In 1742, a highland Andean named Juan Santos led a group of mainly Asháninka and Yanesha warriors against a handful of isolated Franciscan missions in the central high jungle of Peru.Footnote 1 Over the next ten years the rebellion smoldered, occasionally sparking to life, as Santos's forces pushed the missionaries based out of the College of Santa Rosa de Ocopa (near Jauja, Peru) back to the highlands. The uprising culminated in a brief foray into the highlands, but never effectively reached beyond the security of the densely vegetated high jungle, known locally as the central montaña region. Despite its modest accomplishments, the rebellion secured autonomy for the combatant nations during the rest of the colonial period.
While the rebellion was a remarkable victory for the Asháninka and Yanesha, it also unmasked a growing tension between the nascent centralization initiatives of the Bourbon monarchy and powerful religious institutions, such as Santa Rosa de Ocopa. In most cases, these religious entities saw themselves as loyal to the king, but given the vast size and complexity of the Spanish empire, they maintained a semi-autonomous existence. Even in the eighteenth century, official correspondences could spend nearly a year in transit between Madrid and Lima. To reach the missions of Ocopa from Lima could take another four months.Footnote 2 In addition to its geographic obstacles, the American landscape presented a variegated patchwork of languages and cultures not clearly understood by many colonial administrators back in Spain, some of whom had never traveled to the New World. This complicated cultural milieu, along with the obstacles to disseminating information, made rapid reactions from the metropole to emerging situations difficult, leaving crown authorities to rely on local political actors to sort out local problems. These local political actors were not only government officials vested with regal authority but also religious institutions.
The ascendance of the Bourbon dynasty in 1700 signaled a dramatic, though perhaps not sudden, shift in the way bureaucrats in Madrid envisioned the metropole's relationship with its colonies. The result was the Bourbon Reforms, a series of measures that broadly sought to bring the empire under greater crown control and increase royal revenues. While much of the historiography has focused on the nature and process of the reforms, a more important aspect may have been the diffusion of reformist ideas among local political actors.Footnote 3 As early as the 1740s, self-styled proyectistas (social and political commentators) such as José de Campillo y Cossío, Jorge Juan, and Antonio de Ulloa began writing reformist tracts widely read among the political elite.Footnote 4 These thinkers applied the European Enlightenment's emphasis of reason over tradition to argue for an end to the consensus-style “composite monarchy” of their Habsburg predecessors. They advocated instead for concentrating all political power in the person of the king, and by extension the royal bureaucracy.Footnote 5 As Gabriel Paquette has pointed out, however, this movement cannot be placed neatly within the framework of “enlightened absolutism” without ignoring the “juridical and historical underpinnings of Bourbon political thought.”Footnote 6 The exercise of enlightened absolutism, the particularities of Spanish and Spanish American history and law, and the vast distance between metropole and colony resulted in a patchwork of ideas and interpretations about what the reform process and the ideas behind it truly meant.
What did emerge, however, was a new philosophy of regalism meant to strip traditionally powerful non-governmental institutions, such as the Church. Regalist ministers argued that such institutions would have to submit themselves to royal control or face having their power and privileges curtailed.Footnote 7 Regular religious orders and societies such as the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits were specifically targeted because they were viewed by regalists as supranational organizations, subject not to the king but to their leaders in Rome and the pope. These new ideas about governance were particularly problematic in the distant, sparsely populated, economically unimportant regions on the frontiers of the Spanish empire, which had been largely left by the crown for the regular clergy to manage over the past few centuries. Nevertheless, reformers hoped that these groups could be co-opted into complete conformance to new regalist crown policies. What form that would ultimately take, however, seemed up for debate between imperial, regional, and local actors.
The example of the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion against the missionaries of Ocopa, therefore, provides an important window into the spread of reformist ideas. The rebellion pitted against each other the Amerindian rebels of the central montaña and the missionaries, who, due to their distance from the metropole, had considerable autonomy despite the increasingly regalist posture of the viceroyalty.Footnote 8 To many regalists, the Ocopa missionaries were ideal agents, helping to expand Spanish hegemony into a region previously unincorporated into the empire. For this reason, the missionaries gained unprecedented support for their endeavors from crown authorities in Madrid during the first half of the century. At a regional level, however, Ocopa's power and size threatened viceregal authorities in Peru, who were attempting to consolidate royal control. This struggle between local and imperial interests sometimes provoked both reformers and non-reformers to act in ways that seemed to contradict their own goals. Although bureaucrats in Lima desired to exploit Amazonian resources, they were willing to neglect and even obstruct the missionaries in their efforts in order attenuate their influence in Peru. This tension and confusion affected events throughout the viceroyalty, ultimately aiding the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebels in realizing their aspirations for autonomy. The events that occurred in the Ocopa missions, therefore, were not simply the product of royal impositions or the fortuitous triumph of a beleaguered indigenous community, but also the attempts of an intricate web of multiple competing groups to find new spaces in changing cultural contexts.Footnote 9
To include in its focus the larger implications of the rebellion, this article will follow related events in multiple locations throughout the Spanish empire. First, it discusses the initial efforts of the Franciscans of Ocopa in the central Peruvian montaña to highlight the conditions that brought about the rebellion. Next, it examines the rebellion itself and explores its larger implications for Bourbon governance. Naturally, the existence of a smoldering rebellion to the east intensified fears in the capital, particularly in the aftermath of the 1746 Lima-Callao earthquake and tsunami. Furthermore, the Franciscans' failure to prevent the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion added to the anti-Franciscan discourse then circulating in Lima. The conflict crossed the Atlantic to Madrid, where reformers considered ways to curtail the regular clergy while Ocopa pressed for more help against the rebels. Finally, this essay analyzes the political situation back in Lima, where the viceroy decided not to further pursue the Juan Santos rebels for fear of possible Franciscan duplicity.
