Hispanic Legacy

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Everything this instance publishes for machines, with the runtime and corpus versions it is serving. Read this first: it names every other surface, so a client does not have to guess at URLs.

A volume printed in Mexico City in the middle of a civil war, collecting what a bishop-elect of Michoacan had written to the government since 1799. It asks the king to abolish tribute on Indians and c…

Oviedo opens his chapter on wasps by apologising that the bees should have come first, then reports that Hispaniola has none and Tierra Firme has many kinds. Landa found the hives already property in …

Every Audiencia of the Indies carried on its salary roll a lawyer and a procurator for the poor, listed in the annual return of ministers the viceroys had to send the king. They were ordered to be at …

The school of mathematics and navigation that the merchant guild of Buenos Aires paid for out of its own funds, opened under the geographer-engineer Pedro Cerviño with fifteen pupils and closed by a r…

A royal academy of painting, sculpture and architecture in Mexico City whose instruction was free and whose evening rooms, lit by Argand lamps, held hundreds of pupils drawing from casts and copying d…

Oviedo gave the shrub a chapter: a plant as tall as a man and a half whose husks hold red grains the Indians worked into balls to paint face and body, and which they stirred into ground cacao so the d…

A Jesuit who had spent his working life in Peru printed a six-book manual telling the ministers and officers of the Indies what they might and might not do. Its most quoted page grades the peoples of …

The Jesuit book that treated the Americas as a problem in natural philosophy rather than a catalogue of marvels. Printed at Seville in 1590, it argues from the distribution of wild animals that the tw…

A sixteenth-century water conveyance built across the dry plains north-east of Mexico City by one Franciscan and the indigenous communities who supplied the labour, its central arcade still standing w…

A Jesuit sent by royal provision of the Audiencia of Quito came down the whole Amazon in 1639 with a Portuguese armada and printed the survey two years later: the tributaries, the peoples named one by…

A registry of "first in history" claims connected to Spain - the first international vaccination campaign, the first circumnavigation, the first universities and printing press of the Americas, the ne…

Libro VIII, título XI of the Recopilación is the short administrative law of mines of the Spanish Indies. Its five laws make discovery a standing duty of viceroys because silver and gold are "el nervi…

Six laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias settle who administered the avería, the levy that paid for the convoys of the Indies trade, and where its money was kept. They give a vacant administrat…

Leyes viiij to xviij of libro VI, título X of the Recopilación are drafted as prohibitions that first recite the practice. Read in order they list, in the crown's own words, what was being done to the…

A royal chronicler files the avocado among the wild trees the Christians called "pear trees" — then reports the same trees planted by hand in Nicaraguan town squares and cultivated by the Indians, and…

Guadalajara had wells in every house and spent two centuries trying to get piped water anyway. A maestro mayor levelled a spring about 1600 and reported it would arrive below the plaza; a 1641 commiss…

The Nahua master of the college at Tlatelolco who wrote for Sahagun and for Pedro Oroz until Oroz died in 1596, then spent ten years as the hand behind another friar's press: everything that friar pri…

The game the world plays is not the game that came out of India and Persia. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century the queen and the bishop were given the long moves they still have, and the ear…

The surgeon of Madinat al-Zahra outside Cordoba who spent about fifty years on a thirty-book medical encyclopaedia and closed it with an illustrated treatise on operations and the roughly two hundred …

A Valencian law book of 1573 whose chapter on slaves argued that the presumption is always for liberty, that the buyer is accomplice to the seller who had no right, and that no one may be told the fre…

The sales tax of Spanish America. An old Castilian levy extended to the Indies from 1574 in New Spain and 1592 in Peru at two per cent, its proceeds consigned to the maritime armadas. Codified in Reco…

The city of Oaxaca was divided into quarters in 1795 and given unpaid neighbourhood magistrates, with a printed ordinance that sets out what they could do. It obliges them to push parents to school th…

A geographical and historical dictionary of the whole of America, compiled over twenty years by a colonel of the Spanish Guards who says he was born there. Its prologue gives the motive: foreigners ha…

The cotton grown almost everywhere today is Gossypium hirsutum, domesticated in the northern Yucatán some 5,500 years ago. Two Spanish witnesses show what the sixteenth century made of it: Oviedo repo…

The nine laws of this título bond the Casa's bailiffs for a thousand ducados, peg their fees to what Seville's own bailiffs took, cap the number of attorneys at four and the porters at four with two a…

In 1583 the crown confirmed ordinances forcing every load of wheat, flour and barley entering Mexico City into one public hall, where the first price of the day stood all day, carriers had to produce …

The oldest known mercury mine in the world became, after about 1550, the European supply for a Mexican invention: Bartolomé de Medina's silver amalgamation. By 1861 a Spanish government memoir could a…

The Spanish navy's annual astronomical ephemeris, computed at San Fernando for the meridian of its own observatory and printed two years ahead of the year it served. The volume for 1856 calls itself n…

Libro VIII, título XXV of the Recopilación governs how the Spanish crown sold what it owned in America. Its eight laws require the public plaza, a notary, a bound book of remates signed by an oidor, t…

A judge of the audiencia of Mexico wrote to Philip II to argue that the crown had got its own tax base wrong. Read in the 1864 first printing, his memorial turns out to be a fiscal argument before it …

The day before the better-known declaration that the Indians were true men, Paul III wrote to all the bishops of the Indies to settle what missionaries should do: whether rite-less baptisms had been s…

In 1790 the ayuntamiento of Mexico City was ordered to find a permanent revenue for a general street lighting, and proposed three reales on each load of flour entering the capital — about 37,500 pesos…

Survivor of the 1527 Narváez expedition who walked and lived for eight years (1528-1536) among the native peoples of today's Texas and northern Mexico, one of four survivors of an expedition of hundre…

A Mexica noble wrote the history of Tenochtitlan in Spanish about 1598, in a hundred and ten chapters built almost entirely out of speeches - the elders in council, the embassies, the demands of tribu…

A scientific journal written almost single-handed by a creole priest in Mexico City from 1788, whose title page claims corresponding membership of the Paris Academy of Sciences and two Spanish bodies.…

Closing the chapter on the charges of the encomienda, the editor of the 1736 Política Indiana adds seventeen numbered sentences, each digesting a law of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias. Among them…

Spain built permanent anatomical theatres from the middle of the sixteenth century: one was ordered at Salamanca in June 1552 and finished in May 1554, and Zaragoza, Barcelona and Valencia followed on…

The stepped terraces that still contour the Andes and the long canals that fed them are described in engineering detail in book V of Garcilaso's Comentarios reales: retaining walls built three deep an…

The Augustinian friar and cosmographer who in 1565 sailed the San Pedro from Cebú to Acapulco by standing north into the westerlies and running east on the Kuroshio — the return passage, the tornaviaj…

Mineralogist working in Mexico who in 1801 became the first discoverer of the element vanadium, in the Royal Society of Chemistry's own phrase: "Vanadium was discovered twice. The first time was in 18…

A first-person memoir printed in a Mexican compilation of 1855 under the head ANIL, by the eighteenth-century editor who had published a translated treatise on indigo in his periodical of 1772. It rec…

A history of the Kaqchikel nation written in Kaqchikel, in the Latin alphabet the missions taught, by a member of its ruling family who was already an adult when the Spaniards arrived in 1524, and con…

An itinerant healer from Pátzcuaro brought a plant remedy for venereal disease to the archbishop of Mexico in July 1790, and instead of being dismissed or licensed on the spot he was given wards. Sixt…

Catalan architect, dead in 1926, whose Sagrada Família — taken over in 1883, his exclusive occupation from 1914 until his death — remains under construction more than 140 years after its cornerstone, …

The keyboard player of Charles V and Philip II, heard at Genoa as "otro Orfeo de nuestros tiempos" and buried under a monument the king paid for. This entry reports what the nineteenth-century Spanish…

The 1748 account of the South American voyage that Antonio de Ulloa published with Jorge Juan carries the first mention and identification of platinum in European literature — a few lines about a whit…

A Nahua from Azcapotzalco who learned Latin at the college of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, taught grammar there to Indian collegians and to young friars, and then governed the Indian parcialidad of San J…

The crown works at Mexico City that separated the gold locked inside silver bars. On a bar of 133 marcos its charge was the largest single deduction after the tithe, and the king ordered poor bars par…

The aqueduct that gave Málaga drinking water from 1784, built out of a bishop's estate and crown money diverted from the endowment of the Real Colegio de San Telmo, and in 1804 made over to that colle…

A tariff of 6 September 1678 prices the acts of a lawsuit at the Casa de Contratación one by one — the writ, the oath, each witness, the sentence, the torture — mostly at twelve, twenty-four or thirty…

A schedule of maximum prices for every inn on the road between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, issued by the governor of New Spain together with the justices and aldermen of the city. It prices …

The penal título of the Recopilación tells judges of the Indies that the measure of a penalty is not theirs: "no les pertenece el arbitrio en ellas, sino su execucion." The next law prints a cédula of…

Almost every printed tool for Nahuatl was made by a friar for other friars. This one was made by a traveller who could not make himself understood on the road, found the big printed dictionary useless…

Oviedo describes the sung dances of the Isla Española as a deliberate technique of memory — genealogies and defeats kept "en lugar de libros de su acuerdo" — and then does something no later account r…

A working silversmith's textbook of geometry, proportion, anatomy and design, privileged by Philip II in 1585 after the manuscript burned and was written again. Its argument is that antiquity knew no …

A surgeon back from fifteen years in the Indies printed at Valladolid a book whose title page advertises "the manner in which the Indians cure sores and wounds and other afflictions in the Indies". In…

The Recopilación's título on the South Sea armada licenses the inhabitants of the Pacific ports to build any ships they wish, lets merchants load freely in vessels large and small, keeps the Peru–Tier…

The treatise's second inference is that encomenderos must stand permanently armed, by cédulas of 1536 and 1541 which also forbid pawning the arms, and that failing at the first default costs the grant…

A grammar and vocabulary of Cahita, the language of the Yaqui and Mayo rivers, written by a Jesuit of the Sinaloa mission and printed at Mexico in 1737 with a catechism by Tomas Basilio. Its editor in…

The Nahua amantecatl laid undyed bird feathers into pictures. After the conquest the craft was redirected rather than ended: friars and Spanish householders commissioned feather images and retablos, p…

Toledo sits on a granite hill wrapped by the Tagus far below in its gorge. Between the 1560s and 1581 Juanelo Turriano — the Cremonese clockmaker retained by Charles V and Philip II — built a self-act…

The cédula of 1568 ordered that the viceroy of Peru's mounted guard be styled Gentiles-Hombres or Continuos de la guarda del Reyno. A judge of the Audiencia of Lima who sat there records that he saw t…

A judge who took an encomienda without citing the holder was treated, for the purpose of undoing it, as a private despoiler. The close of libro III capítulo XXX sets out the remedy: appeal coupled wit…

In 1559 the crown erected at the silver city of La Plata — the Indian Chuquisaca — a Real Audiencia, an appellate court through which an Indian town or a Spanish subject of Upper Peru could reach roya…

Residence in the province was a condition of holding an encomienda. The standard treatise on the government of Spanish America asks whether study at an approved university excused it, and answers from…

Within twenty years of the conquest, Nahua towns were staging full-length religious plays in Nahuatl, with indigenous actors and casts drawn from the ruling lineages. Two friars describe the productio…

Leyes xiiij to xvij of libro VIII, título XX of the Recopilación govern what a sold office was worth and how the crown was paid. The 1663 law recites that despite earlier orders "todavía se cometian m…

Two years before the Peten was stormed, three Franciscans and four Maya cantores walked into the capital of the last independent Maya kingdom without soldiers and argued for days out of the Itza's own…

A Jesuit who had taught theology at Lima for decades printed a manual telling every officer of the Indies which of his acts were mortal sins. Tome one asks whether the Indians may be sent down the min…

Two laws of libro VII título I of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias attack what kept a corregidor beyond reach. Ley xj, of 1590, states as the crown's own finding that at a residencia the guilty alw…

Five laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias turn a courier's departure into shared infrastructure. One recites that journeys were being concealed so that two customers would pay for one ride, and…

A set of numbered standing orders written for the landing parties of the 1605-06 Pacific voyage: give gifts and good treatment, keep chiefs aboard as pledges, never turn your back, and above all avoid…

Fourteen instructions the archbishop of Mexico had printed in 1769 for parish priests to read out to their indigenous parishioners: raised and separated beds, a fowl for the sick neighbour, a trade fo…

Paul III had freed the Indians of the Indies from most of the obligatory fast. A bishop of Quito tells his parish priests to lean toward dispensing rather than refusing, and that saying a man is an In…

A canon lawyer set out to explain one decretal on usury and, on printed page 85, explained inflation instead: goods and the labour of men fetched far less in Spain before the Indies covered it with go…

Oviedo gives a chapter to who first made sugar in the Indies, credits a bachiller who brought the masters from the Canaries, then prints the testimony against his own award. The same pages give what a…

Spanish state expedition (1803-1813) that carried Jenner's smallpox vaccine to the Americas, the Philippines and China in a living arm-to-arm chain of children, and left behind trained vaccinators and…

The resin the world still calls balsam of Peru comes from Central America, not Peru. This object records what the tree is and where it grows, the Nahuatl name hoitziloxitl, the tapping technique and i…

Spain's first national bank, erected by royal cédula on 2 June 1782 to rescue the vales reales — a state paper that had fallen more than twenty-two per cent against coin — and to feed and clothe the a…

Surgeons in New Spain would not treat a wounded person until a magistrate authorised it, and people bled to death waiting. In May 1777 the viceroy ordered every surgeon in the kingdom to treat first, …

The first original treatise on metals written in Spanish, composed by a parish priest in the Andes and approved at Potosi in 1637 by the guild of refiners whose losses it set out to cure. It records a…

A physician's manual printed in Mexico City in 1607, licensed by the protomedico of New Spain, whose stated purpose is to let people treat themselves in places that have no one to cure them. Its index…

Dominican friar (1484-1566), former encomendero turned defender of the Indians, whose campaigning shaped the New Laws of 1542 and who faced Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in the Valladolid debate of 1550-51 …

Two laws printed side by side in the Recopilación regulate indigenous festivity: public dances need the governor's licence and may not fall in harvest time, and pulque may hold nothing but the simple …

A Yucatec-born Franciscan wrote a grammar of Maya in 1742 and had it printed at Mexico in 1746. Its last page is a retraction: having called an earlier friar the proto-master of the language, Beltran …

A report on the missions of New Mexico laid before Philip IV to obtain more friars, and the earliest sustained description of the peoples of that country in print. It records the turquoise mines and p…

The cold amalgamation of silver ore with mercury, salt and roasted copper pyrites, worked in open yards in New Spain from the sixteenth century and still the standard method three hundred years later.…

Governor of Spanish Louisiana whose Gulf coast campaign (1779-1781) — Baton Rouge, Mobile, and the two-month siege of Pensacola — stripped Britain of its Gulf of Mexico bases during the American Revol…

The great dictionary of Aymara, printed at the Jesuit press of Juli on Lake Titicaca, corrected on the order of an oidor of the Audiencia of Lima and priced by the crown at a real the sheet. Its prolo…

A history of the Incas written at Cuzco in 1551 by a Spaniard who had spent six years of his youth making a Quechua doctrina and two vocabularies, who married a sister of Atahuallpa, and who says in h…

The Bible that Cardinal Cisneros had set in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin at the new university of Alcala, and whose New Testament volume carries a printed colophon dated 10 January 1514. Read from…

A bishop of Puebla endowed a Tridentine college in 1646 and gave it his books; the crown's own chronicler, writing three years later while the donor still lived, records the dowry, the date of the ere…

Three churchmen of the Torres family left their joined libraries and 20,000 pesos of silver to the cathedral of Mexico on condition it be opened to the public. The Latin inscription over the first roo…

The machinery by which the estate of a Spaniard who died in the Americas was inventoried, auctioned, locked in a chest with three keys and shipped to Seville with the dead man's name, surname and home…

Spanish naval commander who, with viceroy Sebastián de Eslava, defended Cartagena de Indias in 1741 against one of the largest amphibious expeditions assembled to that date. The British failure — docu…

Two Franciscan chronicles record the one building technique Mesoamerican masons had not had — the masonry vault — arriving with a mason from Castile at the old church of San Francisco in Mexico City, …

The first medical book printed anywhere in the Americas, from the press of Pedro Ocharte at Mexico in 1570. Its four parts treat the fever the country called tabardete, bleeding in pleurisy, critical …

A giant fossil skeleton dug from the banks of the river Lujan reached Madrid in seven crates in 1789, and the dissector of the Real Gabinete mounted it, drew it and described it. His description staye…

Libro VI, título X of the Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias is the statutory core of Spanish protective law for the Indians. Its opening law names Spaniards, corregidores, religious an…

A Jesuit in the Guarani missions of Paraguay who taught himself mathematics and astronomy, built his own observing instruments out of forest hardwood where bronze or platinum was called for, correspon…

Política Indiana libro I capítulo X closes with two precedents — Ireland given to Henry II by Hadrian IV on condition of conversion and a tribute, and Martin V's grant of 1420 to Portugal — and then t…

Two acts of Paul III, four days apart in 1537: a brief to the Cardinal of Toledo threatening excommunication against anyone who enslaved the Indians, and the constitution declaring them "veros homines…

Every Spanish city in the Indies had a council that elected its own magistrates each year, and the code protects the freedom of that vote in detail — no oidor in the chamber, no governor soliciting vo…

The agave fibre of the Indies, set down by Oviedo in 1535 with its whole process — retted under stones like Castilian flax, scutched like hemp, coming off "like very white linen" — and used for the co…

Oviedo's chapter on the cacao tree carries money in its own heading, and the pages under it give a working price list for Nicaragua, the tribute paid in beans, and the trick used to forge them along w…

Archaeogenomics has moved cacao's homeland: the tree originated in the upper Amazon and was already being carried and crossed across South America five thousand years ago, so Mesoamerica received it r…

Spanish law kept the pre-conquest indigenous lordships in being as heritable offices. A whole title of the Recopilación orders the Audiencias to hear Indians suing over cacicazgos, to restore those un…

Indian towns in the Spanish Indies held property in common — land worked collectively, rents, and capital lent at interest — kept in a locked chest whose keys were divided, audited by a judge of the A…

Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 separates the squashes "proprias de la tierra, que alla llaman Çapallos" from gourds in general, gives their food and vessel uses, and in the same paragraph records Eu…

In a memoir addressed to Mutis and printed among the unpublished pieces of the 1849 Paris edition of the Semanario, Francisco José de Caldas proposed cutting the vegetated part of the earth into twelv…

Política Indiana libro I capítulo XII exists to answer the objection that gold, not the Gospel, drove the conquest. Its SUMARIO opens with the charge in the objectors' words and runs to the author's o…

Spanish novelist (1916-2002), awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability". His La fa…

The medieval pilgrimage network converging on the shrine of the Apostle James at Compostela, still walked in the hundreds of thousands each year, and in 1987 the first route declared a European Cultur…

Between 1695 and 1697 gangs of Maya axemen cut the first land route across the base of the Yucatan peninsula, linking Campeche to the Vera Paz through the Peten forest. The 1701 history prints its iti…

Humboldt's chapter on the roads of New Spain, read from the page, describes a system: four principal roads out of the capital, a spine called el camino de tierra adentro running 440 leagues to Santa F…

A Franciscan chronicle records bell-founding as one of the first European trades indigenous craftsmen took over completely — the proportions of waist, crown and lip, the alloy, and bells "chicas y gra…

A book printed under royal licence in Madrid in 1789 tells the crown that the conquest's rigour was carried on "hasta aniquilar á los infelices Indios", that the Recopilación's protections are dead le…

In the 1530s Spanish witnesses in Peru reported a cinnamon that was not cinnamon: an aromatic traded down to Quito that came not as bark but as the cup of a fruit, "unos vassillos como de bellotas". O…

