The Bishop's Utopia. Emily Berquist Soule

students. And he kept a thorough selection of works that explained who the Indians were and how they had been treated since the Spanish had arrived in the New World. The books that the Bishop brought to help him build his utopia vividly demonstrated his belief that the Indians, plants, and animals of Trujillo were not feeble, unhealthy, or weak, as so many of his European contemporaries insisted.⁶

      Like any ecclesiastic, Martínez Compañón had a full complement of religious texts. Along with his assortment of Bibles, he owned copies of Saint Augustine’s City of God, the collected works of Sor Juana, and the popular Moral Philosophy, by the eighteenth-century Spanish Benedictine polymath Benito Feijoo. The bishop-to-be also owned works by Dom Jean Mabillon, a seventeenth-century French cleric who branched off from his Benedictine brothers to form a splinter sect known as the Maurists, who dedicated themselves to collecting, editing, and publishing historical documents. Mabillon also wrote about his frequent scientific journeys—Martínez Compañón referred to these as itinerarios (itineraries)—wherein he would visit local monasteries and look through their archives as well as investigate nearby catacombs, relics, and archaeological sites.⁷

      Mabillon’s work explained how to collect historical materials; Sacred Painting (by sixteenth-century Italian Cardinal Federico Borromeo), a book that Martínez Compañón requested to borrow in 1788, described how students should be taught to paint images that might accompany such a collection. Borromeo’s central premise was that paintings could represent historical truth if their field of composition truly matched the subject that they depicted. He advocated the use of saturated colors, pointing out that “colors are like words: once the eyes see them they sink into the mind just as do words heard by the ears.” Artwork, he maintained, was most valuable for representing nature. The Bishop must have admired the group of Milanese institutions that Borromeo founded: a library in 1607, a drawing academy in 1613, and a museum in 1618.⁸

      Martínez Compañón owned Alonso Montenegro’s Itinerary for Indian Parishes, one of the most widely used field manuals for priests and vicars in eighteenth-century Spanish America. This five-volume set, written by a sixteenth-century bishop of Quito, discussed the obligations of clerics toward their parishes. Its second volume, “Nature and Customs of the Indians,” stressed how easy it was for the devil to erect “his tyrannical empire” among these uneducated and gullible people who most commonly committed idolatry by accident because they could not grasp the ideological divide between Catholic devotion and heretical idolatry. Montenegro drew liberally from Heinrich Kramer’s ubiquitous Malleus Maleficarum to answer vexing quandaries such as “if he who has been cursed can legally ask the hechicero [who cursed him] if he can remove the curses.” (The appropriately puzzling answer to this question was yes, but only if the curse could be removed without casting another spell. Any spell—even one meant to undo a previous curse—was heretical, so if the hechicero had no other method, the victim of the curse would simply have to bear his sour destiny in this life rather than risk eternal damnation in the next.)⁹

      The Bishop’s library revealed his interest in the natural world: among his many scientific tracts were Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy and various works by Robert Boyle and Francis Bacon. He had a copy of Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus, a delightful seventeenth-century publication that discussed the German Jesuit’s expeditions to Mount Vesuvius under the midnight moon. Kircher’s exploits might have crossed Martínez Compañón’s mind during his journey from Lima to Trujillo as he passed near Peru’s Sabancaya volcanoes. Some of his guides might have told tall tales of the devastating Huaynaputina eruption in 1600, which shrouded the city of Arequipa in ashen rain while aftershocks continued for weeks, convincing many locals that the end of days had finally arrived. While there were no such catastrophic incidents in the eighteenth century, the Sabancaya volcanoes did erupt several times between 1750 and 1784.¹⁰

      Though Kircher’s book on volcanoes was largely pleasure reading, Martínez Compañón’s library showed more than a passing interest in matters of science, as well as matters of state. He was well-read in contemporary theories of society, economy, and governance. This familiarity with eighteenth-century political economy reform would later help him conceive one of colonial Spanish America’s most expansive plans for improvement. The books that guided him included Jerónimo Ustariz’s Theory and Practice of Commerce and Maritime Affairs, which argued that the Spanish should focus on manufacture and commodity trade, not simply exchange silver for goods. He had several works by leading reformer Pedro Campomanes, including Discourse on Popular Industry, which proposed that Spain could save its economy through encouraging economic productivity in the home. He also brought various agricultural manuals, such as Alonso de Herrera’s Agricultura General. First published in 1513, this book was still in use over 200 years later, highly valued for its practical suggestions about how to cultivate everything from bees to cotton to onions. Carefully stored with the books were several collections of prints, including Otto van Veen’s Moral Theater of Human Life, which featured woodcut engravings of voluptuous men and women in allegorical situations. One depicted a disgruntled farmer leaning against a tree with his arms crossed, while an industrious compatriot led a team of oxen plowing a field in the background. The caption reads, “He who does not begin does not finish.” Such books would have helped him to imagine his own reform agendas and also served as references for communicating specific mandates to parish priests, who would be directly responsible for implementing these programs of improvement with the local population.¹¹

      Though we have no exact notice of which day the Bishop last stepped on Spanish soil—in his old age in America, he finally sought (but was never given) a see at home in Spain—documents indicate that his vessel left Cádiz sometime before the New Year, and he assumed his post in the cathedral on July 17, 1768. Presuming that he traveled the typical route for ships sailing from Cádiz, he would have first touched American ground at the Atlantic shores of Montevideo, and then traveled overland to Lima. This trek was likely the same as the one immortalized in the popular picaresque travel narrative Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (Lazarus of the Walking Blind), published in Lima in 1775. It began with the short voyage across the River Plate to Buenos Aires, depicted in Lazarillo as a city with wide, straight streets; fragrant peach trees and grapevines; and happy dogs “so fat they can hardly move” because, like most of the city’s inhabitants, they frequently dined on meat, chicken, and eggs. The next stop was typically Córdoba, which lay approximately 435 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. To reach it, Martínez Compañón and his party would have had to cross the river Tercero, known for its turbulent waters and bountiful fish. From there, they would have continued north on foot, stopping at the base of the Andes in the smaller city of Salta before heading up the mountains to 13,000 feet above sea level. This was the location of one of the world’s highest cities, the snowy and windy mining center of Potosí, which the Cerro Rico mine had made into the most densely populated city in the world by 1650—although by the time Martínez Compañón may have been there in 1768, silver deposits were diminishing and the city was in decline.¹² Next was a short stop in the city of Chuquisaca before the long march along the Andes foothills. This route straddled the main Peruvian volcanic region to the east. To the west was the highest navigable lake in the world, the frigid and glassy Lake Titicaca, which sits at 12,500 feet. Then the party would probably have continued to Cuzco, the former Inca capital known for its beautiful cathedral that some insisted was every bit as striking as its counterparts in Europe. From Cuzco, they would have descended the Andes into the coastal desert of Lima, finding the city damp, cold, and shrouded in the typical garúa mist of the winter months.¹³

      Though his books were likely still making their way up the Pacific Coast, they must have been on the future bishop’s mind as the sterile, hard earth of the altiplano crunched beneath his feet. As he passed through the ancestral lands of the Tiwanaku empire, with its stone megaliths, ceremonial puerta de la luna (door to the moon), and sunken temples, he might have heard that the areas surrounding these sites were sparsely inhabited, by just a few remaining Indians. He likely would have remembered what he had read about these people in popular chronicles by Pedro Cieza de León, Bernabé Cobo, and Garcilasco de la Vega. Almost universally, they depicted the surviving natives of the Tiwanaku region as a dispossessed, pathetic, and unfriendly people who