The Peruvian Apostolic Institute
In 1708, six “apostolic missionaries” led by Fr. Francisco de San Joseph arrived in Lima from Guatemala. Within the year, they had been given pastoral control over large swaths of the high jungle east of the Mantaro Valley (in the modern-day Peruvian department of Junín), which had been abandoned after earlier evangelization efforts. The missionaries, later based out of the College of Santa Rosa de Ocopa (near Huancayo, Junín), were an extension of a missionary reform movement within the Franciscan order that began in Mexico in the late seventeenth century. Upon the insistence of the Franciscan friars at the Santa Cruz monastery near Querétaro, Mexico, Pope Innocent XI had issued two bulls in 1686 founding a special organization under the Franciscan order called the Apostolic Institute, which was dedicated to the evangelization of the Amerindian population not yet converted in the Spanish Empire.Footnote 10 The Innocent bulls, as they came to be known, outlined the creation of colleges de Propaganda Fide to serve as bases where missionaries would be trained to instruct both the faithful and “infidels” alike.Footnote 11
Colleges of Propaganda Fide, in many aspects, did not function like other Franciscan organizations in America. Bemoaning the “excesses” and consequent lack of zeal in the order's large urban monasteries in the Americas, the institute's founders created a system that recruited missionaries directly from Spain, arguing that peninsular Spaniards would be free from local interests and therefore more loyal to the Christian interests of the crown. In many cases, the crown agreed to pay for the missionaries to travel from Europe to America. The practice of recruiting mostly peninsular friars continued in most colleges of Propaganda Fide in America. In Ocopa, for example, from 1709 to 1823, some 302 of the 510 missionaries incorporated into the college—close to three-quarters of the total—were peninsulars. By contrast, the surrounding Franciscan province of Los Doce Apostoles by the eighteenth century was more than 80 percent criollo.Footnote 12 Furthermore, colleges of Propaganda Fide in America also functioned outside of the normal Franciscan leadership structure. Once a monastery received the status de Propaganda Fide, it was no longer accountable to the local Franciscan province in which it was located.Footnote 13
Most important, the Innocent bulls also attempted to overcome one of the Franciscans' largest obstacles to building a frontier mission program: funding. As mendicants, Franciscans depended on the alms of the faithful in the communities surrounding their institutions. In comparison to their counterparts in other clerical institutions, particularly those established by Jesuits, Franciscan frontier missions had been notoriously underfunded. Now the Apostolic Institute turned to the crown to fund both its operating costs and the transport of peninsular missionaries to the Americas.Footnote 14
Within less than a decade of his arrival in 1718, San Joseph secured an unprecedented stipend from the crown of 6,000 pesos per year.Footnote 15 In an accounting made in 1773 this amount was determined to be almost six times larger than the next largest crown stipend for a Franciscan community in Peru; by itself it constituted nearly half of all crown donations in the viceroyalty to the order. From the beginning, however, the Ocopa missionaries found it difficult to secure regular payments of the stipend from the viceregal government. Viceroy José de Armendáriz, Marqués de Castelfuerte (1724–1736), limited the funds he distributed to be “proportional to the needs of them that received it and to the state of the royal treasury which gave it to them,” arguing that his partial payments were “sufficient for the maintenance and advancement of the missions.”Footnote 16 He further frustrated attempts to collect the funds by requiring that missionaries appear personally in Lima—a journey of 180 miles that crossed a 15,800-foot mountain pass—to justify the need for the funds before any disbursement could be made. Castelfuerte's successor, Viceroy José Antonio de Mendoza, Marqués de Villagarcía (1724–1736), continued similar practices.Footnote 17 Consequently, between the years of 1718 and 1745, viceregal officials distributed crown funding to the Ocopa missionaries only eight times, and only once did they pay the full amount of 6,000 pesos.Footnote 18 Between 1718 and 1748, the king issued four decrees demanding the prompt payment of 6,000 pesos each year.Footnote 19
Despite the setbacks in funding, the missionaries claimed to have built an extensive mission enterprise within a few decades. In 1736, the missionaries reported that their 24 mission stations, split between three missionary zones or entradas (literally “entrances” or passes through the mountains) and named for the three closest provincial capitals (Jauja, Tarma, and Huánuco), were populated by 4,835 inhabitants.Footnote 20 There are many possible reasons why the Amerindians of the montaña, mostly from the Asháninka, Yanesha, and Nomatsiguenga peoples, would have been attracted to settling in the missions. The missionaries, however, cite only two motivations other than a genuine interest in the Catholic faith. The first was access to steel tools, particularly machetes, axes, and knives, which according to the missionaries the montaña nations sought with great “greed.”Footnote 21 These implements were of high value in performing the type of slash-and-burn agriculture prevalent in the montaña. Poor jungle soil forced farmers to clear new fields every few years, cutting down the trees and underbrush and burning them to fertilize the soil. Steel tools must have greatly decreased the time and labor necessary to prepare a field, allowing for larger fields to be cultivated and more food to be harvested.Footnote 22
The second reason the missionaries believed Amerindians were drawn to settle in the missions was because of their control of the salt deposits at the aptly named Cerro de la Sal (Mountain of Salt). Only a few years after entering the region, the missionaries built a mission station at Cerro de la Sal in hopes of creating a local salt monopoly. Salt is vital to food preservation in the Amazon, as swollen rivers make fishing during the rainy season impossible. Parties of Amerindians came from long distances to harvest the salt that lay naturally on the surface of the ground at Cerro de la Sal, and the missionaries required them to hear their sermons in order to collect the salt.Footnote 23 The missionaries gave little testimony to the success of this technique and many colonial officials doubted that, given the size of the salt deposits, the missionaries were ever able to create a true monopoly.Footnote 24
Certainly there were other reasons that the Asháninka, Yanesha, and Nomatsiguenga chose to inhabit the missions. Escaping slavers, a primary motivation among groups in other areas of South America, did not seem to have been a factor. It is possible, however, that contact with the missionaries gave Amerindian groups some political or military advantage over neighboring ethnic groups. The steel-cutting implements the missionaries gave the Asháninka and Yanesha, for example, easily became weapons of war to use against neighboring ethnic groups, as the missionaries themselves later discovered.
