4 - The Friends of Ceremony and the Introduction of Reform

Summary

Chapter 4 focuses on the early seventeenth century, when religious policy in the kingdom came to be in the hands of a determined new Audiencia president, an ambitious archbishop, and a radical group of Jesuits. With the support of a broad coalition of the kingdom’s leading settlers, these reformers took Christianisation in a new direction. The reformers focused on the promotion of the regular and frequent participation in a range of quotidian Catholic practices and institutions that their sixteenth-century predecessors had generally discouraged or withheld from Indigenous people, particularly private devotions, popular celebrations, confraternities, and public ceremony. This began in a handful of parishes entrusted to these Jesuit reformers, who had a very particular understanding of the role of ‘external’ manifestations of piety, and who used these sites as testing grounds for new approaches to Christianisation. These ultimately had the effect of affording Indigenous people space and opportunities to engage with Christianity in new – if, for the reformers, not always desirable – ways, laying the foundations for the reformation of the kingdom.

In the middle of August 1606, Archbishop Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero and President Juan de Borja of Santafé sent a joint letter to the king that marked a watershed in the development of the New Kingdom of Granada and its missionary project. It began with a familiar litany of the kingdom’s afflictions: Indigenous people ‘as gentile and idolatrous as they were before the arrival of Spaniards’; priests, ‘whether regular or secular’, failing to perform their duties, ‘lacking all zeal for the salvation of souls, having no doctrine, and living far from exemplary lives’; and a Spanish laity ‘overburdened with the vices of carnality, greed, and lack of religion’.¹ After the catastrophic actions of their predecessors in the sixteenth century, however, the pair proposed a path to overcome these ills that differed from earlier approaches in two key ways. The first was that they announced an ambitious joint plan for the kingdom’s reformation, a complete overhaul of its church and programme of Christianisation. This would be a renewed attempt to introduce Tridentine reform, based on a new and more comprehensive interpretation of what this should involve. The second, subtler, but no less fundamental change was that their initiative had the backing and support of the encomenderos and Spanish settlers of the highlands of the New Kingdom, for it was, in fact, their plan. What Lobo Guerrero and Borja were beginning to implement was a design that had first been proposed three years before by none other than the cabildos of Santafé, Tunja, and other highland cities through their procurator at court, Juan Sanz Hurtado. Having made its way through the machinery of the king’s court and chancery, obtained the purchase and support of leading figures, and assumed its definitive shape in the minds of Lobo Guerrero, Borja, and other ambitious reformers, the settlers’ own design for the overhaul of the kingdom had made it back across the Atlantic and was now beginning to take root.

This chapter focuses on the beginning of this ambitious experiment to reform the church of the New Kingdom of Granada. One aspect would be legislative, renewing the ecclesiastical legislation of the New Kingdom by adapting and translating the normativity of the centres of empire to suit a new interpretation of local conditions. This would involve, over the next few years, a better organised and comprehensive engagement with Indigenous languages, the production of systematic and uniform catechetical materials, and the introduction of new methods and priorities in religious instruction that reflected the most current ideas and practices of Catholicism at a global level. The other aspect would be practical: an ambitious experiment to hand over several Indigenous parishes to a newly arrived, radical cohort of Jesuits – effectively exiled from the Central Andes – to use as a testing ground for reform, with the aim of extending the lessons learned throughout the archdiocese and beyond.

Underpinning all these changes would be a reassessment of the functioning of conversion, rooted in a distinction between internal and external piety that was central to Jesuit spirituality, that prioritised everyday participation in a broad range of Christian devotions and institutions, and moved decisively away from the failed punitive policies of Zapata. The result would make room for Indigenous people to begin to interact with Christianity in new ways and set the development of the New Kingdom and its church on a distinctive course for decades to come. To understand how, we must start in the rubble of the crises of the late sixteenth century.

‘The Good of the Republic’

The monarchy’s response after visitor-general Juan Prieto de Orellana uncovered the extent of the failures of governance of the Audiencia of Santafé of the late 1570s and early 1580s was to attempt, yet again, to overhaul the government of the kingdom. For this, at least, the slate was relatively clean. By the time Prieto left Santafé in May 1585 with the records of his inquiry, he had removed, arrested, charged, sentenced, or exiled practically everyone who had been in power during the santuarios scandal of the late 1570s, the disastrous coverup and assay scandal that followed, and the attempted sabotage of his and his predecessor’s investigations.² Only Archbishop Zapata remained, until his death in January 1590 following a hunting accident. It would take until the end of the century for a new archbishop to arrive in Santafé, after two nominees died and a third was promoted away before taking office.³ For the job of president, after much negotiation, the king appointed a reluctant trusted senior administrator, the Salamanca-educated lawyer Antonio González, a member of the Council of the Indies who had previously served as president of Guatemala and senior oidor in Granada, with instructions to ‘reduce, quieten, comfort, and bring to conformity the disorders of the past’, increased judicial and executive powers, a generous salary, and the promise that he could return to his old job once he sorted out the beleaguered kingdom.⁴ González arrived in Santafé in early 1590.

His response to the crises of the 1570s and 1580s was to blame the settlers, particularly encomenderos, and to strengthen and broaden the reach of the very institutions that had caused the crises in the first place. For this he implemented a tripartite strategy, partly based on broader reforms introduced by his counterparts elsewhere. The first part was to clean house, carrying out composiciones – inspections and registrations of titles – of encomiendas, to tidy up after decades of haphazard grants by his predecessors to their clients and favourites, and to raise some much-needed cash for Philip II’s ruinously expensive war with England. On his arrival, González thus set about identifying encomiendas that had been obtained or inherited irregularly and seizing them from their holders or, preferably, legalising their titles on payment of a fine, with comfortable payment plans made available if necessary. By González’s own account this raised just shy of 42,000 gold pesos for the royal treasury in a few short years, affecting some 128 encomiendas in the lowlands, and ten in the provinces of Santafé and Tunja.⁵

The second, and more comprehensive, effort was the introduction of corregidores, middle-ranking royal justices answerable directly to the Audiencia and designed to extend its reach over encomenderos and Indigenous communities.⁶ These had been a feature of the crown’s efforts to turn back the clock on the growing autonomy of its subjects in different contexts since mid-fourteenth-century Iberia, and had been instituted in Mexico and the Central Andes decades before.⁷ González introduced them to the provinces of Santafé and Tunja from 1593, with comprehensive legislation granting them broad powers.⁸ Corregidores were to police and punish Indigenous people and their leaders for holding ‘borracheras’ and other such practices, for theft and other crimes, and for engaging in illicit unions and sexual relations; to encourage Indigenous people to engage in the market economy by growing crops, raising animals, and producing commodities needed ‘for the good of the republic’ and selling them for cash, which they would help them manage; and to oversee their participation in the labour drafts.⁹ They were also, crucially, to be first-instance magistrates, bearing the rod of justice, with civil and criminal jurisdiction over simple cases involving Indigenous people, over whom they were to administer ‘brief and summary’ justice, referring more complex ones to the Audiencia.¹⁰ They were also to ensure that people obeyed their caciques and captains – for ‘some Indians are so evil that they mistreat their caciques and do not obey them’ – and that these authorities treated their subjects well and distributed tributary obligations fairly among them. Corregidores were also to ensure that everyone stayed in their communities, and that these relocated and remained in their new reducción towns, for which they were empowered to act ‘with all rigour, burning their old houses and ranches if necessary’.¹¹

Their main purpose, however, was to limit the role of encomenderos in the lives of Indigenous people. For this it would now be corregidores, and not encomenderos, who should collect the demora, or encomienda tribute, ‘so that the encomendero should have nothing to do with the caciques’. For this corregidores were to keep copies of the latest tribute assessments and detailed records of all those liable for payments – specified to be males aged between seventeen and fifty-five – adjusting the amount collected as people aged or died.¹² This had an immediate effect on the revenues of encomenderos, as tribute rates began to be adjusted regularly by the new corregidores, instead of every few years (or every few decades) by oidores on visitation tours. The encomendero of Tupachoque in Tunja, Juan Sanz Hurtado, thus saw his income collapse from 216 gold pesos a year to just 74 in 1593, when corregidor Lope González de Piña adjusted it to reflect the 85 tributaries that remained in his encomienda, out of the 247 counted in the last general inspection decades before.¹³ Once collected, corregidores were to pay the priest’s stipend directly, retain any taxes, and only then pay the encomendero their share, keeping detailed accounts. They were also to ensure that ‘no encomendero, his wife, children, or servants dare enter the repartimientos’ of their Indians, and were given express powers to evict them. Their wages, in turn, were to be paid directly by Indigenous people, without having anything to do with the encomenderos, at the rate of one tomín (an eighth of a gold peso) per tribute payer, plus a bonus of 4 per cent of the yields of the community farms and cattle rearing that corregidores were supposed to introduce and foster – increased to 10 per cent in 1600 when it proved not to be incentive enough.¹⁴ Finally, corregidores were to be in charge of levying a new royal poll tax on Indigenous people – the requinto, or fifth of the fifth, equivalent to 20 per cent of the value of the demora – first introduced by Philip II in 1591 in aid of his dismal finances.¹⁵

The third and final dimension of González’s reforms was the thornier question of landholding, drawing on recent legislation that ordered officials across Spanish America to carry out composiciones of land titles as well, particularly to help cover the cost of the Anglo-Spanish War.¹⁶ This legislation asserted the king’s ownership over all land in his American kingdoms, and ordered administrators to examine by what means different groups and individuals had come to possess theirs. All land found to be held without a proper title would revert to the crown, although – as with the composición of encomiendas – those with irregular titles had the option of legalising them for a price, depending on the circumstances. Just as in Mexico and Peru, this process then freed the crown to dispose of its newly recovered lands as needed, although the legislation urged officials to ensure that they assigned some ‘to the Indians that lack them’, for their sustenance.¹⁷

