In the past 20 years, much scholarly effort has gone into unraveling the mysteries of church wealth in Mexico. Most of the books and articles have concentrated on the nineteenth century, the end of a historical cycle in which ecclesiastical wealth and the means of acquiring it were finally removed by the Juárez Reforma. This book offers a welcome addition to the bibliography in that it turns the clock back to the beginning of the cycle in the early sixteenth century and explains the origins of the economic power of the church.
The first four chapters examine the various sources of ecclesiastical revenue—tithes, parish funds, and pious works. The two chapters on tithes are the fullest account yet written of how the tax was administered, collected, and distributed; they are packed with detailed illustrations of personal clerical incomes, costs of living, and expenditures, on everything from canons to choirboys. The conclusions are clear: for the senior secular clergy, the tithe was their most important revenue. It also had much wider economic implications. Nearly everyone in the Spanish and mestizo communities was affected by it, and with the clergy speculating in the market place, particularly with grain stocks, “the tithe made the Church a major factor in the commodity market of the colony and one of the major forces in the development of capital formation and of capitalist agriculture” (p. 49).
The chapter on parish revenues is equally detailed and informative as to how the parishes and their priests were financed. The sections on pious works constitute the best description yet written on what Arnold Bauer has rightly called “the tangled and controversial business” of capellanías and obras pías. The expansion of pious works after 1575 gave the church “an almost unlimited supply of operating capital” (p. 112), and Schwaller carefully describes the origin and function of each of the several types of benefice. Some of his conclusions confirm those of other scholars. For example, clerical funds provided badly needed investment capital for the developing economy, although as the society evolved it tended to be members of urban and rural landowning elites who benefited most. Clerical capital and property did not stagnate under the yoke of the mano muerta but rather reentered the colonial economy.
The final chapter and conclusions concerning the consequences of the 1576 epidemic and analyzing aspects of the economic changes that followed are more general. Like other sectors, the church was affected by the crisis but seems to have withstood it better and to have emerged in an even stronger position, ready to benefit, especially through the tithe, from the subsequent expansion of agriculture and hacienda.
This is certainly an important contribution to our knowledge of the church, but it is nevertheless slightly disappointing in some respects. As Schwaller readily states, it concerns only the secular church and although there are passing references to the regular clergy, there is little or nothing of substance here about their wealth. Thus, only part of the whole picture emerges. Also, although the description of the sources of the church’s investment income is good, there is inadequate attention to the destination of the capital, the borrowers, their use of the funds, and the church’s role in the credit market.
With these qualifications, I warmly recommend the book and strongly advise it for all those interested in the early colonial development of Mexico.
