6 Powhatan's mantle. Deerskin with shell decoration. Although known as a mantle, this deerskin may be a representation of the tribes or villages over which Powhatan ruled. Now preserved in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, it is first recorded in 1638 as the robe of the King of Virginia'. Originally it formed part of the famous collection of antiquities and exotica, known as The Ark', made by John Tradescant, gardener to King Charles I.
7 The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company. The seal emphasizes the commitment of the company to the conversion of the Indians. In the engraving, an Indian echoes the words spoken by 'a man of Macedonia' in a vision of St Paul: `Come over [into Macedonia], and help us.'
8 Simon van de Passe, Portrait of Pocahontas, engraving (1616). Following her famous encounter with Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan, was sent by her father on various occasions to the Jamestown settlement to act as an intermediary. Converted to Christianity and given the baptismal name of Rebecca, she was married in 1614 to John Rolfe and accompanied him to England with their infant son in 1616. Much feted in London, she fell ill and died in the following year while awaiting the departure of the ship that would take the family back to Virginia. Her marriage to one of the early settlers pointed to the path not taken in British America, where interethnic union was to remain relatively rare by comparison with the process of racial mingling in Spanish America.
9 Thomas Holme, A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania in America (London, 1683). As can be seen from this 1682 town plan of Philadelphia, the grid-iron pattern of urban design, extensively used in Spanish America, was adopted by William Penn for the capital of his new colony. Penn stipulated that the streets should be fifty to a hundred feet wide, and that the houses be placed in the middle of their lots, thus setting a pattern that would be widely followed in North America.
10 Samuel Copen, A Prospect of Bridge Town in Barbados, engraving (1695). This, the first large panoramic view of an English colonial settlement, depicts the thriving seaport of Bridgetown, which had been largely reconstructed after a hurricane in 1675. Warehouses for the storage of sugar line the waterfront.
11 New World ethnography in the making. The Relaci6n de Michoacan (1539-40) provides a rich account of the history and customs of the Tarascan Indians of west-central Mexico in the period before the Spanish conquest. The author, possibly the Franciscan Jeronimo de Alcala, is shown presenting his manuscript to the viceroy, Don Antonio de Mendoza.
12 Gaspar de Berrio, Description of the Cerro Rico and the Imperial Town of Potosi (1758). The Cerro Rico, or silver mountain, rises in the background, while the town itself, built to a grid-iron plan, is laid out before it. To the left are the artificial lakes and dams constructed by the Spaniards to power the mills for refining the silver. While work goes on in the mines, a procession comes down the hillside carrying the banners of a religious confraternity. Situated in the high Andes, 13,000 feet above sea level, mid-eighteenth-century Potosi had a population of under 60,000, well down from that in 1600, when a population of over 100,000 made it one of the largest cities of the western world.
13 Jose de Alcibar, St Joseph and the Virgin (1792). Celestial bureaucracy in action. The Virgin and St Joseph act as intercessors, passing up petitions to Christ for decision. While earthly kingdoms were supposed to be modelled on the divine, this painting suggests that the Hispanic world modelled its image of the celestial kingdom on that of the hierarchical structure of a bureaucratized Spanish Monarchy with its elaborate processes of lobbying and petititioning, motivated by the assumption that services would in due course be appropriately rewarded by a grateful monarch.
14 Anon., Mrs Elizabeth Freake and her Baby Mary (c. 1671-74). Elizabeth Clarke was born in 1642, the daughter of a prosperous merchant from Dorchester, south of Boston. In 1661 she married John Freake, a recent immigrant, who became a substantial Boston merchant, and whose portrait by the same artist made a companion piece to this picture. The couple had eight children, the youngest of whom, born in 1674, was the baby daughter shown in the painting. Following her husband's death in an accident in the following year, Elizabeth Freake made a second marriage and survived until 1713. The double portrait of mother and child can be seen as a testimonial to the fruitfulness expected of the Puritan family, while Elizabeth's lace collar, silk dress and jewellery testify to the affluence of the mercantile elite in late seventeenth-century New England.
