1. The reference is to the useless appeals Mier made to the Council of the Indies, the body responsible for overseeing from Spain the execution of decisions regarding the colonies. Mier tried to get his case reviewed because—according to him—he had been condemned without allowing him to speak in his own behalf and as a consequence of an illegal trial. He managed to secure support for his cause from Minister Jovellanos and Dr. Muñoz, a chronicler of the Indies, but in practice it was agents of the Indies who had the real power. They were the intermediaries between the Council, the ministers and the king; according to Miers testimony, all of them were corrupt. The only one he excepts from this charge is Ramón Soto Posadas, the public prosecutor of Northern America, whom he considered to be an honest man. However, Mier’s case did not fall under the public prosecutor’s jurisdiction, but rather under that of one of the allies of Archbishop Núñez de Haro y Peralta in Spain. The person in question was Francisco Antonio León, a minor official whom Mier mentions continually, “an ignorant, bumbling man, corrupt and venal, whom [Haro] trusted not to allow me access either to the court or to the Council.” (Mier, Memorias, vol. 1, 225).
Núñez de Haro made his mark on the history of the Mexican colony in its last years: he was archbishop of New Spain for nearly thirty years (1771–1800) and took over as viceroy of Mexico in 1787; he was the person mainly responsible for the persecution of Mier as a heretic.
The system of administration in Madrid denounced by fray Servando functioned as follows: the king depended on his ministers, and they in turn on their first- and second-rank officials, who in turn allowed secretaries to run the ministries. These secretaries were called covachuelos, because they worked in the covachas (cellars) of the palace. Each of them was responsible for the administration of a province or kingdom of Spain or of the Indies. To Mier’s misfortune, León was the secretary in charge of New Spain; influenced by the virulence of Haro’s reports concerning the Mexican priest, León never left off persecuting fray Servando, with an intensity that would appear to stem from a personal hatred.
2. Mier’s case was sent from the Council of the Indies to the Royal Academy of History to be reviewed. After Mier had endured the trial and travail of six years’ imprisonment, endless red tape and appeals to various authorities, the Academy rendered its verdict: his sermon on the Virgin of Guadalupe did not deny the tradition concerning her nor did it contain censurable elements, and Haro was deemed to have acted unjustly. But the Archbishop’s representatives mobilized, bringing the subject to a dead halt for over a year. The covachuelo León succeeded in getting Mier transferred to the Dominican monastery in Salamanca by interpreting the Academy’s decision according to his own lights: he gave assurances that “no harm is being done him” by sending Mier to a monastery, since he was in holy orders (hiding the fact that Mier had been given the right to choose the place of his detention), and keeping him there for four more years (the time required to serve out the ten years’ imprisonment ordered by Haro).
3. With regard to the identity of León, see the previous notes.
4. The escape to Burgos took place in 1800, the same year as Archbishop Haro’s death.
5. On the situation of priestly castes in the New World and in Spain, see the introduction. Mier is alluding here to the difference in education between the friars of the Peninsula and those of Mexico, finding the latter better educated. For example, when the commander of the Order of Calatrava, Francisco Corbera, made a recommendation that Minister Jovellanos intervene in Fray Servando’s behalf, he warned the minister that “[Servando] was not a Dominican, because in Castile what is meant by that appellation is a man whose education is as rudimentary as his manner is coarse.... There is a phrase used by men of learning in Castile to express the fact that a certain individual is very crude and [his language] macaronic: he is said to be very Dominican. And certain Dominicans who had emigrated from France told me that having left it at the end of the eighteenth century, they were amazed to find themselves in the middle of the fourteenth century in Spain.” (M 235) With the intention of defending his own social status, Fray Servando takes no notice of the fact that the low clergy was equally ignorant in both regions.
