Juan de Torquemada, Monarquia Indiana, book seventeen (Madrid printing of 1723)
A Franciscan provincial in Mexico devoted a whole book of his chronicle to the proposition that the Indians were skilled before anyone taught them. He put the evidence in: goldsmiths who beat the Spaniards at casting, a named Indian sculptor whose work sold above Spanish work, apprentices who reverse-engineered a guarded trade by counting hammer blows. He also printed the papal letter of 1537 declaring them rational men, and the sentence in which Spaniards had denied it.
Why this wins its question: Torquemada reaches English mostly as a bibliographic fact — twenty-one books, printed 1615, a quarry to be mined for Nahua history — and the one book in which he argues at length that the Indians were skilled before contact is almost never quoted. This object opens it from the 1723 sheets and quotes what is actually on the page: Indian casters rated above the silversmiths of Spain by a Spanish friar, a named Indian sculptor whose work is said to fetch more than Spanish work, the chapel of San Jose described as the first seminary of crafts in New Spain by a man who says he walked through its forge, and the gold-beater who hid his trade and was decoded by apprentices counting his hammer blows. It puts the cost on the same page rather than in a caveat: the ape comparison, the claim that God let the Indians paint ugly men because their bodies matched their souls, the archbishop who ordered the carved stones disfigured. And it prints the 1537 letters of Paul III together with the sentence that explains why they were needed — that Spaniards had held these people beasts because they could not understand their language.
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 volume read here is the third tome of the second printing, issued at Madrid in 1723 "en la Oficina y a costa de Nicolas Rodriguez Franco", of "los veinte i un libros rituales i Monarchia Indiana, con el origen y guerras de los Indios Ocidentales, de sus Poblaçones, Descubrimiento, Conquista, Conversion y otras cosas maravillosas de la mesma tierra", composed by Fray Juan de Torquemada, minister provincial of the Franciscan province of the Santo Evangelio in New Spain. Its engraved title page carries the motto "DICO EGO OPERA MEA REGI".
Unlike some later printings of early American books, this one advertises no correction and no earlier edition. The engraved title states only the title, the author and the Madrid imprint of 1723; its verso is blank and the index of books and chapters follows directly. A second digitised copy of the same third tome, set in an evidently earlier typography and opening with a prologue to book fifteen that the Madrid sheets do not carry, was opened for comparison and proved to be a copy whose title page is missing, so no earlier printing could be dated from the volumes reachable here. Every wording below is therefore attributed to the sheets of 1723 and to no other setting.
Book seventeen is given over to a single argument, stated in its own argumento at the head: "LOS INDIOS SON ENSEÑADOS EN OFICIOS. Aprendieron la Musica. Solemniçan las Fiestas mui aventajadamente. Son Limosneros." Its first chapter is headed "De el Ingenio, y Habilidad de los Indios, para todos los Oficios; y primero se trata de los que ellos vsaban, antes que viniesen los Españoles."
The order of proof is deliberate and is stated: before describing what the friars taught, the chapter says it is right to presuppose the ingenio and habilidad the Indians had of their own, and the skill they showed in the offices they used "en su Infidelidad, antes que conociesen à los Españoles". The examples given are of stone sculptors who worked stone with pebbles and flints for want of iron, "tan primorosa, y curiosamente, como nuestros Oficiales, con Escodas, y Picos de Acero", carpenters who worked wood with copper tools, and lapidaries who cut precious stones with a sand they knew.
On metalwork the comparison is made explicitly in the Indians' favour: in casting any piece or jewel "hacian ventaja à los Plateros de España", since they cast a bird whose head, tongue and wings move, and a monkey with moving head, tongue, feet and hands holding spindles that seem to dance; and, the text adds, what is most, they turn out a fish half of gold and half of silver, one scale of silver and the next of gold, "de que se maravillaron mucho los Plateros de España".
The chapter names a living Indian craftsman and rates him above Spaniards: in the town of Santiago there is a sculptor, native of it, called Miguel Mauricio, outstanding among other good ones, "y son sus Obras mucho mas estimadas, que las de algunos Escultores Españoles, y juntamente con ser tan buen Oficial, no es notado de vicio ninguno". The feather-working of Michoacan is called the craft that seems to exceed all human wit.
The same pages carry a judgement that cuts the other way and is left standing. Of the Indian painters the text says they painted men not beautiful but ugly and half monstrous, "que parece lo permitia Dios, que la figura de sus Cuerpos asemejase à la que tenian sus Almas, por el pecado en que siempre permanecian", and that only after they became Christians and saw images from Flanders, Italy and Castile did they paint them faithfully. The same chapter records that Archbishop Garcia de Santa Maria ordered the worked stones set as corner pieces in the principal houses of the city to be picked out and disfigured because some carried figures of the old idols. The praise, the demonological framing of pre-conquest religion and the destruction of the carving are printed by the same author on the same leaves.
