The Relaciones Geográficas de Indias and the printed questionnaire of 1577
On 25 May 1577 Philip II ordered a description of the Indies to be made by the people who lived in them, and sent out a printed questionnaire of fifty numbered chapters to be distributed town by town, in Spanish and in Indian settlements alike. It asked for latitude, distances and terrain, but also for what the town's name meant in the local language, whether there were more or fewer Indians than before and why, and whom they had obeyed and paid before the Spaniards came.
Why this wins its question: General accounts say that Philip II "sent out a questionnaire" and stop there, or reproduce a modern paraphrase of it. This object quotes the cédula's own dateline and countersignature, the instruction's rule that doubtful answers be marked doubtful, and four of the fifty chapters verbatim - including the one that ordered local officers to report whether the Indian population had fallen and why - then sets against them the editor's reconstruction of who actually answered and who never did, ending with the finding that the order's force faded from north to south and died before the Strait of Magellan. The scale of the survey and the limits of the evidence come from the same pages.
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 order is dated and signed on the page. The royal cédula closes "Fecho en Sant Lorenço el Real a veinte y cinco de Mayo de mill e quinientos e setenta e siete años. - Yo el Rey. - Por mandado de su magestad, Antonio de Eraso." It states that a general description of the whole estate of the Indies, islands and provinces is convenient for good government, that the description is to be made province by province rather than centrally, and that governors, corregidores and alcaldes mayores are to be sent as many copies of the printed instructions as they need to distribute among the towns of Spaniards and of Indians in their districts, the completed relaciones to be returned to the Council of the Indies.
The document that travelled with the cédula is headed "Instruction y memoria de las relaciones que se han de hazer para la descripcion de las Indias, que Su Magestad manda hazer, para el buen gouierno y ennoblescimiento dellas". It tells whoever is charged with a town's relación to head it, on a separate sheet, with the day, month and year, the name of the person making it, and the name of the governor or other person who sent the instruction; to read each chapter attentively and answer it in a chapter of its own, by number; to pass over in silence the chapters that do not apply rather than invent for them; and to write "breve y claramente, en todo, affirmando por cierto lo que lo fuere, y lo que no, poniendolo por dudoso".
The questionnaire's own numbering shows what a Castilian government wanted to know. Chapter 1 asks the name of the district or province, what that name means in the language of the Indians, and why it is so called. Chapter 6 asks the elevation of the pole where the Spanish towns stand, or, failing an instrument, on what days of the year the sun casts no shadow at noon. Chapter 13 asks what the Indian town's name means in the language of the Indians, why it is so called, and what language its Indians speak. Chapter 14 asks whose vassals they were in the time of their gentility, what lordship was held over them, what they paid in tribute, and their "adoraciones, y costumbres buenas, o malas".
Chapter 5 is the demographic question, and it is put without euphemism. It asks of many or few Indians, "y si a tenido mas o menos en otro tiempo que ahora, y las causas que dello se supieren"; whether they live in formed and permanent towns; "el talle y suerte de sus entendimientos, inclinaciones, y manera de biuir"; and whether there are different languages in the province or a general one in which all speak. The instrument the crown used to inventory its American possessions therefore required its own local officers to report population decline and to state its causes.
The method was borrowed, not invented for the Indies. The editor of the corpus records that on 25 May 1577 Juan López de Velasco applied to the American relaciones the procedure that had been followed for the topographic relations of Castile since 27 October 1575 - that they be made outside the Council, in the towns and provinces to which each belonged, and that the instruction and memoria for making them be circulated in print - and that the interrogatorio, earlier drafted at two hundred chapters, was recast to fifty under the name Instrucción y Memoria. The enterprise continued one begun by Juan de Ovando as president of the Council of the Indies.
Its author held a permanent office created for the purpose. Juan López de Velasco was named cosmógrafo-cronista mayor de las Indias on 20 October 1571, after the aged Alonso de Santa Cruz had been pensioned, and served until 1591; on 11 January 1577 he was given four hundred ducados for the work of making and ordering a Libro de geografía de las islas y provincias de las Indias, which the returning relaciones were meant to feed.
Compliance was real, uneven, and geographically patterned. The first relaciones to reach the Council were those of the governorships of Santa Marta and Venezuela - Ocaña and Los Reyes del valle de Upar - dated March and April 1578, and Tocuyo in January 1579; New Spain complied best by far, followed in order by the Nuevo Reino de Granada and Tierra Firme, with the latest from those countries dated 1584; Quito answered in 1582 and almost all of Peru proper in 1586; and the editor knew of none from Tucumán, Chile or the Río de la Plata, concluding that the efficacy of the 1577 cédula "fue remitiendo de Norte a Sur y se desvaneció hacia el estrecho de Magallanes".
The crown kept pressing. A second printed edition of the Instrucción y Memoria, differing slightly from the first, was issued and had run out by about 1584, the second impression being consumed in Peru; the instruction was recalled with frequency to viceroys, governors and audiencias in letters and cédulas. The editor lists further repetitions made while López de Velasco held the office, which he left for a royal secretaryship on 19 October 1591 - the circular to the royal officials of 1569 repeated by a cédula of Lisbon and again on 13 November 1581, and the provisión of 1572 for collecting historical and geographical papers repeated on 25 June 1578 - and concludes from them that the Council of the Indies "no cejaba un instante en el propósito de obtener las Relaciones Geográficas".
The motive was government, and the sources say so rather than concealing it. The declared end was "el perfecto conocimiento del gobierno en las tierras y gentes que había de gobernar", and the returns were to be worked up into the projected Libro de la descripción de las Indias. The ethnographic questions - language, pre-conquest lordship, tribute, customs good or bad - were asked because a government that meant to tax, evangelise and administer needed the answers, not out of disinterested curiosity; and the answers were written by Spanish local officers, so the indigenous testimony in them is filtered twice.
Counts drawn from the corpus are lower bounds and should be handled as such. The editor found no relaciones at all from three governorships, reports that some arrived nine years after the order, and reconstructs the pattern of compliance from what happens to survive in the Archivo de Indias; he also notes that the title Relaciones topográficas de Indias del tiempo de Felipe II, under which some of the material circulated, is a faulty one.