LA SAMPABLERA Un veintiséis de diciembre

In the decades immediately following the conquest, the Spanish firmly con- trolled only islands of territory. In the interior they most clearly dominated the eastern highlands, in the same regions that were inhabited by the dense, sedentary Muisca culture. The Spanish also occupied frontier cities in the Upper Magdalena Valley but had little control of the surrounding country. They also established some settlements at the edge of the great eastern low- land plains, but their presence in this region was slight and would remain so to the end of the colonial period. In the West they clearly predominated in the immediate environs of Popayán and around scattered mining towns, but much of the countryside was effectively beyond their purview.

Even in regions that the Spanish completely controlled militarily, the ar- eas outside Hispanic cities were inhabited almost exclusively by the indige- nous population. If the Indians in the area were peaceable, Spanish authority was, for the most part, not challenged. If not, security was unpredictable.

The most important and durable of the scattered Spanish cities were es- tablished where there existed dense and docile Indian populations to pro- vide food and labor for their Spanish conquerors, both of which initially were extracted through the institution of the encomienda. As docile indigenes were most numerous in the eastern highlands at the time of the conquest, Spaniards in the sixteenth century gathered in the greatest numbers in cities in that region.

There were four significant Spanish cities in the Eastern Cordillera. Ac- cording to the survey of López de Velasco (ca. 1570), Santafé de Bogotá had an estimated 600 vecinos (adult male Spaniards), supported by some 40,000 tribute-payers (adult male Indians). In Tunja somewhat more than 200 Span- ish male settlers were surrounded by more than 50,000 indigenous tributar- ies. Pamplona and Vélez, each with perhaps a hundred Spanish vecinos, were thought to have, respectively, roughly 20,000 and more than 5000 tributaries. The other relatively large Spanish city at this time was Cartagena, with some 300 male Spaniards, supported by more than 7000 indigenous tribute- payers. However, in the upper Cauca region to the southwest, there were smaller communities of Spaniards, who also controlled substantial numbers of Indians. Pasto, with possibly less than thirty Spanish vecinos, enjoyed the service of an estimated 24,000 tributaries, while Popayán with Spanish citi- zenry in similar numbers had the support of some 9000 adult male Indians.

In the case of each of these cities most of the indigenous tributaries remained in the surrounding countryside. However, each of these cities did have large indigenous servant populations resident in, or adjacent to, the Spanish ur- ban nuclei.

While the largest and most permanent of the early Spanish cities were established where there were dense, usable indigenous populations, many Spanish settlements sprang up because of the presence of precious miner- als—generally gold, occasionally silver. Spaniards in Popayán were using Indian workers to take gold from nearby streams by the early 1540s, and Al- maguer, some fifty miles south of Popayán, shortly thereafter was mining veins of gold. Gold found in streambeds and veins in the middle Cauca in- duced Spaniards to settle at various sites at about the same time (Cartago, Caramanta, Anserma, and Arma). Gold mined from veins at Buriticá in pre- Columbian times inspired the founding of Antioquia (1541), soon thereafter reestablished as Santa Fe de Antioquia (1546). Various areas near present- day Bucaramanga (but under the jurisdiction of Pamplona), in the Eastern Cordillera, were also early gold-mining sites. Much slighter gold deposits in tributaries of the Magdalena River played roles in the founding of Tocaima (1545), Ibagué (1550), Mariquita (1551), La Victoria (1557), and La Palma (1560).

Gold-mining towns were inherently unstable, as the gold deposits sooner or later ran scarce or the indigenous labor supply died out. Some- times Spaniards left the depleted sites, but kept the names of the towns, which they would reestablish where they found new deposits, sometimes more than fifty miles away. The peripatetic mining town was particularly a feature of Antioquia. At least four towns there moved at least once. Reme- dios changed its location no less than four times between 1561 and 1594, covering more than a hundred miles in a series of thirty-mile leaps.

Some towns near gold deposits also became points of defense in regions where Indians were difficult to control. This was particularly true of Span- ish communities in the upper Magdalena Valley, which were supposed to protect the chief routes connecting Santafé de Bogotá with the Spanish towns in the Cauca Valley. During the sixteenth century these frontier defense towns tended to be overrun by the Indians they were meant to control. Neiva was abandoned several times because of Indian attacks and was not per- manently reestablished until after the defeat of the Pijaos and other ma- rauders from the Central Cordillera early in the seventeenth century.

