Juan de Ovando: Governing the Spanish Empire in the Reign of Philip II

Abstract

Stafford Poole’s Juan de Ovando covers the extraordinary first eight decades of Spain’s intervention in America, during which the Spanish crown incorporated a dynamic region of western Europe, the Netherlands. A barely constructed Castile now faced both west to its American colonies and north to Flanders as it “groped toward a coherent policy on conquests and imperial expansion,” pursuing the mirage of reconciling “the sometimes violent expansion of its empire with the concept of just war, the rights of native peoples and spreading the Christian faith” (p. 152). Spain, an inexperienced empire-builder on a frontier of western Europe, had to improvise imperial policies (the encomienda) to repay entrepreneurs in New Spain, rationalize the administration of distant American vice-royalties by ill-informed consejeros de Indias in Madrid, and finance its armies in Flanders. Philip II’s government also had to recruit and train civil servants dedicated to proto-national goals—the forging of a centralizing monarchy.It was a time of improvisation for the ambitious and literate who sought upward mobility through state service (as Richard Kagan’s Students and Society in Early Modern Spain has shown). Born in Extremadura in 1515, the illegitimate Ovando was a distant cousin of the governor of Española who had brought the encomienda to the New World. At the age of 30, he obtained a scholarship to study law at the University of Salamanca. Eleven years later, he was appointed ecclesiastical judge and vicar-general at Seville through the influence of a fellow alumnus of his college, the archbishop of Seville.Archbishop Fernando de Valdés, and then Ovando as his stand-in, tangled with the independent-minded cathedral chapter over the appointment of its official preacher, Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, suspected of never-substantiated “Lutheran sympathies.” It seems clear that Valdés and Ovando opposed Ponce de la Fuente’s candidacy not on ideological grounds but on lack of limpieza de sangre and a presumed secret marriage. Ovando was already flowing with the tide, strengthened under Philip II, toward hard-line Catholic orthodoxy. His performance at Seville and the attention of a new patron, the president of the Consejo de Castilla, Diego de Espinosa, probably account for a second commission, now as “reformer” of the University of Alcalá de Henares in 1564.Alcalá had been founded just as Castile pushed into the Atlantic and was pulled into northwest Europe. Cisneros was explicit in strengthening Alcalá—university and colegio mayor—to revitalize the clergy and encourage “Christian humanism.” Implicit, it would appear, would be the formation of cadres of civil servants to fill an expanding imperial bureaucracy. Responding to charges of nonadherence to the university’s charter first surfacing in the 1540s, Espinosa dispatched Ovando to investigate administrative practice, finances, and intellectual orientation. With his by-now honed skills, he could quickly report to the Consejo de Castilla he found no inventory of documents nor formal accounting of funds that were “passing through many hands.” Displaying an administrative and financial flair, Ovando fashioned a formal accounting procedure and revised the university’s charters. Next (and deliberately, one must presume), Ovando insisted first that degree candidates in theology prove limpieza de sangre and then extended this provision to candidates in canon law. Perhaps the survival of humanistic currents led some faculty to oppose his extension; Ovando substantiated his position by citing Philip II. Having proven his command of administrative and financial detail and his conservative ideological stance when Madrid felt besieged by the challenge of religious heterodoxy—he had developed the “classic letrado mentality”—Ovando advanced, under the sponsorship of the Consejo de Castilla, to perhaps the high point of his career, visitador (1567–71) of the center of administration of Spain’s embryonic American colonial world, the Consejo de Indias.Ovando’s appointment was, in fact, a hurried effort to handle a crisis in colonial affairs, instability in the viceroyalty of Peru reflecting adversely on clergy, local administrators, encomenderos—all participants in brutal treatment of native peoples. In 1766 (one year before Ovando’s visita), a number of clerics—including Las Casas, Alonso Mal-donado, and Luís Sánchez—had memorialized the Franciscan Superior General and the Consejo de Indias about the treatment of native peoples under the Spanish occupation. For Las Casas, “there is not nor has been a matter more serious . . . nor more worthy of a general council . . . . All the encomiendas or repartimientos are . . . intrinsically evil.” Maldonado insisted on restitution, restoring to native peoples properties seized by royal authority and individual Spaniards. Sánchez reported, “I have seen with these eyes, things and cruelties never before seen”; he felt the cause of civil war in Peru was Spaniards’ “insatiable greed” (p. 105–6, 108).This brings us to the heart of the biography: the interface between a civil servant’s career in the metropole and his performance in reorganizing an inept, uninformed Con-sejo de Indias precisely as the Spanish crown entered the Netherlands cockpit. Here Poole draws upon years of research and publications on the colonial church. In handling Ovando’s visita, he consults responses to detailed questionnaires, mainly from witnesses in Peru where encomenderos insisted their privilege extend beyond a second life. On the recommendation of the “humanitarians” Las Casas, Maldonado, and Sánchez, Ovando formed a junta magna that included Francisco de Toledo (shortly outbound for Peru) and, on his own inspiration, a smaller decision-making group.After his experience in the visita of Alcalá, Ovando could hardly have been surprised that for all purposes the Consejo operated virtually on autopilot. Of the 40 members, 34 lacked colonial exposure; worse, key situation reports were missing. As responses flowed in from the colonies between 1569 and 1570, Ovando delegated their organization to an assistant, Juan López de Velasco, ultimately responsible for the initial preparation of what became the extraordinary materials of the Relaciones geográficas. A second outcome of the visita was a compendium of colonial legislation reflecting eight decades of empire-building, which finally appeared a century later as the Recopilación de leyes de Indias.A third focus of the visita was the mobilization of native labor reserves: perpetuity of encomiendas and forced labor in Upper Peru’s recently opened silver mines. The junta understood that “those who exploited the mines should be helped as much as possible,” with the admonition that “Indians be well treated and not compelled to stay after they completed their service” (p. 135). We know what Viceroy Toledo did with these recommendations. The encomienda had the highest priority on the junta’s agenda, followed by the tithing and Indian tribute; the junta sidestepped recommendations and forwarded all opinions to the king for decision. Probably Ovando foresaw how Peru’s encomenderos would use the Cortes of Castile to support their case for perpetuity (p. 181). To diffuse the issue he used another tack, the Ordenanza del patronato real (1574), trying to silence the “humanitarians” in the mendicant orders by placing them under the authority of the usually less critical bishops and colonial civil servants. Small wonder, Poole comments, that the “friars reacted with disbelief and outrage” (p. 151).Poole’s disclaimer to the contrary, a case can be made for Juan de Ovando as prototypical of what became the expanded civil service of the empire, a technocrat avant la lettre. Ovando’s advice to a protégé who became a private secretary of Philip II tells it all: “[K]eep your mouth closed . . . be very humble, making yourself available to everyone and God will do the rest” (p. 52). Much can be gleaned and learned from Stafford Poole’s careful, informative, and empathetic study in institutional history with a very human face.

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