The Bishop's Utopia. Emily Berquist Soule

he needed “to complete [a project] that His Majesty might review with his own eyes, or [to] be informed of … the different qualities of the lands, of the provinces of this bishopric, and its principal fruits and manufactures of its inhabitants.” Above all, he planned to gather information about the population of Trujillo, “so that this report might contribute to the prosperity of the towns of this bishopric and of the whole nation in general.”²² The parish priests would be key to this endeavor, as they had direct access to parishioners, who could assess the informants’ testimony and who would gather the material and visual reports that the Bishop requested. Once compiled, their data would serve as a foundation from which the Bishop and the people would begin to build their utopia.

      Martínez Compañón’s words about prosperity are a reminder that even though he was first and foremost a man of the cloth, as a vassal of the king, a functionary of the state, and a citizen of the world, he was bound to improve the material and social situation of his diocesans. Accordingly, much of his work consisted of promoting one of the most important concepts of late eighteenth-century government: public happiness. The basis of this, according to Italian Catholic intellectual Ludovico Muratori (whose work Martínez Compañón owned) was charity—a principle made real only when it was executed in daily life.²³ The Bishop had likely begun imagining this charitable work while still in Spain, where he would have started reading about ecclesiastics who worked with the Indians of America. In fact, Spain is where Martínez Compañón acquired his copies of the collected works of Juan de Palafox, bishop of Puebla, New Spain (1640–1655). Palafox wrote that in order to truly grasp how the Indians’ “nakedness, poverty, and work” enriched the state and the church, viceroys and bishops had to gather information from the parish priests who had daily contact with them. Like Martínez Compañón a century and a half later, Palafox was certain that once the Indians were properly understood and managed, they could become useful subjects. “They have a great facility to learn trades,” he argued, “because in seeing painting, they very soon paint; in seeing work, they work; and with incredible quickness, they learn four or six trades.”²⁴

      But before Martínez Compañón could seek the vital demographic, cultural, and socioeconomic data that would be the foundations of these improvements, he had to prepare for the long and difficult journey. In autumn 1782, his servants carefully folded his simple priest’s gown and singlet with an amice (a square piece of linen with a cross in the middle). They might have also prepared his gold-tipped cane, useful to maintain steady footing on precipitous rural roads. Outside the Bishop’s palace, stable hands might have been busy readying his sorrel horse and a small pack mule to carry other personal items.²⁵ As his assistants and servants bustled about, Martínez Compañón selected the team that would accompany him: his secretary Pedro de Echevarri, a missionary, a chaplain, a notary, a scribe, a Spaniard named Antonio de Narbona (who, strangely, does not reappear in the documentation), his nephew José Ignacio Lecuanda, and six slaves to service the group.²⁶ Perhaps one of these was Theodoro, a kitchen slave whom Martínez Compañón had purchased with the plan of granting him liberty in a few years (but as of the Bishop’s promotion to Bogotá, the unfortunate Theodoro was “inventoried” as property of the Trujillo episcopate).²⁷

      Meanwhile, Martínez Compañón coordinated how local clergy would receive the group. In April, he had sent a pastoral letter that told parish priests to expect the visita party. But rather than demanding the lavish ceremony and ritual that would typically accompany a bishop’s visit, he requested restraint and sobriety in their preparations. He cautioned that they were not to arrange for more than three dishes to be served at the midday meal, two at dinner, and one for dessert. In areas with no houses for his party’s lodging, priests were forbidden to order the construction of any structures for their use. “I have decided,” the Bishop wrote, “to bring a tent in which we will stay in those places.”²⁸

      While the priests and their assistants were not to furnish any special creature comforts, they were asked to prepare for the Bishop’s arrival by gathering answers to two questionnaires that they received along with the pastoral letter. The first of the questionnaires was directed to the priests themselves, but in the case of rural doctrinas or añejos that were irregularly staffed, it stipulated that provincial corregidores were to interview “the most learned landowners or city-dwellers,” meaning well-to-do Spaniards or mestizos, and occasionally Indians.²⁹ These questions were to inform Martínez Compañón of standard ecclesiastical matters, such as whether the priests worked alone or with the assistance of a subordinate priest (often known as a vicario). This questionnaire (see Appendix 1 for a transcription) also asked for information on church finances, including whether the priests supported only themselves with their benefice, or if other family members lived from the same income as well. If the parish was home to any cofradías, or religious brotherhoods, the Bishop wanted information about them—specifically, what type of funding they received. He inquired about any additional income generated by religious festivals or arancel fees for religious sacraments. He also asked for information about the distance from añejos to their mother churches and the city of Trujillo. He sought to learn about the devotional practices of parishioners, wanting to know whether local parishes had any “image” or statue that they venerated and “whether the town was sick or healthy, and where one would go for medicines in case of sickness, and how much they would cost.” Finally, he asked if the parish had any poor or infirm residents who could not work. Taken together, these data would help him assess how much local religious authorities would be able to contribute to his planned utopia in Trujillo. He could then employ the information to mobilize parish church resources, with priests at the helm.³⁰

      A Questionnaire for Useful Information

      Martínez Compañón’s request for information about local religious life and ecclesiastical administration was not atypical in an age of close scrutiny of church finances and management. Much more innovative was his plan to use his priests as informants who would help him to complete the research for his “Historical, Scientific, Political, and Social Museum of the Bishopric of Trujillo del Perú” and its accompanying watercolor images and natural history collection. Therefore, they also received a second questionnaire that focused on temporal matters, particularly natural history and local resources. As he told them, he sent it because he believed “that within this diocese we have much more than what we imagine and that a distinct and thorough knowledge of it could be of great utility.”³¹ Such information, he was convinced, would serve not simply for “vain curiosity” but to promote “industry and commerce.”³²

      In employing this second questionnaire to compile information, Martínez Compañón utilized a time-tested technique of gathering data on distant and unknown parts of the Spanish Empire. In sixteenth-century Mexico, Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex and Gonzalo Oviedo’s History of the Indies were both derived from questionnaire responses. But the most widely distributed questionnaire in colonial Spanish America was developed by royal cosmographers Alonso de Santa Cruz and Juan López de Velasco in 1598 as part of Philip II’s massive Relacíones Geográficas project to map the lands of the Spanish Empire. By asking respondents to answer specific questions about local history, the natural world, area economies, and geography, Santa Cruz and Velasco sought to gather sufficient knowledge for the Spanish king to rule the overseas territories that were too distant and dangerous for him to visit himself. Their method of inquiry—asking discrete questions to provoke short answers that could be later compiled and analyzed—signaled a major epistemological shift in European attempts to learn about the world, one that led scholars away from the discursive techniques of the past and toward the methodological inquiry of the future. Two hundred years later in the Spanish Empire, bureaucrats, naturalists, and ecclesiastics employed these same techniques of information gathering through written query and response, now standard throughout the Atlantic basin.³³

      The questionnaire that Martínez Compañón composed reveals that, like most administrators gathering systematic data about unfamiliar territories, he wanted to learn about the people of Trujillo as well as the natural world in which they lived. Without understanding local people, he could not adequately assess how they