Gathering Souls: Jesuit Missions in the Spanish Empire

Abstract

This article examines two different missionary areas where the Society of Jesus was sent to evangelise the native population: the Andean territories previously under Inca domination and the remote Mariana Islands in the Pacific Rim. The gathering of “other barbarians” living outside “civilised” societies was a tool of early modern colonisers within Europe and beyond. The English did so in sixteenth-century Ireland and the Spanish began reducing the so-called American Indians to new settlements in New Spain and Peru. In this paper, I want to compare the methods used to concentrate the natives of the Viceroyalty of Peru, where the Jesuits actively collaborated, with the borderland mission of the Marianas, where the Jesuits worked as parishioners of a much less sophisticated people: the CHamoru.¹ As I will demonstrate, this policy of gathering souls was not an isolated one, but part and parcel of a universalistic principle of spreading God's word that was irremediably embedded in colonial structures of coercion and political control in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.

Drawing from a world history of Christianity, scholars agree that the missionary action of the Society of Jesus from 1549 to 1767 has to be placed within the context of the early modern Iberian expansion, turning the Jesuits into the first “global religious order.”² Recent scholarship has analysed the Jesuit's missionary efforts as a reaction to the global challenges confronted by Reformist Catholicism.³ When Jerome Nadal (1507–80), one of Ignatius Loyola's (1491–1556) closest collaborators, coined the famous phrase, “The world is our home” (totus mundus nostra habitatio fit), he was indeed welcoming the Jesuits as “pioneering globalisers.”⁴ Their “apostolic mobility” is key to understanding the role of the Jesuits’ global mission and the origins of global modernity in Iberian colonial empires from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.⁵ It was part of the “way of proceeding” (modo de proceder) of the founders, including Loyola himself, Francis Xavier (1506–52), and his successors Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1619), to extend the Catholic faith anywhere in the Hispanic and Portuguese world, indeed, “to the ends of the world” (usque ad ultimum terrea) and to convert heathen peoples of East Asia to Catholicism.⁶

The idea of Western colonisation became synonymous with the expansion of what was understood as extending the values of Christian “civilisation.”⁷ Or, in other words, as a way to reaffirm the purity of its own.⁸ In sixteenth-century Ireland, the English Pale, an enclosed or contained area around Dublin, turned into the Tudor borderland. Outside this oasis of English dominion was darkest Ireland, where “barbarous” Gaelic people lived. Significantly enough, being “within the Pale” was to live under the jurisdiction of English law, while being “beyond the Pale,” or “outside the Pale,” meant to live “outside the bounds of civilised behaviour.”⁹

As Richard Kagan noted, the Renaissance idea of a city included two separate but complementary notions: urbs, as built environment, and civitas, as a human and political community.¹⁰ In the early modern colonisation period, the Spanish word policía derived from the Aristotelian term politeia, which particularly referred to a community whose citizens were organised into a (ordered) civic polity, or res publica. ¹¹ Following the inherited linkage between civitas and religion, the mendicant orders conveniently grouped the native population into organised towns (pueblos formados) and turned the New Spain into the “New Jerusalem.”¹² In Michoacán, the parish of San Francisco Acámbaro (1526–32), Santa Fe de la Laguna, located at the banks of Pátzcuaro Lake, together with the first “village-hospital” of the Tarascan capital of Tzintzuntzan (1532), sought to protect the Indians from Spanish greed.¹³ Father Vasco de Quiroga, the future bishop of Michoacán (1537–65), was responsible for such short-lived projects. He was inspired by the critical humanism of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) and particularly by Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to concentrate the Indians into towns.¹⁴ Other similar attempts to organise permanent parishes, or doctrinas, in New Spain were undertaken by the Franciscan missionaries Martín de Valencia (1474–1534), Pedro de Gante (1523–72), and by the first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga (1535–36) and the Second Audience in Oaxaca (1537) and Guatemala (Tuzulutlán, 1537; Vera Paz or Tierra de Guerra, 1547–56).

In 1549, the Society of Jesus was sent to Brazil, where it built colleges, residences, and aldeias (villages) for the social discipline of the Tupi population. In the coastal areas of Salvador de Bahia, in northeast Brazil, the Jesuits began developing the aldeamento system, the practice of settling and Christianizing indigenous peoples of diverse origins in supervised villages under the rule of the first Portuguese governor-general, Tomé de Sousa (1549–53).¹⁵ In Peru the Jesuits helped to build this town-based conception of Christian empire, even though it contradicted in principle the markedly itinerant character—circa misiones—of their order. At the beginning the Jesuits were reluctant to work as parishioners as a way of safeguarding their mobility and financial disinterestedness.¹⁶ However, this apostolic mobility had to be combined with a new pastoral strategy consisting of gathering the Christian flock everywhere in the Hispanic world in a hierarchical order under a universal monarch (universitas cristiana).¹⁷

During Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615)'s long tenure as Superior General, he firmly advocated advancing missionary work in frontier spaces and imposed the learning of indigenous/local languages among all the Jesuits in overseas provinces.¹⁸ By analysing two different missionary areas, the Andean territories previously under Inca domination and the remote Mariana Islands, this essay aims to demonstrate that the Society of Jesus accommodated to work as parishioners in borderland missions, when necessary, without contradicting the spirit of their constitutions (internal rules). This policy was not an isolated one but part of a universalistic principle of spreading God's word overseas that was irremediably embedded in colonial structures of coercion and political control.¹⁹