6. Juan Cornide was a priest from Veracruz who was based for a time in Madrid. Along with Mier, he suffered from slander at the hands of the wife of Saturnino de la Fuente, the agent of the Indies, a swindler, and deeply in debt. The wife denounced Mier and Cornide to the Minister of Grace and Justice, accusing them of being engaged in hatching a plot to kill the king; both priests were arrested and sent to the Royal Prison. The mayor began an investigation, the woman confessed her calumny and was taken off to the prison for madwomen in Madrid. Cornide and Mier were freed after a week, with a royal certificate attesting to their innocence.
7. Manuel de Godoy, Queen María Luisas favorite, was again at the head of the Spanish government. After Louis XVI was guillotined (1793), Spain declared war on France. The following year, the French invaded Bilbao, San Sebastián and Figueras. Godoy feared the spread of the ideas of the French Revolution, but he was even more afraid of England. He signed the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1796, becoming the ally of France and declaring war on Great Britain. Among its basic revenues, Spain had the monies obtained from the American colonies, but the war made communications difficult and eventually opened the New World market to the English. The Franco-Spanish armada was defeated by England in the battle of Trafalgar (1805), which Servando Teresa de Mier witnessed.
8. The Jansenists—members of an unorthodox Catholic movement—were opposed to Jesuit ethics, advocating a more Augustinian evangelical compromise, but this was no longer a matter of importance, since the Jesuits had fallen into disgrace and been expelled from America. During the French Revolution the Jansenists were opposed to the ecclesiastical hierarchy based on the caste system, dissociating in the eyes of the revolutionaries the image of an alliance between the monarchy and the Catholic Church. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, a “Jansenist” priest was regarded as an extremist, as a threat to the reestablished social order.
Mariano de Urquijo was prime minister of Spain during the brief period when Godoy was barred from holding the post (1798–1801). A man of great learning, he backed Humboldt, securing for him the permits necessary for beginning his voyage to America with Bonpland. Manuel de Godoy Alvarez de Faria Ríos Sánchez Zardosa, also known as Prince of Peace and of Basano, Duke of Alcudia and Suca (1767–1851), was the favorite of Queen María Luisa of Spain and twice Prime Minister (1792–98 and 1801–8).
9. There was great tension between Spain and Portugal. In 1801 Godoy succeeded in invading Portugal, in the War of Oranges; Charles V allowed French troops to cross Spanish territory to invade Portugal, an ally of England. In 1814, Portugal was among the countries that forced Napoleon Bonaparte to sign his first abdication.
10. In 1795, Godoy had received the title of Prince of Peace for having negotiated the Peace of Basel between France and Spain. But during this period his power had grown weaker: the aristocrats did not like him, nor was he popular among the people, especially because of the inflation that his policy had brought on. The persecution of the Jansenists formed part of his strategy for holding power. Famous for his intrigues, he contributed indirectly to the Napoleonic intervention: Ferdinand, Prince of Asturias, was plotting against his father, Charles V, to remain on the throne and incidentally to throw Godoy out of power. Taking advantage of the confusion and the unrest, Napoleon expelled the three of them and placed his brother on the throne of Spain.
11. The movement of Julius Caesar’s forces across the Rubicon River (Italy, 49 B.C.) began a three-year war that ended with his being named Caesar of the Roman world. “Crossing the Rubicon” became a popular phrase describing a step that definitely commits a person to a given course of action.
12. In the wake of 18 and 19 Brumaire, in 1799, a conspiracy led by Bonaparte and Abbot Sieyès put an end to the Directorate and named a new government, the head of which was Bonaparte himself as First Consul. This marked the official end of the French Revolution. An enlightened dictatorship came to power, giving the appearance of being a constitutional government, but with no guarantees either of the “rights of man” or of the famous principles of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” Servando Teresa de Mier is here referring to the events of 1801, but in a way that reveals that he is writing from a perspective that dates from long after the events themselves. Th1 text was in fact written in 1818; on questioning the nature of the French Republic at that moment, he is doing so retrospectively, with the knowledge that Napoleon would be named Consul for Life in 1802 and Emperor in 1804.
