Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (1676)
The third university of Spanish America, ordered instituted by cédula of 31 January 1676 after a century of refused petitions and one merchant's legacy of 20,000 pesos. Eight chairs were filled by competition on 6 December 1678, and one of them was Cakchiquel — a Maya language endowed on the same day as canon law and medicine. It read nothing but scholastic method until 1768.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of San Carlos begins and ends with the founding date, usually given as 1676 and occasionally as 1678, with no account of what the founding document actually established. This object opens the chapter that reports the foundation autos and prints what is in it: the century of refused petitions, the postal official's legacy that paid for the chairs, the royal order to weigh the harms as well as the benefits before granting the charter, the eight chairs voted in December 1678 with a Cakchiquel chair among them, and the oposiciones read in the hall of the Council of the Indies because no candidate appeared in Mexico. The costs come from the same pages and not from a critic: nothing but scholastic method for ninety-two years, chairs of scripture, surgery and rhetoric still unfilled in 1810, and a graduate erased from the register and his degree records burned after the Inquisition condemned him in 1795. A second, independent bibliographer supplies the name of a man who actually held the Cakchiquel chair and the book he printed in 1753.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Teaching in the city long preceded the university. Juarros records that bishop Francisco Marroquín, while still only parish priest, obtained a school to teach Spanish children to read and write; that a cédula of 26 March 1546 asked the Real Audiencia for a report on the need for a teacher of Latin; and that by another of 16 June 1548 the Crown instituted a cátedra de gramática in the city.
Two petitions failed before any university existed. In 1559 Marroquín and the ayuntamiento asked the king to found a university "por no haber en ella, quien enseñase Artes y Sagrada Teologia"; in 1560 the bishop and the Audiencia proposed a Jesuit college instead; "ni una, ni otra pretension tubieron efecto". Marroquín then left rents for a college of twelve colegiales, sons of beneméritos, to read philosophy and theology, with the cathedral dean and the prior of Santo Domingo as patrons, and Santo Domingo gave a site inside its atrium.
The stopgap institution was the Colegio de Santo Tomás, and it was thin. Nothing was read in it until 1620, and Juarros cites a report the city made to the king in 1601 saying that at that date there were no studies in the whole kingdom other than those of the Colegio Tridentino of Guatemala. Philip IV allowed the Colegio de Santo Tomás, "que llama Universidad de Guatemala" in ley 2, título 22, libro 1 of the Recopilación, to count courses and give degrees, but only for a limited time; the first doctorates were conferred on 15 June 1625.
What revived the project was a private legacy from the postal service. In 1646 Pedro Crespo Suárez, Correo Mayor of the city, died leaving 20,000 pesos to endow chairs of laws, medicine and philosophy in the university that was still only intended, "con lo que se acaloró en gran manera la referida fundacion".
The Crown did not simply grant it. A cédula of 5 July 1673 ordered a junta of the president, an oidor, the fiscal, the bishop and the cathedral dean to confer on the matter "exâminando, y pesando los provechos y daños, que dicha fundacion podia ocasionar"; the junta reported that far from causing harm the university would be of much profit to the whole kingdom; and the Council of the Indies by cédula of 31 January 1676 ordered a university instituted in the Colegio de Santo Tomás de Aquino de Guatemala. Juarros footnotes the passage: "consta lo que aqui referimos de los autos originales de la fundacion de esta Universidad".
A Maya language was endowed alongside the learned faculties. The chairs were voted on 6 December 1678 by the president, two oidores and the fiscal, and Juarros lists all eight: prima de teología, teología moral, filosofía, cánones, leyes, Instituta, medicina, "y para la de lengua Kacchiquel, Fr. José Senoyo Dominico". The Cakchiquel chair was created in the same act as canon law and medicine, not added later as an afterthought.
