3—
The Royal Revenues

When we turn from Indian population to royal revenues, the information in the report of 1646 deals directly with that year or a short term of years immediately preceding 1646. The report is one of a long series of similar documents, prepared at irregular intervals during the three centuries of the colonial administration, to give an idea of the yield of the royal revenues. It is a tanteo , a trial balance or estimate, in this instance a mixture of information on theoretical yield of some taxes, such as the bulls of the Holy Crusade, and of actual yield for others, especially those which in part or in whole were leased out to cities or farmed to private collectors and so called for fixed yield. It is striking testimony of the disorder in the royal treasury at the time, that the visitador-general should be unable quickly to get exact information on the nature and yield of taxes from the central fiscal agencies in Mexico City.

Let us start not with yield but with the system of Indian tributes: obligation to pay, assessments, kind of payment, and cession of the royal right to receive tribute to Spaniards through encomiendas. From the middle of the sixteenth century, there was a steady move toward extinction of encomiendas as such grants passed through a third life and reverted to the Crown. By the time of the encomenderos' petition to the Crown in 1597–98, approximately two-thirds of the towns in the Audiencia of Mexico were in the Crown, either through original retention or reversion.^[22] By 1646 almost all of the original

[22] In the famous petition of encomenderos of 1597–98 and the legal proceedings carried out in support of it, the encomenderos declared that the proportion of privately held encomiendas still in existence at that time was less than one-quarter. A count of the certified statement of towns still in encomienda gives approximately 463 towns and fractions of towns, or approximately one-third. Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, comp., Epistolario de Nueva España, 1505–1818 , XIII, pp. 3–165, passim .

grants for three lives should have run out, since it would require three long-lived males with unusually wide spacing between generations to have held an encomienda for more than a century. On the other hand, a few of the grants, such as the very substantial one to the Cortés family, would not lapse, since they were in perpetuity. Furthermore, the Crown did make further grants, despite a general policy of letting encomiendas lapse, although the later grants were most often pension arrangements secured upon the tributes of specific towns. Some of the new grants were for one or more lives; some were in perpetuity.^[23] The report of 1646 shows the interaction of these counterbalancing tendencies. It lists, after elimination of duplicate entries, approximately 871 entities. (We deal here with the listings of 1646, which in many instances divide entities as they existed in 1568. We have had to recombine them for our earlier section on Indian population.) There were 202 towns still held by encomenderos in their entirety, and 32 whose tributes were divided between the Crown and an encomendero. Encomienda then affected 234 entities listed in the report, that is, 26.8%. If the towns omitted from the report were entirely in the Crown, adjustment for omission at maximum would require reducing this value to perhaps 18% as the proportion of towns and other entities still paying tribute to encomenderos through old or new grants. Attrition since 1597 then had reduced the former proportion of one-third by nearly half.^[24]

The tribute reform of the middle of the sixteenth century, implemented town by town in a steady series of reassessments, removed exemptions from obligation to pay and imposed a standard definition of tributary and half-tributary. There is no reason to think that these changes, which were fully implemented, changed in any significant way until the middle of the eighteenth century, when unmarried and widowed women were freed from payment of half-tribute. The mid-sixteenth-century reform also began to move assessments toward a standard quota, one silver peso of eight reales and half a fanega of maize as the ordinary tribute. It was supplemented by the half peso of

[23] These matters are treated at considerable length in Lesley Byrd Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain , chaps. 11 and 12, and Silvio A. Zavala, La encomienda indiana, passim .

