The Court Fees Weren't Exactly Light

 

Advice to sojourners in the early-modern era who are trying to avoid execution for witchcraft: be sure you are born male and have a high social rank. These inheritances helped ensure the pardon of Jeronimo Dirucaca, alleged witch and onetime governor of Picuris Pueblo in northeastern New Mexico. In 1713 several men and women from Picuris accused Dirucaca of multiple crimes against the community, including sorcery. Four Puebloan women told Spanish investigators that the former governor, hoping to draw them to his bed or to punish their rejection of his advances, had either enchanted or magically sickened them. Dirucaca’s other crimes included several extramarital sexual liaisons and encouraging his constituents to ignore their priest and “live as your ancestors did.” This last was to the Spanish a chilling reminder of the great revolt of 1680, in which Puebloan warriors killed 400 colonists and liberated New Mexico for the next decade.

Picuris Pueblo, 1941 (Museum of N. Mexico)

Investigators in Picuris determined, however, that Ser Jeronimo’s rebelliousness extended little further than his own person. One of the Tewa Puebloans’ ancestral practices was polygyny, another of the crimes of which Dirucaca stood accused, and in aid of which he had allegedly employed his forbidden supernatural arts. For such a venial transgression Spanish officials were willing to grant leniency, particularly since the transgressor still retained his high rank in the community - the Puebloans allowed former governors to remain ranking elders or “notables,” and town leaders had even let Dirucaca retain his cane of office. Patriarchal rule hath its privileges.

Dirucaca’s willingness to pay a large bribe proved even more decisive in determining his fate. The defendant agreed to trade for a gubernatorial pardon an important piece of information: “the location of a hidden silver mine” in Picuris Canyon. Officials confirmed that the mine - probably the first actual source of silver the Spanish ever located in New Mexico - was real, and released Dirucaca after his payment of court expenses. More advice to time-travelers trying to elude witchcraft charges: be sure you own or have access to a silver mine.

 

Sources: Malcolm Ebright, “Advocates for the Oppressed: Indians, Genizaros and their Spanish Advocates in New Mexico, 1700-1786,” New Mexico Historical Review 71 (1996): 305-39, quote 312; Tracy Brown, Pueblo Indians and Spanish Colonial Authority in Eighteenth Century New Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2013), 46; Maurice Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 36-37.

Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Popular historians and non-fiction writers are partial to the concept of sudden social collapse, which they have used to explain the “disappearance” of such past civilizations as Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Classical-era Mayans, the Ancestral Puebloans, and even the Roman Empire. Many of us like the drama of rapid change, the pathos of social decline, and the ease of finding a moral lesson - beware of war, don’t mistreat the environment, obey your leaders - in a tale of decline and fall. Archaeologist Guy Middleton has recently reminded us that life and death, especially the life and death of an entire human society, are rarely so simple. Elements of a civilization can and do decline over time, but cultures can endure for centuries. Confusing the fall of a single powerful city or the overthrow of a small elite with the death of a whole civilization distorts the lived experience of most of that society’s people, and encourages us to adopt an elitist view of history.

Middleton’s particular specialty is the Mycenaean civilization, which ostensibly fell apart at the end of the Bronze Age. Middleton argues that much of Mycenaean culture (e.g. pottery, religious beliefs) survived the abandonment of its palace complexes in 1200 BCE, and finds little evidence of the kind of violence or resource exhaustion that might have caused a sudden collapse. The Mycenaeans instead abandoned a particular kind of political system, replacing the centralized palaces with smaller and more diffuse settlements, and their old semi-divine kings with the basileis of the early Hellenic era. What ended in 1200 was a polity, not a society. His description reminded me of the fate of the Ancestral Puebloans, whose Pueblo Indian descendants overthrew their priestly elite (ca. 1300 CE), stopped building large stone towns on the elite’s behalf, and moved into smaller but more numerous agricultural towns in the more fertile Rio Grande valley. In each case there was a period of political disruption and social change, but only the old elite and their latter-day sympathizers would see this as devolution.           

