The Changing Racial and Administrative Structure of the Peruvian Military under the Later Bourbons

Abstract

Despite the fact that the conquest of Spanish America had been primarily a military undertaking, during two centuries of Hapsburg rule the army played a secondary role, with real power and authority being vested in a pervasive civil bureaucracy. The armed groups of adelantados who had initially conquered Peru lacked the objectives and organizational structure of true militaries. Fighters rather than soldiers, their social positions defined more through the possession of encomiendas than by military functions, they cannot be ragarded as constituting a true army. In 1615, Viceroy Montesclaros informed the Crown that in any other area these soldados would be regarded as dangerous vagabonds who posed a threat to public safety.