The hospitals and confraternities of Guadalajara (1551-1606): lay charity, a royal order, and the contract that handed a hospital to a religious order without losing it
Guadalajara's first hospital was not founded by the crown or by an order. A lay confraternity established in 1551 added hospitality to its chapel and took a licence in 1557; a second hospital followed at San Miguel. In 1606, when the first Hospitallers of San Juan de Dios reached New Spain, the confraternity handed its hospital to them under written conditions that kept its property, its title and a reversion clause, approved by the audiencia without prejudice to the royal patronage.
Why this wins its question: Colonial Spanish American hospitals are usually described in two registers: royal foundations bearing a viceroy's or a bishop's name, and the great hospital orders. This object shows the layer underneath, from the sheets of a Mexico 1870 imprint of a 1742 chronicle written by a man who was rector of the confraternity in question and had to reconstruct its history from archives because its own books were gone. Guadalajara's first hospital was an appendix to a lay burial-and-charity confraternity founded in 1551, licensed in 1557 by a vacant cathedral chapter, and paid for by its members. When the first Hospitallers of San Juan de Dios reached New Spain in 1600 the confraternity did not simply give the hospital away: it negotiated a written instrument that kept the church's title, kept the confraternity's property under its own mayordomo, kept a room in the building, bound the order to admit the incurable and to bring religious who understood surgery, and provided that everything reverted if the order ever left. The audiencia approved it on the fiscal's advice and reserved the royal patronage. And the object does not stop at the contract: the same chronicler records that the confraternity, relieved of the work, nearly forgot itself within a century.
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 crown moved first and the chronicle prints the order. Page 200 records a royal decree of 13 May 1553 telling the oidores of the audiencia that it would be fitting to report whether a hospital should be founded at Compostela in which the sick Indians should be cured, that this should be of royal patronage, and that ordinances be made for it. Page 200 also records, in the chronicler's own summary of Charles V's purpose, that being grieved at the notice that they were dying of contagious pestilence he sought its remedy by erecting hospitals. This is a royal instruction to a frontier court to consider a hospital specifically for Indians, dated five years after that court was created.
The hospital that was actually built at Guadalajara was built by laymen, and the chronicle gives the dates and the names. Page 200 records that on 15 April 1551 the citizens established, in a chapel on the far bank of the river to the east where the convent and hospital of San Juan de Dios stood in the chronicler's own day, a confraternity under the title of the Santa Veracruz y Sangre de Cristo, approved by the bishop D. Pedro Gomez Maraver, and that its books show it to be the first confraternity of the whole kingdom of the Galicia, the city being then barely nine years old. Page 201 records that the citizens, seeing that by royal order a hospital was being founded at Compostela, determined in emulation and at the cost of their own alms to found another in their city; that the confrades already occupied themselves in offices of charity, attending the poor sick who needed it; and that they added hospitality to their confraternity chapel. To formalise it the cathedral chapter, then vacant, interposed its authority and ordinary jurisdiction and granted the licence, dated 29 March 1557, signed before the notary Alonso de Vera. The founders are named: Cristobal Romero, Miguel Romero, D. Pedro de Cespedes, Rodrigo Gutierrez de Baeza, Pedro de Lazarte and Alonso de Aguilar.
A second hospital followed on the same lay pattern. Page 235 records that in the first confraternity they founded, that of the Sangre de Cristo, they made a hospital, and that in the first chapel or church the city had for a parish, which was that of San Miguel, the second hospital was joined, which is the Hospital Real de San Miguel; and that in the same church was founded the confraternity of Nuestra Senora de la Soledad y Santo Entierro de Cristo, instituted to take out the procession of Good Friday. The chronicle dates that second confraternity to 21 February 1589, with the authority of the ordinary, the canon D. Melchor Gomez de Soria acting as provisor and vicar general of the vacant see, and names its founders and members to the number of about thirty, among them the dean and chantre of the cathedral, a perpetual councillor of the city and a group of citizens. Two hospitals, two confraternities, and in each case the association came first and the hospital was hung on it.
