The Real Audiencia of Nueva Galicia (1548-1572): a second high court built for a frontier, and what it was allowed to decide
A royal decree of 13 February 1548 put four oidores at Compostela with first-instance jurisdiction over twelve leagues and appellate jurisdiction over a frontier kingdom. A second decree of 18 May 1572 raised the court to a chancery with its own seal, and in 1578 its authority in its district was declared equal to Mexico's in its own. Mota Padilla, a lawyer of that court, prints the decrees, the salaries, the reserved cases and the jurisdictional war with Mexico that ran for a quarter-century.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of Spanish colonial justice run through Mexico and Lima, and the audiencias of the interior appear, if at all, as administrative furniture. This object prints, from the sheets of a Mexico 1870 imprint of a 1742 chronicle, the actual founding terms of the second court of New Spain: the decree date, the number of judges, the twelve-league first instance, the four classes of case reserved away from it, the salary in maravedis, the powers of residencia and audit, the twenty-four-year fight with Mexico over recursos de fuerza that Guadalajara lost in 1551 and substantially won in 1572 and 1578, and the rule that left the bench governing the kingdom whenever the viceroy was elsewhere. It also refuses the easy version. The same court that was ordered to report on a hospital for sick Indians and to strip encomiendas from encomenderos who failed to teach doctrine was the court in whose district a cathedral was funded one third from the Indians, and the man who tells us all of it was an advocate of that court, writing its case. Both are claims here, with the advocacy named.
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 court was created by a decree the chronicle dates precisely, and it was created subordinate. Page 198 records that Charles V and Queen Juana gave the order by real cedula of 13 February 1548 that in the city of Compostela an audiencia of four oidores be founded, sitting as alcaldes mayores, and that it be subordinate to the audiencia of Mexico. The first oidores are named on the same and the following page: Hernando Martinez de la Mancha of Segovia, Lorenzo Lebron de Quinones of Santo Domingo, Juan Melendez de Sepulveda, the licenciado Miguel de Contreras Guevara of Penafiel, with Diego de Navarrete as alguacil mayor. Nueva Galicia thus received a resident bench eleven years before the Audiencia of Charcas and within seven years of the war of the Mixton that had nearly emptied the kingdom of Spaniards.
What the court could decide is stated as a list, and the list is the whole point of the institution. Page 199 records that the audiencia was to know in first instance all suits arising within twelve leagues around, and on appeal all cases arising in the kingdom that came from ordinary judges; that appeals in criminal causes in which the parties wished to pursue them further went to the audiencia of Mexico and not to Compostela, except where the penalty was death; and that it was forbidden to hear causes of mayorazgos, of vassals, of fortresses, and of the death or serious wounding of a knight. The oidores were assigned six hundred and fifty thousand maravedis of salary. A further decree of 19 March 1548 gave them the government of the whole kingdom, the provision of corregimientos, authority to send judges of residencia, to take the accounts of the royal officials and to appoint the doorkeepers of their own court. A frontier eight hundred leagues from the Council of the Indies was given a standing court that could hear a peasant's suit and audit a treasurer in the same week.
For a quarter of a century the court's real business was a jurisdictional war with Mexico, and the chronicle prints both the losses and the wins. Page 204 records that the audiencia claimed the faculty to hear recursos de fuerza, that Mexico denied it on the ground that Guadalajara held only oidores sitting as alcaldes mayores in whom the government resided and not a chancery, and that the crown declared against Guadalajara on 31 March 1551. Page 205 records the contest over the provinces of Avalos, Colima, Zacatula and Copala, a criminal case in the Valle de Tuchimilco in which Guadalajara sent a commissioner and Mexico arrested him, and the answer of 27 April 1574 that those provinces remained subordinate to Mexico, with Colima and Zacatula later excepted in Guadalajara's favour. The chronicler treats the rivalry as productive rather than shameful, calling it a laudable competition to know the zeal the two courts had.
The elevation of 1572 is the decisive act and the chronicle gives the terms. Page 205 records that by cedula of 18 May 1572 the crown created the audiencia of Guadalajara, raising it to a chancery, remitted its royal seal, named as its first president Dr. Geronimo de Orozco, oidor of the audiencia of Nueva Galicia, and increased the oidores' salary to three thousand ducados, the fiscal being equalled to them afterwards. Page 205 also records the declaration of 5 July 1578 that the audiencia of Guadalajara had within its district the same authority that Mexico had in its own, and that if either held some authority over the other it was reciprocal. The office of seal and register was provided on 14 March 1574 and the seal itself was received on 15 December 1574 with the ceremony page 205 describes: carried in a box on a mule under a canopy of brocade, the president on its right hand and the senior oidor on its left, the other oidores, the justice and city government and the nobility of the city behind, and the alferez real with the royal standard.