Three chairs could not be filled in America at all, and the fix was unusual. A cédula of 19 September 1678 sent the competition for cánones, leyes and medicina to Mexico City under two ministers of that Audiencia; no candidate came forward; the Council of the Indies then took the resolution — "cosa que no contará otra Universidad" — of posting the edicts at Court, where men from Salamanca competed and read their oposición lectures in the hall of the Consejo de Indias itself. Cánones went to Dr Bartolomé de Amezqueta, leyes to Dr Pedro de Ozaeta on condition that after five years' reading he obtain a seat as oidor in the Audiencia of Guatemala, and medicina to Dr Miguel Fernández.
A cédula of 6 June 1680 ordered statutes drawn up; they were composed by Francisco de Sarasa y Arce, oidor of the Audiencia and superintendent of the university, sent to the Council in 1681, and approved with modifications by auto of 20 February 1686. Self-government came slowly: the first rector held office until his death in 1696, two more were named by the vice-patron for want of enough doctors to elect one, and only from 10 November 1705 was a rector elected every year as the constitutions required.
Innocent XI's bull E Suprema of 18 June 1687 confirmed the erection, gave the university faculty to confer degrees in all the sciences, and granted it all the privileges enjoyed by the universities of Mexico and Lima; by ley 1, título 22, libro 1 of the Recopilación its graduates therefore enjoyed in the Indies the liberties and franchises that graduates of Salamanca enjoyed in the kingdoms of Spain.
Modern science arrived ninety years after the bull, and the book says so in a footnote of its own. "Desde la fundacion de esta Universidad, hasta el año de 1768, no se leyó en ella sino en metodo Escolastico"; the first course of experimental physics was read that year, geometry was examined publicly for the first time in October 1792 and again in May 1795, anatomy examinations were held in 1789, 1790 and 1794 with three statues built for the purpose and kept afterwards for teaching medicine, four young men were examined in surgery in March 1798 as the first fruits of a new chair, and in July 1799 physics was examined "en metodo Socrastico".
Its endowment stayed short of its ambitions. Juarros counts eight endowed chairs, two of them served by Franciscans without stipend — the Doctrina de Escoto from 1688 and philosophy from 1714, repaid by the university with free doctorates for four members of that order — and records that chairs of scripture, surgery and rhetoric were still wanting when he wrote, of which three stopgap lecturers had been found and two had since left the capital. The body then counted fifty doctors, one master of arts and one licentiate.
Membership was policed by confession, and the same pages print the case. The university had gloried that no member of its gremio had ever departed from the true faith until Rafael Gil Rodríguez, who studied there and took his bachelor's degree, "abandonò la sana doctrina... por abrazar las impias maximas del Judaismo": he was penanced by the Inquisition of Mexico in 1795, in the same year struck from the university by judicial sentence, and the records drawn up for his degree were burned by the public executioner.
An independent witness confirms that the language chair was really taught. Squier's 1861 census of writers on Central American languages, which does not draw on Juarros for these entries, lists "FLORES, Fr. Ildefonso Joseph, a native of Guatemala, Franciscan, Professor of the Kachiquel language in the University of San Carlos in the city of Guatemala; died in 1772", whose Arte de la lengua metropolitana del reyno Cakchiquel, with a parallel of Kiché, Cakchiquel and Zutuhil, was printed at Guatemala by Sebastián de Arévalo in 1753 in 387 pages.
The same source shows the university functioning as a repository for indigenous-language scholarship: Francisco Ximénez's Arte comparativa of the three "lenguas metropolitanas" of Guatemala was "now in the University of Guatemala", and the manuscript of his Historias del origen de los indios lay in the university library, from which Carl Scherzer took the copy the Imperial Academy of Sciences published at Vienna in 1857. Squier also places Felipe Ruiz del Corral, whom Juarros names among the first lecturers of 1620, at the College of St Thomas as canon and dean from 1604 to 1636, and credits him with an Arte y Vocabulario for the use of the curates of Guatemala.
What this object is resting on should be stated plainly. Everything above about the seventeenth century comes from a priest of the archbishopric writing in 1808-10 and summarising foundation records he says he consulted, not from those records; the cédulas of 1673, 1676, 1678, 1680 and 1687 are reported here at one remove, which is why the object is tiered secondary and the dates carry confidence below 0.9.