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Building Colonial Cities of God
Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain
By Karen Melvin
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7486-4
Chapter One
Ordering Cities Urban Convents and Friars, 1570–1808
I also charge all the Priors and friars of this Our Province to be punctual in the confessional and in works of neighborliness, especially in places of Spaniards, because from here comes devotion and credit to Convents, affection to friars, and edification to all the faithful. Nor neglect that His Majesty sent us to the spiritual conquests and that His Holiness conceded us various Immunities and Privileges for this purpose.... Because to occupy ourselves in acts of brotherly charity obligates us to exercise similar works in the foundations in cities, and that doing the opposite would result in our being useless to the Catholic Church and of no benefit to the Christian Republics. —Fr. Augustín de Muños, provincial, Augustinian Michoacán Province, 1707
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The emphasis Fr. Augustín placed on his order's role in the spiritual conquest, its special papal privileges, and its benefits to Christian republics echoes how Augustinians, Franciscans, and Dominicans wrote about themselves and their labors during the sixteenth century. What sets his statement apart from these earlier works, however, is its exhortation to ministries directed to the edification of an urban and not necessarily Indian population. Fr. Augustín's perspective is representative of one of New Spain's mendicant orders' most significant transformations during the colonial era: from missionaries in Indian towns to more conventional mendicants in urban areas. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the orders that had come to New Spain for the purpose of converting Indians had became almost exclusively urban entities. The mid-eighteenth-century loss of doctrinas played a role in this transformation, but New Spain's mendicants began their focus on cities much earlier. Not only did Fr. Augustín's instruction come decades before this loss but the mendicant orders also founded more than two-thirds of all their urban convents before 1630.
This chapter examines the changing status of New Spain's mendicant orders between the late sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century by focusing on their institutional presence in cities. This urban presence can be divided into two periods, a time of expansion and general prosperity from 1570 to 1730 and a period of new institutional challenges from 1730 through the end of the colonial period. The earlier era began when significant changes in the church and in colonial society more generally helped turn mendicants to urban occupations. They opened new convents in cities throughout New Spain, and increasing numbers of friars filled their houses. If the sixteenth century was the mendicants' golden age in Indian towns, then the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were their golden age in cities. New or intensified difficulties confronted the orders beginning in the 1730s. Many of these challenges came from state-sponsored reforms that sought to convert orders into what the crown thought they should be: smaller, less powerful, and more compliant. The reforms did not have the universally devastating effects with which they have often been credited, and their impact varied considerably, depending on the order and province. Nor did the reforms seek to undermine mendicants' roles in urban society. They instead targeted the orders' finances and autonomy so that by the end of the eighteenth century, most orders found themselves facing more serious structural problems, but their roles in urban society remained largely intact.
THE GOLDEN AGE IN CITIES, 1570–1730
To determine how orders fared in their urban environments, I have tracked two sets of institutional markers: foundations of urban convents and populations of friars. The discussion opens with the orders' urban roots in the sixteenth century and the process of founding urban houses. It unfolds chronologically, tracing patterns and tracking surges and lulls in where and when orders established new houses. It then turns to populations of friars, examining the ingress of new friars as well as total numbers of friars in the orders' provinces. Numbers rose across the orders throughout this period, paralleling in many ways the growth of convents so that by 1730 the number of friars in New Spain was at its peak. The period between 1570 and 1730 was an unquestioned success story.