The court also governed, and the crown said so in the sharpest form available: it governed when the viceroy was not there. Page 206 records the order of 21 May 1576 that the viceroys had the whole of the government, and that the president was obliged to inform the audiencia of it; and it prints the crown's answer of 27 April 1575 that although the government was committed to the viceroy, in his absence it was left to the royal audiencia, only the government of war and the gratification of service being reserved to him. The clause quoted runs that on the accounts and orders given, in all other matters touching government, it will be discussed with those cases reserved to the viceroy, and remitted to him and to that audiencia. This is the constitutional core of the office and it is the reason a frontier kingdom did not go ungoverned between one viceroy and the next.
The bench was also used as an instrument of Indian policy, and the chronicle prints the instruments as it found them. Page 200 records a decree of 13 May 1553 ordering the oidores to report whether it would be fitting to found a hospital at Compostela in which sick Indians should be cured, that this should be of royal patronage, and that ordinances be made for it; a decree of 10 May 1554 that care be taken that the encomenderos instruct and teach their Indians Christian doctrine, and that failing this their encomiendas be taken from them and given to others with the same obligation; and a decree of 16 December 1550 requiring unmarried encomenderos to marry within three years on pain of losing the encomienda. Page 246 gives the chronicler's own summary, that by many other decrees there are recorded the good offices and reports the audiencia made in favour of the Indians, of the churches and of the monasteries. The same page-run also carries a decree of 9 October 1549 ordering berberisco slaves expelled from the kingdom, which is printed here alongside the rest because the same court was the instrument of both.
One order the court received in 1572 is worth separating out, because it treats a language of the country as a subject of university rank. Page 240 records that because chairs of language were established in the other universities, the crown ordered that one be read at Guadalajara also, in the site and part most convenient for the priests who were to be provided to benefices, that a competent salary be assigned to the person who was to read the chair, and that in conformity with this the royal audiencia, by auto of 12 December of that year, ordered the provision of a salary of seven hundred pesos on the royal treasury with the obligation of reading two hours a day, one in the early part of the day and one in the afternoon, and with an hour daily in the jail. Edicts were posted in Guadalajara and in Mexico. Only one man applied, the Augustinian Fr. Pedro Serrano, who was appointed on 18 June 1573 and took possession the next day in the college of San Pedro y San Pablo. The order is real, the endowment is real, and the field of candidates was one.
The cost side is on the same sheets and is not softened here. Page 209 records the decree of 18 May 1561 by which the episcopal seat was to be kept in the city of Guadalajara and the cathedral built, and states that the cost was to fall in three parts, one on the royal treasury, one on the encomenderos and one on the Indians; part of the provinces subordinate to Mexico lay in the bishopric of Guadalajara, and the viceroy was ordered to provide that the Indians of those provinces contribute. The same page records that in the dispute over jurisdiction in Nueva Vizcaya the chronicler judged the oidores who then governed to have acted with passion. Page 246 records the crown's answer to a batch of the audiencia's own requests, granting some and refusing others, among them the refusal of a house for the audiencia because what it had was sufficient. A court that could audit a treasurer was still a court whose cathedral was paid for in part by the people it was told to protect.
The witness is an interested one and this entry says so before the reader finds out. Mota Padilla was a criollo lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara writing in 1742 a history of his own city and kingdom, and page 246 states his thesis in his own voice: that if the first pacifiers of the realm are worthy of memory for having prepared the canvas with the sword and at the cost of their blood, no less to be valued is the hand of the audiencia, which has known how to draw everything we observe in a republic so well ordered. That sentence is an argument, not a finding. The dates and the terms of the decrees he prints are the part of his book that can be checked against an archive, and they are the part on which the claims above rest; his judgements about what the court achieved are reported here as his.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 197 to 209, 235, 240 and 246 of the Mexico 1870 printing of a manuscript finished in 1742; the manuscript was not seen and the editors' transcription is not tested here. No decree cited has been checked against the Archivo General de Indias, which is not reachable from this container, so every date is reported as the chronicle gives it. Nothing here establishes how many cases the court actually heard, how long its suits took, what proportion of its litigants were Indian, whether its reports in favour of the Indians produced any measurable change, what its judges were found to have done at their own residencias, or what happened to the court after the seventeenth century. The chronicle names Lorenzo Lebron de Quinones among the first oidores and this entry makes no claim about his celebrated visita of the western provinces, which these pages do not describe.