The dugout of the Antilles, measured against European boats by a Spanish official in 1535: no keel, one tree, forty or fifty men in the largest, faster under eight paddles than a ship's boat under twe…

Spanish law gave every Indian town of more than a hundred Indians two or three salaried-by-exemption singers and every reducción a sacristan, all of them free of tribute assessment and personal servic…

A capellanía was an endowment whose capital sat as a censo on somebody else's farm, paying a rent to a chaplain — in substance a mortgage book, and multiplied across Spanish America it made the Church…

The chilli is a Mesoamerican domesticate whose worldwide career began in Iberian ships. Genetics corrects the usual telling on three points: C. annuum won the world probably by arriving first rather t…

A Spanish mathematician printed, on an episcopal press in 1670, a table of the numbers 0 to 32 written with two characters, alongside articles on arithmetic by threes, fours, fives, nines and sixties.…

The Recopilación gives the Casa de Contratación's own prison a título of six laws: a separate jail for the Casa's jurisdiction, visited by its judges twice a week; a jailer who posts bond and can be s…

A colonial jailer in the Indies was paid by his prisoners. Thirteen laws of libro VII, título VI of the Recopilación legislate against what that produced — gifts, irons loosened or tightened for money…

Libro VII, título VI of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias orders a jail built in every city, villa and lugar of the Indies, a separate room for women, a chaplain to say Mass, a bond from every jaile…

A physician's book of questions about America, printed at Mexico in 1591 and written before its author was thirty. It asks why the Indies shake, why quicksilver is lost in the silver works, what choco…

The third charge of the encomienda was personal residence. A Provisión of Charles V of 13 November 1535, printed verbatim in the standard treatise, forbids an encomendero to leave New Spain without li…

Before he could take possession, an encomendero swore fidelity to the king and promised to keep arms and a horse and to fight for the defence of the province where his encomienda lay. A cédula of 1575…

Four laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias build the charge against the officer who collected the avería, the levy that paid for the convoys of the Indies run. They name what the levy was taken …

The comet of 1680 frightened Mexico, and the royal cosmographer printed a pamphlet arguing that it portended nothing. Three men answered him in print; one was the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino. His re…

On 14 August 1881 a physician in Spanish Havana read a paper to the Academy of Sciences proposing that yellow fever passed from person to person inside a mosquito. The room said nothing — no objection…

The Nahuatl grammar printed at Mexico City by Juan Ruyz in 1645, whose author added to it "vna cosa singular" — a four-accent notation that writes vowel length and the glottal stop the Nahua called sa…

Six pages of the Mercurio volante of 1772 carry a letter signed by an Indian described as a cacique - a village schoolmaster, notary, alcalde, gobernador and fiscal who bought the paper in Mexico City…

A letter written in the Timucua language at San Mateo in Florida on 28 January 1688, signed by Timucua chiefs, addressed to the king of Spain, and translated into Castilian by a Franciscan interpreter…

Why "the largest empire in history" is a statement about maps, not about government. The size series behind every popular ranking are atlas reconstructions; this object audits the famous figures - Bri…

The crown agency founded in Seville in 1503 to register, license and control all trade and navigation with the Indies. Beyond customs work it functioned as an early state hydrographic and navigation s…

A viceroy of Peru spent close to fifty thousand pesos on a house for women in Lima, put it under royal patronage, and left it with no income at all. His successor's relacion prints both halves: the ch…

Mexico City's Casa de Niños Expósitos was given printed constitutions in 1774, approved by the king and published the next year. They order the chaplain to write down the day a child was left, the clo…

A whole título of the Recopilación de leyes de las Indias exists to force men who crossed the Atlantic to return to the wives they left behind: audiencias to find them and ship them home with their go…

The law that put mints in Mexico City, Santa Fe de Bogotá and Potosí and then bound their output to a single standard: the same fineness, value, weight, dies and punches as the coin of Castile. It nam…

A verse history of the Indies written by a beneficed priest of Tunja who had spent his life in them, first printed in 1589 and reprinted here from the Madrid edition of 1852. Its royal censor licensed…

One law of the Spanish code of the Indies orders that Spaniards who injure, offend or mistreat Indians be punished more severely than for the same offences against Spaniards, and declares those offenc…

Política Indiana libro I capítulo XII §§35-43 ends the book not in defence but in threat. Gentleness gets more than atrocity; prelates and doctrineros answer for the sins they let pass; what God watch…

Whether to compel the peoples of the Indies to abandon their languages for Castilian was argued in the Council of the Indies. The compiled law settled it on the side of persuasion: masters for those "…

The Castilian handbook that told magistrates what their office was for, read on the sheets of the Antwerp printing of 1704. Men chose a keeper of the common life and fed him so he need not feed himsel…

Eye surgery reached the Americas with the Spanish medical system and was regulated by it: oculists were examined and priced by the protomedicato, couching is documented in Mexico City by 1611, and len…

From 1580 the crown ordered salaried, competitively filled chairs of the lengua general at the universities of Lima and Mexico and in every city with an audiencia, and forbade bishops in the Indies to…

A bishop of Guadalajara found that local talent was wasted for want of teachers and that only those who could keep themselves in Mexico City studied at all. He offered nine hundred pesos a year for th…

On the eastern frontier of Quito, parties of Spaniards and Christian Indians went into unconquered country to take pieces - people to work their land. The bishop's manual for confessors names the two …

Bitter cassava kills unless its juice is pressed out and the pulp heated. Oviedo set down the whole Taíno sequence - the grater, the woven çibucan press, the clay burén - along with the market price o…

Solórzano prints the operative text of the cédula that governed the viceroy of Peru's guard for the next half-century. It fixes the numbers and the pay, forbids unequal salaries and double places, ins…

Política Indiana libro I capítulo XII §§13-27 assembles the crown's orders on treatment of the Indians — Ovando 1501, Isabel's testament, Granada 1527, a Lisbon rebuke of 1582, an order of 1608 that m…

From 1787 the Spanish crown worked to move burial out of the churches of its American cities into ventilated cemeteries beyond the built-up area: asking the bishops what it would cost, sending a stand…

The marigold of Mexican gardens and Mexican graves was described as a medicinal herb of New Spain in the Mexican imprint of 1615 that carries Francisco Hernández's survey, reached Europe in the sixtee…

An official dossier on the draining of the Valley of Mexico, printed in Mexico City in 1637 by order of the viceroy Marques de Cadereita and compiled by the Audiencia's relator Fernando de Cepeda with…

Molina's 1571 dictionary gives chia its own vocabulary: the seed, the oil, the verb for pressing it, the presser, the maker, the seller, and the verb for varnishing an object with it. The 1615 Quatro …

Eighty-four per cent of native chickens sampled across mainland South America carry mitochondrial haplogroup E, the lineage that dominates Europe, and the Pacific lineage is absent from the continent …

Chimalpahin, born at Amaquemecan in 1579 and descended from its rulers, wrote his own altepetl's history in Nahuatl, in the alphabet the friars had brought, keeping the Nahua year count and the Christ…

The lake gardens that fed Tenochtitlan were still being planted and rowed to market when a Mexican Jesuit in Italian exile described them - plaited willow frames, lake mud, plots about eight perches b…

Acosta in 1590 calls the anona soft and white as butter and, to some, the best fruit of the Indies — without once writing chirimoya. Where the tree came from is still disputed: a 1,504-tree survey put…

The potato entered print in 1553 not as a curiosity but as a food security system. Cieza describes the Collao drying papas in the sun and keeping them from one harvest to the next as chuño, the reserv…

A soldier who left Spain before he was thirteen and spent seventeen years marching through the Indies wrote down what he saw, and the first part was printed at Seville in 1553 under royal privilege. I…

A medical topography of Mexico City printed there in 1618 by a Complutense physician incorporated in its university: the site, the waters, the winds and the seasons, read as the causes of the diseases…

Cédulas said an absent encomendero lost his grant ipso jure. The crown's own jurist argues that even so he must be cited, warned and tried: a Cédula Real of 1592 on the absentees of Santa Marta requir…

Spanish lawyer and deputy who won the constitutional battle for women's suffrage in Spain. As the only woman on the 1931 drafting committee she defended immediate, unconditional votes for women — agai…

Nine dissertations printed with a Mexican Jesuit's history of his country, written in exile to answer Cornelius de Pauw's thesis that in America nature had degenerated entirely - in the elements, the …

The Spanish-American right by which an enslaved person could pay part of their own price, have the rest fixed by valuers one of whom spoke for them, and never again be sold above that ceiling — opened…

A Jesuit who had spent most of his adult life between Peru and Mexico finished, in 1653, a survey of the Americas that runs from the cosmography down to how Andean farmers measured a short interval of…

Seven laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias turn the findings of the Seville average audit into money. The accountants may issue their own writs of execution against debtors of balances; everyth…

Monardes in 1580 and Acosta in 1590 printed the first detailed European accounts of coca: how it is sown, dried, chewed with lime, and what it did for people who walked on it. Acosta also priced the P…

The epidemic that halved what was left of the indigenous population of central Mexico in two years, and the paper trail it left. The crown's protomédico wrote down the clinical picture; bodies were op…

America has three coconut populations with three histories: the Pacific coast of Mexico, Philippine and stocked by repeated Spanish shipments after the conquest; the Caribbean and Atlantic, Indian and…

A sixteenth-century manuscript written in two columns with the right-hand column left blank, which its finder read as a Spanish translation of a Nahuatl original by an indigenous layman. It was pulled…

Lay religious brotherhoods that became the one corporate purse most Spanish-American Indian towns controlled themselves: they held cattle, land and cash, elected their own stewards, and paid for buria…

A poor woman of Guadalajara took in girls whose parents could not keep them, taught them to read, write and sew, and paid for it by contracting out their needlework. A donated mill, a bishop, a canon …

A college for women founded in Mexico City by Basque merchants, approved by Carlos III in 1753, and governed - unusually for its century - entirely by laymen, with no vows, women officers elected each…

A Basque merchants' confraternity in Mexico City spent thirty-five years and its own money building a school for orphan girls and poor widows, and then spent sixteen of them in Madrid and Rome to obta…

A school opened in Mexico City around 1547 for the mestizo sons of Spaniards, with a parallel house for mestiza girls, both under royal patronage and both still being inspected and audited by law two …

The college Vasco de Quiroga founded in Pátzcuaro to train clergy who could preach in Tarascan. A royal patent of 1543 describes its intake in its own words — sons of legitimate Spaniards, mestizos, a…

A college founded by Vasco de Quiroga at Pátzcuaro about 1540 and taken under royal patronage in 1543, whose charter describes Spaniards, mestizos and some Indians studying grammar together — the last…

A bishop's college in Michoacán whose royal patent of 1543 states in the crown's own words that it took the sons of legitimate Spaniards, mestizos, and some Indians "por ser Lenguas" so that its stude…

The college a Spanish viceroy built and endowed at his own cost in an Indian quarter of Mexico City so that the sons of Nahua lords could be taught Latin, rhetoric, logic and philosophy. Its collegian…

Schools founded by royal order for the sons of Andean caciques, because, the law says, those boys "han de gobernar á los Indios". Read from the printed law that ordered more of them and from the relac…

Crown-ordered boarding colleges in Peru where the sons of indigenous lords were schooled at royal insistence and paid for out of the Indians' own community funds. Two witnesses who were there describe…

Mexico City had a purpose-built, permanently roofed public theatre standing in the cloister of the Hospital Real de Naturales before 1673, roughly seventy years before Madrid roofed its own corrales. …

A Venetian folio of 1542 that prints, as one book, the medical encyclopaedia of Ibn Rushd of Cordoba and the therapeutic manual of Ibn Zuhr of Seville — the two Andalusi physicians Latin Europe read t…

The first printed monograph on chocolate: a quarto by a physician and surgeon of Écija, arguing against a colleague that the American drink was good for you, and printing the compound recipe, four kin…

Academic comparison of the Spanish and British colonial models in the Americas: legal incorporation and mixture of the indigenous population under Spain, land-focused settlement and displacement in Br…

Three centuries of Spanish record-keeping in the Americas are now read as data by climate science. Over 300,000 early instrumental weather observations have been recovered from twenty countries, begin…

Guide to the two-way transfer of plants, animals, people, silver and disease that followed 1492 — the process Alfred Crosby named the Columbian Exchange. Covers what moved in each direction, the demog…

Titulo XVIII of libro IIII is the food-supply law of the Indies: provisions may be carried freely through every province, corregidores may not corner the wheat trade, Castilian weights and measures ar…

Phaseolus vulgaris was domesticated twice, in Mesoamerica and in the Andes, from wild pools that had parted about 165,000 years earlier. Both reached Europe through Iberia in the sixteenth century, an…

Two Spanish-Mexican water institutions outlived the cession of 1848 into American law, and the standard United States treatise on western water rights shows how unevenly. New Mexico's community acequi…

Leyes xj to xviij of libro VIIII, título XXVII of the Recopilación govern the composición — the money settlement that let a foreigner who had entered the Indies without licence stay and trade. The cro…

Four laws regulate the men who bought the gold and silver landed from the Indies. They must trade as a company of at least two, each bonded at twenty thousand ducados; they may stand surety for nobody…

Spanish penal reformer and writer (1820-1893), a founder of prison reform advocacy in Spain. She attended university law lectures dressed as a man in the 1840s when women were barred, won an academy p…

The first church council of the Americas, held at Mexico City in 1555 under archbishop Montufar. Its chapters fix what a parish priest among Indians may and may not do: no charging for the sacraments,…

The church legislation that governed New Spain for two and a half centuries. Held at Mexico in 1585, confirmed at Rome in 1589, printed in 1622 and again in 1770, it ordered a school in every Indian t…

From a cédula of Valladolid of 20 September 1608 every encomienda granted in the Indies had to be brought to the Council of the Indies for confirmation within a fixed term, on pain of losing its fruit…

An encomendero of Cartagena lost his encomienda to a rival who appealed the governor's grant to the Council of the Indies and won twice over. He then produced a royal confirmation of the same encomien…

The council that governed Spanish America is written down here from its own rulebook: the hours it sat and the rule that no session ended until every petition had been answered, the standing order to …

The last twelve laws of libro VIII, título XXVI of the Recopilación say which royal chest pays a salary when the local one cannot. Cartagena covers Santa Marta, Panamá covers Santo Domingo's judges an…

A royal cedula of 26 December 1804 carried to the Americas an operation already running in Spain: the sale of the real estate of chantries and pious foundations and the calling in of the capital they …

The constitution promulgated at Cádiz on 19 March 1812 defined the Spanish nation as all Spaniards of both hemispheres, listed the American and Asian provinces among its territories, made citizens of …

A provincial bishop's rulebook for an Andean diocese, printed with the abuses it was written against still legible in it: parish priests fined ten pesos a year for not auditing each confraternity, may…

The synodal code of the largest archdiocese in South America, given by Lobo Guerrero in 1613 and completed by Arias de Ugarte in 1636. It bars church visitors and their notaries from charging Indians …

The constitution of the consensus: approved by the Cortes on 31 October 1978, ratified by referendum on 6 December, in force from 29 December. Drafted across the parties after four decades of dictator…

Two American cities were given self-governing merchant tribunals whose judges were elected by the merchants themselves under a title of the law of the Indies. This entry reads that title in the 1681 f…

Four laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias constitute a permanent audit office inside the Casa de Contratación of Seville for the average, the levy that paid for the convoys of the Indies run. T…

Arlegui's chronicle of Zacatecas records that the Tarahumara poisoned their arrowheads with a herb so strong that in the rising of 1690 the scratched died without remedy, because the Spaniards "ignora…

A bishop of Quito gave nine sessions of his manual for parish clergy to what is owed in conscience when Spaniards trade with, employ and tax Indians. Fear of a priest, corregidor or cacique voids the …

Five laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias state the convoy levy of the Spanish Indies trade: why it was imposed, what it falls on, and the limits the Crown wrote around it. They recite the esco…

Copalli, the aromatic resin the Nahua burned before their gods and carried in braziers to meet the first Spaniards, entered European medicine as a fumigant and ointment base. Monardes published it to …

The first printed grammar of Zapotec and the dictionary printed beside it, both from Pedro Balli's shop at Mexico City in 1578. Their author had marched to Cíbola with Vázquez de Coronado before he to…

A state post whose job description was printed in the law code: write the general history of every province of the Indies from the papers sent to the Council, and compile the natural history of its pl…

The district magistrate the Spanish crown put over indigenous pueblos in place of the encomendero: appointed from Madrid, paid a published salary, required to tour his district and forbidden to trade …

Five laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias set up the office through which the correspondence of the Spanish Atlantic passed. The chief courier of the Indies must live in Seville and take in eve…

A title of the Recopilación makes letters between Spain and the Indies free and inviolable, and orders the Indian foot-couriers paid into their own hands. Two centuries later the crown bought the post…

Off the Florida cape in May of Juan Ponce de León's first voyage the ships met water running harder than the wind, and the crown's chronicle records that the cape was named for it. Four years later th…

Havana built warships because Cuba had cedar and mahogany, and the state kept trying to reserve them. A cedula of 1622, another forbidding cuts near the capital after a private yard stripped the neare…

A survey of ninety-six provinces of a South American viceroyalty, issued serially in the annual almanac of the chief cosmographer of Peru and arranged by bishopric. Each entry gives bounds in leagues,…

When a man of no standing offered the government of Peru to keep despatches moving through the air during a war with Britain, the chief cosmographer was ordered to report, and then wrote a dissertatio…

An Aragonese who reached Lima at nineteen, took a medical doctorate there, won a chair by competitive examination and held the office of chief cosmographer of the kingdom for forty years. His annual a…

One salaried post in Madrid held two jobs: keep the crown's map and sailing-route archive of the Americas, and teach mathematics an hour a day beside the Council of the Indies. The code prints the who…

The folio dictionary printed at Madrid by Luis Sanchez in 1611 in which Castilian is explained in Castilian, with an etymology attached to almost every headword. Covarrubias worked alone, named the li…

The cattle loaded at La Gomera in the Canaries on Columbus's second voyage of 1493 founded every American Criollo breed. Genomics of Colombian, Venezuelan and Caribbean herds now reads the crossing ou…

The goats the Spanish landed in the sixteenth century were never bred back to a standard, and the populations that came out the other end are now the animal of the driest, poorest ground in Latin Amer…

The first pigs in the Americas were loaded in the Canary Islands on Columbus's second voyage of 1493. The largest survey of their descendants - 1,715 animals across 46 populations - finds Criollo pigs…

Merino wool was too valuable to export, so the sheep Spain shipped west was the coarse-wooled Churra - and five centuries later the Navajo-Churro is still genetically indistinguishable from it. The sa…

Spaniards born in the Americas were said by learned men to degenerate under American skies, and a bishop of Mexico doubted whether they could be ordained at all. The Council of the Indies told him to …

A report on Inca religion written at Cuzco by the priest of the hospital parish for natives, who says on his first page how he got it: he assembled aged people who had themselves taken part in the rit…

A herbal of Nahua medicine finished at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco on 22 July 1552, dictated in Nahuatl by the indigenous physician Martin de la Cruz and put into Latin by the indigenous L…

Six laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias prescribe how the stores bought with the convoy levy were to be accounted. Each commodity gets its own sheet, each species within a commodity is kept di…

Seven laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias carry a reform of 1650 and 1651 into the audit of the avería, the levy that paid for the convoys of the Indies run. They put the account of what the f…

Leyes xviiij to xxv of libro VIII, título X of the Recopilación set out how the quinto was computed. The fees of the Fundidor, Ensayador and Marcador mayor come off first, then the fifth of the remain…

Spanish law in the Indies forbade granting a second encomienda to a man who already held one, from a cédula of 1528 onwards, and voided a second grant made without telling the crown of the first. The …

The fullest early account of curare is chapter XII of the second tome of Gumilla's Orinoco ilustrado (Madrid, 1745). It records what the poison did, how it was made and what it was made at: a monopoly…

Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 describes the guinea pig on the page — a common little animal of the Peruvian sierra called cuy, held for very good eating and offered most frequently in sacrifices — …