[24] A comparison of the number of towns in encomienda in 1646 with that of 1597 yields the same proportion.

real servicio instituted in the 1590's, payable by all Indian tributaries whether in royal towns or encomienda.^[25] We have ignored the real servicio in this discussion, because it was collected uniformly with perhaps two exceptions.^[26]

Movement toward a standard quota per tributary was hampered by the fact that not all Indian towns were able to pay in money and maize and that the commodities in which they could pay were not as yet easily convertible to money by them. Accordingly, many towns continued to be assessed in local products, usually cloth, clothing, and cacao, occasionally more unusual products such as salt or wheat. As access to Spanish markets and the money economy increased, payment in all kinds of products also increasingly became commuted to coin, usually at the average the tribute had sold at in the preceding three or five years.^[27] That change introduced new elements of variation, for over the years the rise in prices affected different commodities at varying rates, and the towns which earlier had managed to commute their commodity payments to coin found themselves at an advantage compared to those which did so later. In the years from 1627 to 1631, the royal treasury finally set commutation rates for the two major tribute commodities at 9 reales the fanega for maize and 9 reales the pierna for cloth. That remained the rate despite later fluctuations of prices.^[28] Most towns listed in the 1646 report as delivering maize probably paid in coin, for the report indicates that all maize was converted to money at the commutation rate. However, towns which had commuted their maize at an earlier date and lower rate, if the assessment had been changed to coin, continued to pay at the lower rate. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, differences in commutation rates continued to keep tributes, by then almost all paid in coin, from being uniform.²⁹ Towns assessed in textiles continued to deliver products after 1631 despite the permission to commute, for the report of 1646 explicitly declares that no estimate of yield could be made, since tribute cloth and clothing were sold at public auction for varying prices.

[25] Cook and Borah, Essays , I, pp. 19–22.

[26] See below.

[27] See the discussion for the sixteenth century in Borah and Cook, Price Trends of Some Basic Commodities in Central Mexico, 1531–1570 , pp. 5–7 and 18–22.

[28] Cook and Borah, Essays , I, p. 20; Fabian de Fonseca and Carlos de Urrutia, Historia general de real hacienda , I, p. 422.

[29] Fonseca and Urrutia, I, table between pp. 450–451.

The extent to which tribute quotas had moved toward the standard assessment by the 1640's may be gauged from the 1646 report. Of 669 entities held in whole or in part by the Crown, 269, or 40.2%, varied from the standard of one silver peso and a half fanega of maize, or the money equivalent of 1/2/6. Accordingly, approximately 60% were at the standard. Our data cover only Crown towns or fractions thereof and do not touch towns entirely in encomienda. Neither can they give information on the very substantial number of towns omitted from the report. Clearly the movement toward a standard quota went somewhat more slowly than studies to date have supposed, and by the end of the sixteenth century came to a halt. It was resumed in the later seventeenth century, but the vagaries of commutation prevented adoption of a uniform tribute in money.

In Table 1.3 we list by region all of the royal towns, or fractions of towns, in the 1646 report that varied from the standard quota per tributary, either one peso and a half fanega of maize or the equivalent in money at the 1627–1631 commutation rate of 9 reales the fanega. The lowest quotas, and the greatest departures from the standard, involved Tlaxcala, Analco, and the two frontier towns. The province of Tlaxcala paid only one-half fanega of maize per tributary as a special royal favor for its services to Cortés and the Spaniards in the Conquest. Analco (Region V) paid only real servicio:

La prouinçia de çapotecas que cuyo suge to es el pu [ebl] o de analco esta reseruado de la paga del tributo y deue por El Seruy [ci] o R [ea] 1 veynte y dos pessos y quatro tom [ine] s por quarenta y çinco tributarios.

(The province of Zapotecas, of which the town of Analco is a dependency, is exempt from tribute and owes for real servicio 22/4 for 45 tributaries.)

Since the other towns of the Zapotecas all paid tribute, this statement and arrangement are both puzzling. The exemption was probably a remnant of a once much wider one which through negligence or difficulty in bringing the town to pay had been allowed to continue.

The two frontier towns, Tancajual and Tanleón in the Huaxteca (Region II), paid respectively totals of 20/ and 15/ because they were on the Chichimec frontier. Those sums included whatever was given on account of real servicio as well.