In addition to raising cash, González saw this as the perfect opportunity to complete the effort to resettle the Indigenous inhabitants of Santafé and Tunja into planned, gridded towns once and for all.¹⁸ For this, he commissioned oidores Miguel de Ibarra and Andrés Egas de Guzmán to conduct thorough visitations of the provinces of Santafé and Tunja, respectively. It was these that revealed the extent of the collapse of the authority of Indigenous leaders considered in Chapter 3. The first, Ibarra’s visitation of Santafé, completed between 1593 and 1595, was the most thorough, with the visitor reporting having ‘personally visited every place in the province’.¹⁹ Records for just 13 encomiendas survive, although summaries of his findings across 103 towns in 52 encomiendas were sent to Spain that showed that the Indigenous population of the province had collapsed to 20,545 tributaries, and a total of 62,771 individuals.²⁰ This was a precipitous fall from the 35,482 tributaries counted by Tomás López 35 years before, and the total population of over 110,000 that historians have estimated on its basis, discussed in Chapter 2. Egas de Guzmán’s visitation of Tunja began in 1595 but was interrupted the following year and never completed. Records survive for just six communities, and no summaries appear to have been sent to Spain.²¹

In addition to the familiar inspections, interrogation of Indigenous witnesses, and population counts, a key focus of these visitations was the overhaul of land titles. Ibarra’s visitation was preceded by a general call for the settlers of Santafé to exhibit their land titles at the Audiencia within twenty days and to legalise them if irregular, or have them declared null and void.²² This done, the visitation itself paid special attention to land tenure, in line with the 1591 legislation, serving as an opportunity to measure and inspect estates and landholdings in the province, and to use land redistribution to advance the effort of Indigenous resettlement.²³ It was in this way that Ibarra and Egas de Guzmán assigned each community they visited a resguardo – an inalienable holding of land – surrounding the new settlements to which they were relocated. The term ‘resguardo’ may have been rare outside the New Kingdom, but similar policies were of course introduced by administrators across Spanish America and are recognisable in other contexts too. The idea was to guarantee that Indigenous communities had enough land to sustain themselves, fulfil their tributary obligations, and – under the watchful eye of corregidores – produce surpluses with which to engage in the market economy. In practice, as elsewhere, it also legitimised formally stripping Indigenous communities of most of the lands, even if in practice these had already been taken from them long before.²⁴

One such town was Chocontá, where in July 1593 Ibarra determined that its 2,549 inhabitants would need a measure of land stretching out from their new planned town in a rough circle with a radius of between 4,300 and 5,000 paces. He had this measured out in each direction, and ordered the local corregidor to draw a boundary around it and distribute the land inside to different individuals and groups within the community ‘according to their possibilities and quality’, being careful to favour caciques and captains especially.²⁵ The idea, Ibarra explained, was to ‘encourage them to live like Christians and in Spanish policía’ by rewarding them with land, which was also why he took into account the devotion with which they had apparently endowed their church with an elaborate crucifix and established a confraternity devoted to the True Cross.²⁶ Conversely, as in other regions, this process of determining which lands were to belong to Indigenous communities – enough for their needs, in theory, but no more – freed up the rest of the region for new rounds of land grants and sales by the crown. Ibarra repeated the procedure throughout the province, and Egas de Guzmán followed suit in those towns in Tunja that he managed to inspect before his visitation was cut short. That task would be completed by his successor Luis Enríquez, on a new and more thorough visitation tour of Tunja at the turn of the century.

In the meantime, the secular church languished. Zapata’s death in 1590 gave way to a long period of sede vacante during which the secular church lacked an effective leadership, despite the efforts of various members of the cathedral chapter that governed the archdiocese to continue to pursue some of the policies of their late archbishop. From 1591, for example, Francisco de Porras Mejía, the maestrescuela, lobbied the crown for help in re-establishing the diocesan seminary that had been forced to close, but these designs came to nothing.²⁷ In the vacuum, it was the Audiencia that increasingly came to concern itself with religious affairs, much to the chapter’s annoyance. It was thus that González’s new corregidores were instructed not only to cooperate with parish priests the running of parishes – ‘that they may come to love the priests and fear the corregidor’ – but also to watch and inform on them and their churches to the Audiencia, even keeping their own inventories of the property of each parish.²⁸ In the same way, Ibarra and Egas went further than any of their predecessors in investigating ecclesiastical affairs, instructing priests on how to conduct their duties and interrogating witnesses on the actions of their priests.²⁹ The ecclesiastical authorities soon began to complain of the Audiencia’s intrusions on their turf, particularly Ibarra’s willingness to fill vacant positions in Indigenous parishes without involving the diocesan authorities.³⁰ Thus it was in 1597, when he divided each of the parishes of Machetá, Bosa, and Ubaté in two, and asked the Franciscans of Santafé, and not the cathedral chapter, to nominate candidates for the new positions.³¹

The religious orders, previously beaten back by Zapata, were delighted to oblige, and used this period to claw back the independence and influence of which the late archbishop had sought to deprive them. Complaints by diocesan authorities flooded the royal chancery throughout this period, complaining of the regulars’ desire ‘to attempt once again to take root in the towns of Indians’, dusting off privileges granted in the 1560s to justify their actions; of their refusal to recognise the power of jurisdiction of the secular church, bypassing its courts and disciplinary mechanisms in favour of their own; and even of their attempt to excommunicate the cathedral chapter altogether by the end of the century, when it attempted to collect its appointed share of parish revenues.³² Many of the criollo and mestizo priests ordained by Zapata, for their part, found themselves unemployed and displaced from their parishes.³³ All of this was exacerbated by the controversial Francisco de Sande, erstwhile governor and captain-general of the Philippines, failed conqueror of Borneo, and former president of Guatemala, who arrived in Santafé in August 1597 as González’s replacement and continued his efforts to extend the Audiencia’s control over the affairs of encomenderos and the church.

In this way, the situation that the third archbishop of Santafé, the former academic and inquisitor Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero, encountered on his arrival in Santafé in March 1599 was eerily similar to that faced by his predecessor Zapata a quarter century before. Once again, the new archbishop of Santafé, equipped with minimal resources, would have to find a way of asserting his power over the government of the church and its missionary programme, to work out what Tridentine reform might look like in this context, and to implement those reforms. The problem was that he shared this ambition with President Sande, who had his own designs and expected the archbishop to be little more than a rubber stamp.

‘The Greatest Blight’

It was essential not just for the reform of the church, but to its very functioning, that the civil and ecclesiastical authorities work in tandem. Both the archbishop and the president exercised power over ecclesiastical affairs within the framework of royal patronage, and with the same ostensible aim, so it is anachronistic and misleading to understand these struggles in terms of a binary opposition of church and ‘state’ in the modern sense, of independence and separation.³⁴ Instead, both had competence over aspects of the operation of the church, and both tried to pursue initiatives they believed would advance the missionary project. It was for this reason, and not just venal self-interest, that Sande, and González before him, had devoted significant efforts and resources to initiatives such as the resettlement of Indigenous communities or the configuration of parishes. The problem was duplication. Both authorities sought to do similar things, and this overlap created jurisdictional conflicts that frequently resulted in the failure of both efforts. Conflict resulting from the overlap of functions and responsibilities would only cause division, confusion, and discord, and it ran against contemporary notions of good government, frequently characterised through reference to the image of a monstruous body with two heads.³⁵ A similar argument applied in relation to the religious orders, who also had a share in these powers because they had a share in the same responsibilities.³⁶

The first years of Lobo Guerrero’s time in office were mired in jurisdictional, institutional, and personal conflict with president Sande, in what appears to have been just the latest chapter in a longer-running rivalry between the two administrators, who had most recently overlapped in Mexico City during the 1580s.³⁷ Most of the archbishop’s correspondence with the crown in this period consisted of complaints about Sande and his right-hand man, oidor Luis Enríquez. They clashed over matters of ceremony and protocol, from the icy reception Sande gave the new archbishop on his ceremonial entry into Santafé in 1599, to conflicts over the order of precedence during the mass and processions – with Sande presumptuously demanding to be afforded the privileges of a viceroy, according to the archbishop, and Lobo Guerrero wilfully disrespecting the president and through him the king’s own dignity, according to Sande.³⁸ So too over questions of jurisdiction, with Sande drafting legislation on ecclesiastical matters and sending it to Lobo Guerrero to promulgate – ‘usurping the ecclesiastical jurisdiction’, as Lobo Guerrero bitterly complained.³⁹ Nowhere did the pair clash more bitterly, however, than in the conduct of visitations.

Just as González had relied on Egas de Guzmán and Ibarra, Sande commissioned Luis Enríquez to conduct two extensive circuits of visitation to implement his designs on the ground at the turn of the century. The first, from August 1599, was a thorough tour of Tunja, completing the visitation of Egas de Guzmán. The second, starting in June 1600, was a new inspection of some sections of the province of Santafé. Records survive for his inspection of sixty-four repartimientos across both provinces, together with three detailed reports with summaries of his actions dispatched to Spain.⁴⁰ In these he reported that the Indigenous population had collapsed further, to about ‘16,000 tributaries in the province of Santafé’, down from the 20,545 counted in 1595, ‘and in Tunja 20,000 tributaries’, a dramatic collapse from the 52,564 tributaries that López had counted in 1560.⁴¹ In response, in addition to the usual inspections and conversations with witnesses, a key focus for Enríquez’s visitations was the consolidation of smaller communities into larger towns. In this way, in May 1601 he reported having visited 42 towns in the province of Tunja, and ‘reduced them to 17 larger ones, each with a parish, so that their inhabitants could have a priest continuously’, year-round. He repeated the process in Santafé, where ‘he reduced 83 towns of Indians, large and small, into 23 large towns’.⁴² The following year, in March, he reported visiting and reducing a further 104 small communities in Tunja ‘into 41 large ones’.⁴³