An anonymous eighteenth-century manuscript from the Nuevo Reino de Granada setting out, day by day, what to do for a patient with smallpox or measles. Its author bleeds and cups in the first days, the…

The documents issued by the curia that Alfonso IX of León convoked in 1188, inscribed by UNESCO in 2013 as the oldest documentary manifestation of the European parliamentary system — the earliest surv…

In its first year the besieged parliament at Cádiz declared the dominions of both hemispheres one nation whose overseas natives held rights equal to peninsulars', forbade anyone in ecclesiastical, civ…

A royal order of 1786 sent an artillery captain into the forest of Chiapa to examine a ruined city, with a draughtsman, a requisition of Indian labourers and instructions to dig. He cleared it by fell…

Royal orders of 1791 to 1819, communicated to the viceroyalty of Mexico, told commanders what to do with soldiers who showed signs of madness: confine them safely, try them but with medical examinatio…

Guadalajara charged half a real on every fanega of maize entering its grain market, except from the clergy, the tithes, the Indians and any vecino bringing maize to eat. Ninety thousand fanegas came i…

Libro VIII, título XVIII of the Recopilación is the fiscal law of the Spanish slave trade. Its eleven laws license entry, count every person landed, charge four hundred reales a head at Acapulco and s…

Eleven laws govern the money and the conduct of the Casa de Contratación's notaries: nothing for drafting a process or carrying it to counsel, on pain of sevenfold restitution; eight maravedís a signa…

The Spanish state hydrographic office's sailing directions for the Antilles, the coasts of Tierra Firme and the Gulf of Mexico, printed at Madrid in 1837 as companion to its own charts. Its opening no…

The first navigation of the Amazon is usually told as Orellana's adventure. Two documents printed together in 1894 let it be read from both sides: the Dominican Gaspar de Carvajal's eyewitness relació…

Seven laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias protect the man who rides and the party who pays from the office that despatches them. The chief courier may not hold a courier back for better cargo;…

A daily paper began in Mexico City in 1805, half a sheet, sold from early morning at half a real at twelve named stalls. At each stall stood a box locked with a key and slotted at the top: anyone coul…

A daily newspaper printed in Mexico City, read here in its bound second tomo for 1806, from the press of a woman, Doña María Fernández de Jáuregui, under licence of the superior government. It is made…

Three laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias require every pilot and master of the Atlantic run to keep a journal of each voyage — the days of departure and arrival, the courses steered, the wind…

The first dictionary of Spanish to prove every word with a quotation from a named book, begun by an academy founded in 1713 and printed at the king's expense. Its list of vouching authors is where the…

A chronicle of the Tlaxcalan republic written in Tlaxcala by Diego Muñoz Camargo, a mestizo interpreter of the second generation. He tells the succession of the four cabeceras of the confederation and…

Spanish painter (1599-1660), court painter to Philip IV from 1623 — after one portrait, the king would allow no one else to paint him. Las Meninas, with the painter's self-portrait wearing the cross o…

The first book of mathematics printed anywhere in the Americas, issued at Mexico in 1556 — seventeen years after the press arrived and eighty-five before one reached British North America. It is not a…

The tithe of the Indies belonged to the crown by papal grant. The título extends a Castilian tariff of 1501 to America and amends it crop by crop — rice, cacao — abolishes personal and double tithes, …

In December 1782 Mexico City was cut into 8 major and 32 minor quarters, each minor one given an unpaid resident magistrate who had to keep a street book, take a house-by-house register of every inhab…

Five laws of the código's book on the Indians, after the programmatic law that opens it, settle where an indigenous family belonged. The married woman goes to her husband's town and the widow may choo…

Política Indiana libro I capítulo XI concedes the question was open. What the bull gave, §2 says, was held by grave authors to be only "el cuidado de la predicacion, conversion, y proteccion General d…

Asked to raise a loan at Guadalajara after the naval battle, the crown in 1574 told its own president to state the need, to remember that a superior's plea is commonly taken for a command, to proceed …

The chapter that forbids alienating an encomienda makes one opening for marriage. A woman holding a grant in her own name could carry it into her marriage undervalued, to meet the charges of the house…

Colonial Mexico met an unreliable climate with institutions. Water was divided among landowners by the tanda, a system of turns counted in days, with water judges to adjudicate; grain was held against…

A Dominican's history of the Mexica, built from their own painted books and from old men who remembered, finished in 1581 and left unprinted for nearly three centuries. When it was finally set in type…

From July 1936 a Barcelona haematologist collected blood from civilian donors, preserved it with citrate under refrigeration and sent it to fronts 200 kilometres away, drawing 4,000 litres from eleven…

In 1735 the dean of Alicante told a young man not to sail for the Indies: where would he turn, among the Indians, in so vast a solitude of letters? Twenty years later a Mexican theologian answered him…

Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614), Cretan by birth, Venetian by training, and Spanish by everything that made him El Greco: settled in Toledo by 1577, he fused Byzantine formation with Venetian col…

On 28 September 1783 Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar reduced the acid of wolframite with charcoal and obtained a new metal, which they called volfram — the isolation of the element the periodic table lis…

Spanish novelist and critic (1851-1921) who introduced the debate on literary naturalism to Spain with La cuestión palpitante (1882-83) and wrote its major Spanish novels, Los pazos de Ulloa (1886) am…

The grant could not be pledged, but its tribute could. The standard treatise says creditors attached the fruits of encomiendas by judicial order "cada dia", subject to three limits: the charge died wi…

The hub of the empire-comparison benchmark: eleven dimensions, sixty-one operational metrics and the coding rubrics (territorial status T0-T6, administrative reach E0-E3, measurement and causal confid…

The distribution-and-extraction dimension of the empire benchmark: what the crown actually took from the Americas and how the fiscal machine worked. Hamilton's series fix the bullion at Seville; Grafe…

The innovation-and-culture dimension of the empire benchmark loaded for the Spanish Atlantic - the 1539 press, the printed grammars and dictionaries of Quechua, Nahuatl and Guarani, the mandated chair…

The prosperity-and-welfare dimension of the empire benchmark loaded with the Maddison Project reconstructions - GDP per capita for the viceregal cores against the metropoles, c. 1600 to 1850. The data…

The institutions-and-public-goods dimension of the empire benchmark loaded for the Spanish Atlantic - hospitals ordered by law for Spanish and Indian towns, Quiroga's welfare communities, community tr…

The rights-and-autonomy dimension of the empire benchmark applied to the Spanish and British Atlantic: what legal personality, protective legislation and courts the native population held de iure in e…

The slavery-and-coercion dimension of the empire benchmark, loaded with the SlaveVoyages estimates - 12.5 million Africans embarked, 10.7 million landed, 1501-1866 - by carrier flag, destination and p…

The violence-and-demographic-harm dimension of the empire benchmark applied to the post-contact Americas: the catastrophic collapse driven principally by epidemic disease, compounded by war, dislocati…

The strongest argument for hereditary encomiendas was not about rewarding conquerors but about the Indians: a holder who knew the grant was his children's would not strip it, as tenants strip a farm t…

Institution of early Spanish America by which the crown entrusted a group of Indians to a colonist (the encomendero), entitling him to their tribute and, in practice, labor, in exchange for obligation…

What the Laws of the Indies required for the sick on the Atlantic crossing: a physician and a chief surgeon on the same salary, an apothecary, barbers, hospital brothers clothed at the crown's cost, t…

Libro IIII título XXII of the Recopilación prints the ordinances of the ensayadores mayores of Peru: assay by fire and cupel only, never by colour or hammer-blow; a register of everyone examined; stan…

A manual printed for the parish clergy of Spanish America devotes a session to a single question: should preachers enter the lands of unconquered peoples with soldiers or without them? It prints more …

Before 1794 the archives of the viceroyalty of Mexico held no enumeration — the 1742 operation had estimated families, not persons. The count ordered by the second Count of Revillagigedo returned 3,86…

Almanacs, diaries, cabildo minutes, parish burial books and hospital and cemetery ledgers kept across Spanish America are the reason a 2014 study could assemble 22 typhus epidemics in central Mexico b…

The epic of the Spanish war in Chile, written by a soldier who fought in it and often drafted on leather for want of paper. Its declared subject is Spanish valour; its argument is that the Mapuche cho…

The systematic manual of the royal treasury of Peru, by a jurist of the Indies who had been corregidor of Jauja, inspector of the royal chests, procurator of Cusco and judge in Chile. It explains wher…

One law lists, in a single sentence, every act of the Indies fleets that had to pass before the chief notary of armadas at Seville. Twenty-one more govern the notaries who sailed: enlisted men describ…

Nine laws constitute the Casa de Contratación's notaries of chamber: all the business, suits and acts belonging to their offices pass before them or any one of them "y no ante otros ningunos"; their d…

The notaries of Spanish America were licensed from Madrid, examined, required to keep their registers sewn and signed and to write out names and sums in full without abbreviations, and forbidden by la…

Spanish colonial law would not let an encomendero discharge his obligations by deputy as of right. Licence to leave for Spain belonged to the King alone, the cédulas of 1570 and 1571 barring viceroys …

A free drawing school costing twenty pesos a month, opened by the merchant guild of Buenos Aires in March 1799 and refused royal funding a year later because the Crown had graver urgencies. It was rev…

The chairs of medicine and surgery created alongside the Buenos Aires protomedicato, opened in 1801 with nine pupils and no anatomical theatre, no chemistry laboratory and no dissecting instruments — …

A school built beside the church in every Indian town of New Spain, where the choir met each working day and the boys were taught. Who learned to read was decided by rank: sons of the principales in a…

In 1530 the Empress Isabel sent six beatas to New Spain and ordered the Audiencia to build houses out of royal revenue where the daughters of Indian principals and commoners would be taught. The chron…

The Havana Economic Society's own journal printed a campaign for free primary schools that counted what the campaign had not achieved. Of some 150,000 children of school age on the island, 17,459 were…

Arlegui's 1737 inventory of the Franciscan province of Zacatecas — thirty-six houses, a hundred and sixty pueblos, over a hundred thousand administered adults — lists what those houses had to keep: a …

A Quito physician's argument, first printed in 1785, that a town can be preserved from smallpox by deliberate inoculation, and that doing so is a patriotic and a Christian act rather than a presumptio…

Snow cut on the Sierra Nevada and carried through Chalco to Mexico City was a farmed royal revenue. The treasury history of 1792 prints the auction conditions - a fixed price of one real the pound, se…

Mercury was rationed by the crown and priced by what it should yield: a miner drawing a hundred pounds was charged with manifesting a hundred and fifteen marks of silver. Mota Padilla, a lawyer of the…

Nueva Galicia drank palm and agave spirits, and a president decided the way to stop the worse home brews was to license the better one and tax it. A royal fiscal told the Council that prohibiting Indi…

A medical handbook printed at Mexico City in 1712 by a Jesuit lay brother from Silesia, written for the mission provinces of Topia, Sinaloa, the Tepehuanes, the Tarahumara, Sonora and California, whic…

Centuries before Europe fought over cargoes of it, the fertiliser later called guano was a regulated Andean resource. Garcilaso describes seabird-dung islands off the Peruvian coast allotted province …

A royal cédula of 1549 shut foreigners out of the encomiendas of the Indies, and the doctrine built on it went further: not even Spaniards could receive one unless they were present and resident in th…

Fifteen laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias set out how a pilot or master of the Carrera de Indias was licensed. The examiners swore to ask the hardest questions they knew and to vote without …

A licensed legal profession with an entrance examination behind closed doors, four years of certified apprenticeship, a professional college, a fee, a dress mark and a written ethics code carrying ten…

The sales tax of the Indies ran from two per cent in 1575 to six by 1640. It never reached Nueva Vizcaya. A governor's report of 1672, recited in a royal cedula of 1678, told the crown that more than …

The tribunals of the Holy Office founded in the Indies in 1569-70 were barred from proceeding against Indians. The Recopilación prints the bar twice and names the courts that took the jurisdiction ins…

Six laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias state who did not pay the avería, the levy that paid for the convoys of the Indies trade. Alms and sacred things shipped home, the freights, wages and s…

The crown could summon every encomendero in a province by public proclamation to produce his title, and possession without one was worth nothing. But a coloured title was enough to keep the grant unti…

A Potosi refiner promised half again as much silver and half the quicksilver. The viceroy paid the reward and let Lima ring its bells — then withheld the report to the king until the trials could be r…

Acosta had said encomenderos must serve in wars raised in their own province. The treatise argues the limit away: since the title of encomienda states none, and all the Indies lie under one king, enco…

A public-health law that moved burial out of parish churches and into ventilated ground beyond the towns, written after an epidemic traced to the corpses under a church floor. It required a medical su…

Leyes xviiij to xxvj of libro VIIII, título XXVII of the Recopilación govern the status of the foreigner who had already compounded. He is declared outside the prohibition, may reside and trade where …

Under the ordinances printed in 1766 the unit of Santa Fe was the extended household. Each of four quadrillas named a head of family whom its members could replace; house, orchard and plot were held i…

A doctor turned Augustinian friar wrote a home-medicine book for people the medical profession did not reach — "la gente pobre y ausente que carece de socorro de médicos", in Indian villages and count…

The longest discourse of the first tome of the Teatro critico argued that women are equal to men in understanding, and its author later said in print that this equality was its primary and almost tota…

A discourse written because a reader told the author he had printed a common error. Feijoo had reported that Spaniards born in America ripen early and decay early; corrected, he devoted a whole discou…

The discourse in which a Benedictine in Oviedo argues that no nation holds a monopoly on intelligence — and devotes its American section to demolishing the idea that the Indians were governed by insti…

Spanish military engineer turned naturalist who spent twenty years (1781-1801) in the Río de la Plata, producing systematic natural histories of the quadrupeds (1802) and birds (1802-05) of Paraguay —…

Ten laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias set out the procedure of the Seville average audit. The president and judges apportion each account and fix its term; the accountant's salary is paid on…

A descendant of the ruling house of Texcoco, schooled at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco and in his last years interpreter of the viceregal Indian court, who wrote the Nahua past in Spanish fr…

The last of Cajal's direct disciples cut the glossopharyngeal roots inside the skull of seventeen cats and three dogs, found the carotid body still innervated, and concluded in 1928 that it was a sens…

In the cholera summer of 1885 a physician at Tortosa injected more than thirty thousand people in the villages of Valencia with a broth culture of Koch's comma bacillus. A French commission declared t…

A forty-five-mile line from Havana to the sugar town of Güines, ordered by the crown in 1834, paid for with a two-million-peso loan raised in London by a colonial development board, opened in sections…

In the Indies and in some royal cédulas the encomenderos were called Feudatarios and the other Spanish inhabitants Domiciliarios. The standard treatise explains the usage from the oath: the encomender…

Política Indiana libro I capítulo XI closes by answering Bodin, who granted that Alexander VI could give the Indies but held the kings thereby became vassals and feudatories of the Church. §§38-39 den…

A Spanish military surgeon published in 1921, in a Spanish journal, the first description of human thoracolumbar epidural anaesthesia — anatomy, technique, a case series and complications — and named …

The market magistracy of Mexico City: the corregidor and the regidores fieles executores, on a perpetual grant from Charles V and Juana, under ordinances of 1718 confirmed in 1724. By the viceregal or…

A papal brief cut the Indians' days of obligation to about a dozen. That relief immediately became a labour question - if they need not keep the other feasts, may they be compelled to work them, so th…

Seven laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias govern the closing of the convoy levy's accounts. The paymaster is audited within a month of a fleet sailing; expenses incurred in the Indies are scru…

Horses re-entered the Americas on Columbus's second voyage, landing at La Isabela on Hispaniola on 28 November 1493. The Caribbean became the breeding reservoir from which horses reached Mexico, Peru …

Printing reached the western hemisphere in 1539, when the Seville printing house of Cromberger — under royal permission obtained in 1537 — established a press in Mexico City run by Juan Pablos, almost…

The first tome of the flora of Peru and Chile, printed at Madrid in 1798. Its preface states the rule the work was written to: with every species, the soil where it grows wild, the month it was seen i…

The first grammar of a Mayan language of Guatemala to reach a printing press, made in Guatemala City in 1753 by a Franciscan parish priest. Its title promises not one language but a parallel of three …

The scheduled Atlantic convoy of the Indies trade: two fleets a year, each sailing in company with warships, paid for by a levy prorated over every cargo aboard — the king's own silver included — and …

A treatise printed in 1900 by the Jesuits of the Manila Observatory that divides the Philippines into three seismic zones by parallels of latitude, names the epicentral foci in each, tabulates their t…

A charitable fund built from private Mexican donations that financed the settlement of the Californias from 1697, at a moment when the royal treasury had given up paying for it. It carried the mission…

Four laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias carry the working style of the Contaduría Mayor de Cuentas of Castile into the audit of the avería, the levy that paid for the convoys of the Indies ru…

Leyes xij to xxiij of libro VIII, título XXVIII of the Recopilación close it with the procedure of the lawful warrant: a junta decides by majority and the outvoted may enter their votes in a book kept…

A royal physician's book on the drugs of the East Indies whose title misdescribes it. The American materia medica keeps breaking into chapters named for Asian drugs — guayacán inside the chapter on Ch…

Spanish painter and etcher (1746-1828), court painter to three kings, whose career runs from Rococo tapestry cartoons to the war reportage of the 3rd of May 1808 and the black paintings of his own wal…

A creole from Popayan who held three crown scientific posts at once - member of the Royal Botanical Expedition, keeper of the Bogota observatory, professor of mathematics at the Colegio del Rosario - …

The most venerated image in the colonial Andes was carved by an Aymara-speaking Indian of Copacabana who had no training and no licence to practise the art. An Augustinian printed at Lima in 1621 what…

A Franciscan who learned Tarascan in 1536, founded a string of towns in the sierra of Michoacán with a church and a hospital in each, and in 1540 laid out Uruapan himself — site, plaza, streets, orcha…

A law of 1618, compiled into the code of the Indies, strips an encomendero of his encomienda if he obstructs the marriage of any Indian man or woman held in it, and orders parish priests not to marry …

Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 names two pulses the Indians grew for themselves, frisoles and pallares, and states that the European chickpea, broad bean and lentil were not there before the Spaniar…

A final judgment ordered an encomienda restored and never mentioned the fruits that had also been claimed. Was the defendant absolved of them, or could a fresh suit be brought? Libro III capítulo XXXI…

Who kept the tribute of an encomienda while its title was in dispute turned on possession, title and good faith. Libro III capítulo XXXI of the Política Indiana sets out the rules: perception of the f…

The statute behind the reducción. Libro VI, título III of the Recopilación orders the Indians gathered into towns, requires sites with water, woodland, farmland and a league of common pasture, forbids…

Leyes xxvj to xxxiij of libro VIII, título X of the Recopilación regulate the room where American silver was quinted. Officials must attend; the doors are kept shut and one taxpayer enters at a time; …

Every indigenous town in New Spain was entitled by law to a square of land measured outward for each cardinal point, and the size of that square and the point it was measured from were fought over for…

The commentary on mining law written by a Mexican-born lawyer acting as the Mexico City merchants' deputy at the court of Madrid, and printed there in 1761. It is law and metallurgy in one book: along…

The animal chapters of libro nono of the Comentarios Reales carry something no later account reproduces: a running price series for Old World livestock in Peru between 1544 and 1590, taken down by a w…

Castilian law treated marriage as a partnership whose gains belong equally to both spouses, with the wife's own property staying hers. American lawyers printed that doctrine in English in 1839, and in…

In 1599 the crown told the Casa de la Contratacion its sea charts were wrong. Andres Garcia de Cespedes, Cosmografo Mayor de las Indias, sat at Seville with its officers, cosmographers and pilots and …

A treatise on the use, building and government of ships, printed at Mexico City by Pedro Ocharte in 1587 and written by a judge of the Audiencia who had already tested American timbers, cotton canvas …

