; Combine this image with the document about the Middle Passage for a lesson on suffering people of color endured for the profit of the Spanish colonies. The growers were aware of the currency shortage and, even as the price dropped to five pesos the fanega, of the lack of buyers for their cacao beans. Although harvests varied somewhat from one year to the next, and prices were falling steadily, Liendos gross income averaged nearly 3,500 pesos per year during the period 1645-52 (Figure 1). 1, 424-130. Started during the period of alhorra blight and low prices, this was expansion that already purchased slaves could execute. Regular commerce across the coastal mountains was impossible except at Caracas, where a break in the range provided relatively easy access to the sea. The origins of cacao cultivation in this part of the New World are obscure. Diss., Tulane University, 1980), esp. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. #1. to give protection to the natives #2. to help the missionaries convert the natives to Christianity #3. to promote education Unfortunately, many Spanish encomenderos committed abuses, such as: Brutal treatment of the Filipinos Collecting more tribute than that authorized by law Forcing the people to work for them You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. The genealogical studies used are those by Carlos Iturriza Guilln, Algunas familias caraqueas, already cited, and Algunas familias valencianas (Caracas, 1955). (Paris, 1955-58), VIII, pt. This is the last year for which we can be sure that all noncontraband exports were recorded; see n.6. The overall population declined from 110 to 100 individuals, and of those who can be identified by place of birth with certainty (76 percent in 1659; 79 percent in 1671), the number of African-born dropped from 36 to 26. Before 1700 these hopeful immigrants had begun to harvest quantities of cacao in the valleys at the remote edge of the province. ACM, Actas del cabildo, Originales, 1669-72, May 21, June 20, 1671. Although the encomienda was not officially abolished until the late 18th century, in September 1721 the conferment of new encomiendas in Spains colonies was prohibited. With a total of two hundred tributaries and an annual income from them of 6,250 pesos, don Jos was Caracass foremost encomendero.20, The first of these men to settle in Caracas was Diego de Ovalle. Search for other works by this author on: Hispanic American Historical Review (1981) 61 (4): 609635. (Caracas, 1945-58), I, 230-232. The 1,000 pesos were loaned by the Rodrguez Santos family, wheat farmers and merchants; ARPC, Testamentaras, R, fols. Encomienda- A system of control over Native Americans used during the 16th century. This was a labor force of a somewhat different order, although as artisans, grocers, vegetable farmers, overseers, and, perhaps more than any other occupation, muleteers who served the increasingly distant arboledas, they were as closely dependent on the production and sale of cacao as the estate owners who bought their wares and hired their services.54, Before 1700 the population structure of the Caracas region had become a racial-class continuum, with white masters and Black slaves at opposite poles and Canarios, other poor Spaniards, and the mixed-blood pardos and mulattoes scattered in between. Encomiendas ca. That Caracas growers were able both to sell their beans at a competitive price in the Mexican market and purchase hundreds of slaves with the income from these sales would seem to depend on the existence of substantial groves of indigenous cacao trees. Bishop Antonio Gonzlez de Acua to the King, June 15, 1675, in Guillermo Figuera, ed., Documentos para la historia de la iglesia colonial en Venezuela, 2 vols. The author, an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctorate fellow at Tulane University, wishes to thank Stuart Schwartz, John Lombardi, James Lockhart, and Eric Van Young for their helpful criticisms. Population decline among the Indians in the later sixteenth century further weakened the encomienda by reducing the amount of Indian labor available, which prevented the encomienda from producing enough to satisfy the economic and social aspirations of the encomenderos. In these circumstances, Caracass proximity to Africa and its situation as the first port after the Atlantic crossing where slave cargoes might be absorbed on a regular basis made it welcome sighting for ships captains and crews. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. 287-301. Francisco Castillo, encomendero and local tax collector for the Cartagena-based Inquisition court, directed a mixed-labor enterprise that was a variation on the common theme; the wheat grown by fifty African slaves in the Caracas valley was shipped to Cartagena in cotton bags woven by the Indians of his Valencia encomienda.31 In the 1630s and 1640s, cacao sales gave a significant boost to the quantity of slaves that Caraqueos could purchase, and although the cacao encomenderos Indians afforded them the means to obtain the largest slave holdings, other ways were found to form a slave gang. The encomienda system was a trusteeship system used during the Spanish colonization of the Americas , whereby conquistadors were granted the towns of the indigenous people they conquered. With silver production in decline, and forced to depend on the Mexican peso by the crowns decision to devalue the debased Peruvian currency, would-be buyers in New Spain preferred to hoard their sound coins rather than let them go out to distant markets such as Venezuela from whence they might not circulate back. In 1720, before the establishment of the Guipuzcoana Company in Venezuela, there were more than two million cacao trees in the Caracas province, and by 1744 the number of trees had risen to over five million; in each case more than half of the trees were located in the Tuy River region. The most profitable encomiendas in 1635 were the large grants located in the Valencia-Aragua Valley, Region 3. Of twenty-three encomiendas with an annual renta of 1,500 pesos or more, incomes comparable to those of the most profitable cacao encomiendas in Central America at the middle of the sixteenth century,17 eight were located in the Valencia-Aragua region, eight near the town of Caracas, and seven on the coast. In the absence of other heirs, Diegos nephew Juan inherited the valuable Choron estate, much to the disgust of Diegos wifes Caracas family. More than three-fifths, 3,262, were in 9 encomiendas located near sugar mills owned by their encomenderos; 1,085 Indians in 11 encomiendas were at work farming wheat; and 931 were spread thinly among 17 encomenderos whose grants were located near their coastal cacao groves. A sharp decrease in the number of single men, from 30 to 11, and a significant rise in married or widowed men and women, from 20 to 27 men and from 26 to 34 women, are further indicators of adjustment to a reduced slave supply. