Merchants and Missionaries: A Theologian’s View of Clerical Involvement in the Galleon Trade

Abstract

HE PRIVILEGE of Royal Patronage in America brought .Lunder the jurisdiction of the kings of Spain all church functionaries from archbishops to altar boys. In return for this effective control, granted in 1508, the Spanish Crown agreed to pay the expenses involved in the evangelization of the New World. Both in theory and in practice the agreement was fraught with problems, and not the least of these was the irregularity of the royal paymasters. There always seemed to be enough coin in the coffers to send priests to America and the Philippines, but once the missionaries arrived at their destinations, royal beneficence became less evident. The great number of missionaries' letters preserved in the Archive of the Indies asking the Crown for wine, oil, salaries, and ltimosnas, bears eloquent testimony to the truth of this. (Anyone reading these letters today, however, must remember that limosna was an elastic term which might be stretched from enough money to meet actual need to that required to provide wealth and luxury.) The missionaries had many ways of augmenting their finances. In America the religious orders acquired estates at a fraction of the price demanded from the regular colonists. Yerba cultivation in the Jesuit reductions is well known, anid almost 90% of its profits were used within the reductions themselves.1 The missions of Asia, however, responded differently to the same situation. In Japan and China, Portuguese and Spanish missionaries had no estates, and those owned in the tropical Philippines yielded little financial return until sugar cultivation expanded rapidly in the eighteenth century. The Crown often supported hospitals and colleges in this latter mission by assigning a number of native tributes to a specific work. After