The report an oidor of the Audiencia of Guatemala sent to Philip II on 8 March 1576, out of an inspection tour the crown had ordered for the redress of injustices done to the Indians. Inside it is the…

A Dominican who had lived nine years in Peru and afterwards in New Spain took one question — where the peoples of the Americas came from — and answered it by a method rather than a thesis. He collecte…

While refusing both alliance and recognition, the Spanish crown routed material aid to the Continental Army through a Bilbao merchant house. Arthur Lee's papers, printed by resolution of Congress in 1…

The last twelve laws of libro VIII, título XXVII of the Recopilación build a reporting system over the royal treasury of the Indies: a yearly account of extraordinary spending, and an annual return na…

Six laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias govern what the avería, the levy that paid for the convoys of the Indies run, could be spent on. They require an itemised return to the Council of each …

Leyes vij to xj of libro VIII, título XXVIII of the Recopilación name the heads of spending that no governor in the Indies might authorise, give the objecting treasury officer a right to a written cer…

Population genomics has given the mestizaje argument an evidentiary base that neither chronicles nor polemic could supply: Native American ancestry that tracks pre-Columbian population density, admixt…

The grammar of Purepecha printed at Mexico by Juan Pablos in 1558, sixteen years before the better-known Lagunas Arte and surviving in a single incomplete copy that left the country. Its opening warni…

A Spanish operation for one of the deadliest emergencies in eighteenth-century surgery. Instead of cutting upward and outward across dangerous vessels, Gimbernat divided the constricting structure inw…

A chapter of a 1742 chronicle walks through a century of one colonial city's accounts and finds both halves of the story on the same pages. The propios paid for bullfights, players and refreshments fo…

The printed manual by which the Spanish crown tried to keep a living plant alive across an ocean. Written by the first professor of the Madrid botanical garden and sent out with a royal circular to th…

The crown chronicler's see-by-see inventory of the American church, printed at Madrid in 1649. Its dedication counts what the monarchy had founded overseas - sees, prebends, convents, universities, co…

A royal cedula of 1795 approved a printed price list for the favours the Camara de Indias could grant. It charged 500 reales to dispense a man from the legal quality of pardo and 800 from that of quin…

The scarlet dyestuff of Oaxaca was bred on nopal plots under a husbandry that a Mexican compilation of 1855 describes down to the basket journeys carrying the mother insects nine leagues into the sier…

Mexico City had fifty craft guilds with their own ordinances, most of them older than the eighteenth century. In 1798 the viceroy overruled the embroiderers' guild in favour of a poor widow who wanted…

The earliest witness opened here is Sahagún, who describes Tepeyac in the 1570s as a Tonantzin pilgrimage the friars found suspect. The apparition account enters print in the next century, is cited by…

Guava is a Neotropical fruit that modern work calls semi-domesticated. Oviedo's chapter on the guayabo, written in the Caribbean and printed in full in 1851, already records the two facts the genetics…

The first American remedy to become a European blockbuster, and the first to be discredited. Guaiac wood reached Spain by 1508 as the pox spread, was sold as lignum sanctum, was cornered by the Fugger…

For thirteen years the Spanish crown tried to end the Arauco war by giving it up: a fixed frontier, no offensive campaigns, missionaries instead of soldiers, and a Jesuit granted authority equal to th…

In 1541 the peoples of the sierras of Nueva Galicia rose, killed Pedro de Alvarado's army in the field and nearly emptied Guadalajara. Mota Padilla's chronicle prints what most accounts leave out: the…

The wars between the Hiaqui nation of the Sinaloa frontier and the captain Diego Martinez de Hurdaide, and the peace that ended them, told by the losing side's own printed history. It records a Spanis…

In 1611 Covarrubias called the guitar "no more than a cowbell", so easy to strum that "there is no stable boy who is not a guitar player", and mourned the vihuela it had displaced. In 1674 Gaspar Sanz…

The natural history of the Orinoco written by the Jesuit mission superior Joseph Gumilla and printed at Madrid in a revised second edition in 1745. Its twelfth chapter is the first extended European a…

The hanging bed of the Antilles, set down in engineering detail by a Spanish royal chronicler in 1535: the netted cotton cloth, the henequén cords, the trick of lying across it rather than along it, a…

Spanish conqueror (1485-1547) who led the 1519-1521 campaign that brought down the Mexica (Aztec) empire and founded New Spain. The record supports both his extraordinary generalship and diplomacy and…

Governor of the southern provinces at the turn of the seventeenth century, beaten and taken prisoner on the way to the strait of Magellan, and the man who told Madrid he was not strong enough to impos…

A Nahua from Tetzcuco, among the first pupils of the college at Tlatelolco, who translated Latin and Spanish into Nahuatl for sense rather than word by word, and who is named in print as the man with …

Spanish explorer (c. 1500-1542) who led the 1539-1543 expedition through the interior of today's southeastern United States, the first European crossing of the Mississippi River basin. The expedition'…

Before the narrative of his Décadas, the crown's chronicler of the Indies put a separate book: a systematic geography of Spanish America, keyed to engraved tablas that drew the boundaries of each audi…

The eighth and last Decade of the official history of the Indies, and the volume in which its author explains how such a history was made. Its dedication records that the king and the Council of the I…

The first volume of Lorenzo Hervás's catalogue of the world's languages, printed at Madrid in 1800 and given entirely to the Americas. Hervás classified languages by their grammatical structure rather…

The third book of the Curia Philipica's second tome is a working code of ships, seafarers, passengers and cargo for the Spanish Atlantic and Pacific. Seafarers count neither among the living nor the d…

The chapter on failed merchants in the Curia Philipica sorts insolvency by fault before amount. The merchant broken by shipwreck, fire, war or a debtor who did not pay is blameless: no criminal proces…

A Seville surgeon's argument that head wounds should be closed and dried rather than opened with scraping-irons and trepan drills, made not only from Galen and Hippocrates but from a tally he had draw…

A house taken from the expelled Jesuits became Quito's poorhouse in 1785, funded by a bishop's pastoral appeal that raised over seven thousand pesos and then by earmarked levies on sugar, wine and clo…

A royal poorhouse for orphans, foundlings and the destitute begun at Oviedo in 1752, whose printed ordinances carry a first-person argument for it by the minister who promoted it. The case is demograp…

Clause 9 of Hernán Cortés's testament of 1547 orders the hospital he had begun in Mexico City finished at his own cost, to a plan drawn in Spain that year. The document is worth reading for the financ…

A hospital founded in Mexico City in the first years after the conquest under the advocation of la Purísima Concepción, endowed by Hernán Cortés in the same testament whose clauses 39 to 41 order his …

The hospital Hernán Cortés founded at Huitzillan appears in the city council's own books in 1524 and was still working when a government geographer surveyed the city in 1867. It was endowed and then b…

Two printed witnesses, a century apart, record a cradle-hospital at Quiroga's Santa Fe outside Mexico City where exposed infants were baptised, given salaried wet-nurses, clothed and raised until they…

A leprosarium founded at Mexico City in the first years after the conquest, pulled down within a decade by the president of the audiencia who wanted the site, refounded by a physician in 1572, made fa…

A hospital opened in Mexico City by the first bishop for sufferers of the venereal disease, who by his own account were received in no hospital of the city and died on the roads and in the Indian town…

The Valencia hospital founded after Father Jofré's sermon of 24 February 1409 — provoked by seeing a mentally ill man beaten in the street — and financed by eleven citizens with papal and royal backin…

A royal hospital in Mexico City founded to treat the indigenous population - the first in Mexico dedicated to it - whose cemetery has been excavated. Over 600 people lie in mass burials laid down in h…

Guadalajara's royal hospital lived on a ninth and a half of the tithes of a whole bishopric. The cathedral chapter ran it until a crown attorney won it for the royal patronage in 1683; the audiencia t…

Every January the gazette of Mexico City printed how many patients each hospital had taken in the year before, how many had left, how many had died and how many were still in bed, and once worked out …

The Peruvian viceroyalty built hospitals reserved for indigenous people from 1548, and paid for them with a levy on indigenous tribute, the tomin de hospital - so the charity came from the pockets of …

A lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, writing in 1742, records that after a general pestilence the religious arbitrated that every pueblo have a hospital, and that in his day no pueblo lacked one …

In the middle of a chronicle of conquest, a lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara stops reporting what exists and argues for what does not: a hospital for the mentally ill of both sexes, whom the hos…

Guadalajara's first hospital was not founded by the crown or by an order. A lay confraternity established in 1551 added hospitality to its chapel and took a licence in 1557; a second hospital followed…

A 1541 order that hospitals be founded in every town of the Indies, Spanish and Indian alike, codified with twelve further laws into the título "De los Hospitales, y Cofradías". It fixes where a hospi…

A physician's proposal, addressed to Philip II, that the state appoint deputies to test every child's aptitude and assign him the science he is fit for. Huarte grounds ability in the temperament of th…

Amaranth is best known for a story — that Spain banned it — repeated everywhere and sourced nowhere. A dictionary printed at Mexico in 1571 lists nine kinds of the grain by colour under their Nahuatl …

One law of the Recopilación orders viceroys and presidents to find out which children of dead Spaniards and mestizos are wandering their districts, gather them, and appoint tutors "que miren por sus p…

Long before Europe had a word for an elastic solid, Spanish books described one. Oviedo wrote in the 1530s that these balls bounce, again and again, by themselves; Molina's 1571 Mexico vocabulary glos…

The word hurricane entered European languages from the Caribbean, and the earliest detailed European account of a hurricane says so: Oviedo's chapter of 1535 defines huracán as a word of the island's …

A country-by-country estimate of what the Spanish and Portuguese crowns actually administered during the Iberian Union - juridical area versus effective area, and population under each crown, publishe…

Citrus seeds taken on at Gomera on Columbus's second voyage, and peaches brought from Chile by Nunez de Prado in the 1550s, became naturalised populations that Andean and Guarani communities took over…

Arlegui's 1737 chronicle states a standing rule of the Franciscan custody of Zacatecas — every newly arrived friar was to be taught the language of the nation he was posted to — and prints what it pro…

Illegitimate birth barred a man from holy orders and from any benefice with cure of souls. The bishop of Quito's manual asks whether bishops in the Indies could dispense that bar, and answers that the…

A Piedmontese printer who had worked three years in Mexico moved his shop to Lima and in 1584 produced the first book printed in South America: the trilingual Doctrina christiana of the Third Council …

A press was licensed in Havana in 1735; a royal cedula of 1774 refused a second one and forbade any press but the government's; the Captains General did not enforce it and four offices were working by…

Books printed not in a viceregal capital but in Indian towns: a ritual manual "Laureti typis" in 1721, Montoya's Guaraní grammar reissued at Santa María la Mayor in 1724, and two devotional works whos…

The first printing press of Buenos Aires was not owned by a printer, a university or the crown's treasury: it was assigned to the city's foundling home, which took its profits. The types were the disu…

The author of the Comentarios Reales de los Incas (first part, 1609) called himself an Inca and a native of Cuzco, wrote from Spain, and set out to correct Spanish historians of Peru on the ground tha…

A judge of an American Audiencia could not marry in his district, nor let his children marry there; could not buy land or houses, sow wheat or maize, lend at interest, hold a pearl canoe, work a mine,…

A law of 1555, printed as libro II título I ley iiij of the Recopilación, orders that the laws and good customs the Indians had anciently for their government be kept and executed — while conditioning…

Two cross-referenced laws of the Recopilación keep the indigenous population out of the tribunals of the Holy Office: because proceeding against Indians is prohibited to the inquisitors, faith cases g…

A law of 20 June 1567, printed in the title on jail visits, regulates what happens to an Indian jailed for a debt he cannot pay. He may be handed to his own creditor to work it off — never sold to a t…

An encomienda was not divided among a man's children, not brought into hotchpot, and not counted against the eldest son's legal share: it passed entire to the one called to succeed, because "la misma …

Three laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias add to the avería, the levy that paid for the convoys of the Indies trade, and fix who may give it orders. The proceeds of pardons compounded for unre…

The water-powered sugar mill reached Hispaniola in the 1510s and by the 1530s the island had twenty of them and four horse-driven trapiches. Oviedo, a royal official resident there, priced one at ten …

Potosí gets rain three or four months a year, so its silver industry ran on stored water. Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 counts the plant: seven gated reservoirs of about 1,700 varas round and three…

Why did the crown take encomienda suits away from courts that tried murder? Libro III capítulo XXX answers at §14: the revolts the encomiendas caused, the ill treatment of the Indians they occasioned,…

On 9 July 1714 a chest was opened at Guadalajara before physicians, surgeons, notaries and two royal scribes sent by the audiencia. They closed the doors to exclude a draught, used two neighbouring bi…

A royal instruction sent to viceroys, governors, corregidores, alcaldes mayores and intendants telling them how to choose, prepare and ship the natural productions of their districts to Madrid. It dro…

A royal code for the Spanish Indies that fined owners for underfeeding or abandoning the people they held, ordered every death or absence reported to a judge within three days, prosecuted anyone but t…

A general order of the audiencia of Mexico voiding every sale, loan, pledge or lease of indigenous land made without licence, including sales between Indians and sales of land held by private inherita…

In the same packet as the famous 1577 questionnaire, Spain sent the Americas a second printed sheet almost nobody reads: instructions for observing eclipses of the moon in order to fix latitude and lo…

Leyes viiij to xiij of libro VIII, título XXX of the Recopilación govern what may be in a royal consignment and who may touch it. Bars are numbered from one each year and stamped with year, number, fi…

A salaried, sworn interpreting service attached to every royal court in Spanish America: an oath to add and conceal nothing, a ban on taking so much as food from a litigant, a printed fee of one or tw…

Política Indiana libro I capítulo XI §8 records that a "notable Carta, ò Protestacion" was ordered "para que se leyesse, è intimasse à los Indios, antes de llegar à hacerles guerra, ni daño alguno", t…

Spanish naval officer who designed and built the Peral submarine — launched at La Carraca on 8 September 1888, electrically propelled and torpedo-armed — which in trials fired the first torpedo launch…

The woman who inherited command of a Pacific expedition by testament. Dying at Santa Cruz in October 1595, the adelantado Álvaro de Mendaña left doña Isabel Barreto universal heir and named her govern…

Queen of Castile (r. 1474-1504) whose marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon created the dynastic union behind early modern Spain. She financed the 1492 Columbus voyage, and her testament instructed just tre…

Rectress of the Corunna Foundling Home and the only woman on the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition (1803-1813), responsible for the care of the foundling boys whose arms carried the smallpox vacc…

Spanish dramatist (1866-1954), awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the happy manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama". His best-known play, Los int…

The Havana Economic Society's botanical garden published an annual return in its own journal: what was sown and weeded month by month, four cases of classified Cuban plants sent to the botanical garde…

A Mexican-born astronomer who taught himself mathematics after finding neither professor nor books nor instruments at his college, learned indigenous languages and the reading of Aztec glyphs from an …

Spanish naval officer and scientist (1713-1773) who, with Antonio de Ulloa, served on the Franco-Spanish geodesic mission to Quito (1735-1744) that measured a degree of the meridian at the equator and…

A wage clause in the personal-service laws of the Recopilación de leyes de las Indias that is rarely quoted: the day-wage of Indians is what they themselves will take, no tariff imposed, and paid "en …

Spanish dramatist, civil engineer and statesman (1832-1916), the first Spaniard to win a Nobel Prize. He shared the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature with the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, cited for r…

Son of a freed Black woman and shut out of Lima's university by the purity-of-blood statutes, Davalos took his medical degree at Montpellier and in 1787 offered the Societe Royale de Medecine of Paris…

A Barcelona surgeon who, treating the wounded of a bombed city, standardised a handling of compound fractures that broke with the reflexes of the last war: excise early, do not suture, do not drain, s…

A Franciscan who had not wanted to learn Nahuatl, and who published eleven books in it, opened his last big one by naming the eight Nahua scholars who had made them: where each was born, what he could…

Spanish aeronautical engineer whose autogiro C.4, flown at Getafe on 17 January 1923, was the first successful rotary-wing aircraft of any kind. His articulated rotor with flapping hinges solved the p…

The Franciscan who learned Tarascan in 1536 and spent the next decades gathering people the Spanish conquest had driven into the sierra back into towns he laid out himself — plaza, streets, orchards, …

The Franciscan sent to Mexico as bishop-elect and Protector of the Indians, who quarrelled with the first Audiencia over that office, brought the first printing press of the Americas with the viceroy,…

A Spanish naval officer set out to take shipbuilding out of the hands of carpenters and put it on mechanics. The 1771 treatise reviews the European literature by name, rejects Bouguer's masting rules …

Two essays by a Chilean-born Jesuit expelled with his order and writing in Italy: a natural history that carried Chilean species into the Linnaean system, and a civil history whose second book treats …

A Dominican bishop of Guatemala who made the wage and the forced service of Indians a matter of the confessional: he refused absolution to anyone holding an Indian in service or repartimiento until th…

Spanish poet (1881-1958), awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which in Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistical purity". Author of Platero …

The one first-rank dramatist of the Golden Age born in the Americas, printed in Madrid in 1628 and Barcelona in 1634 while he held office as relator of the Council of the Indies. His nineteenth-centur…

Basque mariner (c. 1487-1526) who commanded the ship Victoria on the final leg of the Magellan expedition and completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth, returning to Spain in September 1522 wi…

Libro VII título I of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias governs the pesquisidor and the juez de comisión, the judge sent out from an audiencia for a single job. Its first law confines them to unavoi…

The last four laws of libro VII título I of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias deal with judges commissioned over Indian grievances, cochineal and the ban on selling wine to Indians. One of them reco…

A bishop of Quito devotes a treatise of his manual for parish priests to gambling, and defends play as morally neutral before regulating it. The disciplinary canon he then quotes in full is aimed not …

Libro VII, título II of the Recopilación caps play at ten gold pesos a day, bans dice outright and makes Castile's gaming fines fourfold in the Indies. Its own recitals place the gaming houses in the …

The Mexican constitutional action that lets any inhabitant ask a federal judge to protect any right the constitution grants — not only personal liberty — against a law or an act of any authority, and …

Every royal officer in the Spanish Indies, from a village corregidor to the viceroy of Peru, had to stand a public audit when his term ended, and could not be appointed to anything else without the ce…

Six laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias settle who judged the convoy levy of the Spanish Indies trade and what happened to those who evaded it. They give it a judge drawn from the Casa's lawye…

A standing court in every American Audiencia, staffed by a rotating oidor, whose business was to find the estate of anyone who died in the Indies, inventory it, auction it, ship the proceeds to Sevill…

A standing court in Mexico City for the lawsuits of indigenous litigants, still being regulated in 1784 by a printed cartel that gave it two salaried advocates, two solicitors, a general interpreter, …

The royal expedition delivered cowpox to America in 1804; the harder problem was keeping a living fluid alive afterwards, year on year, in cities without refrigeration. Two theatres show how it was do…

In 1555 the Segovian physician Andrés Laguna printed at Antwerp the first Castilian translation of Dioscorides, with his own commentary and plant figures. In the nightshade annotation he set down some…

The grammar and dictionary of the language of Michoacan printed at Mexico in 1574, four years after a Franciscan working out of Tarecuato and Guayangareo submitted it for approval. Page one announces …

The Franciscan who burned the Maya books wrote, in the same account, the list of Maya day signs and sound signs that became the first key anyone had to reading them. Both sentences sit on facing pages…

A Guatemalan Jesuit, expelled from America with his order in 1767, spent his Italian exile writing fifteen books of Latin hexameters about the country he would not see again: the lakes of Mexico and t…

In 1554 the viceroy of Peru was sent out with the power to grant encomiendas withdrawn from him, and told instead to find other ways to reward the deserving. He answered by raising companies of horse …

The law book compiled at the court of Alfonso X from 23 June 1256, which Castile never let go: pushed to last place in the order of authorities in 1348 and kept there for five centuries, taught as der…

