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Updated: June 14, 2025
They are aided also by the stipend given them from the encomiendas for the instruction that they give there. Consequently the religious of the orders live well and with the comfort necessary.
Laws had already been passed which allowed the encomiendas, as the grants of land and Indians in Spanish America were called, to be held in a family only during two lifetimes. They then reverted to the crown. Thus the Indians were being gradually emancipated.
The owners of the encomiendas, both those of his Majesty and those of private persons who possess them, have sustained considerable loss and reduction in the value of the encomiendas.
In other causes which do not involve their customs, and in criminal cases, the matter is determined by law as among Spaniards. All of these islands and their natives, so far as they were pacified, were apportioned into encomiendas from the beginning.
There were also officers appointed to protect the interests of the crown in the reversion, so that it was no longer possible to repeat the horrors of Hispaniola. When Las Casas heard that the proposal had been made to allow the holders of encomiendas to get possession of them in perpetuity, he went at once to the King and succeeded in preventing it.
He sent a number of commissioners, as visitors, into different parts of the country, whose business it was to inspect the encomiendas, and ascertain the manner in which the Indians were treated, by conversing not only with the proprietors, but with the natives themselves. They were also to learn the nature and extent of the tributes paid in former times by the vassals of the Incas.28
It formed the chief support of the young Spanish colony, and, after the rise of the Encomiendas, was nearly the only source of its prosperity. It was feared that the junks would offer their cargoes to the Dutch if any obstacle was put in the way of their coming to Manila. I take these facts from Morga.
This matter is in charge of the governor, who takes into consideration the merits and services of the claimants. In like manner the villages that become vacant are assigned. There are many very excellent encomiendas throughout the islands, and they offer many profits, both by the amount of their tributes and by the nature and value of what is paid as tribute.
His Majesty has a number of encomiendas apportioned to his royal crown throughout the provinces of the Filipinas Islands. The tributes of those encomiendas are collected for his royal treasury by his royal officials and the collectors engaged for that purpose by the royal officials. From year to year these amount to thirty thousand pesos, after deducting costs and expenses.
This worthy Dominican friar had come to the court for the sole purpose of denouncing the system of "encomiendas" and the cruel treatment of the natives to which it gave rise. He found willing listeners in Cardinal Cisneros and Dean Adrian, of Lovaino, the regents, who recompensed his zeal with the title of "Protector of the Indians."
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