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 November 1981; 61 (4): 609635. 1613; it was published in Revista de Historia (Caracas), 28 (Aug. 1970), 63-81. Peter J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (Cambridge, 1971), pp. Castillo Lara, Materiales para la historia de Aragua, pp. These were the infant years of cacao commerce, however, and this was Ibarras first purchase. One clue to this process, which merits much closer examination than is possible here, comes from the record of the Mexican Inquisition. A precise idea of the profitability of these groves is provided by accounts kept for the arboledas of Domingo de Liendo, brother of encomendero Pedro de Liendo. 170-172. The word encomienda comes from a Spanish verb meaning "to entrust." In theory, the conquistador or colonial official receiving an encomienda had the duty of providing protection and religious instruction to the natives on his land. The price collapse in Caracas at that time could then be linked to the resumption of high output in Guayaquil after 1640.38 The diseased Caracas industry, rather than contributing to the seventeenth-century crisis of the Central American cacao economy, was like it overwhelmed by competition from Guayaquil. Where: Old World (Europe, Asia and Africa) to New World and vise versa. Population decline among the Indians in the later sixteenth century further weakened the encomienda by reducing the amount of Indian labor available, which prevented the encomienda from producing enough to satisfy the economic and social aspirations of the encomenderos. In 1684, all eleven of the encomenderos whose Indians grew wheat near Caracas were also owners of either sugar or cacao properties. New answers. A huge wooden storehouse doubled in the upper loft as a drying shed. Encomienda, the right to control the labor of and collect tribute from an Indian community, granted to subjects, especially the first conquerors and their descendants, as a reward for service to the Spanish crown.Unlike the Spanish peninsular version of the encomienda, the grant in the New World did not give the grantee, or encomendero, legal right to own land. 335-346. A principal factor in the crisis was the blight known as alhorra. No peso value was assigned to the slaves on the Ovalle estate in the inventory of 1653, but the average value of slaves recorded in other inventories taken at about the same time was 250 pesos or more; ARPC, Testamentarias, 1648 RU; 1653-55 CL. Only encomenderos with Indians in the wheat fields near Caracas, in Petare, Barata, and La Vega, had uniformly paid their taxes and kept their titles in order. Coastal encomiendas produced a renta of about six pesos more per tributary than those in the traditionally profitable wheat farming areas north and east of Caracas town (36.6 pesos per annum in Region 1 compared to 30.7 pesos in Region 2). Who were these seventeenth-century parvenus with profitable encomiendas on the inhospitable coastal fringe of Caracas society? Arcila Farias was aware of this exemption (Economa colonial, pp. In itself this difference, something less than the value of one African slave, does not adequately reflect the impact that the cacao bean bonanza had already had on Caracas society by the 1630s. History of the Americas APUSH Unit 1 ID Terms Flashcards Learn Test Match Flashcards Learn Test Match Created by habbiness Terms in this set (15) Columbian Exchange Who: Colonists of New World and Europe What: An exchange of goods, ideas, and skills. Unit 1: Learning Objective D , Unit 1: Learning Objective E , Unit 1: Learning Objective F Google Classroom A high-level overview of Spanish efforts at early colonization. An encomienda was a system adopted in all the Spanish colonies based upon the practice of exacting tribute from Muslims and Jews during the Reconquista (Reconquest) of Muslim Spain. Guillermo Figuera, ed., Documentos para la historia de la iglesia, II, 119120. (Caracas, 1971), IV, 631-638. By 1675 slavery was well established, and by 1700 slaves had almost entirely replaced indentured servants. Drawing by Felipe Guamn Poma de Ayala. The effect was heavy depopulation of Indians from brutality and disease leading into African slaves becoming a new labor force. Who had power in the . Since about 1640, his African slaves had planted some cacao trees in the valley, but in 1653 only 1,165 trees of a total of more than 12,000 were not indigenous to the area. The ecclesiastical establishment, its temples and convents in ruins and the mortgages it held rendered worthless by the destruction, suffered the most. The Ibarra-Ovalle dispute is in Archivo Arquidiocesano de Caracas (hereinafter AAC), Episcopales, Obispo Gonzalo de Angulo. Historians use the Hispanicized term mita to differentiate the system as it was modified and intensified by the Spanish colonial government, creating the encomienda . The value of the Cepi land in 1650 is unknown, but the half of the valley not owned by Liendo was sold for 1,000 pesos in 1630 by someone who had no slaves to someone who did. (Caracas, 1967), I, 161-180. For a list, see AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. Spain's American colonies helped make it the richest, most powerful nation in the 16th century. In 1684 his heirs owned a small cacao grove in the coastal valley of Osma.32. He turned to making bricks and tiles for the houses of those more directly favored