From the Norman Invasion to the Gathering of the “Barbarous” (Catholic) Irish (Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries)

Any “civilisation,” or polity, cannot think of itself, as Claude Levi-Strauss noted, unless it has others with which it can be compared.²⁰ From the ninth to the fifteenth century, the Spanish reconquista focused on Christian supremacy over Muslims and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula. As Kagan pointed out, “the city played a crucial ‘civilising’ role in the struggle by Christian rulers to rid the peninsula of Muslim rule.”²¹ From the very beginning, the town was an institution through which monarchs claimed legitimate possession. In addition, the town was strategically useful for populating, and thus Christianizing, the newly conquered lands.

During the same period the Scots and the Irish were also considered less worthy than, and even inferior to, the English. In 1185, Gerald de Barri, a loquacious Norman official in the service of Henry II (1133–89), better known as Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), wrote a detailed description of Ireland in tune with the interests of his patron in colonising the island. His Topographia Hibernia expressed a certain admiration for the secret marvels of nature while showing his profound contempt for those “barbarous,” “dirty,” and unwelcoming Gaelic Irish people, who plunged shamelessly into vice.²²

The English justification for the settlement in neighbouring Ireland was based on the argument of the misuse of agricultural land. According to Gerald of Wales, “the wealth of the soil is lost, not through the fault of the soil, but because there are no farmers to cultivate even the best land: ‘the fields demand, but there are no hands.’”²³ Accordingly, if Irish lands were fertile but nobody had ever cultivated them, such improper behaviour could only come from peoples who were not organised in civil societies, and therefore, they were unable to develop a model of civilisation.²⁴ At that time the Normans had begun to establish alliances with local Scottish and Gaelic Irish power-holders in their attempts to impose a pattern of “European” sociability in what were considered the borderlands of civilisation. To validate Norman superiority over Irish “barbarity,” English pope Adrian IV enacted the famous bull Laudabiliter (1155), in which he granted the English King Henry II dominium jurisdictionis, or sovereignty, over Ireland, and urged him to expand the Church's influence and spread the Christian faith among the savage and illiterate peoples of those lands.²⁵

This negative categorisation of the Scottish and Gaelic Irish as unworthy and inferior peoples was fully in force during the sixteenth century. In an astonishing passage that reveals such antagonism, English historian W. Camden (1551–1623) referred to “Savage (Henry) a Gentleman which amongst the first English, had planted himselfe in Ulster in Ireland, advised his sonne for to builde a castle for his better defence against the Irish enemy, who valiantly answered: that hee woulde not trust to a castle of stones, but ho his castle of bones.”²⁶ Likewise, Edmund Spencer showed the same contempt towards the Irish. For the Elizabethan historian, marriage with an Irish person was considered no less than “the most barbarous and loathly conditions of any people (I thinke) under heavan.”²⁷ Not surprisingly, an Englishman bluntly stated that “we have Indians at home: Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, and Indians in Ireland.”²⁸

During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), moderate Protestant Sir Henry Sidney (1529–86), Lord Deputy of Ireland (1565–67), set forth a project to colonise the island that would attract the “barbaric Catholics” to the English “Pale” (An Pháil, in Irish), which had been directly under the control of the English government since the late Middle Ages.²⁹ Sir Henry's plan in fact displaced the bellicose Irishmen of a given area, such as Munster, and substituted a population of planters from whom greater loyalty to the English would be expected.³⁰ It also included regulations that sought to transform the Irish language, laws, customs, and even social habits, becoming the first step towards the establishment of Elizabethan hegemony over Ireland. Eventually, many among the peripheral “barbarians”—Irish Catholics and Scottish highlanders—were integrated into the “English civilisation” and became valuable “intercultural allies” in the colonisation of Georgia and New Scotland, as Geoffrey Plank pointed out, “in part because of their reputation for primitive violence.”³¹

In any case, English soldiers and governors coincided in seeing the lingering Roman Catholicism as the root cause of the intransigence and “barbarity” of the Gaelic people. Despite Irish traditional obstinacy to remain Catholic, everything seems to indicate that the pattern of Elizabethan “plantation” was not English, but Spanish Catholic. Between 1553 and 1556, Sir Henry Sidney was living in Spain as an emissary of Queen Mary I (1553–58). He could have learned about the Spanish techniques to “reduce” the American Indians during his stay in the Spanish court. In the following years those techniques were applied for this “programmatic governor” to implement the Elizabethan “plantation” in Ireland.³² In the Americas, however, the English missionary enterprise did not include the conversion of the Indians as a major priority.³³ Unlike Spain's missionary project, the English established their settlements in sparsely settled regions in New England, inhabited by small tribal polities, which meant, to borrow Elliot's words, that the process of settlement was to assume different forms in the Iberian American and the Anglo-American worlds.³⁴

