Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE SPANISH SPIRITUAL CONQUEST
The need for a
spiritual conquest
to reinforce its successful military conquest of Alto Peru
was taken seriously by the Spanish crown, which sponsored all the major religious orders
toundertaketheconversionoftheAymaraandQuechuamasses.Incareligiousceremonies,
pilgrimages and public rituals were banned, and a great number of idols and ceremonial
sites destroyed. Beneath the surface, however, their mystical and magical appeal endured
and, while publicly accepting
Christianity
, the indigenous population preserved its own
deep-rooted
pre-Inca cults
. In time, elements of Catholicism and traditional beliefs inter-
mingled, as the Aymara and Quechua appropriated the symbolism of the Christian faith,
turning it into a vehicle for their own religious expression.
The religious orders were also employed as a cheap means of pacifying the
tribes
of the
Northern and Eastern Lowlands, who had resisted conquest. Small groups of missionaries
had considerable success in drawing semi-nomadic groups into settled agricultural com-
munities, where they were converted to Catholicism and enjoyed the mixed benefits of
Spanish civilization - as well as, most importantly, being protected from the ravages of the
conquistadors. However, the regime of forced labour and the constant epidemics that swept
the settlements meant that many groups later abandoned or rebelled against the mission re-
gimes, and many missionary priests met violent deaths. Missionary efforts reached their
apogee in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the
Jesuit missions
of Moxos and
Chiquitos, where a handful of priests established a utopian, semi-autonomous society, us-
ing a kind of theocratic socialism, where thousands of indigenous people successfully ad-
opted European agricultural techniques and built flourishing mission communities graced
by some of the finest churches in all the Americas.
Colonial society
Initially, the Spanish sought to continue the Inca pattern of control through indirect rule. Co-
lonial society was conceived of as consisting of two separate communities, the Spanish and
the
Republica de Indios
. A class of indigenous nobles -
kurakas
or
caciques
- was left in
place to act as intermediaries between the Spanish and the mass of Aymara and Quechua-
speaking peasants, who were permitted to remain in control of their land in return for tribute
in the form of produce and labour service. These peasants were administered through the
exploitative
encomienda
system, whereby individual conquistadors were granted control of
the tribute paid by large indigenous groups in return for taking charge of converting them to
Catholicism
and generally “civilizing” them - the standard moral justification for the Span-
ish conquest.
In the highlands, the strict boundaries the Spaniards had erected between themselves and
the indigenous majority quickly broke down. The conquistadors were overwhelmingly men,