One such town was the new settlement of Sátiva in Tunja, created by Enríquez in February 1602, which brought together the communities of Tupachoque, Ocavita, Chitagoto, and Sátiva on a new site located roughly between their old settlements, and whose people were ordered to move to the new town and assigned a new resguardo, while their encomenderos, including Juan Sanz Hurtado, were ordered to come together to pay the year-long stipend of the Franciscan Juan de Fuentes, the new parish’s priest.⁴⁴ Sátiva was far from unique: many towns and villages of modern-day Cundinamarca and Boyacá, and often their parish churches, date to Enríquez’s visitation. As Guadalupe Romero has shown, of his eighty-one new towns, records survive for the establishment and layout of twenty-eight, all commissioned according to a standard plan, radiating from a central square faced by the parish church, the priest’s house, and plots allocated to Indigenous notables.⁴⁵ The process also generally involved commissioning the construction of new churches, as he found existing buildings to be almost universally inadequate. As he reported in April 1602, ‘in the province of Santafé there are just 4 or 6 decent churches’, with a further six or seven in Tunja. ‘Among the rest a few are of poor-quality brick and thatch’, he explained, ‘but most of them are meagre houses of adobe and mud, worse than the houses of many Indians.’⁴⁶

Much to Lobo Guerrero’s annoyance, Enríquez did all of this and more without any input from the ecclesiastical authorities. As the archbishop reminded the king in May 1599, royal legislation required oidores on visitation to request from the archbishop ‘a delegate to accompany him’ to inspect and resolve ecclesiastical matters, but Enríquez instead intruded in ecclesiastical affairs without bothering with the diocesan authorities.⁴⁷ In the parish of Suta and Moniquirá, for example, Enríquez demanded that the parish priest give him the keys to the church, so he could inspect the building and its ornaments himself.⁴⁸ As Chapter 6 discusses, this was a central task in the conduct of ecclesiastical visitations, governed by a clear procedure and ceremony that was supposed to express the absolute power of the archbishop as ordinary in the disciplinary affairs of his church and clergy.⁴⁹ When the priest of Suta refused, the Audiencia ordered Lobo Guerrero to remove him from the parish. ‘They did not communicate with me’, he later complained, ‘except to charge me to execute what they had decided.’ The archbishop had no choice but to comply, and all he could do was write to the king.⁵⁰

At the same time, Lobo Guerrero attempted to conduct visitations of his own, whether directly or through his agents, but the civil authorities undermined their efforts. One area of contention was the power of ecclesiastical visitors to fine laypeople. These were usually applied to the expenses of the visitation and to the construction or maintenance of the parish in which they were levied, but the Audiencia disputed their legality. When Lobo Guerrero imposed these fines himself while visiting the lowland city of Mariquita, the Audiencia ordered him to stop, and its agents confiscated the documentation of his visitation and arrested his notary. Frustrated, Lobo Guerrero could only complain to the king that he had been forced to abandon his visitation altogether.⁵¹ His agents fared worse still. One Alonso Domínguez de Medellin, a corregidor in the province of Tunja and a close associate of Enríquez, allegedly declared to the Indigenous authorities of the province that the ecclesiastical visitor that Lobo Guerrero had sent to inspect them ‘was not their judge and had no power to punish them’, and to resist him if he tried to punish them. ‘If the visitor tries to apprehend anyone’, Lobo claimed Domínguez had said, ‘the Indians should get together and tie him up first, and their priest too’, and take them to the Audiencia for trial.⁵² Witnesses, mostly priests, presented by Lobo Guerrero predictably claimed to have overheard their parishioners celebrating after learning of Domínguez’s instructions, saying that ‘there is no need to believe in what our priest says and commands any more’. Others tried to draw parallels with what they had heard about Protestant Geneva and England, where this sort of thing apparently happened all the time.⁵³ Worse, when Lobo Guerrero summoned Domínguez to testify about these allegations, the Audiencia intervened to protect him.⁵⁴ When he summoned other witnesses to testify about his actions and those of Enríquez in order to report to the king, the Audiencia seized the documentation, and tracked down and arrested every witness, priests and all.⁵⁵ Lobo Guerrero tried again, and when he refused to hand over the resulting papers to the Audiencia, Sande and his men ‘surrounded his house, barred the doors, and took it from him violently, with much scandal among the people’.⁵⁶

Lobo Guerrero was not alone in flooding the royal chancery with complaints of Sande and Enríquez. So too did the encomenderos and other settlers of Santafé and Tunja, who found themselves on the receiving end of their policies and initiatives. These prompted the king to send a visitor to investigate Sande’s conduct, Andrés Saldierna de Mariaca, who arrived in March 1602 and promptly suspended Sande and arrested and imprisoned Enríquez, pending investigation, only for both he and Sande to die unexpectedly in September 1602, after which Enríquez went free.⁵⁷ It in this context that Enríquez penned his final report on his visitations of the two provinces, in April 1602, in which he made his fiercest condemnation of the settlers and archbishop and proposed the most radical of solutions. Encomenderos, he wrote, were to blame for the problems of the kingdom: they were ‘the greatest blight devouring the Indians’, showing little concern for Christianisation, ‘taking and occupying the best lands’, abusing their labour, and ‘telling the Indians that it is they who are their real lords: that the corregidor, oidor, or president might be replaced tomorrow, but that they will endure’. In response, he argued, the king should abolish encomenderos altogether, revert all encomiendas to the crown and assign all tributes directly to the royal treasury, so that if he wished to reward the service of any settlers in future, a portion of these revenues could be assigned to them ‘in the manner of a pension’ but ‘without the title of encomenderos’.⁵⁸

It is easy to see why historians since Orlando Fals Borda have characterised these efforts by the civil authorities at the turn of the seventeenth century as the ‘triumph of the royal patron over the local power of the encomenderos’.⁵⁹ After all, it is from Enríquez that we see the sternest condemnation of the encomienda from a royal official in the New Kingdom yet, and the most radical proposal to address it. But this is all it was: paper and complaints, as so many times before. Even his ambitious resettlement campaigns, like those of Tomás López and Zapata before him, were easier to plan and commission than to execute. Land was abundant and records show that laying out the grids for the new settlements cost the royal treasury only between thirty and one hundred pesos in wages for a surveyor.⁶⁰ As before, however, getting people to actually move to the new sites and remain there was another matter entirely. The next visitations of Santafé and Tunja, in the 1630s, found that far from remaining in Enríquez’s 81 consolidated towns, people were still living in over 200 settlements of different sizes, even as demographic collapse continued to gather pace.⁶¹ In the same way, González and Sande’s composiciones and other measures to reorganise tribute collection and land tenure were the boldest to date, but these had more to do with raising much needed cash for the Anglo-Spanish War than with the imposition of a new colonial relationship on the settlers. The ‘local power of the encomenderos’ continued to be, in practice, the foundation of the power of ‘the royal patron’ as much as it had been in the previous century. The latter could not function – let alone triumph – without the former.

Instead, the efforts of the civil authorities had a similar effect to those of Zapata a few decades before, making strange bedfellows of a broad coalition of local opposition to these measures that included not only the encomenderos of the interior of the kingdom and the cabildos of their cities, but also the beleaguered Archbishop Lobo Guerrero, who wrote enthusiastically in support of their proposals. This was the context for Juan Sanz Hurtado’s mission to court, through which the encomenderos of Santafé and Tunja presented their own diagnosis of the kingdom’s woes and counter-proposal to address them in early 1603 – alongside a letter of recommendation from Lobo Guerrero himself urging the king to listen to him, for he spoke ‘with one voice’ on behalf of the entire kingdom.⁶²

The petition Sanz presented comprised two parts, concerning temporal and spiritual affairs in turn. The first described the bleak state of the kingdom, a familiar picture of precipitous demographic collapse, especially in the lowlands, where the population, by their estimation, had crashed by 80 per cent in twenty years; of shortages of provisions and labour, uncoupling the highlands from the lowlands, and threatening the tributary and mining economies; and of growing emigration of Indigenous people from their communities, and collapse of the authority of caciques.⁶³ But far from being caused by encomenderos and settlers – they argued – all these issues were to be blamed on the efforts of successive administrators to displace them, imposing further obligations on Indigenous people in the process. Demographic collapse – they alleged – was the result of ‘pestilences of smallpox and measles’, and from ever growing colonial pressures, particularly the introduction of the requinto tax (‘a knife that has destroyed their lives’) and of corregidores (‘known here as requinto collectors’), which pushed Indigenous people to breaking point, resulting in growing emigration, lower birth rates, and even mass suicides. It was these innovations that should be rolled back, and not the encomienda. This, they argued, predictably, should instead be strengthened and made permanent, for no encomendero would run their subjects to the ground with no regard for sustainability if they knew that their position would be inherited by their children and grandchildren and be ‘their own lifeblood, substance, and honour’.⁶⁴

That encomenderos would rally to defend the encomienda and its privileges should surprise precisely no one, but what is more interesting about their petition was the second part, their assessment of the religious affairs of the kingdom and their proposal for their reform. Here they painted a picture of negligible progress in Christianisation, resulting from mediocre instruction and the depredations of ill-educated, undisciplined, and venal priests and administrators, and from the failure of the authorities to discipline and rein them in. Far from fulfilling the monarchy’s self-declared aim and justification for empire, in the form it had taken until now Christianisation was in fact undermining the kingdom. Quite simply, ‘the principal cause for the consumption of the Indians has been and remains the preaching of the holy Gospel and our desire to make these idolaters into Christians’. This had made the missionary project entirely counter-productive. ‘Its proponents, lacking what it takes for such ministry, have been and remain a blazing thunderbolt and powerful instrument for the will of Satan’, rather than a force for good.⁶⁵

In response, what was needed was a complete overhaul of the church and its missionary project. The effort to congregate Indigenous people into towns should be completed, but in consultation with Indigenous leaders, and only in sites where large groups were known to have already been able to make a living. Once settled in the new towns, their instruction should not be in the hands of the mendicants, who had disgraced themselves and should be sent back to their convents to reflect on their vows, but instead run by Neogranadian-born secular priests. Because these might need some help, owing to their imperfect educations – after all, they lamented, ‘there have been few professors to teach in our wretched kingdom’ – these should be assisted by members of one of the new discalced orders, ‘or by fathers from the Society of Jesus, whose fruits are already known across the world’. These should also set up schools in Santafé and Tunja to teach Indigenous and Spanish children – perhaps fifty of each – who could then teach their elders, bringing Indigenous people into the faith and improving the behaviour of Spaniards.⁶⁶ Only this way could the kingdom be saved.

