Parcel
The commendation (from the Latin: commendo, "to trust"), in medieval Europe, was the relationship of personal dependency between two free men, revealed in an exchange of benefits, where the strong gave protection to the weak in exchange for loyalty and the provision of certain services, which would become a submission of the weak to his feudal lord, becoming his vassal.
This institution was introduced as a Spanish labor system that compensated the conquistadores with part of the labor of certain groups of conquered people; it was a type of tax. The workers, in theory, received benefits from the conquistadores for whom they worked.
The encomienda was first established in Spain during the Reconquista, and continued to be used during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Philippines. The conquered towns were considered vassals of the Crown.
During the Conquest, the Crown granted an encomienda as a right granted to a specific individual; This system consisted of the monopoly of temporary jobs (corvea) of certain groups of indigenous people, maintained in perpetuity by the holder called encomendero, and his descendants. However, from the New Laws of 1542, when the encomendero died, the encomiendas expired and were replaced by the repartimiento; from the middle of the s. xvi, with the monetization of the indigenous tribute, the situation of the natives in America was equivalent to that of the pecheros in Spain.
With the removal of Christopher Columbus in 1500, the Spanish Crown replaced him with Francisco de Bobadilla. Bobadilla was succeeded by a royal governor, Fray Nicolás de Ovando, who established the formal encomienda system. natives were forced to perform forced labor and subjected to extreme punishment and death if they resisted. However, Queen Isabella I of Castile prohibited the enslavement of the native population and considered the natives "free vassals of the crown" #34;. Various versions of the Laws of the Indies from 1512 tried to regulate the interactions between colonists and natives. Both the natives and the Spaniards went to the Royal Audiences to request help in the framework of the encomienda system.
The encomiendas had often been characterized by the geographic displacement of the enslaved and the breakdown of communities and family units, but in Mexico, the encomienda ruled free vassals of the crown through existing community hierarchies, and the indigenous people remained in their settlements with their families.
Commission in the European Middle Ages
In Castilla y Aragón, during the Middle Ages, these were territories, real estate, income or benefits belonging to a military order headed by a knight in habit, called a commander appointed by the master of one of the many orders of cavalry or religious that existed from the beginning of the Spanish Middle Ages. Each commander had under his protection and defense the & # 34; encomienda & # 34; received, in exchange for services, such as land rents. The orders with the largest territorial possessions were those of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcántara in Castilla, that of Montesa in Aragon and that of the Order of San Juan in both kingdoms.
The wars against the Muslims, also called Moors, in the Iberian Peninsula led these orders to become true circumscriptions in the medium and long term. During the stage of the reconquest of the Spanish territory, the encomienda played a very relevant role, since many of the Christian warriors needed a social organization system with which to manage and repopulate the territories they achieved after their victories.
It should be noted that, in 1492, it was the year that Jews and Muslims were finally expelled from present-day Spain, and in the same year Columbus arrived in America, with which an evolution of the same legal structure was implanted in America.
Church
It is also said to entrust the donation of a vacant ecclesiastical entity to an ecclesiastical person who was called a commander, who had to take care of it until the position was officially filled.
The parcel in America
Origin
When Columbus arrived in Hispaniola he discovered gold deposits. For the extraction of it, he created a tax on the native population, according to which every indigenous person over 14 years of age had to give him a Flanders rattle full of gold every three months; those who did not live near the mines had to deliver an arroba of cotton. According to the work Historia del Admiral, written by his son Hernando Colón, Christopher Columbus always conquered the territories in the name of the Catholic Monarchs but with the arrival of the investigating judge Francisco de Bobadilla in the year 1500 Columbus was arrested and Francisco would exploit the disagreements of the colonists against Columbus and offer them Indians in encomienda and lands in exchange for their support against the Admiral. Francisco de Bobadilla would be named governor and would take possession of Columbus's palace and properties in Santo Domingo. Later, Bobadilla would be relieved by Nicolás de Ovando. Columbus established an order according to which half of all the gold obtained by the colonists should be given to the Crown, although no one obeyed that order until Ovando lowered the amount to one fifth.
