spanish missions in the new world -- 7/30/24

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Today's selection --from How the Spanish Empire Was Built by Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo. The success and impact of Spanish religious missions (of which the Alamo is perhaps the most famous) in the New World:

“Scholarship has exposed all the deficiencies and failures of missions as means of spreading faith and inculcating allegiance: they were incubators of diseases; they exacerbated plagues by introducing livestock that were reservoirs of infection; their methods of evangelization were often superficial—Dominicans, especially, were often critical of Franciscans for inattention to dogma, and Jesuits for tolerating dubious areas of pre-Christian Indigenous cultures. Physical abuse was the obverse of efforts to maintain discipline with insufficient manpower, and scourging —devolved for the sake of priestly decency to native or Black intermediaries—was the standard remedy for every ill. Rebellions were, if not common, recurrent and some orders seemed to welcome them as opportunities for martyrdom. It is worth observing, however, that missions were, on the whole, surprisingly successful in drawing recruits and harnessing affections. Franciscans in the remote areas of the forested eastern flanks of the Andes, where they launched missionary efforts in the eighteenth century, seem to have benefited from the control of precious salt supplies and the judicious bestowal of steel tools. But the loyalty they inspired seems inexplicable in balance-sheet terms. The researcher Cameron Jones has uncovered what he calls 'a preference' for the missionaries, feeding them through famines and dying to defend them against pagan assailants. 

“The claim that secular intruders hampered evangelization had a lot of strong evidence and stronger opinion on its side. The notion that the sinfulness of lay Spaniards set the indios bad examples was among the themes of Dominican homilies at least as early as 1511, when Fray Antonio de Montesinos — a preacher as small, noisy and uncompromising as St Paul — uttered his famous sermon against Spanish rapacity, inspiring the young Bartolome de Las Casas, the future voice of humanity in the empire, to dedicate his life to the protection of indios. In 1517 similar scruples led the crown to hand government of the American dominions to a commission of three Jeronimite friars. In 1522 Las Casas, who by then was formally charged by the crown with defence of indios against injustice and maltreatment, launched his first scheme for liberating natives from excessive impositions by transferring some of their responsibilities for production to Spanish peasant immigrants. One of his unremitting complaints was that the conversacion — close contact, that is — of lay intruders was inimical to the conversion of the crown's native subjects and destructive of their souls. His next big project, launched in 1537, was for a colony in Guatemala he called 'La Vera Paz', from which all lay people were to be entirely excluded. The Dominicans eventually found the colony unmanageable without help from Spanish soldiers, but the ideal of an empire of love, unencumbered by worldly purposes and uncorrupted by secular presence, continued to tug at clerical sensibilities. Against this background, the role of missions as forges of empire is intelligible. 

“In most places the religious found in practice that they could not manage without secular help and, in particular, without armed force to protect them. The Dominicans gave up in La Vera Paz after the martyrdom in 1556 of the author of a vast theological summa in Quiche — the longest work in any indigenous language of the Americas. The Jesuits massacred at Chesapeake in 1571 had refused soldiers, as did the Franciscans who perished at San Saba in 1758. The Jesuits who manned the first mission in the Pacific island of Guam in 1668 were guests of a local chief, who, in a classic demonstration of the stranger-effect, gave the land for a church. They tried to do without Spanish troops and to exclude lay Spaniards, but the martyrdom of their leader in 1672 provoked a violent Spanish conquest. Indeed, Jesuits' valorization of martyrdom was almost heretical in its intensity, recalling the lust for self-immolation that St Augustine condemned in the Donatists, and may have contributed to risks they undertook. Their mission among the Guaycuru in the 1590s failed so miserably that they turned to thoughts of compulsion by 'fire and sword'. Nonetheless, three regions in America stand out as mission fields where the foundations of Franciscans and Jesuits effectively took the place of imperial structures and —as it were— kept the empire going with little or no secular input: Florida, California (outside the presidios discussed above) and the inner frontier of Spanish South America in the basins of the Amazon and Paraguay river systems. 

The Church of the Dominican Convent of San Pablo in Valladolid where Bartolomé de Las Casas was consecrated as Bishop on March 30, 1544.

“Florida was first. 'In future,' claimed Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565, seeking to tempt his king into investing in the conquest of what is now the southeast United States, 'Florida will render much wealth to Your Majesty and, in value to Spain, will greatly exceed New Spain and even Peru.' His words proved delusive. Indeed, the entire project for colonizing Florida rested on false assumptions and in particular on wildly wishful mental constructions of the geography of the imperfectly explored hemisphere. Menendez de Aviles had chosen Santa Elena as the site of Florida's first Spanish settlement because he mistakenly thought it to be near the mythical 'land of Chicora', vaunted by an earlier explorer, and only about 1,255 kilometres (780 mi.) from the Mexican silver mines of Zacatecas: in reality the distance was about 2,900 kilometres (1,800 mi.), with the Mississippi in between. Viceroy Luis de Velasco thought the colony could be close enough to Mexico to be supplied by cattle drives and planted unworkable and short-lived garrisons along the supposed route.  