The Coming of the Jesuits

In the historiography of Peru, Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero is generally regarded as a strong figure who initiated the first systematic, centrally organised campaign for the extirpation of idolatry in the archdiocese of Lima, where he served as archbishop after leaving the New Kingdom (1609–1622).⁶⁷ Lobo Guerrero – the story goes – arrived from Santafé already armed with ‘convictions and inclinations toward the forceful reform of Indian religiosity’.⁶⁸ This made him especially receptive to the ideas of a group of missionaries who favoured a similar approach, including Francisco de Ávila, whom he met within days of his arrival, and a group within the Society of Jesus that included Juan Sebastián de la Parra, Pablo José de Arriaga, and Diego Álvarez de Paz.⁶⁹ This Jesuit connection was crucial, given that ‘during his time in New Granada (1599–1607), Lobo’ – apparently – ‘demonstrated a particular desire to work with the Society of Jesus in the investigation and destruction of Indian religious error’.⁷⁰ The result was that over the next few years, Lobo Guerrero, this group of Jesuits, and the viceroy, the Marquis of Montesclaros, were able to promote an approach to Christianisation that prioritised forceful means to promote the reform of the religious life of Indigenous peoples, transforming the ‘personally motivated and regional initiative’ of Ávila in Huarochirí into ‘an intermittent archiepiscopal enterprise’ that would assail Indigenous parishes over the next century. More broadly, it led to the emergence of a religious atmosphere that favoured extirpation.⁷¹

The shadow that Lobo Guerrero’s career in Peru casts on his time in New Granada is problematic. For a start, the feeble figure of the first years of his time in Santafé stands in stark contrast to that of the powerful Peruvian extirpator, capable of asserting his will on the most important diocese in South America and reshaping it to fit his priorities and preoccupations. Lobo Guerrero would come to wield significant influence over the reform of the New Kingdom soon enough, but only with the support and collaboration of many others. More significantly, given his traditional portrayal in the historiography of Peru as a dyed-in-the-wool advocate of ‘forced conversion as a means of eliminating the Indians’ fidelity to the traditional divinities’, it would be natural to expect him to put forwards similar policies in the New Kingdom as soon as he had the chance; and yet, no such campaign against Indigenous ‘idolatry’ developed in the region under Lobo Guerrero or his successors, and the strategies he sponsored in fact advocated the opposite.⁷² His background, his relationship to the Jesuits, and the circumstances of his alliance with Borja all deserve closer attention.

Lobo Guerrero came from different circumstances to his Neogranadian predecessors. Barrios and Zapata had been Franciscan reformers, and the latter had spent considerable time in Peru introducing reforms through disciplinary methods. Once archbishop, Zapata sought to use his new powers – not least the power to ordain new priests – to full effect. Lobo Guerrero had different ideas. A doctor of canon law, he had been an academic in Salamanca and later Seville, where he had risen to the position of rector of the Colegio de Santa María de Jesús.⁷³ In 1580, he had had been sent to Mexico to serve as fiscal, or prosecutor, for the Mexican Inquisition, becoming inquisitor in 1593, and eventually the most senior official in the institution at the time of his appointment to the see of Santafé in 1596.⁷⁴ By then, he had developed close links to the Jesuits and to their provincial in New Spain, Esteban Páez. One of his first acts after his consecration as bishop, even before setting off for New Granada, was to ordain the Jesuit novice Francisco de Figueroa to the priesthood, at Páez’s request.⁷⁵ Lobo Guerrero’s close links to the Jesuits dated from Mexico, and he sought to take advantage of them in his new appointment. Rather than setting off for his new see immediately, Lobo Guerrero spent some time in Mexico preparing for his new mission and convincing Páez to allow two Jesuits to accompany him, and to petition his superiors in Rome to allow them to establish a permanent presence in Santafé.⁷⁶ It was only after this request was approved by Rome that Lobo Guerrero set off for Santafé with Francisco de Figueroa and a second Jesuit, Alonso de Medrano, at the end of April 1598, almost two years after his appointment.⁷⁷

Lobo Guerrero installed the two Jesuits in Santafé and began to rely on them for various tasks – even to the exclusion of the regular and secular clergy of the archdiocese. This bears a striking resemblance to the strategy of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who on his arrival in Peru fostered the Jesuits, installed them – not without controversy – in a couple of Indigenous parishes, and relied on them in his plans for reform, notably during the general visitation he soon conducted of his viceroyalty.⁷⁸ Lobo Guerrero would do much the same, starting by taking these Jesuits with him in his initial abortive visitation of the archdiocese of Santafé as secretaries and interpreters.⁷⁹ Although later abandoned in the fallout of the archbishop’s row with the civil authorities, the visitation was nevertheless revealing of the state of Christianisation in the kingdom, the lack of a systematic language policy, the independence of the regular clergy, and the priorities of missionaries around the region, including their attitudes to admitting Indigenous people to the sacraments and participation in other aspects of everyday Christian devotion. The reports that emerged from these visitations were used by Lobo Guerrero to lobby the king, and by the two Jesuits their Roman superiors, to establish a permanent presence in the New Kingdom and to send reinforcements, arguing that ‘no other remedy could morally be found’ to the ills of the New Kingdom of Granada ‘than to bring the Society to this land’, as the means to ‘rescue it from its wretched darkness’.⁸⁰

These requests initially fell on deaf ears, even after Figueroa crossed the Atlantic in 1601 to seek support for their initiative personally, with detailed reports and even a proof-of-concept grammar and catechism of the ‘Muisca language’, discussed in Chapter 5.⁸¹ As late as September 1602, the king continued to dismiss the archbishop’s requests, arguing that if he was concerned about ‘how poorly taught and indoctrinated the natives of the Kingdom are’ he should rely on the ‘many orders and very respected people’ already there.⁸² What brought about the change was the petition of the encomenderos of the kingdom and the lobbying of Juan Sanz Hurtado, who took advantage of his time in court to present his ideas widely.

Among the people Sanz met was the influential aristocrat Juan de Borja y Armendía, who served as mayordomo to the king’s grandmother, the dowager Holy Roman Empress Maria of Austria, and who was appointed the new president of the Audiencia of Santafé in August 1604.⁸³ Borja quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of their plans for reform, and – no doubt in part as a result of his family connections, as the grandson of Francis Borgia, third Jesuit superior general – not only shared the archbishop’s conviction that the Jesuits should play a key role in these efforts, but also had the ear of the Jesuit authorities in Rome, who soon began to receive regular petitions from the new president for support of their plans.⁸⁴ This was how the first batch of six Jesuits – four priests and two brothers – was finally sent to the New Kingdom in 1604 with instructions to establish a new vice-province, to be led by one Diego de Torres Bollo, an experienced and ambitious reformer who would later go on to be one of the architects of the Jesuit missions of Paraguay, but who currently found himself effectively exiled from Peru by his opponents.

As Aliocha Maldavsky has shown, by the beginning of the seventeenth century the Jesuits of the province of Peru, which then covered most of Spanish South America, were deeply divided. The question at the root of the conflict concerned the role that the Society should play in the New World, particularly in relation to Indigenous people.⁸⁵ This was not a new debate. The Jesuits of Peru had long been divided on the roles and responsibilities they should take: whether they should actively hold cure of souls in Indigenous parishes; something less involved, such as concentrating on the education of the children of Indigenous elites; even less, limiting their involvement to occasional itinerant missions; or even minister primarily to Spaniards instead.⁸⁶ These old divisions, never resolved, rose to prominence once again at the turn of the century, when the Jesuits of Peru came together to deliberate on their affairs in their Provincial Congregation of 1600.⁸⁷ The debate there concerned the division of the province of Peru, separating the regions of Chile, Tucumán, and Paraguay from the province’s Central Andean heartlands and establishing them as an independent province of their own. Because these regions had been the focus of much Jesuit missionary activity since the 1580s, spinning off these regions also meant shedding much of the province’s missionary focus along with them, breathing new life into the old debate over the nature and shape of Jesuit involvement in missionary activity in South America.⁸⁸

By now, two camps had emerged, broadly composed of those who believed that the Jesuits’ priority in Peru should be missionary activity among Indigenous people – holding more Indigenous parishes and conducting itinerant missions – and those who favoured focusing on the Spanish.⁸⁹ The first was headed by Diego de Torres Bollo, who had arrived in Peru two decades earlier and spent much of his career ministering to Indigenous people, first in their Indigenous parish of Julí and later from the colleges of Cuzco, Quito, and Potosí. From as early as the 1580s, Torres had been a passionate advocate within the order for keeping their Indigenous parishes and even accepting more.⁹⁰ The second, by his rival Juan Sebastián de la Parra, who had taken a different path, serving as rector of the Jesuit colleges in Potosí and Lima before serving as head of the province.⁹¹ After much disagreement, the Provincial Congregation of 1600 elected Torres procurator and entrusted him with the mission of travelling to Rome to lobby for the division of the province of Peru.