Calakmul, Classic-period Mayan city

The Mayans and Easter Islanders provide additional examples of the evolution-not-devolution model of cultural change. Fiction writers and television programs have generated much popular interest in the question “What happened to Mayan civilization?” Middleton's answer is both simple and surprising: it survived in one form or another until the Spanish destroyed the last city-state in 1697. States rose and fell in the Classical period (750-1050 CE), and drought or intra-elite violence led to the abandonment of some urban centers, but the post-Classical Mayans continued to build cities, write books, and engage in maritime trade well into the early modern period. Middleton has little patience for those who charge the Mayans with destroying themselves, and even less for writers like Jared Diamond who castigate the people of Rapa Nui for wrecking their environment and becoming a pack of starving, deracinated wretches. Historical evidence shows that indigenous Easter Islanders instead lived fairly rich and decent lives, maintaining a stable population and a sizable agricultural surplus well into the nineteenth century. The toppling of the island’s distinctive statues, or moai, occurred not in one spasmodic bout of desperate violence, but in a smaller series of conflicts over the course of 200 years. As with the Mayans, the destruction of Rapa Nui’s people came from outside forces, in particular the arrival of Euro-American slavers in the 1860s.   

Middleton’s insight can even be applied to the largest and most dramatic episode of civilizational collapse in historical literature, namely the fall of Rome. There is a good reason that the most famous historian of this process, Edward Gibbon, took 2,700 pages and fourteen years to chronicle “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:” Rome’s so-called collapse took nearly 1300 years from start to finish, a period spanning twenty human lifetimes and exceeding by a millennium the institutional lifespan of the United States. The Eastern Empire, home to the imperial capital and most of the old empire’s wealthy urban centers, did not end until midway through the Renaissance, while in the West a soi-disant Roman Empire held on until Napoleon’s time. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Roman civilization did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downward. Indeed, the Roman language and ecclesiastical bureaucracy (in the form of the Catholic Church) remain with us today. Slow change and cultural persistence make for a less exciting story than the sturm und drang of socio-political collapse, but they more accurately characterize the lives of far more people, rich and poor, famous and obscure, than war and ruination.  

(My thanks to John Barnes for linking to Middleton's fascinating article.)             

Huaynaputina's World

Few people outside of South America had heard of Huaynaputina, a volcano in the Bolivian Andes, prior to its eruption. Few knew of its existence afterward. Events do not have to be well-known to disrupt or even end people’s lives. Huaynaputina killed more than its share of human beings. During a two-week period in February and March 1600, the mountain ejected thirty billion pounds of magma, tephra, volcanic ash, and sulfur dioxide. The solid ejecta obliterated nearby towns and promptly killed 1,500 people. The ash and gas shot into the troposphere and dimmed the Sun’s rays over much of the planet for more than a year. The Earth cooled, the winters lengthened and deepened, and crops failed in China and Japan, which could endure a failed harvest or two, and in Russia, which could not.

Thames Frost Fair, ca. 1605

Russia’s peasants already lived on the edge of subsistence, raising barely enough grain during the four-month growing season to feed themselves. (The early Russian state actually raised more money from taxes on the fur trade than  agricultural duties.) One bad harvest could kill them. The 1601 harvest was bad indeed: frost gripped the soil through the spring and into early summer. 1602 brought more cold temperatures and more dead or withered crops. By the time normal harvests returned in 1603, two million Russians, or twenty-five percent of the kingdom’s population, had died. The famine undermined the authority of Russia’s ruling monarch, clearing the way for civil war and the eventual accession of the Romanov Dynasty.

North America also saw colder-than-usual weather in 1601, and New Mexico was visited by hunger, though cold had less to do with this than drought. Low rainfall and the depradations of Juan de Onate’s army started the first of several famines that the Pueblo Indians, who normally grew enough food to trade the surplus with their indigenous neighbors, would endure in the seventeenth century. Those who did not wish to starve had two unpalatable options: they could seek refuge with neighboring Indian groups like the Navajos, or they could beg newly arrived Franciscan priests, whose missions had their own food supplies, to succor them. Many made the latter choice, came under pressure from the missionaries to accept the Spaniards’ faith, and, under duress, consented to convert. By 1607 the Franciscans reported 600 Pueblo converts in the newly conquered province, enough to persuade the Crown to retain New Mexico. The immiseration of the many usually provides some form of opportunity to the few, whether those few wear the habiliments of a Muscovite prince or the cassock of a Spanish missionary.


Sources: K.L. Verosub and J. Lippmann, "Global Impacts of the 1600 Eruption of Peru's Huaynaputina Volcano," Eos 89 (2008), no. 15; Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (1974); Andrew Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (1995).

