1. The series of letters spanning almost two decades (1590 to 1608) from Alvaro de Paredes to his brother in Cáceres are in AMG Fondo Barrantes Ms. B/3, as are the letters from Juan Tejado to the same. Paredes's mother, doña Estevanía de Paredes, conceivably was a member of the Paredes family of Trujillo; in one letter Alvaro referred to "our cousin Juan Barrantes," who might have been the son and heir of the returnee Pedro Barrantes and his wife, doña Juana de Paredes. The preservation of such a series of private letters is certainly out of the ordinary. They eventually came into the possession of the nineteenth-century bibliographer Vicente Barrantes, who left his private collection to the archive of the monastery of Guadalupe.

2. See AHPC Pedro González 3830.

3. The padrones (tax lists) of the towns in Trujillo's district (see AGS EH 189-56) sometimes note that someone owned half or part of a house.

4. One such case was that of Hernán González, who petitioned to go to New Spain in 1575 with his brother and his family. González's wife, Mari Hernández, was from Plasencia. Witnesses said they were poor and had lived with her parents in Plasencia after they married and then later came to Trujillo, where they lived with his parents; see AGI Indif. Gen. 2056.

5. Demographic reality, of course, also limited the possibilities for multigenerational households, since children might lose one or both parents fairly young.

6. Rodríguez Sánchez, Cáceres , 194.

7. Ibid., 234. He found that in eighteen cases of marriages of tailors' daughters, the average age at marriage was seventeen; and in ten cases of marriages of the daughters of shoemakers, the average age was eighteen.

6. Rodríguez Sánchez, Cáceres , 194.

7. Ibid., 234. He found that in eighteen cases of marriages of tailors' daughters, the average age at marriage was seventeen; and in ten cases of marriages of the daughters of shoemakers, the average age was eighteen.

8. AGI Contratación 5222. They were on their way to New Spain with Teresa González's father in 1575 (see chap. 5).

9. AGI Contratación 5221. This is based on information given in 1569 when Licenciado Altamirano was on his way back to Peru. At that time he was fifty, doña Leonor was forty, and their eldest son around fifteen years old.

10. AGI Indif. Gen. 2083.

11. AGI Contratación 5227.

12. AGI Contratación 5234B.

13. AGI Contratación 5228.

14. AGI Contratación 5227. Another example of the considerable age range in children was the family of Juan González, age forty-five, and his wife Juana González, forty, who in 1591 were taking their eight children to Peru. The oldest was a daughter, aged twenty; there were two boys, fourteen and ten; three daughters, all named María, aged nine, eight, and seven; another daughter of five; and a baby boy aged 1 1/2 years.

15. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, 1977), 63, 64, who points out that the lengthening of the birth intervals might have been due to decreasing fertility with age, contraceptive practices, or both.

16. Rodríguez Sánchez, Cáceres , 217, 219, and Stone, Family , 64.

17. ACC-HO leg. 5, pt. 2, no. 10.

18. ACC-HO leg. 8, no. 101; J. M. Lodo de Mayoralgo, Viejos linajes , 208. See also Rodríguez Sánchez, Cáceres , 83-84, note 64.

19. AGI Contratación 5221.

20. AGI Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 1.

21. See Lockhart, Men of Cajamarca , 168-189 for Juan and Gonzalo's upbringing. For Blas de Soto's letters to his sister Isabel and Señora Inés Rodríguez de Aguilar, see AGI Justicia 1070, no. 9.

22. The ''Open Lineage Family" that Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage , 4, 86 describes for sixteenth-century England characterized the upper classes above all. He writes (p. 5) that marrige "among the upper and middling ranks . . . was primarily a means of tying together two kinship groups, of obtaining collective economic advantages and securing useful political alliances. Among peasants, artisans and labourers, it was an economic necessity for partnership and division of labour in the shop or in the fields." Stone's data for the upper class, however, are much more extensive than for other groups, and in fact the differences probably were not as considerable as he suggests.

