Conquistador politics, struggles for compensation,

and the propulsion of conquest in Chile, 1539–1554

by

Daniel Watson Esterowitz Holt

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
(HISTORY)

at the

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MADISON

1996
 Acknowledgements

A number of people have provided me with help, support, encouragement, and inspiration during
the production of this thesis. I would like to acknowledge some of them by name.
Florencia E. Mallon, Francisco A. Scarano, and Steve J. Stern have provided me with
inspiration, constructive criticism, and friendship. I feel privileged to have had the chance to work
with people of such intellectual and human caliber and am honored to be able to call them my
mentors.
Many fellow students at the University of Wisconsin have helped me to stay sane and to
grow intellectually and personally. They include Nancy Appelbaum, Andy Daitsman, Liz DiNovella,
Emily Fader, Eileen Findlay, Leo Garofalo, Lily Guerra, Julie Italia, Roger Kittleson, Anne
Macpherson, René Reeves, Karin Rosemblatt, Sinclair Thomson, and Jean Weiss. Others in
Madison to whom I am grateful for friendship and support are Deb Coltey, Joel Shoemaker and,
especially, Jim Gerndt.
Friends on the East Coast who have helped to keep me from isolation here in the Ivory
Tower and whom I have missed during my time here are Ron Hayduk, Vanessa McGann, Jeb Sharp,
and Jay Voss.
Before coming to Madison, I benefitted from rich relationships with Marilyn Young and the
late Warren Dean, professors at New York University, and Professor Janet Abu-Lughod at the New
School for Social Research.
I cannot thank my parents, Bob and Joan Holt, enough for their love and for their always
helpful intellectual questions, input, and criticism. My brother, Michael, has also been a great source
of comfort and support.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to my compañera, Ellen Baker. She has been a bottomless fount
of love, respect, challenge, stimulation, and humor. I cannot imagine what my life here would have
been like without her.

i
 Introduction

It took the Spanish a very long time to conquer Chile. From the time of the first Spanish forays into
Chile in the 1530s to the final conquest—or “pacification”—of the Mapuche1 Indians by the
Republic of Chile in the late nineteenth century, some three hundred fifty long years elapsed. The
principal reason why conquest took so long was that the Mapuches, unlike most native peoples in
the Americas, managed a remarkably successful defense of their country against the European
invaders. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the interesting and important task of
explaining Mapuche success. The War of Arauco, as the protracted military conflict between
Spanish and Mapuches came to be called, lies at the center of conquest history and eclipses most
other historical issues.
That the War of Arauco occupies such a privileged place in the history books does not just
reflect historians’ fascination with warfare and heroism (though such enchantment comes through
in some cases)—the War of Arauco is, indeed, of central importance to any understanding of Chile’s

1
My decision to use the term “Mapuche” represents an imperfect solution to the problem of
accurately identifying Chile’s native peoples. Although no group ever called itself “Araucano,” or
“Araucanian,” that term came into early and widespread usage to denote the Indians of south-
central Chile who put up the longest resistance to conquest. Their descendants today call themselves
Mapuches, a name they also ask us to use in reference to their forebears. Nevertheless, at the time of
Spanish arrival, at least ten identifiable peoples inhabited what are today Chile’s geographical
boundaries, though considerable ambiguity remains around how distinct several of these groups
were from one another. The historian’s task is not aided by the inconsistent and often vague ways in
which sixteenth-century documents refer to indigenous people. The most common word used in
colonial documents is “naturales,” or “natives,” a term which tells us only that the people in question
were native Americans. To make things more complicated still, during the colonial period great
demographic changes occurred among Chile’s native populations. Not only were great numbers of
native people killed in combat or felled by disease and the hardships of forced labor, but
considerable southward—and then eastward—migration took place as well. I have chosen to use the
term Mapuche except where I am reasonably certain the people in question were of another group,
such as the Diaguitas of the La Serena region. Though this choice comes at the risk of papering over
what were no doubt meaningful differences between groups, since those differences are not central
to my story I have decided to favor narrative clarity over anthropological precision in this matter.

1
conquest and subsequent history. But, as is often the case when great dramas are present, attention
to the War of Arauco has come at the expense of examining other important historical matters that
pertain to the conquest. In this thesis, I consider another protracted struggle that shaped the
conquest from its very beginnings and, in so doing, influenced the course of Chilean history: the
internal conflict over rewards between the colonial leaders and colonists below them.2

THE PROBLEM

Although in practice no two regions of the New World were conquered in precisely the same way, a
general strategy or model for conquest did exist. The Crown authorized privately-financed and -
organized expeditions to pursue the conquest of individual regions in the New World. This strategy
allowed Spain to increase the lands under its rule at little or no cost or risk to itself. From the spoils
of conquest, the Crown provided material compensation to those who rendered distinguished
service in the New World. This approach to conquest dated to the successful Reconquista of Iberia,
beginning in the late eleventh century.3 As Spain undertook to conquer the New World, it was only
natural to continue an approach developed and refined over hundreds of years on the peninsula. To
kings and aspiring conquistadores alike, the model was understood, accepted, and sanctified by
centuries of history.
Since rewards were never meant to be allotted in an egalitarian fashion, in order to satisfy
those on the lower rungs of conquistador society—who hardly intended to risk life and limb in

2
My focus on tensions between fellow Europeans rather than tensions between them and the
Indians does not mean that I think such internal conflicts took place in isolation from struggles
with Indians. Nor does it mean that I see internal conflicts as unaffected by Spanish and Indian
relations. By directing my attention to the colonists and away from the indigenous people, I am not
expressing any belief that the Spaniards’ history is more valid or important than that of the Indians.
3
Mario Góngora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America, trans. Richard Southern
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 3. The spread of Islam in earlier centuries was
also organized in similar fashion, a fact which suggests that the Moors themselves may have
provided some elements of the model by which they ultimately lost to the Christians in Iberia. For a
relevant discussion of the spread of Islam see Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed, translated by Anne
Carter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), chapters 5–7.

2
America in order to be poor in a new setting—the New World would have to serve up a vast total
amount of spoils. Inevitably, many participants in the conquest fought and worked terribly hard,
only to find little or no material compensation for their efforts forthcoming. These hapless soldiers
often had little choice but to join further expeditions, hoping that the next campaign would bring
better fortune than the last.
In this thesis, I explore the problems that this strategy ran into in Chile, a land where the
ratio of rewards to service was extremely unfavorable to conquistadores of all but the highest
standing. I argue that objective conditions in Chile combined with inequitable reward allocation to
produce profound and ongoing conflicts within the Spanish community there. The very conquest
faced two fundamental risks as a result of these conflicts, viz., that the colony would be abandoned
as an impossible or nonviable undertaking, or that disgruntled and frustrated colonists would rise
up against a leadership they perceived as denying them their just rewards. In the event, both of these
risks nearly destroyed the conquest.

The Spaniards in Chile faced two basic objective difficulties: a lack of obvious or easily-obtained
mineral riches, and the determination and effectiveness of the Mapuches to resist conquest and
forced labor. Had these difficulties not been present, the conquest of Chile might have borne more
resemblance to that of Peru, where internal conflicts were no less important but revolved around
competition over abundant spoils.
In these pages I look at how the colony’s internal conflicts played out during the rocky
tenure of Pedro de Valdivia, the colony’s first governor. I argue that, counterintuitively, the conquest
went forward—in spite of long odds and perhaps against sound judgment—more because of the
inegalitarian and contradictory model than despite it. Deeply held expectations and faith in the
promise of the system predisposed the less-fortunate members of the conquering forces to attempt
to make the system work for them, rather than to reject the system wholesale in favor of some new
order. Like workers in contemporary capitalist society, then, these lesser conquistadores had been
sold a bill of goods, which they energetically and, for a great many, self-defeatingly struggled to make
pay off for them. Their faith in the inegalitarian model reinforced the socioeconomic stratification
of their world.

3
 Yet the resulting relentless pressures for rewards that the colonial leaders had to contend
with meant that, if they were able to build and profit from a project of conquest structured around
an inegalitarian model, at the same time they were forced to seek ways of accommodating those
below them. In the short run, that dialectical struggle between a dominant elite and a subordinate
majority upon which it depended provided a motor that propelled the conquest through its most
tenuous years. In the long run, out of that internal conflict emerged practices of reward and
remuneration that permitted a seemingly hopeless conquest to succeed.
During the fifteen-year period I examine in this thesis, the strategy by which Valdivia
attempted to placate the colonists who pressed for compensation was to expand the territory under
Spanish control and, thereby, to liberate land, gold, and, most importantly, Indians, for distribution
to his unsated conquistadores. Since by fighting back so effectively the Mapuches made abundantly
clear that such expansion would require the influx of additional Spaniards, Valdivia made increasing
the colony’s population through immigration from Peru an ongoing priority.
The inherent illogic of Valdivia’s approach—that newcomers might help expand the colony
but would also press for rewards of their own, thereby simply reproducing the problem—appears to
have been lost on him. But we must remember that everything Valdivia had experienced and learned
led him to believe that a conclusive victory over the Mapuches was not only attainable but
foreordained. The decisive victory would usher in a period of growth and prosperity and would put
an end to the temporary difficulties of rewarding his people in a context of warfare. Valdivia’s faulty
assumptions and misapprehension of the situation at hand would cost him and the entire colony
dearly.
As the colonists grew in numbers, their yearning for wealth propelled territorial expansion
that went beyond the Spaniards’ capacity to defend. The results were catastrophic. Seeing their
incautious enemy spread too thin, the Mapuches launched an offensive at the end of 1553 in which
they slew Valdivia and numerous other Spaniards. As Mapuche attacks continued, the colony
plunged into a succession struggle that sharply compromised its military effectiveness. Before long,
the Mapuches had devastated their adversary’s southern flank, inflicting losses it would take the
colonists years to reverse. Only with the arrival from Peru of a new governor and an army of 450

4
Spaniards in 1557 did the colony manage to retake the initiative—temporarily—from the
Mapuches.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY

Historical studies of the early conquest period have tended toward description rather than analysis.
Nevertheless, a number of scholars have delved into several important themes, among them the
effectiveness of Mapuche resistance, the difficulties of mounting and sustaining the military aspects
of conquest, slavery in Chile, and the debates and conflicts over colonists’ treatment and
exploitation of Indian servitors.
In a 1957 article entitled “Cultural Change and Military Resistance in Araucanian Chile,”
Robert Charles Padden offered a penetrating and imaginative explanation for the Mapuches’
military effectiveness.4 Padden saw their ability to learn the Spaniards’ weak points and constantly
to refine their own strategies and tactics accordingly as a process of ongoing cultural adaptation.
Padden argued that the areas which bore the brunt of Spanish aggression—the Mapuches’ military,
political, and religious forms and practices—were all areas of Mapuche culture that were able to
bend without breaking. While his argument is not without flaws—most notably, that his exclusive
focus on matters pertaining to warfare and resistance yields a distorted and simplistic portrait of
what was surely a considerably more complicated society—it has provided the foundation and
framework for our understanding of how the Mapuches managed to stave off conquest so much
longer than indigenous peoples elsewhere in the Americas.
Chilean historian Alvaro Jara showed how the financial requirements of the War of Arauco
proved beyond the capacity of a model based entirely on private sources of funding. In Guerra y
sociedad en Chile, Jara argued that, faced with the impossibility of conquest without royal financial
outlays, the Crown saw no choice but to fund a permanent, paid army in Chile. By Jara’s account, it
took the near total loss of Spanish-controlled territory south of Santiago in the massive 1598
Mapuche offensive to convince Spain to depart from its long-standing policy against funding local

4
Robert Charles Padden, “Cultural Change and Military Resistance in Araucanian Chile, 1550–
1730,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13 (1957):103–121.