In 1606 the confraternity gave its hospital away, and it did so by contract. Page 258 records that the hospitality of the sons of San Juan de Dios had its beginning in the time of the presidents Mota and Vera, because in the year 1600 the first religious of that order passed from Europe to New Spain with royal licence and with the faculty to found where they should find comfort; that the citizens who were confrades of the Santa Veracruz y Sangre de Cristo moved the Council and the city government to propose to Fr. Bruno de Avila, elder brother of the Casa de los Desamparados of Mexico, that the hospital be handed to him in administration with the goods it had; and that the crown ordered five hundred pesos a year to be given from the royal treasury to the confraternity for the support of that hospital. The conference took place on 2 July 1606 with the licence of the bishop D. Alonso de la Mota, and page 258 names the seventeen men who appeared for the confraternity, among them the treasurer of the royal treasury, the fiscal of the royal audiencia, the royal accountant and an alcalde ordinario, with Fr. Bruno de Avila and Fr. Andres de Alcaraz for the order.
The conditions are the substance of this entry, because they show a lay body handing over an institution without handing over its property. Pages 258 and 259 set them out: that the religious would receive the goods delivered to them, that the five hundred pesos assigned would be put out at interest, that the goods of the confraternity would remain independent of those of the hospital and stay in the hands of its own mayordomo, who would collect the alms, and that the confraternity would solicit alms apart from those of the sick; that the church would always keep the title of the Santa Veracruz and the confrades be joint brothers of the religion; that the Holy Cross was always to stand on the high altar; that if at any time the religious withdrew, the goods of the confraternity and of the hospital, and whatever should be acquired thereafter, would revert; that the confraternity hall and the room where the insignia are kept were reserved to its service; that the religious would help with the feasts; and that the hospital was to receive all the sick, even those who were incurable, because the order was to bring, being able, religious who understood surgery and curing. A reversion clause, a separate treasury, a reserved room and a duty to admit the incurable, written in 1606 on the western frontier of New Spain.
The transfer was not complete until a court approved it, and the court kept the crown's rights in the instrument. Page 259 records that these conditions, reciprocally accepted, were presented in the royal audiencia, and that with what the fiscal said they were approved and licence was conceded for the said fathers of San Juan de Dios to be received into the administration of the hospital, without prejudice to the royal patronage and to jurisdictional right; and that possession was given on 11 July 1606, the president being D. Santiago de Vera. Nine days separate the private conference from the judicial act. The same audiencia whose foundation and jurisdiction this corpus records separately is here doing the ordinary work of that jurisdiction: hearing a fiscal, approving a contract and reserving a right.
The contract preserved the confraternity on paper and the confraternity decayed anyway, and the chronicler says so because it happened to him. Page 259 records that once disembarrassed of the administration of the hospital the confrades gave themselves to the cult of the church, and that the memory of the confraternity was almost lost and only a few devout persons persevered; that the election of rector, mayordomo and deputies was made now one way and now another, and that the secular city government had forgotten the vote by which it was entitled to name the rector. Mota Padilla then records that the lot fell to him, that on 21 June 1737 he was made rector, and that with that motive he had to investigate the origin he reports, having no books of the confraternity but only various ecclesiastical and secular archives. An institution that keeps its property and loses its function is a real outcome and this entry keeps it next to the contract that was meant to prevent it.
Two cautions belong on the record with the rest. First, this entry establishes nothing about whether the hospital for sick Indians that the decree of 1553 told the oidores to consider at Compostela was ever built; the chronicle prints the order and not an outcome, and the seat of the kingdom moved to Guadalajara in the years that followed. Second, the Cristobal Romero named on page 201 among the founders of the confraternity bears the same name as the encomendero whom pages 153 and 154 record as condemned to death by the viceroy for shielding the Indians of his encomienda at the Mixton and then pardoned; the chronicle does not identify the two, and neither does this entry. What the coincidence does show is the size of the group in question: the same few dozen Spanish householders appear as conquerors, as encomenderos and as the founders of the charity of their own city, and the chronicle records them in all three capacities without noticing any tension in it.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 199 to 201, 235 and 256 to 259 of the Mexico 1870 printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742; the manuscript was not seen and the editors' transcription is not tested here. The licence of 1557, the foundation of 1589 and the contract of 1606 are reported as the chronicle prints them and have not been checked against any archive, none being reachable from this container. Nothing here establishes how many beds either hospital had, how many patients they treated, whether Indians were admitted to them or treated separately, what the five hundred pesos actually bought, what the order's own accounts show, or whether the reversion clause was ever tested. The chronicler's remark on page 201 that the city did not suffer plagues even when the whole kingdom was contagious is his and is not repeated here as a finding.