“(…) muy mañoso para esto”. Comisiones para don Pedro Osores de Ulloa, segundo juez de composición de tierras de Charcas, 1594-1596

Abstract

In 1594, the viceroy of Perú don García Hurtado de Mendoza appointed don Pedro Osores de Ulloa as judge of land composition in the province of Charcas, in order to review the questioned performance of his predecessor, don fray Luis López, bishop of Quito, and see his task finished. However, Osores de Ulloa had to operate in the broad fields of Charcas’s politics and economics simultaneously, which exceeded such task. This paper provides a transcription of the Commissions of Osores de Ulloa, with details of orders and powers, and of the Testimony of the cost of the compositions (Testimonio de la cantidad que valieron las composiciones), with the amounts collected by judges of composition during their work. This paper not only makes available to researchers unpublished legal and administrative documents which are central to understand the structure of colonial agrarian and economic system during the late Sixteenth Century, with a detailed analyses of land issues. It also aims to reconstruct the colonial context of Commissions and finally it suggests lines of research opened by the published documentation in order to contribute to social and agrarian history of colonial Charcas.

Keywords

• Don Pedro Osores de Ulloa
• land composition
• agrarian history
• Viceroyalty of Perú