“By about 1619, when Fray Luis Jeronimo de Ore wrote his Account of the Martyrs in the Provinces of La Florida, the truth was obvious. 'One cannot hope', the friar averred to Philip's successor, 'for any temporal gain from the many thousands Your Majesty spends in sustaining the soldiers in the presidio, and the number of religious engaged in preaching the law of Christ.' The newly acquired province had no resources that Spaniards thought worthy of exploitation; the coast from the Chesapeake southward was of interest only because its bays commanded the Gulf Stream route from the Caribbean to the zone of westerly winds in the North Atlantic that took ships back to Spain; the sole reason to occupy the coast was to keep it out of the hands of foreign 'pirates'. Florida was a 'loss leader' in the imperial economy. 

“The monarchy's willingness to pay the costs of Franciscan missions in what are now northern Florida and southern Georgia is often attributed to royal piety; but Ore's text helps to show that the friars gave good value for the king's cash. Compared with soldiers, Franciscans were cheap to maintain, relatively dispensable and of high propaganda value as martyrs. In Ore's summing-up, 'they pay for their keep.' In its day, his rough-hewn compilation of materials circulated in manuscript and functioned as a conduit of the texts it unites into the historiographical tradition. Now it provides a quarry of wonderful anecdotes of sacred sufferings and hair-raising escapes. The work is full of instructive data on the friars' struggles with concubinage, their notions of sanctity and martyrdom, their methods of evangelization, their animadversions on native 'superstitions' (which strikingly resembled the 'popular culture' of talismans, taboos and unscientific treatments that godly meddlers harried in Europe in the same period), their outraged response to the menace of English pirates and their modest expectations of miracles. Ore cannot forbear to mention a dog that died after daring to profane a martyred friar's body; the vultures prospered by showing greater respect or perhaps better taste. The long list of martyrs Ore praised was, in one respect, deceptive: despite high turnover in apparently precious clerical manpower in the early decades of the enterprise, Florida represented a stunning success story for Spain. Native chiefs sought legitimation from representatives of the Spanish crown from as early as the late 1560s. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when English competitors tried to suborn or intimidate Indigenous communities into a new allegiance, the loyalty of most natives to a monarchy that lacked resources to defend or reward them adequately was remarkable. The missionaries did the monarchy's work. After describing some gruesome martyrdoms of the 1580s, Ore described the surprising turnaround: 'It was God's will, though, that little by little these difficult conditions were eased so that today the Indians consider it a great honor to be Christians. In fact they pursue those who are not and insult them, so the religious are now faced with defending these hanopiras,' as they called the recalcitrant pagans. 

“The missions should, perhaps, be commended not for working well, but rather (like the empire of which they formed part) for working at all. From the 1590s onward Franciscans established foundations on the Georgia coast and inland in Timucua and Apalachee; like pagan kings in late antique and early medieval episodes of evangelization, indio leaders seem readily to have seen ways of using the friars, sometimes as legitimators of their own claims to authority, sometimes as advisors and technical experts, and sometimes as mediators with a transcendent source of power, but compliance was unreliable and normally contingent on payola in the form of doles of European goods or material help against other native peoples. In the interior, the Spanish Empire came to rely on unfortified and largely ungarrisoned missions, which were viable as long as no one disputed them in arms. Even then, they tended to be economically precarious and feeble as agents of Christianization. One of the Jesuits who launched the Santa Elena mission summed up the difficulties in a letter to Menendez in 1570. Seasonal migrations interfered with evangelization, so that 'in order to obtain fruit in the blind and sad souls of these provinces, it is necessary first of all to order the Indians to come together and live in towns and cultivate the earth.' However, it must be done rightly, as our Lord commands, neither by compelling them nor with a mailed hand. And this for two reasons: the first that they have been accustomed to live in [the present] manner for thousands of years, and to take them out of it is like death to them; the second, that even were they willing, the poverty of the soil and its rapid exhaustion will not admit of it ... Unless this is done, although the religious remain among them for fifty years, they will have no more fruit than we in our four years among them, which is none at all, nor even a hope, nor the semblance of it. 

“Still, the Franciscans who took over from the Jesuits made huge investments of effort and manpower. By 1675 they had nine missions at intervals on the Florida coast from San Agustin northward almost as far as modern Savannah, while 26 more stretched inland to beyond the Apalachicola River. Most had a few dozen indios. There were 150 at Santa Catalina, the largest and northernmost. The westernmost missions, however, were rebellious and unsustainable. Such security as they enjoyed ended in the late seventeenth century, when French and English adventurers began infiltrating Georgia and western Florida respectively, from Mississippi and Carolina.”

author:	Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Manuel Lucena Giraldo
title:	How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400 Year History
publisher:	Reaktion Books
pages:	263-267