by cacao, and in time he was able to accumulate, in addition to the brick works, a respectable town house, a dozen slaves, and a small fortune in silver and gold coin. In the encomienda, the Spanish crown granted a person not only land but a specified number of natives as well. Frightened by marauding French corsairs and by raids on Maracaibo by the Englishman William Henry Morgan, townsmen expressed faith that Caracas was once again worth protecting and weighed the possibilities of persuading the crown to finance a new fort to be built on the road to La Guaira.44. By 1671, the role of Curaao in the supply of slaves was so commonplace that the Caracas cabildo issued a matter-of-fact warning that slaves afflicted with the Dutch evil (mal olanda) were entering from the island.46 Yet it may be that Curaao did not immediately become little more than a gigantic slave pen after the Dutch occupation, as one historian recently suggested.47 Between 1659 and 1671, the slave population at Chuao underwent changes in demographic composition that suggest that few, if any, African slaves had been introduced to that coastal valley. At that time, 3,328 Indian tributaries were to be found divided unevenly among 100 encomiendas held by vecinos of three Spanish towns: Santiago de Len de Caracas, Nueva Valencia del Rey, and San Sebastin de los Reyes. By clicking Accept All, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. 14, July 29, 1628. An extensive network of roads and disciplined armies The capital city of the Aztec empire was? 115-118. They all married well in that soon after their marriages they obtained encomiendas on the basis of the station and merits of their Caracas-born wives families. Comparison with the agricultural property owned by the encomenderos who held these 37 grantsas the 1684 padrn permits makes it possible to account for the specific activities that employed Indian labor at the end of the century. Advertisements. This image was created as part of a campaign to end the encomienda system. The encomienda system was a method by which the Spanish crown rewarded colonial settlers by entrusting them with a group of natives whom they would civilize and convert to Christianity , in return for gifts in the form of labor, taxes, or goods as tribute. Multiple holdings of encomiendas were not unusual in seventeenth-century Caracas; Arcila Farias, El rgimen, pp. The majority (14 of 27) of married and widowed men in 1671 were African-born, but the majority of women of the same status (17 of 34) were creoles. In 1710, Turmero Indians complained that Tovar canefields were encroaching on their village, and in 1730 these same Indians were still identified as the people of Don Antonio Tovar, their last encomenderowho had been dead for more than forty years.61. The property owned by Pereiras heirs in 1684 is listed in the document identified in n.48 infra. The encomienda system didn't last long, but it established the precedent of subjugating colonized people by force, and it sparked debate - the Valladolid Debate - in Europe about European colonization and the morality of it. It Brought Forth the Vile Encomienda System . . This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The sources listed in notes 49 and 52 infra were used to fix a date for this document. Increasingly self-sufficient generally, New Spain continued to depend on external suppliers for cacao, and when commercial capital was unavailable, as was the case from about 1650 until about 1670, Mexicans invested their money in local enterprises and probably did without cacao beans. 2, no. In 1607, the slave factor and six of the towns encomenderos, including Ovalle, were from Portugal.21, He was also a shrewd trader. Two years later, in a legal suit brought before the bishop, Ibarra complained that since no one was then interested in the cacao trade, he had been doing Ovalle a favor by offering to take his cacao in exchange for merchandise. How did slavery replace indentured servants? 1635 document is in AGN, Fundacin de Trujillo, leg. Mario Gngora has shown how the encomienda in agrarian Chile was absorbed by a class of owners who derived their power from various sources and who were therefore not dependent on Indian tribute for wealth and prestige.62 This was all the more true in Caracas, where the monetary value of an encomienda frequently depended on the market skills of the encomendero, and where, especially after 1650, ownership of large, movable gangs of slaves was the decisive factor in the maintenance of aristocratic status. At least in the Chuao case, the immediate presence of Dutch traders was unimportant and, from the point of view of the slave community, the stagnant African trade had beneficial demographic effects (Table III). From 1650 to the 1670s a general crisis in the supply of currency choked trade in the Spanish Caribbean.40 To aggravate matters further, from 1620 to 1650 the Mexican Inquisition tried more than 200 Portuguese for practicing Judaism, many of them cacao traders who had been the primary buyers of Caracas cacao.41 By eliminating these middlemen and reducing the opportunity to barter cacao for Africans, Caracas growers were forced to depend on cash sales to Mexican merchants who were generally unwilling to make such purchases. By 1690, cacao cultivation and the forced immigration of Black slaves had reduced the coastal Indian communities to fragments of their original form. Until about 1650 profits from these sales came particularly easily, for the greater part of the beans was collected from the virgin trees known as rboles de la tierra. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". MacLeod, Spanish Central America, pp. In fact, the earliest testamentary inventories of coastal cacao groves indicate that the first trees to be harvested were native to the region. Hides, from extensive herds of privately owned cattle, were also traded (see Table I). Source: ARPC, Testamentaras, 1653-1655 CL. 1 What caused the end of the Encomienda system? Too few and too thinly scattered to be organized into encomiendas, in many cases the most profitable use of the San Sebastin natives was their capture and sale to Spaniards whose agricultural enterprises were more directly integrated with the marketplace. September 1721 Of more dubious benefit, but a clear indication of the reemerging social order, the jail, destroyed in the 1641 earthquake, was rebuilt in 1674. There his family had vineyards and fruit orchards, the produce of which had been sent traditionally to Medina del Campo and Valladolid. (Caracas, 1943-75), IV, 127-128. Source: AGN, Fundacin de Trujillo, leg. Only 1,165 had been planted during the previous twenty-five years, and the ages of these trees, labeled rboles de Trujillo, were known exactly. A Dominican friar, Las Casas had been one of the earliest Spanish settlers in the Spanish Caribbean. Within a few years, however, the crown authorized this practice, called the encomienda system. 193. Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Ovalle heads the list of foreigners in Relacin de los estrangeros [Apr. by Dr. Eric A. Anderson Immediately the conquest had ended there appeared in the oolon'izatbn (of conquered territories and peoples) the need to apportion lands and Indians, as a reward to the most vigorous oonquistadores. Later it was adopted to the mining economy of Peru and Upper Peru. Leopoldo de la Rosa, La emigracin canaria a Venezuela en los siglos xvii y xviii, Anuario de Estudios Atlnticos (Tenerife), 20 (1976), 617-631. It was first put in place to reward the military officials leading the charge for exploration across the Americas. Once planted, an arboleda required only a maintenance crew of waterers and weeders during most of the year, and this meant that a gang of the younger, sturdier slaves could be kept constantly at work bringing new land under cultivation. The actual meaning in the Caracas context of this designation of gentility is not considered here. Source: AGN, Real Hacienda, legs. The Basque Liendo family was among the first to ship Caracas beans to Mexico; their first lot was sent to Veracruz in 1628. In 1609 the local definition of tributary was established as all men between the ages of 12 and 60 and all women between the ages of 10 and 60 inclusive; Ordenanza de encomiendas de Sancho de Alquiza y de fray Antonio de Alcega de 30 de noviembre de 1609, published in Arcila Faras, El rgimen, pp. This was an investment against any misfortune and one that those who survived the prolonged depression of the 1650s and 1660s seemed to have made freely while cacao sales were brisk and profitable. 190194. 191-193, 227-229. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". Note: The seven coastal encomiendas (Region 1) may well have belonged to the eight unidentified vecinos described in 1628 as having considerable wealth in haciendas de cacao. Actas del Cabildo de Caracas, 12 vols. In 1659, in addition to the estate house and tools, he owned a warehouse and two stores in La Guaira, a sloop to carry his cacao there, and 106 slaves.28 For their part, the Blanco Ponte family participated directly in the slave trade; as buyers and brokers their credit was respected from Lisbon to Loanda to Cartagena. Typically, an encomienda included an entire village, up to several hundred men, women, and children. So that San Sebastin encomenderos would not keep these drivers at work nearer the coast, the ordenanza required that Indian muleteers return from Caracas within fifteen days; Arcila Faras, El rgimen, p. 347. Bishop Baos y Sotomayors Ynforme of 1690, on which the tax was to be based, allows a glimpse at the remnant of Indian society that was then very much at the margin of Caracass Hispano-African community.57. These laws, passed in 1542, gave certain rights to indigenous peoples and protected them against abuses. What wars took place during the Dark Ages? 81. of these encomiendas held by dons and doas. Robert J. A copy is in the Archivo de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, Caracas, Traslados, Seccin Caracas vol. With this property as collateral, Pereira worked as a middleman, buying cacao with borrowed money guaranteed in Caracas and selling it for a profit at La Guaira. Pedro and his brothers Santiago and Domingo de Liendo, who were not encomenderos, were perhaps Caracass most ambitious cacao planters during the first half of the seventeenth century. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. The Spanish colonists abused the encomienda system, essentially rendering it a system of slave labor. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. On the other hand, many of those of the poor and distant San Sebastin district, Region 4, would be removed from their homeland during the early 1600s. He made no clear reference to the source of his information, but evidently he used the series entitled Libro comn y general de la tesorera, Real Hacienda, AGN. There were several Portuguese among the poorer encomenderos, but Diego de Ovalle was the only individual of this nationality whose grant was valued at 1,500 pesos or more annual income. An additional goal of the encomienda system was to convert locals to Christianity via Spanish missionaries. The most thorough account of Portuguese Jews who traded Venezuelan cacao in New Spain is by Stanley Mark Hordes, The Crypto-Jewish Community of New Spain, 1620-1649: A Collective Biography (Ph.D. In 1658, the heirs of Domingo de Liendo had 24 men and boys and 8 women and girls on the original coastal estate at Cepi, 7 men and boys and 7 women and girls in domestic service in Caracas, and 8 men and 3 women at work planting cacao trees at Santa Luca in the Tuy Valley.51, Here we have perhaps the most salient characteristics of colonial Caracas economy and society: the ready availability of well-watered land and the mobility of the slave gang encouraged constant expansion. Encomienda (roughly translated: trustee) was a formal system of forced labor in Spanish colonies in Latin America and the Philippines, intended to encourage conquest and colonization. Who are some historical people related to the encomienda system? Here is more about the significance of the encomienda system. African men without African women were fortunate if, as occurred in Chuao, they were provided with creole women; otherwise they found