Despite missionary propaganda, life in the missions was not idyllic. The missionaries subjected the Amerindians to a strictly regimented schedule of religious rites, that included attending mass four times a week and a rosary prayer meeting on the other days. The schedule was designed to keep the Amerindians concentrated around the chapel so as to prevent them from slipping off into the jungle to continue their “heretical” practices.Footnote 25 The settlement of the Amerindians in the missions, which effectively ended their semi-nomadic lifestyle, however, had dire consequences. First, the concentrated population made it difficult to provide enough food. Within a decade of establishing the mission stations, the poor jungle soil became exhausted, prompting the missionaries to import food from the highlands. The inconsistency in the missionaries' funding hampered these efforts to stave off starvation, and missionaries recorded several famines in the Jauja and Tarma entradas during the 1720s and 1730s. During a famine in 1732, one missionary lamented that the lack of food was so severe that nursing mothers “lactated blood instead of milk.”Footnote 26
The most detrimental effect of Ocopa's missionary enterprise, however, was epidemic disease. Up to this time, the relative isolation of the montaña nations had spared them from the great pandemics that had killed most of the inhabitants of the Americas in the first decades of colonial rule. The incursion of the missionaries, however, brought with it consecutive waves of outbreaks. In the Tarma missions, epidemics of smallpox killed large numbers of converts in 1711, 1713, and 1715, in some cases reducing the mission stations' populations by more than half. Other outbreaks of unknown diseases hit the Ocopa mission stations in 1721, 1724, and 1736–37. Despite the inflow of converts to the missions, these epidemics created an overall stagnation, if not decline, in mission populations.Footnote 27 What effect these diseases had on the population outside of the missions is unknown, but presumably they suffered a similar demographic decline. The mortality rates of these epidemics were exacerbated by the missionaries themselves, who prohibited the Amerindians' cultural tradition of scattering into the forest during outbreaks. The missionaries argued that such a practice was emblematic of the Amerindians' “barbaric and pitiless” nature, as they left those already infected for dead.Footnote 28 Certainly, however, the prohibition was also motivated by the missionaries' fears that the natives would return to their “idolatries.”Footnote 29 These epidemics, according to the anthropologist Fernando Santos Granero, led to violent unrest in the missions. The outbreaks particularly infuriated mission Amerindians, he argues, because they disproportionately affected children (those under 14). Indeed, uprisings in 1712, 1719, 1724, and 1737 occurred in mission villages recently decimated by disease.Footnote 30
Despite these setbacks, the Ocopa missions were considered by many to be the crowning missionary achievement of the Franciscan order in Peru. While other regular institutions were mired in corruption scandals, the Ocopa friars were at least attempting to fulfill Spain's papal mandate to evangelize the Americas. Even reformers critical of the order praised Ocopa. The anticlerical Viceroy Castelfuerte, for example, suggested that the Ocopa missionaries had the “prosperity of the divine blessing” because they had followed “the best method of repairing the great decadence that is found. . . in the montaña.” The viceroy was particularly impressed that the missionaries had begun to press the mission Amerindians into the production of textiles and other finished goods, demonstrating, according to him, that “the art of making Christians is the science of raising men.”Footnote 31 As Castelfuerte's comments testify, some Bourbon reformers found the missionaries of Ocopa to be the ideal “enlightened” clerics. They were peninsular Spaniards not only helping to expand Spanish domination in the American hinterland, but advocating for human productivity and commerce. Until 1742, their positive public identity seems to have insulated them against the increasingly anticlerical reforms taking place in colonial centers such as Lima, and to a certain extent helped the Franciscans throughout Peru to justify their existence. But this era of good feeling toward Ocopa began to unravel as missionaries in the Tarma and Jauja entradas began sending reports of young men fleeing the missions, headed, according to those who remained, to Quispango to see the Apu-Inca (Inca Lord), Juan Santos Atahualpa.
Juan Santos Atahualpa's Rebellion
Little is known about Juan Santos. Most sources say that he was a mestizo from Cuzco, reportedly the former servant of a Jesuit priest. According to accounts that are third-hand at best, Santos claimed that his former master had taken him to Europe and Africa. Whether his peregrinations outside of Peru, uncommon for an Andean during the period, actually occurred or not, Santos did indeed try to contextualize his uprising in the wider Atlantic world. According to words attributed to him by later accounts, he conceived the world to be comprised of only three kingdoms: Spain, the Congo, and the Americas, the last of which he should rightfully rule as the direct descendant of the last Inca, Atahualpa.Footnote 32 To further solidify his links to the last Inca, he added the name Atahualpa to his own.
