When was encomienda established

The larger the grant, the larger the amount of tribute and labor available, and thus the greater the potential wealth and prestige of the assignment. In reality, the native population was accustomed to a similar organization of tributary towns under the Aztec. In time, the encomenderos became the New World version of Spanish feudal lords. This new source of political power came to worry the Spanish authorities because of the dangers of a local nobility capable of contending peninsular authority.

Although disease and hardship decimated the indigenous population, increasing numbers of Spaniards arrived with great expectations of new wealth.

Along with this flow of Europeans came the African slaves, who were directed to the central areas of New Spain.

One example is Isabel de Moctezuma. Francisca Pizarro Yupanqui was a mestizo woman who also had Indians under her encomienda. Thank you for bringing this to our attention! I appreciate you saying something so that we can make sure the information we share is accurate and helpful.

However, it is known that ecomienda was used particularly extensively in Peru, Nicaragua, Mexico, and the Caribbean island of Hispanola. The Spanish also used ecomienda in the Philippines, and even in Spain itself. During the Reconquista era of domestic Spanish history, which ran from the s to the end of the 15th century, residents of Spain were sometimes forced into labor on Spanish soil under ecomienda.

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Name required. Email will not be published required. Menu Magoosh Blog High School by. Search this site X. Sarah Bradstreet. Share 1. Pin 1. Declan McGurk August 26, at pm. Thank you, this was a very helpful and well-written article. Magoosh Test Prep Expert August 28, at am.

Kassianta November 2, at pm. Magoosh Test Prep Expert December 19, at pm. Hi there! Hope this helps! Glad to hear this helps, Joe! Christophere SanJuan August 7, at pm. But looking beneath the level of formal institutions and administrative policy, the evolution could be expressed in simplest terms as follows.

At all times there were private Spanish holdings in the countryside with workers attached to them, and these holdings always drew temporary labor from the Indian villages.

From the Conquest period until the present century, the constant trend was for the Spanish properties and their permanent crews to grow, while the Indian villages and their lands and production shrank. It now begins to appear that Spanish agricultural enterprises, generally speaking, never achieved complete reliance on a resident working force during the colonial period.

Scholars familiar with conditions in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have projected into the colonial period the solid, sedentary force of debt peons thought to characterize more recent times.

The villagers came to work on the estancias and later haciendas, first through encomienda obligations, then through the mechanism of the repartimiento, 31 and finally through individual arrangements, but they were always the same people doing the same things.

In the Conquest period the greatest landowners were the encomenderos, whose estancias formed an integral if informal part of their estates. Yet from the very beginning there were other Spaniards with similar holdings, both small and large. Encomendero families or their legal successors seem often to have retained, consolidated, and even expanded their properties, which may have had a special aura of permanence and nobility.

But the lands of the non-encomenderos increased even more, until the countryside contained several times the number of great estates present in the Conquest period. This development paralleled the great expansion of the Spanish or broadly speaking urban sector. The organization and social composition of those who owned and managed the estate hardly changed from the age of the encomienda to the hacienda of the eighteenth century.

Giving importance to these basic social and economic continuities does not require one to believe that the encomienda as an institution involved landholding, or that it evolved directly into the hacienda.

As far as agriculture and landownership are concerned, the technical antecedent of the hacienda was the estancia rather than the encomienda. One may retain a narrowly legal definition of the encomienda as the right to enjoy labor and tribute and. At the same time, it is quite possible to appreciate that the Spaniards tried to use each legal framework in turn as the basis of the same kind of great estate. Ideally this would have combined jurisdiction over vassals with vast possessions of land and stock.

In the encomienda only the governmental aspect was formally expressed, and the rest was left to the spontaneous action of socioeconomic ambitions and opportunities. The hacienda was just the opposite, giving legal status only to landownership and leaving the jurisdictional aspects to de facto patterns. This basic, essentially unitary social institution, the great estate, was quite fixed as to ideal attributes and social organization, and it maintained constant its function as intermediary between the growing Spanish towns and the receding Indian villages.

It evolved along two simple lines— constant rise in the legal ownership of land and change in the balance of the labor force, as permanent workers increased and temporary workers decreased. Let us view the great estate, therefore, as a basic social pattern with certain permanent attributes and a few recognized principles of evolution.

By so doing, we can hope to understand the increasingly complex picture that is emerging as research proceeds to areas other than Mexico. Each region in the Spanish Indies seems to have produced a different form of the encomienda and a different timetable for its downfall.

The same is true for the repartimiento or mita. Some areas suffered great population loss, while others did not; still others had little or no population to start with. Some estates arose from holdings associated with encomiendas, others from lands accumulated by administrative and judicial officials, others from humble wheat farms.

From region to region the hacienda veered toward pastoralism, cereal production, sugar growing, and other activities. But we can cope with all these variations if we understand them as retarding, hastening, or modifying an institution that was ultimately embedded in Spanish social practice and had its own coherence, its own dynamics of development. One may conclude that the rise of the hacienda was essentially a development rather than a struggle.

The evolution of the great estate responded to such realities as the size of cities and Spanish populations, the degree of acculturation among the Indians, and the nature of Spanish society in early modern times. The royal policy of discouraging an independent aristocracy and the humanitarian campaigns to protect the Indians deserve intensive study in themselves, but the struggles over these matters cannot be said to have greatly affected the evolution of the great estate.