The Policy of Reducciones in Colonial Peru

The negative evaluation made by the sixteenth-century Spaniards regarding the “barbaric Indians” of the New World could feasibly have a connection with the centenarian representation of the Gaelic population of Ireland as isolated, fierce, and savage. It does not seem, therefore, that the Spanish invented something new, except the method of concentrating Indians in towns—the so-called reducciones—which the English later adapted in the settled area around Dublin called the English area or Pale. From the beginning of the Spanish conquest, the royal authorities responded to the wishes of the papacy by reducing wandering peoples of the Caribbean to a sedentary and therefore “civilised” lifestyle in centralised villages, placing the Roman church as their ideological as well as geographical focus.³⁵ Later on they designed well-planned towns, or reducciones, which involved a broad range of attributes of civilised life, such as politeness, cleanliness, and rationality, oriented towards the preservation of the first source of wealth: the Indians themselves.

The term policía assimilated to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas's notions of cities as instruments of evangelisation, and therefore, they contained a crucial religious component.³⁶ Thus, the basic pattern of native towns, parishes, or doctrinas de indios was designed by the mendicant orders in the Caribbean and New Spain within the encomienda system. Accordingly, the encomenderos had the right to extract tribute and work from the natives in exchange for evangelisation and protection.³⁷ However, the Spaniards’ abuses led some Dominican priests, particularly Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), to raise their voices to decry the misbehaviours of the encomenderos. As the Indian labour force was running out, the Spanish Crown began questioning the encomienda system.

Philip II's (1556–98) centralising policy put the Indian populations under the control of royal officials, enacting laws to remove these groups from their own remote hamlets and scattered farms among the mountains and concentrate them into new villages and rural pastures. The royal instructions imposed the policy of forced resettlement of large numbers of Indians into new orderly towns. Like the ancient Romans, the Spanish believed that by forcing the natives to live in regular grid-plan towns based on straight streets, square blocks, and a central plaza, they would progressively abandon their backwardness (rusticitas) and embrace (Spanish) “civilisation” (civilitas).³⁸ However, the high degree of coercion employed to bring the natives into the Christian fold had irreparable consequences for the native population, including deterritorialisation, because many communities were moved from one ecological zone to another; exploitation, because Indians were mostly used as a cheap labour force, which led to massive migration of local groups as well as the subsequent readjustment of the regional socioeconomic structures to the capitalist logic of profit.³⁹

The monarchy pursued a similar policy of native resettlement in the Viceroyalty of Peru where the Roman church enjoyed a total monopoly over religious life. In 1549 Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor (1516–56), issued a royal instruction ordering local magistrates to cooperate with ecclesiastical authorities “to reduce, little by little, the Indians into towns” and evangelise the Andean population.⁴⁰ Nonetheless, the land question, collection of tribute, and use of Indian labour remained the overarching problems. In the early 1560s, Spanish officials began implementing the formal establishment of rural and urban settlements, which uprooted natives from their lands into church-centred communities, where they could be more easily indoctrinated and monitored. The consequences were the same as those affecting the Caribbean natives in the early 1500s: their autonomy was violated and thousands of them died as a result of violence and epidemic diseases to which they had no immunity. If governor Pedro Lope García de Castro (1564–67) took the first steps in concentrating the Andean population into reducciones, it was viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1568–80) who did it programmatically.⁴¹ After his arrival in Lima, Viceroy Toledo made a real drive in this direction. During five years he visited most of the Andean territory seeking a better way to reorganise the Andean ecosystems, altering the vertical organisation that was specific to the traditional indigenous organisation (ayllu). He also sought to facilitate the collection of tribute, evangelise the Andean populations and teach them new moral codes, and monopolise the cheap Indian labour force in the newly founded Spanish-like towns.⁴²

After Toledo's famous instructions concerning reducciones which were issued, appropriately enough, in 1573, the year in which Philip II's detailed Ordenanzas sobre descubrimiento nuevo y población appeared, the viceroy began concentrating the Indian population into new orderly towns under the spiritual care of the Society of Jesus. This decision provoked some distrust among the other religious orders, particularly the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who had arrived much earlier than the Jesuits. The Franciscans believed the heathen must be urgently converted, and that their spoken truth was so unquestionable that it sufficed to proclaim it and the heathens would accept it. When they became frustrated with conversion, they quit evangelising and mistreat the natives.⁴³

As the Franciscans had done with the Jews in Portugal (1499) and the Muslims in Granada (1502), they attempted to force the natives to take baptism.⁴⁴ Not surprisingly, Franciscan projects of settlement in New Spain, which were clearly influenced by ideals of the twelfth-century Cistercian Abbot Joachim Fiore's millenarianism, reclaimed ancient, primitive Christian purity.⁴⁵ In the Yucatan peninsula, Franciscan provincial Diego de Landa (1524–79) reacted violently against any expression of native religiosity, destroying what Spaniards considered pagan books, temples, idols, and false images to build a new Jerusalem.⁴⁶ Unlike Franciscans such as Juan de Zumárraga (1468–1548) and Toríbio de Benavente (or “Motolinía,” 1482–1568), who justified a harsh repression of all Mayan idolatries, Jesuits were focused less on conversion than on salvation. It was not the missionaries who were ultimately to save the Indians’ souls, as Franciscans mistakenly thought, but God. For the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta (1576–81), the native American religions were certainly diabolic in origin and nature. However, violence could only be justified as a way to rid the Andean population of Satan's influence through extirpation and exorcism.⁴⁷