Torres crossed the Atlantic the following year and remained in Rome until 1604, developing links to influential reformers and gaining supporters for the Paraguayan project within and beyond his order.⁹² The result was that the Jesuit authorities in Rome approved the division of the Province of Peru, appointed Torres as the new provincial of the Province of Paraguay, Chile, and Tucumán, and sent him back across the Atlantic to set up his new province as the head of fourteen Jesuits, including the phenomenally well connected reformer, Martín de Funes, former tutor to the queen, Margaret of Austria, and close correspondent of leading cardinals.⁹³ It was at this point that Torres’s opponents in Peru, led by Sebastián de la Parra, decided to strike. They had not been able to prevent his election as procurator in 1600 or his trip to Rome, but when he passed through Lima they were able to convince Esteban Páez – Lobo Guerrero’s old ally from Mexico, who had since become the head of the Peruvian province – to stop him from going to Paraguay and send him to the ‘wretched darkness’ of the New Kingdom instead.⁹⁴

With this, Páez killed two birds with one stone: he answered the pleas for Jesuits from his old supporter Lobo Guerrero, and rid himself – at least temporarily – of the troublesome Torres Bollo and the Paraguayan project that was causing such division in Peru.⁹⁵ Torres’s opponents would remain entrenched in Lima, and it was precisely this faction of Jesuits that would receive Lobo Guerrero there towards the end of the decade: Torres’s old rival Juan Sebastián de la Parra, who by then had been elected provincial for the second time, Diego Álvarez de Paz, and their ally Pablo José de Arriaga.⁹⁶ That alliance would result in the development of idolatry visitations as a centrally organised archiepiscopal venture and key feature of ecclesiastical politics in that region.⁹⁷

For the New Kingdom of Granada, however, the result of these machinations was that in 1605 two immensely influential Jesuits – Torres Bollo and Funes – arrived in Santafé with a very particular vision of how evangelisation should be conducted, a desire to work among Indigenous people in the parishes even on a permanent basis, and broad experience in missionary theatres around the New World and the Old.⁹⁸ This brings us full circle to the joint letter that Borja and Lobo Guerrero sent the king in mid August 1606: a proposal that outlined a vision for the reformation of the New Kingdom of Granada first articulated by the encomenderos and settlers of Santafé and Tunja, given shape by the archbishop and the president, and fully articulated and developed in collaboration with Diego de Torres Bollo, Martín de Funes, and the other Jesuits. Their plan deserves a closer look.

The Plan for Reform

In their proposal of 1606, Lobo Guerrero and Borja identified three areas in need of remedy: the lack of education and lax behaviour of the clergy, the corruption of the Spanish laity, and the dismal state of the Christianisation of Indigenous people. The first they could begin to remedy easily enough. They had already reopened a diocesan seminary a few months before, and now the pair proposed placing it ‘under the discipline and government of the fathers of the Society’ to foster a new generation of properly trained and disciplined priests. Their general ‘lack of doctrine’, moreover, could be addressed by establishing chairs to teach seminarians and priests not just Indigenous languages, as had been the case since the 1580s, but also Latin, arts, and theology – all of which were absent in the region. For this purpose, they asked the crown for 3,000 pesos to establish a Jesuit college in the city.⁹⁹ The other two problems were more complex. To begin to deal with them, the pair proposed overhauling the ecclesiastical legislation of the kingdom, to serve as a ‘general remedy’ and foundation for reforms. For this they planned to hold the first diocesan synod for half a century, in which they would ‘receive’ the legislation of the Third Provincial Council of Lima, of 1582–1583, which the Jesuits had brought with them, and which had been ‘approved by the Holy See, Your Majesty, and 23 years of experience’.¹⁰⁰ This would avoid the difficulties of holding a provincial council in Santafé for some time, and allow the reform of the church to begin at once.

In what concerned Indigenous people more specifically, the reformers proposed implementing three strategies advanced by Lima III. First, they would round up all the ‘priests of idols and sorcerers that are here known as xeques and mohanes’, and enclose them in a building in the city of Santafé where they could live for the rest of their lives, out of harm’s way.¹⁰¹ They also advocated for a renewed emphasis on the use of Indigenous languages for religious instruction and the production of standardised translations of catechetical texts – explored in greater detail in Chapter 5 – which the Jesuits had already started to prepare. Third, recalling the request of Sanz Hurtado and the encomenderos of the kingdom, they called for the successors of caciques be educated in a school run by the Jesuits, ‘where they can grow as new plants in the faith and Christian devotion, and forget their superstitions’, so that they could later set a good example to their subjects, and serve as allies and agents of reform.¹⁰² If these policies seem like a straightforward implementation of a Peruvian template in a new context that is, in large part, deliberate. In presenting their proposals, the reformers minimised the complexity and innovation of their designs. Instead, they highlighted the continuities with existing precedent to neutralise potential opposition to their more contentious initiatives. Nowhere is this clearer than in their final and most controversial proposal: to use the Jesuits to overhaul the administration of Indigenous parishes.

In their letter, the president and the archbishop petitioned the crown for as many Jesuits as possible to be sent to New Granada, who, on arrival, were ‘to be divided in pairs or in trios, and deployed in Indigenous towns’, where they could master Indigenous languages. In doing so they would ‘perform the office of priests’, but only temporarily – ‘until they have instructed [the Indians] well in the faith and Christian customs’ – before leaving the parishes in capable hands and repeating the process elsewhere, ‘returning them after they have been reformed’.¹⁰³ In reality, what the reformers had in mind was for the Jesuits to hold a number of parishes indefinitely, to serve as laboratories for new missionary methods and initiatives, which would then be extended and introduced across the archdiocese through legislation, frequent rounds of ecclesiastical visitations, and the support of the civil authorities and encomenderos. These would also serve as sites for the Jesuits to engage with Indigenous languages, and to train their own members in the sorts of missionary activity that Torres Bollo and his allies wanted to foster among their order. The experiment was, in fact, already under way: Lobo Guerrero and Borja had given the Jesuits the parish of Cajicá, near Santafé, in 1605 and they had been running it ever since.

The reformers also had to convince the Jesuit authorities in Rome, which meant wading into the old controversy over the kind of missionary activity that was desirable, or indeed permissible, to the Jesuits in the New World. In the 1570s, the Jesuits of Peru had reluctantly agreed to accept a small number of parishes in Peru under pressure from viceroy Toledo, but many in the order were opposed to the decision. These included the influential José de Acosta, then provincial, who was uneasy with regulars of any sort holding parishes, least of all the Jesuits.¹⁰⁴ Holding the cure of souls was expressly forbidden by the constitutions that governed the society.¹⁰⁵ This had not, however, deterred Torres Bollo, who had not only supported taking on additional parishes in Peru since the 1580s, but had also spent much of the 1590s lobbying for the establishment of an even more permanent and ambitious cure of souls – what would become the famous Jesuit missions of Paraguay.¹⁰⁶ Now it fell to him to convince their Roman superiors to go along with the plan for Santafé. In a draft of their earliest annual report – littera annua – for 1605, Torres mentioned that two Jesuits number had been sent ‘on a mission to a large Indian town belonging to the crown, called Cajicá, holding the office of priests for the period of the mission’, and that two more had joined them later, ‘to help them and learn the language in that town’.¹⁰⁷ By the time he composed the final version, Torres leaned more heavily still on the language argument: they had ‘taken charge of a town of the king’, he explained, ‘mainly because we have found no other means for our own to know the language, which is the most difficult one known in the Indies’.¹⁰⁸

Claudio Acquaviva, the superior general, was not keen, reminding the Jesuits of Santafé ‘that it is not in accordance with the Institute of the Society to take charge of doctrinas permanently’ – but, in the end, as in Peru, the archbishop and civil authority were able to convince the superior general to concede a compromise. In June 1608, Acquaviva agreed to allow the Jesuits of Santafé to keep their parishes temporarily, in the manner of a mission, until the laity was ‘informed in the faith and Christian life’ – for which he provided a series of instructions and requirements. Then, when a replacement was appointed, they were to ‘move to another town and parish which has the same needs as the first’.¹⁰⁹ The compromise would, in fact, be the thin end of a wedge and the beginning of a much more permanent arrangement. That same year, in 1608, the Jesuits of Santafé had in fact obtained a second parish, the larger town of Fontibón. Further negotiations capped the number of parishes they could take on to two, and in 1615 when they obtained the parish of Duitama in Tunja they returned that of Cajicá. They would later exchange that for Tópaga and eventually obtain Tunjuelo, holding their parishes for years and even decades at a time.¹¹⁰

‘Little Else to Add’

There was a similar strategy of emphasising continuity and downplaying complexity in the legislation of the Second Synod of Santafé, the cornerstone of the new programme of religious reform, which concluded after a brisk two weeks of sessions on 2 September 1606. In broad terms, the legislation adapted the constitutions of Lima III, as the text itself claimed – ‘with little else to add’.¹¹¹ But this concealed a more subtle reality. The synod in fact emphasised those aspects of the Lima council that reflected the concerns and priorities of its principal architects – Lobo Guerrero, Borja, and their Jesuit allies – and left the rest behind. The Third Provincial Council of Lima, held over a number of sessions between August 1582 and October 1583, and marked by the development of a number of conflicts among those convened, had produced a sprawling and generally unstructured collection of constitutions discussing a variety of issues pertaining to the church of the region.¹¹² The constitutions of Santafé, in contrast, were composed in a little over ten days, structured in a more systematic fashion, and covered far fewer subjects.¹¹³ In other words, the synod was an opportunity to adapt select aspects of Lima III for use in Santafé, but given the constraints of time and the clear agenda of the ecclesiastical elite that convened it, not much of a forum for discussion or the voicing of concerns by the rest of the clergy. The choice of material imported from Lima is revealing.