Wherever it might appear that the Crown or the Church became a prime mover in its development, one will find on close examination that deeper forces were at work. Crown policy has been credited with the destruction of the encomienda, but natural developments in the colonies had doomed the institution. On the one hand, the fortunes arising from commerce and mining were not directly dependent upon the encomienda; on the other hand, the sheer growth of Spanish society produced newly powerful families who began to carve out estates of their own, undermining the in flexible encomienda system.

Historians have commonly observed the general tendency of the Conquest period to set basic patterns for later times. The hacienda, taking shape in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has appeared to be a major exception.

But the interpretation of the great estate set forth here reintegrates the hacienda into the general picture. From the broader perspective one may argue that the Conquest period created the function and the basic social and economic modes of organization, while following years brought mainly growth or shrinkage—in other words, quantitative change. Such a view implies that perhaps scholars investigating the history of the hacienda should begin at the beginning.

One of the few complaints that one might bring against the magnificent work of Chevalier is that, faced with a vast body of material on the hacienda, he accepted a conventional view of the Conquest period and the encomienda, without submitting them to the same kind of analysis which he applied to his more immediate subject. Spanish American colonial history has three principal elements: the city, the great estate, and the Indian village.

Of these only the village was truly and thoroughly rural. The function of the great estate was to mediate between city and country, to carry back and forth supplies, people, and ideas that were vital to the growth of Spanish American civilization. It is no accident that the now discredited thesis of the essential identity between the two institutions was upheld most strongly by scholars in less legally oriented disciplines, like the geographer George M.

Diffie as were interested mainly in social and economic matters. Some geographers remain unimpressed by the notion of the landless encomienda to this day. Beyer Ithaca, , , Ralph A. Gakenheimer fully equates the encomienda with landholding, apparently unaware of the tempests which the issue has stirred up among historians.

In the introduction to a reprint of the same work New York, , xxvi, he abandons this view while still maintaining that the encomienda at least facilitated control over land by Spaniards.

As an aside it will bear mention that the doctrine of the separate encomienda and hacienda has never achieved quite the orthodoxy among scholars in Spanish America, that it now enjoys here. There are at least two good reasons. First, the Spanish Americans have a broader conception of the agrarian problem, including in it social, cultural, and other elements.

Second, the detailed demonstration of the sad juridical destiny of the encomienda applies in all its rigor only to central Mexico an area, as it now seems, where the weakening of the encomienda occurred sooner and more evenly than in any other major region.

As recently as Juan Friede, certainly no stranger to the work of Zavala and Simpson, published an article defending in its pure form the older notion that the encomienda gradually became confused with property rights. He even mentions without specific sources late sixteenth-century encomienda titles that included lands, waters, and forests. The two words were not strictly synonomous, however, and to delve a bit deeper into contemporary usage may be revealing. Representative titles are quoted in Zavala, La encomienda indiana , , and in The Harkness Collection in the Library of Congress.

Campesinos de los Andes , 14, , , Gibson estimates some haciendas for the Valley of Mexico in the late colonial period, as opposed to about 30 encomiendas in the years after the conquest The Aztecs under Spanish Rule , 61, The treatment that follows is so generalized that specific footnoting seems inappropriate. The terms of the comparison are drawn from the descriptions of the encomienda and hacienda referred to in footnotes 9 to Particularly important for the hacienda is the material in Chevalier, Land and Society , , The whole comparison applies primarily to regions of sedentary Indian settlement.

It holds above all for the former centers of Indian civilization, Peru and Mexico, and with slightly diminished force for adjacent regions such as Colombia, Chile, or Guatemala. In fringe areas like Paraguay or Venezuela, the encomienda assumed a great variety of forms, though it appears to the author that these various arrangements were in each case as close an approach to the classic estate form as conditions permitted, with some residual influence of the tradition of rescate , a mixture of trade and booty.

The present writer believes that such an interpretation is essentially justified, but there are two factors tending to obscure it. In this sense it designated an area where a small group of Indians lived remote from the main group.

They could be called simply majordomos like the head stewards, and in Mexico they often went by the name of calpisque , after the Aztec tribute collectors. A third alternative name, capataz , had the strongest agricultural connotations of all, but was quite rare. For the sake of clarity, the above presentation makes a clean distinction between estancia activity and unsupervised tribute producing.

Actually a common practice was for the encomienda Indians to grow tribute products on certainland set aside for the purpose, under as much or as little supervision as the majordomo saw fit to apply.

There was no basic difference between this and an estancia. Mario C. Beyond the bare statement that the main elements of the Spanish American estate were brought from Spain, the present article hardly touches on the question of antecedents, because both the Spanish estate and possible Indian forerunners are very incompletely studied.

It is clear, here as in other facets of Spanish American life, that Spanish influence was concentrated in the upper and middle levels, Indian influence at the lowest, and that the Indian element was recessive. Often it is hard, when analysing any one trait, to make a clear decision on whether it is Spanish, Indian, or a coincidence of both.

This is true even for something as distinctively Indian as the special services of the Incas, some of which were very close to practices on European estates. The Aztecs under Spanish Rule , The viceroyalty of Peru, which had an exceptionally strong pre-Columbian tradition of obligatory rotary labor, and apparently suffered less population loss in highland regions, remained at this stage longer than Mexico.

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