15 Andres de Islas, Four Racial Groups (1774). These four works, taken from a series of sixteen casta paintings by a Mexican artist, are typical of a genre that was highly popular in the eighteenth century. They illustrate well the attempt to devise a taxonomy for the gradations of racial mixture to be found in the viceroyalty of New Spain. Top row: 1. From a Spaniard and Indian is born a mestizo; 2. From a Spaniard and a mestiza is born a castizo. Bottom row: 3. From an Indian and a mestiza is born a coyote; 4. From a lobo, or wolf (the result of a union between an Indian man and an African woman) is born a chino.
16 Anon., Don Luis de Velasco the younger, marquis of Salinas (1607), second son of Don Luis de Velasco who governed New Spain as its second viceroy from 1550 to 1564. Educated at Salamanca University, he was a member of the entourage that accompanied the future Philip II to England in 1554 for his marriage to Mary Tudor. In 1560 he joined his father in New Spain, where he married the daughter of one of the conquerors of Mexico, Don Martin de Ircio, a wealthy encomendero. In 1590 Philip II appointed him to his father's former post as viceroy. In 1611 he was recalled to Madrid to become president of the Council of the Indies, a post from which he retired in 1617, dying the same year. Smoothly ascending to the highest levels of the imperial bureaucracy, he exemplified, like his father before him, the extensive deployment of patronage by American viceroys to reward relatives and dependants and form profitable connections with the creole elite.
17 Sir Peter Lely, Portrait of Sir William Berkeley. Governor of Virginia from 1641 to 1652, and again from 1660 to 1677, Sir William Berkeley (1605-77) stamped his personality on a troubled and faction-ridden colonial society, for which he harboured great ambitions. Like Don Luis de Velasco he had strong personal interests in the land and society over which he presided, and, again like Don Luis, governed through a circle of friends and dependants chosen from among the creole elite. His career, however, unlike that of Don Luis, ended in failure and disgrace. Resentment at his style of governance helped provoke Bacon's rebellion, and led to his recall in 1677 to England where he died, a broken man, before being able to clear his name.
18 Anon., Angel Carrying Arquebus. Peru, Cuzco school (eighteenth century). Andean artists developed in the later seventeenth century a unique iconography representing a celestial militia composed of elegantly attired angels and archangels, many of them sporting arquebuses. Alongside the biblical archangels, Michael and Gabriel, the series frequently showed apocryphal archangels, whose inclusion, regarded as heterodox in Europe, passed without challenge in America. The origins of the iconography remain uncertain. It could well reflect the teachings of Christian missionaries in the Andes, but depictions of a militant heavenly host carried echoes of pre-conquest religious beliefs which may help to account for its popularity among the peoples of the Andes. The angelic manoeuvres with the arquebus are borrowed from engravings of drill movements taken from Jacob de Gheyn's Exercise of Arms, first published in the Netherlands in 1607.
19 Anon., Santa Rosa of Lima and the Devil. Santa Rosa of Lima (1584-1617), canonized in 1671, was the first American to be made a saint. Although a native of Peru, her cult spread to other parts of Spanish America, including the viceroyalty of New Spain, as demonstrated by this late seventeenth-century painting from a retablo in the cathedral of Mexico City.
20 Anon. Plaza Mayor de Lima (1680). The painting testifies both to the splendour and preeminence of the viceregal capital, and to the diversity of the city's population. Behind the fountain at the centre of the Plaza Mayor rises the cathedral, with its baroque facade
. Beside it stands the archbishop's palace, and, to the left of the painting, on the north side of the square, the viceregal palace. The proximity of the two palaces suggests the close union of church and state. The numerous figures in the plaza cover the spectrum of Peruvian colonial society, from members of the Spanish and creole elite, in carriages or on horseback, to Indian women selling food and fruit in the market and African water-sellers filling their jars.
