Sacro y Real Monte de Piedad de Ánimas: pledge credit for the poor of Mexico City, 1775
A silver magnate gave 300,000 pesos to open a pawn bank in Mexico City in February 1775 that lent against clothes and jewels and charged nothing, asking only whatever alms the borrower chose to leave. Its own printed returns count 755,191 loans and 13.5 million pesos advanced in the first twenty-two years. The same returns record the alms turning into a fixed three per cent, and a later compendium records the fund collapsing to 105,809 pesos by 1814.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of credit in colonial Spanish America run to the merchant guild, the mining bank and the church's censo lending; the pawn bank that lent to the city's poor without interest, and that still trades in Mexico City under the same name, is usually a sentence about a philanthropic count. The dates and the terms are quoted here from the Audiencia's own compilation of 1787, and the volume of business from two annual directories opened page by page — a run of figures nobody else sets side by side, which is what makes the twenty-two-year totals checkable rather than assertable. The same pages carry the cost: the free loan lasted eleven years before a royal cédula priced the alms at three per cent payable in advance, seventy thousand pledges had gone to auction unredeemed by 1796, the premises were confiscated Jesuit property, and the endowment was a small fraction of one man's silver.
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 foundation is registered as auto DXX in Beleña's compilation of the orders of the Audiencia of New Spain. The king admitted "la generosa donacion hecha por el Sr. D. Pedro Romero de Terreros, Caballero del Orden de Calatrava y Conde de Regla, de la cantidad de trescientos mil pesos efectivos que desde luego depositó en estas Caxas Reales para fondo de un Monte de Piedad" to be established in the capital under the Real Patronato, its stated purpose being that public necessities be relieved and suffrages said for the souls of the dead, "prestándose dineros sobre alhajas ó prendas que se dexasen empeñadas". The royal cédula of 2 June 1774 ordered it carried out, and the establishment opened on 25 February 1775.
The donor's money was silver money. The Mexican encyclopaedia of 1854, in its article on the Mineral del Monte, dates the first of that district's three eras to "el primer conde de Regla, D. Pedro Romero de Terreros, quien con su talento estraordinario puso en movimiento la mayor parte de sus minas cuando iba á abandonarlas D. José Bustamante", and puts the silver extracted at twenty-five million pesos. On that figure the endowment of the pawn bank was of the order of one part in eighty of what the mines yielded him, and the labour that produced it was the labour of the Real del Monte workings.
The terms at the opening were a loan at no charge. The 1854 compendium states that "en 1775 no se cobraba por la cantidad del empeño cosa alguna; dejando á los individuos dieran voluntariamente la limosna que por bien tuvieran", and describes the institution's object as lending the needy the sums they required on their clothes and jewels, "librándolos así de caer en manos de frios y egoistas usureros". The claim that the first years charged nothing rests on this later source alone and is carried accordingly.
The voluntary alms did not stay voluntary, and the colonial printings date the change precisely. Beleña's own footnote to auto DXX records that "por Real Cédula de 8 de Diciembre de 1786 se manda, entre otras cosas, que la limosna con que al tiempo del empeño deben contribuir las personas á quienes socorre el Monte se regule á razon de un tres por ciento al año". Both the 1792 and the 1797 guides to Mexico City print the same notice under the institution's table of operations, that by the new resolution the alms are to be given at the time of the pledge rather than at redemption. A charitable gratuity had become a priced, prepaid fee.
The scale is printed annually and can be read twice. The guide for 1792 sets out, in columns of individuals, pesos and masses, that from 25 February 1775 to the end of November 1790 the Monte had relieved 525,699 individuals with 9,694,530 pesos, and 39,425 more with 577,985 pesos in the year to November 1791 — 565,124 individuals and 10,272,515 pesos in all; that 505,727 pledges had been redeemed for 9,193,528 pesos, with 244,675 pesos given in alms; and that 49,217 masses had been said.
The guide for 1797 continues the same series to the end of 1796: 755,191 individuals relieved since the creation, with 13,562,492 pesos; 684,989 redemptions, returning 11,714,280 pesos; 315,528 pesos collected in alms; 64,480 masses said. Pledges were taken on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, redemptions made on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
The two printed series carry their own hard edge. Subtracting redemptions from loans in the 1797 table leaves about 70,000 pledges unredeemed by the end of 1796, and about 1.85 million pesos lent against goods never recovered by their owners; the institution's officer list for that year includes a Juez de Almoneda, the judge of the auction at which forfeited pledges were sold. This subtraction is arithmetic performed here on the printed columns, not a figure the guides state.
Governance was public rather than private, and the 1797 guide names it post by post: "Juez Protector y Presidente de la Junta particular, el Señor Oydor Don Cosme de Mier y Trespalacios" — a sitting judge of the Audiencia — with a Director, a Contador, a Tesorero who was the honorary royal officer of the treasury of Mexico, a Depositario, the Juez de Almoneda, an Interventor, a Capellán and an officer of the accounting office. Beleña's auto records the same arrangement from the other end: the foundation was placed "baxo el Real Patronato", the crown offering its protection and that of its successor kings to perpetuate it.
Where the office stood is part of the record. The 1854 compendium states that the establishment opened in the part assigned to it of the house of San Pedro y San Pablo, "que habia sido de los jesuitas de entonces espulsos" — the Jesuits having been expelled from the Spanish dominions in 1767 and their property seized. The relief of the poor was housed in confiscated premises.
The institution was not proof against its own officers. The same compendium reports that "por algunos malos manejos de los empleados, los fondos y los productos que debiera haber habido, quedaron reducidos en 1814 á 105.809 pesos, 3 reales, 4 octavos", a loss later repaired, the house holding a fund of more than 400,000 pesos of its own by the middle of the nineteenth century. The compiler's explanation of why the free loan ended is his own and is partisan — that the men relieved abused the benefit and, once out of trouble, showed themselves ungrateful — and is reported here as his account rather than as a finding.
What this evidence can carry should be stated plainly. The two guides are directories printing what the foundation reported of itself, without an audit beside them; Beleña abstracts what was ordered, with the cédula dated in his margin, not what was performed; the 1854 dictionary writes some seventy years after the events and gives no citation at the point of use. Together they establish the terms, the dates, the governance and the order of magnitude of the lending. They do not establish who the borrowers were, what a typical loan was worth, or how the forfeited pledges were priced at auction.