In the first decades after their founding the Spanish cities were at first quite primitive. At Santafé de Bogotá, Spaniards for a time inhabited bohíos, the Indian huts made of bahareque (reeds or branches sealed with dried mud). In time most Spanish houses in Santafé, Tunja, Popayán, and other signifi- cant towns in the interior were constructed in a mode brought from Spain— walls of tapia pisada (pressed earth), with tile roofs. As early as 1542 municipal authorities in Santafé ordered Spanish residents to build their homes with brick or stone, but walls of pressed earth remained the dominant mode for

city homes for most of the colonial period, at least in the interior. Most ur- ban homes in the colonial period were of one story. But by the early seven- teenth century, the houses of the more affluent and well-placed tended to be of two stories; these larger homes were built around one or two patios, used in part for stabling mules and horses. In addition, such homes were likely to have adjacent plots, on which some Indian servants lived in their traditional huts.

On the Caribbean coast, there was a parallel transition from flimsy to more solid construction. In 1552 virtually the whole city of Cartagena burned down because all of the houses had wooden walls and straw roofs. This hap- pened again when Francis Drake attacked the port in 1586. However, after this point Cartagena moved to the use of brick. The more substantial homes had brick walls also in the Magdalena River port of Mompox, in this case because the river periodically flooded the town and walls of pressed earth would not have held up. In these commercial port towns large storage rooms for goods in trade tended to take the place of the large patios of the cities in the interior.

Churches also evolved toward solidity, after a time. Santafé’s first cathe- dral, constructed of wood in 1566, immediately fell down. Rebuilt in stone in 1572–1592, its roof collapsed again in 1601. During the seventeenth cen- tury, however, a number of monasteries and convents were built solidly of brick, often atop stone footings. But churches were much simpler, with walls of pressed earth, in the country towns that developed in the seventeenth century, inhabited first by Indians and then, by the eighteenth century, by many mestizos.

Although in the first decade after the conquest, the cities of the con- quistadores in some ways retained an Indian look, in other ways they were developing European textures. In the early 1540s Spanish women were ar- riving in Santafé, many of them single women brought by Spanish author- ities as potential mates for triumphant conquistadores. The basic elements of European material culture also began to be introduced at the same time. In the early 1540s, wheat, barley, chickpeas, green beans, and other garden plants reached Santafé de Bogotá. Not long thereafter wheat was being milled and baked into bread. By 1542 Santafé had its first tannery, and the next year it was producing brick and tiles.

A parallel development of European agriculture was occurring in parts of the West. By the 1540s wheat brought from Quito was being cultivated in Pasto, and during the 1560s and 1570s it spread to Popayán. Both Pasto and Popayán supplied some other parts of the West with European grains. Dur- ing the last third of the century sugar cane cultivation was established around Cali and Buga.

In regions under clear Spanish dominance, the indigenes also were adopting elements of European material culture. Often at least part of the

encomienda tribute owed by Indians had to be paid in gold; because in many

market to raise the necessary gold. They thus had to learn to adapt to the vagaries of the market. To make tribute payments they also often had to learn how to produce some European commodities, such as chickens and pigs on the Caribbean coast and wheat and barley in the eastern highlands. Within a few decades, the Spanish and indigenous economies had be- come intertwined. In the highlands, sheep as well as pigs and chickens had become an integral part of the Indians’ domestic economy. By the 1580s more than three thousand Indians were coming regularly to the market in Santafé with loads of coca, cotton, and textiles, which they exchanged for golden

tejuelos, a kind of indigenous coin. Spaniards also used tejuelos as a means

of exchange. Spanish landowners grew indigenous maize and potatoes, as well as European wheat and barley. On their haciendas the ground was bro- ken, during the early seventeenth century, both by indigenous digging sticks and by European wooden plows. Indians served as drovers of Spanish- owned mule trains. By the early seventeenth century, if not before, some In- dians had become small entrepreneurs, for example, renting out horses to Spanish travelers and merchants.

A similar integration of indigenous and European material cultures took place on the Caribbean coast. There, while pigs and chickens joined maize and cassava in the Indians’ domestic economy, people of Hispanic culture incorporated cassava and maize into their farming and their consumption.