13. The Catholic Church had suffered a severe setback during the French Revolution, whose leaders demanded that it submit to the civil authorities except in matters of doctrine. Just three years before Mier’s stay in Paris, Pope Pius VI (1775–99) suffered the humiliation of being driven out of Rome by the French army and taken as a prisoner to France, where he died. By 1801 the new pope, Pius VII, had bettered the position of the Church with Napoleon, but he did not succeed in recovering its secularized land holdings or in completely reestablishing either its image or its influence.
1. Known as “the preceptor of Simón Bolívar” and the instigator of the famous Oath of Monte Sacro that was to mean so much to the fight for independence in Latin America, Simón Rodríguez (1771–1854) was the Socratic teacher who wanted to teach how to live and make citizens through education. An early conspirator against Spanish colonialism, a Venezuelan expatriate for twenty-seven years, going by various other names, most importantly that of Samuel Robinson, he was one of the freest and most original writers of the first half of the nineteenth century in Latin America. Simón Rodríguez was one of the fathers of emancipist thought in America; nonetheless, like Mier, he is not so much read as remembered for his most eccentric behavior and outlandish adventures in many corners of the globe.
2. The 1801 translation appeared under the title Atala o los amores de dos salvajes en el desierto; escrita en francés por Francisco-Augusto Chateaubriand. The translation and a brief introduction were signed S. Robinson, one of Simón Rodriguez’s pseudonyms. Historians differ as to the identity of the real author, since Mier maintains in the Memoirs that it is his work entirely; nonetheless, it seems quite unlikely that Rodríguez would hire him as a “ghost writer,” since the two of them were equally penniless. Rodriguez’s biographers usually prefer to regard it as a case of coauthorship, taking no credit away from Mier despite his not having signed his name to the translation.
3. Count Constantin-François de Volney, a historian, a philosopher and a Girondin, was the epitome of eighteenth-century rationalist thought in France.
4. This period was as difficult for the Catholic Church as that of the Great Schism and the Babylonian Captivity of the Pope. Not only did the prestige of the Supreme Pontiff suffer, but the religious orders were placed in question by Enlightenment thinkers and at the same time they were manipulated by the kings of Europe, who wanted to use them in order to get rid of the Pope and enhance their own power. During the papacy of Pius VI, the Church was completely divided (see chapter 1, note 13) between republicans and monarchists, between rationalists and traditionalists. The entire ecclesiastical hierarchy was being called into question, and Mier himself questions the power of bishops (see the introduction).
5. The Council of Trent (1545–63) was very important for the Catholic Church because it issued edicts for self-reformation and clarified dogmatic definitions called into question by Protestants; this strengthened the Church in Europe, but fray Servando observes that it did not do so in France.
6. The invocation of the name of the celebrated Bishop Gregoire in favor of his cause clearly reveals Mier’s position with regard to the conflicts between Church and State. Gregoire was the great defender of the Constitutional or nationalized Church during the French Revolution: in 1789 he was an active participant in the Revolutionary Assembly attempting to bring about the union of the clergy and the Third Estate and the abolition of slavery; in 1790 he was named the Constitutional bishop of Loire-et-Cher (the diocese of Blois); two years later he proposed the abolition of the monarchy. He was opposed to the coup of 18 Brumaire, the proclamation of the Empire and the reconciliation with Rome proposed by Napoleon. Like Mier and despite the loss of prestige suffered by the priesthood, he continued to wear clerical attire and openly professed his religion.
7. On Carli, Humboldt and the early presence of Christianity in America, see the introduction.
8. Mier is here referring to the Synod of Pistoia (1786), presided over by Matteo Ricci, the bishop of Pistoia-Prato, under the tutelage of the Grand Duke Peter Leopold, which was very important in the history of Jansenism (see chapter 1, note 8).
9. The Treaty of Amiens (1802) was a peace accord signed by France, England, Spain and the Netherlands, which brought peace to Europe for fourteen months during the Napoleonic wars, but strengthened Bonaparte’s absolutism as First Consul. Two years later he proclaimed himself Emperor, a fact known to Mier at the time that he writes this.
