves in doubt in writing. Because concerning "los esclavos naturales de la dicha Nueva-España, así de guerra como de resgate, ha habido muchas dudas é opiniones sobre si se han podido tener con buena conciencia, é hasta ahora no está determinado", Cortés orders his son Don Martín and those who succeed him in the estate to make every inquiry that serves "al descargo de mi conciencia é suyas".
Clause 40 orders restitution of land. Where lands in his estate had been taken for orchards, vineyards, cotton fields and other uses, it was to be established whether they properly belonged to the naturales of those towns, and if so "mando que se les restituyan las dichas tierras, con los aprovechamientos que los señores de ellas pudieron haber habido", setting against that the tributes those towns had owed. He names one case himself: the parcel at Coyoacán he had given to his servant Bernardino del Castillo, who built a sugar mill on it.
Clause 41 extends the same order to labour. Besides tributes he had received from his vassals "otros servicios, así personales como reales, é tambien sobre esto hay opiniones si se pueden recibir con conciencia ó no"; he orders an accounting of what he had taken beyond what was due to him, "é se les pague é restituya todo lo que así pareciere que justamente deben haber". Clause 38 had already told his heir that if it were ever found he had drawn tributes beyond those the pre-conquest lords used to levy, on the strength of the old padrones he had searched out, the charge fell on his son's conscience.
What the document contains is an instruction to inquire, not a record of restitution made. Every one of these clauses delegates the finding-out and the paying to Don Martín Cortés and his successors; the testament itself reports no sum returned and no case decided, and states that the question of the slaves "hasta ahora no está determinado". Nothing here shows that any land was given back.
Alamán, printing the testament in 1844, holds that this hospital "fué incontestablemente el primero que hubo" in Mexico City and places its foundation "en alguno de los tres años primeros inmediatos á la conquista", arguing from the fact that town lots granted nearby were thereafter described by their position relative to it. He is an admiring witness writing the history of the founder's estate, and the dating is his inference rather than a document.
One piece of physical evidence is quoted for the early building: a stone of a vara and a quarter square set into the north corner wall, serving as the sill of a gothic window, carried the inscription "Diego Diaz Deusbona, de nacion portugues, hizo esta ventana, año de 1535". The window was closed in 1800 when that end of the building was rebuilt from its foundations after the San Juan de Dios earthquake of that year.
A second nineteenth-century Mexican reference work says the same thing about the foundation from a different angle: among the graces Cortés obtained at Rome through his envoy Juan de Rada was "el patronato perpetuo del hospital de la Purísima Concepcion, hoy conocido con el nombre de Jesus, que habia fundado Cortés desde los primeros dias despues de la conquista". The corroboration is weaker than it looks: the Diccionario was compiled in the same Mexico City circle as the Disertaciones and may not be independent of them.
The hospital owes its familiar name to an indigenous woman's bequest. Petronila Gerónima, "india rica", kept a much venerated image of Jesus Nazareno in her oratory and directed by testament that it be drawn by lot among five churches she named; the lot fell to the hospital church of la Purísima Concepción three times over, the draw being repeated, and common use then changed the name of church and hospital alike to Jesús Nazareno.
The establishment Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora described in the seventeenth century was staffed by three chaplains, an administrator for the internal and financial side, a physician, a surgeon, a barber, a head male nurse, a nurse, a cook, "tres indios que por turnos venian de Cuyoacan á cuidar de la limpieza, y ocho esclavos hombres y mugeres para asistir en todo el servicio doméstico". The house that treated the sick poor was cleaned by Indians rotating in from the marquesado's own town and served by eight enslaved people.
The same account gives the working figures. The apothecary's contract stood at 500 pesos a year; the rents of the hospital's properties had risen from the 4,000 ducados — reckoned by Alamán at two thousand two hundred pesos — that they yielded when Cortés ceded them, to eleven thousand two hundred pesos by Sigüenza's time; and Sigüenza put the average intake at about four hundred patients a year, a figure he took from the hospital's own entry books.