The road book of the royal post inspection that laid out the stages between Buenos Aires and Lima, published in 1773 over the name of a Cuzco-born narrator who calls himself Concolorcorvo. It is a wor…

The last charge of the encomienda was to restore everything wrongly taken: to the injured Indians or their heirs, and failing them to their communities, churches and hospitals. Restitution was commonl…

The first systematic bibliography of the Americas, printed at Madrid in 1629 by a jurist raised in Lima and employed as relator of the Council of the Indies. Its catalogue is indexed by the language a…

A book on a narrow question - which grants in the Americas need the king's confirmation - that became the first systematic treatment of the royal law of the Indies. Leon Pinelo, raised in Lima, had sp…

The book a criollo astronomer of Mexico City wrote about two Mexica monuments dug out of the main square in 1790, arguing from Nahuatl manuscripts and codices in his own hands that their makers had ge…

Spanish engineer (1852-1936) who built the Telekino — recognized by an IEEE Milestone as a pioneer of wireless remote control — designed the Whirlpool Aero Car still operating over the Niagara gorge s…

A Provisión issued at Malines on 20 October 1545 took every suit over an encomienda away from the governors and Audiencias of the Indies and reserved it privatively to the king. Libro III capítulo XXX…

The título of the Indies code headed "De la libertad de los Indios" is where Spanish law made exceptions to its own principle, and where it took one back. Its laws forbid selling an Indian "porque son…

Libro VI, título II of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias opens with the law declaring the Indians free and not subject to servitude. Consolidating six orders from 1526 to 1548, it bars captivity eve…

The second book of the Política Indiana opens on the liberty of the Indians by naming its accusers — Grotius and Las Casas — then reporting the case against liberty at full strength: a bishop it calls…

Six laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias govern how money left the chest of the avería, the levy that paid for the convoys of the Indies trade. No sum comes out without a recorded resolution of…

Fourteen laws on what could be printed about the Indies, what could be shipped there and who checked it. The título forbids novels in 1543, sends grammars of indigenous languages to a local examiner r…

Five laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias govern the working day and the paper of the audit office of the average at Seville. They set six hours a day with two half-days off, pay the salary onl…

Seven laws of libro VI, título V of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias make the tribute assessment a ceiling and police the men who collect it. An encomendero may take nothing beyond the tasa "aunque…

Having argued the encomendero's military service as far as it would go, the treatise turns and limits it. A holder whose grant will not meet the cost serves at his lord's expense or may ask for an ayu…

A bando of 1769 required every house in Mexico City to build a covered refuse pit and a masonry cesspit vented to the roof, banned tipping into the streets and acequias, and set convict carts to empty…

Hernández's remedies, printed by Ximénez in Mexico in 1615, describe a great tree the Nahua call xochiocotzotl whose incised bark yields the liquor Spaniards named liquidámbar yndiana, and record it p…

A village animal-doctor of Aragon printed, in 1734, a case against bleeding as a routine. He complains that masters open a vein because the authors order it and not because the case indicates it, surv…

The dramatist who gave the Spanish stage its repertoire and who is quoted for a number he never verified: 1,500 plays by his own count, 1,800 by his first biographer's. Twentieth-century attribution s…

A working Seville master carpenter put the geometry of the Andalusian timber roof into print — thirty-two chapters of template-squares, muqarnas clusters, land valuation, artillery calibre and sundial…

A surgical manual printed at Mexico City by Antonio Ricardo in 1578, written by the surgeon and nurse of the hospital for Indians of that city — a man with no medical degree, who signed himself by his…

The first attempt to describe every part of the Spanish Indies in one book, compiled by the cosmographer-chronicler of the Council of the Indies between 1571 and 1574 and left in manuscript for three …

A remedy book put together in New Spain by a hermit who was not a physician, its cures tried at the hospital of Huaxtepec and keyed to Nahuatl plant and bird names. The Madrid 1708 printing read here …

Política Indiana libro I capítulo XII §§28-35 is where the crown's own jurist moves the blame: the Indians gave cause by their customs and treasons; the killing was done by their vices, earthquakes, i…

The zoologist of the Royal Botanical Expedition of New Granada published in the Semanario a memoir on the snakes of the kingdom and on the remedies for their bites. It sorts the remedies by how they a…

The only grammar of Muisca ever printed, by a Dominican born in Bogotá who held the chair of the language there, set in Madrid in 1619 with a character not in the Spanish alphabet because the language…

Spanish Baroque sculptor (1652-1706), trained in her father Pedro Roldán's Seville workshop, who rose to escultora de cámara — sculptor to the royal chamber — under Charles II in 1692: a woman holding…

The only printed grammar and dictionary of Lule and Tonocoté, two Chaco languages that no longer have speakers. A Sardinian Jesuit working on the Tucumán frontier put the languages into rules and got …

A Mexican imprint of 1615 counts the uses of the agave the Nahua called metl one by one and says the plant alone could supply almost everything human life needs. A creole naturalist of 1788 claimed mo…

The Canaries are usually a waypoint in this story - the last watering stop before the Atlantic. Isotopes in 66 skeletons from Gran Canaria turn the islands into the measuring instrument instead. Befor…

Spain's great Enlightenment scientific circumnavigation: five years, the corvettes Descubierta and Atrevida, hydrographic surveys and natural-history collections from the Americas to the Philippines a…

Oviedo opens his manatee chapter by saying that neither Pliny nor Albertus Magnus wrote of this animal and that Spain has none. He then records flippers in place of arms, hide without scales, grazing …

The peanut is an American domesticate the Spanish world moved rather than made. Genetics and biogeography place its origin in southeastern Bolivia, where both wild progenitors still grow near Villa Mo…

Leyes iiij to viiij of libro VIII, título X of the Recopilación govern when American metal had to be declared and where it had to be quinted. A barterer has thirty days and must post sureties; the fif…

The annual sailing link between Acapulco and Manila that from 1571 to 1815 carried American silver west and Asian goods east — the first sustained trade route connecting the Americas with Asia, and in…

A Spanish army surgeon who, between a colonial war in Morocco and a children's ward in Madrid, was treating open fractures by excision and sealed plaster fifteen years before the Civil War made the te…

Spanish composer (1876-1946), in the state archives' own description the most important and universal Spanish composer of the twentieth century. Formed by Pedrell in Madrid and by the Paris of Debussy…

In 1775 the royal geographer Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla issued at Madrid a large map of South America compiled, its own title says, from original maps and reports adjusted to astronomical observ…

On 30 April 1751 the collegiate chapter of the Guadalupe sanctuary outside Mexico City assembled the most credited painters of the city, took the glass off an image, and asked them to judge by the rul…

The first printed description of an Amazonian language of the Bolivian lowlands, licensed at Lima in December 1701 and printed there with a vocabulary, a catechism and a confessionary bound in. Its op…

Ley xxxiiij of libro VIII, título X of the Recopilación taxes wrought gold and silver in the Indies and builds a procedure to make the tax visible in the object. The bullion is weighed and entered in …

Política Indiana libro I capítulo XI §§29-37 states the objection — that preaching, commerce and navigation must be free to every nation, with Grotius's Mare Liberum named in the footnote — and answer…

Spanish molecular biologist (1938-2019), formed in Severo Ochoa's New York laboratory, who introduced molecular biology to Spain and whose phage phi29 research yielded the phi29 DNA polymerase — a hig…

Spanish philosopher (1904-1991), formed in the Madrid of Ortega y Gasset, who spent forty-five years in exile after the Civil War — Paris, New York, Havana, Mexico — and received, after her return, th…

The thirteen-chapter treatise in which a Jesuit historian argued that debasing the coinage is a tax levied without consent, and therefore theft; that money has two values which a well-ordered commonwe…

Peruvian-born writer (1936-2025), Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". A Spanish nat…

In 1804 a Jesuit expelled from New Spain published in Rome, in Italian and with plates, the first European book devoted to two Mesoamerican buildings. Pedro Jose Marquez worked at one remove, from two…

A friar from Pamplona who offered to be carried into China as a slave if that was the only way in, and who went instead as an envoy from Manila in 1575 with a friar born in Mexico. He came back with p…

An almanac, cosmography and natural history computed for the sky over Mexico rather than shipped from Spain, printed in 1606 by its author, the crown's cosmographer. Its prologue says why: books broug…

In pueblos where no grain but maize grew and the nearest wine landed two hundred leagues away, mass was sometimes simply not said. The bishop of Quito's manual works the problem as canon law - and ref…

Five friars are recorded as having written grammars, dictionaries, sermons and catechisms in Matlatzinca; not one was printed. By 1862 only two of the bodies of work could be found, both in manuscript…

After the hieroglyphic books were burned, Maya towns went on keeping their own histories in Maya, in the alphabet the missions had taught them, and went on copying them into the eighteenth century. Th…

Under the reign usually written off as the nadir of Spanish power, the monarchy ran standing military hospitals from Mechelen to Cartagena, put a surgeon in every regiment and a physician, surgeon and…

Between 1717 and 1778 the American medicinal plants landed legally in Spain tripled, from 45 tonnes a year to 155 - cinchona, jalap, sarsaparilla, ipecacuanha, guaiacum, the balsams. The knowledge tha…

In 1812 the Alta California missions were asked, among much else, what plants the Indians used as medicine. Thirteen of eighteen answered that they used them; between them they named sixteen species. …

Spanish America measured water as an aperture, not a volume: a buey was a hole one vara square, subdivided into surcos, naranjas, reales and pajas, so that a grant was a fixed share of a moving stream…

In 1750 the Real Tribunal del Protomedicato had a manual written for the women it was about to begin examining again. The prologue says why: the examination of midwives had been suspended in Castile a…

The printed defence of the Castilian towns that had replaced street begging with a municipal alms fund. Its author advised the reform at Zamora, was ordered to set down his grounds, and answers the th…

A campaign of petitions, some of them made public, by which a pilot tried for a decade to get a fleet sent back to the South Sea. The crown treated his written memorial as an asset transmissible to a …

A Franciscan history of New Spain written under a written order from Rome, dedicated to a superior in 1611, and not printed until 1870 — 259 years between the dedication and the press. Its second book…

The book that told early modern Europe what China was. Compiled at Rome in 1585 by an Augustinian who never entered China, out of the reports of friars who had, it was reprinted and translated across …

In 1805 a Spaniard published in London a complete collection of tables for finding longitude by lunar distance. The Commissioners of Longitude and the East India Company each voted money to cut its pr…

A Dominican manual of commercial morality written for the merchants who dealt on the steps of Seville cathedral, and the place where one of them set down what the Cape Verde traffic actually was: manu…

Leyes viij to xj of libro VIII, título XXVII of the Recopilación order that every pension charged on a royal chest in America be shifted onto vacant Indian encomiendas "para que se vayan extinguiendo,…

The cinnabar of Huancavelica, worked from 1564, gave Peru its own supply of the mercury that silver amalgamation consumed. The achievement has a measured price: an estimated 56,000 tons of mercury vap…

A paper printed at Lima from January 1791 by men writing under Greek pseudonyms, whose stated purpose was to dispel the prejudices by which less instructed pens had degraded Peru and its wits from the…

A paper begun at Mexico City on 17 October 1772 by Josef Ignacio Bartolache, doctor of the Real Universidad, appearing every Wednesday because that is the day the posts of the kingdom left the capital…

Mexico City's cabildo drew up ordinances for the herds around 1540; the crown confirmed them in 1542 and ordered the institution introduced wherever the same reason held. What it produced is a working…

Spanish American law barred people of mixed descent from notaryships, from the protectorship of the Indians, from holy orders and from encomiendas — and the crown's own leading jurist printed, in the …

The apostolic college of the Santa Cruz de Querétaro governed its mission pueblos by a method its own missionaries agreed among themselves in 1767 and reported to the viceroy in 1772: bells at sunrise…

Author of Don Quixote (two parts, 1605 and 1615), baptized in Alcalá de Henares on 9 October 1547 and dead in Madrid in 1616. Soldier at Lepanto — where he lost the use of his left hand — five years a…

Spanish physician and theologian (c. 1511-1553) whose Christianismi Restitutio (1553) contains a description of the pulmonary transit of blood — against Galen's doctrine of pores in the heart's septum…

Bernardo de Vargas Machuca printed in 1599 the first practical manual of American frontier soldiering, dedicated to the president of the Council of the Indies. Its own censor's parecer, printed in fro…

The reglamento that reorganised the Cuban militia in January 1769 put two battalions of free pardos and one of free morenos on the same establishment as five battalions of white infantry, and gave eve…

Free men of colour in the Spanish Caribbean served in battalions of their own with commissioned officers of their own colour. The Cuban militia rulebook gave every militiaman the fuero militar, exempt…

In 1638 the mission Indians of the Parana and the Uruguay asked to be given firearms, and the Crown broke its own standing rule and agreed. Within a year the raiders out of Sao Paulo had been beaten i…

From an ordinance of the Council of the Indies of 1571 and a chapter of the New Laws of 1542, the men who distributed encomiendas were forbidden to receive them: councillors, viceroys, presidents, oid…

The six laws that close the Recopilación's título on the accounting office of the avería pay its whole staff out of the levy it audited. They charge the clerk, the porter-bailiff and the petty expense…

Sourced answers to recurring questions about the Spanish empire — whether Spain only extracted bullion, whether the Inquisition matched its legend, where the Black Legend framing comes from, and wheth…

In 1780 Spain founded two pueblos among the Quechan at the Colorado crossing on a formula it had not used in the Indies: no congregación, no mission regime, Indians free to join if the settlers' examp…

In the deserts of Baja California and Sonora the Jesuit missions laid a system of water retention and conduction onto relict wetlands already there, and planted them in layered orchards. The missions …

Andean system of rotational draft labor, pre-Hispanic in origin, adapted by the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru from the 1570s to supply workers — most notoriously to the silver mines of Potosí. It kept t…

A grammar and a dictionary of Mixtec, printed by Pedro Balli at Mexico City in 1593 under a single licence. The dictionary's title page says it was made by the Dominicans of the Mixteca and only final…

Libro III capítulo XXIX of the Política Indiana asks how encomiendas end. It lists the modes — death, the lives spent, absence, renunciation, profession in religion, delict, ill-treatment of the India…

The two-way Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary printed at Mexico City by Antonio de Spinosa in 1571 — an enlarged second edition of Molina's 1555 vocabulary, with a wholly new Nahuatl-to-Spanish half added. I…

Acosta in 1590 calls the molle a tree of much virtue whose little clusters the Indians ferment into wine, and records that Mexico named it árbol del Perú because it came from there. Garcilaso, an Inca…

The book that carried American pharmacy into European medicine, written by a physician who never crossed the Atlantic and who interrogated in Seville the men who had. It names the Indian healers who t…

A documented Castilian lawsuit in which the medical claims of an imported oil were put to a court. An Italian merchant selling petroleum as medicine was ordered to stop on the ground that it was "fake…

A silver magnate gave 300,000 pesos to open a pawn bank in Mexico City in February 1775 that lent against clothes and jewels and charged nothing, asking only whatever alms the borrower chose to leave.…

Spain built a survivors' pension fund for the widows and orphaned daughters of its officers and officials, paid for by a standing deduction from serving salaries, and extended it across the Atlantic w…

The sermon a Dominican preached on Hispaniola in 1511 against the men who held Indians in repartimiento, and the chain it set off: a second sermon that refused to retract, a friar sent across the Atla…

The account the Jesuit superior of the Paraguay missions wrote at court in 1639, best known for the flight of Guairá: seven hundred rafts and canoes carrying more than twelve thousand people down the …

The four books with which Antonio Ruiz de Montoya fixed Guaraní in print: a grammar, a Spanish-to-Guaraní vocabulary, an 800-page Tesoro running the other way, and a catechism, all examined by the Cou…

The prologue to the 1766 life of Vasco de Quiroga lists what its author read: five printed authorities, the title deeds of Patzcuaro and Tzintzuntzan, a testament, a damaged residencia file, a dean's …

Leyes x and xj of libro VII, título V of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias order the good treatment of free black militiamen and the keeping of the preeminences of the Compañía de Morenos libres of …

A criollo lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara gave a chapter of his history to arguing that the mission-only frontier policy of California, Texas, Sonora and Nayarit had failed and that arms, presi…

The account finished at Tehuacán in 1541 by fray Toribio de Benavente, one of the twelve Franciscans sent to Mexico in 1523, who signed himself with the Nahuatl word for "poor". Its first chapter cata…

When the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 the Crown had to decide who would run thirty-odd Amazonian mission towns. It tried parish priests under a reglamento of 1762, then secular administrators under a…

An encomienda suit had been sent from the Indies to the Council in Madrid when both parties died, leaving heirs who could not inherit the grant but claimed the tribute already litigated. Send the case…

Feudal law admitted no women, and a provision of 1546 revoking grants made against the New Laws gave as one ground that women were "not capable" of holding Indians. The same crown had already broken w…

When Cajal printed the roll of his School in 1922 it carried two women: a Sydney-born physician who spent months at the bench, and his laboratory preparator, who published a paper alone and then vanis…

Everything moving inland in Spanish South America moved on mules, and a book printed in 1773 describes the industry from inside: the trick that made a mare raise a donkey foal, the price of a mule at …

A Tlaxcalan mestizo who served the Spaniards as interpreter and wrote, in Castilian, the only surviving monograph on his own city and its people. Torquemada quarried the manuscript for the Monarquia I…

A royal cosmographer was ordered in 1779 to write the history of America and given a cedula opening every archive in the kingdom to him. The prologue he printed fourteen years later is the report of w…

The medical doctrine of cinchona written by José Celestino Mutis at Santa Fé de Bogotá, serialised in the city's newspaper from May 1793, and printed as a book at Madrid only in 1828, twenty years aft…

Crown-funded scientific expedition (1783-1816) directed by José Celestino Mutis that documented the flora of present-day Colombia for more than three decades, producing one of the most important colle…

Mota Padilla opens his history of western Mexico with the diversity of languages, prints a Mexica migration tradition traced back to a cacique's grandfather, names the cocas, tequexes, choras, tecualm…

Because every encomienda had to be confirmed in Madrid, the viceroy or governor who granted one had to state in the title what it was worth, how it fell vacant, what the grantee had done, what he alre…

Leyes xxvij to xxxvij of libro VIIII, título XXVII of the Recopilación define who counts as a natural of the Indies and set out the qualification by which a foreigner could earn a cédula de naturaleza…

The volume of Spain's official documentary edition that prints the papers of the Loaísa and Saavedra voyages to the Moluccas, each with the shelfmark it was copied from. It is the working end of a nin…

The grammar of Castilian that Antonio de Nebrija finished printing in Salamanca on 18 August 1492 — described by the library that holds it as the first European grammar of a Romance language, and buil…

A circular royal cédula of 14 April 1789 ordered that enslaved people who escaped from foreign colonies into Spanish territory were not to be given back and kept the liberty they acquired by taking re…

The Otomi grammar printed at Mexico in 1767 by the holder of the Otomi chair at the Real y Pontificio Colegio Seminario, and by his own account the first arte of the language to reach a press. It writ…

Ordinances promulgated by Charles V on 20 November 1542 (extended 4 June 1543) that prohibited the enslavement of the Indians, ordered their good treatment as free persons, and moved to extinguish the…

The Spanish neurohistologist who spent 1908 to 1910 at the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, organised one of the earliest laboratories for systematic neuropathology inside an American…

The book in which a Spanish canon and royal fiscal took apart the most successful forgeries in Spanish history - the chronicles fathered on Flavio Dextro, Marco Maximo, Luitprando and Julian Perez - b…

Mesoamerica did not merely domesticate maize; it invented the alkaline cooking that makes maize a safe staple, releasing bound niacin and tryptophan, multiplying its calcium and destroying most of its…

The obvious inference from the encomendero's oath was that he ranked with the titled nobles of Spain. The standard treatise on the law of the Indies refuses to draw it: no cédula or municipal law of t…

The Jesuit dictionary of Tagalog, licensed at Manila in 1753 and 1754 and reprinted at Valladolid in 1832 and Manila in 1860. Its prologue states the evidentiary rule the work was built on: Juan de No…