5
conquests. That policy had yielded six decades of advances and reversals and the humiliating deaths
of two governors, to say nothing of the hundreds of colonists who lost their lives. By the end of the
sixteenth century, with victorious Mapuches parading the head of Governor Martín García Oñez de
Loyola through the lands he had previously governed, the Crown saw little choice but to commence
regular disbursements of funds to maintain a standing army in Chile.
Jara argued that the War of Arauco continued to shape the colonial economy through the
seventeenth century. Soldiers in the south, paid by the Crown, provided a market for internal
commerce, the royal subsidy spawned graft and corruption, and Spanish raids into Mapuche lands
fed a burgeoning slave trade with Peru.
The use of forced Indian labor was the subject of impassioned debates and polemics
throughout the New World, the most famous of which involved the Catholic priest Bartolomé de
las Casas. By the time the conquest of Chile began in the mid-sixteenth century, the Crown had
already issued a series of laws aimed at regulating the use of Indian labor, reining in colonists whose
hunger for wealth drove them to work “their” Indians to death, and providing for the conversion of
Indians to Catholicism. In Spanish Policy in Colonial Chile, Jesuit priest and historian Eugene H.
Korth argued that, from the beginning, the colonists in Chile took advantage of their remoteness
from Spain to ignore the Crown’s instructions regarding Indian labor.5 Korth traced the tireless
efforts by Spaniards like Gil González de San Nicolás, a Dominican friar, and Hernando de
Santillán, an oidor (judge) of the audiencia (highest court) of Lima, to persuade a succession of
Chilean governors to enforce the Crown’s policies. With only sporadic exceptions, these efforts to
bring the colonial leadership and the colonists into line with royal policy failed. Korth argued that
the colonists’ greed overwhelmed any concern for the well-being of those Indians with whose
protection they were ostensibly charged. Korth also argued that the relentless cruelty of the
Spaniards provided the Mapuches with the will to resist conquest. Somewhat less persuasively,
Korth attributed Mapuche endurance to their force of will.
While the determination of the Mapuches was unarguably impressive, the Spaniards
themselves overcame tremendous hardships and obstacles during their first years in Chile. The fact

5
Eugene H. Korth, Spanish Policy in Colonial Chile: The Struggle for Social Justice, 1535–1700
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968).

6
that they ultimately prevailed should not blind us to the remarkable courage they had to muster in
order to face constant fear of death in a strange, desolate corner of the earth. In his Descubrimiento y
conquista de Chile, historian Francisco Esteve Barba attributed the early colonists’ staying power to
their tremendous force of will.6 For Esteve, Valdivia was a hero of Olympian stature.
Even after the colonists’ first years of total isolation ended and irregular voyages between
Chile and Peru brought a sporadic flow of supplies, people, and communication, the colony’s
location on the periphery of the Spanish empire remained a fact of no small importance. In Early
Latin America, James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz devoted some attention to the particular
situation of the “fringe” areas of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas. They defined
the fringes as those areas which, largely for economic reasons, were not (yet) of particular interest or
importance to the conquest.7 Throughout the period under consideration in this thesis, Chile most
certainly lay on the fringe of Spain’s New World empire.
Lockhart and Schwartz stress that fringe areas tended to reveal the strong influence of the
core areas nearest to which they lay. In the Chilean case this was indeed so; laws, politics, and events
in Peru had consistently important implications for the Chilean colony. But if we may generalize
that Peru exercised a powerful influence on Chile, the nature of that influence was by no means
simple or consistent. Sometimes Peru offered inspiration and direction, sometimes it served as a
horrible example to avoid repeating, sometimes its puissant and meddlesome presence simply
reinforced Chilean colonists’ inclination to cut their own path.
If fringe areas such as Chile often felt the unwanted influence of their more powerful
neighbors, they also could suffer the opposite: neglect. Considered relatively unimportant,
particularly in Spain, fringe colonies both enjoyed and suffered from a margin of autonomy. In the
case of Chile, this margin both permitted and impelled the colonists to develop tailor-made
solutions to their peculiar problems.8

6
Francisco Esteve Barba, Descubrimiento y conquista de Chile (Barcelona: Salvat Editores, 1946).
7
James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A history of colonial Spanish America
and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 253–256.
8
In 1543, Juan Bautista Pastene captained the first ship from Peru to Chile since Valdivia’s party
arrived there in 1540. During those three years in isolation, the colonists endured hunger, fear,

7
 The specific processes by which such solutions were arrived at has been almost wholly
neglected by historians. In “The Dynamic of Conquest,” Andrew L. Daitsman offered an insightful
analysis of the role played by internal proto–class conflict in Pedro de Valdivia’s decision to press
south of the Maule River after 1549.9 Though not the first scholar to acknowledge the existence of
internal conflicts, Daitsman departed from earlier authors by examining the repercussions of those
conflicts.
In this thesis I build on previous scholarship in several ways. I demonstrate that strong and
often conflicting pressures from within the colony’s ranks shaped Valdivia’s decisions and actions
from the earliest days of his expedition. I explicate the ways in which his expectations and those of
the colonists, connected as they were to a particular logic of conquest employed by Spain
throughout the New World, framed their understanding of the problems they faced and the options
at their disposal. Finally, I show how Valdivia’s attempts to respond to internal pressures and to
make the standard Spanish approach to conquest work in Chile by fostering immigration and
leading ambitious expansion backfired. Only gradually, over the decades after Valdivia’s death, did
subsequent generations of colonists and leaders cobble together an unorthodox formula for meeting
their common thirst for profit and distinction in Chile’s uniquely challenging context.

attacks from the Mapuches, and a host of other hardships. Although his voyage was in response to
Valdivia’s plea for help from Peru, Pastene’s orders stressed the Empire’s global geopolitical
concerns; his mission was, first and foremost, to collect whatever meager gold and silver the
colonists might have amassed since the Holy Roman Empire faced an urgent shortage of specie in
Europe. His orders made no mention of the desperate situation faced by Valdivia and his men. This
episode illustrates both how marginal the colony in Chile was from the standpoint of the Empire,
and the degree to which the colonists were left to their own devices in working out solutions to the
peculiar problems Chilean conquest entailed. Pastene’s orders appear in “Autorización concedida
por Vaca de Castro á Juan Bautista Pastene para venir á Chile, como capitán de cierto navío y gente
[10 April 1543],” Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de Chile desde el viaje de
Magallanes hasta la batalla de Maipo, 1518–1818 [hereafter CDI], compiled and edited by Jose
Toribio Medina, 30 vols. (Santiago: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1888–1902), 8:42–43.
9
Andrew L. Daitsman, “The Dynamic of Conquest: Spanish Motivations in the New World” (M.A.
thesis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1987).

8
 1.

One Cuzco morning in 1540, a handful of European men under the command of Pedro de Valdivia
awoke before dawn and prepared to set out for the as-yet-unconquered long strip of coastline that
stretched south from Peru to the Strait of Magellan. Their mission was clear: to conquer Chile in
the name of the Christian god and the Spanish monarch and Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.
What thoughts ran through these men’s heads as they pulled on their boots and rubbed sleep from
their eyes, we cannot know. But we have a fairly clear sense of how they might have come to join
Valdivia’s expedition.
The bulk of the Europeans in the New World were men of modest origins and means who
came to America in the hope of amassing a fortune and making a name for themselves, thereby
transcending the limitations of social and economic advance they faced in Europe.10 Risking life and
limb for the Empire, the conquistadores fully expected to receive material benefits, perhaps grants of
Indian labor, perhaps gold, silver, or precious stones. When the time came to distribute the spoils of
conquest, however, these men discovered that their rewards reflected their status in the sharply
stratified world of the armies of conquest. The leaders of campaigns to incorporate new territory
received handsome rewards, but, as finite riches got divided commensurate with rank, those at the
lower rungs of the conquest ladder often had to content themselves with meager pelf; they could
only hope that, in due time, as the Empire expanded, they would eventually receive their due. Such
hopes drove many hundreds of these lower-rung Europeans to follow the ever-widening perimeter
of Spanish settlement. Thus, when Pedro de Valdivia began to organize a party to conquer Chile, he

10
In Spain 1516–1598: From Nation State to World Empire (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), John
Lynch describes in some detail the poverty that most Spaniards faced at the time. He also argues
that while religious motivations may have stirred some of them, the bulk of the conquistadores were
primarily motivated by more material aspirations. Francisco Pizarro articulated the attitude of many
when he dismissed the pleas of a priest who implored him to put an end to widespread abuses of
Indians and instead tell them of the Christian god and faith. “I have not come for any such reasons. I
have come to take away from them their gold.” Quoted in Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for
Justice in the Conquest of America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), 6–7.

9
was able to recruit among resentful and dissatisfied veterans of the Peruvian conquest who had not
done nearly so well there as they had hoped.
Despite more-than-ample numbers of potential recruits at hand, Valdivia had to contend
with the legacy of the adelantado Diego de Almagro’s ill-fated Chilean foray, from which the latter
had returned to Peru bedraggled and far from triumphant in 1536. Almagro and his men had not
found El Dorado, nor copious mineral wealth of any sort, in Chile. Instead they had met robust
indigenous people most unwilling to submit to European intruders. In response to their abusive
conduct toward the native people they met, Almagro and company had received a thrashing and
brought back very glum news to those in Peru who eagerly awaited word that material deliverance
lay, at last, just to the south. Yet despite the disheartening experience of the Almagro expedition,
Valdivia succeeded in rallying enough men for a second, more determined attempt. His success
testifies to the bitter lack of prospects these men saw for themselves if they remained in Peru, as well
as to Valdivia’s powers of persuasion. It also helps to explain why, in April of 1539, Francisco Pizarro
readily acceded to Valdivia’s request for permission to lead an expedition, or entrada, to Chile. In
the words of one historian, “all the entradas had at least the secondary aim, and often the primary
one, of getting the discontented out of Peru and into the great spaces beyond, from which, with
luck, they would never return.”11
Pizarro’s blessing obtained, Valdivia turned to the task of outfitting his small but growing
party. After much effort and numerous setbacks, Valdivia was making his final preparations for
departure at the end of 1539 when he encountered an unexpected and unwelcome obstacle in Pedro
Sancho de Hoz.12 Sancho, a veteran of the first Peruvian wars, had been present at the capture of the
Inca Atahualpa and had served as the official scribe during Pizarro’s distribution of the Inca’s riches.
His efforts earned him an encomienda (a grant of Indians as tribute payers) and appointment as

11
Stephen Minta, Aguirre: The Re-Creation of a Sixteenth-Century Journey Across South America
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), 17.
12
Sancho’s name appears with various spellings in the documents of the time (Pero Sancho de Hoz,
Pero Sancho de la Hoz, and so on). I use the spelling used by Sancho himself on documents that
bear his signature: Pedro Sancho de Hoz.

10
Pizarro’s secretary.13 In April of 1535, Sancho had returned to Spain and, while there, had gained the
King’s favor. Friends in high places can be profitable indeed, and Sancho returned to Cuzco in
December of 1539 with a royal capitulation authorizing him to explore and conquer the lands on
the south side of the Strait of Magellan. While those lands would turn out to be perhaps the least
desirable in all the New World, Sancho’s documents also granted him authority over all ports and
coastal areas south of Peru that had not yet been discovered or specifically included in other colonial
jurisdictions. Although it stipulated a maritime expedition, his capitulation presented a direct threat
to Valdivia’s dreams and plans. To further complicate matters, Valdivia held the rank of lieutenant
governor, whereas the King had ordered that Sancho administer the lands he conquered as a full
governor and captain general.14 Thus, Sancho’s arrival presented an immediate problem to both
Valdivia and Pizarro.
Pizarro’s personal loyalties lay with Valdivia, who had served loyally as his maestre de campo
in his recent defeat of his rival, Almagro. But Pizarro could hardly disregard a royal capitulation. As
1539 drew to a close, Pizarro managed to broker an agreement between the two men whereby they
would undertake the enterprise as partners. Exactly how authority and power was distributed in that
agreement we cannot say; the document no longer exists. We do know that Valdivia was able to
return to his preparations and to set off as planned. Sancho de Hoz was to assemble horses and
supplies and then join him en route by the end of March 1540. As we shall see, things did not go
entirely as planned.
After Valdivia and Sancho signed their pact of partnership, or compañía, they parted ways,
Valdivia leaving Cuzco for Chile and Sancho turning his energies to gathering the horses, ships,
materiel, and other supplies he had pledged to contribute. Sancho quickly ran into financial
difficulties that proved insurmountable. While away in Spain, he had lost his Cuzco encomienda to a
man by the name of Villacastín, a more recent arrival who was not among the original

13
Esteve, pp. 235–237.
14
“Real cédula prorrogando á Pero Sancho de Hoz por un año más el plazo para que fuese á España
[7 March 1539],” CDI, 8:25–26; “Capitulación y asiento que se tomó con Pero Sancho de Hoz para
efectuar descubrimientos en el Mar del Sur [24 January 1539],” CDI, 8:16–17; “Título de
Gobernador para Pero Sancho de Hoz [8 February 1539],” CDI, 8:21–23; “A Pero Sancho de
Hoz.—Capitanía general [8 February 1539],” CDI, 8:20.

11
conquistadores. Although encomenderos were supposed to remain in the country of their
encomiendas and absence was grounds for loss of these grants, Sancho had obtained explicit royal
sanction for his extended stay in Spain and guarantees that he would not lose his encomienda. More
important for the matter at hand, these royal guarantees stipulated that the revenues from Sancho’s
encomienda were to be held for him, to be collected upon his arrival in Cuzco.15 Sancho had counted
on getting hold of these proceeds and when he could not, his financial situation rapidly fell apart.
Soon he was imprisoned for inability to pay his debts.16 By late April, already overdue for his
rendezvous with Valdivia, Sancho was still struggling to regain the encomienda. Although the
Crown did come through on 23 April with a royal cedula granting his request for restitution,17
Sancho accurately perceived with every passing day his governorship slipping further from his grasp
and into the eager hands of his rival, Valdivia.

