Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación (1573)
The 148 ordinances Philip II signed at the Bosque de Segovia on 13 July 1573, which struck the word "conquista" out of every future contract with the crown, replaced it with "pacificación" and "población", and set down in advance how an American town was to be sited and laid out. They arrived after Mexico and Peru had already fallen, and the prohibitions in them had to be reissued for a century afterwards — both facts are on the record here.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of 1573 is thin and tends to one of two summaries: a public-relations rebrand of conquest, or proof of Spanish benevolence. Neither cites the text. This object quotes the operative clauses from a digitised printing of the Recopilación opened page by page, gives the marginal attribution that ties each one back to a numbered 1573 ordinance, names the archive shelfmark of the original, and puts the two strongest objections — that the rules came after the conquests, and that they had to be reissued for a century — beside the achievement as sourced claims rather than omitting them.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Philip II promulgated the Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias on 13 July 1573 at the Bosque de Segovia; they run to 148 capítulos, and the original is held in the Archivo General de Indias, Indiferente General, legajo 427, libro XXIX, folios 63 to 93.
They were part of the code the jurist Juan de Ovando was drafting for the Council of the Indies between 1569 and 1575, a project cut short by Ovando's death on 8 September 1575 while he presided over the Council; the code was never finished, and its material passed instead into the later compilations.
The best-known provision survives verbatim as Recopilación libro IV, título 1, ley vj — "Que en las capitulaciones se excuse la palabra conquista, y usen las de pacificacion, y poblacion" — ordering that in all contracts for new discoveries "se excuse esta palabra conquista, y en su lugar se use de las de pacificacion, y poblacion", so that the word should not "ocasione, ni dé color á lo capitulado, para que se pueda hacer fuerza ni agravio á los Indios"; the printed margin attributes the law to Ordenanza 29 de Poblaciones.
The ordinances legislated the physical form of the American city. As codified in Recopilación libro IV, título 7, ley j — margin "D. Felipe II Ordenanza 39. 7. y 40. de Poblaciones" — the site was to be chosen "sin perjuicio de los Indios y naturales, ó con su libre consentimiento", and the town laid out "por sus plazas, calles y solares á cordel y regla, comenzando desde la plaza mayor, y sacando desde ella las calles á las puertas y caminos principales", leaving enough open ground that however much the settlement grew it could always be extended in the same form.
The pacification procedure was ethnographic before it was military. As codified in libro IV, título 4, ley j — margin "D. Felipe II Ordenanza 139. de Poblaciones" — settlers were first to inform themselves of "la diversidad de Naciones, Lenguas, Idolatrías, Sectas, y Parcialidades" of the province and of the lords the natives obeyed, and to draw them into friendship by trade and gifts, "con mucho amor y caricia … sin codicia de las suyas"; ley ij, from the following ordinance, directs that once peace is settled the preachers proceed "usando de los medios mas suaves", and not begin by reprehending the natives' vices or taking away their women or their idols.
The chronology is the first honest qualification: the ordinances belong to the settlement phase of the empire, after the discovery phase under the Catholic Monarchs and the conquest and occupation phase under Charles I. Mexico and Peru had fallen half a century earlier. The 1573 rules governed what came next, not what had already happened.
The second qualification is that the norms were neither new nor obeyed. The same título of the Recopilación that carries the 1573 ordinances on pacification also carries a law of Charles V of 1523 forbidding war on the Indians "ni otro qualquier mal, ni daño" and the taking of anything of theirs without payment; and the marginal apparatus of the law abolishing the word "conquista" records it being issued again by Philip IV at Madrid on 11 June 1621 and again under Charles II. A provision restated across a century is a provision that was being disregarded.