Relacion de las ceremonias y ritos, poblacion y gobierno de los indios de la provincia de Mechuacan (1541, printed Madrid 1869)
The fullest surviving account of the Tarascan state, written in Michoacan in 1541 by a friar who says on his first pages that the viceroy asked him twice or three times why he did not set down the government of these people, that he took it "por relacion de los mas viejos y antiguos desta provincia", and that he wanted the province ruled by the good it had in its own time. The same page calls that past ceremonies, drunkenness and wars.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the Relacion de Michoacan reach it through modern translations and encyclopedia summaries, which describe it as a Franciscan compilation of Tarascan tradition and stop there. What is quoted here is the 1541 prologue itself: a viceroy asking, twice or three times, why nobody had written down the government of Michoacan; a compiler taking his material "por relacion de los mas viejos y antiguos desta provincia"; and the explicit aim of governing the province by the good it had in its own time. The same page carries what a defensive account would cut - the friar's declaration that his order's purpose is to remake these people, and his judgement that his own book contains hardly a moral virtue. Beside the prologue the object sets what the text actually preserved: a hereditary priesthood that kept the histories, and an annual court with its offences, its proofs and its executions.
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 text reached print three hundred and twenty-eight years after it was written, inside a Spanish state documentary series. Its section title page reads "Relacion de las ceremonias y ritos, poblacion y gobierno de los indios de la provincia de Mechuacan, hecha al Ilmo. Sr. D. Antonio de Mendoza, virey y gobernador de Nueva Espana, sacada del codice original C.-IV.-5, existente en la Biblioteca del Escorial, por Don Florencio Janer", and it stands in tomo LIII of the Coleccion de documentos ineditos para la historia de Espana, published by the Marques de Miraflores and D. Miguel Salva of the Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Imprenta de la viuda de Calero, 1869. What is quoted from it is therefore one editor's reading of one Escorial manuscript, not an autograph.
The commission is recorded by the compiler in the prologue, and it is a request from a governor for a description of an indigenous government. He writes that he had lost hope of the undertaking but for the words of the viceroy, who "viniendo la primera vez a visitar esta provincia de Mechuacan me dijo dos o tres veces que porque no sacaba algo de la gobernacion desta gente"; that he set his hand to write "algo por relacion de los mas viejos y antiguos desta provincia"; and that his purpose in showing those customs to the viceroy was "para que V. S.a las favorezca, rigiendolos por lo bueno que en su tiempo tenian, y apartadoles lo malo que tenian".
The stated motive at the head of the prologue is investigative rather than administrative. The compiler says a natural desire came to him, as to others, "de querer investigar entre estos nuevos cristianos que era la vida que tenian en su infidelidad, que era su creencia, cuales eran sus costumbres y su gobernacion, de donde vinieron", and that he had often thought of asking and enquiring into it but did not find himself fit for it nor find the means.
The cost and the contempt are printed on the same page as the request, and the object records them as the compiler wrote them. He names two difficulties, that "esta gente no tenia libros" and that persons old enough to have notice of these things were lacking, and states that the religious have another purpose, "que es plantar la fe de Cristo, y pulir y adornar esta gente con nuevas costumbres, y tornallos a fundir, si posible fuese, para hacellos hombres de razon". He then delivers his own verdict on what he is about to transmit: "apenas se vera en toda esta escriptura una virtud moral, mas cirimonias y idolatrias, y borracheras, y muertes y guerras", the one virtue he grants being the liberality of the lords, who held it a disgrace to be sparing. The work that preserves the Tarascan past is the work of a man who thought it had almost nothing to teach.
The informants belonged to the class that held the histories, which is why the text can describe institutions rather than merely customs. The account of the priesthood names a chief priest over all the others called petamuti, held in great reverence, wearing a gourd set with turquoises and carrying a lance with a flint; preachers called curitiecha who went through the province; the curicitacha or curipecha who tended the braziers; and the tininiecha who carried the gods on their backs to the wars. All these priests were called cura, "que quiere decir abuelo", all were married, and "veníanles por linaje estos oficios, y sabian las historias de sus dioses e sus fiestas".
What the text preserves is a working legal system, penalties included. It describes a justicia general held once a year, twenty days before the feast, by "aquel sacerdote mayor llamado Petamuti" at the order of the cazonci, with justice done on ordinary days as well; a catalogue of those imprisoned for it, among them physicians who had killed a patient, sorcerers, people who left their towns and went about as vagabonds, those who had let the cazonci's war-fields perish and those who broke the magueys, all of them called Vazcata; and a rule that those who had offended four times were sacrificed. It also records how proof was brought: the husband split the ears of both wife and adulterer as a sign and was believed on it, the relative of a bewitched man brought a finger cut from the dead and wrapped in cotton, and a man whose green maize had been pulled brought the canes.