If the Indians were absorbing European material culture, they also were dying from European diseases. Santafé suffered major epidemics of small- pox in 1566 and 1587–1590; typhus in 1633, 1688, and 1739; and smallpox again in 1783. But lists of epidemics give no sense of the year-to-year Indian mortality that occurred because of Spanish exactions and the contexts in which they occurred. Among the indigenous populations most quickly dec- imated were those employed in gold mining. In 1582 an Augustinian friar surmised that in the course of two decades the Indian populations of Al- maguer and Popayán had declined by 85 percent, while to the north, farther down the Cauca River valley, in present-day Caldas and Antioquia, the In- dian population had been even more reduced. Other Indians who suffered particularly heavy losses were those forced to provide transportation ser- vices for the Spanish. Indian boatmen on the Magdalena River suffered a particularly heavy toll. Some Spanish officials asserted that over a period of two decades (1578–1596) more than 95 percent of the indigenous boatmen had died. Indigenes who carried cargos overland also suffered a high mor- tality, whether hauling goods from the Pacific coast to Cali or from the Mag- dalena River to the Central Cordillera or the eastern highlands.

Indians living in the cool highlands who were required to perform mainly agricultural labor were declining a bit more slowly—but still dra- matically. According to the calculations of a modern scholar, in the Tunja district the number of indigenes dropped by close to 70 percent in the thirty- four years between 1562 and 1596. However, dying was not the only way that Indians might “disappear.” By leaving their indigenous communities

and becoming resident workers on haciendas, in mines, or in Spanish cities, they vanished statistically but not necessarily in the flesh.

REGIONS

The two chief centers of Spanish control in the interior in the sixteenth cen- tury, the eastern highlands and the upper Cauca region, were isolated from each other and would remain substantially disconnected long thereafter. They were separated physically by the Central Cordillera, which was often impassable by mule train and in which untamed Indians periodically at- tacked Spanish travelers. East and West were also separated administratively in large part because of the patterns of conquest—since the East was seized by men from Santa Marta, while the West was taken first by men from Quito and secondarily by conquistadores from Cartagena. Popayán and much of the rest of the Cauca region remained closely tied to Quito. The region was under the authority of Quito until 1549, when Santafé de Bogotá became the seat of an audiencia. However, when Quito also became an audiencia, much of the West, from Pasto to Buga, returned to the jurisdiction of Quito. East and West also were separated at first by the fact that they had similar, more- or-less self-sufficient economies.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, East and West began to become more different economically. By this time only one gold- mining region in the Eastern Cordillera, between Pamplona and Bucara- manga, was producing significant amounts of gold. Most of the eastern high- lands focused on the production of grains and the weaving of textiles. The East found at least a limited market for these in some mining regions of the West that continued to produce gold during the first half of the seventeenth century. Already by the 1580s gold dust from the West was paying for tex- tiles woven by Indians in the Eastern Cordillera. Peasant-woven textiles from the eastern highlands continued to be sold in the West through most of the colonial period and into the nineteenth century. For a time in the early sev- enteenth century, the eastern highlands also sent preservable foods (hard- tack, cheese, and hams) to some mining centers on the western side of the Magdalena River—to the Middle Cauca and to Remedios and Zaragoza. However, because of high transportation costs, these were in effect luxury products, so the volume of this trade must have been somewhat small.

Just as the East increasingly focused on agriculture and weaving textiles and the West became the chief source of gold production, the third major re- gion of Spanish settlement, the Caribbean coast and the lower Magdalena River Valley, had its own special functions, all of which related to naviga- tion and external trade. Cartagena was New Granada’s official nexus with external commerce, with monopoly control of legal imports of European lux- ury products (particularly oil and wine) and African slaves. However, dur- ing the seventeenth century, and particularly in the eighteenth century, there also developed an active contraband trade along much of the Caribbean

coast, from Riohacha on the east to the Atrato River on the west. Another function of the Caribbean coast was to supply foodstuffs to the armed Span- ish fleet that brought European goods in exchange for American treasure. This fleet called at Cartagena from the latter half of the fifteenth century well into the eighteeenth century.

Cartagena also had a complementary relationship with the two major regions of the interior. It exchanged its imported slaves for gold from the western mines. It sent much of its luxury imports to Santafé de Bogotá, the chief consumption and distribution center in the eastern highlands. In turn