Much of the variation revealed in Table 1.3 can be ascribed to small adjustments made as compensation for sterility or unusu-

ally favorable fertility of land. Thus a number of towns paid at the rate of one peso per tributary without maize, or paid a lower quota in money but more maize, the latter kind of adjustment being particularly prominent in the Chalco district, one of the granaries of Mexico City, where the local quota was 0/6 and one fanega of maize. The Indian suburbs of Mexico City represent another kind of adjustment, since they paid only 1/0 on the ground that they were held to provide special services in the city.^[30] It is also true that they raised relatively little maize. Still other towns with quotas ranging from 1/1 to 1/2 without maize probably represent towns that took early advantage of the possibility of commuting commodity payment to coin, that is, they did so when the commutation value of maize was lower. In the instance of Tehuantepec (Region VI), where the commutation of maize took place at different times for two separate fractions of the town, commutation at different rates meant different quotas per tributary within the same town. The heaviest impact of commutation upon tributary quota came in Huapanapa (Region IV), where an original quota of 0/2 and a pound of cochineal became 1/7/4 upon commutation of the cochineal. Tribute quotas calling for delivery of wheat, still not commuted in 1646, were likely to follow a similar course.^[31]

[30] See the assessment of Santiago Tlaltelolco, 7 September 1565, in Mexico, AGN, El libro de las tasaciones , pp. 515–516.

[31] Borah and Cook, Price Trends , p. 18.Gastos y alimentación de un ejército en el siglo XVI según un presupuesto de la época , and the long series of studies published in Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations , frequently under the heading "Vie matérielle et comportements biologiques." See, for example, the articles in the bibliography by Frank Spooner, Frederick C. Lane, Jean-Jacques Hémardinquer, Michel Morineau, J.-P. Filippini, and B. Bennassar and J. Goy, eds. See also José Gentil Da Silva, Desarrollo ecónomico, subsistencia y decadencia en España , pp. 17–63; and Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme (XV XVIII siecles), esp. pp. 97 et seq . Most of these studies are based on the records of formal provision for soldiers, sailors, people in charitable institutions, and wealthy families. The mass of the population, and especially the lower levels, had far less available. Braudel suggests 2,000 kilocalories a day as a fair estimate for the mass of the European population.

Inspection of Table 1.3 suggests that implementation of the standard quota was linked rather directly to altitude and its concomitant climate, that is, towns on the plateau were most likely to have been brought to or close to the proposed norm, whereas towns at lower elevations on the coasts or intermediate zone were more likely to be assessed in cotton cloth of various kinds, cotton clothing, and in cacao. Thus Regions III, V, VII, and X had both the highest proportion of variation from the standard quota as well as the highest proportion of quotas in cloth or cacao. Region V, the Zapotecas, was the most prominent in these respects. There tended to be variations in the quotas in cloth and cacao, largely by district and probably based upon quality, capacity to produce, and perhaps accessibility. In Region V the unusually inaccessible area of the Huatenicamanes had a tributary quota of 2 1/2 varas of cloth and 1/4 fanegas of maize, in general half that of the other towns of the region. Since a pierna of cotton cloth, that is, a strip woven on a backstrap loom, most often of 5 varas, was worth 9 reales under the commutation circular of 1631, many of the quotas in cloth came close to the value of the standard assessment.

Variations in quality alone probably will not explain differences in the quotas of cacao, although cacao did come in different grades. In Regions VI and VII, the range of variation in quota was from 2800 beans per tributary through 2600, 1600, and down to 970 and 811. The last, the quota for Pinotepa del Rey, now Pinotepa Nacional, is not exact, since the total tribute divided by the number of tributaries does not come to an exact number of cacao beans. The assessment must have been by global amount. At the standard sixteenth-century long-term wholesale price for cacao, 20/ the carga of 24,000 beans, a quota for 1600 beans had a money value of 1/3 in Mexico City.

