Encomienda

The encomienda was a grant of the right to use labor and exact tribute from a given group of natives conveyed to a person in return for service to the Spanish crown. The origins of the institution in the Americas dates back to 1497 when Christopher Columbus assigned native communities to Francisco Roldá and his men. Roldá and his company had risen in revolt against the Crown's authority and refused to reestablish peace except at that price. Subsequently, under Governor Frey Nicolás de Ovando (in office 1502–1509), who as Commander of the Order of Alcátara had administered encomiendas in Spain, the grants were institutionalized and extended to the entire Island of Hispaniola as a means to control the natives. The encomienda was not a land grant (merced). Instead, the conveyance consisted of native peoples, identified by their chiefs, put at the disposal of the encomendero or grantee to work in their homes or on public and private construction projects, and in their fields and mines. Initially, the natives labored without limit, benefit, or tenure. In time, royal officials made such grants with conditions: that the encomenderos marry, live in a nearby town, Christianize the natives, and protect and treat them benevolently. Thus began an institution that supported a class of powerful individuals, created by royal fiat, that would figure prominently in the history of the New World for the next century and into the eighteenth century on the fringes of the Spanish New World empire.

Encomenderos, addressed as encomenderos feudatarios, had no peers at first. They held a monopoly of local political power as the only persons able to sit on the town council. Their grants also gave them a near monopoly over native labor. Later-arriving Spanish immigrants depended on them for the help they needed to build homes and shops, tend plants and animals, or mine ore. This control and their prestige as first founders and conquerors quickly enriched the majority of encomenderos.

Harsh treatment of the natives and the catastrophic decline in their numbers due to disease, overwork, starvation, and flight caused the crown and Council of the Indies to reconsider the encomienda. Royal officials sent decrees ordering the fair treatment of the natives. These were codified in the Laws of Burgos of 1512 and again in the New Laws of 1542. One clause of the latter abolished the encomienda at the death of the holder. Encomenderos in Mexico protested this assault on their status and wellbeing. The encomenderos of Peru revolted, and eventually confronted the first viceroy, Blasco Núñez Vela. They found him unyielding in his zeal to implement the laws, so they beheaded him, setting off a civil war that was not totally quelled until 1549.

The rebellion and civil war in the Andes together with continuing news of the unchecked mistreatment of the natives and their dwindling numbers forced the crown to take steps to reconquer the Americas from an ever more powerful and semi-autonomous encomendero nobility. The encomienda was thereafter renewed (or not) on an individual basis, at the death of the previous encomienda holder; assigned a steep transfer tax; and gradually eliminated, except on the frontiers of the empire (e.g., Paraguay). The crown also appointed local magistrates, called corregidores de indios, as its representatives to mediate the relations between encomenderos, non-encomendero settlers, and the natives. In this way, the crown could more easily direct the use of indigenous labor to activities deemed worthwhile, like mining. The increasing control and eventual disappearance of these grants ended the political dominance of the encomendero class. Power passed to royal officials, miners, landowners, and eventually merchants. The surviving native population, under increasingly Hispanicized chiefs and overlords, then became liable for a tribute payment to a royal official and for periodic, temporary, rotating, and paid labor service to designees of the Spanish crown.

see also Mita; Tribute.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Avellaneda, Jose Ignacio. The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Himmerich y Valencia, Robert. The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.

Keith, Robert G.. "Encomienda, Hacienda, and Corregimiento in Spanish America: A Structural Analysis." Hispanic American Historical Review 51, no. 3 (August 1971): 431-446.

Moya Pons, Frank. Después de Coló: Trabajo, sociedad, y política en la economía del oro. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1986.

Puente Brunke, Jose de la. Encomienda y encomenderos en el Peru: Estudio social y politico de una institucion colonial. Seville, Spain: Diputacion Provincial de Sevilla, 1992.