Sancho caught up with Valdivia’s party on the edge of the imposing Atacama desert in June of 1540.
He was months behind schedule, a fact that would not be lost on Valdivia. By the terms of the two
men’s 28 December 1539 compañía, Sancho was committed to delivering fifty horses, two ships
laden with necessary supplies for the expedition, and 200 breastplates, all within four months of the
compañía’s signing.18 Though the documentary evidence does not tell us what portion of this

15
“Real cédula prorrogando á Pedro Sancho de Hoz el plazo que se le había concedido para que
estuviese en España [31 May 1538],” CDI, 8:13; “Real cédula prorrogando á Pero Sancho de Hoz el
plazo que se le tenía concedido para ir á España [24 January 1539],” CDI, 8:17; “Real cédula para
que Francisco Pizarro no quite á Pero Sancho de Hoz los indios que tenía encomendados [21
February 1539],” CDI, 8:24; “Real cédula prorrogando á Pero Sancho de Hoz por un año más el
plazo para que fuese á España [7 March 1539],” CDI, 8:24.
16
Francisco Frías Valenzuela, Manual de historia de Chile, 3rd rev. ed. (Santiago: Editorial
Nascimento, 1956), 72.
17
“Real cédula para que se haga justicia á Pero Sancho de Hoz acerca de la restitución de ciertos
indios [23 April 1540],” CDI, 8:31–32.
18
“Dejación que hizo Pedro Sancho de Hoz de una provisión que el Marqués D. Francisco Pizarro le
habia dado á consequencia de no haber cumplido lo que había asentado y capitulado con el Capitán
Pedro de Valdivia para el descubrimiento de las provincias de la Nueva Extremadura [8 August
1540],” CDI, 8:33.

12
contribution he was able to render, it is clear that Sancho fell far short materially, compounding the
problem of his tardiness.
In August 1540, Sancho affixed his signature to a carefully worded dejación, or nullification,
of his compañía with Valdivia. On its surface, the document has Sancho asking for four things, all of
his own free will: to be released from his obligations to Valdivia; to be permitted to stay on as a
member of Valdivia’s party “and to earn rewards in the province of Chile, in accordance with the
quality of his person, always obedient to said Pedro de Valdivia and under his banner”; to be
reimbursed for the few horses and other supplies he had delivered; and to have the compañía
dissolved. The document notes that Valdivia acceded to all four requests. Four days later, the
document continues, Sancho freely chose to resign any and all titles and claims to power in a
Chilean colony, be they of royal origin or otherwise. He handed over all such powers to Valdivia,
who he pledged to serve and follow. Before four witnesses, Sancho swore on a cross that he would
never in any fashion seek to reclaim any of what he had relinquished, on penalty of great fines,
“perjury and infamy.”19
What lay behind Sancho’s thorough renunciation of his royal capitulation, and with it any
hopes for colonial power and leadership? A botched attempt to assassinate Valdivia. Before his
arrival at the Atacama encampment was known, Sancho slipped into Valdivia’s tent, determined to
plunge a dagger into his rival’s heart and to seize control of the expedition. Little did Sancho know
that Valdivia had ridden ahead with a scouting party and was not to be found in the encampment.
Disoriented in the dark, the hapless Sancho stumbled upon Inés Suárez, Valdivia’s lover.20
Perceiving his fateful misstep, he feigned having hoped to surprise Valdivia with warm greetings.
But Suárez saw the dagger in his hand and discerned Sancho’s darker purpose.21
Aware of the precariousness of the moment—and of the audible presence of Sancho’s
accomplices outside her tent—Suárez pretended to accept the foiled assassin’s explanation of his

19
“Dejación que hizo Pedro Sancho de Hoz . . . ,” CDI, 8:33–36.
20
Valdivia had a wife back in Spain, so Suárez cannot properly be said to have been his consort; the
considerable influence and authority she exerted—albeit unofficially—makes the term “concubine”
even more inappropriate.
21
Testimony of doña Inés Xuárez (sic), “Proceso de Francisco de Villagra. III,” CDI, 22:623–625.

13
behavior. After seeing to it that Sancho and his four confederates were fed, Suárez quietly advised
Pedro Gómez de Don Benito, Valdivia’s maestre de campo, of the situation. They decided to delay
further action until Valdivia’s return. Shortly thereafter, two soldiers slipped off inconspicuously,
riding into the night under orders to apprise Valdivia of Sancho’s antics.22
Thinking their complot to still have a chance of success, Sancho and his associates set about
stirring up rebellion among discontented members of Valdivia’s party. With his royal capitulation in
hand, Sancho promised to grant encomiendas to those who joined him. More than a few found
Sancho’s call tempting and a climate of palpable unease descended upon the encampment. Sancho
and his comrades, Antonio de Ulloa, Diego López de Avalos, and the brothers Juan and Diego de
Guzmán, were fanning the spark of mutiny.23
But the spark did not catch and the unrest proved short-lived. Valdivia returned two days
after Sancho’s arrival and quickly stabilized the situation. He sent López and the Guzmáns back to
Peru—on foot and unarmed—and granted clemency to Sancho and Ulloa in exchange for their
pledges of loyalty.24 Sancho signed the dejación in August, two months later.25 That Valdivia delayed
resumption of the journey south until the exclusivity of his authority was guaranteed suggests that
Sancho’s dejación may not have been as much a matter of free choice as the document blandly states.
Given the nature of Sancho’s crime, his options were surely limited.
Sancho’s bungled assassination attempt spelled the end to his hitherto strong legal claim to
a place at the height of colonial power in Chile. It did not, however, stop him from wanting and
conspiring for such a place. As we shall see, Sancho remained a thorn in Valdivia’s side for the next
seven years and served as a lightning rod for dissent among disgruntled colonists.

22
Esteve, pp. 247–248.
23
Esteve, p. 248; testimony of Santiago vecino Gonzalo de los Ríos, “Proceso de Francisco de
Villagra. III,” CDI, 22:566.
24
Testimony of doña Inés Xuárez, p. 624. The episode did not teach Juan de Guzmán to give up
further intrigues; he was executed two years later for complicity in Pizarro’s assassination. Esteve, p.
249. Ulloa, for his part, will reappear in our story. His promises to serve Valdivia faithfully will prove
to have been as hollow as Sancho’s.
25
“Dejación que hizo Pedro Sancho de Hoz . . . ,” CDI, 8:32–36.

14
 2.

From atop a wooded hill, Valdivia looked down upon Chile’s verdant Central Valley, watered by the
undulating branches of the Mapocho River.26 It was a summer day near the end of 1540. Valdivia
breathed in the warm breeze and declared that the seemingly-endless eleven-month journey from
Peru was over. On 12 February 1541, he formally founded Santiago del Nuevo Extremo, the first
permanent Spanish settlement in the land he dubbed Nueva Extremadura. 27
Straightaway, Valdivia busied himself with drawing up a plan for the city and distributing
building lots to “some gentlemen who accompanied him and other soldiers of lesser standing.”28
Over the next weeks, he also assembled a government for the fledgling colony. On 7 March 1541, he
named two alcaldes (judges), six regidores (administrative officials), a mayordomo (manager), and a
procurador (town advocate). Four days later, he convened the alcaldes and regidores in the colony’s
first cabildo (town council). The Santiago Cabildo quickly set to work on such matters as
establishing a meeting schedule and voting procedures for itself. Its first weeks were spent mostly in

26
Those familiar with contemporary downtown Santiago will observe that the Mapocho no longer
branches as it did in Valdivia’s day. The bed of the Mapocho’s second branch was later filled in as the
city grew. The Alameda, central Santiago’s broad boulevard, travels the former path of this second
branch.
27
“Primer libro de actas del Cabildo de Santiago llamado jeneralmente Libro Becerro. de 1541–
1557 [hereafter, “Actas del Cabildo”],” in Colección de historiadores de Chile y documentos relativos a
la historia nacional, edited by José Toribio Medina (Santiago: Imprenta del Ferrocarril, 1861),
1:67.Valdivia was a native of the region of La Serena in Extremadura, Spain.
28
Góngora Marmolejo, Alonso de, “Historia de todas las cosas que han acaecido en el Reino de
Chile y de los que lo han gobernado (1536–1575),” in Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 131:
“Crónicas del Reino de Chile,” edited by Francisco Esteve Barba, 77–224 (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas,
1960), p. 82. Góngora Marmolejo also wrote that Valdivia gave “Indians to most, corresponding to
the possibility of the land,” though this assertion of so early a distribution cannot easily be
corroborated. Most likely this distribution was rather informal and for immediate needs such as
building. There is no extant documentary record of the distribution, nor do subsequent documents
relating to distribution of Indians make mention of it.

15
swearing in other officials and functionaries: a cabildo scribe, a master builder, a town crier, and a
constable and deputy.29
These measures, by Valdivia and the Cabildo, constituted deliberate arrangements of power
toward political ends beyond simple administrative practicality. They also represented rewards to
favored men, rewards that both acknowledged past service and aimed at ensuring future loyalty. All
these positions meant power and influence, while some carried salaries as well. Formal lines of
inequality among the colonists were quickly being drawn and emphasized. Most of the
conquistadores did not receive titled offices in the fledgling colony; for them, compensation would
have to wait. Yet distribution of offices and functions did not only go to the emerging elite: The
office of town crier, a paid position, went to Domingo, an African slave owned by vecino Juan
Negrete. The Cabildo explained its decision to give Domingo the position on the grounds that,
while the job ought normally to go to a Spaniard, the exigencies of war did not permit that one
could be spared for the task.30 This illustrates that from early on the problems of allocating rewards
to those who wanted them ran into the companion problem of having adequate numbers of
Europeans on hand to produce the rewards that were so desired.

Before long, the colonists saw the green leaves of Chilean summer crisp to reds, oranges, and
browns, then fall from the trees. As the days grew shorter, the nights colder, and the Spaniards
prepared uneasily for their first winter in Chile, news of disturbing events in Peru began to reach the
settlement. The perennial rivalries between Almagrists and Pizarrists in Peru had reignited and,
according to Indian rumors the colonists dared not take lightly, in May of that year, 1541, an
Almagrist had assassinated Francisco Pizarro. The Spaniards in Peru, the Indians said, were killing
one another off. Soon the Incas would return to power and the Chilean Indians would follow suit.31

29
7 March 1541, 11 March 1541, 14 March 1541, 18 March, 1541, 10 April 1541, 25 April 1541,
“Actas del Cabildo,” 1:67–74. The actual titles used were escribano, alarife, pregonero, alguacil
mayor, and alguacil menor.
30
10 April 1541, “Actas del Cabildo,” 1:72,
31
10 May 1541, “Actas del Cabildo,” 1:75.

16
 Pizarro’s assassination held profound implications for Chile, for not only was Peru the
center of Spanish power and authority in South America, but Valdivia’s very right to govern the
Chilean colony derived directly from his relationship with Pizarro, whose word only indirectly
constituted royal sanction. While the Chilean colonists did not yet know if Pizarro was indeed
dead—they would later learn that the rumors actually began a month before his murder—the
possibility that he might be could not but cause them profound concern. What would happen to the
colony in the absence of Pizarro’s legitimizing influence? What would happen to Valdivia? At a time
when an all-out Indian attack was rumored to be in the works, any questions about the colonial
leadership’s stability demanded immediate attention.
Almost at once, the Cabildo moved to shore up Valdivia’s position and to upgrade his title
from lieutenant governor to full governor. As a governor, no longer serving on the Peruvian
governor’s behalf, Valdivia’s word would then carry royal weight and Chile’s stability would be
uncoupled from that of Peru. Antonio de Pastrana, the town advocate, drew up a petition calling on
the Cabildo to elect Valdivia governor, which it readily did. Not wishing to appear hungry for the
increased power, however, Valdivia demurred repeatedly before finally accepting election by a
cabildo abierto, or town meeting, with appropriate protestations.
The election of a governor at this time would seem to have been a prudent move. Yet we
should not accept at face value the apparent unanimity of conviction that Valdivia should be that
governor. How do we explain the impassioned calls Pastrana made for Valdivia, knowing, as we do,
that the advocate would be hanged for leading a mutinous conspiracy against the governor scarcely
two months later? Let us look for what answer might reside in the language of Pastrana’s appeals.
At first glance, Pastrana’s petition reads like a boilerplate document. He extols Valdivia’s
virtues and warns of the dire consequences of allowing a power vacuum to develop in the absence of
a full governor. He notes that only a full governor can be expected to place the interests of the King
and his vassals (i.e., the native people) before his own—though Pastrana hastens to add that
Valdivia’s conduct as lieutenant governor has been irreproachable.32
But a closer reading suggests that Pastrana is particularly concerned with the interests of the
conquistadores and with the process governing their remuneration. Thus, when Pastrana lays out

32
4 June 1541, “Actas del Cabildo,” 1:84.