For a start, both Spaniards and Indians were to be required to learn the basic prayers, the sacraments, the principal mysteries of the Christian faith, ‘and that all other things worshipped by other people are not God, but are lies and demons’.¹¹⁴ For this purpose, the synod introduced the key texts of the council of Lima for use in New Granada: the Catecismo mayor, the Brief catechism for Indians, and the Confessionary.¹¹⁵ The latter two were to be translated into Muisca, as Chapter 5 examines, and the first was to be adapted into sermons composed in Muisca for use among Indigenous people. Every Sunday and feast day, the parish priest was to preach an explanation of doctrine, in Spanish to Spaniards and in Indigenous languages in doctrinas. Spaniards were to receive daily catechism during Lent, while adults in Indigenous parishes were to be catechised every Tuesday and Thursday – until the priest was satisfied – and children and the elderly daily.¹¹⁶

The text devoted an entire chapter to the reformation of the clergy.¹¹⁷ Following Lima III, it banned priests from being involved in business transactions, on pain of excommunication. They were not to take part in campaigns of war against Indigenous groups, comedies and indecent plays, gambling, or close relations with women. The synod even issued regulations on appropriate dress, the length of beards, the bearing of arms, and the size of ruffs and collars. Such legislation might seem trifling, but underpinning it was a concern with discipline and the imposition of the authority of diocesan authorities over the clergy. It addressed more fundamental concerns in the same spirit. For example, the synod introduced a clear prohibition on non-residency. Secular priests were forbidden from leaving the archdiocese without the express permission of the archbishop.¹¹⁸ Indeed, they were not to absent themselves from their benefices at all, except under a limited number of circumstances – to confess, or in the case of urgency; and even then, it was to require the consent of the ordinary, and the appointment of a replacement during their absence – requirements that went beyond those of the Peruvian legislation the synod took as its model.¹¹⁹ Turning to their education, the archbishop’s deputies in the provinces, his vicars, were to appoint examiners to assess the training and conduct of the priests, paying special attention to their knowledge of ceremonies – another aspect that the legislation of Lima did not see the need to address.¹²⁰

None of this, of course, was strictly innovative. It was, at face value, just the application of the requirements of Trent and Lima III, with a few adjustments. But these changes, and the careful selection of what to include, what to emphasise, and what to leave behind, fundamentally adapted the legislation to the reformers’ reading of local conditions in Santafé – making this, in effect, an innovative legal translation.¹²¹ Other adaptations are even clearer. For example, the legislation firmly subordinated the regular clergy involved in the cure of souls to the jurisdiction of the diocesan authorities. After years of jurisdictional conflict – the result of the confusion over the validity of the privileges and exemptions of the religious orders after the Council of Trent, the upheaval of the years after Zapata’s death, and the chaos of the period of Lobo Guerrero’s feud with President Sande – the synod devoted a whole chapter to the male religious orders, which made the new position abundantly clear. ‘The said religious,’ the text ordered, ‘shall not say mass, preach, or hear confessions without our licence’.¹²² The synod urged the regular authorities to cooperate in the programme of reform, and sought to avoid engendering a new wave of antagonism, but it was clear who was to be in charge of the missionary project. In contrast, the equivalent legislation in the constitutions of Lima is far less forceful, simply reminding regulars not to perform the sacraments of baptism or marriage except when they held the office of parish priest.¹²³ There, an explicit assertion of the monopoly of the ordinary and the secular clergy over the cure of souls of the laity of the archdiocese seemed unnecessary.

The legislation concerning Indigenous people was also an abbreviated selection of the comprehensive legislation of Lima, that gave priority to those aspects that reflected the priorities of the reformers. The starting point, as in so much legislation of this period, was the characterisation of Indigenous people as ‘new to the faith and of very limited capacity, poor, oppressed, and afflicted’, and therefore in need of special protection.¹²⁴ Their faith was to be fostered and their faults corrected by instilling Christian civility and the qualities of political life – the broad range of ideas encapsulated by the contemporaneous concept of policía. This idea can be found in broad terms in much of the legislation of Lima III, and indeed this section of the Santafé legislation was based on a constitution from the Lima council that dealt with it more explicitly.¹²⁵ The difference is that in the latter this appeared in the very last session of the council and seems almost an afterthought, whereas in Santafé it was the very foundation of the synod’s strategy. This clear, the synod then summarised several other constitutions from Lima concerning Indigenous people into four concise chapters with the same emphasis. These began by ordering parish priests to ‘have great vigilance and take great care to teach them how to live politically’ as a precondition for their spiritual development, and moved on to legislating on how they were to care for themselves, sleep on beds or hammocks and not the floor, how they should dress (even inside their homes), and how they should raise their children. Those found to be drunk were to be shorn, and if they were caciques they were to be reported to the civil authorities to receive exemplary punishment. Some of this is reminiscent of the legislation of Archbishop Zapata the previous century, but the difference is that among these hackneyed markers of civility were others that reflected the new priorities of the reformers. In this way, when the synod explained that Indigenous people should be taught the habits of a Christian life, ‘things pertaining to good Christians’, much of it was new in the context of the New Kingdom: that Indigenous people should be taught to pray on waking and before going to sleep, to visit their parish churches to pray before work, to keep images and crosses in their houses for their private devotions, and to have rosaries and use them to pray.¹²⁶

Indeed, a recurring emphasis of the reformers was on the importance of frequent participation in devotional activities private and public, and most significantly in the sacraments. The synod began by emphasising the importance of regular confession. The annual obligation to confess during Lent had been in place since it was introduced at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, but in the New Kingdom it had been largely impossible to meet for Indigenous people. This was beginning to change with a greater emphasis on Indigenous language education for priests, as Chapter 5 explores, and with growing numbers of them working in Indigenous parishes. Their task was also about to get easier, with the introduction of new translations of the Lima III confessionary a few months later. Building on this, the synod now underscored the obligation of confessors ‘to understand the whole conscience of the Indians when they confess’, and not to be satisfied with less ‘for lack of language, or out of laziness and tiredness’. For this, the synod also revoked the licences of all confessors, pending a new examination, with which the authorities intended to check that they met these new requirements.¹²⁷ Beyond its sacramental function, confession was to also serve a more practical purpose, typical of the reconfiguration of the sacrament after Trent, as an opportunity to evaluate the progress of religious instruction.¹²⁸ Confessors, ‘at the beginning of confession’, were to require penitents to recite ‘the Creed, the Our Father, and the commandments, and at least instruct them in the principal mysteries of our holy faith’.¹²⁹

The synod also allowed Indigenous people greater access to the Eucharist, the central sacrament of the Tridentine church. This had been expressly forbidden by the previous synod, in 1556, which had ruled it was ‘not to be administered under any circumstance, except to a woman married to a Spaniard’ and even then only with great care and preparation.¹³⁰ Zapata, for his part, had maintained this prohibition in 1576, ‘because these Indians are most imperfect in knowing and appreciating the good that there is in this sacrament’, except in the most exceptional circumstances, with the explicit approval of the archbishop himself, ‘and in no other way’.¹³¹ Hostility to administering the Eucharist to Indigenous people was by no means unique to New Granada. It remained controversial in Mexico and Peru, where it had been allowed by the legislation of its provincial councils since the 1550s and 1560s, respectively.¹³² At the time, much of the controversy hinged on the question of whether the person receiving the sacrament was worthy of doing so. This required, as it did everywhere else, that communicant was in a state of grace, having said a full confession and received absolution, the essential precondition, and also that they had sufficient understanding of the significance of the sacrament and an adequate disposition to receive it.¹³³ But in this colonial context, it inevitably raised a more fundamental question, whether Indigenous people were capable of meeting these requirements at all. The framers of Lima III were inclined to think that Indigenous people could one day be capable but determined that they had not yet met the necessary requirements, explaining that the Eucharist had not been widely administered to Indigenous people because of the ‘obstacle of borracheras, concubinage, and especially superstitions and idolatry’.¹³⁴

Many Jesuits took a different view.¹³⁵ For them, the question of whether to admit Indigenous people to the Eucharist was not just a matter of preparation, but also hinged on a subtler theological understanding of the sacrament. In this view, encapsulated by the influential Jesuit theologian José de Acosta, the Eucharist could play an active role in the moral improvement of Indigenous people. For a start, it could be presented to the new converts as a reward to which they should aspire, serving to incentivise them to embrace Christianity and reform their lives. More subtly and significantly, however, for Acosta and other Jesuits, receiving the sacrament would in itself have a salutary and improving effect, which would strengthen the fledgling faith of the new converts.¹³⁶ This same perspective was brought to the New Kingdom by Torres Bollo and his fellows, and is reflected in the 1606 synod, which echoed the Jesuit emphasis on the sacrament as a key pillar of missionary strategy. It was for this reason that the synod relaxed the barriers to access, allowing Indigenous people to receive it with just the approval of the archbishop’s vicars – deputies, often the priests of the larger parishes, appointed by Lobo Guerrero across the archdiocese in greater numbers to help implement his reforms.¹³⁷ It also ordered priests to take special care to administer it to the dying as viaticum, and required the display of the consecrated host – the Blessed Sacrament – on the altar of every parish church so that, in its words, ‘with its presence, we hope idolatry will be banished’, a statement, as we will see, drawn directly from Jesuit practice.¹³⁸

The idea of eliminating influences counter to Christianisation – to be clear – was not absent from the legislation, or indeed from the broader project of reform. It was implicit in the sections that aimed to reform the way that Indigenous people lived and behaved. Introducing policía, after all, was also a means to isolate people from the supposedly malign influences of their former environments and ways of life.¹³⁹ It was also explicit in the reformers’ proposal for the removal of xeques and their confinement in the sort of perpetual re-education institution that had also been envisioned by Lima III. Indeed, Lobo Guerrero and the Jesuits also reported seizing and destroying Indigenous ritual objects they encountered in the course of visitations.¹⁴⁰ None of this, however, was at the centre of their efforts. Instead, the reformers proposed that the introduction and promotion of new practices, routines, and rituals among Indigenous people would lead them to abandon these practices and embrace Christianity without the need for this direct, punitive intervention. It was initiatives such as the display of the Blessed Sacrament in parish churches, and not campaigns of extirpation, that would become central to the development of the missionary project in the New Kingdom for decades.¹⁴¹ To understand how, we must look more closely at these Jesuit parishes to see reform in practice.

The Jesuit Experiment

The Jesuit experiment in overhauling Christianisation in the New Kingdom began in the parishes of Cajicá and Fontibón, in the province of Santafé. These were ideal sites for their purposes. They were both located near the city; both were royal encomiendas, which meant that there was no lay authority to contend with aside from President Borja and the towns’ caciques, don Juan Sachigua of Cajicá and don Diego of Fontibón; and they were of a reasonable size.¹⁴² Cajicá had a population roughly the size of a standard reducción town – ‘776 men and women, old and young’, as per a 1603 visitation – while Fontibón had perhaps double that.¹⁴³ They also, of course, had a difficult recent history. The two towns had been at the centre of Zapata’s campaign to confiscate santuario offerings in the 1570s, and subsequent visitors had found and confiscated further objects in the years since, including Lobo Guerrero himself, at the beginning of his time in Santafé, with the two Jesuits who had come with him from Mexico.¹⁴⁴ Now the two parishes would be the epicentre of the new approach.