10. The Napoleonic Code was the first civil code in history to be founded on a rational idea of the law, based on common sense; adopted in France in 1804, it had a decisive influence throughout the entire nineteenth century, both in Europe and in Latin America. Father Mier’s support for the Code is revealing, since it not only permits divorce but in fact also replaces the previous legal system, based on principles of the Catholic Church.
11. Mier was made a member of the Institut National de France in 1814.
1. In 1802, the infanta Isabel of Austria was about to marry Ferdinand VII, Prince of Asturias and heir to the throne of Spain. Ferdinand ruled as king between 1808 and 1833, although his reign was interrupted by the Napoleonic wars, when he was sent into exile in Bayonne. The rebels—both in Spain and in America—who were against the French occupation, staged an uprising to secure the return of Ferdinand, now called “Ferdinand the Desired,” in whom the Cortes of Cádíz believed they had an ally who would support a liberal constitution on his return to the throne. But history took a different turn, and Ferdinand was not to accept such a constitution until many years later, under pressure and foreseeing that his reign was approaching its end. The marriage alluded to by Mier did not bear fruit; the king fulfilled the obligation of fathering an heir only with his fourth wife, María Cristina I of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, who gave birth to Isabel II in 1830.
2. The reference is to the brief reign in Spain of Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte (1808–13) and to Joachim Murat, one of Napoleon’s marshals, who was made king of Naples (1808–15).
3. Father Mier is really referring to the Catholic cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, the leader—along with the legendary Fra Diavolo—of a popular-royalist counterrevolution, against the Bonapartist forces in Naples and in support of King Ferdinand IV (1798).
4. Correct grammar and pronunciation were one of the obsessions of the learned men of the nascent American republics, as a way of obtaining both autonomy and national homogeneity. Mier returns to the subject more than once; in, for example, his Carta de despedida a los mexicanos, written in the castle of San Juan de Ulúa in 1821, he attacks the “ugly” Spanish pronunciation of the letter j, advocating the restoration of the “soft x” in the name of Mexico. Both he and Simón Rodríguez, and later Andrés Bello and Domingo F. Sarmiento, attempted to simplify the alphabet, reducing the number of letters to the same number of sounds as in the spoken language. The proposal did not succeed.
5. Catholic priests wrote grammars, dictionaries and catechisms in the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro writes about this period in Idea dell’universo (1778–87).
6. Las Caldas (diocese of Santander) was the monastery in Spain to which Servando Teresa de Mier was banished by Archbishop Nuñez de Haro. For his sermon on the Virgin of Guadalupe he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment there, accused of heresy by the Inquisition. The Holy Office, let it be said in passing, formally came into being as an institution in Mexico in 1569; Mier was to live to see its definite eradication in 1820.
7. The epitaph is in dactylic hexameter in Latin:
Mantua gave birth to me; the Calabrians snatched me away; now [Mount] Parthenope holds me [i.e., I am buried there]. I sang of pastures, leaders.
I owe this and other translations from Latin to the generosity of John Bodel, Department of Classics, Rutgers University.
8. Give flowers to the sacred ash: that true [ash] of the [muse of] Virgil is next to this tomb. (Trans., John Bodel).
Maronis is cited in place of Virgil’s whole name: Publius Vergilius Maro.
1. The Jesuits’ fall from grace began with the theological adventure in China of Matteo Ricci, who—in a way that calls to mind the Franciscans in New Mexico and the myth of the Virgin of Guadalupe—persistently maintained that he had found evidence of Catholicism in Confucianism. Popes Clement XI and Benedict XIV condemned these theories, and in conjunction with the condemnation, resentment against the political power of the Society of Jesus grew more intense. The crown of Portugal expelled the Jesuits in 1759, France declared the Society of Jesus illegal in 1764, and in 1767 Spain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies took repressive measures against it. In 1773 Pope Clement XIV issued a decree abolishing the society for the good of the Church in Rome— the majority of the priests expelled from the colonies had ended up in Italy and Portugal—thus accounting for Mier’s surprise on noting the power of the Jesuits in Italy. The society continued its clandestine activities until 1814, when Pius VII restored the order’s legal status.