The Ancient Regime of early modern Spain was a monarchical, aristocratic, social, and political system where the Crown and the Roman church were like twins; it was not possible to think of one without the other. As there were not enough secular priests, the mendicant orders had to administer the Indian parishes. According to their evangelisation programme (Constituciones circa misiones, 1544–45), the Jesuits were not allowed to take care of indigenous parishes (officium parochi), but only itinerant or temporary missions, similar to those developed by the religious order in Europe.⁴⁸ However, after the first Provincial Congregation, held in Lima, 16–27 January 1576, and in Cusco, 8–16 October 1576, Viceroy Toledo gained support of the provincial Jesuit José de Acosta (1576–81), not without criticism from within the order. The so-called “Peruvian Solon” compelled the Jesuits to accept the administration of two of the most significant native parishes of Peru: Santiago del Cercado (1571) and Juli (1576). The first was a district at the outskirts of Lima peopled mostly by immigrants and rootless Quechua-speaking Indians from other places. Juli was a group of Indian parishes near Titicaca Lake, from which Jesuit missionaries expanded south to Paraguay (1609–37). Juli was an astonishing experiment on the Andean highlands, whose native people spoke Aymará, a language that Peruvian Jesuits wanted to learn.⁴⁹ Both Indian settlements became linguistic laboratories for those Jesuits going to the frontier missions.⁵⁰ Within the Jesuit reducciones the “barbarous Indians” could be transformed into civilised—that is, Catholic—subjects by implementing a disciplinary control over them. This forced socialisation aimed at breaking the natives’ deviant behaviours, such as polygamy, collective drinking, idolatry, laziness, and amancebamiento (consensual union or concubinage) between single young men and women.

The gathering of the natives living at the outskirts of Lima was a case in point. Initially they lived scattered through the town, with a notorious concentration around the neighbourhood of San Lázaro, outside the original limits of the city. In 1568, governor Lope García de Castro was the first to attempt to resettle those of San Lázaro into a new area to the northeast of the city, to be called el Cercado (the enclosure). In 1569, after his arrival in Lima, Viceroy Toledo designed a special enclosed area within a high wall with three gates, which were locked at curfew every evening as a way to protect the Indians from Spanish or Negro intrusion to avoid the proliferation of the castas (mixed-race people, such as mestizos and mulattos), considered pernicious for the social order.

The new parish, or reducción, was finally founded 26 June 1570, following the pattern laid down by oidor(judge) Juan de Matienzo's (1520–79) Gobierno del Perú (1567).⁵¹ Towns were judged by the degree to which they conformed to Matienzo's standards about orderliness, straight streets, spacious plazas, and substantial brick and stone houses with proper portals.⁵² Accordingly, the new Spanish colonial towns should be properly laid out in a straight line, “por sus cuadras, y en cada cuadra cuatro solares, con sus calles anchas, y la plaza enmedio, todo de la medida que pareciere al visitador, conforme a la gente y disposición de la tierra”.⁵³ In one of the plots that surrounded the block would be constructed the house of the corregidor, and behind it, the house of the tocricuc or tucuyrico—from the adverb “tucuy” and the verb “rikuy,” which means the one who sees or views everything—who was in charge of the regular inspection of the Inca Empire.⁵⁴ Originally appointed by the Inca, these inspectors, or veedores, were responsible “de ver todo lo que acaecía en aquella provincia, ansí de remediar las necesidades de los pueblos, como de hacer que fuesen bien tratados los vasallos de los inferiores señores”.⁵⁵

Well into the seventeenth century, the Hispanic-Castilian monarchy (Philip II) evolved to a Roman-Catholic monarchy (Philip III), which allowed the Holy See to re-evangelise heretical Europe and strengthen its role in the missionary activities of the East and West Indies.⁵⁶ Full of this triumphant spirit (Ecclesia triumphans), the Jesuits, as pioneers of early modern globalisation, gave new impetus to the apostolic activity in the province of Peru.⁵⁷ The viceroys Marquis of Montesclaros (1607–15) and the prince of Esquilache (1615–22) had excellent relations with the order. They both supported the mission apostolate in the context of the extirpation campaigns agreed to in 1610 by the Jesuit father Pablo José de Arriaga (1563–1622), rector of the College of San Martín, and the archbishop of Lima, Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero (1609–22). This repressive attitude was consolidated during the Synod of Lima of 1613 (Article 8), which prohibited most native dances, festivities, and ceremonies in central Peru, particularly in the archbishopric of Lima.⁵⁸

On 17 November 1626, viceroy Don Diego Fernández de Córdoba, first marquis of Guadalcázar (1622–29), was ordered to accomplish a general gathering of the Andean peoples into towns. Their troubling decline along with the flight from their original settlements led to a demographic crisis that required urgent solutions.⁵⁹ Before taking office in April 1625, the new archbishop of Lima, Don Gonzalo del Campo, was able to verify that the Andean peoples were living isolated at the high mountains, as they used to do in the time of the traditional Inca and pre-Inca rule. On 27 May 1626, the archbishop undertook a pastoral visitation, along with Doctor Hernando de Avendaño and Jesuit fathers Miguel de Salazar (1586–1653) and Luis de Teruel (1590–1670), in order to provide information about idolatrous Indians and other major shortcomings of his diocese. The solution was deemed to be none other than gathering all of them into new “Spanish-civilised” settlements, following Viceroy Toledo's grid-plan townships, where they could be more easily assessed for tax purposes and evangelisation. This major task, the archbishop thought, could only be carried out by the Jesuits, so he resolved to hand over all Indian parishes to them.⁶⁰ Thus the Jesuits became agents of evangelisation vis-à-vis the Andean population that they came into contact with.