21 A representation (1653) of the transfer in 1533 of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe to its first chapel in Tepeyac, outside Mexico City. The two `republics' of Spaniards and Indians are clearly distinguished. In the Virgin's first miracle an Indian is cured, after being accidentally wounded by an arrow in a mock battle of Aztecs against Chichimecas. Her image is shown in the background being brought across the causeway to Tepeyac.
22. Anon., Return of Corpus Christi Procession to Cuzco Cathedral (c. 1680). The Spanish American city as the scene of open-air religious theatre. One of a series commissioned by the bishop of Cuzco showing different stages of the procession, which took place in a period of renewed civic confidence and splendour following the city's recovery from a devastating earthquake in 1650.
The antipathy was liable to come to a head during the elections periodically held for the appointment of priors, provincials and their councils. During the seventeenth century these elections came increasingly to pit creoles against peninsulares, and aroused the most intense passions not only in the religious houses themselves but throughout a society in which everyone had a relative in the religious life. `Such were their various and factious differences', wrote Thomas Gage of the election of a provincial for the Mercedarians, `that upon the sudden all the convent was in an uproar, their canonical election was turned to mutiny and strife, knives were drawn, and many wounded. The scandal and danger of murder was so great, that the Viceroy was fain to interpose his authority and to sit amongst them and guard the cloister until their Provincial was elected.'88
Both locally and in Rome the Spanish-born friars fought hard to prevent their orders in the Indies from being taken over by the creoles, and found a weapon to hand in the alternativa, which could be used to impose the regular alternation of creoles and peninsulares in election to office. The alternativa - or, for the Franciscans, a ternativa, stipulating the succession in turn of a peninsular who had taken the habit in Spain, a peninsular who had taken it in the Indies, and a creole - was to become a source of growing irritation to the creoles as they became the majority element in the orders. It also became an important political issue as viceroys sought to impose the system of alternation on different religious communities in a desperate attempt to keep the peace.89
Regular versus secular clergy, order against order, creole against native-born Spaniard, a state-controlled church all too often impervious to state control - these different sources of tension, conflicting and combining, ran like a series of electric charges through Spanish American colonial life. Storms could blow up very rapidly, as they did again in New Spain twenty years after the downfall of Gelves, when the Bishop of Puebla, Juan de Palafox, renewed the campaign for the secularization of parishes in his diocese, and became embroiled in a violent dispute with the Jesuits over their refusal to pay tithes. Once again the viceroyalty lurched into a major political crisis, with Palafox receiving the acclaim of the creoles, not least for his efforts to open up to them parishes controlled by religious orders which too often seemed unresponsive to creole aspirations.90 Yet, if animosity and vituperation abounded, the church could call on vast reserves of loyalty in a society where the Inquisition - less energetic than its peninsular coun- terpartN1 - exercised its policing activities over a colonial population well insulated from the danger of competing faiths by geography and the strict control of emigration in Seville.