While there would be several refinements to the Jesuit approach to managing their parishes, the broad features can already be identified in Cajicá from their arrival in 1605. One aspect was to bring their parishes up to the standards required by existing legislation, a task made easier by the fact that, unlike every other parish, the Jesuits tended to staff theirs with three priests and a novice each and could fund them independently. Their earliest reports from Cajicá claimed that they had found a parish in disarray: the roof of the church had collapsed a year earlier and lay in disrepair; the church lacked the necessary ornaments and objects required for worship; and there was no programme of religious instruction.¹⁴⁵ The new arrivals repaired the church, purchased the necessary equipment – standard practice, at least in theory, for any new incumbent arriving in a new parish – and established a systematic programme of catechisation.¹⁴⁶ For this, they ordered children and the elderly to come together in the mornings and afternoons to learn the catechism. ‘In less than a month’, they claimed, ‘over 300 children learnt it, as did many older people who, anxious to learn, came at the times designated for children’.¹⁴⁷ So too in Fontibón, where ‘some of the mysteries of the faith have seemed so new’, as they reported in 1609, ‘that they had never heard such things, especially of the resurrection of the flesh, which they find very novel’.¹⁴⁸

Examining the work carried out by the Society of Jesus in Indigenous parishes necessarily involves examining the writings and reports of the Jesuit themselves, which poses methodological challenges. These require a particularly careful reading, not simply because of their immediate context of the polemic concerning obtaining and retaining these Neogranadian parishes, which frequently led the Jesuits to denigrate the efforts of previous holders and to idealise their own progress, as in the earlier quotations, or because the Jesuits – like their contemporaries – made sense of their experiences and the lives of Indigenous people through European interpretative frameworks. Rather, because there are issues specific to Jesuit materials, and particularly, as Marcus Friedrich explains, to the ‘edifying correspondence’: the relationes, or missionary reports, often meant to be widely disseminated, and the litterae annuae, annual letters sent to Rome that brought together reports from across each province and which were then edited, translated, compiled, published, and circulated within the society.¹⁴⁹

Although these materials aimed to present factual information about their work, their principal aim was to edify, console, and encourage their readers, whether within or beyond the society, to emulate them.¹⁵⁰ Their content and narrative structure were powerfully shaped by the rhetoric, conventions, and type scenes of the early Christian literature in which their own training, meditations, and writing were steeped: the writings of church fathers, early Christian histories, the lives of saints, and accounts of the Christianisation of Europe in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.¹⁵¹ The time of the great miracles may have been long past, in the well-known words of José de Acosta, but edifying accounts of more quotidian miracles – from scenes of miraculous conversions and healing, to battles with demons and the destruction of ancient cairns and idols – were ubiquitous in Jesuit edifying correspondence, all carefully recounted in short, accessible, and easily excerpted narratives known as exempla.¹⁵² And yet, for all their issues, it is these sources that provide the most detailed insights into the conduct of Jesuit missionary in the parishes of the New Kingdom, and the changes they introduced to Christianisation in the early decades of the seventeenth century.

Miracles aside, these show a shift in practice in three interconnected directions: a reassessment of the capacity of Indigenous people, a greater inclusion of Indigenous people in the running of their parishes, and a new emphasis on the everyday practice of Christian devotions. The first of these changes was most visible in a renewed emphasis on education – not just religious instruction, but a broader complement involving the teaching of alphabetic and pictorial literacy, music, and the introduction of parish offices and institutions as new makers of policía and of spiritual potential.¹⁵³ While earlier efforts had long emphasised the importance of educating Indigenous children, the amount of teaching involved was always remarkably limited. The Laws of Burgos-Valladolid of 1512–1513, for example, had only required encomenderos in command of fifty or more Indigenous people to teach a single young man to read, so that he could then teach others and help friars with evangelisation.¹⁵⁴ The legislation of the synod of 1556 had encouraged priests to teach the Indigenous inhabitants of ‘major towns’ to ‘read and write, count, [and] sing’ on feast days, along with learning the Spanish language, but with barely any missionary activity in the archdiocese this was hopelessly overoptimistic.¹⁵⁵ Zapata moderated this, ordering priests to teach just twenty or so children to read and write in every parish.¹⁵⁶ In contrast, Lima III ordered that more comprehensive schools be established in each Indigenous parish, a requirement also incorporated into the synod of Santafé, and the Jesuits set about demonstrating how this should be put into practice on the ground in their parishes.¹⁵⁷

In Cajicá they had already followed these instructions to the letter, establishing a ‘school for the children of the most notable Indians, to read and write’.¹⁵⁸ These were not just the children of Indigenous leaders, but a broader slice of the parish’s population. In Cajicá they reported selecting ‘50 children, the most able’, in 1605, and in 1613 they reported that the school for children in Fontibón had over one hundred pupils, ‘taught to read, and write, and sing, and play flutes and viols’.¹⁵⁹ This sort of education was integral to the Jesuit conception of mission, but it also represented an incentive for Indigenous people to participate in Jesuit initiatives. Jesuit accounts provide glimpses of the fact that these benefits were recognised by Indigenous people even in towns not under their care. An exemplum from their 1611–1612 littera annua, for example, which described how the inhabitants of neighbouring towns had visited Cajicá on a certain feast day, and apparently been so impressed by what the Jesuits were doing in the parish that clamoured for their own parish to be run by the society – a common trope in reports of this kind – mentioned, amid the self-aggrandising remarks of a Jesuit keen to impress his superiors, the request that the group made when they asked ‘if they could send their children here, to be taught how to read and sing’.¹⁶⁰

Jesuit education in literacy was not limited to the alphabetic, but also involved the transmission of broader visual systems of referentiality.¹⁶¹ The Jesuits were key to introducing, for the first time in some parishes, devotional images for use in catechisation and the liturgy. When the Jesuits arrived in Duitama in 1615, for example, they soon set about raising funds for the purchase of votive images, importing three Spanish sculptures of the Christ Child, the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, and St Lawrence, the patron of the parish.¹⁶² In Tópaga, the new church was ‘adorned by beautiful busts of cherubim of great stature’ around the tabernacle. The main altar was adorned with a reredos with ‘elaborate images in the niches, especially a beautiful one of the Our Lady the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception’, while a side altar was dedicated to St Peter, and decorated with a bust of the saint.¹⁶³ Not all images were as elaborate. In 1610 the Jesuit Joseph Dadey petitioned Acquaviva from Fontibón for a ‘set of the prints of Father Nadal’, which ‘were well known for the fruit they provide’ in catechisation.¹⁶⁴ These were the Evangelicae Historiae Imagines – Images of the Gospel Story – of Jerónimo Nadal, one of the founding members of the Society of Jesus, engraved by the Wierix brothers in Antwerp in 1593, and widely used and reproduced in Jesuit missions around the world.¹⁶⁵ Through these images the Jesuits sought not only to reach a broader share of their parishioners, beyond those they could teach to read and write, but also to transmit a new visual literacy to Indigenous people, an ability to understand Christian imagery. This too became a priority for the archdiocese, which began to concern itself with systematically promoting the introduction of devotional images in Indigenous churches and homes.¹⁶⁶

Musical education was another innovation, promoted in Peru by Lima III and included by the reformers in the synod of 1606.¹⁶⁷ Children in Jesuit schools were taught to sing and play instruments in the church.¹⁶⁸ By 1612 the students of the Jesuit school for children in Cajicá were taught to sing in ‘plainchant [and] accompanying an organ, and [to play] music with instruments (flutes, chirimías, and viols), with which they performed in the mass and other divine offices’.¹⁶⁹ Their musical training served a range of purposes, responding to the Tridentine desire to exalt the mass and divine offices through art and music, and promoting the Jesuit model of parish management: the music of Cajicá, the Jesuits reported, ‘was the envy of surrounding towns, so that they all wanted to have us as their parish priests’.¹⁷⁰ The Jesuits were not subtle about the success of their efforts to train choristers and musicians. They deliberately invited priests in nearby parishes to visit them for celebrations on feast days and recorded their reactions. On the feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1611 or 1612, for example, a friar who held a nearby parish was so impressed by what he witnessed – or so they claimed – that he confessed that ‘he thought it was a miracle to have achieved such a great thing, and I would not have believed it if I had not seen and heard it’.¹⁷¹ Most significantly, the initiative embodied a new conception of the capacity of their Indigenous parishioners. For the Jesuits, earlier efforts to evangelise Indigenous people, in short, had underestimated them.

Earlier efforts had also underutilised them. The second shift in practice, derived from the first, was a greater inclusion of Indigenous people in the running of their parishes and the conduct of their own Christianisation. This involvement ranged from the traditional – employing Indigenous agents in catechisation, as had long been the case in other regions – to other roles more novel for this context.¹⁷² This included employing children, who received daily instruction and learned how to read and write, to aid in the catechisation of the adults of their parcialidades when these came for instruction on Sundays and feast days. As their littera annua for 1609 explained, in Cajicá the adults would gather in the main square and arrange themselves into a circle with children in the middle, holding a long cross, leading the rest in the recitation of prayers and the catechism. Only after this preparation would they be instructed by the priest, before moving to the interior of the church for a sermon and sung mass, in which the children and other Indigenous people would also feature.¹⁷³ After all, a central purpose of literate and musical education was to support the celebration of the liturgy. This extended into other arenas as well. Scholars of other regions have highlighted how Jesuits invested considerable efforts in the training of Indigenous assistants in different missionary contexts, who could act with some degree of independence – a practice not without controversy.¹⁷⁴ The New Kingdom was no different: here their roles ranged from administering baptism in cases of emergency, helping to establish and manage parish hospitals for the care of the dying, preparing their fellows to receive various sacraments, and assisting with the organisation and running of public celebrations.¹⁷⁵ By the time of their 1613 annua the Jesuits explained how priests in Cajicá had come to rely on ‘the more advantaged Indians, who help to catechise and die well’, to the point ‘that we are not needed where they attend’.¹⁷⁶

The third and final departure in their missionary methods involved a new emphasis on the everyday practice of Christianity, including regular participation in the sacraments, private devotions, and public celebrations. Frequent participation in Penance and the Eucharist, as we saw, was a pillar of the Jesuit mission strategy, to the point of being a favourite measure of the success of their endeavours in their edifying correspondence and in their letters to the king. In the annua for 1609, for example, Francisco Vargas, a Jesuit attached to the college of Santafé, boasted of the great number of confessions he heard from Indigenous people. In Cajicá he granted certificates of confession to 200 people, so that they could take communion, of whom one hundred had made the longer, general confessions favoured by the Jesuits.¹⁷⁷ During Lent in 1608, he had ‘spent 11 or 12 hours every day confessing the Indians’ in Santafé, well into the evening, estimating that ‘over 4,000 people have confessed with me in this school, many of them general confessions’.¹⁷⁸ In their annua for 1652 the Jesuits of Santafé reminisced about their arrival in Fontibón, writing of how ‘in the town there was not one person who took communion’ then, but that it had now ‘been many years since even one person has failed to take it’ – an exaggeration, perhaps, but revealing of how they assessed their success. They could be proud, he added, ‘that such a holy custom and unavoidable obligation, previously unknown in this Kingdom, has spread in its observance to the rest of the towns’ of the archdiocese.¹⁷⁹ Indeed, this new approach, as Chapter 6 shows, would eventually be enshrined in legislation, and spread around the archdiocese by reforming prelates through systematic ecclesiastical visitations.

