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The encomienda (, ) was a 16th-century Spanish labour system that rewarded Spain's with the labour of conquered non-Christian peoples. In theory, the conquerors provided the labourers with benefits, including military protection and education. In practice, the conquered were subject to conditions that closely resembled instances of forced labour and slavery. The encomienda was first established in Spain following the Christian Reconquista, and it was applied on a much larger scale during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Spanish East Indies. Conquered peoples were considered of the Spanish monarch. The Crown awarded an encomienda as a grant to a particular individual. In the conquest era of the early sixteenth century, the grants were considered a monopoly on the labour of particular groups of indigenous peoples, held in perpetuity by the grant holder, called the encomendero; starting from the New Laws of 1542, the encomienda ended upon the death of the encomendero, and was replaced by the repartimiento.James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz, Early Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 138: «The encomienda in its early heyday granted a lifetime monopoly on the utilization of temporary Indian labor in a given area to one Spaniard, the encomendero. The succeeding repartimiento ...»
Encomiendas devolved from their original Iberian form into a form of communal slavery. In the encomienda, the Spanish Crown granted a person a specified number of natives from a specific community but did not dictate which individuals in the community would have to provide their labour. Indigenous leaders were charged with mobilising the assessed tribute and labour. In turn, encomenderos were to ensure that the encomienda natives were given instruction in Catholicism and the Spanish language, to protect them from warring tribes or ; to suppress rebellion against Spaniards, and maintain infrastructure. The natives provided Tribute in the form of metals, maize, wheat, pork, and other agricultural products.
With the ousting of Christopher Columbus in 1500, the Spanish Crown had him replaced with Francisco de Bobadilla.Noble, David Cook. "Nicolás de Ovando" in Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, vol. 4, p. 254. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1996. Bobadilla was succeeded by a royal governor, Fray Nicolás de Ovando, who established the formal encomienda system.Ida Altman, et al., The Early History of Greater Mexico, Pearson, 2003, p. 47 In many cases natives were forced to do hard labour and subjected to extreme punishment and death if they resisted. However, Queen Isabella I of Castile forbade slavery of the native population and deemed the indigenous to be "free vassals of the crown".Ida Altman, et al., The Early History of Greater Mexico, Pearson, 2003, 143 Various versions of the Laws of the Indies from 1512 onwards attempted to regulate the interactions between the settlers and natives. Both natives and Spaniards appealed to the for relief under the encomienda system.
Encomiendas have often been characterized by the geographical displacement of the enslaved and breakup of communities and family units, but in New Spain, the encomienda ruled the free vassals of the crown through existing community hierarchies, and the natives remained in their settlements with their families.Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, Stanford, 1964.
The encomienda system traveled to America with the implantation of Castilian law in Spanish territories. The system was created in the Middle Ages and was pivotal to allow for the repopulation and protection of frontier land during the reconquista. This system originated in the Catholic south of Spain to extract labour and tribute from Muslims (Moors) before they were exiled in 1492 after the Moorish defeat in the Granada War. (2025). 9781118772485, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN 9781118772485 It was a method of rewarding soldiers and moneymen who defeated the Moors. The encomienda established a system similar to a Feudalism relationship, in which military protection was traded for certain tributes or specific work. It was especially prevalent among military orders that were entrusted with the protection of frontier areas. The king usually intervened directly or indirectly in the bond, by guaranteeing the fairness of the agreement and intervening militarily in case of abuse.
The encomienda system in Spanish America differed from the Peninsular institution. The encomenderos did not own the land on which the natives lived. The system did not entail any direct land tenure by the encomendero; native lands were to remain in the possession of their communities. This right was formally protected by the crown of Castile because the rights of administration in the New World belonged to this crown and not to the Catholic monarchs as a whole.Scott, Meredith, " The Encomienda System ".
In his study of the encomenderos of early colonial Mexico, Robert Himmerich y Valencia divides conquerors into those who were part of Hernán Cortés' original expedition, calling them "first conquerors", and those who were members of the later Narváez expedition, calling them "conquerors". The latter were incorporated into Cortes' contingent. Himmerich designated as pobladores antiguos (old settlers) a group of undetermined number of encomenderos in New Spain, men who had resided in the Caribbean region prior to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.