2. Pius VII, whose baptismal name was Barnaba Gregorio Chiaramonti, was pope from 1800 to 1823. Mier here treats him with contempt, but in point of fact the Church—devastated by the French Revolution—was restored during his papacy. The Mexican friar could not forgive him for having restored the Society of Jesus, for having concluded the Concordat with Napoleon and for his attacks on those who were attempting to liberalize the Church. Despite his great efforts to modernize the papacy, the Papal State was reestablished, and his death was followed by a “government by priests.”
3. Father Juan de Mariana, a Spanish Jesuit, maintained in his De rege et regis institutione (The King and the Education of the King, 1598), that overthrowing a tyrant was justifiable under certain circumstances; he was accused of inciting tyrannicide when Henry IV of France was assassinated in 1610. His Tractatus VII(1609), one of a series of political and moral treatises that included the defense of the heretic Arias Montano, was banned by the Inquisition. Mier attacks the Jesuits by invoking the example of Mariana, but in point of fact Mariana was a great critic of the Society of Jesus, as is evident in his Discurso de los grandes defectos que hay en la forma del gobierno de los jesuitas (Discourse on the Great Defects that Exist in the Rule Governing the Jesuits, 1625). On the Jansenists and Molinists, see chapter 1, note 8, and chapter 2, note 4.
4. Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, bishop of Puebla and viceroy of New Spain, a Jesuit regarded as a model of the secular priest and the initiator of the Her-rerist style of architecture in the sixteenth century, the author of works such as Virtudes del indio (Virtues of the Indian), Vida interior (Inner life), Direcciones para los señores obispos y cartas pastorales (Instructions for the Reverend Bishops and Pastoral Letters) and Relación breve de la venida de los de la Compañía de Jesús a la Nueva España (A Brief Account of the Coming of Members of the Company of Jesus to New Spain). The mention of Palafox is interesting, since in his diocese of Puebla—adjoining Cholula, the holy city of Quetzalcóatl—he had ordered the destruction of the last remaining statues of Mexican divinities in public places. It must be remembered that among Father Mier’s polemical theological theses was that of Saint Thomas-Quetzalcóatl as an apostle to Mexicans, developed at greatest length in his Apología del doctor Mier.
The Jesuits were expelled from Mexico in the second half of the eighteenth century, at the very height of their power; they had been responsible in large part for the triumph of the national cause of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as well as for restricting the power of the viceroy over the missions and preventing the beatification of Palafox, proposed by the missionary bishops, a prelate for whom Mier must have felt a certain sympathy.
5. Accusing the Jesuits of being Freemasons was an unreasonable charge on fray Servando’s part, since the Freemasons were not even a Christian institution, their belief in the existence of a Supreme Being notwithstanding. In general, in the world of the Enlightenment and in Latin America, the Masons were freethinkers and anticlerical. Many leaders of Latin American independence, such as Francisco de Miranda, Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, were associated with freemasonry. Mier himself was accused of being a Mason— an accusation he always denied, as can be seen in the chapter of his Memoirs entitled “From My Arrival in Barcelona to My Arrival in Madrid,” despite the fact that he expressed his gratitude for the “infinite” aid that the lodges contributed toward “overthrowing Iturbide and establishing the republic.” (“Carta a Cantú,” August 31,1826, in the Ayacucho edition) Moreover, there are documents extant that establish the affiliation of Servando Teresa de Mier with a lodge: “In the middle of September, 1811, he was initiated into a society that met in the San Carlos district, in Cádiz, founded by the Argentine military leader Carlos Alvear and made up principally of Americans troubled by the situation of Spain and the misfortunes that would befall its American dominions if it surrendered to Napoleon. The society went by the name of Los Caballeros Racionales [The Knights of Reason].... The obligations of its members were to defend the fatherland, to aid other members and to keep its existence secret.” (Virginia Guedea, “Las sociedades secretas durante el movimiento de la independencia,” in Jaime E. Rodríguez O., ed., The Independence of Mexico …, 52–3).