The last laws of the Recopilación's título on the pilots give the Atlantic fleets a second pilot aboard every flagship to serve as adviser and a master able to take over if both die, require the maste…

One chapter of the Comentarios Reales defines the words colonial Spanish America invented for its own children, and it was written by one of the people the words named. It gives criollo an African ori…

The confidential report two Spanish naval officers wrote for the crown on what they had seen in Peru and Quito, and which the crown kept unpublished until a British editor printed it in London in 1826…

Libro VIII, título XXIV of the Recopilación is complete on one leaf. Its first law orders that the crown's two ninths of the American tithe be entered in the royal chests and then paid out by libranza…

A Spanish captain taken by the Mapuche in 1629 and released alive later wrote the book arguing that his captors had treated him better than his countrymen treated them. It is an officer's brief agains…

Ordinary subjects owed no special oath, the treatise holds, but domicile alone bound them to come at the king's call and defend his person and kingdom without pay or claim to merit. Nobles were bound …

The cloth mills of Spanish America were governed by a title of the code that required a royal licence to found one, forbade any mita or repartimiento of Indians for it, and ordered the mill kept "cont…

The cloth workshops of colonial Mexico were the hardest labour regime the viceroyalty tolerated, and the fullest account of what happened inside them is the government's own. This entry reads the law …

The Spanish philology of America's languages is remembered through the books that were printed. The standard Spanish bibliography of the field, Viñaza's of 1892, is built in two parts precisely becaus…

How roads, bridges, drains and fountains were paid for in Spanish America. A título of the Recopilación orders works apportioned among those who receive the benefit; a companion law caps the Indians' …

An octagonal tower raised in the garden of the Real Expedición Botánica at Mutis's expense, begun 24 May 1802 and finished 20 August 1803, with a meridian line on the floor of its main room and a gnom…

A Jesuit observatory founded at Manila in 1865 to find the laws of the typhoons and announce them in advance. Its first public warning went out on 7 July 1879; by 1880 the warnings were on the Hongkon…

Libro VIII, título XX of the Recopilación calls the creation of public office a regalía of the crown and says why it sells them anyway: public necessity has obliged it to benefit the offices that do n…

The plant traffic between Spain and the Andes ran both ways. Surveys of the medicinal plants sold and used today in northern Peru and southern Ecuador find 17% of them to be Old World introductions, m…

By 1590 the olive was growing in Mexico and Peru and there was still not one oil mill in either: the fruit was cured and eaten, and all the oil came from Spain. The law of the Indies nevertheless made…

The grammar of Nahuatl that a Franciscan finished in 1547 at the convent of Hueytlalpan, twenty-five years before the oldest Nahuatl grammar that reached print. It stayed in manuscript for 328 years —…

The brief that chartered the missionary church of Spanish America. Adrian VI, writing from Zaragoza before he had reached Rome, let mendicant friars cross to the Indies, elect their own prelates there…

In November 1772 the viceroy of New Spain circulated to every district subdelegate an order that the caesarean operation be practised throughout the viceroyalty: official assistance on pain of five hu…

In 1566 a layman of Mexico City opened a hospital outside the walls and then turned it over to the many demented people of the city who had nowhere to be cared for. The brotherhood that grew out of it…

A hospital rule that began in Santiago de Guatemala and was confirmed by Clement X on 2 May 1672, printed with the rest of the order's papal documentation at Rome in 1773. Its statutes admit convalesc…

A hospital opened in Granada in 1537 by a layman, made a religious institute after his death and confirmed by papal bull in 1572, which wrote its bedside practice into binding constitutions and carrie…

A 24-page printed rulebook that cut Queretaro into nine wards, put an unpaid neighbourhood magistrate over each, and told him what he might and might not do. It orders schools, medical relief for the …

The ordinances a crown judge sent from Charcas laid on the southern provinces in 1612, ending the personal service of Indians and cutting the encomienda back to the tribute owed to the crown. Read fro…

A merchant corporation wrote its own commercial law, the crown confirmed it, and the result was the most complete commercial code in Europe seventy years before the French one. Its court decided cases…

In March 1524 the governor of New Spain issued a code for the Spaniards living in it, and it stayed in a private family archive until a Mexican historian printed it in 1844. It arms every householder …

The 148 ordinances Philip II signed at the Bosque de Segovia on 13 July 1573, which struck the word "conquista" out of every future contract with the crown, replaced it with "pacificación" and "poblac…

Ninety-four chapters that turned a building full of transferred paper into an institution: salaried archivist and officials, a class called Historia for the relations, antiquities and customs that fit…

Written for two towns just founded in Honduras and declared to bind every town settled afterwards, these ordinances fix what a Spanish municipality in the Indies was to be: two alcaldes, four regidore…

The first body of royal law written specifically about how the indigenous people of the Americas were to be housed, fed, taught, worked and rested — thirty-two chapters despatched after the Dominican …

Arlegui's 1737 chronicle sets out, chapter by chapter, what the peoples of the northern missions could do that the Spaniards could not: forecast rain and frost from birds and stars "con mas verdad, qu…

The first attempt to map and classify all the languages of Mexico, printed at Mexico City in 1864. Its author states in the introduction that he knows none of the languages he classifies and has proce…

The first substantial book about Chile printed in Europe, written by a Jesuit born in Santiago who found that in much of Europe people did not even know the country's name. It credits the Mapuche resi…

The first natural history of the Americas, and for three centuries the least read of them. Oviedo printed nineteen books at Seville in 1535 and left fifty; the rest stayed in manuscript until the Real…

An Andean nobleman from between the Canas and the Canches wrote the history of his own people in Spanish, signing it with five generations of his ancestors and opening with a full profession of the Ch…

Four laws govern the paymaster of the armadas, and they are severe. They forbid him to receive a single maravedí on his own, void the receipts he gives alone, put every coin into chests of three diffe…

A memorial to the king of Spain by the man whose principal office had been Protector de los Indios, arguing that the Indians of New Spain are not what the ministers say they are. It credits the resist…

A tree of the flooded lowlands of Yucatán gave a Spanish American port its export and its name, and gave modern pathology haematoxylin, still the standard nuclear stain. Alcedo's 1786 dictionary, read…

The earliest surviving description of an American people written by a European, made on Hispaniola in the 1490s by a Hieronymite hermit ordered to learn the language. It preserves Taino cosmology by n…

Three printings read here — Seville 1553, Seville 1590 and the Madrid reissue of Garcilaso — describe the papa, the frost-and-tread process that turns it into chuño, and the trade in that chuño which …

Oviedo's chapter on the papaya gives the fruit three names and then does something rarer: it names the man who moved it. A hidalgo called Alonso de Valverde carried the fruit from the country of the c…

A twice-weekly half-sheet begun in Havana on 31 October 1790, edited first by the Captain General himself and then by a committee of the economic society. Its editors printed a wholesale price list, s…

The grammar of Timucua, a language of the Florida peninsula, written by the Franciscan Francisco Pareja and printed at Mexico by Juan Ruyz in 1614. It is the earliest printed grammar of any language o…

A Timucua–Castilian catechism printed at Mexico by Juan Ruyz in 1627, whose preliminary leaves are the paper trail of a mission publishing programme: a provincial licence signed at San Agustín de la F…

On the Chilean frontier the Spanish crown negotiated with an unconquered indigenous people in general assembly, at a place the Mapuche named, in a form the Mapuche already used. This object holds only…

Leyes xiiij to xx close libro VIII, título XXX of the Recopilación and the volume, on the eighty-kilometre crossing where the silver of Peru met the Atlantic. The president of Panamá must house the tr…

One título of the Recopilación made the pastures, woods and waters of the Indies common by law, capped how much range one stockman could hold, turned harvested fields back into common pasture, freed t…

The Muscovy duck — pato criollo in Spanish America, Cairina moschata in zoology — was domesticated in Central or South America before any European arrived, and Cabeza de Vaca found Guaraní farmers bre…

The crown's patronage over the Church in Spanish America: the inalienable right to present every bishop and parish priest, to license every church, monastery and hospital, and to govern the American C…

New Spain stopped buying soldiers for the Zacatecas road and started buying peace: capitulaciones negotiated by a mestizo captain who spoke Guachichil, four hundred married Tlaxcalan households moved …

The Flemish lay brother who reached Mexico in 1523, a year before the twelve Franciscans, and who built beside the church of San Francisco a chapel, a school and a row of workshops. Mendieta calls it …

A Canary Islander who died in Guatemala in 1667 and left a small house by the Calvario that had been a free schoolroom for the children of the poorest quarter and became a hospital. The life printed a…

A physician of Mexico City, one of the first to profess medicine in New Spain, got the city to give him the disused public granary in 1582 and turned it into a hospital with wards for both sexes and a…

An Italian humanist at the Castilian court began writing down what returning captains told him about the western islands, because, as he put it, the Spaniards took care only of the general findings an…

A man born in Riobamba who opened at his own cost, and after a hundred and twenty years of failed royal orders, the road from Quito to the navigable Esmeraldas river; who is met on that coast in a mem…

Leader (d. 737) of the mountain polity in Asturias that resisted the Umayyad conquest of Iberia, remembered for the victory at Covadonga (c. 718-722). The earliest narrative was written about 160 year…

The working manual of the parish clergy of Spanish America, written by the bishop of Quito and reprinted commercially in Lyon in 1678. It tells a priest who cannot speak his parishioners' language tha…

The penal título of the Recopilación doubles Castile's money penalties for the Indies, then forbids levying them on Indians at all. In their place ley x authorises temporal personal service — reciting…

The Jesuit provincial's history of the missions of Sinaloa and Sonora, printed at Madrid in 1645. Inside a triumphalist frame it carries field observations of a kind rarely met that early: that the la…

The Jesuit provincial's folio on the missions of Sinaloa and Sonora, printed at Madrid in 1645, is the fullest seventeenth-century description of the peoples of the Mexican northwest. It admires langu…

The first sustained printed account of the peoples of Sinaloa, Sonora and the sierra of Durango, published at Madrid in 1645 by a Jesuit who had spent sixteen years among them and says so on the page.…

The first large printed dictionary of a Maya language, set in Merida from types ordered in New York because the alphabet Spanish friars devised for Maya needed sorts no Yucatecan press held. Its prolo…

Ten paragraphs close the chapter on alienating encomiendas by asking whether two holders could exchange theirs. The rule is no: the encomendero owns nothing, the dominion is the king's, his person was…

The doctrine that placed the Indians among the persons Roman and canon law called miserabiles, and with it a bundle of procedural privileges — the protections of minors and rustics, summary and cheap …

Every spring from the sixteenth century Guipuzcoan ships sailed for the cod and whale grounds of Terranova. A Basque priest writing in 1625 set down the voyage, the rendering cauldrons, the barrel mea…

Book IIII, title 25 of the Recopilación de leyes de las Indias governs the Caribbean pearl fishery law by law: free access for Indians in 1578, the death penalty for forcing anyone to dive in 1585, ru…

Concretions from Andean camelids entered a drug category the Old World already had, and two Seville printings record the transfer. Acosta names the animals, writes the Indians' causal theory down as t…

Europe paid for snake-stones believed to grow in the heads of Oriental serpents. Section VI of Torrubia's Aparato (Madrid 1754) prints the recipe instead: deer antler cut with a bolo, calcined overnig…

A history of New Granada written in Madrid by a cleric from Santa Fe de Bogotá while prosecutions kept him at court, licensed in 1688. Its two engraved plates give named medallion portraits to the zip…

Section XIII of Torrubia's Aparato traces fossil crabs gathered by measure on the beaches of Aparri and Buguey in Cagayán, sent by the Dominicans to the apothecaries of Manila, carried to Madrid by a …

The mining ordinances of New Spain left standing pillars of the richest ore and forbade the owner to take them. The 1761 commentary explains why: the pillars hold the roofs, carry the ladders, catch a…

The state office that licensed Atlantic pilots and kept the master chart. From 1508 the Casa de la Contratación examined and graded the pilots of the Carrera de Indias, taught them in a salaried chair…

Oviedo devoted a chapter of 1535 to the fruit the Christians called piña, and it contains the agronomy that made the plant portable: one fruit per plant, ten months to ripen, and the crown on top as t…

The man who found the cells Cajal could not stain — microglia in 1919, oligodendroglia in 1921 — and correctly guessed what both were for. Cajal expelled him from the laboratory in 1920 and never conc…

Book VIII, chapter XXVI of Oviedo's Historia general is a description of the dragon fruit: fist-sized, scarlet, scaly-looking, borne on leafless four-cornered arms longer than a man's reach. Oviedo sa…

Libro nono of the Comentarios Reales is a dated inventory of the Old World crops that entered Peru, written by a man who was in Cuzco while it happened: wheat carried by Maria de Escobar and shared ou…

Masses of native silver were found lying at the surface in Pima country on the last bounds of Sonora, one of them said to weigh 160 arrobas. Mota Padilla, writing at Guadalajara in 1742, reports it an…

An Asian crop that reached the Americas because a Dominican friar carried it from Gran Canaria to Santo Domingo in 1516. Oviedo names the man and the year, says he saw the plants in the Canaries himse…

Two royal decrees of one date in 1677 record what the crown paid to settle Coahuila: four pueblos with resident clergy, each given a hundred and fifty fanegas of maize and five bullocks or ploughs for…

Six laws of libro VI, título I of the Recopilación set the economic standing of indigenous people. They may raise every kind of livestock "como lo pueden hacer los Españoles sin ninguna diferencia"; t…

A corregidor of Cuzco who studied Inca law in order to govern by it, and whose working notes survive as a report that dates the empire from quipu king-lists, measures the courier relay in leagues and …

A doctor from Menorca who graduated at Barcelona in 1936, set fractures through the Civil War, crossed into France with a convoy of wounded in 1939 and practised two years in rural Mexico before reach…

A tariff printed as a law of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias prices the mail landed from America: one real for a single letter, one real per ounce for a heavier packet with fractions not reckoned,…

Four laws of libro VIII, título XX of the Recopilación govern the bidding when the Spanish crown sold a post in America. Ley x forbids viceroys and ministers to take or give prometidos; ley xj bars th…

An Andean domesticate that reached Europe in Spanish ships in the second half of the sixteenth century, by way of Spain and the Canaries. The earliest description available here is printed in Seville …

The middle of Política Indiana libro I capítulo X runs the remaining titles: that all jurisdiction passed to the papacy, that the Emperor is universal lord of the world, that the Pope holds temporal p…

A farrier of the royal stables, who was also the crown officer examining every farrier and animal-doctor in the monarchy, put his practice into print in 1680. Another royal farrier refereed the book b…

Having described a salaried guard raised in Peru in 1554 and paid out of Indian tribute, the standard treatise on the law of the Indies spends seven paragraphs justifying it by precedent — the Athenia…

A cross-examination of Europeans by an American ruler that the Spanish side put into print. Lopez de Gomara gives the questions at length — the flood, the stars, where souls go, whether the pope dies,…

Prescription is a kind of alienation, so the treatise asks whether an encomienda could be acquired by long possession, and answers with periods: thirty years and on some opinions a hundred against the…

Política Indiana libro I capítulo XI §§11-19 answers the doubt whether prescription runs between kingdoms that recognise no superior — Vázquez de Menchaca said no, and the footnote names Grotius among…

Pezuela's 1866 dictionary prints Cuban municipal budgets article by article. Nuevitas in 1863 owed 12,384 pesos: five primary teachers, a contribution to a teacher-training school, vaccine conservator…

In 1700 Charles II ordered the audiencia of Guadalajara to report on a bishop's request to erect a university in his city, funded by the bishop himself, a three per cent levy on the rents of hospitals…

Seventeen years after the press reached Mexico City it was printing music. A 1556 Augustinian Ordinarium carries plainchant notes in red and black; a 1568 doctrina set wholly in Mixtec carries them to…

Spanish law punished an encomendero who abused the Indians entrusted to him by taking the encomienda away. The standard treatise justifies the penalty three ways, holds that no prior warning is needed…

The close of libro III capítulo XXIX holds that an encomienda could not be taken on a pretext: the fault had to be proved, and neither prince nor viceroy could deprive or regrant without citation, hea…

Laws of the Recopilación set the Tlaxcalan republic apart from every other indigenous polity in New Spain: its own ordinances of 1545 confirmed, its Indian governors required to be natives of the prov…

A cédula of Charles V of 15 April 1540, printed as ley viij of libro VII, título V of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias, orders the royal audiencias that if any person held as a slave claims liberty…

A viceroy of New Spain ordered every royal treasury to report what the king's dues had come to in each of the ten preceding years. Mota Padilla printed the northern returns, argued from them that mine…

An encomienda was a personal grant for one or two lives, and the standard treatise holds it admitted no alienation or cession to a third party without the king's own consultation and special dispensat…

The Recopilación opens its título on foreigners with a flat ban on trading in or passing to the Indies without naturaleza and royal licence, extends the penalty to the Spaniard who fronts for a foreig…

Leyes j to vj of libro VIII, título XXVIII of the Recopilación forbid anyone in the Indies to draw on the royal treasury without the king's own signature, and build a chain of refusal around it: the r…

Leyes x to xviij of libro VIII, título X of the Recopilación forbid unquinted metal to leave the Indies or pass between provinces, then name the places one by one: the Puerto de Aguilar, Guadalajara a…

Cities in the Indies held their own endowed revenues, and the law hedged them: no extraordinary spending above three thousand maravedís without licence, leases auctioned to the highest bidder, nothing…

A royal cédula of 1575 ordered that when the tribute consigned for the guard's pay fell short, what was collected should be shared out among all of them in proportion to service. Solórzano, who decide…

The office charged with defending the Indians in the colonial courts. By 1591 every city with an Audiencia was to have a salaried lawyer and a procurator to run the Indians' lawsuits, forbidden to tak…

The law that licensed medicine in Spanish America. Its opening piece is a 1570 instruction sending protomédicos across the Atlantic with orders to take the testimony of every physician, surgeon and he…

The chapter that makes residence a condition of holding an encomienda ends with two awkward questions. Where does a man with encomiendas in distant provinces live? And what of the councillors of the C…

Avalos and Colima answered to Guadalajara in justice and to Mexico in government, a hundred leagues away. Mota Padilla, a lawyer of that court, argues for joining the two, and in the middle of the arg…

Spain sent four salaried teachers from Madrid to open a free school in a colony it had governed for three years, built a hospital for lepers at the council's expense, and after the fire of Good Friday…

A royal licence of 1560 gave 500 pesos for a bridge where people were drowning, then 400 more, then in 1563 ordered the cost apportioned with the Indians' share capped at a sixth. Nothing was built: e…

The Recopilación's título on ports is an infrastructure and harbour-management code. It orders paired leading marks with lanterns at San Juan de Ulhua, watchtowers that signal by smoke and fire, a ban…

A book of royal law printed in Mexico City by Pedro Ocharte in 1563, gathering the cedulas and provisiones issued for New Spain from 1525 onward. The viceroy's printing order, dated 3 March 1563, name…

The Mexican imprint of 1615 in which a Dominican lay brother put Doctor Francisco Hernández's Latin survey of New Spain's plants and animals into Spanish, for people living on estancias and in mining …

For nearly two centuries the general language of Peru was treated in print as a working language: a Dominican lexicon at Valladolid in 1560, a two-volume vocabulary at Lima in 1607 and 1608, a Jesuit …

Cinchona bark — quina, cascarilla — was the first specific against malaria, and the fullest Spanish account of it is the Quinología published at Madrid in 1792 by Hipólito Ruiz, first botanist of the …

A Dominican's grammar of Mixe, printed at Puebla in 1729 inside a bilingual devotional book of 550 pages, and reprinted at Oaxaca in 1891 by a Mexican philologist who wanted it back in circulation bec…

Leyes xxxv to xxxviij of libro VIII, título X of the Recopilación tax the Caribbean pearl fishery. Unquinted pearls are forfeit; canoe owners pay monthly on pain of six years' exile; the pearls dived …