In 1508, Nicolás de Ovando would write to the Crown urging instructions so that the conversion of the Indians to Christianity be done without subjecting them to any force, so that the Indians instead of living in a dispersed and primitive way & #34;They will congregate in towns, as are the people who live in our kingdoms" and that interracial marriages will be encouraged, with a view to a faster civilization and Christianization. The repartimientos will be institutionalized in America for a Royal Provision of December 20, 1503. However, starting in 1505, Nicolás de Ovando, who was a major encomendero of the order of Alcántara, stopped distributing Indians and began to entrust them. The encomienda regulated, in theory, the reciprocal relations between the encomendero and the encomendado, and for this reason it took on natural status in the New World.
To avoid recovering the misuses and medieval systems abolished in 1509, the Crown decreed that the encomienda could not be considered in perpetuity and that the Indians could only be entrusted for a maximum period of two years.
Indigenous tributes in kind (which could be metals, clothing, or food such as corn, wheat, fish, or chickens) were collected by the chief of the indigenous community, who was in charge of taking them to the encomendero. The encomendero was in contact with the encomienda but his place of residence was the city, the nerve center of the Spanish colonial system.
A way was found to reward those Spaniards who had distinguished themselves for their services and to ensure the establishment of a Spanish population in the newly discovered and conquered lands.
The encomienda also served as a center of culturization and compulsory evangelization. The natives were regrouped by the encomenderos in towns called "Doctrinas", where they had to work and receive the teaching of Christian doctrine generally in charge of religious belonging to the regular Orders. The natives also had to be in charge of the maintenance of the religious.
The encomienda for the Spanish colonization of America and the Philippines was established as a right granted by the King (since 1523) in favor of a Spanish subject. The Spanish holder of the right (encomendero) receives the encomienda in order for him to receive the taxes that the indigenous people had to pay to the crown (in work or in kind and, later, in money), in consideration of their quality as subjects of is. In exchange, the encomendero had to take care of the well-being of the indigenous in the spiritual and in the earthly, ensuring their maintenance and their protection, as well as their Christian indoctrination (evangelization). However, there were abuses by the encomenderos and the system often led to forms of forced or unfree labor, replacing, in many cases, the payment in kind of the tribute for work in favor of the encomendero.
The distribution of the parcels was not homogeneous among all Spaniards. In 1514, more than half of the Spaniards did not have any Indian in their care, while 11% of those who did have received 44% of these.
Parcels and encomenderos
- Coatzacoalcos encomienda: Bernal Diaz del Castillo, was part of the troops of the conquerors Pedrarias Dávila and Hernán Cortés
- Connection: Francisco Pizarro, conqueror
- Encomienda de Charcas: Gonzalo Pizarro, sister of the conqueror Francisco Pizarro
- Encomienda de Ecatepec, hoy Ecatepec de Morelos: Luis (Arias) de Saavedra and (Pérez de) Guzmán, son of the first Count of Castellar.
- Elosuchitlan-Axalyagualco: Juan Duran, was part of the troops of Hernán Cortés. Yerno del conquistador de Guatemala, Bartolomé Becerra
- Encomienda de Guaraz: Sebastián de Torres, conqueror, ally of Francisco Pizarro. Later owned by his widow Francisca Ximenez and her second husband Rui Cabeza de Vaca
- Huaylas encomienda: Francisco Pizarro, conquistador
- Petares encomienda, hoy Petare: Pedro Galeas de Mendoza, captain. Son of the conqueror Pedro Alonso Galeas
- Commendation of Recuay: Jerónimo de Aliaga, conqueror, ally of Francisco Pizarro
Anti-abuse legislation
The encomienda gave rise to abuse and violence, a kind of disguised slavery. These behaviors were denounced by some individuals, such as Fray Antonio de Montesinos and Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Fray Matías de Paz reflected from the Christian point of view while the jurist López de Palaci y Rubios contributed a legal point of view. Bartolomé de las Casas would come to be attended by Carlos I and Felipe II.
