The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

960 Karen Spalding
to augment his finances by granting authority over distant people to their
Spanish overlords. He asked a council of theologians in 1553 to determine
the justice of selling the vassals of the Church to raise moneys for the
war against the Turks. Philip's interest was further stimulated by an offer
presented by a representative of the Peruvian encomenderos, promising 5
million ducats in exchange for making encomienda grants permanent,
with full civil and criminal jurisdiction - in other words, transforming
them into feudal principalities. Despite royal pressure and the guarded
and conditional approval of the clerical lawyers, the Council of the Indies
resisted the project. 91
In several articles Carlos Sempat has laid out the basic outline of
the campaign against the encomienda in the Andes, as well as the fragile
alliance between the kurakas and the Church in that campaign. The
story is an extremely complicated one, not least because the agendas of
the allies were contradictory. The clerics, or at least some of them, initially
supported the kurakas efforts to gain Spanish recognition and
protection of their own privileges, as well as protection against challenges
to their authority from other members of Andean society. The
kurakas petitioned the Spanish authorities to "preserve our good customs
and the laws that existed and continue to exist, and are just for
our government and ourselves, as well as the other customs from before
our conversion." 92 Domingo de Santo Tomas and other clerics initially
supported the efforts of the kurakas to enlist the Spaniards in
preserving and reinforcing their authority. The clerics argued that the
kurakas were the foundation of local social order, arguing that their
authority should be confirmed and reinforced. The Church even went
so far as to use the confessional to reinforce chiefly authority as they
saw it. In the instructions to clerics on how properly to interrogate the
Indians in the confessional prepared by the Peruvian Church, the
priest was instructed to include a question about proper respect for the
kuraka in the questions relating to the observance of the fourth commandment:
"Thou shalt honor thy father and mother." 93 Some kurakas
were appointed to positions of political authority, holding the of-
" The story is told in Sempat, "Los senores etnicos," Transiciona, 221-225. I suspect that the role
of Gasca in the Council of the Indies may be important here; in any case the council felt die
issue to be important enough to oppose their sovereign's expressed wishes.
92 Sempat, "La renta de la encomienda en la decada de 1550: piedad cristiana y desconstrucci6n,"
Transitions, 160; see also John V. Murra, "Waman Puma, etn6grafo del mundo andino."
93 Doctrina Christiana y caucismo para instruction de indios [1584]. Facsimile of the trilingual text
issued by order of the III Provincial Council of Lima (Madrid, 1992).
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