During his short tenure, the archbishop López del Campo aimed at converting the unfaithful Indians to Catholicism, beginning with the village of Carabaillo. On 15 June 1626, he arrived in the region of León de Huánuco, next to the lands inhabited by the heathen Carapachos and Panatahuas, in the township of Huamalíes, where he ordered an auto-da-fé, punishing the sorcerers and burning idols.⁶¹ Given his success, the archbishop sent a group of secular visitators, reaching as far as the province of Conchucos, next to the bishopric of Trujillo, where the famous extirpator of idolatries, Father Francisco de Ávila (1573–1647), had arrived in 1617 to expel all pre-Hispanic religious beliefs and patterns of cultural and ethnic mobility from the Peruvian highlands.⁶² The prelate's aim was to place Indian idolatries and superstitions under the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but he failed.⁶³ There was so much to do and he had no time to accomplish it, dying before fulfilling his purpose.

From the beginning of 1630s, the arrival of a new American-born archbishop, Don Hernando Arias de Ugarte (1630–38), confirmed the importance of reducciones as an indispensable instrument to preserve the Indians from total extinction.⁶⁴ Unlike his predecessors, he was not interested in organising campaigns for the extirpation of idolatries in the diocese of Lima. During the first tenure of Neapolitan father Nicolás Durán Mastrilli (1630–34),⁶⁵ the Jesuits acted in accordance with their missionary identity, launching flying missions to the “lands of infidels” and incorporating them into the existing system of rural missions.⁶⁶ After the Congregation of 1630 the Jesuits acceded to the request of the prelate, as well as to the will of the new viceroy, Don Luis Jerónimo Fernández de Cabrera y Bobadilla, fourth Count of Chinchón (1628–1639), whose confessor was provincial Diego de Torres Vázquez,⁶⁷ and accepted a borderland doctrine, called San Cristóbal de Chavín de Pariarca, to convert the Indians living outside the immediate confines of the Marañón River, using pacific and persuasive methods.⁶⁸ The Jesuit provincial commissioned Father Pedro de Silva, together with two coadjutor brothers, to reduce the great number of Indian villages of Chavín “a sólo dos (. . .) lo que fue negocio de gran dificultad sacar a los indios de los lugares donde habitan, porque piensan con vanísimo engaño que dejan en ellos sus pacarinas, que son el principio y origen de sus linajes y descendencias”.⁶⁹ At the end of 1631, after the foundation of the village of Asunción (15 August 1631), two more Jesuits joined them: Fathers Jerónimo Mejía and Antonio de Aguirre.⁷⁰ Their activities were not limited to this particular doctrine, but soon extended to the neighbouring doctrines of the so-called Carapachos (1632–37) at the request of lawyer Rodrigo Hernández Príncipe, who held them in great esteem.⁷¹

Indeed, viceroy the Count of Chinchón had the task of implementing the royal instructions in the diocese of Lima and Charcas. To do so he asked for the opinion of some prominent people and civil and ecclesiastical institutions, such as the Society of Jesus. The Parecer of the Jesuits can be read in the letter that vice-provincial Diego de Torres Bollo (1550–1638) sent to the viceroy, dated in Lima, 6 April 1633, standing up for the economic (registers, censuses), sociopolitical (life in human and Christian policía), and religious (evangelisation) benefits that a general reduction would eventually have for the good government of Peru.⁷² In June 1631 archbishop Arias de Ugarte carried out the pastoral visitation of the parish of Santiago del Cercado.⁷³ Between 1633 and 1636 he often visited the parishes administered by the Jesuits, whom he had always admired for their exemplary behaviour, informing the king of the spiritual fruit they had borne in his archdiocese.⁷⁴ Likewise the viceroy sent him two reports confirming the importance of the Jesuit missionary project, insisting on how difficult it was.⁷⁵ During these years, the forthcoming rector of the College of San Pablo (1632–34) and current provincial Antonio Vázquez (1634–38) was advocating the missionary and apostolic activities of his predecessor, Father Mastrilli Durán (1630–34), former superior of Juli (1600–03) and former provincial of Paraguay (1623–29), as an evangelical spearhead, without taking other ministries off their shoulders. The archbishop was absolutely in tune with these expansive policies of evangelisation among the Andean population.⁷⁶

Nonetheless, this policy of gathering Indian souls was not implemented without opposition. Those natives who rejected Christianity were regarded as prototypes of evil tendencies in human nature. But was this “resistance” also a deliberately organised reaction against the Spanish imperial rule? In my view, it should be interpreted as an ongoing negotiation through which both the coloniser and the colonised imposed new forms of existence.⁷⁷ In other words, the Andean peoples put in practice an “adaptive resistance” to accommodate not only to a new monetarised economy that pushed them into the mining industry, but also to another sense of belonging and identity, which severely impacted the traditional self-sufficiency and authority of kuraras, or ethnic lords.