substitutes among the women from the coastal encomiendas. Ibarra sent wheat flour and dry goods to Choron and waited for his cacao to arrive at the La Guaira wharf. In his early life in the Americas, he owned Indian slaves and was the recipient of an encomienda. (Caracas, 1964), pp. 138. Venezuelan historian Eduardo Arcila Faras suggested that cacao grown on the coast originated in the Andes because cultivation of the plant was recorded in Mrida in 1579; Eduardo Arcila Farias, Economa colonial de Venezuela (Mexico City, 1946), p. 88. Ovalle had refused to pay to have Ibarras cacao shipped to La Guaira, however, and while the two men argued over who should transport it, the market value of the merchandise fell by half. Relacin de Villanueva in Arellano Moreno, ed., Relaciones geogrficas, p. 280. In 1635, his encomienda at Chuao was made up of thirty-five tributaries. In the Americas, the first encomiendas were handed out by Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean. What caused the Dark Ages in Rome? It was published, dated tentatively but erroneously as sixteenth century, by Guillermo Morn, Historia de Venezuela, 5 vols. By 1635 encomienda labor was clearly most profitable in the coastal cacao zone. Updated: 10/04/2021 The Encomienda System Spain's conquest of the New World was largely driven by prospect of wealth, especially in gold and silver. Which came first: the Middle Ages or the Crusades? Derived from the Spanish verb encomendar (to entrust a mission for someone to fulfill), the mission of the encomienda was to care for and protect indigenous people by awarding part of their labor and produce to men who had served the . MacLeod, Spanish Central America, p. 117. 17 (So Paulo, 1974). Undoubtedly much impressed by the combined disasters of earthquake and crop blight, Caraqueos appealed to divine providence for assistance. 208-220. Don Rengifo Pimentel married the Caracas cattle heiress doa Francisca Gmez and in her name held the four encomiendas already mentioned, including two on the coast worth 1,000 and 3,000 pesos per annum. Cause & Effect: The cause of the Encomienda system was the Spanish crown offering land and Indian slaves to . However, you may visit "Cookie Settings" to provide a controlled consent. To reach Caracas from the west, agricultural produce was carried along the banks of first the Aragua and then the Guaire rivers. More revealing is the portion of all agricultural estates that benefited from encomienda labor; while a third of the sugar trapiches and fully two-thirds of the wheat farms were owned by encomenderos, only about one cacao planter in ten was also the holder of an Indian grant in 1690. 89, 463), but when he compiled his statistics on commerce, he ignored the fact that his source did not include the greater part of all cacao shipped, that which belonged to Caracas vecinos. Most likely for this reason it is commonly assumed that the first cacao trees on the Venezuelan coast were planted there by native and African laborers at the command of Europeans. What happens to atoms during chemical reaction? New Spain merchants offered considerably less for Caracas cacao from the late 1640s until the late 1660s, a period that corresponds closely to the general depression of Zacatecas silver mining. In the future, contracts would specify the location of delivery, either puesto puerto La Guayra or puesto costa del mar, but on this occasion Ovalle, who had not made arrangements to do so, refused to ship the beans at his cost to La Guaira. KevinWagner. Encomenderos brutalized their laborers with punishing labor. These groups were still stable in 1690, sexually balanced and headed by an aged patriarch, quite unlike the truncated, often caciqueless encomiendas on the coast.60, In the Aragua Valley, where the original population had been dense and indigenous culture was able to survive the seventeenth century more nearly intact than it had on the coast or in Caracas, it may have simply made good tactical sense to allow the encomiendas to return to the crown. Wealth accumulated during the first years of booming commerce made it possible for the families of many of the first encomendero-slaveholders to survive the several decades of economic slump. Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, Las acciones militares del gobernador Ruy Fernndez de Fuenmayor (16371644) (Caracas, 1978), pp. In all, the material wealth of Choron was predominantly utilitarian. Thus concentrated, Valencia Indians survived as an ethnic group to become sharecroppers in that area in the nineteenth century. ARPC, Testamentaras, 1653-55 CL. What are the two chemical messengers in the body? Ibarra, having already given merchandise for the much-wanted cacao, had no choice but to send for it and pay the transportation charges himself.22, Ovalle made a good deal of money selling cacao, and he used his wealth to protect himself from the problems that could arise on account of his Portuguese nationality. What year did the encomienda system begin? 10, Sept. 22, 1613, and June 25, 1618. 4. The 1690 encomienda census is in AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. The encomienda lasted from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the seventeenth century. The Encomienda System . 