4 - Paying for Thebaid

Summary

The chapter examines the systems of taxation, tributes, and donations that maintained the mission enterprise.In modern scholarship, studies continue to recycle old tropes of mendicant poverty and development projects. Departing from these analyses, this chapter examines the mission’s economic dependence on native tributes and forced labor systems.Arrangements between native rulers and missionaries constituted a colonial economy that sharply contradicted the mendicants’ self-image as ascetic hermits.The chapter begins by contrasting Spanish claims that the mission was financed through royal patronage with colonial records that demonstrate the myriad ways in which indigenous communities supported it with finances, goods, and labor.The chapter then examines the consequences of the missionaries’ dependence on native economies. Far from their imagined lives as desert hermits in a pagan land, friars lived in close proximity to indigenous towns and faced a plethora of temptations.This section examines numerous reports of misconduct by friars, as well as efforts by mendicant Orders to regulate material wealth.The missionaries’ material dependence on indigenous communities challenged ideals of poverty and chastity at the core of their identity.Thus, while indigenous people paid dearly for the mission with their labor, friars paid for it with their racked consciences.