17
the inherent dangers in the prospect that an outsider might be named governor by the higher
authorities beyond Chile, he says that in such an event, Valdivia
will cry with one eye and us [the conquistadores and vecinos] with two: because . . .
newly arrived [authorities] not only do not give Indians to those [Spaniards] who
deserve them, as His Majesty commands in his Royal Provisions, . . . but take from
the conquistadores those few [Indians] they find them with. Not because they
deserve to lose them, but in order to give them [the Indians] to those who came
with them [the new authorities].33

Pastrana has already discovered that Chile is poor enough and the conquistadores badly
enough compensated for their service under Valdivia; an unknown replacement sent from Peru
could make the difference between hardship and indigence. He sees the weakness of the
conquistadores’ position: while the wishes of the King are on their side (or so he argues, and not
unreasonably34), the implementation of such wishes can be another matter entirely. In the New
World, the letter of the law matters little beside the application of that law, and Pastrana knows this.
In a second petition Pastrana calls upon the Cabildo to ignore Valdivia’s excuses and compel the
latter to accept the governorship. With legal matters at the front of his mind, the advocate asks the
Cabildo to further see to it
that he [Valdivia] should distribute [reparta] the land and its Indians among those
[of us] who have worked [in service to the Crown], and that he should give us our
cedulas of deposit [i.e., deeds] as His Majesty’s governor, elected by his cabildo and
people in his [Majesty’s] name: because giving them to us as lieutenant governor the
great harms and excessive costs to the vecinos conquistadores and settlers of this land
and city, and of such other cities as might be populated, would grow, because . . . we

33
4 June 1541, “Actas del Cabildo,” 1:84
34
The 1543 additions to the New Laws of the previous year, for example, would support this
argument. In describing the problems to which they were addressed, the 1543 additions noted that
“in New Spain there are some people who are of the first conquistadores who have no repartimiento
of Indians whatsoever.” The problem had only worsened over time: “in said New Spain there are
some sons of the first conquistadores who not only do not have Indians, but were left poor and do
not have with which to sustain themselves.” “R[eal] Provisión. Declaraciones Añadidas a las Leyes
Nuevas [Valladolid, 4 June 1543],” in Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social
de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810, edited by Richard Konetzke, 3 vols. in 5 (Madrid: Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953), 1: 222–223.

18
 are forced, in order to have some security, to go to the provinces of Peru so that said
governor Pizarro, or whichever other, should confirm the fruit of our labors.35

Thus, we must consider Pastrana’s argument for Valdivia’s governorship to be at least in part
directly motivated by what he perceived as his best interests and those of his comrades. We cannot
assume, however, that he numbered among his comrades all the European colonists. As we shall see
when we examine Valdivia’s ill-fated first attempt at a repartimiento of Indians, and the struggles
which surrounded it, factions divided colonists against one another. Thus, while we may conclude
that Pastrana, or those for whom he spoke, saw their interests served by having Valdivia assume the
mantle of full governor, we cannot assume that all—or even most—colonists felt similarly. In fact,
even Pastrana’s professed support for Valdivia’s stewardship turned out to be short-lived. In a matter
of weeks, Pastrana and others began to plot the new governor’s demise.

3.

By mid-winter of 1541, a number of colonists began to complain to one another,

saying that they had come unwittingly to bad land, that they would do better to
return to Peru, rather than awaiting uncertainty, since signs of riches were not
forthcoming in the land, and that it was not a just thing for good men, in order to
make Valdivia a noble, to suffer so many labors and necessities as they had before
them.36

Chronicler and conquistador Alonso de Góngora Marmolejo described this dissension as “what one
often sees at similar stages” in the process of reward allocation. Don Martín de Solier, a regidor on
the Santiago Cabildo, was the loudest of Valdivia’s detractors. Solier described Valdivia as a “power-
hungry” (cudicioso de mando) man who had only come to Chile because he had grown bored in
Peru, and who would take full advantage of his position to exploit those under his command.
Valdivia was untrustworthy, his reassurances and promises empty: “although he had told them that
he would do right by all of them,” he was a “man of uncertain faith and later would do as he

35
4 June 1541, “Actas del Cabildo,” 1:85.
36
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 82.

19
pleased.” As Solier saw things, it was a foregone conclusion that the conquistadores would suffer
under burdens imposed at their leader’s capricious whim.37
There were hints of discontent even in Pastrana’s petitions in support of Valdivia’s election.
Recall that Pastrana had requested of the Cabildo that it ensure “that he [Valdivia] should
distribute the land and its Indians among those [of us] who have worked [in service to the Crown],
and that he should give us our cedulas of deposit. . . .”38 Implicit in these words is a quid pro quo for
backing Valdivia: The conquistadores want to be rewarded in a substantial and legally secure
fashion. And if they do not receive what they desire, they are fully aware of and prepared to appeal
to a higher authority: “in order to have some security, to go to the provinces of Peru so that said
governor Pizarro, or whichever other, should confirm the fruit of our labors.”39
It should come as little surprise that the dissension of Solier and his comrades soon came to
Valdivia’s attention and that he took swift steps to squelch it. In his account of the episode, rendered
in a 1545 letter to King Charles V, Valdivia describes the grousing as a plot by hitherto-trusted
former allies of Almagro against his own life.40 Whether the conspirators actually intended
assassination, we cannot know.41 There is no record of any formal investigation into the matter, nor
is there any indication that Valdivia followed any due process in issuing and executing summary
judgment against the men—Góngora Marmolejo wrote that Valdivia acted according to “the laws
of wartime.”42
First Valdivia ordered the arrest of Alonso de Chinchilla, a long-time ally of Sancho’s. In
custody, it was only a matter of days before Chinchilla implicated himself and several others in
organizing many of the colony’s rank and file. Chinchilla’s confession led to six other arrests,

37
Góngora Marmolejo, pp. 82–83.
38
4 June 1541, “Actas del Cabildo,” 1:85.
39
4 June 1541, “Actas del Cabildo,” 1:85.
40
“Al Emperador Carlos V, La Serena, 4 de septiembre de 1545,” in Cartas de Don Pedro de Valdivia
que tratan del descubrimiento y conquista de la Nueva Extremadura [hereafter, Cartas], edited by
Miguel Rojas-Mix (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1991), p. 66.
41
Góngora Marmolejo asserted that they intended “mutiny” and “rebellion” but he did not
explicitly state that murder was in the works. Góngora Marmolejo, p. 82.
42
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 83.

20
including those of Sancho, Solier, and Pastrana.43 By Valdivia’s own account, the number of soldiers
involved was so great that to execute them all would have been to court disaster. He chose to have
Solier beheaded (in recognition of his noble station) and Pastrana, Chinchilla, and two other
principal figures in the dissent hanged, in the hopes that swift and certain punishment would cow
the rest of his presumed assassins into obedience.44 Góngora Marmolejo remarks that “with this
punishment that he dealt, Valdivia ended up so feared and reputed as a warrior, that one and all took
care to please him and serve all his wishes” thereafter. 45 If more out of fear than love, for the time
being dissatisfied colonists would toe the line and watch their tongues.
Of the seven indicted men, only Sancho escaped conviction. On first glance, it seems
surprising that a man who once attempted to assassinate Valdivia should repeatedly elude execution
when other heads were falling around him. Sancho’s longevity becomes more understandable when
we consider the isolation of events in Chile from both the Peruvian and Spanish centers of higher
authority. Recall that King Charles V had granted Sancho a capitulation under the terms of which
the latter held the rank of governor. Sancho’s subsequent dejación was not known in Spain, nor was
it certain that the Crown would accept the legality of Sancho’s transfer of powers to Valdivia.
Further, despite his election by the Santiago Cabildo, Valdivia still had not obtained royal
acknowledgment of his governorship and did not wish to take any actions that might jeopardize
that eventual ratification. Thus, his cautious dealings with Sancho, as costly as they may have been,
derived from calculated prudence. It is telling that in his account of the episode to Charles V,
Valdivia made no mention of Sancho’s role in the cabal.
This early incident, when the colony was not yet a year old, prefigured the tension and
conflict of interests between leadership and rank and file that would strain the colony’s cohesion
and success for decades to come. Those who had gone to Chile to serve in a difficult conquest would
have to be compensated for their sacrifices if their loyalty was to be ensured. Calculated displays of

43
Pedro Mariño de Lobera, “Crónica del reino de Chile,” in Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 131:
“Crónicas del Reino de Chile,” edited by Francisco Esteve Barba, 225–575 (Madrid: Ediciones
Atlas, 1960), p. 262.
44
“Al Emperador Carlos V, La Serena, 4 de septiembre de 1545,” in Cartas, pp. 66–67.
45
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 83.

21
violence might quiet them for a time but would do nothing to satisfy their hunger. As Valdivia and
his successors were to discover, the material rewards they could offer their followers would be hard-
won and rarely extravagant. As time went on, the pressure to deliver well-earned rewards to the
conquistadores would impel the governors to strive constantly to expand the Spanish dominion. Yet
such expansion could not be accomplished without the influx of more conquistadores, whose
appetites for reward would, in circular fashion, demand further expansion still. The Crown certainly
did not embark on the conquest of the New World in order to create opportunities for
socioeconomic upward mobility for common Spanish folk—royal economic, religious, and
geopolitical motives were not characterized by egalitarian sensibilities. Yet, willy-nilly, the Crown’s
project, dependent as it was on the satisfaction of popular appetites it had helped to whet, became
decreasingly apparent on the ground level, eclipsed by the individual, often conflicting agendas of
those who carried out the conquest in the King’s name.

4.

Though today it is a commonplace that the indigenous people suffered greatly under the European
yoke the fact was also not lost on the conquistadores themselves. In his chronicle of the early
conquest period in which he participated, Góngora Marmolejo noted that shortly after Valdivia
founded Santiago, the local Indians began to organize against the Spanish intruders, accurately
“seeing that they were terrible neighbors, covetous of their landed property and imperious.”46
Scarcely a month after surviving Solier and company’s conspiracy, Valdivia faced a far more serious
threat to his dreams of conquest: the determination and ruthless effectiveness of native resistance to
Spanish rule.
Before dawn on 11 September 1541, in a mere hint of what the future held in store for
them, the colonists at Santiago came under attack by four huge battalions of Mapuche fighters
under the command of Michimalongo. Valdivia and others were away to the south of the city and
had left behind only fifty or so colonists to defend the settlement. The Spaniards were taken by
surprise and, vastly outnumbered, were soon fighting for their lives. The battle lasted much of the

46
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 83.

22
day and when the tide eventually turned and the attackers withdrew, Santiago lay in ashes and nearly
all of the colonists’ possessions and provisions had been destroyed. Valdivia later wrote the King
that all that remained were two small sows and a hog, a hen and a cock, and a couple of handfuls of
grain.47
The two years after the destruction of Santiago were a time during which survival took
precedence over concerns with reward distribution. Internal tensions and rivalries undoubtedly
remained, but all accounts of the period focus on the hunger and fear the colonists faced as they
tended their own food crops, always armed and watchful for Indian attack. Not until late 1543,
when Captain Alonso de Monroy returned from a mission to Peru for supplies, bringing with him
about seventy fresh recruits, did a sense of stability return to the colony. Monroy had also obtained
confirmation of Valdivia’s leadership of the colony from Peru’s new governor, Vaca de Castro, but
this recognition was bittersweet for Valdivia: Vaca de Castro reauthorized Valdivia at the rank of
lieutenant governor. Though he continued to refer to himself as “elected governor,” and even
implausibly denied receiving Vaca de Castro’s orders, his official rank of lieutenant governor
continued to compromise Valdivia’s authority.48

The new supplies and people permitted Valdivia in early 1544 to focus less on questions of survival
and to turn his attention to the renewed need to conquer and distribute territory and Indians
among the colonists. Though warfare continued, the Spaniards were now in a better position not
only to defend their settlements but to increase the land under their dominion as well. In his first
repartimiento (distribution) of Indians, Valdivia issued grants to some sixty conquistadores in
January, 1544.49 This left scores of conquistadores unrewarded, yet such a situation seemed

47
”Al Emperador Carlos V, La Serena, 4 de septiembre de 1545,” in Cartas, p. 67.
48
H.R.S. Pocock, The Conquest of Chile (New York: Stein and Day, 1967), pp. 101, 104.
49
In fact, Valdivia had begun distributing Indians among many of these sixty conquistadores as early
as 1542, but those allotments were informal, haphazard, and undocumented. The 1544
repartimiento was the first with any legal standing and the first attempt to actually delineate any sort
of geographical borders between grants. Guillermo Feliú Cruz and Carlos Monge Alfaro, Las
encomiendas según tasas y ordenanzas (Buenos Aires: Talleres S.A. Casa Jacobo Peuser, 1941), pp.
94–95.