From Subjects to Allies

The early Spanish colonization of New Mexico brought much grief and few benefits to the province’s Pueblo Indian peoples. The conquerors destroyed several Pueblo communities, notably the town of Acoma, and imposed heavy tribute burdens on the survivors. Those Indians who sought the protection of the province’s Franciscan missionaries found themselves subject to coerced labor and corporal punishment, their ceremonial centers proscribed and their veneration of indigenous gods (katsinas) condemned. The Puebloan nations had to endure most of a century of Spanish domination, mitigating its worst effects by “playing off” venial officials and overworked friars against one another, or forming personal alliances with individual colonists, or fleeing the colony.

Eventually, Native New Mexicans decided they would rather fight than submit any longer. In 1675, on the heels of a severe drought and famine, Spanish officials and missionaries united to suppress the katsina faith and execute Pueblo holy men. This became the last straw. Five years later several thousand Puebloans rose in rebellion against their overlords. In a series of coordinated attacks, Pueblo warriors killed four hundred priests, officials, and colonists (out of a European population of 1,000) and forced the survivors to flee the province. The colony ceased to exist. The Pueblos recovered their independence and maintained it for thirteen years, until Spanish troops re-took Santa Fe and reconquered New Mexico.

“Reconquest” may be too strong a word. The new Spanish governor, Diego de Vargas, did crush an anti-Spanish uprising in 1696, but his successors generally treated their Indian subjects very gingerly. Post-Revolt governors reduced the heavy tribute the Pueblos had once paid, and missionaries no longer pursued heretics and “witches” as vigorously as before. Memories of the 1680 rising probably contributed to this conciliatory posture. As important, however, were the growing military power and intensifying raids of New Mexico’s non-Pueblo neighbors: the Utes, Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches. Spanish officials believed the best defense against these nations was a good offense, but they could not conduct those offensives on their own, having only 200 soldiers under their command. If Spain wanted to hold its re-conquered colony, it needed Pueblo Indian military assistance.

Dependency became particularly obvious in 1705, when Navajo raiders hit several pueblos in the Rio Grande valley. That summer Roque Madrid assembled a punitive expedition to, as he put it, “make war by fire and sword” on the Dine*. Of his force of 400 men, over one hundred were Indian allies of “all the nations,” including Pueblos and detribalized Plains Indians (genizaros). Madrid frequently showed his reliance on the Pueblos as he made his 300-mile journey to eastern Navajo country, west of Chama in northern New Mexico. He relied on his warriors and war captains to scout the route of march. Pueblos and genizaros fought as equals in the expeditionaries’ skirmishes with the Navajos, and helped destroy their milpas (cornfields). Madrid had to allow his warriors to kill captives whom he would have preferred to interrogate or enslave. (Doubtless they wanted vengeance for earlier Navajo raids). The only decision the commander seems to have left to his white colleagues was the collective resolution to retreat, which Madrid and his captains made after two weeks on the trail. Pueblo warriors may have wanted to push on, but they depended on Spanish arms as much as the Spanish depended on them, and they too turned homeward.

The Pueblos did not have the uppermost hand in eighteenth-century New Mexico, but the 1680 rising had left an indelible impression on Spanish memories. Spain now saw its Puebloan subjects not as placid peasants but warlike peoples. This actually became an asset for indigenous New Mexicans, for in the 1700s the Southwest became a highly militarized environment. The Navajos, Utes, Pueblos and Comanches alternated raiding one another’s homelands with marketing the proceeds of their raids: foodstuffs, horses, and (most valuable of all) captives. Spanish officials wanted to protect their own colony from raids and, as importantly, profit from the sale of plunder and slaves. They needed manpower, and the Pueblos had demonstrated that they could provide it. The rebels of 1680 had organized their insurrection in order to free their communities from Spanish domination and religious oppression. If they at least partially succeeded in attaining both goals, it was because the revolt had given them a reputation as people dangerous to cross but useful to have on your side in a fight, and because the returning Spanish realized New Mexico was going to be in a lot of fights. An apparently idealistic gesture of liberation became a component of a realistic modus vivendi. Just because a rebellion appears to fail doesn’t mean it won't eventually prove a good idea.

Sources: Rick Hendricks and John Wilson, eds., The Navajos in 1705: Roque Madrid’s Campaign Journal (University of New Mexico Press, 1996), quotes 13, 22; James Brooks, Captives and Cousins (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 93. The standard history of the 1680 revolt is Andrew Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), reviewed here.

* Dine was the eponym (self-given name) of the Apaches and Navajos.


Image of Laguna Pueblo man and woman, ca. 1900, courtesy of National Park Service.