Gerónimo de Mendieta's Historia eclesiástica indiana (written by 1596, first printed Mexico, 1870)
A Franciscan history of New Spain written under a written order from Rome, dedicated to a superior in 1611, and not printed until 1870 — 259 years between the dedication and the press. Its second book describes Nahua religion, law, schooling and marriage before any account of the conversion, and its index names the harm Spaniards did to the Indians in the same column as the favours of Charles V and Philip II.
Why this wins its question: The Historia eclesiástica indiana is usually met as a citation inside other people's footnotes - a source for Motolinía, for the Colegio de Santa Cruz, for the twelve Franciscans - and almost never as a book with a history of its own. Read as a book, its front matter answers the questions the footnotes skip: who ordered it and in what words (a Latin patent from Rome dated 27 June 1571, with a brief that is openly partisan), when it was offered to a press and to whom (Vitoria, 1 July 1611), and who finally paid for the type (a private collector in Mexico who had been setting his own volumes by hand and had just lost his press). The same volume supplies the counterweight without any editorial help: a table of contents in which the harm done by Spaniards to the Indians occupies chapters of its own, and a chapter that measures Nahua child-rearing against Aristotle and finds Aristotle followed better by people who had never read him.
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 title page states the case plainly: "HISTORIA ECLESIÁSTICA INDIANA, OBRA ESCRITA Á FINES DEL SIGLO XVI POR FRAY GERÓNIMO DE MENDIETA, De la Orden de San Francisco. LA PUBLICA POR PRIMERA VEZ JOAQUIN GARCIA ICAZBALCETA", imprint "MÉXICO, ANTIGUA LIBRERIA, PORTAL DE AGUSTINOS Nº 3. M.DCCC.LXX." A sixteenth-century history of New Spain reached print for the first time in 1870, in Mexico.
The book exists because a superior in Rome ordered it. The volume opens with the "OBEDIENCIA DEL GENERAL DE LA ÓRDEN PARA EL AUTOR" - a Latin patent in which Frater Christophorus de Capitefontium, Minister General of the Friars Minor, commands Mendieta "per sanctam obedientiam" to return to the Province of Santo Evangelio, and mandates that, because in the Mexican province many things worthy of memory were done by the Order's fathers in the conversion of the gentiles, he compose commentaries on them "lingua castellana" and send them to Rome as soon as he can. It is dated "Romæ apud Aramcæli, Anno Domini MDLXXI, die Junii xxvij."
The commission fixes the book's brief and therefore its bias. What the Minister General asked for was an account of what "ab Ordinis nostri sanctis Patribus gesta sunt" - the deeds of the Order's own saintly fathers - so praise of the Franciscans of New Spain is the assignment the book was given rather than a conclusion it reached. Any reading of the Historia has to carry that with it.
The manuscript was ready for a press in 1611 and did not reach one. The Carta dedicatoria is addressed "Á NUESTRO PADRE FRAY ANTONIO DE TREJO, LECTOR JUBILADO Y COMISARIO GENERAL DE TODA LA FAMILIA DE LAS INDIAS DE NUESTRO SERÁFICO PADRE SAN FRANCISCO", and closes "En nuestro Convento de S. Francisco de Vitoria, en primero de Julio de 1611. FR. JOAN DE DOMAYQUIA." Domayquia writes that Mendieta was "natural de esta ciudad de Vitoria, donde yo nací, y pariente de parientes mios", and that the friar was "casi de los primeros que las poblaron" and wrote the history of the conquest "como lo vió por sus ojos". Two hundred and fifty-nine years separate that dedication from the imprint on the title page.
The 1870 volume says nothing about why the book waited. The Advertencia accounts only for its own delays - the Historia had been announced in 1866, in the prologue to the second volume of the editor's Coleccion de Documentos para la Historia de México, as the third volume of that series, and appears instead "como obra enteramente separada" so that a buyer would not hold a volume labelled third with no first and second. Nothing in the front matter explains the gap between 1611 and 1870, and this object does not fill it from elsewhere.