Let us turn now to the yield to the royal treasury, and examine the curious mixture of theoretical amount and actual collection in the report of 1646. We have tabulated the sums and amounts given in the report in Tables 1.4A and 1.4B, adjusting the way amounts are listed to reflect somewhat more orderly categories than were customary in seventeenth-century fiscal accounts. One difficulty that there is no way of handling without detailed knowledge of the accounts lies in the reporting of some royal revenue by subtreasury, those of San Luis Potosí

and Veracruz, with specification only of what taxes were not covered. Presumably all others for those districts are grouped under the global amounts, but probably the sums represent primarily one tax. Thus, the total for the subtreasury of Veracruz is largely or entirely almojarifazgo (customs revenue), and that for the subtreasury of San Luis Potosí the royal taxes on mined silver and other specie.

We have organized our presentation to show by column the gross revenue, the amount entering the general revenues of the Crown, and the amount earmarked for special application. The important special applications were the diversion of money and maize from tributes for the stipends of doctrineros and the application of new taxes and parts of old to maintain the Armada de Barlovento , a permanent fleet created to deal with the menace of corsairs, pirates, and foreign forces in the Caribbean. The last columns in the table are there because of the fortunate circumstance that when Fonseca and Urrutia prepared a history of the royal treasury for Viceroy Revillagigedo II in 1790–91, they attempted to calculate the average yield of many taxes in the past from the records in the viceregal treasury. In each case they calculated decennial collections and the average for the ten-year period, their decades coinciding with the standard ones of the calendar. Accordingly, we have a means of verifying for some of the revenues the actual average annual collections, as far as Fonseca and Urrutia were able to locate records.

Indian tributes, because of the more intricate nature of the sums and items entering the ramo , are further analyzed in Table 1.4B. The clerks who prepared the report of 1646 counted 160,948 1/2 t, and listed a total yield in coin of 190,522/4/6. In that sum were the payments in coin for the ordinary tribute, the amounts realized from maize and items commuted to coin, and the real servicio. We should note further that already deducted from the maize before calculating its money value at the standard commutation rate were the tithe, a proper charge before calculating treasury yield, and the stipend in maize delivered to the doctrineros, some 9,737 fanegas 10 almudes, worth 10,954/7/8. The clerks did not convert to money value nor estimate the yield in coin of the very substantial quantities of cloth received as tribute nor such relatively minor items as clothing, cacao, wheat, and salt. Their explanation was that

these items were sold at public auction and varied so much in quality and in the prices bid from year to year that no exact figure could be given. Nevertheless, if we are to glean some idea of the state of the royal revenues, we must arrive at an idea of approximate value. So little is still known about prices in seventeenth-century Mexico that we are forced to guesses. We have used the standard conversion rate of 0/9 the pierna of cotton cloth set by treasury circular in 1631 as the best rate for the cloth. For clothing we have used 0/6 per item, on the theory that quotas per tributary attempted to come close to a standard of 1/2 or 1/2/6. Cacao we have valued at the later sixteenth-century long-term legal maximum of 20/ the carga of 24,000 beans. Wheat we have valued at 2/4 the fanega, on the basis of the trend line in our previous calculation of movement of tribute commodity prices.^[32] That would mean a ratio of 20:9 between wheat and maize, so that we are probably low. Lastly, salt has been valued at 0/2 the cone on the same theory as clothing. On the basis of these estimates, the tribute commodities listed without calculation of yield in coin would have

[32] Ibid .

been worth approximately 85,837/6, a considerable addition to the other tribute and the servicio real together. Since Fonseca and Urrutia found that collections in these years averaged 269,224/ annually for tributes of all kinds, our estimate may be near the mark.

The factors that have to be taken into account in examining yield from tributes are somewhat intricate: (1) The report of 1646 lists the tribute assessments, on which its calculations are based. (2) The proportion of omission in the report should be applied to arrive at the actual value of total assessments of Indian tribute at the time; that is, the totals of the report should be increased by perhaps a third. (3) The report does not take into account the substantial amount of arrears in payment of tribute. The statement in Fonseca and Urrutia relates to actual collections. Failure to pay in full was especially prominent in this period and may have led to global arrearages of nearly a third. Accordingly, it is possible to find a rough agreement among all of this testimony and calculation.