23
unavoidable, given that the Spaniards had been able to bring only a limited amount of territory
under their control. Not only did Valdivia fail to reward all meritorious conquistadores, but those
who did benefit soon discovered that their grants failed to live up to their hopes and expectations.
As we shall see, the reasons for this were fairly simple, yet it took Valdivia and his successors quite
some time fully to understand and accommodate them.
Valdivia knew that his repartimiento had not fully satisfied his people. Góngora Marmolejo
tells us that just as he was giving out these Indian grants, Valdivia also was preparing to push the
colony’s boundaries outward, so that he might “fulfill his promise to his followers.”50 By Góngora
Marmolejo’s account, Valdivia’s motives for expansion had directly to do with his need and wish to
satisfy the colonists: “he wanted to provide for their satisfaction, knowing that many lacked” what
they desired.51 Valdivia’s approach to rewarding himself suggests that he could probably ill-afford
not to appear concerned with the colonists’ desires: “Because the Valley of Chile was better and
more populous than any other, he took it for himself, and also because there were many rich gold
mines in its lands.”52
Shortly after announcing the repartimiento, Valdivia set in motion a phase of expansion. He
led the first of what would be several southern campaigns to establish towns and to “pacify” Indians
for subsequent distribution to colonists. For similar purposes he also authorized pushes in other
directions. Francisco de Aguirre, one of the original Santiago Cabildo members, led a party of
soldiers to establish a Spanish settlement in an area known by the native Diaguitas as Coquimbo,
some 480 km north of Santiago. The purpose of his mission was both to set up a second nucleus for
the colony and, from that nucleus, to lead the conquest of the Copiapó, Guaco, and Limari valleys.
Shortly after he founded the new Spanish town, dubbed La Serena for the valley of Valdivia’s birth,
Aguirre was recalled to Santiago for using excessive violence against the Diaguitas in his efforts to
make them submit. Juan Bohón, a member of the first cohort of regidores of Santiago, requested and

50
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 87.
51
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 87.
52
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 86. Góngora Marmolejo overstated the number and richness of these
mines, which suggests that Valdivia’s compensation to himself produced resentment among some of
the colonists.

24
obtained permission to take over the command of La Serena that September. Bohón would govern
La Serena and oversee the distribution of local Indians to the town’s new vecinos for the next four
years.53 On the heels of the La Serena campaign, Valdivia named newly-arrived mariner Juan
Bautista de Pastene his naval lieutenant and placed him in charge of a southward push of the colony
by sea. Along with Jerónimo de Alderete, Rodrigo de Quiroga, and Valdivia’s secretary, Juan de
Cárdenas, Pastene set out with two vessels that Spring.54

Valdivia based his first repartimiento on what turned out to have been a serious miscalculation of
both the dimensions of the land and the numbers of Indians living on it.55 The beneficiaries of the
repartimiento were lucky if they could find concentrations of 100 individuals within their
designated tracts; more common were clusters of 30 to 50 people, often unaccustomed to sedentary
life and unskilled in the work to which the Spaniards sought to put them. And both the pace of
work and ongoing fighting between Spaniards and Indians were steadily eroding the already limited
Indian population.56 These were hardly the teeming, lucrative feudal realms of which the
conquistadores dreamed.
When Valdivia sat down to issue the first repartimiento in Chile in early 1544, he drew upon
the Peruvian model and experience. He had two main reasons for using this model: first, it would be
seen as legal and legitimate by royal officials and by those below him, many of whom had cut their
colonial teeth in Peru; and second, it was the only model he knew and the model according to

53
Góngora Marmolejo, pp. 86–87.
54
Pocock, pp. 108–109.
55
The confusion about the numbers, residential patterns, and social organization of the Indians was
by no means a uniquely Chilean problem. In an essay entitled “Tribe and State in a Frontier Mosaic:
The Asháninka of Eastern Peru,” Michael F. Brown and Eduardo Fernández note that “The
Spaniards’ inability to identify the proper scale of indigenous political units led them to oscillate
wildly between over- and under-specificity in naming [native] peoples.” In War in the Tribal Zone:
Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare, edited by R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead
(Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992), p. 179.
56
“Traslado de un requerimiento hecho á Pedro de Valdivia para que verificase la reformación de
repartimiento de la ciudad de Santiago, y pregones que sobre ello mandó dar [6 July 1546],” CDI,
8:120–121.

25
which he had received lucrative rewards of his own in Peru. But Valdivia and the conquistadores had
yet to understand that, just as Chile was no Peru, so a repartimiento modeled on the Peruvian type
could not succeed. They arrived in Chile with notions about how a conquest should proceed and
how the spoils and rewards ought to be divided. And, since people tend to see what they expect to
find, it took quite a while for them to recognize and adjust to the many ways in which Chile was not
Peru.
The Peruvian encomiendas tended to encompass large numbers of Indians and were based
upon preexisting social and political units of organization; a given conquistador might be granted
one or more caciques’ Indians. Since the Incas had a long-standing practice of collecting tribute
from stably-organized political units headed by caciques, Spaniards had only to take the place of the
Incas at the top of the tributary pyramid and a substantial part of the conquest was accomplished.
Because Chile’s Indians were neither spatially nor politically concentrated in large, sedentary
population centers, great tracts of land often contained fewer Indians than the Spaniards at first
expected, given their experiences in Peru and Mexico. Furthermore, Spanish violence and attempts
to coerce them into labor commonly inspired Indians to pick up and move south, beyond the
Europeans’ reach. Those who did remain, pushed by the colonists to provide rapid and lavish wealth,
often died from the inhuman pace of work.
As the months passed, many of the conquistadores who had received Indians in deposit
came to an agreement that Valdivia must be prevailed upon to distribute additional Indians and to
reduce the total number of grants so as to improve the profitability of the deposits. The new
procurador, Bartolomé Flores,57 consented to draft a petition to Valdivia to this effect. On 6 July
1546, Flores brought the petition before the Cabildo.
Near the beginning of his petition, Flores compared the Santiago-centered repartimiento
with those elsewhere in the New World:
In the provinces of Peru and in other parts where Indian repartimientos have been
given, there are vecinos who alone have in their repartimiento double the land that in
all of this city is divided. . . . In New Spain, Guatemala and Nicaragua and the
provinces of Peru and in all other parts where Indians have been distributed, in

57
Flores, a German by birth, had by this point given up his far less convenient natal surname of
Blumenthal.

26
 every city areas very much larger than [those] in this city are given, especially in the
first city populated in these provinces, as this [city of Santiago] is.58

By making an explicit comparison with Peruvian repartimientos, Flores reveals not only the standard
by which the conquistadores had set their expectations, but also the standard by which they
intended to judge Valdivia when he compensated them for their services. Flores went on to suggest
that the recipients of the first repartimiento had benefited so little from their deposits that they
would be unable to provide horses and arms for their defense, or shelter and sustenance for any new
arrivals from Peru.59
Standing to benefit from a revision of the original repartimiento, the Cabildo members
obligingly voted their unanimous endorsement. Valdivia assented to the petitions and agreed to
make a revision.60 He was able to do this by simple decree since the repartimiento had consisted of
deposits of Indians, not formal encomiendas. If this turned out to be convenient for Valdivia and for
those who benefited from his revision, it was also legally prudent and perhaps necessary, for Valdivia
did not have the formal authority to grant encomiendas until he obtained ratification of his
governorship in Peru two years later.61 But the flexibility that a deposit-based repartimiento afforded
Valdivia also had its costs. As procurador Pastrana had made clear when petitioning the Cabildo to
elect Valdivia governor in 1541, deposits of Indians were far less secure than encomiendas.
To the original repartimiento, Valdivia added a dozen caciques from the region between the
Maule and Itata rivers, thereby slightly increasing the number of Indians to be distributed among 32
fortunate recipients.62 By his act, 19 of those who had originally received deposits of Indians were

58
“Traslado de un requerimiento hecho á Pedro de Valdivia . . . ,” CDI, 8:121–122.
59
“Traslado de un requerimiento hecho á Pedro de Valdivia . . . ,” CDI, 8:121.
60
“Traslado de un requerimiento hecho á Pedro de Valdivia . . . ,” CDI, 8:131.
61
Diego Amunátegui Solar, Las encomiendas de indíjenas en Chile, 2 vols. (Santiago: Imprenta
Cervantes, 1909–1910), 1:67–68.
62
The thirty-two recipients were: Captain Francisco de Aguirre, Juan Fernández de Alderete,
Jerónimo de Alderete, Rodrigo de Araya, Captain Juan Bautista Pastene, Alonso de Córdoba, Diego
García de Cáceres, Gabriel de la Cruz, Juan de Cuevas, Alonso de Escobar, Bartolomé Flores, Juan
Gallego, Diego García de Villalón, Juan Godínez, Juan Gómez de Almagro (alguacil mayor), Pedro
Gómez de Don Benito (Valdivia’s former maestre de campo), Rodrigo González Marmolejo (cleric),

27
stripped of what they felt to be their hard-earned and well-deserved rewards for loyal service in the
conquest.63 The only palliative for the losers was the promise of new repartimientos as soon as the
colony expanded. Fifteen of these men were among the 132 who had reached the Mapocho Valley
with Valdivia six years earlier, while 6 of the 32 had arrived later. Thus, the reallocation cannot be
put down to an effort to prioritize the original conquistadores for compensation. The move was
more politically complicated.
Valdivia had, in effect, drawn a line of power and influence between the thirty-two who
benefited from his move and the nineteen from whose sacrifices those benefits derived. Predictably,
the division was not arbitrary. Consider the cases of two who lost their deposits in the reallocation:
Francisco Martínez and Alonso Galiano.
The relationship between Pedro de Valdivia and Francisco Martínez dated at least from
October of 1539, when Valdivia borrowed 50,000 gold pesos from Martínez against the expected
riches that lay ahead in Chile. The two men signed an agreement on the tenth of that month
whereby half of all the riches Valdivia accumulated in Chile would go to Martínez as debt servicing.
When Martínez traveled to Chile four years hence, bringing additional horses, arms, and provisions,
he expected a sizable sum—half of Valdivia’s profits—to be waiting for him. To his dismay, he found
that “the land is lost and said Governor [Valdivia] has not a coin” to his name; instead of having
prepared to repay Martínez, Valdivia had more than doubled his personal indebtedness.64
Exasperated, Martínez demanded that Valdivia pay him 9,800 gold pesos as compensation
for the horses, arms, and supplies he had brought from Peru, in exchange for which he would write

Juan Jufré, Juan Lobo (cleric), Francisco Martínez Vegaso, Pedro de Miranda, Captain Alonso de
Monroy, Salvador de Montoya, Rodrigo de Quiroga, Francisco de Riberos, Gonzalo de los Ríos, Inés
Suárez (Valdivia’s lover), Marcos Veas, Gaspar de Vergara, Francisco de Villagra (Valdivia’s maestre
de campo), Pedro de Villagra, and Gaspar de Villarroel. List appears in Amunátegui Solar, 1:66–67.
63
The nineteen were: Santiago Bazan, Juan Cabrera, Francisco Carretero, Catalina Diez, Juan Galaz,
Alonso Galiano, Pedro Gamboa, Pedro de Herrera, Francisco Martínez, Alonso Moreno, Juan
Negrete, Juan Pinel, don Francisco Ponce de León, Francisco Rabdona, Antonio Tarabajano, Luis
Ternero, Francisco de Vadillo, Diego de Velasco, and Antonio Zapata (mayordomo). Listed in
Amunátegui Solar, 1:67.
64
“Certificación de haberse deshecho cierto asiento ó compañía que habían formado entre sí Pedro
de Valdivia, electo gobernador de Chile, y Francisco Martínez [11 October 1543],” CDI, 8:53–54.