Sixteenth-Century Roots
Upon arriving in New Spain, the Franciscans (1524), Dominicans (1526), and Augustinians (1533) headed to Mexico City, where each order established a convent that served as its most important administrative center and the base for its expansion throughout central New Spain. Over the next decades, the three orders founded as many houses as they could in order to claim territory in what was essentially a first-come, first-served competition. By the end of the sixteenth century, the orders managed to establish a staggering 274 houses, mostly in pueblos de indios. The Franciscans, with 141 houses, secured more than half (51.4 percent) of all these foundations, followed by the Augustinians with 83 (30.3 percent) and the Dominicans with 50 (18.2 percent).1 The Franciscans gained this sizable territorial advantage because they were the first order to establish a permanent presence in New Spain and had greater manpower than the other orders thanks to the larger influx of friars from Spain. More important, early Franciscans proved willing to adapt and curtailed their contemplative duties in favor of evangelical ones. The head of the order, Fr. Francisco de los Ángeles, instructed the first group of Franciscan missionaries to New Spain to "hurry down now to the active life." He continued by exhorting friars to "pay back your neighbor fourfold with the active life together with the contemplative, the shedding of your very blood for the Name of Christ and for the salvation of men's souls—which He regards and weighs fourfold compared with contemplation alone." The convents founded by these early Franciscans were clustered around large Indian populations in Mexico City, Tlaxcala, Texcoco, and Huejotzingo, and afterward the order expanded west into Michoacán and northwest into New Galicia.
The Dominicans had a slower start because of their fewer numbers and because of internal debates about whether the best way to evangelize was to establish houses in Indian pueblos or to send out expeditions from a few major convents. The Dominicans' first vicario general, Fr. Domingo Betanzos, preferred that friars be concentrated in fewer houses so they could better follow the order's constitution and more perfectly observe monastic discipline. Fr. Vicente de Santa María, who arrived in New Spain in 1528 with the same vicario general title as Betanzos, put more emphasis on work among Indians and, therefore, favored more houses, even if they accommodated fewer friars. After a few years Fr. Vicente's faction gained the upper hand, and the order intensified the pace at which it established houses, centering its efforts away from those of the Franciscans. The order anchored itself to the south and southeast of Mexico City, particularly concentrating on areas around Puebla and Oaxaca. Throughout the colonial period, it maintained a near monopoly in many of these territories, especially in the Bishopric of Oaxaca. The Augustinian order, as the last of the original three orders to arrive, was, in the words of Robert Ricard, "obliged to mold itself into the inevitable lacunae of the Franciscan and Dominican apostolate." Most of its establishments were located around Mexico City, to its northwest, and into Michoacán, so the order's territorial competition was more with the Franciscans than the Dominicans.
The orders administered these areas through a system of doctrinas that, by the last third of the sixteenth century, had come under attack. The Council of Trent sought to untangle a complicated church structure by privileging diocesan structures over the church's many other types of corporate bodies, including mendicant orders, and it specifically prohibited friars from serving as parish priests. Although this mandate did not directly alter the orders' legal position regarding doctrinas, it did indicate growing preferences within the church for diocesan over mendicant clergy in ministries to the laity. After Trent, Philip II, who might otherwise have preferred a less expensive, nonbeneficed, mendicant-run church in the Indies, offered increased support to diocesan structures in their struggles with the mendicant orders. A major shift in mendicant-diocesan power relations came with the 1574 Ordenanza del Patronazgo that placed doctrinas under bishops' supervision and inspired new struggles to define what that supervision entailed, struggles that continued as long as the orders held on to their doctrinas. Also around 1570 the first of New Spain's doctrinas were secularized (turned over to diocesan clergy) when the archbishop of Mexico forced all three orders (although the Franciscans were most affected) to give up some of their doctrinas around Mexico City. Another royal cedula of 1583 decreed that diocesan clergy were to be favored over friars for positions in parishes or doctrinas, and at the Third Mexican Provincial Council (1585), which attempted to implement the decrees of Trent, administration of doctrinas became one of the most controversial issues. Such challenges by no means led the mendicant orders to turn away from work in doctrinas. Over the next two centuries friars valiantly argued their orders' legal rights to administer doctrinas as well as the advantages of mendicant-run doctrinas over diocesan-run parishes. These events, which highlighted the precariousness of the mendicants' rights to manage doctrinas, were not without effect, and around this time the orders turned more attention to urban areas.