Libro VIII, título X of the Recopilación opens with three laws that define what the quinto falls on. Ley j (1504, 1572) takes a fifth of every metal drawn from the ground, "neto, sin otro ningun descu…

Cieza de León's Seville imprint of 1553 describes quinua as a staple, with its leaf, its height, its two seed colours and the two ways it was eaten; Garcilaso places it in the province where maize wil…

Knotted-cord records did not stop at the conquest. Acosta's 1590 Seville printing says the quipocamayos were bound to render account like public notaries and had to be given entire credit, and he saw …

Three laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias carry the convoy levy's audit out to sea. The masters answer for everything put aboard; rations must be issued in victuals by weight and measure, neve…

Cajal's youngest direct disciple, in Madrid at eighteen, in the United States from 1931 and at the Rockefeller Institute from 1936 to 1970. He named the cortical elementary unit in 1933, two decades b…

A purgative root from the province of Michoacán that a Purépecha healer gave to a sick Franciscan around 1550, and that within thirty years was being sold in Seville by the quintal under the borrowed …

A crown compilation of 1787 states in its own words that pulque was drunk by the Mexicans before the conquest and is permitted by old laws as a regional drink beneficial to the Indians — and then prin…

Leyes xxxxij to xxxxvj of libro VIII, título X of the Recopilación police the pearl fishery. Nothing leaves the ranchería unquinted, on pain of six years' exile; one royal official must visit every mo…

Cattle of Spanish colonial descent that the Raramuri of the Sierra Tarahumara kept for roughly five hundred years with almost no managed breeding. In 2005 three bulls and thirty heifers went to a USDA…

Anyone who bought the Mexico City almanac for 1797 got three pages of the city's own vital statistics: marriages, births and deaths in all fourteen parishes, a twelve-house hospital return with the de…

Having argued perpetuity at full strength, libro III capítulo XXXII of the Política Indiana answers it and refuses it. The objections are that the crown would have nothing left to reward with, that va…

Fifteen paragraphs of libro III capítulo XXXII of the Política Indiana argue that the encomienda should have been made hereditary. The case is built on reward: services that produced perpetual effects…

A chair of practical anatomy and surgical operations created in 1768 inside the Real Hospital de Naturales of Mexico City, with a professor as director and a substitute for the dissections, bound by i…

The dockyard that built a hundred and nine vessels for the Spanish navy in a Caribbean city, including the largest warship of the age of sail. This entry works from a Havana imprint of 1813 that print…

The yards that built the Pacific fleet of Spanish America, described in 1741 by the governor who had administered the province: 176 vessels since the city's foundation, keels of guachapelí that resist…

A royal decree of 13 February 1548 put four oidores at Compostela with first-instance jurisdiction over twelve leagues and appellate jurisdiction over a frontier kingdom. A second decree of 18 May 157…

Thirty-three articles that opened Puerto Rico to Catholic settlers of any nation, gave every colonist free land in perpetuity with a written title, and suspended tithes and the alcabala for fifteen ye…

A naval surgery school approved by royal order of 11 November 1748, the first of the Spanish royal colleges of surgery and the model for Barcelona and Madrid. Its own textbook of 1763 shows how it wor…

The daughter school of Seville's San Telmo, founded at the request of the Málaga consulado and given its own code eighteen months later. A hundred and fifty boys, orphans of Málaga and Granada preferr…

A boarding school in Seville that took in poor boys of eight to fourteen, orphans preferred, and taught them mathematics, the nautical faculties, commerce, drawing, French and English. Its 1786 ordina…

A Basque chartered company took the cacao trade of Venezuela in 1728 and set out to end the Dutch contraband that carried it. Its own printed account of 1765 claims exports rose from an average 21,440…

The third and least-known of the crown's American botanical expeditions, ordered in 1787 under Martin Sesse with the charge of founding a botanical garden in Mexico City. Its teaching chair opened in …

A boundary commission sent to fix the line with Portugal surveyed the Orinoco instead. Its cosmographer's observations of 1756 are the latitudes a Franciscan of the expedition printed in 1779; its boa…

The crown's cigar factory in Mexico City opened in a rented house on the calle de Cadena at the end of June 1769 and grew, on the compilation's own account, to employ "siete mil personas de ambos sexo…

A cathedral dignitary built a poorhouse in Mexico City at his own expense for people too old or too ill to work; it was approved in 1765 and opened in March 1774, and from 1783 the crown paid it a tho…

A land-title statute written because smallholders could not afford Madrid. It moved the granting of crown land from the king's person to the viceroys, ordered officials to leave in quiet possession — …

The administrative rewrite of New Spain: twelve intendancies, the old corregimientos and alcaldías mayores extinguished, an irremissible penalty on any official who forced goods or cattle on Indians, …

Two centuries after ordering that Indians have "entera libertad para casarse con quien quisieren", the crown required parental consent before betrothal and stripped titles, arms and succession from an…

The mining college ordered for New Spain by the royal mining code of 22 May 1783: endowed places for twenty-five boys, Spanish or noble Indian, and — in the article next to it — free entry and free tu…

Spain's first economic society, licensed because the law forbade forming associations and holding assemblies without one. Its printed annual proceedings show what such a body actually did: a boarding …

A private association of a judge, a doctor, a friar and other townsmen that in five years put spinning wheels into Guatemalan hands, opened a free night school of drawing for thirty-two young men, a s…

A subscription society of Havana that ran free primary schools, a public library, a botanical garden, an anatomy museum and a midwifery class, and printed its own accounts. Its 1834 proceedings count …

A self-governing corporation of miners in the Americas, erected by royal cédula of 1 July 1776 and codified in 1783: thirty-three territorial deputations electing the deputies who sat in Mexico City, …

Five laws of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias build the machinery that actually collected the convoy levy of the Spanish Indies trade. They bind the receiver by oath and by sureties of thirty thous…

The code of the Spanish Indies, first printed at Madrid by Julián de Paredes in 1681 in four volumes and nine books, and still being reprinted by order of the Council of the Indies in 1791. Its distin…

Gathering scattered native peoples into fixed towns — reducción in Peru, congregación in New Spain — gave them self-governing towns with churches, magistrates and common land, and bound them there by …

The rents charged with the pay of the viceroy of Peru's guard fell into arrears, and viceroys began paying whom they pleased and leaving the rest, in the treatise's words, without a penny and obliged …

The rulebook that widened Spain's American trade beyond the old fleet system, opening thirteen ports in Spain and the islands to more than twenty in America and abolishing the shipping duties of the 1…

The slave regulation drawn up in Havana under governor Jerónimo Valdés by a fiscal, a government assessor and a war auditor: it fixed fifty pesos as the sum an owner could not refuse for coartación, c…

The decree that lifted the ban on Chinese silks at Acapulco and fixed the Manila permission at 500,000 pesos out and a million back, printed in full in the Mexican treasury's own compilation. The reas…

The printed rulebook that turned irrigation water in New Spain into a measured, divisible quantity. It defines the buey de agua as an opening one vara square and subdivides it into surcos, naranjas, r…

The fullest surviving account of the Tarascan state, written in Michoacan in 1541 by a friar who says on his first pages that the viceroy asked him twice or three times why he did not set down the gov…

The frigate Santa Maria de la Cabeza surveyed the Strait of Magellan in 1785-86 with marine chronometers borrowed from the Cadiz observatory, and the book published from its officers' diaries did two …

A standing royal order required each viceroy of the Indies to leave his successor a written account of the state in which he left the kingdom. The result is a long series of self-audits by the men in …

On 25 May 1577 Philip II ordered a description of the Indies to be made by the people who lived in them, and sent out a printed questionnaire of fifty numbered chapters to be distributed town by town,…

Libro III capítulo XXXI of the Política Indiana opens on the machinery of the suit: the rent that decided whether an Audiencia of the Indies or the Council in Madrid heard the case, a term for proofs …

The first history of Chiapas and Guatemala to reach print, built out of municipal cabildo books fetched from every city of the governorship by order of the president of the Audiencia. Its prologue sta…

Libro VIII, título XXX of the Recopilación opens with four laws on sending the royal treasury home. Ley j orders every peso in every American chest remitted yearly and forbids holding back a partida f…

Since an encomienda was granted for the military charge, the standard treatise on the law of the Indies infers that encomenderos could not in strict justice ask for new rewards for the campaigns they …

The Havana state lottery, ordered by royal order of 28 April 1810 and run from 1812 under the reglamento of the Mexico lottery of 1769 - one Indies institution governed by another's rulebook. Its ordi…

A royal cédula of 13 August 1764 made tobacco a crown monopoly in New Spain. Planting was banned outside three districts, the independent cigar trade was extinguished by 1775, and by 1788 the branch p…

A salaried officer of the Casa de Contratación did nothing but divide the court's suits among its four notaries, weighted by the kind of case, entering every allocation in a book with the day, month a…

Spanish law gave every Indian town in the Americas its own indigenous alcalde, and towns above eighty households two alcaldes and two regidores, all of them Indians of that town, each year's officers …

Closing the chapter on the encomendero's duty to reside, the editor of the 1736 Política Indiana digests leyes 27 to 33 of título 9, libro 6 of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias in seven sentences. …

Twelve laws of libro VI, título V of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias build a procedure for lowering an Indian tribute assessment. The visiting judge is ordered to moderate an excessive tasa of his…

Política Indiana libro I capítulo XI §§20-28 moves the question from acquiring the Indies to keeping them, where the law favours possession and a probable opinion suffices. §22 holds that the kings co…

At §13 of libro III capítulo XXIX the Política Indiana asks whether the prince may extinguish every encomienda he has granted and incorporate them all in his crown. It builds the case that he may, the…

In a report of 22 February 1788 the governor of Moxos told the Audiencia de Charcas that a Mojo Indian writes the annals of his town on a board or a piece of cane by means of signs, and that a critic …

The Nahuatl grammar printed at Mexico City by Pedro Balli in 1595, written by a Jesuit who was himself a Nahuatl speaker from Texcoco. Fifty years before Carochi's celebrated accents, it devotes a sec…

A captain of engineers printed in 1598 the fortification lectures he had been ordered to give in the royal academy at Madrid, after a doctor there began reading Euclid to soldiers. The book asks for E…

The 1801 continuation of the first Spanish monograph on cinchona: new species collected in the Peruvian Andes by Juan Tafalla, the first printed description and plate of the quina naranjada of Santa F…

Leyes v to viij of libro VIII, título XXX of the Recopilación route four peripheral treasuries onto the Atlantic convoy system by name. Nueva Granada must reach Cartagena by the end of June; Venezuela…

A treatise on human nature published under the name of Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera of Alcaraz, dedicated to Philip II, still being reprinted at Madrid a century and a half later. It argues that sad…

Royal cédulas forbade ordaining Indians. The crown's own leading jurist printed, in the chapter of the Política Indiana that colonial courts used, that he could find no law excluding them from the pri…

The short appendix Bernardino de Sahagún attached to the tenth book of his Historia general, and the closest thing the sixteenth century produced to a defence of indigenous intellectual capacity writt…

Libro VIII, título XXVI of the Recopilación opens with ten laws on when a crown salary in America is earned and paid. Salary runs by thirds and from the day of embarkation, is withheld from the minist…

The Salamanca professor of music who measured tuning instead of arguing about it. His 1577 folio sets out three temperaments of keyboard instruments as exact fractions of the comma, judges the third —…

After a viceregal expedition failed to break them, the maroons of the mountains above Córdoba wrote to Luis de Velasco proposing terms, and the viceroy granted them a town of their own with a priest a…

The book in which a Jesuit at Cartagena de Indias set down, in print and in Spanish, what the Atlantic slave trade did to the people carried in it: the chains, the closed hatches, one bowl of meal a d…

Thirteen laws on the Chinese of Manila: a cap of six thousand, a court of their own with appeal to the Audiencia, a ten-year tax holiday on conversion, an itemised catalogue of the bribes and swindles…

Spanish histologist (1852-1934) whose microscopic studies established that the nervous system is built of individual cells — the neuron doctrine at the foundation of modern neuroscience. He shared the…

A hurricane flattened the settlement in September 1502; the governor moved it across the Ozama and it was rebuilt in cut stone with wide, ordered streets. The crown's own chronicler, who lived there, …

The first grammar of Quechua, finished at Valladolid in January 1560 by a Dominican who had spent fifteen years in Peru. Its prologue to Philip II turns the grammar itself into evidence: a tongue this…

The Franciscan dictionary of Tagalog, reprinted in 1794 at the convent press of Sampaloc by a lay brother of the order. Its opening notes are a field manual: four accents that change meaning, entries …

The royal press at Madrid printed Sarmiento's 1579-80 journal of the Strait of Magellan in 1768, and bound in front of it a dossier of testimonies from other writers, Spanish and foreign. The journal …

Sixteenth-century movement of theologian-jurists at the University of Salamanca, founded by Francisco de Vitoria, that laid groundwork for modern international law — separating the law of nations from…

Mulberries and silkworms reached Mexico in the 1530s and were taken up so fast that a friar writing in 1540 named growers drawing three and four hundred pounds of raw silk. The trees stood on indigeno…

The court sent from Spain to try the first Audiencia of Mexico and to govern until a viceroy came. Under its president, the bishop Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, twenty-five people were sentenced in 1…

The encomienda was justified as an office: the encomendero was to be a patron and protector, charged with the instruction and defence of the Indians entrusted to him. A royal letter of 1555 says so in…

The 1672 manual of the Seville Indies trade describes a working insurance market: printed policy forms, a registered broker forbidden to underwrite, a cap on hull cover, general average, abandonment o…

A weekly printed at Santa Fé de Bogotá from 1808 under Francisco José de Caldas, carrying observatory weather tables, a memoir on snakes and antivenom by the crown's zoologist, quina export figures, t…

A handbook by the parish priest of the Sagrario of Mexico City, written to help other priests recognise and stamp out Nahua ritual practice. To make it usable he printed the thing he meant to destroy:…

Three laws on the two American crops the crown judged most dangerous to the people who grew them. Coca is not banned — the king refuses to take from the Indians "este género de alivio para el trabajo,…

Spanish-American biochemist (1905-1993) who first synthesized ribonucleic acid in the laboratory. He shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Arthur Kornberg for the discovery of the…

Guide to Spain's Golden Age — the flowering of letters, painting and music from the mid-16th to the late 17th century, when Cervantes wrote while Velázquez painted at court and Victoria's polyphony ma…

Spain moved mulberries and silkworm seed to Mexico within a decade of the conquest, and by 1541 a royal plantation in the valley of Atlixco held a hundred and ten thousand trees while a friar predicte…

Libro VIII, título XXVII of the Recopilación opens with seven laws on the situación — a charge fixed on one named fund and payable from no other. No consignación may be moved, no salary advanced, and …

Before any of its own charges were met, the treasury of New Spain paid out more than three million pesos a year to places that did not raise enough revenue to defend or govern themselves: Havana, Cuba…

The navy surgeons who had Jenner's vaccine working in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Yucatan, Guatemala, New Granada, Peru, Charcas, the River Plate and Chile before the Real Expedicion Filantropica de la Vacuna …

Roman law made the lower ground receive the water running down from the higher. The mining ordinance of New Spain reversed it underground: the shallower mine that let its waters fall into the deeper o…

The president of the Audiencia of Quito set up an economic society in November 1791 with twenty-four members, put the bishop at its head and made the creole physician Eugenio Espejo its secretary. Esp…

The systematic treatise on the law of the Spanish Indies, written by a judge who spent eighteen years on the bench in Lima under a royal order to write down what he learned there. Its second book open…

A Hieronymite nun of Mexico City whose verse was printed in Madrid in 1689, enlarged by her own hand in Barcelona in 1693, and completed in Lisbon in 1701 with the letter in which she defends a woman'…

A Salamanca theologian's brief to the heir to the throne against the poor laws the Castilian towns began to enforce in 1544, which licensed and confined begging. Soto concedes the whole case against a…

The treaty of 1848 bound the new sovereign to respect property "of every kind" already held in the ceded territories, and the act of 1851 ordered American commissioners and courts to decide land claim…

Spain was neutral in the First World War, so Spanish newspapers were free to report an epidemic the belligerent powers were censoring. The disease acquired the name of the only country that published …

Spanish passed 500 million native-command speakers for the first time in 2025, reaching 520 million — the world's third mother tongue after Mandarin and Hindi — with 635 million potential users counti…

After 1848 the United States acquired territory whose mines and land titles had been governed by Spanish and Mexican law, and American lawyers put that law into English so their own courts could apply…

Since dedicated institutions were created in 1989, Spain has led the world in deceased organ donation - 114.8 transplants per million people before the pandemic, against 7.6 in the lowest-ranked EU co…

For most of the sixteenth century the books that taught England to navigate were Spanish: Enciso, Pedro de Medina and Martín Cortés in translation, behind them a Casa de Contratación that examined pil…

Index of the Nobel Prizes awarded to Spaniards — two in medicine (Ramón y Cajal 1906, Ochoa 1959) and six in literature (Echegaray 1904, Benavente 1922, Juan Ramón Jiménez 1956, Aleixandre 1977, Cela …

The first printed book on teaching deaf people to speak came out of Madrid in 1620, written by the secretary of the Constable of Castile. It was not the first method: a Benedictine at Ona had taught d…

The silver peso of eight reales, minted from American silver, became the first currency used on every inhabited continent. After Manila's founding in 1571 linked American mines to Chinese demand for s…

Three expeditions sailed from San Blas under the viceroy of Mexico and examined the American coast from Monterey to beyond the 58th parallel - reaching Nootka four years before Cook and the mouth of t…

Orientation guide to the instance: what it covers (Spain's contributions to science, exploration and culture, rigorously sourced), how it works (every assertion is a claim bound to registered sources,…

Two Spanish printings eight years apart describe the sunflower as it actually was in Spain: a plant grown for the garden and for the pot, carrying seven competing names and a Peruvian provenance that …

The military charge of an encomienda could be discharged by a substitute. Women served by their husbands, minors and men over seventy and the disabled by an escudero, and a father might send a son, be…

Sweet potato left the Americas three separate times and genetics can tell the lines apart: a pre-Columbian Polynesian crossing, dated in southern New Zealand to 1430-1460 CE; a Portuguese line west fr…

The plant Nahuatl speakers called picietl entered European practice as a wound dressing that Spanish soldiers were taught by indigenous healers, was published to Europe from Seville as a cure for doze…

The Inca road carried lodgings and stores at intervals; the Spanish crown kept them running and then spent half a century legislating about who paid for what in them. Three laws of 1563, 1595-96 and 1…

Mesoamerica moved its freight on people's backs, and the Spaniards who arrived kept the system running. Between 1528 and 1549 the crown banned it outright, was lobbied into licensing it under conditio…

The only printed grammar, catechism and dictionary of Huastec to come out of colonial Mexico, and a book that dates its own delay: written more than forty years before it appeared, licensed more than …

A Franciscan printed a history of Mexico in Mexico in 1778 and put it in the mouth of two speakers, an Indio and an Espanol, credited on the title page as its authors. The Indian holds the position, p…

Leyes xxxviiij to xxxxj of libro VIII, título X of the Recopilación handle the pearls a five-part division cannot reach. Each grade is bagged separately; where no whole fifth can be cut the officials …

The Nahua vapour bath appears in the printed medicine of New Spain as a step in treatment. The Mexican pharmacopoeia of 1615 records it twice as the close of indigenous protocols - after bone-setting …

Two storekeepers at Seville served alternate two-year terms, and the one out of office drew a reduced salary to close his accounts before he could serve again. He took over the stores by notarial inve…

Leyes xxxxvij to liij close libro VIII, título X of the Recopilación. No one in the Indies, "así Indios, como Españoles", may keep unquinted plate or jewels at home; a silversmith who holds such metal…

A council of the Peruvian church commissioned thirty-one model sermons for parish priests and had them translated into the general language of Cuzco. Its preface is a manual of how to preach to Andean…

