Basques and Vicuñas at the Mouth of Hell: A Documentary History of Potosí in the Early 1620s

by Kris Lane (Editor), Timothy F. Johnson (Translator)

Overview

In June 1622, the silver mining metropolis of Potosí, Bolivia, erupted in gangland violence, only halted three years later by a viceroy’s blanket amnesty. Basque immigrants were at the center of the controversy, squaring off against nearly a dozen other nations known collectively as Vicuñas. At stake were the world’s richest silver mines, a means to wealth and power in the Americas, Europe, and beyond.

As mines flooded and Indigenous workers died or fled, the city descended into a maelstrom of swordfights, gun battles, ambushes, sniper attacks, and summary executions. Though its roots were economic, the Basque-Vicuña conflict strained the sinews of Habsburg global governance even as it exposed festering local tensions, only some of which were unique to Potosí.

This rich collection of original sources, all of them archival documents housed in Bolivia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, consists of contemporary eyewitness accounts from several perspectives, allowing readers to play historian. All sources have been expertly translated and carefully annotated in a manner that will engage students and scholars alike. Basques and Vicuñas at the Mouth of Hell includes an extensive introduction, seven vital documents in translation, and appendices on everyday life in 1620s Potosí and on the historiography of this watershed episode of colonial violence.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647791391
Publisher:	University of Nevada Press
Publication date:	11/07/2024
Series:	The Basque Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	472
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Kris Lane holds the France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the author of Pandemic in Potosí: Fear, Loathing, and Public Piety in a Colonial Mining Metropolis; Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World; Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750; Colour of Paradise: Columbian Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires; and Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition. Lane is currently writing a history of the great Potosí mint fraud of the 1640s.
 
Timothy F. Johnson is associate professor of Spanish at Central College. His research centers on the early modern connections between literature and warfare, and he has translated several colonial texts in collaboration with Kris Lane, including The Indian Militia and Description of the Indies and Defending the Conquest: Bernardo de Vargas Machuca's Defense and Discourse of the Western Conquests.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from the Introduction:

At some point in the year 1620, deadly violence erupted in Potosí between those openly identifying as Basque and nearly everyone else, starting with a string of unsolved murders and escalating in mid-1622 to mutual ambushes and near-pitched battles, a “civil war” resembling but outstripping medieval Spanish precedent. Basques and their enemies attacked and retaliated in city and countryside, cutting each other down in cold blood and torching each other’s thatch-roofed dwellings...Belligerents included soldiers hardened in the quagmires of Flanders or the sub-alpine forests of northern Italy, but most of Potosí’s soldados sueltos (euphemistically called soldados honrados) were untrained but well-armed young men bruising for a fight. To protect themselves, prominent Basques retained dozens of such “soldiers,” as did their Fat Vicuña (or “Castilian”) opponents. With increasingly large and dangerous gangs roaming the streets of the Imperial Villa by mid-1622, merely strolling alone at night as a known Basque or Vicuña could be fatal.
 

Table of Contents

Contents List of Illustrations Preface Introduction Chronology Translator’s Note The Documents Document One. “Treatise of the most notable things that occurred in the Imperial Villa of Potosí between the Castilians and Basques from 1620 to 1625, when His Excellency the Lord Viceroy and Marquis of Guadalcázar gave his Pardon” (New York Public Librar Document Two. “Narrative of the disturbances and uprisings of the Imperial Villa of Potosí” by Gabriel Gómez de Sanabria (British Library) Document Three. “Calamities and Misery”: Three Basque Reports on the Events in Potosí (Real Academia de la Historia, General Archive of Gipuzkoa, Archivo General de Indias) Document Four. “Treatise of the Potosí Uprisings” (Archivo General de Indias) Document Five. “Brief treatise on a dispute and disagreement that occurred between two friends, one a Castilian of Burgos and the other a Basque in the Villa of Potosí” (Biblioteca Nacional de España) Document Six. The 1623–24 Potosí Militia Muster Roll: A Sample (Historical Archive of Potosí) Document Seven. A Letter from the “High-Desert Cavaliers” or Los Caballeros de la Puna Appendix 1. Life, Death, and Trade in 1620s Potosí Appendix 2. Historians and the “War Between Basques and Vicuñas” Cast of Characters Glossary Notes References Index About the Author and Translator

Editorial Reviews

Basques and Vicuñas at the Mouth of Hell is a significant addition to the historiography of colonial Spanish America and deserves a place in any library devoted to general studies and research. The editor’s work is superbly accurate and the translator offers clarity and, at the same time, retains the flavor of the seventeenth-century Castilian.” 
—Xabier Lamikiz, associate professor of economic history, University of the Basque Country, author of Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks 
 

From the Publisher