28
off the remainder of Valdivia’s debt to him and terminate their pact. Martínez asserted that he had
more than fulfilled his side of the agreement and that the relationship had no future for him.65
The 1539 agreement stipulated that it could only be abrogated by mutual consent,
something Valdivia refused to do. Instead, he argued a reading of the (unfortunately no longer
extant) document by which the two men were to share equally the costs of the conquest as well as
whatever profits it might yield. Rather than agreeing to dissolve the agreement, Valdivia demanded
of Martínez a total of 220,000 gold pesos as reimbursement for his own expenses. Eleven days later,
the Santiago Cabildo intervened in the dispute, dissolving the partnership and requesting that
Martínez and regidor Jerónimo de Alderete choose two representatives to determine the extent, if
any, of Valdivia’s further debt to Martínez.66
The two representatives chosen to arbitrate the dispute (jueces árbitros nombrados) heard
evidence for a few weeks before reaching an assessment acceptable to both sides: Valdivia would pay
Martínez 5,000 gold pesos within nine days.67 Three years later, Martínez and Alonso Galiano, the
man he chose to represent him in settlement of the dispute, found themselves among the nineteen
who Valdivia ordered to surrender their deposits of Indians. In contrast, the Cabildo’s
representative in the arbitration, Diego García de Villalón, numbered among the fortunate thirty-
two who saw their holdings increase by Valdivia’s 1546 revision of the repartimiento.68

The revision of the first repartimiento gave Valdivia the opportunity to address an issue that was of
particular concern to him and that would plague the colonial leadership for decades to come:
compelling the recipients of deposits (and, later, encomiendas) to continue actively to participate in
the defense and expansion of the colony. While the traditional Spanish encomienda carried with it an
obligation for the recipient to provide horses, arms, soldiers, and often personal service in the

65
“Certificación de haberse deshecho cierto asiento . . . ,” CDI, 8:53–54.
66
“Certificación de haberse deshecho cierto asiento . . . ,” CDI, 8:54–56.
67
“Certificación de haberse deshecho cierto asiento . . . ,” CDI, 8:56–61.
68
“Certificación de haberse deshecho cierto asiento . . . ,” CDI, 8:55–57; Amunátegui Solar, 1:67.

29
defense of the realm,69 encomenderos in the New World frequently shirked this obligation, and for
obvious reasons: Once rewarded for risking life and limb, they preferred to enjoy their newly-gained
wealth rather than continue to face hardships and dangers of the sort that they had endured upon
arrival in America. Such recalcitrance posed a problem for the colonial leadership, particularly in a
tenuous colony like Chile, where over the years encomenderos would try to avoid military service by
every possible means.70
Valdivia used the occasion of his repartimiento revision to reiterate the obligations to the
colony that holding Indians in deposit entailed: Not only must the recipients materially provide for
the colony’s defense, they must also follow Valdivia in expanding the colony through new
campaigns. In effect, their rewards came not just for prior service but bound them to present and
future service as well. In order to appear concerned with the hardships this obligation implied and
to present himself as attentive to his followers’ needs, Valdivia permitted them five months from the
date of their deposits to come up with the horses and arms needed for participation in further
campaigns. After this grace period—which represented a 25 percent increase over that permitted by
Crown regulations—they would have to participate as best they could, on foot if need be.71
Needless to say, the nineteen losers in the 1546 redistribution could not be expected eagerly
to accept Valdivia’s decision. Therefore, Valdivia ordered them to turn over all their former Indian
charges in no more than fifteen days or face severe penalties; even voicing objections to his decision
was forbidden.72 He also announced that deposits made since the first repartimiento (of Indians
living beyond the Maule) were unaffected by his new allocation.73 Valdivia’s act did nothing to
endear him or the lucky thirty-two to those who either lost deposits of Indians or who had never

69
The custom of granting land in exchange for military service was not a Spanish innovation. It was
general practice throughout France by the end of the ninth century, according to Amunátegui Solar,
1:71. See also note 3, above.
70
Amunátegui Solar notes that some of the governors who succeeded Valdivia required
encomenderos to take a formal oath upon taking possession of their Indian charges that their military
service obligations would be fulfilled. Amunátegui Solar, 1:69–70.
71
“Traslado de un requerimiento hecho á Pedro de Valdivia . . . ,” CDI, 8:130–131.
72
“Traslado de un requerimiento hecho á Pedro de Valdivia . . . ,” CDI, 8:129.
73
Amunátegui Solar, 1:68.

30
held them in the first place. Valdivia may have been prescient to anticipate resistance to his orders,
but if he hoped to nip that opposition in the bud by sternly ordering swift compliance with his
wishes he clearly miscalculated.
In spite of Valdivia’s warnings, his revised repartimiento occasioned considerable anger and
protest within the colony. Valdivia responded to complaints by telling dissatisfied colonists to take
up their grievances with the King, something they were obviously in no position to do. That advice
failing to quiet the colonists, Valdivia turned to threats of hangings and beheadings, threats he had
shown himself all too able to carry out. Though he succeeded in muffling the chorus of the
discontented, the silence came at a cost to the internal solidarity and unity of the colony. As he was
wont to do, Sancho then began to maneuver to take advantage of the fissures.74
Confident that dissatisfaction with Valdivia and his allocation of rewards was becoming
overwhelming, Sancho made the mistake of courting Pedro de Villagra, whose older cousin
Francisco was close to Valdivia. Through the younger Villagra, Valdivia learned that Sancho had sent
letters denouncing Valdivia to Peru. He had also conspired with his old ally Antonio de Ulloa, who
had since returned to Peru on the pretense of getting more supplies and colonists. Now Ulloa was
assembling an armed force to use against Valdivia. Though criticized by his friends for his continued
lenience, Valdivia merely exiled Sancho to Talagante, some 30 km outside Santiago. Deprived of the
element of surprise, Ulloa’s planned armed assault on Valdivia subsequently fizzled.75

Having defused yet another plot against him, Valdivia saw more than ever the need to attract
enough additional people to Chile so that more territory could be conquered and more Indians
“pacified” and distributed among conquistadors long overdue for recompense. It appears that the
need for people became a preoccupation for Valdivia. Góngora Marmolejo repeatedly mentions
Valdivia’s need for people in phrases such as: “what Valdivia lacked was people to populate the [land
that lay] ahead.”76 The fact that the chronicler never explicitly explained or questioned this need
suggests that it was generally accepted and understood to exist. Beside concerns about the number of

74
Pocock, pp. 118–119.
75
Pocock, pp. 120–122, 124–126.
76
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 87.

31
colonists, the goals of the conquest receive next to no mention. Góngora Marmolejo repeatedly
comments on measures Valdivia took to increase his own wealth and power, yet that should not
quickly be taken to show that Góngora Marmolejo saw Valdivia as driven solely by a personal
agenda. Conspicuously absent from Góngora Marmolejo’s text, nevertheless, is any reference at all
to a Spanish (i.e., imperial) agenda. Were we to rely on Góngora Marmolejo’s account for our entire
understanding of the Chilean conquest, we would never know that Catholic Spain was pursuing
geopolitical, economic, and evangelical objectives of its own; on the ground level, only the
conquistadores’ and their leaders’ goals are in evidence. This is not insignificant, since Góngora
Marmolejo was writing primarily for the Council of Indies, not for his fellow conquistadores. For
Valdivia, and for the rest of the colonists, local, personal goals had long since overshadowed any
broader imperial agenda.

5.

By 1547, Valdivia’s concern that the colony was in jeopardy and that the need for more colonists
was growing critical led him to take dramatic measures. He instructed Francisco de Villagra and
Jerónimo de Alderete to take the colony’s one ship back to Peru for the purpose of transporting
more people to the colony. There was no difficulty finding men to accompany Villagra and Alderete
on the voyage. After enduring years of hunger, cold, injury, and want, some of those who had finally
put together small fortunes of gold wished to put Chile behind them and return at long last to
Spain. While years earlier Valdivia had hanged men for speaking of returning to Peru, now he went
about “amicably granting permission to all who wished” to leave.77 Góngora Marmolejo noted that
in readily approving—indeed, encouraging—all requests to depart, Valdivia was acting “like a man
who had in mind to do what he [subsequently] did.”78
When the morning of departure arrived, some fifteen men had decided to make the journey.
The ship would carry them and their gold from Valparaíso to Peru, from which they would sail first
to Panama and then on to Seville. When all was ready, the gold and other possessions loaded on

77
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 87.
78
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 87.

32
board, the ship rocking at anchor not far from the beach, Valdivia threw a banquet for the fifteen
homeward-bound men. “My only consolation,” he told them, “is the knowledge that you will be
resting and enjoying what you so well deserve, and that eases my grief at least a little.”79
The men sat around reminiscing in the warm December sun, discussing their plans for the
future. Suddenly someone noticed that Valdivia had slipped away and was rowing the only boat out
to the waiting ship, loaded with everyone else’s gold. The man they had elected governor reached the
ship, climbed aboard, and those on the shore watched in horror as the anchor came up, the sails
billowed in the Pacific wind, and the ship began to move. They were livid: “well you will sense what
they were capable of speaking: so many were the vituperations and maledictions that they struck fear
in those who heard them.”80
Valdivia had committed an astonishing, daring, scarcely believable act of betrayal. The men
he left behind responded with anguish and rage. Some, like Alonso de Torres, were modest soldiers
who had converted into gold whatever livestock and other possessions they had; they lost everything
they owned. Valdivia’s scribe, who loyally served beside him for long years, lost the 3,000 pesos he
had painstakingly saved for his daughters’ dowries. One soldier, Francisco Pinel, was so distraught
that he could think of nothing else save his lost gold. Later, after Valdivia returned to Chile and
tried to postpone repaying what he had taken, Pinel’s desperation got the better of him and he
hanged himself.81
Valdivia had left Francisco de Villagra behind to run the colony in his stead, with his
assurances that he would repay the gold he took— all 90,000 pesos worth82—as soon as he returned
from Peru with more people. If ever there was a moment for rebellion against colonial authority,
this was it. Many colonists were both angry and disconsolate. Their leader had robbed and deceived
them and was farther away by the hour. They faced the possibility of renewed warfare with the
Mapuches, against whom they might have to fight under an unproved leader not of their choosing.

79
Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, trans. Cedric Belfrage, 3 vols., (New York: Pantheon Books,
1985),1:111.
80
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 88.
81
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 88.
82
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 88.

33
Many colonists bore resentments that long predated Valdivia’s treachery in Valparaíso. And, lest we
forget, Pedro Sancho de Hoz was still on the scene, longing as always for the governorship he felt
was rightly his. In the coming months, these elements would come together in a direct challenge to
Valdivia’s authority and that of Villagra.

6.

Immediately after Valdivia’s departure, Sancho de Hoz launched an attempt to overthrow him and
acting governor Francisco de Villagra. This plot was to be Sancho’s last, for it finally cost him his
head. Given the leniency with which for years Valdivia had treated Sancho, Villagra and those
around him understood that Sancho’s execution was an extremely serious matter. The official record
of the events gives the impression that a certain desperation underlay Villagra’s actions. No doubt
he gauged the threat Sancho presented to be very real. Faced with a great number of colonists who
had colluded with Sancho, among them men as prominent as alcalde Rodrigo de Araya,83 Villagra
decided that Sancho must pay the ultimate price for his treason. Ignoring Sancho’s protestations of
innocence and pleas for exile, Villagra had him summarily executed without a trial. After Sancho’s
disembodied head was placed on display in the Plaza de Armas, the town crier announced that the
execution was meant as a punishment to Sancho and as a warning to others: “Whosoever does the
same shall suffer the same.”84 The following day, 9 December 1547, Villagra sentenced another
ringleader, Juan Romero, to death by hanging. That afternoon he called the Santiago colonists
together for a meeting, at which he presented his formal account of the events and of his actions and
offered an amnesty to those whose loyalty had faltered.85 Only afterwards, did Villagra scramble to
assemble a documentary record to establish Sancho’s guilt and legitimize ex post facto what he
feared would be judged an illegal execution.86

83
Pocock, pp. 133–135.
84
“Quien tal hace que tal pague.” “Proceso de Pedro Sancho de Hoz, [8 December 1547],” CDI,
8:157.
85
Pocock, pp. 141–142.
86
“Proceso de Pedro Sancho de Hoz,” CDI, 8:159.