Gathering Souls in the Mariana Islands

By the mid-sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown had established an overseas empire of colossal dimensions. In the Philippines, the few Jesuits that arrived in September 1581 via New Spain—and eventually to the Marianas—in response to a plea addressed to the Spanish Crown by governor Guido Lavezaris (1572–75), began fostering a circulation of (missionary) knowledge to a global scale. Although the evangelising task corresponded primarily to the mendicant orders, by the end of the sixteenth century the tendency in the Americas was to substitute friars with diocesan clergy. In the Philippines it was not possible to implement such a reform, first, because there were not enough clergy willing to undertake these ministries, and second, because the Spanish population continued to be low even in places that were already pacified. Therefore, friars ended up serving as parish priests in strategic enclaves where the Spanish peninsular population ranged from scarce to none. To use an expression that became famous, on its regular voyages from Acapulco to Manila, the galleon essentially transported “friars and silver.”⁷⁸ However, this “frailocracy” did not limit the Jesuits’ missionary impact; in fact, despite the acceptance of some parishes, they continued their missionary activities to other more conflictive adjacent islands of the south (Mindanao, Sulu), which were under the influence of Islam, or to the archipelagos of Mariana, Palau, and the Caroline Islands, which were located at the margins of the Catholic Spanish Empire.⁷⁹

Schools or colegios were the Jesuits’ starting point to a new global perspective in Christianity. From them they organised their so-called “flying missions,” which were soon followed by the “long missions” that superiors sent to the groups of infidels across the Philippines.⁸⁰ To attend to these multiple open fronts, General Aquaviva sent twenty-five priests to the Philippines under the auspices of Philip II, who at that time promulgated a royal decree that divided the missions territory of those finis terrae into four areas of influence: Pampanga and Ilocos were to be ministered by the Augustine order; Camarines and Tayabas by the Franciscans; the Visayan Islands by both the Augustine and Jesuit orders; while Dominicans were in charge of the evangelisation of the Chinese population in the Manila Parian and the provinces of Pangasinán and Cagayán. The lion's share went to the Franciscans and Augustines, while the Jesuits received the poorest and least populated areas.⁸¹ As in the Americas, the (re)organisation of the native peoples was set up around their submission to the curatos (parishes).

The Jesuits, like the rest of the clergy, did not simply act as ministers of God, but as political and economic administrators of the missions they administered. In theory, their objectives were pervasively efficacious: natives were to be evangelised for the greater glory of God (ad maiorem Dei gloriam), thus transforming the identity of the Asiatic Pacific peoples through missionary action. But in practice, Jesuit identity was also deeply transformed by processes of indigenous resistance, borrowing, appropriation, and accommodation over the course of years.⁸²

However, in Micronesia, the natives were not regarded as sophisticated civilisations to be compared to the Aztecs, the Incas, or the Chinese or Japanese nations. Still, the Jesuits adjusted their foodways to the social and physical environment of the Mariana Islands—“gastronomic accommodation,” in Peña's words—to overcome the lack of Iberian resources.⁸³ In the missionaries’ eyes, the CHamoru (whom they referred to as Marianos) were inferior in moral terms, similar to those Indians inhabiting the Caribbean Islands. In return for avoiding eternal damnation, those “destitute natives” of the Marianas, unlike the Chinese and Japanese, were forced to renounce their beliefs and traditions, and ultimately collaborate with the new political and religious authorities of the Pacific Islands.⁸⁴ To accomplish these goals, Jesuits enforced peaceful methods that ended up being far more coercive and violent than expected.

The conquest and colonisation of the Marianas was never a profitable enterprise for the Spanish Crown. The island of Guåhan (or Guam) is the main and southernmost of the isles and islands that comprise the Mariana Archipelago, a set of fifteen volcanic and coral islands that extend from north to south, forming a wide arc of more than 800 kilometres in the western Pacific, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator. Most of them are very small and practically uninhabited (terrae nullius), but the largest inhabited islands have fertile land as well as bays and coves that make them accessible and safe for navigation.⁸⁵

During the initial phase of the conquest and evangelisation (1668–76), Fathers Luis de Medina (1670), Diego Luis de San Vitores (1672), and Sebastian de Monroy (1676), among others, became “illustrious heroes” of the Catholic reform, who died at the hands of Matå’pang, Hirao, Agualin, and other “indomitable barbarians” to defend their faith. As the utmost culmination of the Jesuit missionary experience, martyrdom transformed those islands into central reference places where missionaries watered the soil of indigenous communities with their sweat, tears, and blood.⁸⁶ The occupation of the Marianas in the name of God and Christianity was an action with long-lasting political consequences.