The institution behind the teaching is named and described from sight. The first and only seminary in New Spain for every kind of craft, for the service of the church and for secular use alike, was the chapel called of San Joseph beside the monastery of San Francisco in Mexico City, where Fray Pedro de Gante resided many years as "primero, y principal Maestro, è industrioso Adestrador de los Indios". Not content with a large school of children taught doctrine, reading, writing and singing, he had the older boys apply themselves to Spanish crafts their fathers and grandfathers had not known, and kept rooms about the chapel where they worked as tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths and painters. Torquemada writes that he himself saw the forge where the smiths worked and the hall with the chests of painters' colours, "aunque yà no ha quedado rastro de nada de esto".
The transfer of skill is told as a story of Spanish craftsmen protecting a monopoly and losing it. Spaniards arriving with a trade expected to sell and earn as they pleased, believing no one else had it, and "luego los Indios se lo hurtaban, por la viveça grande de su ingenio". A gold-beater, the first to come, tried to conceal his craft and said a man needed six or seven years' apprenticeship; the Indians instead watched every particular of the work, counted the blows he struck with the hammer and where he hit, how he turned the mould, and before the year was out produced beaten gold, having borrowed from the master a little book he never saw again until they returned it.
The same craftsman also made gilt leather and hid his materials from the Indians, above all how to give the gold and silver colour. They took a little of each material he threw away, brought it to a friar — "que seria el mismo Frai Pedro de Gante, que holgaba de que ellos hiciesen aquestas travesuras" — and asked where such things were sold, saying that if they once had them in their hands, however much the Spaniard hid from them they would make gilt leather as the masters of Castile did. The friar told them where to buy, and they made it.
The praise is not unqualified even in the sentence that carries it. The reason given for the speed with which the Indians took up the crafts is partly commercial advantage and partly that they are "como Monas, que lo que vèn hacer, tambien lo quieren hacer" — a simian comparison printed in the middle of the argument for their capacity.
Book sixteen chapter twenty-five records that the denial of the Indians' rational capacity was a Spanish position and says why it took hold: coming from dealings with the Indians of the islands, where those had seemed to them "mas Bestias de el Campo, que Hombres Racionales", the Spaniards wished to hold the same of these, "no porque los vnos, ni los otros lo fuesen, sino porque el carecer de Lengua para entenderlos, les hacia creer, que lo eran"; and the case went so far that they almost held them incapable of the law of God and unfit to have the Gospel preached to them.
Against that opinion the chapter prints the apostolic letters of Paul III in Latin and then in Castilian. The Latin declares that the Indians, as true men, are not only capable of the Christian faith but run to it most readily; that the said Indians and all other peoples who may hereafter come to the notice of Christians, though they be outside the faith of Christ, are not to be deprived of their liberty or of the dominion of their goods, but may freely and lawfully use, possess and enjoy that liberty and dominion, and are not to be reduced to servitude; and that whatever may happen to be done otherwise is void and of no effect. It is dated at Rome in 1537, on the fourth of the Nones of June, in the third year of the pontificate.
Torquemada's own gloss on that document names the motive of the letters as the refutation of Spaniards. The pope, consulted on the case and abominating "la Calumnia de los falsos Contraditores", gave sentence to the contrary, determining with apostolic authority, as a matter of faith, that the Indians, as rational men of the same nature and species as ourselves, are capable of the divine sacraments of the church.
The same tome preserves a mechanism by which the orders reached the crown, and its collapse. The provincials of the three orders of Santo Domingo, San Francisco and San Agustin, each with four definitors, used to gather, confer on what needed remedy, write jointly to the king and send it signed with their names; being the opinion of fifteen or sixteen of the most eminent persons in the land, no Christian king was going to refuse it. Chapter twenty-one of book seventeen states plainly what that channel was for: by its means the Indians of New Spain and of other parts were preserved, "que perecieran de el todo, como los de las Islas".
The chapter then records that the channel was broken deliberately and that the Indians were worse off for it. Some persons of the Royal Council, it says, were given to understand that it was not well that the friars should have so much hand and credit with the king, and that where they were no other governors were needed; a scheme was concerted with a personage who, entering a chapter of the Franciscans with the title of a great devotee of the order, showed much feeling at the harmful error of their joining with the Dominicans and Augustinians to write to the king and his Council. Since those favours failed, more than twenty years back, the christianity of the Indians "siempre ha ido de caìda, y ellos à menos" — and this, the text insists, not for want of will in the royal person but for want of being advised.
What this object does not establish should be said. The pages opened for it do not record how Torquemada gathered the material of book seventeen, what he took from Motolinia and other earlier friars without saying so, how far the crafts described survived the century in which he wrote, or what the Indian craftsmen were paid. The volume is a Franciscan provincial's account of a Franciscan achievement, and reads as one.