Students of colonial Mexico have frequently felt the need for a scholarly treatment of the Marquesado del Valle, the seigniorial estate granted to Fernando Cortés in 1529 and retained by his heirs until the independence period. Certain basic facts concerning it have been well known: that the “valley” indicated in the title was the Valley of Oaxaca; that 23,000 “vassals” were originally allowed; that the actual number of inhabitants was much larger than this ; and that the Cortés family possessed some special political powers within the jurisdiction. But many questions remained. Was the Marquesado really just a large encomienda with some additional authority assigned to the encomendero? Did Cortés’ properties outside the Valley of Oaxaca belong to the Marquesado, or were they separate? What real controls did the Marqueses del Valle exert, and how did these controls change through the colonial period? What was the status of resident whites? Why were the Indian inhabitants called “vassals,” and what was a vassal in the context of colonial Mexico ?
These and related problems are systematically confronted in Bernardo García Martínez’ historical analysis of the Cortés Marquesado. The author’s basic orientation lies in legal and institutional rather than social or regional history, and we begin therefore with the problem of the señorío and the application of the señorío tradition to the conditions of the American colonies. For obvious reasons the subject has been more thoroughly investigated with reference to French colonization than with reference to Spanish. Indeed, given the disappearance or absence of other examples, the colonial Spanish señorío is effectively limited to this single case. García Martínez emphasizes institutional differentiations between the señorío and other categories of royal award, including encomienda, and he criticizes Chevalier, Zavala, Simpson, and others on the score that they have blurred rather than clarified the distinction.
Thus while one tendency of current scholarship is to redefine colonial institutions in a more comprehensive pattern (see especially James Lockhart’s article, “Encomienda and Hacienda: the Evolution of the Great Estate in the Spanish Indies,” HAHR, XLIX [August 1969], 411-429), another proceeds in the opposite direction. The crucial point noted by García Martínez is that a señor partially replaced the king in exercising dominio. The rights of an encomendero were not propios, but depended on specific royal cession. A señor had his own vassals, whereas the Indians of an encomienda remained vassals of the king. The author insists that these are differences in kind, not simply degree, and if one grants the assumptions, so they are.
The work contains much also for readers interested in other aspects of Marquesado history: struggles between Cortés and the audiencia; the limits and political subdivisions of the estate (which did indeed include more than the Valley of Oaxaca, but which fell short of including all the Cortés family properties) ; government by Cortés’ heirs and their agents; identification of sites; the estate’s population and revenue. Much of the detail depends, as it must, on the Hospital de Jesús papers. But as the author candidly asserts, quantities of material not related to the calidad señorial of the Marquesado remain to be examined by others.