Though Juan Santos's uprising started in the montaña, his goal was to gain support in the highlands. From there, he would eventually march on Lima and, aided by the British navy, with whom he claimed to have conspired during his travels, force the viceroy to surrender Peru.Footnote 33 According to later Franciscan accounts, Santos sent a “spy” to try to convince the highland Andeans to join his cause.Footnote 34 Santos's rhetoric, if accurately recorded, demonstrates a keen understanding not only of local Spanish concerns, but of larger geopolitical power struggles. Santos deeply worried colonial officials by invoking the ascendant naval power of the British, with whom the Spanish were currently at war (the War of Jenkins's Ear). More importantly, he seems to have understood very well that the sparsely populated Amerindians of the montaña could never have alone challenged the colonial regime in Peru. Only the majority highland Andean population, whom crown officials most feared, could conceivably force them out. Indeed, most of Santos's known pronouncements seemed aimed at highland Andeans. For example, he ordered an end to obrajes (textile-producing workhouses) and the mita (an Andean forced labor service), neither of which existed in the Ocopa missions.Footnote 35
Juan Santos's military force, however, was composed almost entirely of the indigenous nations of the montaña. When he first arrived in the region is unclear, but by all accounts he spoke the local Asháninka and Yanesha languages, suggesting that it was at least several years earlier. Anthropologist Stefano Varese argues that Santos was able to command Amerindian forces in the montaña because of key alliances he had forged with the local caciques in the Tarma entrada.Footnote 36 Perhaps, as an outsider, he was able to serve as a powerbroker, stitching together a coalition of diverse, often warring ethnic groups. While the support of local caciques was vital in initiating the rebellion, the size, duration, and multi-ethnic composition of the rebellion suggest that Santos's appeal to the Amerindian cultural traditions in the montaña was more important in mobilizing supporters than any traditional ethnic or familial alliances. Santos seems to have invoked messianic and millenarian themes that already existed in montaña Amerindian culture. Yanesha culture, for example, had an absent messianic figure called the Yompor Ror, who, according to tradition, was to return to give the people the gift of immortality. This figure may have resulted from a hybrid mixture of local beliefs with Christianity.Footnote 37 After Santos's arrival, the Yanesha alternatively began to call the Yompor Ror by a new name, the Yompor Santo, which gives credence to Santos's ability to tap deeper socio-religious connections to build his forces.Footnote 38 What exactly Juan Santos said to jungle Amerindians to cause such devotion is unknown, but it was certainly intensified by the demographic collapse many of these communities were experiencing at the time.
The rebellion started in a small and relatively bloodless way. Quispango (in the Tarma entrada), where the rebels initially congregated in June 1742, had no permanent mission priest and was manned only by two enslaved Africans, whom the rebels simply expelled.Footnote 39 The first reported deaths came in September, when local militia forces, guided by three missionaries, tried to quash the uprising. The party was ambushed while crossing a bridge. Further attempts by local militia the next month were similarly rebuffed. In November, the viceroy dispatched two companies of Spanish regulars from the capital. The force marched as far as Quimirí (near the salt deposit in the Tarma entrada), where they garrisoned 70 soldiers at a small fortress constructed earlier by the missionaries. Believing that the garrison at Quimirí would be sufficient to pacify the region, the commander took his remaining troops back to the highlands. When a supply party tried to return to the garrison in December, however, they were stopped at a river crossing by withering fire from four small swivel cannons and a force of Amerindians displaying the bloody shirts of the garrison. It seems that at some point during the previous month, Santos's forces had overrun the stronghold, killing all its defenders and commandeering the arms and munitions inside, including the cannons.Footnote 40 After January 1743, Santos's rebels controlled all of the missions in the Jauja and Tarma entradas except for one, at Sonomoro.
Regalism, Anticlericalism, and Natural Disasters
The loss of most of the Ocopa missions had a direct effect in Lima on the discourse surrounding the Franciscans. Once viewed as some of the most influential reformers of the period, the missionaries were now open to the same criticisms that regular clergy were experiencing throughout the empire. The failings of the missions, previously considered exemplars of Franciscan piety, seem to have been of great interest to reformers. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa in their famous report to the crown, delivered in 1748 and later known as the Noticias Secretas de América, stated that one might clearly see the abuses of the regular clergy simply by turning to Ocopa. They wrote:
To clarify the basis for our opinion, [we refer to] the latest revolt of the newly converted Indians in the provinces of Jauja and Tarma. There 40 years have been wasted reducing [converting] a group of only 2,000 Indians. When the revolt began, the Indians' principal aim was to flee the abuses and excesses of the clergy [rather than the tribute collectors, since they were then exempt]. To gain adherents, the rebel leader preached that he was going to free the Indians from Spanish oppression. If the Indians were rebellious by nature, could any Indian from any village—since they are treated so cruelly and contemptuously—have failed to take sides against such tyrannical abuse? Certainly not.Footnote 41
In truth, Juan and Ulloa never traveled to the Ocopa missions, or to most of the other places of which they claimed to have intimate knowledge.Footnote 42 Most likely, their reflections on the Ocopa missionaries were based on the reports of other like-minded regalists they encountered during their stay in Lima. Nonetheless, the report demonstrates that at least some of Lima's political elite was quite ready to believe that the Ocopa missionary efforts were not only unproductive but even detrimental to the advancement of royal authority in Peru. These attacks only intensified with the installation of a new viceroy.
