3 - Settlers

Summary

The institutions evolved in the long struggle against the Moors in homeland Spain had the attraction of obvious appropriateness to the conquerors on Spain's frontiers in the Americas. In Yucatan Montejo deployed notions of government derived from Spain's medieval and unequivocally military past. His own title of adelantado, and the extensive judicial, military and executive powers which went with it identified him with the Marcher Lords of the Reconquista, who had also directly represented the Crown in their frontier zones. When Montejo exercised that authority to establish government of the new territories he drew on another institution of the Reconquista, the encomienda, used throughout Spain's American empire in its first phase. The essential form of the encomienda was simple enough. The Crown, or in this case, the Crown's delegate, granted to an individual worthy of reward the right to exact tribute and labour from a specified number of royal tributaries. In return the grantee, or encomendero, undertook to care for the material and spiritual well-being of his charges, and to maintain himself in readiness for military service. The neat economy of such a system, providing as it did instant rewards to the conquerors with instant control and exploitation of the conquered, was as irresistible in Yucatan as it had been elsewhere in the Indies: by the close of 1545 Montejo had parcelled out the native towns and villages of the peninsula in encomienda grants among his followers.