Viceroyalty of Peru

Politics and institutions

The Viceroyalty of Peru was created in 1542, after the conquest of the Inca, to bring order to a colony in civil war. The crown's authority arrived with viceroys — Blasco Núñez Vela was killed by Gonzalo Pizarro's rebels in 1546 — and was consolidated by Francisco de Toledo (1569–1581), who toured the Andes for five years, resettled Indians into reducciones, codified the mita draft, established the Inquisition and reorganized the treasury. Lima, founded by Pizarro in 1535 as the City of Kings, became the capital of Spanish South America, with an audiencia, a cathedral, a university and the viceregal court. The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century cut the viceroyalty down: New Granada was separated in 1717 and La Plata in 1776, intendancies replaced corregimientos in 1784, and fiscal pressure helped provoke the great Andean revolt of Túpac Amaru II in 1780–81. Independence, declared in Lima in 1821, was secured only by the battle of Ayacucho in December 1824.

Economy and finance

Peru was the silver heart of the Spanish empire. Potosí, discovered in 1545, and the mercury mine of Huancavelica, opened in 1563, together made the amalgamation process work, and the mita — a rotating labour draft of Andean communities — supplied the miners. Silver flowed down the Andes to Arica and Callao, crossed the isthmus at Panama and reached Seville in the annual fleets; the crown's quinto and the merchants of Lima took their share. Around the mines, the valleys produced wine, olive oil, wheat and sugar, while Quito's obrajes wove textiles for the Andean market and coca from the eastern slopes supplied the mines. The eighteenth century brought decline: Potosí's ores thinned, Buenos Aires drew the trade of Upper Peru through the Río de la Plata, and contraband eroded Lima's monopoly. The economy was extraction on a grand scale, and its inequalities outlasted the viceroyalty.

Society and culture

Peruvian society was built on the two republics — Spaniards and Indians — and on the labour that joined them. The reducciones gathered dispersed Andean communities into grid-plan towns under royal officials and parish priests; the mita and the obrajes consumed Indian labour; African slaves worked the coastal plantations and households; mestizos, mulattos and the castas filled the cities of Lima, Cuzco and Quito. The church organized education and charity, the University of San Marcos (1551) trained the elite, and the printing press arrived in 1584. Andean religion survived inside Catholic forms — the Virgin of Copacabana, the pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit'i — while the chronicles of Garcilaso Inca de la Vega and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala preserved the Inca past and denounced colonial abuses. Cuzco school painting and the Baroque churches of Lima and Arequipa made the viceroyalty one of the great centres of American art.

Military and frontiers

The viceroyalty's army was first an army of conquest and faction, then a frontier garrison. The civil wars of the 1540s and the execution of the last Inca, Túpac Amaru I, in 1572 were followed by a long defensive war against the Mapuche of Chile — the Arauco War, which lasted for centuries — and by campaigns against the Chiriguano and the peoples of the Upper Amazon. Lima's fortifications at Callao and the Armada del Mar del Sur guarded the Pacific coast against Drake and later privateers; the garrison of Chile and the presidios of the frontier absorbed the treasury's silver. In the eighteenth century the Bourbon crown raised militias and a standing army, but the great test came from within: Túpac Amaru II's revolt in 1780–81 and the siege of La Paz by Túpac Katari in 1781 shook the colony, and their repression was savage. Independence came from outside — San Martín's expedition and Bolívar's armies — and was sealed at Ayacucho.

Foreign relations

Peru's external relations ran through the Spanish imperial system, but the Pacific and the Brazilian frontier gave it a diplomacy of its own. Lima depended on the fleets and on Panama, and its merchants fought to keep the trade of Upper Peru from Buenos Aires; the Portuguese advance from Brazil into the Guaraní missions, and the founding of Colonia do Sacramento in 1680, kept the Río de la Plata contested. The crowns of Spain and Portugal negotiated the boundaries of the Amazon and the south in the treaties of Madrid (1750) and San Ildefonso (1777), which redrew the line of Tordesillas. British, Dutch and French contraband and scientific voyages — La Condamine's expedition to Quito, the Malaspina expedition of 1789–94 — probed the colony's wealth and weaknesses. After 1810 the revolutionaries of Buenos Aires and Chile opened a new front, and Peru became the last royalist bastion in South America; its independence was recognized by Spain only in 1879.

Legacy and influence

The Viceroyalty of Peru left South America its silver, its cities and its inequalities. Potosí's mountain financed the Spanish monarchy and the European price revolution, and the mita organized Andean labour for three centuries; the mines, haciendas and obrajes set the pattern of extraction that the republics inherited. Lima remained the cultural capital of Spanish South America, and the University of San Marcos, the Cuzco school and the chronicles of Garcilaso and Guaman Poma kept an Andean past visible in a colonial order. The administrative partitions of 1717 and 1776 created the outlines of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina. Independence did not dissolve the hierarchies of race and labour; the Quechua and Aymara communities, the coastal plantations and the mining camps remained the base of Andean societies, and the memory of Túpac Amaru became the symbol of their struggles.