100 CHAPTER 5 STATE, CHURCH, AND SOCIETY
INEFFECTIVENESS OF MUCH SPANISH COLONIAL LAW
The frequent violation of Spanish colonial law was
a fact of colonial political life. In considerable part,
this situation refl ected the dilemma of royal offi cials
faced with the task of enforcing laws that the pow-
erful colonial elites, with whom they generally had
close social and economic ties, bitterly opposed.
This dilemma found its most acute expression in
the clash between the crown’s legislative desire to
regulate indigenous labor—the real wealth of the
Indies—and the drive of colonial elites for maxi-
mum profi ts. The result was that these protective
laws were systematically fl outed. The crown often
closed its eyes to the violations, not only because it
wished to avoid confrontation with powerful colo-
nial elites but because those laws sometimes con-
fl icted with the crown’s own narrow, short-range
interests (its need for revenue to fi nance wars and
diplomacy and to support a parasitic nobility).
Thus we can see the contradiction between
that protective legislation, so often cited by defend-
ers of Spain’s work in America, and the reality of
indigenous life and labor in the colonies. In a report
to Philip II, Alonso de Zorita, a judge who retired to
an honorable poverty in 1566 after nineteen years
of administrative activity in the Indies, wrote the
following:
The wishes of Your Majesty and his Royal
Council are well known and are made very
plain in the laws that are issued every day in
favor of the poor Indians and for their increase
and preservation. But these laws are obeyed
and not enforced, wherefore there is no end
to the destruction of the Indians, nor does
any-one care what Your Majesty decrees.But not all colonial legislation was so laxly en-
forced. A considerable body of exploitative or dis-
criminatory laws was still in effect, including laws
that required indígenas to pay tribute and perform
forced labor for token wages, permitting the forced
sale of goods to them at fi xed prices and limiting
their landownership to a low maximum fi gure
while allowing the indefi nite growth of Spanish
estates.
How can the longevity of Spanish rule over
its American colonies, so distant from a European
country that grew steadily weaker in the course
of the seventeenth century, be explained? The an-
swer does not lie in Spain’s military power be-
cause Spain maintained few troops in the Indies
until the eighteenth century. Much of the durabil-
ity of Spanish rule seems to lie in a royal policy of
making the large concessions needed to gain and
maintain the loyalty of colonial elites. The politi-
cal apparatus of viceroys, audiencias, corregidores,
and the like played a decisive role in implementing
this royal program. The frequent failure to enforce
protective legislation, the strict enforcement of the
exploitative laws, the composiciones (settlements
that legalized usurpation of native lands through
payment of a fee to the king), and the toleration of
great abuses by colonial oligarchs are illustrations
of the policy. To be sure, alongside this unwrit-
ten pact between the crown and the colonial elite
for sharing power and the fruits of exploitation of
indigenous, black, and mixed-blood people in the
Indies went a royal effort to restrain the colonists’
power and ambitions. Until the eighteenth cen-
tury, however, this effort did not go far enough to
threaten the existing arrangements.The Church in the Indies
The Spanish church emerged from the long centu-
ries of struggle against the Muslims with immense
wealth and an authority second only to that of
the crown. The Catholic Sovereigns, Ferdinand
and Isabella, particularly favored the clergy and
the spread of its infl uence as a means of achieving
national unity and royal absolutism. The Span-
ish Inquisition, which they founded, had political
as well as religious uses, and under their great-
grandson Philip II, it became the strongest support
of an omnipotent crown. While the Spanish towns
sank into political and then into economic deca-
dence, and the great nobles were reduced to the po-
sition of a courtier class aspiring for favors from the
crown, the church steadily gained in wealth and
infl uence. Under the last Hapsburgs, it threatened
the supremacy of its royal master. It remained for
the enlightened Bourbon kings of the eighteenth