In 1745, King Philip V recalled Viceroy Villagarcía to Spain. Some years later, Viceroy Manuel de Amat (1761–1776) insinuated, perhaps ironically, that Villagarcía's removal from office was due in part to his inability to quash the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion, even though at 79 years of age he was certainly due for relief, regardless.Footnote 43 Villagarcía's successor, José Antonio Manso de Velasco, had seen action on the battlefield during the War of Spanish Succession (1700-13) and was an experienced colonial administrator as well, having previously served as captain-general of Chile. Manso de Velasco also enjoyed the political patronage of Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea, marquis of La Ensenada and the minister of finance, war, navy, and the Indies as well as superintendent of revenues—or in the words of one historian, “secretary of everything.”Footnote 44 Together, Ensenada, the secretary of state José de Carvajal y Lancaster, and the king's confessor, Padre Francisco de Rávago, formed a group within the Spanish government known as the Jesuit Party. While obviously advocating for the Society of Jesus, they attempted, like many regalists before and after, to wrest political power from other regular religious orders. Since the Franciscans were one of the most powerful in the empire, they became a particular target.
Even so, Manso de Velasco, at least initially, attempted to win back the territory lost to Juan Santos. Ensenada had ordered Manso de Velasco to “assure the pacification” of the rebellious provinces in the east, and suggested that he could even bring in troops from Chile to accomplish the task.Footnote 45 In January 1746, the viceroy organized the largest expedition to date against Juan Santos, dispatching 150 Spanish regulars out of Callao, supported by 200 local militiamen from Tarma and Jauja. Unwisely, the viceroy insisted that the expedition leave immediately for the montaña, in the midst of the rainy season (December to April). At least one of the militia commanders objected to leaving in such an inclement season, but with no one wanting to further countermand the viceroy the expedition left Tarma in two columns in February and March. Predictably, it was an utter failure. Damp conditions rotted the troops' provisions, and they began to suffer from disease and fatigue, while many pack animals slipped and stuck in soft mud and had to be abandoned. Both columns fought small skirmishes, but neither achieved a victory because the rains had saturated the powder supplies, making them unusable. After a few weeks, both columns returned to Tarma. In his official correspondence with the crown on June 21, 1746, Manso de Velasco claimed victory for the expedition, asserting that despite their losses, the troops had at least pushed Juan Santos deeper into the jungle, thereby securing the border.Footnote 46 Whether due to ignorance or premeditated malice, the timing of the expedition certainly doomed any chances that it would dislodge Santos's forces. However, any criticisms from Manso de Velasco's superiors regarding the success or failure of the expedition were drowned out by other events just a few months later in the viceregal capital.
On October 28, 1746, at 10:30 in the evening, a massive 8.4 magnitude earthquake rocked Lima, instantly killing about 1,500 people. An even greater disaster followed a half hour later, when the sea around Lima's port, Callao, began to retreat. Suddenly, a wall of water approximately 50 feet high crashed down on the bustling port town, killing all but a few hundred of its approximately 6,000 inhabitants. Lima lay in ruins and Callao was essentially obliterated.Footnote 47
Manso de Velasco used the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami as an opportunity to rebuild Lima, both physically and spiritually, on an enlightened regalist model. Of particular importance to this project was divesting the regular clergy of their influence within the city, and by extension in the viceroyalty as a whole. Starting in December 1746, just two months after the earthquake, Manso de Velasco wrote a series of letters to the crown regarding the state of the regular clergy in Lima. The viceroy criticized the severe overcrowding of the major convents and monasteries, which he believed caused laxity in the regular orders' religious piety. The viceroy even posited that “Divine Providence” had sent the earthquake to facilitate the reformation of Lima convents. He directed his criticisms mainly at the Franciscans, and to lesser extent the Dominicans. Only the Jesuits were spared, because of their popularity at court.Footnote 48
In the weeks and months after the earthquake, Manso de Velasco began enacting reforms aimed specifically at reducing the power of the clergy. For example, he targeted the city's censos (liens and loans that monasteries and convents made to private citizens, other religious institutions, and even the state). The interest charged on the censos was set below market rate to avoid the appearance of any engagement in usury, which was considered a sin by the Church. In January 1747, the viceroy froze all censo payments for two years, cut the principal of all censos in half, and reduced the rate of interest from the standard 5 percent to 1 percent or 2 percent, depending on the type of agreement.Footnote 49 Manso de Velasco argued that the reduction would allow Lima residents to rebuild their homes more quickly, since many limeños still owed money to the Church for their former residences, which now lay in ruins.Footnote 50 While this measure did help many such limeños, it also aided the royal treasury, which was also in debt to the religious houses. Manso de Velasco even froze all payments from the crown to religious orders during the months immediately following the earthquake.Footnote 51 The reduction of censo interest rates, of course, impaired the orders' ability to rebuild their religious houses, doubtlessly pleasing Manso de Velasco, who hoped to reduce their number and influence in his new enlightened regalist Lima. Royal officials in Madrid praised him as an efficient administrator, and court ministers were particularly impressed with his regular remittances of silver back to Spain, even immediately following the disaster. In 1748, his efforts earned him the title of Conde de Superunda (suggesting a “count who rules the waves).”Footnote 52