Another practice that would soon spread and take root was the devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, the display of the consecrated host on the altar in the parish church for its adoration by the faithful.¹⁸⁰ Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and participation in the associated feast of Corpus Christi – both celebrations of the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the consecrated Eucharist – were both reinforced by the Council of Trent in the face of Protestant challenges.¹⁸¹ Trent had made clear the duty of all Christians to pay the consecrated host ‘the cult of latria that is owed to the true God’, but the practice had been rare in Indigenous parishes in the New Kingdom before the Jesuits began to introduce it to Indigenous parishes under their care, starting with Cajicá.¹⁸² So too with Corpus Christi celebrations, which centred around the triumphal procession of the Eucharist, under a dossel, along a decorated route, and which had acquired a new significance by middle of the sixteenth century.¹⁸³ These had been common in Spanish cities for some time – we saw in Chapter 3 how in 1577 Corpus Christi celebrations in Santafé had drawn the leaders of neighbouring communities to the city to watch – but rare in Indigenous parishes before the coming of the Jesuits. Under their direction, these became momentous occasions, serving as theatrical statements of the Jesuits’ emphasis on the value of the devotion, but also tangible demonstrations of the effects of all their policies to transform the Christianisation of Indigenous people.¹⁸⁴

When the Jesuits first installed the Blessed Sacrament in Fontibón on the feast of Corpus Christi, they organised an elaborate two-day celebration, inviting not only President Borja and the oidores, Spanish notables, and a number of priests, but also caciques of neighbouring towns with their subjects. The first day featured ‘many Indians with banners and trumpets, and other sorts of music’, lavish decorations, an elaborate mass in the parish church, and, in the evening, plays performed by Indigenous actors, complete with parades on horseback and dances performed in ingenious costume, before ‘many fireworks, and [the lights of] many lamps on the church, and a castle made of straw and flowers in the middle of the square, with three sets of chirimía players, and people dressed as soldiers, firing blanks’. The next day, the square was decorated with flowers and three altars were placed around it. Celebrations began with another mass, a sermon explaining the purpose of the celebration, and then a procession started, ‘with great ecclesiastical spectacle, the priests dressed in rich vestments, carrying the float of the Blessed Sacrament on their shoulders’, processing ‘under a dossel, and behind them floats of other saints, and many banners, and much music of trumpets, three sets of chirimías, [and] the firing of muskets and arquebuses’.¹⁸⁵

In case the role of the devotion in the Jesuit mission was not abundantly clear by now, a short play was put on with Indigenous actors before the three altars positioned around the central square. In the first, an actor dressed as an angel appeared with a representation of drunkenness, ‘carrying many of the insignia of intoxication with which the Indians celebrate their borracheras’ but bound in ropes, which then ‘collapsed before the Blessed Sacrament, so that there would never again be that vice in the town, now that the Blessed Sacrament was present’. The process was repeated at the other two altars as the procession moved through the square, ‘where another angel destroyed in the same way dishonesty, and in the third platform … idolatry’. These celebrations were an advertisement of their model of evangelisation to the elite of Santafé, and through them to the rest of the clergy; and central to this was asserting their understanding of the capacity and potential of Indigenous people. In this way, the highlight of a banquet to which visiting dignitaries were invited afterwards was a recitation by a young Indigenous boy from the parish ‘of rare ability’ from the pulpit of the church, dressed in the garb of a priest, ‘in all the languages: Latin, Castilian, Greek, Italian, Muisca, Quechua, Valencian, [and] Portuguese’.¹⁸⁶

‘Friends of Ceremony’

The installation of the Blessed Sacrament in Fontibón in many ways encapsulated the experiment in the reform of the church and Christianisation called for by the encomenderos of Santafé and Tunja, initiated by Archbishop Lobo Guerrero and Borja, and given shape by Diego de Torres Bollo and his fellow Jesuit exiles. Their plan was to reform the church and reset its missionary project along new lines, departing from the punitive policies of their sixteenth-century predecessors, and offering a new interpretation, tailored to the Neogranadian context, of how Tridentine reform could work. In doing so they drew on the legislation of Lima III, which had itself sought to reform the Peruvian church along Tridentine lines, but subtly and carefully translated to suit local conditions and their own priorities, and on Jesuit experience in managing Indigenous parishes in Peru and their broader missionary enterprise in theatres around the world. In doing this, the reformers may have emphasised continuity and precedent, but their approach in the New Kingdom was nothing short of revolutionary. In their parishes, the Jesuits introduced a more systematic programme of religious instruction, employed new methods, and introduced new practices and standards of behaviour among their parishioners. They encouraged active participation in the sacraments, redoubled efforts to catechise in Indigenous languages, and imported the pageantry and ceremony of some of the central devotions of the Tridentine church.

These policies contrasted sharply with those of their sixteenth-century predecessors, whether in the religious orders, the secular church, or the civil authorities, and also with the approach that Torres Bollo’s rivals would promote in Peru over the following decades, and which would culminate with the campaigns for the extirpation of idolatry of the archdiocese of Lima. Instead of withholding features that were central to the everyday practice of Catholicism in Europe and other regions, such as private devotions, public celebrations, participation in the sacraments, the use of devotional images, and other aspects of the cult of saints and – as we will see – religious confraternities, owing to concerns that Indigenous people might misuse them as a result of the imperfection of their Christianity, the idea instead became to use these practices to cultivate it. As the Jesuit Vice-Provincial Gonzalo de Lyra reported in 1613, even if Indigenous people lacked a real ‘interior piety’, acquiring and maintaining ‘the appearance of Christians’ through frequent participation in the sacraments, devotional practices, and pious institutions would engender and foster this piety, so that with time ‘they will be as Christian on the inside as they appear to be’ on the outside.¹⁸⁷

This logic was based, on one hand, on a distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ piety that was central to Jesuit spirituality, as can be seen, for example, in their Spiritual Exercises.¹⁸⁸ And on the other, on the idea, by now widely established, that Indigenous people were particularly easily influenced by ‘external things’.¹⁸⁹ As Lyra explained in 1613, ‘the cleanliness and adornment of the Church, elaborate processions, divine services with music of voices and instruments: all of this moves them greatly’ because ‘their understanding has been obfuscated by the barbarous lives that they and their ancestors lived’. What is more, because he and his fellows assumed that Indigenous religious practices were functionally equivalent – if the inverse – of Christian ones, they assumed that the introduction of Christianity would involve simply displacing one set of practices with another. ‘They are such friends of ceremony in the offerings and sacrifices to their idols’, Lyra concluded, that this fondness could be exploited by ‘swapping them for the cult and adoration of the true God’. All that was needed was to ‘introduce ecclesiastical things with the greatest pomp possible: this is how they will forget their idolatries’.¹⁹⁰

In their concern for fostering ‘external devotions’, the Jesuits had stumbled – quite unintentionally – on a solution to overcome the fundamental failing of the earlier model of evangelisation. They understood public ceremonies, the cult of saints, religious confraternities, hospitals and visits to the sick, the promotion of visual and alphabetic literacy, and the inclusion of Indigenous agents in the running of some aspects of the life of the parish in terms of contributing to foster an inner spirituality. Perhaps it did. But for the Indigenous peoples of Santafé and Tunja, the new approach of these Jesuit ‘friends of ceremony’ opened new avenues for them to interact with Christianity and new opportunities to pursue their interests in different ways. This was not because these practices were equivalent to Indigenous ones, as the Jesuits assumed, but because they provided individuals and communities new ways of satisfying their personal and collective, political and social, and material and spiritual needs and concerns in a period of intense change. The experience of the many Indigenous immigrants in the Spanish cities of Santafé and Tunja who had for years been embracing many of these practices on their own, as evidenced in their wills and other documents considered in Chapter 6, suggest there was more that was attractive about the new approach than just the respite it provided from the terror and dispossession of the previous century. It made space, in other words, for Indigenous people to interact with what Christianity had to offer them.

Celebrations as elaborate as that first introduction of the Blessed Sacrament to Fontibón, to be sure, would be rare even in Jesuit parishes, but over the next few years, public celebrations, private devotions, images, and pious institutions of the sort introduced by the Jesuits became a regular feature of everyday life in Indigenous parishes, organised by Indigenous people themselves. These may not have involved banquets for the kingdom’s leading dignitaries or displays of expensive imported fireworks, but they were no less important to the people who made them possible. Many, in fact, were a consequence of a final innovation, the promotion of confraternities in Indigenous towns, a focus of Chapter 6, which would soon become fundamental to the very functioning and financing of the church at a local level. To understand how these changes spread and took root around the archdiocese, however, we must first turn to the thorny question of language, the subject of Chapter 5.