23. See Solís Rodríguez, "El arquitecto Francisco Becerra," 304, 315.

24. For her acquaintance with Pablo Vicencio (known in Trujillo as Francisco Pérez), see AGI Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 8. In 1549, when she testified, Inés Rodríguez was fifty years old and literate (she signed eas-

ily). The evidence that she was in Seville in 1534 when Hernando Pizarro left for the Indies comes from the will made by Martín de Chaves in October 1534, before his own departure; Inés was a witness; see AGI Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 1. Doña Graciana's will is in AMT García de Sanabria A-1-1. Inés Rodríguez's father, Gonzalo Pizarro, also made her one of the executors of his estate, along with her brother Hernando and aunt Estefanía de Vargas (see Gonzalo's will in Luisa Cuesta, "Una documentación interesante sobre la familia del conquistador del Peru," Revista de Indias 8, 30 (1947): 869. It is interesting to note that Estefanía de Vargas also had been effective head of the household during the years of Gonzalo Pizarro's absence.

25. For the details of Isabel Corvacho's properties, see Altman, "Emigrants, Returnees and Society," 99-100 and AHPC A. Pacheco 4102, 4104. Despite the donation to her sons, she still possessed considerable means. In 1584 she bought 3086 1/2 maravedís of winter rental in a dehesa for 115, 743 maravedís; see ACC-HO leg. 4, no. 2.

26. See Altman, "Emigrants and Society."

27. Muñoz de San Pedro, Crónicas trujillanas, Chaves, 189, 192. Gerbet, La noblesse, 316.

28. Boys from age fourteen and girls from twelve years could make their own wills, however.

29. AGI Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 1.

30. See AGI Contratación 5227.

31. AGI Contratación 5222.

32. AGI Patronato 112, ramo 2 (probanza of doña Isabel de Aguilar, 1564). The other sister was Mencía de Montenegro. Fray Alonso de Montenegro died in Cartagena, en route back to Spain.

33. In the testimony regarding settlement of the estate and debts of Alvaro de Ovando after his death in 1549 (he had two children, both minors), Cristóbal de Ovando, a regidor, stated he was second cousin to Alvaro de Ovando; another regidor, Francisco de Ovando, testified he was related to the children in the fourth degree; AHPC Pedro Grajos 3923. It may be a mistake to assume that commoners did not keep track of and look to a wide kinship network; we simply lack the documentary evidence. In 1591, for example, Diego de Alarcón testified for Francisco López de Castro, who was leaving Trujillo for Peru. He stated that they were related "but very little, in the fourth degree"; see AGI Contratación 5237.

34. AHPC Pedro González 3828.

35. See Gerbet, La noblesse, 175-177.

36. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3923. If the entail did not go to the direct descendants of Francisco de Saavedra and doña Marina Gutiérrez de

Carvajal, then her share of the estate would go first to her brothers and their descendants, and then to whoever succeeded to her husband's entail.

37. See Altman, "Spanish Hidalgos," genealogical charts following p. 344.

38. Of course there was a more distant connection through the paternal line, since doña Juana de Acuna and her husband, Luis de Chaves, were cousins; see Muñoz de San Pedro, Crónicas trujillanas, Chaves, 189-192.

39. Muñoz de San Pedro, La Extremadura del siglo XV, 169 and Crónicas trujillanas, Hinojosa, 146.

40. See note 14 above.

41. AGI Indif. General 2094.

42. Francisco Rodríguez was an escribano; he went to Peru with his wife and two children, to join his parents, in 1574; see AGI Indif. General 2087. At the age of fifty he testified in December 1591 in Trujillo on behalf of Juan de Camargo, who was going to Peru; AGI Contratación 5235.

43. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3923.

44. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3923; Luis de Roa y Ursúa, El reyno de Chile, 1535-1860 (Valladolid, 1945), 167; and AGS Expec. Hacienda 66 (padrón of Aldea del Cano).

45. For Juan de Vita y Moraga, see AGI Indif. General 2055; for Pedro de Vita, see AHPC Diego Pacheco 4100. For Bernardino de Moraga, see AHPC Alonso Pacheco 4102 and Roa y Ursúa, Chile, no. 1829.

46. AGI Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 1.

47. Acedo, "Linajes," Vargas, 48 ^a72 .

48. AGI Indif. General 2049.

49. AGI Indif. General 2083.

50. AMT 1584: IX-8 (see also note 90 below).

51. AGI Justicia 1154, no. 5, ramo 1. Juan de Hinojosa de Torres sent Bartolomé Pérez, who lived in Santa Cruz (although he might have been a vecino of Trujillo). Pérez's son Juan de Alvarado also went to Peru. Pérez died there in the late 1560s; AGI Indif. General 2086.