11, fols. Encomenderos Initially the encomienda system was devised to meet the needs of the early agricultural economies in the Caribbean. Carpentry tools and a forge, both used by African artisans, were kept in a second structure. Source: La obra pa de Chuao, pp. Luis Alberto Sucre, Gobernadores y capitanes generales de Venezuela, 2d ed. The Liendos and don los Rengifo Pimentel are also included in Iturrizas genealogical study, Familias caraqueas, II, 451-452, 726. You just studied 15 terms! What caused the end of the Carolingian Renaissance? The encomienda system was also the first racially-based system of slavery in the New World, and can be seen as a precursor to the African slave trade that eventually replaced it. See Marta Espejo-Ponce Hunt, The Process of the Development of Yucatn, 1600-1700 in Ida Altman and James Lockhart, eds., The Provinces of Early Mexico (Los Angeles, 1976), p. 38. This document, dated about 1635, lists four series of facts: the names of the encomenderos and the titles of social distinction (don or doa, maestre de campo, capitn, and so forth) of those who were so identified; the geographical location of the encomiendas; the number of Indian tributaries in each grant; and a specific value in pesos defined only as the renta of each encomienda.11 That this value represents the annual income of each grant is confirmed by an existing fragment of the church tithe record. Bartolom de las Casas, OP (US: / l s k s s / lahs KAH-ss; Spanish: [batolome e las kasas] (); 11 November 1484 - 18 July 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish landowner, friar, priest, and bishop, famed as a historian and social reformer. His brother Pedro Blanco Ponte had been in Caracas since at least 1619 when he declared himself a vecino without estancia or land and asked the cabildo for a plot near the La Guaira road where he could pasture his pack mules, but Alejandro did not leave Tenerife until after 1627, the year when the Casa de la Contratacin formally prohibited direct trade between the Canaries and the Indies.19 A third encomendero was Pedro de Liendo, a Vizcayan and the nephew of a retired admiral of the galleon fleet. What events happened during the Crusades? 23-25. Once begun, the export of cacao from Caracas expanded at a remarkable rate. Ibid. Travel in the Aragua Valley is described in Mariano Mart, Documentos relativos a su visita pastoral de la dicesis de Caracas, 1771-1784, 7 vols. Classified zambos" by the Ynforme compilers, these children of Indian and African parentage were considered Indians for tax purposes. His brother Antonio was corregidor in Santo Domingo; ARPC, Escribanas, Nov. 12, 1637. Once freed from encomienda service, it was decided that Indians would be required to pay a tax for the religious instruction that they were to continue to receive. MacLeod documents falling prices for cacao in Santiago de Guatemala after 1651 and attributes the decline to successful competition from Guayaquil and Venezuela: In all the price history of cacao in Middle America, the main factor seems to have been the question of supply.37 If this was indeed the case, the high prices paid for cacao in the Mexican highlands and elsewhere (including Caracas) until the late 1640s may have been in part the consequence of declining production from Caracas because of the alhorra. They were not the first to bring Africans to Caracas. Ask students to write a letter to King Charles V of Spain, describing their reaction to the image and why the encomienda system should be ended. During the half century after 1630, Caracas completed the transformation from a minor supplier of a European food crop to Spanish sailors to a major supplier of a tropical quasi-drug to Indian and European consumers alike. The average age and cash value of the Liendo slaves sixteen years old and older are as follows: The strategies of kinship and their relationship to elite status and property are studied in Robert James Ferry, Cacao and Kindred: Transformations of Economy and Society in Colonial Caracas (Ph.D. Mit'a (Quechua pronunciation: [mta]) was mandatory service in the society of the Inca Empire.Its close relative, the regionally mandatory Minka is still in use in Quechua communities today and known as faena in Spanish.. These connections, and those he evidently had with the Portuguese slavers who monopolized the supply of African labor to the Caribbean, were no doubt of some interest in Caracas. The Spanish managed labor relations through a legal system known as the encomienda, an exploitive feudal arrangement in which Spain tied Indian laborers to vast estates. 457-459. An encomienda was land given to a conquistador, usually with natives already living there. To what degree these trends are coincidental must await a study of the New Spain cacao market and its merchants, but such a study might well reveal that the rise of seventeenth-century Caracas was closely tied to the simultaneous development of a diversified capitalist economy in Mexico. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. 16, 1608, was copied into the cabildo record in 1619; Actas del Cabildo de Caracas (hereinafter ACC), 12 vols. Acknowledged by contemporaries as the first such census of the towns rural domain, the 1684 padrn is a crucial document for the history of seventeenth-century Caracas.48 Caraqueos owned 373,250 cacao trees distributed on 167 estates, 18 wheat farms, 26 sugar trapiches, and 28 cattle hatos in 1684. Archivo del Registro Principal del Distrito Federal, Caracas (hereinafter ARPC), Testamentaras, 1653-55 CL; AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. The system also worked to the benefit of the Spanish by keeping the population in check. 280-287. Thus the San Sebastin referred to by Villanueva was located about 160 or 170 kilometers south of Caracas. ENCOMIENDA SYSTEMENCOMIENDA SYSTEM established social and racial relations as the basis for the economic and political order in the Spanish areas of the Americas. With a similar population norm of 29 or 30 tributaries, the annual income from a coastal grant was therefore about 200 pesos, or 20 percent, more than a years earnings from a typical grant near Caracas (Table IIa). Jos Antonio de Sangroniz y Castro, Familias coloniales de Venezuela (Caracas, 1943) is serviceable, but lacks the detail and completeness of Iturrizas work. 10, fols. For a boom-and-bust society of slavers and smugglers, it was a useful symbol of stability and the nobility of their origins, and for this reason the titles of these encomiendas were nearly all in order in 1690. Pedro de Liendos will is in Universidad Central de Venezuela, La obra pa de Chuao, 1568-1825 (Caracas, 1968), pp. 2. Rather than collect a fixed sum, or tributo, from their Indians, encomenderos expropriated their labor directly: that is, Indians were put to work gathering cacao beans, planting new groves, or carrying on any other activity considered useful or profitable by the encomendero. In May 1640, Pedro Blanco Ponte bought forty-eight slaves from Francisco de Aquilena, a vecino of Cartagena and agent to don Francisco de Vasconcelo, governor of Angola, on credit at the bargain price of 160 pesos each (the current rate was about 250 pesos).29 There is no record of slaves held or sold by don Rengifo Pimentel. More conjugal pairs and a greater sexual balance in 1671 occurred as single men found creole wives. What caused the downfall of the Incan Empire? A related problem has to do with the very success of this commerce. (Caracas, 1969), II, 286-429. The Navarro groves were completely destroyed by the alhorra blight. Climatic information is from J. Snchez C. and J. Garca B., Regiones meso-climticas en el centro y oriente de Venezuela, Agronoma Tropical (Caracas), 18 (Oct. 1968), 429-439. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, p. 251. AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. At least until mid-century there was no permanent road between Caracas and San Sebastin; the cattle ranchers of the district offered encomendero Luis de Castro 1,000 pesos to open a trail from Paracotos to the Tuy River, midway between the towns; ARPC, Escribanas, Apr. The Blanco Ponte family is traced in Carlos Iturriza Guilln, Algunas familias caraqueas, 2 vols. The best description of the earthquake is Bishop Mauro de Tovar to the King, Aug. 14, 1641, AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. Alejandro Blanco Pontes marriage to doa Francisca Infante, the granddaughter of town founders, brought him an encomienda at Caraballeda worth 1,500 pesos per annum. Ovalles small collection does not appear in Leals extensive inventory. If the Mal olanda were the same disease later described as the mal de Loanda, then it probably meant scurvy, an infirmity associated with overloading and undersupplying the slave ships. Urban functions and services came to a standstill. Diezmos collected for the region described in treasury documents as costa del mar y caraballeda totaled 2,600 pesos and 2,979 pesos for the years 1632 and 1634 respectively.12 These amounts correspond very closely to what would have been the Churchs 10 percent share of the 27,450 pesos of total renta for the twenty-five encomiendas located along the costa del mar de la jurisdiccin de Caracas, according to the 1635 list (Region 1 in Table Ha and Map). It is reasonable to suppose that the opportunistic Dutch, then the Atlantics leading merchants, provided planters with an alternative outlet for their cacao during the years of sluggish legal commerce. Why this was so can be inferred from the demographic composition of the encomiendas recorded in the Ynforme. A dozen books, including Antonio de Herreras Historia de las Indias, occupied a shelf.25 The upstairs bedroom contained just the touch of luxury in a style already common to Caracas cacao exporters: two carved cedar chests imported from New Spain and a four-poster bed covered with a Mexican quilt and pillows of Chinese silk reflected the importance of the market where Ovalle had made his modest fortune.26, Close by were the other buildings used for maintaining the estate and preparing cacao for shipment. The encomienda system was a method by which the Spanish crown rewarded colonial settlers by entrusting them with a group of natives whom they would civilize and convert to Christianity, in return for gifts in the form of labor, taxes, or goods as tribute. In 1649, Santiago de Liendo paid the priest at Cepi in devalued copper currency, the unwanted velln, because there was nothing else. In 1654, for the first time cacao had to be brought at Liendos cost from Cepi to La Guaira, to sell it and give it a market because there was none in Cepi and the cacao was about to be lost, rotting in the storehouse.42, The better to weather this combination of events, Caracas residents withdrew to the countryside. The bishops colorful career is described in Andrs F. Ponte, Fray Mauro de Tovar (Caracas, 1945), and in Manuel Guillermo Daz, El agresivo obispado caraqueo de don Fray Mauro de Tovar (Caracas, 1956). Ferry; Encomienda, African Slavery, and Agriculture in Seventeenth-Century Caracas. Instead of being a grant of land, the encomienda was a grant of people. Few Caracas residents received goods on consignment from merchants in Seville. 12, 1607], Archivo General de las Indias, Seville (hereinafter AGI), Santo Domingo, leg. Descripcin de Santiago de Len de Caracas in Antonio Arellano Moreno, ed., Relaciones geogrficas de Venezuela (Caracas, 1964), p. 120. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". Hopewell Culture The word encomienda comes from the Spanish word encomendar, meaning "to entrust." The encomienda system had been used in feudal Spain during the reconquest and had survived in some form ever since. Baltasar de Escovedo, ARPC, Testamentaras, 1634-37 MDPACVG; Agustn Pereira, ARPC, Testamentaras, 1656-57 sin letra; ARPC, Escribanas, Jan. 21 and Dec. 23, 1630, May 3 and Oct. 3, 1634. With a growing slave population and at a time when several decades of economic hardship had ended and a new, poor white class had begun to fill the town and countryside, Caracas seems to have become quite race conscious. Since the 1580s their toil had served a steady Spanish demand for bread, and in 1635 there were more encomiendas (33) in this temperate climate zone than in any other. Mikhail Gorbachev Operation Rolling Thunder Potsdam Conference Revolutions of 1989 Second Cold War Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan For the literature on pre-Hispanic Venezuelan culture and civilization, see Mario Sanoja and Iraida Vargas, Antiguas formaciones y modos de produccin venezolanos (Caracas, 1974). In 1632, the year of his sisters wedding, don Francisco Infante transferred a debt to the royal treasury of 5,403 pesos to his new brother-in-law, Alejandro Blanco Ponte, who immediately paid one-third of the outstanding amount in cash. He was appointed as the first resident Bishop of . What are the three major causes of slavery? The problems of supply at this critical juncture are much more evident than those that caused the price paid for cacao in Caracas to drop to one-fifth of its customary level (Figure 2). What came after the Dark Ages? Cornelius Osgood, Excavations at Tocorn, Venezuela (New Haven, 1943), p. 49. ARPC, Escribanas, Jan. 15, 1630; ARPC, Testamentaras, 1653-55 CL. Arcila Farias first published his data on Caracas commerce in 1946 in Economa colonial, pp. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to, About Hispanic American Historical Review, https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-61.4.609, Paying Tribute for the Dead: Religion and Spectral Labor in Sixteenth-Century Mexican Epidemics, Isabel de Velasco, menina de Las Meninas , y los indios del antiguo seoro de Zinacantn en 16421659, Norberto Codina (Caracas, Venezuela, 1951), No. Such were the profits from cacao that favored planters came to have three sets of slaves: in addition to their domestic servants, they had a caretaker crew and an expansion crew. 117, 241, 378. Due to this error, Arcila Farass often cited data give the impression that cacao cultivation and trade developed gradually and steadily over the course of the seventeenth century. Ovalle was born in the Vila do Mojadoiro on the upper Douro River in the Portuguese province of Tras-os-Montes. The surveyed area, comprising the legal jurisdictions of this triangle of towns, can be divided into four zones of agricultural production (Table II and Map). More revealing is the cabildos lament in 1626 that the lure of greater profits from coastal cacao arboledas had left the wheat farm encomenderos without Spanish labradores, overseers who were willing to administer Indian labor in return for a share of the harvest.16. encomienda, in Spain's American and Philippine colonies, legal system by which the Spanish crown attempted to define the status of the indigenous population. The concept of encomienda was adopted by the Spanish Crown in 1503 during the early days of colonization. By contemporary estimate, these forty enjoyed the benefit of the labor of 4,000 native tributaries, but this was only one-third the number of Indians who had inhabited the region ten years earlier. 310 (Sept. 9, 1619). Like Ovalle, Liendos principal expenditure was for African slaves. Created by kbrizan Midterm Study Guide Terms in this set (116) The Inca maintained their empire through the use of? The Portuguese Agustn Pereira came to Caracas with a few slaves that he sold to buy two houses in the center of town. With central Spain in depression at the end of the sixteenth century, Tras-os-Montes became part of the economic system of Seville, and there Ovalle established commercial relations that he maintained throughout his life. (Caracas, 1978), I, cix-cx. The end of the encomienda system led to the Catholics/Spaniards stop using Native Americans for labor and instead using African slaves. Where did the Middle Ages occur? ARPC, Testamentaras, 1650-53 sin letra; Ovalles wifes dowry, 12,565 pesos of 10 reales, is in ARPC, Escribanas, Feb. 21, 1602. The encomienda system granted a Spanish leader a number of Native American laborers. Cause of rebellion. The slaves quarters, because they represented no value to Ovalle, were not included in the inventory of his holdings, but the livestock and agricultural implements used to produce food to feed them were counted: seven milk cows, a hundred head of cattle, six teams of oxen with harnesses, several plows, hoes, and a variety of other tools filled out the list. The absence of expensive consumer goods may well have been the consequence of Ovalles considerable investment in slaves. Francisco Castillo de Consuegras will is in ARPC, Testamentaras, 1614-34 CEFMSU. The estimate of Indian population comes from the testimony of Francisco Infante and Garci Gonzlez de Silva, Jan. 3, 1589, in Archivo General de la Nacin, Caracas (hereinafter AGN), Encomiendas, 5 vols. The 136 conquistadors are listed in Hermano Nectario Mara, Historia de la conquista y fundacin de Caracas, 2d ed. Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet. Their entrepreneurial talents and trading contacts made them first welcome in Caracas and then part of its propertied elite. The earliest descriptions suggest a sense of general stagnation and disappointment. The same data are given in Eduardo Arcila Faras, Comercio entre Venezuela y Mxico en los siglos xvii y xviii (Mexico City, 1950), pp. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. In 1618 Ovalle sold one of the first lots of cacao ever to leave the Caracas coast to the Basque merchant Juan de Ibarra. 12, fols. Mario Gngora, Urban Social Stratification in Colonial Chile, HAHR, 55 (Aug. 1975), 430-431. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-61.4.609, Founded in 1567, Caracas, as was soon evident, had neither the human nor the mineral resources to sustain a prosperous Hispanic settlement. In terms of the value of each tributarys labor, average income from Region 3 encomiendas (23.1 pesos per tributary per annum) amounted to only two-thirds that of the coast (36.6 pesos) and three-fourths that of the Caracas region (30.7 pesos) (Table IIa). (Caracas, 1965, 1967), II, 101-104. The last will and testament of a second cacao encomendero, Pedro de Liendo, has also survived. The first was how to reward the blood-soaked conquistadors who had taken the land (and who had been badly cheated out of their shares of the gold by Cortes). This number had risen to eighty-four in 1644, and by 1650, the year of his death, Ovalle was master of ninety-four slaves.24, The inventory of Ovalles Choron estate provides a glimpse of the material life constructed from the economic life of Indian and African labor and fifty years of vigorous trading. Part of a series on Slavery Contemporary Historical By country or region They also settled in Caracas town, in the Candelaria parish on the settlements eastern fringe, which in time became a Canario barrio. Nicolas de Ovando: The royal governor who first established the encomienda system on behalf of the crown In the process, African slavery rendered the encomienda a nonessential anachronism. 22, 1649. Encomienda. They were paid for there with hides, tobacco, cotton, and some cacao, the only reference in the Villanueva report to the tropical plant that would shortly revolutionize the Caracas economy.3.
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