Propios y arbitrios: the audited municipal purse of the Spanish American cities
Cities in the Indies held their own endowed revenues, and the law hedged them: no extraordinary spending above three thousand maravedís without licence, leases auctioned to the highest bidder, nothing spent on banquets for visiting judges under a thousand-ducat penalty, accounts taken yearly and reported to the Council. Two printed statements show what the rules governed — 108,669 pesos at Mexico, 13,410 at a second city — and what leaked through them.
Why this wins its question: "Colonial municipal finance" is a phrase that usually arrives without a single figure or rule attached, and English accounts of the Spanish American cabildo tend to stop at the sale of offices. This object quotes the actual constraints from the law book — the three-thousand-maravedí ceiling on extraordinary spending, the compulsory auction with the sitting lessee barred, the thousand-ducat penalty for feasting a visiting oidor out of city funds, the annual accounts reported to the Council and the oidor who reviewed them — and then sets beside them two printed statements showing what a city of the Indies actually raised and paid: 108,669 pesos at Mexico across four named branches, a water judge and two official weight-checkers on the payroll, and, in the same columns, a thousand pesos for a ceremonial standard and a councillors' perquisite carved out of the meat revenue until a visitor-general abolished it.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Municipal spending in the Indies was capped by law and the cap is small. Libro IIII, título XIII of the Recopilación, "De los Propios, y Pósitos", ley ij — Felipe II, Madrid 4 October 1564, with later confirmations — orders the ayuntamientos, justicias and regimientos of the cities, towns and places of the Indies to keep the laws and ordinances in the distribution and spending of the propios, "y no hagan gastos extraordinarios, que excedan de tres mil maravedis, ni sitúen salarios en ninguna cantidad, sin preceder licencia nuestra", on pain of the sum being recovered from the persons and goods of those who authorised it, and forbids any regidor to go on commissions at the city's salary.
Leases of municipal revenue had to go to open auction, with the sitting lessee expressly barred from pre-empting. Ley iij, Felipe II, Madrid 25 February 1568 and Lisbon 10 December 1581, orders that rents and propios whose leasing belongs to the justicia and regimiento "se rematen y dén en arrendamiento á los que mas dieren por ellas, y los Arrendadores del tiempo antecedente, no las puedan tomar por el tanto, procurando que siempre se rematen en el mayor postor". Ley viij, 18 August 1593, requires one of the oidores to be present at the auction of the provisioning of meat and candles and of the leasing of the propios in cities where an Audiencia sits, with notice to the Acuerdo before the award is made.
One law is aimed squarely at the entertainment of visiting officials. Ley iiij — Felipe II, El Pardo 12 April 1574 and San Lorenzo 25 August 1596, Felipe IIII, Madrid 22 February 1627 — provides that in the reception of prelates, presidents, oidores, alcaldes, fiscales, corregidores "y otros qualesquier Ministros", when they travel to their posts or pass through visiting their districts, no expense be made from the propios "en fiestas, comidas, ni hospedages", nor may the ministers accept it, under a penalty of a thousand ducats for each contravention, to be charged at their visita or residencia and executed without remission; and cabildos are not to have such spending allowed in their accounts.
The audit was annual, external and reported upward. Ley vj, 16 May 1573, orders viceroys, presidents and governors to have the propios accounts of the cities of their districts taken each year by the royal officials and to send the reason for them to the Council of the Indies, "para que se vea y entienda su gasto y distribucion". Ley vij, from the Ordenanza de Audiencias of 1563, orders that an oidor, by annual turn beginning with the most junior, review the accounts taken by the city cabildo wherever an Audiencia resides. Ley viiij requires cities holding a grant of the penas de Cámara to send authenticated testimony of what their propios yield and how it was spent whenever they ask for the grant to be renewed, on pain of no further renewal.
What the rules governed can be read off two printed statements of account. For the city of Mexico the documentary section of the printed Informe del Marqués de Sonora gives a "UNION DE CAUDALES" of four branches — propios, pósito 12,500 pesos from the grain levy, sisa 50,000 pesos from a duty on barrels of spirits, wine and vinegar, and obras públicas 7,450 pesos from the fourteen meat tables and the abasto contractor's payment towards the causeway of San Antonio Abad — totalling 108,669 pesos of public revenue, which puts the propios line at about 38,719 pesos. The second statement, for another city, totals its propios at 13,410 pesos 1 real 6 granos, of which the Alhóndiga yielded 1,000 pesos and the meat shambles 2,258.
The expenditure side names posts rather than functions, and the list is the most concrete evidence of what a colonial city bought with its own money. At Mexico: a juez superintendente at 500 pesos, fifteen regidores at 33 pesos each, the corregidor as president of the Junta de Policía at 550, two deputies of propios at 300 each, a procurador general, an obrero mayor and a juez de aguas at 300 each, an alcaide of the Alameda at 200, two deputies of the pósito and alhóndiga at 150 each, a juez superintendente of Chapultepec at 400, a treasurer of propios at 2,300, the collector of the grain levy at 750, two porteros almotacenes at 200 each and two fieles repesadores — official weight-checkers — at 400. The second city's list includes a procurador de pobres at 100 pesos, an advocate at 200 and an agent resident in Mexico at 100.
The same statements record what the rules did not stop. The second city pays its alférez real a thousand pesos of ayuda de costa "para sufragar á los crecidos gastos del Pendon" — ceremonial expenditure of an order comparable to the salaries of half a dozen officers — and the law itself provided in ley x, 9 June 1584, that mourning for the deaths of royal persons be paid from the propios of the cities, "con que no haya exceso". Mexico City's own 1830 report describes a further leak of exactly the kind the audit laws contemplate: of the 8,400 pesos the meat tables paid, 1,200 were withdrawn under a cédula of 12 February 1761 and shared out among the regidores as "propina de carnicería", until Gálvez ordered the whole sum into the propios account and the perquisite taken away from the capitulares.
Dedicated funds were kept physically separate as well as legally. Mexico City's granary money sat in "la arca del pósito de tres llaves", one key with the corregidor, one with the deputy of the pósito and one with the treasurer; the maize charge collected in the Alhóndiga was paid into that hall's own chest on the first of each month and, by article 37 of Gálvez's arrangement, deliberately not mixed with the product of the three cuartillas, with the escribano keeping a separate book for each. Separation of accounts and separation of custody were the same policy.
The limits of this evidence are real and worth naming. The Recopilación states the standing rules of 1680 as reprinted in 1791; it is evidence of the regime, not of compliance, and the repetition of ley iiij across 1574, 1596 and 1627 is itself a sign that the banquets kept happening. The two statements of account are undated in the pages read and reach print in a nineteenth-century edition, so their year is inferred from the report they accompany rather than read off the document, which is why the figures are carried at 0.75; the propios line at Mexico is a subtraction performed here on the printed column, not a figure the page states. Nothing here shows what share of municipal revenue actually reached public works in any given year.