The loyalty was inculcated from an early age by a church whose doctrines and ceremonial were woven deeply into the fabric of daily life. The wealth generated by the mining economies of the two viceroyalties made it possible to sustain a continuing programme of church building and refurbishing. In the nine years following his nomination as Bishop of Puebla in 1640, Palafox brought to a triumphant conclusion the construction of the city's magnificent cathedral, with the use of a labour force of 1,500 and at a cost of 350,000 pesos. This most austere of men had no compunction in devoting massive resources to a building that would proclaim to the world the glory of God and the power of His church.92 Everywhere, elaborate altarpieces and a profusion of images were the order of the day. Of the churches in Mexico City in the 1620s Thomas Gage wrote:
There are not above fifty churches and chapels, cloisters and nunneries, and parish churches in that city, but those that are there are the fairest that ever my eyes beheld. The roofs and beams are in many of them all daubed with gold. Many altars have sundry marble pillars, and others are decorated with brazilwood stays standing one above another with tabernacles for several saints richly wrought with golden colors, so that twenty thousand ducats is a common price of many of them. These cause admiration in the common sort of people, and admiration brings on daily adoration in them to these glorious spectacles and images of saints.93
The spectacle was carried out of the church doors into the streets in the innumerable processions which filled the liturgical year. Writing of the cult in Lima in his Compendium and Description of the West Indies, the early seventeenthcentury cosmographer Antonio Vazquez de Espinosa observed that `in few parts of Christendom is the Holy Sacrament brought out to such an accompaniment, both of priests ... and populace ... all in a vast concourse, and with universal devotion at whatever hour of day or night . . .' (fig. 22).94 The participation in these great processions not only of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities but also of the guilds and confraternities, competing with each other in the liberality of their contributions and the splendour of their floats, helped further to lock great sections of the populace into the ceremonial apparatus - and, with it, the ideology - of a state church in a church state.95
Inevitably the construction and adornment of churches, the maintenance of the cult and the upkeep of a large and imposing clerical establishment made continuing demands on the energy and resources of colonial society, of a weight and on a scale simply not to be found in British North America. Tithes, conceded in perpetuity by the papal bull of 1501 for the upkeep of the church in the Indies, were the foundation of the church's finances.96 Even if there was continuing uncertainty and confusion over the liability for tithes of land held by Indians,97 the growth of a prosperous agricultural economy meant a large and continuous flow of funds into the coffers of the church. These were supplemented by the usual fees for baptisms, weddings, funerals and other ecclesiastical services. The religious orders were dependent on alms-giving and charity, and their activities were financed by a vast outpouring of donations and pious bequests from creoles, mestizos and Indians alike.NB
The willingness of this population to found chaplaincies and convents, endow masses in perpetuity and leave property in its wills for the support of religious and charitable activities was both an expression of its devotion to a particular order or cult, and a form of spiritual investment promising longer-term if less immediately tangible benefits than the appropriation of wealth for secular activities. Founders and patrons of convents, for instance, could expect constant prayers to be offered up for the salvation of their souls and those of their family. In a society, too, in which identities were affirmed and status measured by conspicuous expenditure, spectacular expressions of piety performed an essential social function. Religion, status and reputation were intimately related and mutually reinforcing in Spanish American colonial society, and the pious benefactions which created a close association between a family and a particular religious institution bought for it not only spiritual benefits but also social prestige.99
But there were other, and more easily calculated benefits, too, to be gained from investment in the faith. As a result of the continuous flow of gifts and
legacies, the church, in its various branches, became a property-owner on a massive scale. By the end of the colonial period 47 per cent of urban property in Mexico City belonged to the church,100 and the religious orders, with the exception of the Franciscans, acquired large tracts of profitable land through donations, purchase and transfers.101 By the time of their expulsion in the eighteenth century the Jesuits, as the most successful landowners of all, owned over 400 large haciendas in America, and controlled at least 10 per cent of the agricultural land of what is now Ecuador.102 Religious institutions thus became involved, either directly or indirectly, in estate management, and were often liable to find themselves with funds surplus to their immediate needs. With money to spare, once they had met the obligation imposed on them by the Council of Trent to be self-financing, they naturally sought outlets for the investment of their surplus capital. As a result, even in seventeenth-century Peru, unique in Spanish America for its seven public banks founded between 1608 and 1642, the church emerged during the course of the seventeenth century as a major - and frequently the major - supplier of credit in a society short on liquidity.103 Landowners, merchants and mining entrepreneurs would turn to ecclesiastical institutions for loans, in order to invest in new enterprises or simply to keep afloat, and those already possessing close family links with some religious foundation - through patronage, endowments and the presence of relatives as friars and nuns104 - clearly enjoyed privileged access to the facilities they could offer.
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 35