34
 Knowing that his exemplary punishment of Sancho did nothing to address the causes of
discontent upon which the latter had build a base of support, Villagra next drew up two probanzas,
or findings, one denouncing Valdivia, the other supporting him. He then instructed his cousin
Pedro to lead a delegation of Valdivia’s critics to Peru. Once there, Pedro de Villagra was to assess
Valdivia’s dealings and decide which of the two probanzas to present to audiencia president Pedro
de La Gasca—one that would hasten Valdivia’s demise or one that would corroborate his virtue and
so merit his gratitude.87

It was Valdivia’s good fortune to arrive in Peru in January, 1548, just as La Gasca was preparing to
mount a military assault on the rebel Gonzalo Pizarro. Reprising his role in the defeat of Diego de
Almagro by Gonzalo’s brother Francisco in 1539, Valdivia contributed his considerable military
expertise to La Gasca’s campaign and led the February rout of the rebel forces. To his great relief and
satisfaction, on 23 April Valdivia received his long-coveted prize: the official title of Governor.88
Governor Valdivia soon turned to the task of recruiting people to bring back to Chile with
him. Although expanding the population of colonists risked increasing the upward pressure for
rewards, Valdivia assumed that an influx of Spaniards would permit the defeat of the Indians. That
goal accomplished, meting out rewards and managing internal tensions would be a great deal easier.
So Valdivia requested, and was granted, permission to take with him people who were no longer
wanted in Peru, because they had sided with Gonzalo Pizarro or committed other transgressions
that rendered them “outcasts” (“desterrados”).89 But Valdivia was overly energetic in his efforts to
recruit people and to gather supplies. As he made his way closer to the Chilean border, news of his
heavy-handedness traveled north to La Gasca. Around this time, La Gasca also received word of
Sancho’s execution. On 20 October 1548, La Gasca’s troops arrested Valdivia and escorted him
back to Lima to face legal charges.90

87
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 89.
88
Pocock, pp. 145, 147.
89
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 90.
90
Though the documents of the period usually refer to Lima as Ciudad de los Reyes, for the sake of
clarity I have chosen not to do so. Góngora Marmolejo, p. 90; Pocock, pp. 149–150.

35
 Pedro de Villagra’s party arrived in Lima within days of Valdivia’s arrest. Judging their
governor’s lucky star to have dimmed, the colonists brought their complaints against him before La
Gasca. But they soon realized that they had misgauged both the severity of Valdivia’s predicament
and La Gasca’s receptivity to charges by colonists against their leader. La Gasca permitted all thirty
colonists to file charges before informing them that, as plaintiffs, they could not also serve as
witnesses. With no one left to testify, and “seeing they had been tricked,” 91 they had no choice but
to withdraw their charges and to ask for Valdivia’s forgiveness. Valdivia accepted their overtures,
assured them of his friendship, and promised to repay the gold he had taken from them. He also
told the colonists that “he would provision them, that is, give repartimientos of Indians to all.”92
After a brief legal process, on 19 November 1548, La Gasca acquitted Valdivia of the
charges that had led to his arrest. Before releasing him, however, La Gasca issued Valdivia a series of
orders which showed that the complaints brought by the members of Pedro de Valdivia’s party had
not fallen on deaf ears. La Gasca told him to repay all the gold he had taken from the colonists and
to settle all his debts; to permit passage to anyone who wished to emigrate from Chile; to ensure
that all territories and Indians within the colony’s borders be properly cared for and protected; and
to put an end to his illicit amorous activities with Inés Suárez and have his wife in Spain come join
him within six months. La Gasca also took the occasion to formally upgrade to encomienda status all
of the deposits of Indians Valdivia had distributed.93
While the colonists’ legal case had collapsed, they had succeeded in influencing La Gasca’s
decision to put Valdivia on notice that he would be expected to fulfill the responsibilities that his
new title entailed. And, despite their subsequent scramble to patch up relations with Valdivia, the
colonists had demonstrated a willingness and ability to watch for and seize opportunities to seek
redress when they felt they had received unfair treatment.

91
Góngora Marmolejo, pp. 90–91.
92
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 91.
93
Galeano, 1:116; Pocock, p. 155; Feliú and Monge, p. 98.

36
 7.

Valdivia arrived in Chile in the autumn of 1549. Eager to re-establish his presence in the colony and
to show that he had brought some two hundred new colonists to help accelerate the conquest, he
decided to pass through La Serena. Expecting to stage a triumphant entrance there, Valdivia’s
optimism was shattered by what he found. Where once stood a modest colonial town all that
remained were the burnt carcasses of buildings. Not a single Spaniard remained to greet the new
arrivals.
In order to understand the destruction of La Serena, let us go back to the circumstances of
the town’s establishment. After the first repartimiento was revised in 1546, colonists who still lacked
Indians—or who had just lost them—began to see the writing on the wall: If they were to profit
from their labors in Chile, they would not do so in Santiago. The combination of these restless
colonists and an expansion-minded leadership provided the political, economic, and social impetus
to continue sending off branches from the colony’s core. But if demographic factors encouraged
outward growth, for military reasons they also inhibited that growth. The case of La Serena provides
an example of how demographic pressures and constraints produced a paradoxical situation for the
young colony.
Recall that the settlement at La Serena took root in 1544 under the leadership of Juan
Bohón. In the spring of 1548, Bohón led thirty-two soldiers to conquer the Copiapó valley in order
to bring more Indians under Spanish rule. Encountering little resistance in the valley, Bohón eagerly
accepted Indian declarations of submission—too eagerly, as it turned out. When the Indian attack
on Bohón and company came, it was skillful, swift, and ruthlessly effective. All thirty-two Spanish
soldiers died in combat. Bohón’s end came somewhat less quickly—extended torture served as the
prelude to his eventual hanging.94
The shaken vecinos of La Serena immediately sent word to Francisco de Villagra of Bohón’s
catastrophic Copiapó venture and requested defensive assistance. Villagra responded that he did not
have enough people at his disposal and that they were on their own; they were free to abandon La

94
Góngora Marmolejo, pp. 88–89.

37
Serena without dishonor or to defend it as best they could, but he could not help them. The vecinos
decided to stay because they knew that, despite the risks, remaining in La Serena offered them their
best chance for the prosperity they sought. The prospect of returning to Santiago, with the scarce
Indians of its environs already distributed among other Spaniards, was more dismal than facing the
unknown in La Serena was frightening.95 In the event, the vecinos’ decision cost them dearly. Before
long the Diaguitas followed the example set by the people of Copiapó and launched a surprise attack
on La Serena; only one colonist, who hid in an oven, survived the devastating strike. Traveling on
foot under cover of darkness, he eventually made his way back to Santiago. When Valdivia arrived in
La Serena, he could only guess at what nightmare had befallen the town’s inhabitants.96
The episode illustrates how colonists, driven by desire for profit, acted against what a
prudent appraisal of their situation might have advised. Clearly, the Spanish were spread thin and
risked having their dispersion—fueled by individual yearnings for lucre—undermine the colony’s
stability. Expansion was unavoidable if social pressures were not to erode colonial cohesion. Yet
expansion by handfuls of soldiers in hostile land was perilous indeed. The solution—getting more
Europeans into Chile—might meet the short-term goals of those already in Chile, but would bring
with it a reproduction of the basic problem that plagued the colony from the outset: how to provide
adequate levels of reward to the colonists. The story behind the destruction of La Serena offered
important lessons for the colony’s future; Valdivia’s failure adequately to learn them would prove to
be a fatal shortcoming.

8.

After his unsettling experience in La Serena, Valdivia pushed onward, arriving in Santiago in April,
1549. Francisco de Villagra was only too happy to relinquish responsibility for leading the colony’s
defense. The Indian offensives at Copiapó, La Serena, and smaller raids elsewhere had produced a
creeping climate of fear and unrest among the colonists, and Villagra and the rest of the colonial
leaders were finding it harder and harder to mobilize the colonists for military duty. Several

95
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 89.
96
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 91.

38
documents dating from the weeks leading up to Valdivia’s return illustrate their difficulties in
rallying the increasingly weary and spiritless settlers.
After Indians slaughtered Bohón’s party and wiped out La Serena, Villagra led a punitive
mission against them. Soon after, the Spanish in Santiago received word that the native people of
the Copiapó valley had killed a detachment of 20 Spanish soldiers, a victory that had the Indians in
a state of excitement.97 The colonial authorities grew increasingly uneasy, what with Valdivia not yet
returned from Peru, Villagra in the vicinity of this latest attack, and Indians of the Santiago area
asking probing questions about just which Spaniards remained in the city. In this context, on 13
March the Santiago Cabildo took a series of measures to ensure the security of the city. First, several
Indian leaders from the Central Valley were detained. Then, the Cabildo granted constable and
vecino Juan Gómez de Almagro extensive powers to mobilize the Spanish defense.98 To that end,
Gómez received free rein to compel the vecinos and other Spanish residents of the city to provide
military service in whatever manner he saw fit. Disobedience would not be tolerated; Gómez
obtained authority summarily to impose whatever penalty he deemed just upon those who might
resist.99 So that none could plead ignorance of Gómez’s sweeping powers, the Cabildo ordered the
measure broadly publicized. As regards the Indians, Gómez received permission to torture and burn
any, friendly or otherwise, who might render information relevant to the war effort. The Cabildo
assured Gómez that he would never have to answer for whatever acts to which he might resort.100
The Cabildo would have had no reason to grant Gómez carte blanche unless it anticipated
that he would run into problems in mobilizing the colonists. No mention of previous resistance to
military service appears in the Cabildo record, yet, despite the precariousness of the Spaniards’
situation, the threat of non-compliance apparently seemed very real. Why might Spaniards have
been reluctant to defend their city? Perhaps they did not want to sacrifice their horses or other assets
(including Indian servitors). Perhaps they distrusted or disagreed with their leaders. Perhaps they

97
13 March 1549,”Actas del Cabildo,” 1:169; Tomás Thayer Ojeda, Formación de la Sociedad
Chilena, 3 vols. (Santiago(?): Prensas de la Universidad de Chile, 1939–1943), 3:232.
98
13 March 1549, “Actas del Cabildo,” 1:169–70.
99
“. . . les pueda poner y ponga la pena o penas que le pareciere de parte de justicia. . . .” 13 March
1549, “Actas del Cabildo,” 1:169.
100
13 March 1549, “Actas del Cabildo,” 1:169–70.

39
feared for life and limb. Whatever the reason, the Cabildo feared it soon might have to force the
colonists to defend Santiago. Thus, Valdivia’s return at the head of two hundred reinforcements just
a matter of weeks later could not have come at a more welcome time for Villagra and the Cabildo.

With the new colonists, and with subsequent infusions of additional groups from Peru, Valdivia
presided over a heady period of territorial expansion that lasted until the end of 1553. Francisco de
Aguirre, once recalled from the leadership of La Serena for his excessive violence towards the
Indians, now led the mission to repopulate that settlement and to inflict punishment on the Indians
who had lain it waste.101 One by one, scouting parties fanned out to the south, the north, and the
east, assessing the land and its inhabitants. Conquest and settlement drives followed many of these
expeditions and produced a series of towns, the most notable of which were: Concepción (1550); La
Imperial, Valdivia, and Villarrica (1552); and Los Confines and Santiago del Estero (1553).102
Each stage of the expansion involved battles with the Mapuches, but the Spaniards did not
always dictate the terms of these engagements. The Mapuches chose when to fight and when to
submit, carefully avoiding battles that would undermine their long-term strategy of resistance. They
had learned early on that their enemies wanted peace and would readily accept Indian pledges to
stop fighting and to provide service instead. As often as not, the Indians waited until the European
invaders felt they had “pacified” an area and let their guard down. Then, when least expected, the
Mapuches would launch swift attacks on colonial settlements, putting to use the knowledge of
Spanish defenses and weaknesses learned while feigning “pacification.” In an effort to provide
defensive security for their southern settlements, the colonists established forts at Tucapel, Purén,
and Arauco. While the on-again, off-again engagements took their toll on the Spaniards, expansion
proceeded in irregular spurts.
In the new towns, Valdivia issued grants of Indians to favored colonists (and, in Concepción,
to himself as well), while the cabildos generally handled allocation of building sites and land for

101
Góngora Marmolejo, p. 92.
102
La Imperial was located at the site of present-day Carahue. In the sixteenth century, Santiago del
Estero and other places that are now part of western Argentina fell within Chile’s eastern border.