Fonseca and Urrutia included in their estimate of yield for tributes those of free people of color, the negros y mulatos libres . For this item the report of 1646 gives an estimate based on actual collections, 2600/. The yearly quota for this group of tributaries was set by Viceroy Enríquez in 1579, when the levy was instituted, at 2/ a married couple and 1/ for each unmarried or widowed adult male or female, effectively a quota of 1/ a year per adult.^[33] In 1646 the population of color in the Audiencia of Mexico must have comprised approximately 50,000 persons.^[34] We have no means of determining at this time the proportion of slaves, but it cannot have been much more than half. Of the free people of color, less than half at maximum would have been exempt from tribute as too young or too old. So there would be left at a minimum perhaps 12,500 adults subject to a quota of 1/ a year. The royal treasury collected from approximately a fifth of these. Two factors were operating: a proportion of exemption for militia service on the coasts, even at this early date, and, most important of all, very substantial evasion. In the degree of evasion from tribute, the Audiencia of Mexico shared the experience of other jurisdic-

[33] Fonseca and Urrutia, I, p. 418.

[34] See Cook and Borah, Essays , II, chap. 2, esp. table 2.1b.

tions as fiscal agents attempted to enforce collection upon the free people of color.^[35]

Simple inspection of Table 1.4A indicates that the tax yielding the most revenue was the alcabala. The estimate in the report is based upon actual yield, since most of the tax was leased to cities. Within the district of the Caja de México, the ordinary alcabala yielded 299,263/ and the extraordinary levy for the Armada de Barlovento another 106,806/. The calculations by Fonseca and Urrutia of average yield in the 1640's, probably to be equated with the ordinary tax, come only to 266,039/, a discrepancy of about 11%. The next largest yields were those of the taxes on silver and customs (almojarifazgo), which in the report of 1646 are somewhat difficult to disentangle since for the collections directly in the Caja de México the two items are lumped as a single amount and the subcajas are listed as to total yield without a breakdown. The total of the two sets of taxes comes to 399,600/. If we allocate all of the yield of San Luis Potosí to imposts on mining, all of that of Veracruz to customs, and divide the mixed item for the Caja de México equally, taxes on mining would come to perhaps 207,500/ and customs to 192,100/. The yield of both fell below that of tributes from Indians and pardos. Fifth in order of yield came the Bulls of the Crusade, which theoretically were worth 150,000/ a year to the royal treasury. The remaining items each fell below 100,000/ annually, ranging from the 88,400/ a year theoretically due from the monopoly of playing cards, farmed out to a private holder, to the small sums derived from rental of the royal houses in Mexico City (actually the rental of the ground floor for shops) and the royal monopolies of mercury, chloride (solimán ) and alum. The royal monopoly of mercury, carried in the report as worth 120,000/, involved an equal amount of expenditure for the royal treasury, since the Crown had to buy the mercury, transport it to Mexico, and then to the mines.

A substantial part of the royal revenue was specifically earmarked for the Armada de Barlovento, which constituted the overwhelming destination of earmarked revenue.^[36] An addi-

[35] Cook and Borah, Essays , I, pp. 33–34; Borah, "Los tributos y su recaudación," p. 39.

[36] On the armada, see Fonseca and Urrutia, II, pp. 12–16 and 304–305; Palafox y Mendoza, Instrucción reservada, Bancroft Library, Mexican MS 162, ff. 16v–22v.

tional quota of 2%, added to the standard sales tax, and an additional impost of 25/ on each pipe of wine landed at Veracruz, yielded a theoretical 205,806/5/4 for the fleet plus its share of any surplus in the pension paid by the alguacil mayor of Mexico City that was not absorbed by the drainage of the Valley of Mexico.

