The document we here offer is a cabildo (i.e., town council) act. Bernal Díaz served as a member of the cabildo of Santiago de Guatemala for a number of years, an honor bestowed on him as a conqueror and early settler of the region. In this document the cabildo acknowledges receipt of a royal decree, reads it verbatim into its minutes, and formally agrees to comply. The king writes that he is informed that the post of notary public and "del número" in Santiago is vacant because Juan Núñez de Soria, who held the royal appointment to that position, "is gone to Our kingdoms of Peru." On the advice of the Royal Audiencia (i.e., High Court) the king appoints Juan de Rojas to be notary public and "del número."

•  The document is housed in a red half morocco slipcase with an internal corset. Six small wormholes in each leaf affect one or two letters each, but not the signature of Bernal Díaz.

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•  Very good condition. Sewn.

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This also appears in the HISPANIC
                      MISCELLANY — click here.

The Comunero Revolt in Argentina (ca. 1723–35) was a prolonged episode of uprising against the colonial government by residents in northeastern Argentina (Corrientes) and an adjacent part of Paraguay who felt marginalized by the Jesuit domination of the Guarani Indian labor pool and the Society of Jesus’s near monopoly of the yerba mate and tobacco trade with Buenos Aires.

•  Very good condition. Margins a little irregular; paper a little rumpled. Written in a clear, easy to read hand.  (24647)

This is the file relating to that chaplaincy and its various holders during the first 100 years of its existence. It also contains a detailed listing of the lands and messuages of the hacienda and their value as of March 1748, and a certain amount of information about the development of the hacienda in the years prior to 1748.

•  Sewn, dusty, tattered, incomplete at end. Written in a variety of easy-to-read hands. Some tears. Now housed in a simple phase box.

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•  Written in a small notarial hand and slightly difficult to read. All edges tattered with some loss of paper and of an occasional word or end of word, not impairing sense.

•  Written in a very clear hand, with the paper and wax seal below the king’s signature (wax desicated and paper loose, but present). Two blank leaves at end. Very good condition.

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•  On Gage, see: The Dictionary of National Biography, XX, 353–55. Recent marbled paper over light boards. Second and third blank leaves pasted together. Some light soiling, and some chipping and tears without apparent loss of text. Rubber-stamps from a now-defunct library. The paper here is decidedly blue; the hand is very readable.

The first audiencia was established in Santo Domingo in 1508 with others springing up as the Spaniards discovered and settled North and South America. The Audiencia of Guatemala came into existence on 20 November 1542 through the New Laws and had a troubled and peripatetic beginning: The documents that compose this collection do not deal with things quite as dramatic as either the judicial insanity or the big-time smuggling of those earliest years, but they do, nonetheless, document various unstudied aspects of the presidencies of Dr. Alonso Criado de Castilla (1598-1611), Don Antonio Pérez Ayala Castilla y Rojas (1611-26), and Dr. Diego de Acuña (1626-33). The royal cedulas fall into three broad categories: requests for information, demands for action, and orders ending existing practices.

An example of the Crown's requests for information is a decree of 4 December 1601. The king would sometimes receive complaints that were best handled extrajudicially, often involving political activities of clerics, over whom the civil and criminal courts did not have jurisdiction and with whom, the authorities felt, the ecclesiastical courts would deal ineffectively. In one case, the governor of Honduras had complained to the king that the dean of the church in Comayagua was disrupting attempts to recruit men for the defense of the port of Trujillo: The king, investigating, expects that the audiencia's information will be unbiased because of its physical and emotional distance from Honduras and its local politics and squabbling.

Another, much more ominous, request was handed down on 28 June 1621. The king has "discovered" that "foreigners" are living in the New World. Since they are there illegally, he wants a list of them and correlated inventories of their possessions and land holdings. This was the beginning of the oppression of Portuguese settlers who had moved to the New World during the "Babylonian captivity" of Portugal by Spain.

The royal demands for action were usually grants of royal patronage or largesse. On 10 July 1600 the king orders the audiencia to administer the terms of his decree granting a one-time-only gift of money to the cathedral in Santiago, and on 4 July 1601 he orders the court to give the mission church in Trinidad de Sonsonate a chalice and a bell.

The Crown was fully aware that the physical distance between it and its New World provinces would result in the development of local customs and practices, and to a l arge extent it tolerated these deviations from "the norm." For example, on 31 May 1600, Felipe III officially accepts the local custom of the audiencia's appointing the majordomo of the Royal Hospital. But at other times the Crown felt put upon and ordered the end of "local practices." On 12 December 1619 the king orders the audiencia to stop subdividing encomiendas and parcelling the subsections out as parts of government pensions.

The documents in this remarkable collection are unpublished.  They are an important unused source for the history of the high court during the first quarter of the 17th century. Through them we find out what the "local customs" of patronage and of usurpation of royal prerogative were. Through the reiteration of previously issued decrees we discover which decrees the court was ignoring, using the famous doctrine of "obedezco pero no cumplo." Through these decrees we glimpse royal patronage and royal displeasure.

•  Clarence H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, pp. 126, 75-76, and 113-14; Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, pp. 390-91, on the audiencia's earliest years. The decrees have been very carefully removed from a bound volume and, now stored in Mylar sleeves, are housed in a blue cloth slipcase with blue morocco spine labels. This major source for the study of the Royal Audiencia of Guatemala is in very good condition.

This is a fine, extremely early example of Father Hidalgo's signature.

The woman who provided the money for the above mentioned masses was the wife of Antonio de Vivano (also spelled Bibano) Gutiérrez and mother of Antonio Guadalupe de Vivano, the first two Condes de Vivanco. Cambridge scholar David Brading credits Antonio de Vivanco with restoring the mining region of Bolaños to prosperity in the early 1770s, following the region's sharp decline in silver ore production during the first two-thirds of the 18th century — whereby he became very wealthy.

In addition to payment for masses for her soul, Doña Augustina's will provides for large sums of money to be spent on construction work on the chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the bishopric of Guadalajara. The paperwork, including receipts, associated with the distribution of her largesse is weighty and detailed.

Among the collateral documents in this offering are copies of the last wills and testaments of Antonio de Vivanco Gutiérrez (1796), Augustina Velázquez (1780), and Antonio Guadalupe de Vivanco (1800); the inventory of the younger Vivanco's massive estate (1801); and a marvelouscalligraphic manuscript in which the bishop of Guadalajara grants a special privilege to Vivanco the elder. All are notarially certified copies of the originals.

•  All documents in very good condition, sewn, in contemporary vellum bindings.