In the New World, the Crown granted conquistadores as encomendero, which is the right to extract labour and tribute from natives who were under Spanish rule. The encomienda system was established on the island of Hispaniola by Nicolás de Ovando, the third governor of the Spanish colony, in 1502.
Some women and some indigenous elites were also encomenderos. Maria Jaramillo, the daughter of La Malinche and conqueror Juan Jaramillo, received income from her deceased father's encomiendas.Robert Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991 p. 178 Two of Moctezuma's daughters, Isabel Moctezuma and her younger sister, Leonor Moctezuma, were granted extensive encomiendas in perpetuity by Hernán Cortés. Leonor Moctezuma married in succession two Spaniards, and left the encomiendas to her daughter by her second husband.Himmerich y Valencia (1991), The Encomenderos, pp. 195–196Himmerich y Valencia (1991), 27 Vassal Inca rulers appointed after the conquest also sought and were granted encomiendas.
The encomienda was essential to the Spanish crown's sustaining its control over North, Central and South America in the first decades after the colonization. It was the first major organizational law instituted on the continent, which was affected by war, widespread epidemics caused by Eurasian diseases, and resulting turmoil.Inga Clendinnen; Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1517–1570. (p. 83) Initially, the encomienda system was devised to meet the needs of the early agricultural economies in the Caribbean. Later it was adopted to the mining economy of Peru and Upper Peru. The encomienda in Peru lasted from the 1530s to the eighteenth century.
Philip II enacted a law on 11 June 1594 to establish the encomienda in the Philippines, where he made grants to the local nobles ( principalía). They used the encomienda to gain ownership of large expanses of land, many of which (such as Makati) continue to be owned by affluent families.
Each reducción had a native chief responsible for keeping track of the labourers in his community. The encomienda system did not grant people land, but it indirectly aided in the settlers' acquisition of land. As initially defined, the encomendero and his heirs expected to hold these grants in perpetuity. After a major Crown reform in 1542, known as the New Laws, encomendero families were restricted to holding the grant for two generations. When the Crown attempted to implement the policy in Peru, shortly after the 1535 Spanish conquest, Spanish recipients rebelled against the Crown, killing the viceroy, Blasco Núñez Vela.
In Mexico, viceroy Antonio de Mendoza decided against implementing the reform, citing local circumstances and the potential for a similar conqueror rebellion. To the crown he said, "I obey crown authority but do not comply with this order."Arthur S. Aiton, Antonio de Mendoza, First Viceroy of New Spain, Durham: Duke University Press 1972. The encomienda system was ended legally in 1720, when the crown attempted to abolish the institution. The encomenderos were then required to pay remaining encomienda labourers for their work.
The encomiendas became very corrupt and harsh. In the neighborhood of La Concepción, north of Santo Domingo, the adelantado of Santiago heard rumors of a 15,000-man army planning to stage a rebellion. Upon hearing this, the adelantado captured the involved and had most of them hanged.
Later, a chieftain named Guarionex laid havoc to the countryside before an army of about 3,090 routed the Ciguana people under his leadership. Although expecting Spanish protection from warring tribes, the islanders sought to join the Spanish forces. They helped the Spaniards deal with their ignorance of the surrounding environment.
As noted, the change of requiring the encomendado to be returned to the crown after two generations was frequently overlooked, as the colonists did not want to give up the labour or power. According to the Codice Osuna, one of many colonial-era Aztec codices (indigenous manuscripts) with native pictorials and alphabetic text in Nahuatl, there is evidence that the indigenous were well aware of the distinction between indigenous communities held by individual encomenderos and those held by the Crown. Codice Osuna, Ediciones del Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, Mexico 1947, pp. 250–254
The priest of Hispaniola and former encomendero Bartolomé de las Casas underwent a profound conversion after seeing the abuse of the native people.Bartolomé de Las Casas, who arrived in the New World in 1502, averred that greed was the reason Christians "murdered on such a vast scale", killing "anyone and everyone who has shown the slightest sign of resistance", and subjecting "all males to the harshest and most iniquitous and brutal slavery that man has ever devised for oppressing his fellow-men, treating them, in fact, worse than animals". Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Kindle Locations 338–341). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition. He dedicated his life to writing and lobbying to abolish the encomienda system, which he thought systematically enslaved the native people of the New World. Las Casas participated in an important debate, where he pushed for the enactment of the New Laws and an end to the encomienda system.Benjamin Keen, Bartolome de las Casas in history: toward an understanding of the man and his work. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1971), 364–365. The Laws of Burgos and the New Laws of the Indies failed in the face of colonial opposition and, in fact, the New Laws were postponed in the Viceroyalty of Peru. When Blasco Núñez Vela, the first viceroy of Peru, tried to enforce the New Laws, which provided for the gradual abolition of the encomienda, many of the encomenderos were unwilling to comply with them and revolted against him.