Back in Spain, Ensenada worked quickly to back Manso de Velasco's clerical reform agenda. In 1748, Ensenada and Carvajal met at the Escorial with the archbishops-elect of Lima and Mexico and the heads of all the religious orders. Ensenada and Carvajal reached an agreement with the prelates to reduce the number of regular clergy. Ensenada then convinced the king to form a special council of ministers to expedite the reform process, in particular to support the “enlightened” rebuilding of the city of Lima that Manso de Velasco so advocated. Between the end of November in 1748 and March 1749, Carvajal and Rávago convened the ministers’ council on Carvajal's estate, where they agreed that the crown should allow only licensed convents and monasteries to rebuild, and that every order in the city should be limited to one religious house for each gender. On October 4, 1749, also on the council's recommendation, the crown ordered the gradual removal of the regular clergy from rural Amerindian parishes in the archdiocese of Lima. The decree stipulated that when a regular cleric vacated an Amerindian parish, a secular priest would fill the position. At first this rule pertained only to the archdioceses of Lima, Mexico City, and Bogotá, but a later decree (1753) extended it to include all of Spanish America.Footnote 53 Ironically, one of the reasons the crown assented to the removal of regulars from their parishes was so that the orders could concentrate on missionary work on the frontiers of the Spanish empire, rather than maintaining their large urban convents and monasteries.Footnote 54
Back at the Ocopa missions, the effort to dislodge Juan Santos Atahualpa had ground to a halt in the wake of the Lima earthquake. Despite the possible security threat to Lima after the seismic disaster, Manso de Velasco kept the three companies of regular Spanish troops he had dispatched in 1746 in place along the border of the montaña, far from the capital. In spite of their proximity, these troops did not try to reenter the montaña, and during a lull in hostilities in 1747 the missionaries tried to make peace directly with the rebel leader. According to missionary sources, Ocopa's representatives successfully met with Juan Santos, who received them “with great respect.” Santos allowed the missionaries to celebrate mass, but he would not speak of peace. He responded with “ambiguous words,” saying that he would not end the hostilities until the kurakas (ethnic Andean chieftains) of the highlands came down and promised him their obedience.Footnote 55
A year later, another delegation, this time sent by the commander of Spanish forces in Tarma, José de Llamas, entered the montaña and attempted once again to resolve the conflict via negotiation. The delegation, however, was never heard from again. In 1750, after two years of holding back, Llamas launched a last expedition to quash the rebels. Again, Santos withdrew deeper into the montaña, allowing the hot, humid conditions, difficult terrain, and lack of supplies, combined with the harassment of the soldiers by Amerindian archers at every step, defeat the Spanish force. After several weeks of frustration, the expedition retreated to the highlands.Footnote 56 While the expedition ended neither the progress of the missionaries' evangelization efforts nor the perceived threat to state security, events elsewhere in the Spanish empire seemed to have caused Manso de Velasco to reevaluate his strategy against Juan Santos.
Franciscans vs. the Viceroy
Manso de Velasco's attitude underwent a shift in the late 1740s, as many Franciscans, including Ocopa's leadership, began to intensify their criticisms of Peru's colonial regime. The viceroy's ire focused on the dissemination of a political tract probably written by the Franciscan friar Antonio Garro in consultation with the indigenous cabildo of Lima, sometime before 1748. Known as the Representación verdadero (true representation), it utilized the rhetoric of the Lamentations of Jeremiah to create a pointed criticism of the Spanish colonial system.Footnote 57 The author of the Representación wrote at length on the vast gulf between the theory of Spanish colonial rule and its actual practice. He particularly condemned the viceroy and audiencia for failing to implement crown policies.Footnote 58 Much of this criticism was a mere preamble to the principal focus of the work: the unwillingness of the colonial government to allow Amerindians to become full members of religious orders.Footnote 59
While by law Amerindians were not permitted to become friars, a royal decree in 1691, later ratified (1725) in Peru by Viceroy Castelfuerte, granted Amerindians of noble birth this privilege. Nonetheless, these injunctions were often been ignored, leading to discontent within the regular religious orders and the indigenous elite.Footnote 60 One such disenchanted Amerindian, a noble and the person most closely associated with the Representación, was Brother Calixto de San José Túpac Inka (known later as Fray Calixto).
Fray Calixto was born in Tarma in 1710 to Pedro Montes, a Spaniard, and Dominga Estefania Túpac Inca, an Amerindian of noble Incan descent. According to records procured by the missionaries of Ocopa, he was the eleventh descendant of Inca Túpac Yupanqui. In 1727, Calixto entered the Franciscan order in Lima as a donado (oblate). In colonial Latin America, donados were usually Amerindians, mestizos, or in some cases illegitimate Spaniards, who lived in Franciscan communities but worked essentially as servants. Although they were not permitted officially to hold offices or lead liturgical or evangelizing activities, a lack of skilled manpower within the order, particularly in regard to those with ability to speak native languages, forced many Franciscan institutions to allow donados to perform tasks normally reserved for friars. Calixto spent almost two decades in Lima working for various Franciscan institutions, principally as a procurador, a clergyman charged with soliciting funds from private donors or the crown and with managing those funds for a particular community.Footnote 61 At some point, he also spent a few years working as a missionary for Ocopa, where “he served in the missions, and the college of Ocopa, with much edification and example to the missionaries.”Footnote 62 In 1744, the procurador of Ocopa in Lima began the process of securing documents to prove Calixto's status as a member of the indigenous nobility so that he could be elevated from a donado to a lego (lay friar), but this seems to have been unsuccessful.