52. ARCG 508-1987-8.

53. ARCG 3 ^a -599-3.

54. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3923. Payment was made in 1548.

55. AGI Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 1.

56. AHPC Pedro González 3827.

57. AMT García de Sanabria A-1-1. On disinheritance, see Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest, 29-30.

58. Cristóbal's will (1602) and codicil (1618) are in ACC-HO leg. 1, no. 21. Cristóbal de Ovando Paredes's oldest son, don Cosme, was named the heir of his great-uncle Juan de Paredes de la Rocha in his will of 1593 (ACC-HO leg. 1, no. 20), but since this bequest came long before Cristóbal made

his will, clearly it did not influence his plans at the outset. For don Cosme's attempts to reclaim the entail, see ACC-HO leg. 7, no. 22.

59. Muñoz de San Pedro, Diego García de Paredes, 359-361.

60. AHPC Pedro González 3828.

61. When two daughters of Cosme de Ovando and doña Beatriz de Paredes entered San Pablo in 1557, their father pledged a dowry of 4,400 maravedís of "renta de yerba" in the dehesa of Torrejón de Arriba and 11, 593 1/2 maravedís of rents in the dehesa of Arenal. He also agreed to give them each 1,000 maravedís a year; AHPC Diego Pacheco 4100.

62. See the 1602 will of Cristóbal de Ovando Paredes, ACC-HO leg. 1, no. 21.

63. For example, in 1556 Gonzalo de Saavedra paid 77, 509 1/2 maravedís in cash (about 200 ducados) and 110 fanegas of wheat to Santa María in Cáceres for the time two orphan daughters of Gabriel de Saavedra lived there; AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3925.

64. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3925.

65. See AMG Fondo Barantes Ms. B/3, fol 94.

66. AGS Exped. Hacienda 189-56.

67. AGS Exped. Hacienda 189-56.

68. AGI Contratación 5220, 5227.

69. Muñoz de San Pedro, Diego García de Paredes, 45-46, 88-89, 275, and ACC Asuntos de Trujillo, leg. 3, no. 2.

70. See Lockhart, Men of Cajamarca, 137-139.

71. Probably this continued to hold true in the working classes. Gabriel Calderón and his wife María González, both thirty-seven years old in 1591 when they asked for a license to go to Peru with their four daughters, were both illegitimate children of parents who apparently never married; see AGI Contratación 5237. Both gave the names of their parents. Gabriel Calderón's mother was in service to Hernando Calderón de Chaves, probably the source of his surname.

72. AGI Indif. General 2049.

73. ACC-HO leg. 1, no. 7 (will of 1530).

74. Angel Rodríguez Sánchez, "La natalidad ilegítima en Cáceres en el siglo XVI" (Badajoz, 1979), 26, 27, 31. As one example, Sebastiana, the slave of Licenciado Espadero (probably the brother of Alvaro de Paredes in Mexico) gave birth to Antonio (January 1580), Francisco (January 1583), and Pablo (May 1586), all of father unknown.

75. AHPC Pedro González 3829.

76. Don Juan de Sande's will of 1571 is in AHPC Pedro González 3828. He named as his heirs "Diego y Jerónimo mis hijos naturales que al presente tengo en casa de mis padres." When Sande's mother died shortly after he did, the children became the wards of his uncle, don Sancho de

Sande, tesorero of Plasencia. Jerónimo de Sande went to the Indies in 1591 at the age of 21; AGI Contratación 5234A.

77. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3923, 3924.

78. AHPC Pedro González 3830, Pedro de Grajos 3926.

79. AHPC Pedro González 3830.

80. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3925.

81. After his death María would inherit 20,000 maravedís at the age of sixteen; if she died before then, her brother Alonso would inherit. If Nuño Gutiérrez died before María was sixteen and she decided to live with her mother, than Alonso García, a silversmith, would administer the 20,000 maravedís until María reached the age of twenty or married; see AMT García de Sanabria A-1-1.

82. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3925; Pedro González 3828. In a similar case Antonio de Sotomayor, a regidor of Cáceres, freed his slave Mateo, the son of Domingo Pérez. Pérez had been the mayoral (foreman) of the comendador de Piedra Blanco, Sotomayor's uncle (whom he called "mi señor"). Pérez had had the child by a mulatta slave who belonged to the comendador. At the time of his death Pérez had asked that Sotomayor free Mateo, which he did in 1563; AHPC Diego Pacheco 4102.

83. AGI Indif. General 2059.

84. AHPC Pedro González 3827. Diego Cano subsequently changed his mind about the house he donated, deciding he needed it for his servants, and instead offered Ana Sánchez 26 reales a year to rent another. After Ana married Francisco Sánchez, in October 1570 they said they had received the thirty fanegas of wheat from Diego Cano.

85. See his información of 1577 when he petitioned to go to Peru; AGI Indif. General 2084.

86. AHPC Diego Pacheco 4113.

87. Catálogo, 4, no. 2780; and the biography by Muñoz de San Pedro and Nectario María, El gobernador y maestre de campo Diego García de Paredes .

88. See Nader, Mendozas, 112. By this method of calculation, the heir to the "tercio y quinto" received 46.7 percent of the total legacy. David S. Reher has suggested that there was another way of figuring the share, by which the "quinto" was set aside "de libre disposición" before any division was made. Added to the "tercio," this would yield 53.3 percent for the designated heir, while the remaining heirs would receive equal portions of the other 46.7 percent. I have not been able to determine which method of calculation was used in sixteenth-century Extremadura; in any case, the difference is not great.

89. Gómez de Solís and Juan de Hinojosa, in Peru in 1559, renounced their inheritance in favor of their brother Francisco de Ulloa Solís, heir of

the family entail, in Cáceres; see AHPC Alonso Pacheco 4104; the donation was listed in the inventory prepared in 1579 after the death of the fourth brother, Lorenzo de Ulloa Solís.

90. Alonso Bravo, the native of Búrdalo who took up residence in Trujillo, had no children. In his will of 1584 he made provisions for various nieces and nephews, but his second wife, Francisca Nuñez, received the largest inheritance--his best pair of oxen, forty pigs, twenty-four fanegas of wheat, half of the house (she owned the other half), all the furnishings in the house, 50 ducados, and the income from a mill; see AMT 1584:IX-8. All the rest of his property was to be sold to buy censos to found an obra pía to marry "an orphan, the closest relative in my lineage who is an honorable woman" (or a relative of his first or second wife).

91. AMT Pedro de Carmona A-1-9. He also made her curador of their children unless she remarried, in which case Pedro Barrantes, another returnee, would become curador. It seems very likely that García López de Aviles himself was in the Indies, although the evidence is entirely circumstantial--his close association with other returnees, and the fact that he had juros in Seville, as did many other returnees.

92. Hernando Corajo in his will of 1513 said his wife Beatriz de Contreras was to live in the house in the "villa" of Trujillo and have everything in the house except the slaves and things his uncle Alvaro de Paredes had sent from Italy; she was also to enjoy the income from the rents; see ACC-AT leg. 3, no 2. Legally a spouse could not inherit outright unless there was no relative within the seventh degree who could inherit; see Gerbet, La noblesse , 171.

93. AMT Pedro de Carmona B-1-27. Gonzalo's sons, Captain Martín, Gonzalo, and don Francisco, were in the Indies when the partition of his property was made in 1580.

94. AHPC Pedro González 3830.

95. ACC-HO leg. 4, no. 4 and AHPC Alonso Pacheco 4103. According to Bartoloé Clavero, Mayorazgo: propiedad feudal en Castilla, 1369-1836 (Madrid, 1974), 235 a woman could found an entail without her husband's permission only in her will.

96. See, for example, the joint entail founded by Francisco de Solís and doña Juana de Hinojosa in 1535, AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3924. Doña Juana de Hinojosa's properties in Trujillo were to go to her Trujillo relatives in default of the direct male line.

97. Clavero, Mayorazgo, 222, writes "la voluntad del fundador es la ley fundamental del mayorazgo."

98. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3924.

99. ACC-HO leg. 1, no. 21 (will of 1534); see Altman, "Spanish Hidalgos," 336-338.

100. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3923.