Despite mendicants' medieval and European origins as city dwellers, before the 1570s orders had few urban convents in New Spain. The orders had not abandoned their long-standing urban traditions, however, and they placed administrative centers in the few cities where Spaniards were concentrated. Within a few years of arriving, each order had established a convent in New Spain's two most important cities, Mexico City and Puebla, as well as one in a major city near its strongest concentration of doctrinas. The Franciscans added a convent in Guadalajara (1544), the Dominicans one in Oaxaca (1528), and the Augustinians one in Valla dolid (now Morelia, 1550). Highlighting the importance of these convents is that each one, with the exceptions of the Franciscans' and Augustinians' Puebla houses, later became a convento grande, the capital of its province. In addition to ministering to local residents, these convents were meant to support the orders' mission in doctrinas, and they housed the novitiates, schools, and infirmaries that prepared and supported friars in this work.
These urban convents were the only ones the Dominicans and Augustinians established before 1570, but the Franciscans had founded the majority of theirs by this date, inaugurating nineteen (70 percent) of their twenty-seven urban convents (Table 1 and Figure 1). This unique pattern is less an anomaly than it seems since most of these foundations were made in pueblos de indios that later became sizable, multiethnic cities. During the orders' sixteenth-century scrambles for territory, the prime locations were those with large settled populations, and the Franciscans took advantage of their head start and manpower advantage to secure the more attractive pueblos. As an early Augustinian provincial explained with some hyperbole but not without an element of truth, "And as the friars of the order of St. Francis came first, they built their convents in large pueblos; and to us fell small pueblos in harsh and hot lands." Over the following centuries, as places like Atlixco and Toluca grew into cities with significant non-Indian populations, the houses that the early Franciscans founded as doctrinas also became urban convents.
Founding Urban Houses
During these first decades of expansion in New Spain, orders founded houses with little or no regulation, but as bureaucracies and hierarchies became better established in the colony, the process of founding an urban house became far more complex, time-consuming, and politically fraught. Now, in addition to requiring support from within the order and from local residents, foundings involved bishops, bureaucrats in New Spain, and royal officials in Spain as well. The factors in a successful foundation thus included the circumstances of individual orders, local conditions, and the miter's and crown's willingness to grant licenses.
The houses founded in urban locations could have different official designations—conventos (convents), casas de recolección (houses of seclusion), or hospicios (hospices)—depending on their purpose and status within the province. The majority of urban houses were conventos, which were supposed to maintain at least eight friars in permanent residence. Most provinces also had one or two houses designated as casas de recolección where friars could focus on their contemplative duties or take time from their worldly responsibilities to complete retreats or spiritual exercises. Hospicios might have a few friars in permanent residence and function like a small convent, or they could be unstaffed houses that temporarily sheltered friars while they traveled, collected alms, conducted business, or ministered to local lay organizations. Because conventos were larger and took a more active role in urban life, they were more tightly regulated and difficult to found.
The process of establishing any of these types of houses began with local supporters, who were crucial for funding the project as well as for convincing people in the bureaucratic chain that a foundation was necessary. In the early years of the colony, the crown offered subsidies for new churches, but this practice was already rare by the end of the sixteenth century. Local supporters stepped in and provided sites for the church, donations of cash, and income-producing properties. Personal connections, devotions to a particular saint, or a special affinity for an order often played a role in determining which orders were invited to found a convent. For example, Pedro Romero de Terreros, the first conde de Regla, was dedicated to Franciscan causes, especially missionary colleges, and his support helped transform the Discalced Franciscans' convent at Pachuca into such an institution. Similarly, one of the founders of the Carmelites' Puebla convent was Melchor de Bonilla, a vecino (resident, typically of Spanish ancestry) originally from Brihuega, Spain. Ida Altman, in her study of the large Briocense population that came to Puebla in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, suggested that these immigrants sought out familiar religious institutions because they fostered a sense of continuity or connection between the religious life of the two places. At that time, the only male order in Brihuega was the Carmelites. Orders rarely refused offers of support, but internal divisions within an order could prevent their acceptance, as happened with the Carmelites and a potential foundation at Guadalajara. When in 1649 a resident there offered to support a foundation and the bishop agreed to give his license, some of the province's leadership wanted to accept it, but the provincial, who prioritized other locations, declined.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Building Colonial Cities of God by Karen Melvin Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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