Sometime before 1748, Calixto returned to Lima, where he began to disseminate the Representación illegally, sending copies to kurakas throughout the viceroyalty to solicit funds for his journey to Spain, where he hoped to present the document before the king. After Manso de Velasco denied his request for a license to travel there, Calixto decided to take the cheaper, illegal route to Europe through Portuguese Brazil. In September 1749, he left Lima to travel overland to Buenos Aires, accompanied by a lay friar and fellow Ocopa missionary, Isidoro Cala y Ortega. Fr. Isidoro carried with him a document in Latin (perhaps written by Francisco Garro, author of the Representación), titled Planctus indorum (the Indian's lament). Like the Representación, the Planctus advocated for an Amerindian clergy and condemned the abuses of the Spanish colonial system.Footnote 63
On August 22, 1750, Brother Calixto and Fr. Isidoro arrived in Madrid. That same night, they made their way to the palace, where they were told they could not present their petition until it had first been sent to the Council of the Indies. Fearing that the council might not send the Representación on to the king, the two men instead appeared outside the king's rural estate the next morning and watched for his carriage to emerge. As the carriage went by, they passed the document to the king through an open window, without, according to Calixto, the carriage even stopping. The king received the Representación favorably, and on the following day Calixto and Isidoro received word that he would pass it on to the Council of the Indies for further consideration.Footnote 64 The sudden appearance of the Representación seems to have caught some ministers by surprise, particularly Ensenada, who sent a series of frantic letters to various people looking for a copy of the manifesto.Footnote 65
One of Calixto's most ardent advocates before the crown during his stay in Madrid was Ocopa's representative at court, Fr. Joseph de San Antonio. In a long petition to the crown, San Antonio touted Calixto's service in the Ocopa missions saying he had served with “fidelity” and was a “good example to all.” He stated that he and Calixto were there on the same mission, to advocate for the rescue of the missions of Ocopa, which would ultimately save Peru from the unrest of the Amerindians, who, without recourse to the king, were oppressed by local governors. He hoped not only that the king would allow Calixto to be made a lay friar, but that he would be able to take those vows at Ocopa and continue on there as a missionary. San Antonio believed that allowing noble Amerindians like Calixto to take vows as friars would give Amerindians hope that someday their children “could obtain the same benefit” and would therefore calm unrest. The ordination of indigenous clergy, he continued, would provide the missionaries with sufficient manpower to save the souls of the “infidels” as well as guide the faithful, and thus avoid the total destruction of the viceroyalty that the Representación implied. San Antonio's lobbying, along with that of others, must have been persuasive: on May 17, 1751, Calixto was made a lay friar in Valencia.Footnote 66
Events coming to light in Lima, however, undermined the crown's support for Calixto and his advocates. On June 21, 1750, a priest came to the viceroy to report that he had learned, during a confession, of a conspiracy by the city's indigenous population to overthrow its government. The next morning, another priest came forward with a similar story from a confessant. According to the informants, on September 20, St. Michael's Day, a group of the city's Amerindians would use the day's celebrations as a distraction as they burned the thatched roofs of the temporary houses on the outskirts of the city. A later account claimed that conspirators even had plans to dam the Rimac River so that the fires could not be extinguished. While the citizenry was distracted by the fires, other conspirators would storm the viceregal palace and take control of its armory. As soon as the city was taken, all important Spanish officials would be executed, except for a few members of the regular orders, to be kept for conducting Catholic rites in the city. According to Manso de Velasco, some rebels even wanted to summon Juan Santos and crown him as king, although the viceroy himself seriously doubted whether they had actually communicated with the distant rebel leader.Footnote 67
After a brief investigation that apparently confirmed the priests' stories, Manso de Velasco acted quickly to arrest most of the alleged conspirators. Ultimately, he executed six Andeans in the main square of Lima, administered lesser punishments for others, and issued a general pardon for the rest of the populace. However, these executions did not stop the conspiracy from spreading outside the city. While Manso de Velasco was arresting suspects in Lima, one of the conspirators, Francisco Jiménez Inca, was attending his daughter's wedding in the adjacent highland province of Huarochirí. During the wedding festivities, word of his impending arrest reached Huarochirí, but by then he had already recruited several local people to the conspiracy and secured the protection of two kurakas of the region. Spanish officials initially were unconcerned, believing that when royal troops arrived to arrest Jiménez Inca, the locals would simply hand him over. The Spaniards' feeling of security was confirmed when one of the kurakas agreed to deliver Jiménez Inca into their hands. Unfortunately for the Spanish forces, it was a trap. On July 19, 1750, as Spanish forces waited in the village of Huarochirí for the supposedly cooperative kuraka to arrive with Jiménez Inca, Andeans attacked the Spanish forces by surprise, killing several in the initial assault. Some, including the Spanish commander, barricaded themselves in the town hall but were killed when they tried to escape the next morning. The rebels' successes, however, did not last long. Within a few weeks, the viceroy dispatched more than 400 regular army troops and 150 militiamen to Huarochirí. The force that went out from Lima was joined by conscripted indigenous workers from the nearby mining region, and the uprising was eventually crushed.Footnote 68
In his report to the king dated September 24, 1750, Manso de Velasco blamed the Lima Conspiracy, as the failed attempt to overthrow the city's leaders was later dubbed, and the Huarochirí rebellion on two causes. First, as the viceroy noted, the conspirators had denounced the abuses of corrupt corregidores, judges, and priests—complaints common throughout colonial Spanish America.Footnote 69 However, Manso de Velasco claimed that the Lima conspirators were also “exasperated” over the exclusion of Amerindians from the priesthood. The viceroy attributed the “patronage of this sentiment to two friars of the order of San Francisco,” whom he described as possessing “indiscrete piety and poorly allocated zeal.”Footnote 70 He was, of course, speaking of the friars Calixto and Isidoro. Manso de Velasco further lambasted the Representación, stating that giving universal permission for Amerindians to take such vows was against “the nature and condition of the Indians.” He continued: “The indiscrete expressions with which [the “Representación”] is filled reflect on, more than is just, the pain that [the Amerindians feel at] seeing their own lands possessed and governed by foreigners. It has influenced, not a little, their [the Amerindians'] inability to avoid disloyal thoughts, which they conceive during the drunkenness to which their meetings are reduced, [and] has produced the effect of their reckless machinations.Footnote 71