The printing was a private undertaking, not a state or academic one. Icazbalceta writes that the first two volumes of the Coleccion "fueron impresos en mi casa, y en gran parte por mis propias manos", that the press passed "en 1867 á poder de otras personas" and that this volume was executed there under his own immediate direction; he ends by declining to continue the Coleccion - "solo, sin auxilio de nadie, he publicado tres gruesos volúmenes" - and by hoping the materials he has gathered, which will stay unpublished, fall one day into hands able to continue the work. The piece is dated "México, 31 de Diciembre de 1869."
The order of the work puts the Nahuas before the friars. The Indice shows Libro II running from the creation of the sun and the death of the gods through the temples, the idols, the fasts, the calendar and the human sacrifices to the upbringing of children, the marriage ceremonies, the customs of war, "De la judicatura y modo de proceder que tenian en los pleitos" at page 134, the punishments given to offenders, the penalty for drunkenness, the dances, the migration and genealogy of the peoples, the kings of Mexico and the election and burial of lords - and Libro III, "en que se cuenta el modo como fué introducida y plantada la fe", does not begin until page 169.
Chapter XX of Libro II is headed "De cómo estos indios general y naturalmente criaban á sus hijos en la niñez, siguiendo las doctrinas de los filósofos, sin haber leido sus libros." Mendieta takes Aristotle's precepts on rearing children from the seventh book of the Politics, chapter seventeen, and concludes of the first of them that "ningunas gentes lo guardaron mejor que los indios, sin haber leido ni oido al Filósofo". He then testifies in the first person: in the valley of Toluca, one of the coldest parts of New Spain, going out at dawn each Sunday to say mass, he found Indian women washing their babies in streams turned to ice, and, going stiff with cold himself, was amazed that they did not die.
The chapters that follow print Nahua moral discourse at length and in the first person, and they leave the gods in the plural. The exhortation of an Indian farmer to his married son runs "así alcanzarás la gracia de los dioses y de los mayores", warns him off another man's wife "porque pecarás contra los dioses, y á ti harás mucho daño", tells him to work with his hands and eat what he earns, not to murmur or carry a quarrel back with a message, and closes on the point that "de los dioses es dar á cada uno segun á ellos les place". A Franciscan history set these speeches in type without converting them.
The cost is in the table of contents, next to the credit. Libro IV lists "Cap. 12. Del ingenio y habilidad de los indios para todos oficios, y primero se trata de los que ellos usaban antes que viniesen los españoles" at page 403 and the founding of the colegio de Santa Cruz "para enseñar á los indios en todo ejercicio de letras" at page 414; it also lists "Cap. 29. De los favores que el Emperador D. Cárlos ... dió á los indios" at 469 and the favours of Philip II at 483 - and then, at 491, "Cap. 31. Del daño que se ha seguido despues que las órdenes no se juntan para dar aviso á nuestros reyes católicos de las necesidades de los indios", and at 501 "Cap. 33. De muchos daños que la frecuente comunicacion de los españoles ha causado á los indios para su cristiandad."
The prefatory life of the author is a eulogy and reads like one, so its figures are treated here as the prologuist's rather than as established. The Prólogo al devoto lector opens by arguing that historians are either learned and unholy, and so write "falsedades, malicias, sátiras y otras bellaquerías", or holy and "idiotas y sin letras"; it then says Mendieta was a son of the Province of Cantabria and a native of Vitoria, that he "murió viejísimo, muy cerca de los noventa años de su edad, y sesenta de morador en las Indias", that his superiors ordered him to write "por santa obediencia" and that he excused himself as far as he could, and that he "no dice cosa en esta historia que no la hubiese visto por sus propios ojos", taking the rest from trustworthy witnesses, from notarised relations and from papers in convent archives. Round numbers in a funeral notice are weak evidence of a birth date.
The same prologue names the book's own sources inside the Order and so shows it is a compilation as well as a testimony: the most memorable things done by the first twelve Franciscans, it says, had already been written down by two of them - "el santo padre Fr. Francisco Jimenez en la vida que escribió del santo Fr. Martin de Valencia, y el santo padre Fr. Toribio de Motolinia en un borrador que dejó escrito de su mano."