By 1679 the Royal Audience of Manila ordered the deployment of a punitive expedition that was to secure the “pacification” of CHamoru villages through conversion that became virtually synonymous with reducción. ⁸⁷ The new mission's superior, Bartolomé Besco (1614–80), along with the German, Italian, and Spanish Jesuits that had arrived in the galleon San Antonio de Padua, agreed that force was necessary to subjugate the dissident groups led by Agualin and other chiefs. The Jesuits—ten fathers, three coadjutor brothers, and oblate Felipe Sonsón—worked in the reduction and evangelisation of the subdued population while the civil authorities promoted the repartimiento of the surviving captives among soldiers and particulars.⁸⁸ As Cynthia Ross points out, “reducción was at the heart of the increased militarisation of Guåhan, with both the government and the military charged with supporting this ecclesiastic policy.”⁸⁹

There were other “heroes” as well, laymen who joined the martyrs as moral referents of conquest and colonisation, particularly the “very pious” Don José de Quiroga y Losada, captain and sergeant major of the Hagåtña presidio and interim governor (1680–81). He was a tough commander, whose severity and force indeed succeeded in destroying CHamoru opposition, punishing the “seditious” CHamoru natives—termed “barbaric, fierce and Jesuit-killers”—who in 1676 had taken the life, among others, of Father Antonio de San Basilio. Instead of gaining the enmity of the Jesuits for his cruel methods, however, Quiroga gained their gratitude and trust.⁹⁰ He set about to capture and execute those who had been directly responsible for the deaths of Spaniards and Jesuits, including Hurao and Agualin, who was captured in Rota and executed in 1680 in Guåhan.⁹¹

Other “heroes” were those CHamoru soldiers, interpreters, and collaborators, such as Don Ignacio de Hineti (o Hinesi), the “good Christian” from Sinajana, and lieutenant governor and captain general of Guåhan, Don Antonio de Ayihi, who tenaciously defended Spanish missionaries against CHamoru insurgency in 1684.⁹² As some scholars have pointed out, European colonial empires could not have been built without the effective collaboration of local indigenous groups. And the conquest of the Marianas was not an exception. Like Hernán Cortés (1485–1547), Francisco Pizarro (1478–1541), and other conquistadors of the Americas, Spanish invaders of the Marianas integrated native soldiers and auxiliaries as valuable “allies” in their military forces. Quiroga's government lasted for only a year, ending on 13 June 1681. The new governor, Don Antonio de Saravia y Villar, arrived in Guåhan from Mexico, with the post of governor of the Marianas, dependent on the Royal Audience of Manila.⁹³ Saravia was an experienced soldier who had served in Sicily for thirty years and who was apparently close to the Society of Jesus.⁹⁴ With the collaboration of faithful CHamorus, Saravia promoted the evangelisation and conquest of the Northern Mariana Islands (collectively referred toas Gani), including those where the first missionaries had already done some evangelising work before the first wave of CHamoru violent resistance in the mid-1670s. He also sought to reinforce the peace and reorganise the population according to stable residence patterns. The “pagan” villages that had not been militarily conquered yet were to pay a tribute in labour and goods that recognised their vassalage to the Spanish king, while the ones that had accepted Christianity were distributed in several reducciones, despite their resistance, and for the next forty years they were exempted from paying tribute.⁹⁵

Following the model imposed in the Philippines, new patterns of semi-urban settlement were applied in Gani, reducing the various houses and ranches around the presidio into three barrios, which concentrated some three hundred families.⁹⁶ Soon after, the natives were forced to live in five partidos or districts, governed by alcaldes mayores, each formed by small municipios or towns, mostly across the coastal zone. These alcaldes were more like military overseers or foremen who supervised the agricultural and livestock production of each village or partido. ⁹⁷ The town-dwellers were headed by a native gobernadorcillo (“little governor”) or a fiscal (akin to a cabildo governor), and grouped various barrios whose inhabitants were under the direction of the pre-Hispanic chiefs. Each town had a patron saint and a church or chapel, and the Jesuits organised cofradías and schools for the evangelisation of the natives.⁹⁸ In the Marianas mission, Jesuits had almost exclusive control over the dynamics of conquest and colonisation, but the fierce resistance presented by the natives made war practically inherent to Spanish and Jesuit frontier politics.

Spanish colonisation, of which Christianization was a fundamental aspect, was experienced by native CHamoru as an exercise in exploitation, forcefulness, and humiliation. The physical violence of the conquest also contributed to the construction of the Christian God as far from the loving being the Jesuits strove to present. The system that arose was a militarised society that depended on the extortion of baptised natives. The Jesuit missionaries, like the regular clergy in the Philippines, taught the children at the rebuilt school of San Juan de Letrán different trades so that they could work as carpenters, shoemakers, and so on instead of focusing on a more profound education.⁹⁹ In fact, in a letter to Fr. Francisco García, Father Lorenzo Bustillo (1642–1716) accused reverend superior Fr. Manuel de Solórzano (1649–84) of neglecting the true educational duties of the Society and treating and preparing the youngsters as if they were slaves.¹⁰⁰ He also complained about the polos (or personal services), an institution of free labour that obligated the natives to provide unpaid labour for the Crown for a given number of days (usually forty) out of every year, in a system not unlike the Peruvian mita, with similarly devastating results and negative reactions.¹⁰¹ Having adapted the Filipino system of barangay, some priests used their influence over the chiefs to obtain free native labour to build and repair houses and other buildings, raise and tend to the animals, and work their private and church lands.¹⁰²