The Laws of Burgos
In 1512 the denunciations of Fray Montesinos, related to some abuses of these first encomiendas, provoked the immediate promulgation of the Laws of Burgos that same year, extended a year later, where the labor system is developed and explicitly defined in the encomiendas, with the following rights and guarantees of the Indians and the obligations of the encomenderos of fair treatment: work and equitable retribution and that they evangelize the entrusted. However, after the secularization of the Spanish empire, these obligations were omitted, transforming the encomienda into a system of forced labor for the native peoples in favor of the encomenderos. On December 9, 1518, this law was enriched by establishing that only Those Indians who do not have sufficient resources to earn a living may be entrusted, as well as that at the moment they were able to fend for themselves, they would have to cease in the encomienda. The laws even made it obligatory to teach reading and writing to the Indians.
The New Laws
In 1527 a new law arose that determines that the creation of any new encomienda must necessarily have the approval of religious, on whom falls the responsibility of judging whether a specific group of Indians could be helped to develop an encomienda, Or if it would be counterproductive.
In 1542 Carlos I, after 50 years of existence of the encomienda, considered that the Indians had acquired sufficient social development so that all Indians should be considered subjects of the Crown like the rest of Spaniards. For this reason, the New Laws were created in 1542, where it is recorded that:
- No new orders will be assigned, and the existing ones will necessarily die with their headlines.
- Those commissioners working for members of the clergy, public officials, or persons without the title of conquest, were abolished.
- The amount of taxes to be paid to those entrusted is considerably limited.
- That there was no cause or motive for making slaves; that the existing Indian slaves were released, if the full right to keep them in that state was not shown.
The new viceroys arrived in America with express orders that these laws be complied with, the opposite of what had happened with the previous ones, leading to a war in Peru between the encomenderos and those loyal to the king in 1544 led by Gonzalo Pizarro and another in 1553 led by Francisco Hernández Gijón. Meanwhile, in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, Viceroy Luis de Velasco y Ruiz de Alarcón freed 15,000 indigenous people. He also stirred up a conspiracy headed by the son of Hernán Cortés, Martín Cortés Marqués del Valle and his brother and whose outcome was his perpetual banishment from the Indies.
The New Laws could not be fully applied. In Peru, they were taken as an excuse for a serious revolt, led by Gonzalo Pizarro, and this, together with the pressure of various power groups, made Carlos I annul article 30, which eliminated the hereditary nature of the encomiendas. This caused it to survive in some areas until 1791. In the second half of the 16th century, the Viceroy of Peru Francisco de Toledo discussed the suppression of the right of inheritance of the parcels with Felipe II, but the issue was not resolved.
Decline in America
Denunciations of the mistreatment of indigenous people by some encomenderos and the advent of the so-called demographic catastrophe of the indigenous population, caused the encomienda to enter into crisis since the end of the century XVI, although in some places, such as Yucatán and Chile, it survived until the 18th century. The encomienda was replaced by the distribution of Indians, peonage, wage labor and African slavery.
In Chile, Ambrosio O'Higgins, by means of an edict of February 9, 1789, abolished the parcels when they were already simply an institution in decline. This edict was ratified by Carlos IV in 1791, the date on which its final abolition was completed.
The institution of the encomienda was strongly based on the tribal affiliation of the individual subject to it (being in fact the caciques, curacas, or other tribal chiefs who acted as intermediaries and organizers of the service). The mestizos, for example, were exempted by law from the encomienda. This caused many aborigines to deliberately seek to dilute their ethnic or tribal identity and that of their descendants, trying to marry individuals of a different ethnic group, especially Spaniards (newcomers, or Creoles). The encomienda thus severely weakened Amerindian ethnicity and tribal identification, and this in turn diminished the number of potential encomiendas. They are, in short, factors such as miscegenation and the progressive decrease of natives, which ended up transforming the encomienda system into one of tenancy or latifundismo in Colonial America.
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