The actual facts of collection and yield were somewhat different from the estimates in the report of 1646. The Fonseca and Urrutia calculations indicate that the collection of the ordinary alcabala ran perhaps 11% below the theoretical yield, although we cannot tell exactly where the discrepancy lay; tributes including yield from auctions were in reasonable agreement as to yield if one allows for arrears; and the yield of the third tax for which Fonseca and Urrutia give a calculation, the media anata (half of the first year's income of a new appointment), came to more than the estimate in the report of 1646. The worst discrepancies show up through the relación de mando prepared by Palafox. According to that report, the revenues earmarked for the Armada de Barlovento fell far short of raising the funds needed to maintain the fleet. When the armada was established, it had been estimated that an additional 2% of alcabala and 2 reales per pack of playing cards would raise 200,000/. The province of Yucatan was to contribute 40,000/ a year through a new levy of a tostón or half-peso per tributary, and the Audiencia of Guatemala was to raise 40,000/. The rise in alcabala indeed provided the sum envisaged, but it had never been possible to persuade the concessionnaire of the royal monopoly on playing cards to accept the new burden, and he was 500,000/ behind on the existing contract. The tax of a tostón in Yucatán had had to be abandoned; the Audiencia of Guatemala was able to contribute only 12,000/. At the time Palafox prepared his relación de mando , the sum of 200,000/ was urgently needed for the Armada de Barlovento merely to keep it in operation.^[37]

Palafox reported great arrears and negligence everywhere in the collection and administration of the royal revenues. The administration of the Bulls of the Holy Crusade was 300,000/ behind; the miners of Zacatecas, which lay outside the district

[37] Palafox y Mendoza, ff. 16v–22v.

of the Caja de México, owed the royal treasury 600,000/, probably a mixture of arrears of payments for mercury and slowness in paying the tax on mined silver.^[38] So the royal treasury in its sales of mercury was actually advancing credit to the miners through deliveries of mercury which the Crown had paid for. We know from other sources that the assessment and collection of Indian tributes was under an especially negligent and corrupt administration.

It is true that some ramos undoubtedly existing in the royal treasury at that time are not included in the report of 1646. A major one, stamped paper, recently instituted, was expressly excluded because it had not been in existence for three full years preceding the preparation of the report. Quitas y Nuevas Leyes , essentially the yield of encomiendas forfeit under the New Laws, was earmarked for the support of descendants of conquerors. It yielded small sums that may have been subsumed under tribute yield in the report of 1646. Penas de Cámara y Gastos de Justicia , the yield of fines and assessments for costs, probably had no surplus after charges, for from it were paid many costs of the courts and special grants. There should have been yield from other ramos such as Oficios Vendibles y Renunciables , the sale and transfer of office; licenses for slaughter of cattle and other livestock; goods confiscated as contraband; and the fees for Ventas, Composiciones y Confirmaciones de Tierras y Aguas , that is, the sums paid the Crown for grants of land and water or for issuing clear title to land and water in cases of clouded title or none at all. In addition, there were the payments for composiciones of all other kinds, the payments to the Crown for overlooking irregularities in status or violation of ordinances and laws. So there was royal revenue of varying but probably not substantial amounts that does not show up in the report of 1646.^[39]

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt of the basic truth of Palafox's judgment. It may well be that the yield of the royal revenues did not meet the costs of royal government. Even less did it provide a surplus to be sent to Spain for a Crown perennially short of revenue and embroiled in the quagmire of

[38] Ibid ., ff. 40f–44f.

[39] These are ramos antedating 1646 but not listed in the report of 1646. See Fonseca and Urrutia, I–VI, passim .

European wars. It was not until the administration of Mancera (1664–1673) that a steady deficit in the treasury of the Audiencia of Mexico was brought to surplus.^[40] The fiscal confusion of the mid-seventeenth century was so bad that there was substantial reform and overhaul in advance of the far-reaching changes of the eighteenth century.

[40] "Instrucción que de órden del Rey dió el virey de Méjico (D. Antonio Sebastian de Toledo, marqués de Mancéra) á su sucesor (el Excmo. Señor D. Pedro Nuño Colón, duque de Veraguas), 22 October 1673," in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España , XXI, pp. 523–552.