After the Second Great War (1684–86), the remaining CHamorus passed the “point of no return.”¹⁰³ The Jesuits organised Guåhan into a republic by reducing it to five assigned districts or parishes—St. Ignatius of Hagåtña, St. Rose of Hågat, Humåtac, Pågu, and Inalåhan (or St. Anthony of Fina)—that separated civilisation from barbarism, “the world of the polis from the world of the beasts.”¹⁰⁴ Using presidio funds to transform the island of Guåhan into a model Spanish mission, the military officers founded congregations, parishes, and schools to advance the Christianization of the islanders.¹⁰⁵ As a result, the municipality of St. Ignatius of Hagåtña attained a certain size and importance as a “perfect community” (perfecta communitas), in Thomas Aquinas's words, to successfully evangelise the Northern Mariana Islands (Gani). In recognition, on 30 March 1686, Charles II issued a royal decree declaring it a “city.” At the same time, he declared Humåtac a “villa.”¹⁰⁶ Unfamiliar with these acknowledgements, the CHamorus continued trickling north to the islands of Gani, which prompted the governor to organise a new expedition of twelve Spanish soldiers and a large number of faithful natives commanded by Captain Sebastian Luis Ramón, with the purpose of bringing them back to Guåhan.¹⁰⁷

Missions were an important part of religious identity in the Spanish colonial empire. On 26 July 1696, General Joseph de Madrazo, new interim governor of the Marianas, was determined to relocate and reduce the Gani natives to the main islands—Guåhan, Saipan, Rota—to be “instructed and educated” in the Catholic faith. At that time Jesuits clearly had the political and religious leadership of the islands in their hands, becoming the founders of a “missionary state” in which martyrs were permanent moral referents for years to come. But the situation was far from being as idyllic as the Jesuit historian Antonio Astrain imagined.¹⁰⁸ There was no systematic policy of extermination. However, epidemic diseases (1700), natural disasters (particularly the typhoons of 1671 and 1693), hard labour, continuous wars, and migration took their toll on the CHamorus. In 1701, the natives of the Marianas and Mindanao wrote a letter to King Philip V describing this miserable situation and asking him to address the long-standing grievances caused by the Spanish governors.¹⁰⁹ By 1710 there were a little over three thousand natives left in the Marianas.¹¹⁰ The CHamoru demographic collapse was cause for a great deal of concern in the Philippines and the Spanish court.

However, despite this demographic decline and the appalling corruption of the governors, the Jesuits persisted in the archipelago until 1769, when the Society of Jesus was finally expelled from the Philippines.¹¹¹

Conclusions

From the sixteenth century onwards, Western empires organised and transformed colonised areas into fundamentally European constructs, based on the domination of physical space and the policies of “civilising” the native population, yet with different results. To control spatial boundaries, colonial discourses elaborated mechanisms of knowledge to count, classify, register, and evangelise the “barbarous others.” Because Iberian secular officials and religious priests equated “civilisation” with urbanism, those people who retained nomadic habits, according to Aristotle, persisted in “barbaric, bestial, almost sub-human” practices and idolatries.¹¹² To provide a Christian and spatial order in the Indies, the Spanish authorities gathered the native population into towns and parishes as an efficient method of social control. Other Western powers implemented the same policies, like England in Ireland, where Catholic “barbarians” were to receive English civilisation. Conversely, the “civilised Spaniards” considered that the Andean peoples of Peru, and those “barbarous and war-like” natives living in the Oceanic islands, had all of them to be converted to Catholicism and relocated into grid-plan towns.

In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the Jesuit missionaries, as cultural mediators, played a crucial role in the construction of a political/moral order. However, in the long run, the resettling of native population into reducciones failed as the only way to establish a “good sociability.” Andean peoples were not passive victims of metropolitan imperialism. They reacted in several, not always successful, ways. Sometimes they left the reducciones; others adapted to foreign customs and beliefs. In the end, Western colonial power was not completely in the hands of coloniser. Quite the contrary, colonialism should be considered as an ambivalent and fluid process that involves appropriation, cultural borrowing, and effective resistance on the part of the colonised.¹¹³

Likewise, CHamorus’ cultural patterns survived by integrating, adapting, or reinterpreting the new Christian symbols and codes as a way to preserve their own customs and traditions in an ongoing process of native resistance and cultural continuity.¹¹⁴ In this process of CHamoru métissage, women played a crucial role.¹¹⁵ As Franz Quimby put it, the CHamorus had always mixed: first, as a result of trade exchanges with neighbouring islanders; and second, from the transoceanic exchanges that facilitated the arrival of the Europeans.¹¹⁶ In the following years, the increasing arrival of Spaniards, Philippines, Creoles, and mestizos from New Spain helped to cobble together a neo-CHamoru ethnic mosaic that guaranteed the continuity of the aboriginal CHamoru population and culture through intermarriage with non-CHamoru (taotao sanhiyong).¹¹⁷