Motolinía's Historia de los indios de la Nueva España (1541)
The account finished at Tehuacán in 1541 by fray Toribio de Benavente, one of the twelve Franciscans sent to Mexico in 1523, who signed himself with the Nahuatl word for "poor". Its first chapter catalogues ten plagues: smallpox, the war dead, famine, the overseers, the tributes, the gold mines, the rebuilding of Mexico City, the branding of slaves, the road to the mines, and the Spaniards' own factions — an accounting of the cost of the conquest, by a member of the mission that followed it.
Why this wins its question: The ten plagues are usually met second-hand — a phrase in a survey, or a single line about smallpox — and almost never in Motolinía's own sequence, which puts epidemic disease, war dead, famine, the overseers, the tribute, the mines, the rebuilding of the capital, the branding iron, the road, and Spanish faction on one list. Each of the ten is quoted here from the printed page, in order, with the friar's own framing of them as God's chastisement left standing rather than paraphrased away. It is also stated plainly that this eyewitness was a member of the evangelising mission and that the received text is a nineteenth-century editor's reconstruction — the two facts most often omitted when the passage is quoted for effect in either direction.
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 work opens with an Epístola Proemial addressed to "Illmo. Señor Don Antonio Pimentel, sexto conde de Benavente" and closes it "Hecha en el convento de Santa María de la Concepción de Tehuacan, dia del glorioso Apóstol San Matías, año de la redencion humana 1541", signed "Pobre y menor siervo y capellan de V. I. S. — MOTOLINIA, FRAY TORIBIO DE PAREDES".
The first chapter dates the mission: "En el año del Señor de 1523, dia de la conversion de San Pablo, que es á 25 de Enero, el Padre Fray Martin de Valencia, de santa memoria, con once frailes sus compañeros, partieron de España para venir á esta tierra de Anáhuac", sent by the Franciscan minister general Francisco de los Ángeles and by express command of the Emperor "para la conversion de los Indios naturales de esta tierra de Anáhuac, ahora llamada Nueva España".
The same chapter frames what follows as a reckoning: "Hirió Dios y castigó esta tierra, y á los que en ella se hallaron, así naturales como extranjeros, con diez plagas trabajosas." The ten are then set out in order.
The first plague is smallpox, which he says came in one of Pánfilo de Narváez's ships with an infected man; "en las mas provincias murió mas de la mitad de la gente, y en otras poco menos", because the Indians did not know the remedy and bathed as was their custom and "morian como chinches á montones". Whole households died together, and for want of anyone to bury the dead the houses were pulled down on top of them, "de manera que su casa era su sepultura". They called it the great leprosy, from the pocks; eleven years later measles arrived with a Spaniard, and was called the little leprosy.
The second plague is the dead of the conquest of Mexico itself, of which he writes that between the two sides "dicen ser mas los que murieron en Jerusalem, cuando la destruyó Tito y Vespasiano"; the third is the famine that followed, because with the war no one had sown, and the maize the Spaniards had brought from the islands failed too.
The fourth plague is the calpixques or overseers set over the repartimientos — servants or slaves of the conquerors, "y aunque por la mayor parte son labradores de España, hánse enseñoreado de esta tierra y mandan á los señores principales naturales de ella como si fuesen esclavos"; in the first years they were "tan absolutos … en maltratar á los Indios y en cargarlos y enviarlos lejos de su tierra y darles otros muchos trabajos, que muchos Indios murieron por su causa".
The fifth plague is tribute. The Indians paid first from the gold accumulated over generations in the temples and in graves; when that was gone, "vendian los hijos y las tierras á los mercaderes, y faltando de cumplir el tributo por ello, hartos murieron, unos con tormentos y otros en prisiones crueles, porque los trataban bestialmente, y los estimaban en menos que á bestias".
The sixth is the gold mines: the enslaved Indians who had died in them by the time he wrote "no se podrian contar", and he judges the gold of the land to have become "como otro becerro por Dios adorado". The seventh is the rebuilding of Mexico City, where in the first years more people worked than on the temple of Jerusalem, some crushed by beams, others buried when buildings were pulled down to raise others, especially where the principal temples were being demolished.
The eighth plague is the enslavement and branding of Indians for the mines. They were brought to Mexico from all parts "tan grandes manadas como de ovejas, para echarles el hierro", and the haste was such that people were taken as slaves who by no law were slaves; those handed over bore not only the royal brand but the letters of each successive owner, "tanto que toda la cara traian escrita, porque de cuantos era comprado y vendido llevaba letreros".
The ninth is the service of the mines, sixty leagues off, the porters carrying their own food; the road, he writes, was so covered with the dead that "apenas se podia pasar sino sobre hombres muertos ó sobre huesos", and there were so many birds and crows feeding that they "hacian gran sombra al sol", for which cause many villages were depopulated, other Indians fleeing to the hills and leaving their houses and holdings abandoned. The tenth is the factions and armed quarrels among the Spaniards themselves, which he says put the land in the greatest danger of all.
The witness is an interested one, and the text does not hide it. The author is a friar of the mission whose success he is recording, he addresses the work to a Castilian grandee, and he reads the catastrophe as divine chastisement rather than as a policy outcome — the plagues are the ones with which "hirió Dios y castigó esta tierra". His quantities are impressions of a man on the ground, not counts, and are cited here as such.
The wording is an editor's. The text read here is Joaquín García Icazbalceta's Mexico 1858 printing, made from manuscript and collated against the earlier Kingsborough edition, whose footnotes record variant readings, words present in one witness and missing in the other, and passages the English edition lacks. No autograph is being quoted.