After governing New Spain (1603–7), don Juan de Mendoza y Luna, the third marqués de Montesclaros, ruled as viceroy of Peru from 1607 to 1615. Spanish historian Pilar Latasa Vassallo admirably analyzes Montesclaros’s Andean administration during years when Peru seemingly outshone Spain’s other colonies in both wealth and grandeur. The author does not aim to provide a biography of the viceroy. She is more concerned with examining his viceregal administration. Her book is institutional in focus, but nonetheless it contains a treasure of information about Montesclaros and Peru that easily supplants Aurelio Miró Quesada’s literary biography, El primer virrey-poeta en América: don Juan de Mendoza y Luna, marqués de Montesclaros (Madrid, 1962), for most aspects of the viceroy’s Peruvian administration.
Montesclaros worked to protect and enhance the power of his office and to increase silver shipments to Spain. In creating the archdiocese of Charcas and the bishoprics of Trujillo, Huamanga, and Arequipa, Montesclaros encountered little opposition, except from the archbishop of Lima and the bishop of Cuzco, who lost territory to the new jurisdictions. Establishment of the Tribunal de Cuentas touched off disputes regarding procedures, jurisdiction, and protocol. Latasa Vassallo describes the roots of later Tribunal problems analyzed by Ronald Escobedo Mansilla and Kenneth Andrien. Key to increasing royal revenues were the viceroy’s initiatives regarding the Huancavelica mercury mines and the great silver district at Potosí. Mining problems at the former cut mercury supplies to Potosí’s silver refiners. Montesclaros personally inspected conditions at Huancavelica, something even Viceroy Francisco de Toledo had not done during his famous tour of the Andes, and took steps to ventilate the mines to make them workable. When the crown ordered better treatment of indigenous workers, Montesclaros tried to solve the ensuing labor shortages at Potosí by forcibly relocating yanaconas (Andean workers who had lost their ethnic affiliation) there. When that scheme proved impossible, he preserved the Potosí mita as well as that at Huancavelica. Meanwhile, Montesclaros denied the mita to miners at Oruro, although less from a humanitarian concern than from fear that it would harm Potosí. With coastal waters threatened by foreign marauders, he strengthened the fleet, but its defeat by Dutch interlopers off Cañete in 1615 revealed that Montesclaros’s efforts to protect Peru and simultaneously carry silver to Panama had been insufficient.
Latasa Vassallo’s study unfolds much like the official reports (relaciones) that viceroys prepared for their successors. The book contains sections about Montesclaros’s dealings with the state’s political and legal bureaucracy, his oversight of the fiscal apparatus, his handling of ecclesiastical matters, and his efforts to expand and defend the viceroyalty. It concludes with an examination of the viceroy’s residencia, the judicial inquiry of his administration conducted at its end. The author draws on a vast amount of documentation, primarily from Spanish public and private archives, and effectively integrates the works of institutional scholars, such as Ismael Sánchez Bella.
Her focus on institutional detail, however, sometimes obscures more relevant issues related to Montesclaros. The study contains little information about the context and long-term consequences of Montesclaros’s policies and actions. Did his new contract with the guild that operated Huancavelica, for example, make any significant difference? What lasting innovations and decisions should scholars attribute to Montesclaros? The imperial and institutional perspective of Latasa Vassallo perhaps unavoidably provides little insight into the socioeconomic or cultural effects of these undertakings, especially for the mass of the Andean population.
These cautions aside, Latasa Vassallo’s work has much to recommend it. Too few Peruvian viceregal administrations have been blessed with such detailed, useful studies. Latasa Vassallo is adept at exposing the intricate workings of the viceregal bureaucracy. Colonial Andeanists and other scholars of imperial bureaucracy should consult her assessment of how the office of viceroy functioned in the early 1600s, a period in which Peru predominated in Spanish America while Potosí’s silver still poured forth and the monarchy continued its consolidation of power over the tumultuous Andes.