The liberation of thousands of Native Americans held in bondage throughout the Spanish empire by the new viceroy, Blasco Núñez Vela, on his journey to Peru, led to his eventual murder and armed conflict between the encomenderos and the Spanish crown which ended with the execution of those encomenderos involved.
In Chiloé Archipelago in southern Chile, where the encomienda had been abusive enough to unleash a revolt in 1712, the encomienda was abolished in 1782. In the rest of Chile it was abolished in 1789, and in the whole Spanish empire in 1791.
Yale University's genocide studies program supports this view regarding abuses in Hispaniola. The program cites the decline of the Taíno population of Hispaniola in 1492 to 1514 as an example of genocide and notes that the indigenous population declined from a population between 100,000 and 1,000,000 to only 32,000, a decline of 68% to over 96%. Historian Andrés Reséndez contends that enslavement in gold and silver mines was the primary reason why the Native American population of Hispaniola dropped so significantly, as the conditions that native peoples were subjected to under enslavement, from forced relocation to hours of hard labour, contributed to the spread of disease. For example, according to anthropologist Jason Hickel, a third of Arawak workers died every six months from forced labour in the mines.
(1974). 9789561111639, Editorial Universitaria. ISBN 9789561111639
Repartimiento
The encomienda system was generally replaced by the crown-managed repartimiento system throughout Spanish America after mid-sixteenth century. Like the encomienda, the new repartimiento did not include the attribution of land to anyone, rather only the allotment of native workers. But they were directly allotted to the Crown, who, through a local Crown official, would assign them to work for settlers for a set period of time, usually several weeks. The repartimiento was an attempt "to reduce the abuses of forced labour". As the number of natives declined and mining activities were replaced by agricultural activities in the seventeenth century, the hacienda, or large landed estates in which labourers were directly employed by the hacienda owners ( hacendados), arose because land ownership became more profitable than acquisition of forced labour.Tindall, George Brown & David E. Shi (1984). America: A Narrative History (Sixth ed.). W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 280.
Deaths, disease, and genocide
Raphael Lemkin (coiner of the term genocide) considered Spain's abuses of the native population of the Americas to constitute cultural and even outright genocide, including the abuses of the encomienda system. He described slavery as "cultural genocide par excellence" noting "it is the most effective and thorough method of destroying culture, of desocializing human beings".Raphael Lemkin'
/ref> Economic historian Timothy J. Yeager argued the encomienda was deadlier than conventional slavery because of an individual labourer's life being disposable in the face of simply being replaced with a labourer from the same plot of land. University of Hawaii historian David Stannard describes the encomienda as a genocidal system which "had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths".
Denial toward accusations of genocide
Denial towards accusations of genocide linked to the encomienda and the Spanish conquest and settlement of the Americas typically involve arguments like those of Noble David Cook, who posits that accusations of genocide are a continuation of the Spanish Black Legend. Writing about the Black Legend and the conquest of the Americas, Cook wrote, "There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact" and instead suggests the near total decimation of the indigenous population of Hispaniola as mostly having been caused by diseases like smallpox. He argues that the Spanish unwittingly carried these diseases to the New World. However, there is growing evidence that purposefully infecting Indigenous populations was not an obscure policy, being attempted multiple times across the Americas. With the American Society of Microbiology stating that "the depraved indifference, if not intentional genocide".
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