From a cédula of Aranda of 14 August 1610 the crown began reserving to its treasury a third of every encomienda that fell vacant in Peru. One viceroy refused to apply it, the next promulgated it at Li…

Two centuries before Lisbon 1755, a Jesuit in Peru wrote a chapter on earthquakes that separates them from volcanoes, places them on coasts, reports the great ones running in order from Chile to Quito…

Libro VIII, título XII of the Recopilación is the treasure-trove law of the Spanish Indies. It takes the quinto and then half of everything found in "enterramientos, sepulturas, oques, casas, ó templo…

An Indian in the Spanish Indies could make a will, and a law of 1580 with a rubric of its own exists because parish clergy were pressing dying Indians to leave the church everything. The code orders v…

The pre-conquest marketplace survived as a legal institution. A law of 1552, re-issued in 1563, forbids stopping the Indians from holding "los tiangues, y mercados antiguos en sus Pueblos", and the la…

Between 1612 and 1627 the presses of Mexico City printed catechisms, two confessionals, a grammar and a catechism for communicants in Timucua, the language of northern Florida, written by the Francisc…

Libro I capítulo X of the Política Indiana opens with the harshest title offered for the conquest: the Indians were infidels, and that alone made them liable to war and dispossession. Solórzano states…

A survey of Spain's coasts built, on the certifying board's own account, as one unbroken chain of astronomical and geometric operations — sextant latitudes taken by several observers at once and separ…

The 12th-century translation movement centered on Toledo through which Arabic science and philosophy — and with it much of Greek learning — passed into Latin Europe. Gerard of Cremona and Dominicus Gu…

Spanish composer (c. 1548-1611), in the reference literature arguably the most famous Spanish composer of all time and the peer of Palestrina and Lasso in late Renaissance polyphony. Trained in Rome a…

The tomato crossed the Atlantic in Spanish hands and nobody wrote it down. Seville was the port of entry for American plants, and there is no record of the tomato arriving there. What survives instead…

A Franciscan provincial in Mexico devoted a whole book of his chronicle to the proposition that the Indians were skilled before anyone taught them. He put the evidence in: goldsmiths who beat the Span…

The dissertations that give Torrubia's Aparato its title argue that fossil shells found far inland and high above the sea are real marine bodies. The argument rests on a stated rule — only petrifactio…

The first Spanish printed treatise on fossils argues, from teeth found in the Campos de Toluca, that a race of giants once lived in America. The conclusion is false. The reasoning is not: comparative …

Seven laws of libro VI, título II of the Recopilación deal with the traffic in Indians across the frontiers of the Spanish Indies: cargoes shipped from the Marañón with papers calling them true slaves…

Holders of encomiendas could make no transaction or compromise that harmed or bound the king or the next man called to the grant, unless royal licence intervened. One case was carved out. Where two ho…

Quiroga's ordinances are cited as the constitution the Santa Fe towns lived under. Their 1766 prologue says less: a draft found in a cathedral archive as a notebook without beginning or end, identifie…

After the earthquake of 29 July 1773 the capital of the Kingdom of Guatemala was not rebuilt but moved. The decision was taken by two open assemblies, the second voting by plurality for the Valle de l…

After the earthquake of 29 July 1773 the capital of the kingdom of Guatemala was surveyed, argued over in open assembly, and moved to another valley at royal expense — one of the earliest documented c…

For several consecutive years the Manila galleons did not reach Acapulco and New Spain ran out of the Philippine snake-stone. Torrubia's Aparato (Madrid 1754) records what was done instead: he gathere…

Six laws of libro VI, título I of the Recopilación govern who may move an Indian. Voluntary movement between towns is protected; transfer between cold and hot country, out of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, …

From 1530 to 1619 the Spanish crown was repeatedly asked to make the encomienda hereditary. The proposal was refused, reversed, ordered, revoked, priced and consulted with theologians, and never resol…

A road and street police court for northern New Spain, whose name records the moment its sentences stopped being reviewed. The crown's 1787 compilation prints the file: the 1710 restoration of the San…

In 1605 the crown planted three standing audit courts in the Americas — at Lima, Santa Fe de Bogotá and Mexico City — with the rank, hours and ceremony of an Audiencia, sole power to close the account…

Libro VII, título V of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias opens with four laws taxing free black and mulatto households at a mark of silver a year. The levy is graduated by means and remitted for the…

Five laws of libro VI, título V of the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias govern whether Indian tribute was paid in coin or in produce. The code pushes one way and then the other, calls its own commutati…

Libro VIII, título IX of the Recopilación governs tribute from the Indian towns the crown held directly rather than by encomienda. Its first nineteen laws are an accounting regime, and inside it stand…

The last five laws of libro VIII, título IX of the Recopilación cover what the crown drew from the encomienda system itself: a third of every Peruvian encomienda worth over eight hundred ducats, perpe…

The standard treatise lists what an encomendero may not take: nothing above the assessed tasa, no bargains with his Indians because such bargains are presumed harmful, no rustic work, no personal serv…

Indian tribute was not what a lord could extract but what an assessment said. Título V of libro VI of the Recopilación sets the rules of the tasa: half rates for two years after resettlement, ten year…

The Old World grain that went the other way across the Columbian exchange, and what happened to it when it did: hundredfold yields on the plain of Puebla, unmanured land sown every year, wheat planted…

Oviedo devotes a chapter of book VIII to the tunas: the fruit sold daily in the plaza of Santo Domingo, the pads used to top the walls of yards and orchards, and the day in 1515 when he ate them and b…

Almost every animal in the Columbian exchange moved west. The turkey went the other way. Penned and maize-fed in Mesoamerica long before contact, it was carried to Europe on Spanish ships in the early…

The only large livestock animal the Americas domesticated was domesticated twice, independently, by indigenous peoples - once in Mesoamerica and once in the US Southwest - and ancient DNA says the two…

Two Spanish books describe an elastic solid Europe had no word for. Oviedo, on Hispaniola, watches balls of boiled roots and juices bounce higher than Spain's air-filled balls, and reasons from the bo…

The book a Spanish naval officer wrote after two decades in the Americas: a comparison of the territories, climates and productions of both hemispheres, a treatise on fossil shells found petrified in …

An annual directory of a South American viceroyalty, opening with a quantitative sketch of Peru measured from the Meridian of Cádiz, listing officials by name with their street addresses, and printing…

The medical topography of a South American capital, by the professor of prime medicine at San Marcos, printed at Lima in 1806 and reissued at Madrid in 1815. It carries barometer readings kept in the …

A cattle-and-mule town founded in 1573 in Comechingón country carried, within fifty years, higher studies open to poor clerics and laymen without inheritance and a house authorised to confer degrees. …

The seamen's corporation of the Carrera de Indias. Begun as a Triana confraternity, it founded a house and hospital in 1569, ran a mutual fund out of a levy on every ship's freight that cured sick sai…

The third university of Spanish America, ordered instituted by cédula of 31 January 1676 after a century of refused petitions and one merchant's legacy of 20,000 pesos. Eight chairs were filled by com…

Havana's university was asked for by its town council on the ground that its young men had to sail to Salamanca, Mexico or Santo Domingo to take a degree. A papal bull of 1721 and a royal pase of 1728…

By royal decrees of 1551, the Spanish crown founded universities in Lima (San Marcos) and Mexico City — the first universities established by royal authority in the Americas, teaching by 1553, modeled…

Libro VII, título IV of the Recopilación removes vagrant Spaniards, mestizos, mulattoes and zambaigos from the Indian towns, and the ground it gives is the harm they do to the Indians who live there. …

A Mexico imprint of 1615 describes the vine the Nahua called tlilxochitl and says the plant takes its name from its pods, the "vainillas"; a Madrid treatise of 1631 prints the chocolate recipe that pu…

A Franciscan rhetoric printed in Europe by a friar who had spent some thirty years in New Spain, and who put the pictorial writing of the Nahua into a European art of memory as a working system rather…

The first printed grammar of Mapudungun, read here in its Seville 1684 reprint. Its preface argues that one language runs four hundred leagues from Coquimbo to Chiloe, that it has almost no irregular …

Formal disputation convoked by the Spanish crown at Valladolid in 1550-51, in which Bartolomé de las Casas confronted Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda over the justice of the conquests and the rational capacit…

Vanilla was domesticated and cured in Mesoamerica long before Europeans saw it, and Spain's contribution was distribution rather than invention: by 1631 a Madrid monograph on chocolate treats the pods…

By 1590 the fact that a magnetic needle does not point true north everywhere had a Spanish sailors' vocabulary — nordestear, noruestear — a rule about where the error vanished, and a printed warning t…

Two settlements founded near Mexico City and in Michoacán by a judge of the second Audiencia who paid for them out of his own salary, governed by written ordinances that fixed a six-hour common workin…

A judge in Philip II's service printed, in a book of forensic controversies, the propositions that neither pope nor emperor is lord of the world, that all men are equally free, that legitimate rule co…

The working manual of the Casa de la Contratacion, written by its treasurer and judge and printed at Seville in 1672: the offices, the courts, the fleets, the duties, the registers, the seamen's corpo…

A Jesuit born in Riobamba, expelled to Italy in 1767, wrote there a history of his own country and dated it 1789. Quito's government press printed the ancient part in 1841, its editor admitting he had…

The three-volume Madrid printing of 1757 that first put California before a European reading public, edited from a manuscript history written in Mexico in 1739 and from other relations. Its ethnograph…

A law book printed at Madrid in 1761 for the mines of New Spain turns from drainage to a second killer: the corrupt vapours the operarios must flee to avoid suffocating. It prints, with two figures, a…

In the spring and summer of 1554 a press in Mexico City printed two folio volumes of logic by an Augustinian who had spent years teaching it in New Spain. They were the first books of philosophy print…

The marriage treatise written in Mexico by the first holder of the prime chair of theology in the university there, and the earliest sustained attempt to work out what canon law should do about the ma…

From Jerónimo de Carranza's book of 1569 the Spanish masters tried to replace the secret thrust sold by a guild master with something argued from causes: a geometry of the imagined circle between two …

A natural history of the New World written by a Mexican-born Franciscan who called himself "Mexicano" on his own title page, printed in Mexico City by a woman, and built around Nahuatl names. Its firs…

Spanish poet (1898-1984) of the interwar generation, awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Literature "for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in present-day societ…

Two Spanish books describe the only large herd animals the Americas domesticated. Acosta's Seville sheets of 1590 give the llama as the greatest wealth of Peru — sheep and pack-beast in one, feeding i…

The report of a serving Spanish intendant governor that ends by attacking the plan of government his own colleague had obtained for the ex-Jesuit missions of Moxos and Chiquitos. It argues from the La…

An epic poem, printed at Alcala in 1610 and dedicated to Philip III, written in Virgilian verse by a captain who marched with the 1598 expedition to New Mexico. It is the earliest printed book devoted…

A Spanish army surgeon's chronological history of every plague, contagion, epidemic and epizootic recorded in Spain from the arrival of the Carthaginians to 1801, printed at Madrid in two volumes. It …

Cathedral chapters in New Spain commissioned complete cycles of villancicos for the matins of a feast and printed them in the year they were sung. The printed cycles close with an ensaladilla, a delib…

A royal order of 19 July 1741 told the viceroyalty to describe itself. The crown's accountant for quicksilver, working from returns sent in by local officials, produced a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction …

Spain planted essentially one black grape in the Americas - Listan Prieto, called Criolla Chica in South America and Mission in California - and it carried American wine for three centuries. Acosta in…

A whole title of the Laws of the Indies orders judges into the jails. Two oidores every Saturday afternoon, three in Lima and Mexico, the whole court at the three Pascuas, and in Mexico City two oidor…

Every three years each American Audiencia had to send one of its own judges out to ride his district in person: to hear what the Indian towns had suffered and from whom, whether tribute exceeded the a…

A Salamanca professor took the question nobody at court wanted reopened — by what right the Indians had come under Spanish rule — and answered it in two halves. The first demolished every title then i…

The Valencian humanist's scheme for public poor relief, written for the magistrates of Bruges in 1526 and read here in the Castilian version printed at Valencia in 1781. It puts every charitable endow…

A volcano broke out of flat sugar-cane country in Michoacan on 29 September 1759. Within a fortnight the alcalde mayor had reported it to the viceroy and required the administrator of the ruined estat…

An encomienda ran for two lives. A cédula of 1552 ordered that when they were spent the Indians returned to the crown at once and were not to be granted again to the son, the daughter or the wife of t…

A título of ten laws on the rigging of the Indies fleets. Hemp must be worked to two ends; rope may not be tarred before inspection; named defects bar a sale; old cable may not be remade into new rope…

Son of Xicotencatl the elder of Tepeticpac, Tlaxcalan war-leader at Spanish contact and principal Tlaxcalan opponent of the alliance with Cortés. After the alliance was made he was executed at Texcoco…

A Dominican parish priest in the K'iche' town of Chichicastenango copied out, word for word, the book his parishioners kept, and put a Spanish translation beside it. He did it to expose their errors, …

In Charcas and across Peru, Indians settled on Spanish chacras came to be held as yanaconas — transferred with the estate when it was sold, unable to leave it. A law of 1618 ordered that they not be d…

The printed grammar of Cumanagoto, a Cariban language of the Venezuelan coast, issued at Burgos in 1683 with a dictionary by Matías Ruiz Blanco bound in behind it. It describes a language with no case…

Yerba mate was gathered wild, in forests weeks from anywhere, by conscripted carriers, and the death toll was notorious enough that the order profiting from the trade wrote it down. The reduction town…

Bitter cassava kills whoever eats it raw. The Taíno of Hispaniola had a processing chain that made it the bread of the Caribbean, and Oviedo, a royal official on the island, printed the whole procedur…

A parish priest's grammar of Totonac, printed in 1752 with a doctrina in the Naolingo dialect bound in, and the only one of at least seven described Totonac works to be printed at all. Its author says…

The textbook that trained and examined the pilots of the Indies run, by the holder of the chair of cosmography at the Casa de la Contratacion, styled piloto mayor on this title page too. Its address t…

The two dances European art music kept as the sarabande and the chaconne are described in Spain's first monolingual dictionary while they were still street repertoire. Covarrubias's Tesoro of 1611 giv…

An American climbing root taken from indigenous practice in New Spain, shipped to Seville from about 1560 and made the standard treatment for the pox after guaiac failed. Two printings read here — Sev…

32 sources, abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813 … alzate-gacetas-1831-prologo-editor.

25 sources, alzate-gacetas-1831-t1 … avendano-thesaurus-indicus-antverpiae-1668.

27 sources, azcarate-memoria-policia-urbana-mexico-1864 … bernini-2021-italian-heritage-turkeys.

38 sources, bertonio-vocabulario-aymara-1612 … cabrera-teatro-critico-americano-1822.

32 sources, cajal-recollections … chimalpahin-annales-simeon-1889-introduction.

33 sources, chimalpahin-annales-simeon-1889-text … constituciones-ninos-expositos-mexico-1775.

36 sources, constituciones-sinodales-guamanga-1677 … diccionario-universal-1853-cortes-hospital-concepcion.

39 sources, diccionario-universal-mexico-1853-colegio-de-san-ignacio … feuz-meyer-ficca-meyer-2023.

30 sources, flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print … gawron-gzella-yerba-mate-2021.

35 sources, gayarre-louisiana-spanish-domination-1854 … gutierrez-ensenanza-publica-1915-dibujo.

33 sources, gutierrez-ensenanza-publica-1915-medicina … ibanez-cerda-1973-ordenanzas-intro.

29 sources, ic-anuario-2025 … kamen-spanish-inquisition.

36 sources, karremans-2024-vanilla-artificial-pollination … lorenzana-1769-serie-obispos-antequera.

32 sources, lorenzana-avisos-para-los-naturales-1769 … medina-orden-de-la-limosna-1545.

23 sources, memoria-comision-cientifica-pachuca-1865 … moliner-2018-tagetes-erecta-edible-flowers.

21 sources, monardes-historia-medicinal-1580 … mota-padilla-nueva-galicia-1870-catedras-y-colegio-de-san-juan.

20 sources, mota-padilla-nueva-galicia-1870-coahuila-y-texas … munoz-camargo-historia-de-tlaxcala-1892.

46 sources, munoz-camargo-historia-de-tlaxcala-chavero-1892 … ordenanza-alcaldes-de-barrio-oaxaca-1796.

25 sources, ordenanza-aqueducto-san-telmo-malaga-1804 … padilla-jacobo-2018-mexican-turkeys.

32 sources, palacio-carta-al-rey-copan-1860 … pimentel-cuadro-descriptivo-1862.

28 sources, pinosova-2021-occupational-disease-chronology … recopilacion-1791-libro-iv-positos-y-alhondigas.

8 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-ix-administracion-y-arca … recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-vii-aviso-y-registro.

8 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-vii-correo-mayor … recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-viii-cuenta-por-una-mano.

7 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-viii-fenecimiento-de-cuentas … recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-viii-raciones-y-alarde.

7 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-x-arancel-de-1678 … recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-xiii-compradores-de-plata.

4 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-xix-tenedor-de-bastimentos … recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-xviii-pagador.

6 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-xx-escribano-mayor-de-armadas … recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-xxvii-composicion.

8 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-ix-titulo-xxvii-compuestos-y-residencia … recopilacion-1791-libro-vi-titulo-ii-rescates.

8 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-vi-titulo-iii-reducciones … recopilacion-1791-libro-vii-titulo-i-averiguaciones.

7 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-vii-titulo-i-comisiones … recopilacion-1791-libro-vii-titulo-v-morenos-libres.

8 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-vii-titulo-v-tributo … recopilacion-1791-libro-viii-titulo-x-cuenta-y-valor.

8 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-viii-titulo-x-fundicion-y-peso-de-barras … recopilacion-1791-libro-viii-titulo-x-tasacion-de-perlas.

8 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-viii-titulo-x-tenencia-y-plateros … recopilacion-1791-libro-viii-titulo-xxiv-novenos.

7 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-viii-titulo-xxv-almonedas … recopilacion-1791-libro-viii-titulo-xxviii-forma-de-la-libranza.

12 sources, recopilacion-1791-libro-viii-titulo-xxviii-generos-prohibidos … recopilacion-indias-1791-t1-libro-ii.

33 sources, recopilacion-indias-1791-t2 … ruiz-pavon-flora-peruviana-1798-t1.

28 sources, ruiz-pavon-suplemento-quinologia-1801 … sep-school-salamanca.

24 sources, serna-manual-de-ministros-navarro-1953 … solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-carga-de-residir.

15 sources, solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-cargas-militares-y-juramento … solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-feudo-y-licencia-pontificia.

13 sources, solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-fiestas-y-trabajo-de-los-indios … solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-lanzas-precedentes-antiguos.

13 sources, solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-lanzas-prorrata-y-reversion … solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-nobleza-de-los-encomenderos.

13 sources, solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-perpetuidad-razones-afirmativas … solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-quipos-como-prueba.

21 sources, solorzano-politica-indiana-1736-remuneracion-de-los-servicios-militares … soriano-fuertes-historia-musica-espanola-t1.

36 sources, soriano-fuertes-historia-musica-espanola-t2 … torquemada-tomo-iii-libro-xv-cap-xliii-colegio-de-santa-cruz.

32 sources, torquemada-tomo-iii-libro-xvii-cap-xix-favores-del-emperador … vazquez-de-menchaca-controversiarum-francofurti-1606.

23 sources, vazquez-de-menchaca-controversiarum-illustrium-venetiis-zalterus … vives-socorro-de-los-pobres-1781.

22 sources, vizcainas-resena-historica-1889 … zorita-breve-y-sumaria-relacion-cdi-1864.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

53 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

56 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

57 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

53 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

59 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

59 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

57 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

57 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

59 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

47 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

59 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

59 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

57 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

59 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

56 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

55 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

56 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

53 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

63 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

57 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

58 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

62 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

61 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

59 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

60 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

64 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.

40 KB of the corpus text. Read the shards in order and join them with newlines to reconstruct llms-full.txt exactly.