40
gardens, orchards, vineyards, and pasture in the immediate vicinity of urban areas.103 As the colony
grew, its economy began to develop and diversify, offering limited niches for lower caste Spaniards
and, gradually, mestizos in a number of trades. These compensatory opportunities for those whose
social rank placed encomiendas beyond their reach blunted the restless ambition of many at the
lower rungs of the colonial community.
The discovery of gold in south-central Chile’s rivers in 1552 fueled Valdivia’s expansionist
drive. As news of the yellow metal’s discovery reached Peru, greater numbers of Spaniards decided to
travel to Chile in the hopes of making their own fortunes. Within a year, the colony boasted a
population of more than a thousand European settlers.104
The influx of colonists allowed Valdivia to continue a strategy of conquest that had changed
little from his original scheme. He organized armed incursions into native-held territory and,
wherever such campaigns yielded “pacified” Indians, he granted encomiendas to Spaniards who had
distinguished themselves in the field. The most fortunate conquistadores also obtained land through
which the few streams containing gold flowed. These conquistadores put “their” Indians to work in
placer mining, a particularly harsh form of labor. Before long, the fledgling colony had achieved
sizable dimensions and seemed finally to have found its footing and attained a measure of economic
and military stability.
Placer mining was a form of labor to which the Chilean Indians were mostly unaccustomed.
Under the best of circumstances placer mining is backbreaking work. In Chile, the combination of
sparsely-populated encomiendas, only modest quantities of gold in the rivers, and Spanish desires for
quick wealth was a recipe for particularly severe exploitation of Indian laborers. Although the
Crown had by this time issued numerous laws aimed at protecting Indian laborers from unbridled
exploitation, the encomenderos in Chile simply ignored these measures with impunity. Thus, an
institution designed as a means of tribute collection became, in Chile, de facto slavery. The mines

103
Mario Góngora, Encomenderos y estancieros: Estudios acerca de la constitución social aristocrática de
Chile después de la conquista, 1580–1660 (Santiago: Universidad de Chile, Sede de Valparaíso,
1970). For numerous examples of encomienda grants see CDI, especially vol. 9.
104
Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. 54.

41
took a constant toll in Indian lives, a fact that only bolstered the “unpacified” Mapuches’ resolve to
defend their liberty.

9.

At the end of 1553, Valdivia could look back on the previous three years with satisfaction. The
colony had finally left behind the era of hunger, hardship, and mutinous plots. Gold had been
discovered, agricultural enterprises on a number of the encomiendas were producing food in
abundance, and the colony’s ever-expanding borders augured years of prosperity to come. That
warm day, thirteen years before, when he first set eyes on the Mapocho River and chose the site for
Santiago, must have seemed a lifetime ago.
One December day, Valdivia and roughly thirty Spaniards on horseback set out from the
southern city of Concepción to avenge the deaths of three colonists killed by local Indians. After
being joined by several dozen other colonists, they rode into a Mapuche ambush. The battle was to
be Valdivia’s last. The Mapuches killed at least thirty Spaniards and carried Valdivia off for slow
torture and execution.
The ambush in which Valdivia met his end was but the beginning of a full-scale Mapuche
insurrection. In short order, the Indians attacked Spanish towns throughout the land south of
Santiago. The severely overextended Spanish defenses collapsed in settlement after settlement, as the
Mapuches substantially reversed the colonists’ previous three years of territorial gains. In the midst
of the Mapuche offensive, the colonial elite fell into a protracted power struggle over who would be
Valdivia’s successor. This struggle only undermined the colony’s ability to resist Mapuche attacks
and to regain internal stability.
The subsequent years of unrest only came to an end in 1557, when a new viceroy in Peru
named his own son to serve as Valdivia’s replacement. Governor García Hurtado de Mendoza
arrived that April in Coquimbo, Chile, leading a party of some 450 Spaniards. Among the
newcomers was Alonso de Ercilla, who would later pen La araucana, the epic poem of the battles
with the Mapuches and a classic of Spanish literature. Lacking the political expertise to take on the
task of healing the factional rifts in the colony, the twenty-two-year-old Hurtado concentrated

42
instead on the military reconquest of the settlements that had fallen to the Mapuches.105 Hurtado
did manage to turn the tide of the war. But the 1553 insurrection would turn out to be but the first
of a series of large-scale Mapuche uprisings.106 Gradually, these insurrections put to rest Spanish
hopes that conquest of the region below the Biobío River would be anything but a long, difficult,
and costly endeavor.

Beginning in the late 1550s, the struggle for rewards underwent a partial transformation. As
Europeans arrived in ever-greater numbers, the old problem of eager colonists outnumbering
available rewards continued unabated. But the passage of time, population growth, defeats by the
Mapuches, and the diminishing prospects of a major increase in Spanish-controlled territory any
time soon altered the ways in which the basic remuneration problem manifested itself. Increasingly,
colonists entered into competition and disputes with one another over the finite number of
encomiendas.
Disputes between colonists were, of course, nothing new. But, as hopes for meeting the
demand for rewards through territorial expansion waned, tensions among colonists—particularly
between old-timers and more recent arrivals—increased. Rival claims for rewards found expression
in an enormous number of drawn-out legal battles. By engaging in endless suits (pleitos) and
counter-suits, prospective encomenderos channeled much of their dissatisfaction horizontally—
against one another. Indeed, the importance of character witness testimony in these pleitos
discouraged litigants from directing their discontent vertically, that is, toward the cabildos and
governors. While there is no evidence to suggest that the colonial leadership encouraged the pleitos

105
Della M. Flusche, Two Families in Colonial Chile (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press,
1989), pp. 14–15.
106
The other major insurrections were in 1598 and in 1655. The former resulted in the death and
dismemberment of the governor and scores of other colonists and the Spanish loss of all their
southern towns and outposts. In the latter insurrection, which came as a reprisal against a large-scale
Spanish slave-hunting campaign, the colony’s southern border was again pushed north to the Maule
River. See Sergio Villalobos R., “Tres siglos y medio de vida fronteriza,” Relaciones fronterizas en la
Araucanía, ed. Sergio Villalobos R. et al. (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 1982),
pp. 18–19.

43
in order to get the colonists to fight among themselves, thereby deflecting upward popular pressure,
the pleitos did serve that purpose.107

107
For a description of several such pleitos, see Flusche, chapter 2. Since Flusche’s interest is in
tracing the emergence of two elite families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she does little
to interpret the functional role of the pleitos she recounts. For documentary examples of the pleitos
and of the probanzas and informaciones de méritos y servicios that provided much of the evidence in
these suits, see DI, vols. 23–27.

44
 Epilogue

Martín García Oñez de Loyola, the nephew of St. Ignatius, was the last Governor of sixteenth-
century Chile. He had earned a name for himself in Peru, where he captured the last Inca, Túpac
Amaru. But he too proved unable to “pacify” Arauco. In the last year of the century, reprising their
victory against Valdivia, the Mapuches captured and killed him. And like Valdivia’s, there was no
honor in his death: the Mapuches impaled his severed head on a long lance and for years paraded it
around mockingly.
In the last years of the century, the Spanish successes of the previous decades began suddenly
to seem as nothing against the onslaught of a new Mapuche offensive. One by one, the Mapuche
cavalry laid siege to and destroyed eight of the twelve major Spanish towns in Chile, killing between
a fifth and a quarter of the colonists.108 In their siege of La Imperial, the Mapuches altered the course
of a river to deny the Christians water.109 Before long, the colonists saw the territory under their
control halved, as the Mapuches regained everything south of the Biobío River.

From Valdivia’s death in 1553 until Oñez’s in 1598, the colony continued to follow a modified
version of Valdivia’s original strategy: population growth, military expansion, encomiendas, gold
extraction, and agriculture. The distinctive feature of this time period was the growing importance
of the trade in Mapuche slaves, which supplemented the inadequate rewards. Only after 1598 did
the goal of expansion south of the Biobío finally get semi-formally deferred. At that point, the
border became relatively stable, maintained by a Crown-financed standing army and a string of
forts.
Malocas, or raids for the purpose of enslaving free Mapuches, remained of key importance
until they sparked a huge Mapuche insurrection in 1655 that severely weakened the Spanish
presence between the Maule and Biobío rivers. In the wake of the insurrection, the increasingly
difficult slave trade got eclipsed by cross-border economic, social, and cultural ties and

108
Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988), p. 40.
109
Galeano, 1:169.

45
collaboration. Such relations had been solidifying, out of the spotlight, for decades. With the formal
end of slavery in 1683, its replacement by a more reciprocal border economy was complete.110

110
Villalobos R., pp. 20–21.

46
 Conclusions

Resistance and opposition to higher authority can take a great many forms, some of which are quite
subtle and difficult to perceive. The conquest of Peru is a case in point. Beside the overwhelming
might of the Spanish conquistadores’ strategy, tactics, technology, and timing, Peru’s Indian peoples
were virtually powerless to defend against conquest or to resist exploitation at the Europeans’ hands.
Or so it seemed. By questioning the assumption of their powerlessness and their lack of meaningful
influence in the course of their own lives, historian Steve J. Stern unearthed a hitherto lost saga of
Indian creative responses and “resistant adaptations” to the challenges the Spaniards represented.111
His book, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest, demonstrated how, if Indians
did not defeat Spanish attempts to subjugate them, they managed to use Spanish institutions to the
detriment of the Spaniards themselves. By so doing, they retained an meaningful measure of power
to shape the conditions of their lives and to undermine the Spaniards’ agenda. The implications of
his work were far-reaching, forcing a reconsideration of long-held assumptions about the mechanics
of domination and the options for response and resistance at the disposal of subordinate peoples.
Stern’s book was soon followed by James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak, an invaluable
study of peasant resistance in Malaysia.112 Straddling the boundaries of political science and
anthropology, Scott was not responding to as severe a disciplinary inattention to peasants and
indigenous peoples as had Stern.113 Nevertheless, his study of “everyday forms of peasant resistance”
had a deep impact both within his field and beyond. In that study, and in a subsequent volume
entitled Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Scott challenged readers to rethink their fundamental
assumptions about how subordinate peoples resist domination and about why that resistance can be

111
Steve J. Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982 [2nd ed., 1993]). For his first use of the specific
phrase “resistant adaptation,” see Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the
Andean Peasant World: 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
112
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985).
113
Indeed, the Vietnam War and its aftermath turned many a social scientist engaged in the study of
southeast Asia to focus on peasants.

47
so hard to discern.114 Before long, Stern and Scott had scholars looking for—and finding
everywhere—evidence of the agency of people once seen as essentially powerless.
Calls for a rethinking of what power is and how it operates did not only come from scholars
who were studying the Third World. French thinker Michel Foucault contributed provocative and
tremendously influential ideas about power. In The History of Sexuality, and elsewhere, Foucault
presented a model of power as tremendously diffuse, present at all levels of society and inherently
impossible to monopolize.115 Like Stern and Scott, Foucault provided scholars with conceptual
innovations the influence of which continues to expand.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the rethinking of assumptions about power and domination has
had its greatest impact in studies of people previously considered to be the powerless, the victims, or
the weak: indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians. Yet such attention has
tended to blunt our awareness off the implication of these new ideas about power for people at
neither the top nor the bottom of society. By focusing on the polar ends of the spectrum, we risk
overlooking the influence of those at the middle on history and on the lives of both the
downtrodden and the elite.

This thesis makes a contribution to our efforts to rethink the importance and influence of groups
that are neither at the apex nor at the bottom of a stratified society. I have shown how, by exerting
unrelenting pressure on their leaders to compensate them for the hardships and personal costs they
had endured in service to the Crown, the conquistadores in Chile acted as an engine of colonial
expansion. My study has implications for how we understand the influence of popular objectives on
decision-making and priorities in the context of conquest. That influence is never absolute, but, as
we have seen, it can have a profound impact on both tactical and strategic levels of policy formation.
My study suggests several directions for further inquiry, a few of which I will mention by
way of a conclusion.

114
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990).
115
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978–1986).

48
 While I have shown the importance of the colonists’ struggles for compensation, I have not
delved into a more microscopic study of all the individuals involved in these struggles. What
motivated specific people to side with Valdivia or against him at particular junctures? Can we
correlate people’s loyalties and actions with their regional backgrounds? With their class or caste
backgrounds? With their involvement in the rivalry between Pizarrists and Almagrists? More detail
on the social makeup of the colony and of the various participants in its internal struggles would not
only add nuance to our understanding of the early period but also might reveal other, less easily
perceived ways in which internal tensions shaped colonial history.
I have focused only on internal tensions around the distribution of rewards, but other
tensions undoubtedly existed, both between the middle layer colonists and their leaders, and
between the former and those at the very bottom of conquest society: the foot-soldiers. Further
research into other forms of internal struggles, debates, and tensions would significantly expand our
understanding of early colonial history.
Taking the study forward chronologically, we still have much to learn about how the
tensions surrounding reward allocation played out in the years following Valdivia’s death. How did
internal struggles shape and determine the rise of the trade in Mapuche slaves and the use and
misuse of the royal military subsidy? How did these struggles change over time as they were waged
between rival colonists of different generations?
Finally, on a more theoretical note, since the internal tensions around reward allocation do
not appear to have involved a fundamental rethinking of the inegalitarian model upon which
compensation was based, we must consider the implications of the conquistadores’ struggle for our
understanding of how hegemony (in the Gramscian sense of the word) operated in the context of
the conquest. Why did conquistadores press for the implementation of a model that, by its
definition, could only benefit a small number of them? By what processes, discursive, coercive, or
otherwise, was such an inegalitarian model implanted so deeply in the culture of the time? Answers
to such questions hold implications for our understanding of conquest throughout the New World
and for central historical problems in our own time.

49