Ocopa's relationship with Calixto and Isidoro had its consequences. In the same letter that condemned the two lay friars, the viceroy suggested abandoning attempts to retake the territory lost to Juan Santos. In 1751, Manso de Velasco acted on his own recommendations by ordering an end to all expeditions to the central montaña. The viceroy argued that “these expeditions of excessive cost and little effect [were] an intolerable burden to the provinces” and that, given his limited resources, he could not marshal a military force large enough to counter Juan Santos.Footnote 72 Instead, he built a string of fortifications along the mountain passes leading into the central montaña and garrisoned them with three regular companies. This arrangement, according to an estimate made by his successor a decade later, cost over 50,000 pesos a year to maintain.Footnote 73
Manso de Velasco went one step further. In 1751, San Antonio successfully convinced the crown to issue another decree granting Ocopa 6,000 pesos per year, despite the loss of most of their missions to Juan Santos.Footnote 74 In a separate letter to the viceroy, the king, in an uncharacteristically emphatic tone, demanded that the viceroy heed his royal decree, stating, “I command you to give attention to this subject [the missions of Ocopa], commendable as it is, and of great interest to the service of God and myself. . . without delay. . . . I want to have proper and prompt fulfillment of what has been ordered in this decree so that the missions receive the necessary aid. This is my will.”Footnote 75 Manso de Velasco, however would give Ocopa only 3,000 pesos. He argued that since they had lost all their mission areas except one, they no longer needed the rest of the money.Footnote 76 Only when his patron Ensenada fell from power in 1754 and his' own political fortunes began to change did Manso de Velasco restore Ocopa's annual stipend of 6,000 pesos.Footnote 77 However, he continued to resist calls from the Ocopa missionaries, as well as the new royal ministers in Madrid, to change his strategy against Juan Santos. In 1756, he even ordered the Tarma and Jauja borders closed indefinitely to everyone, including the Ocopa missionaries.Footnote 78 That same year, he had Fray Calixto arrested and eventually confined to an “austere” monastery in Castile, far away from any port, so the friar could not communicate with anybody in the Americas and further spread his “sedition.”Footnote 79
After Manso de Velasco was recalled to Spain in 1761, Ocopa's fortunes dramatically improved. However, the territory lost in the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion was never again brought under even nominal Spanish control. Indeed, it faced continual rebel incursions into the highland, as demonstrated by a raid led by Santos on the frontier village of Andamarca in 1752.Footnote 80 Unfortunately for Santos, he did not enjoy his triumph for long. According to most sources, he was killed in an inter-ethnic conflict, probably around 1755, though one Jesuit source claimed he was swallowed by hell in a cloud of smoke and fire.Footnote 81
Conclusion
Although the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion represented a great triumph for the Asháninka and Yanesha nations, allowing them to remain relatively unmolested for the rest of the colonial period, it also revealed serious tensions within the Bourbon reform process. Though in theory these reforms emanated from the king, it was his ministers in Madrid (Ensenada) and in Lima (Manso de Velasco) who interpreted and even created them in reaction to perceived events on the ground. In particular, they hoped to attenuate the power and influence of the regular clergy, foremost among them the Franciscans, whom they perceived to be disloyal to the king or at least to their own regalist projects. Ocopa, therefore, presented a difficult case for these reformers. On the one hand, Ocopa's missionaries were pious peninsulars trying to evangelize Spanish America's vast borderlands. On the other, they were a substantially well-funded non-governmental (that is, Franciscan) operation, whose distance from the metropole gave them great autonomy. Furthermore, their popularity and successful lobbying at the court in Madrid made them even more difficult to control. For these reasons, Manso de Velasco's predecessors could curtail Ocopa's power only by delaying the payment of the yearly stipend.
Initially, the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion did little to help reformist ministers reduce Ocopa's influence. The viceroys had to, at least publicly, continue to support the missionaries, for three critical reasons. First, the rebellion had demonstrated the viceregal government's embarrassing inability to protect its own frontiers. Second, despite the rebellion and criticisms from reformers such as Juan and Ulloa, the missionaries still enjoyed an excellent reputation at court. Lastly, the Franciscans' appeal to King Ferdinand's piety seemed, at least partially, to trump his devotion to regalism. The turning point came when the former Ocopa missionary Friar Calixto, for whom Ocopa's representatives in Madrid had been advocating, was implicated in the Lima Conspiracy. The connection, however tenuous, between Franciscans (Ocopa specifically) and the conspiracy seems to have given Manso de Velasco the political cover he needed to end campaigns against the rebels and cede victory to Juan Santos, thereby depriving Ocopa of most of its missions. It is certainly possible that, even with a greater military force, the Spanish would never have been able to completely control the territories lost in the rebellion; however, by choosing to cordon off the region, they closed off the possibility of any future rapprochement or negotiations with the rebel indigenous nations, which might otherwise have offered some likely solutions after Santos's death and the break-up of his alliance.
In the end, the rebellion showed the implementation of the early Bourbon reforms (before 1759) to be a messy and conflicted process that suffered constant vicissitudes. The messiness and conflict were intrinsic to the diffuse nature of Spanish power, which depended on the actions of loyal local non-governmental institutions, such as regular religious institutions, to maintain hegemony. By attempting to weaken these groups to create a more centralized regalist system, the reformers tore at the very political fabric that had allowed Spanish control, albeit contested, to continue. As corrupt as the Franciscans seemed to the reformers, the reformers needed them to govern Spain's vast American territories. As the reforms intensified after 1759, it was the structural changes aimed at gaining more direct royal control that ultimately made the empire increasingly brittle and led to its demise.