101. ACC-AT leg. 3, no. 2.

102. AHPC Alonso Pacheco 4103. Such conditions were not limited to entails. Sancho Solano in 1551 made his daughter Isabel his universal heir if she would marry his cousin's son, Juan Solano; if not she would inherit only one-fourth of his estate, with half going to his brother Juan Solano in Rome and the other fourth to his cousin Alonso Solano as a dowry for the latter's daughter; AMT García de Sanabria A-1-1. Solano does not seem to have been quite acceptable as a surname for a woman (the same was true for other surnames ending in "o," such as Ramiro, Cornejo, etc.). Sancho first referred to his daughter as Isabel Solano but later as Isabel Alvarez la Solana (Alvarez was from his mother's side of the family). Around the same time Solano arranged to give Mari Sánchez, another daughter of his cousin Alonso Solano, 50,000 maravedís for her dowry on behalf of this brother Juan Solano.

103. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3923 (1546 and 1547).

104. ACC-HO leg. 1, no. 16 (1564).

105. See AMT Pedro de Carmona B-1-27.

106. AHPC Pedro Pérez 4123; Alonso Pacheco 4104.

107. AGI Justicia 1062, no. 1, ramo 2; Acedo, "Linajes," Calderón, 334 ^a31 .

108. AHPC Diego Pacheco 4113, Pedro González 3828.

109. AHPC Alonso Pacheco 4103.

110. AHPC Pedro González 3828.

111. AHPC Pedro González 3829. Don Francisco de Torres's grandmother doña Teresa Rol was from a noble family of Alcántara, the only daughter of Pedro Rol. Martín Rol was her father's first cousin and the comendador of Almorchón and Cabeza del Buey. He founded an entail for doña Teresa in 1506, which was her dowry when she married Diego de Ovando de Cáceres. See AHPC Diego Pacheco 4101 and Gerbet, La noblesse , 218, 243.

112. Acedo, "Linajes," Orellana, 92-93, 107.

113. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3924. Doña Francisca de Ulloa had only one brother, so clearly her father effected a simple division of all his property between his two children. Antonio C. Floriano in Estudios , 1:125 writes that in 1170 a member of one of the Leonese contingents involved in the reconquest of the area established an estate between the valleys of the Ayala and Salor rivers, known then as the "aldea de Pedro Cervero" and later as La Cervera.

114. Doña Francisca's second marriage was to a leading noble of Cáceres, Alonso de Ribera, himself a widower, who created an entail for their daughter doña Catalina de Ribera when she married in 1583. Two of

Alnoso de Ribera's sons by his first marriage--Juan Pantoja de Ribera and Rodrigo de Chaves—went to the Indies; Juan Pantoja remained in Honduras and Rodrigo de Chaves returned to Cáceres. His oldest son by this marriage, Alvaro de Ribera, received the entail he founded in 1531 (see ACC Mayorazgo de Ribera leg. 1, no. 16); his daughter doña María de Ribera married the wealthy returnee, Trujillo councilman and Pizarro ally, Juan Cortés. Doña Catalina de Ribera, Alonso de Ribera's daughter by doña Francisca de Ulloa, married Pedro Rol de Ovando, the oldest son of Francisco de Ovando, one of the three heirs of Francisco de Ovando, el rico.

115. In the codicil to his will (1577) Pedro de Grajos said his daughter Isabel García la Romera received a dowry of 350 ducados when she married Alonso de Solís. When his daughter Elvira Díaz married Gil Delgado, Grajos and his wife, together with son Gabriel de Grajos and sons-in-law Solís and Francisco Cotrina, endowed her with 500 ducados. Solís also contributed to the dowry of another daughter, Catalina García la Romera. AHPC Alonso Pacheco 4103.

116. AHPC Pedro Gonzalez 3829, 3830.

117. Although this pattern is closely associated with the nobility, its influence extended beyond that group, as can be seen in the Enríquez-Camargo mercantile family. Vicente Enríquez and his wife Leonor Alvarez created an entail for their son Vasco Calderón Enríquez; another son, Juan de Camargo, was a regidor of Trujillo and must have come into a good inheritance also. But son Alonso Enríquez went to Chile, Diego de Camargo became a priest, and one daughter entered the convent of Santa Clara; see Acedo, "Linajes," Calderón, 295, 334 ^a12,33,41 .