6. Probabilism was first formulated by the Dominican Bartolomé de Medina in the sixteenth century and later developed in detail by the Jesuits. The central premise was that when a person does not know if a certain conduct is licit or illicit, he can have recourse to a “probable opinion” based on logical argument or on the views of authorities. The Jansenists, who believed that it was imperative to adopt the strictest point of view in case of doubt, attacked Jesuit confessors for having set forth a relaxed system of morality.
7. Francis Xavier Alegre was the first serious historian of the Jesuits and was expelled with the others from Mexico to Italy. He was the author of works such as Alexandrias, Homeri Ilias, latino carmine expressa (The Iliad of Homer, Expressed in Latin Verse) and Institutionum Theologicarum. His Historia de la Provincia de la Compañia de Jesús de Nueva España contributed to the Guadalupan tradition; in Mexico there was an aura of supernatural signs that should be read; Alegre was stricken with the plague of 1725 and of 1736; as a consequence of the latter epidemic, the Virgin of Guadalupe was declared the patron saint of New Spain. Fray Servando maintained that Alegre fell out of favor with the Jesuits because he defended “vigorous physical activity” (“promoción física”): I am inclined to interpret this statement in the light of the fact that Alegre was in favor of sports and against activities such as chess, since “it is foolish to devote a great deal of attention and effort to a fictitious thing of no importance which produces mental fatigue.” (“Stultum enim est in re umbratili, et nullius momenti maximam atten-tionem et Studium cum capitis defatigatione collocare,” Institutionum, III, 479). Arnold Kerson says: “As a man possessed of good logic and practical sense, he recommends games requiring less mental concentration and more physical activity.” (“Francisco Javier Alegre, humanista mexicano del siglo XVIII,” in Cuadernos americanos 160 (1968): 174; and Mauricio Bechot, “La ley natural como fundamento de la ley positiva en Francisco Xavier Alegre” Hispanic Enlightenment Aesthetics and Literary Theory 14, nos. 1–2 (Spring-Fall 1991): 124–29). It is my impression that, given the context, Mier is poking fun at the Jesuits themselves, who have no idea whom to attack next.
8. Mier writes Paw instead of Pauw: this is not the only name whose spelling he changed. On the discourse of Pauw, Raynal, Robertson and Clavijero, see the introduction. It also contains a discussion of the influence on Mier’s works of fray Bartolomé de Las Casas and his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, a work that began the “black legend” of the Spanish Conquest and Spanish colonialism.
9. The Spanish soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo was one of the first to offer a version of the Conquest from a nonofficial point of view in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1632).
10. These are a pair of verses from Virgil’s Eclogues (3.104–5): the better texts have tris for tres and caeli for coeli. According to John Bodel’s interpretation the translation is: “Tell me in what lands, and you will be a great Apollo to me, the expanse of the sky is not more than three ells wide [Ell is a unit of measurement, from palm to elbow; while the original word ulna equals about five feet.]
There are several possible solutions. One is that Virgil is referring to the tomb of Caelius, a bankrupt who in selling his property reserved only enough ground for a tomb. The other is that it may refer to the well at Syene (Aswan) used by Eratosthenes, who is not, however, mentioned, in calculating the earth’s circumference. According to Asconius Pedianus (9 B.C.–A.D. 76), Virgil is said to have told him that by writing this passage he had set a trap for interpreters (hoc loco se grammaticis crucem fixisse). Now the majority of interpreters relate this with the sphere of Archimedes or with that of Posidinous (a friend of Cicero’s); the measurement of the construct establishes a contrast between the dimensions of the sphere and the immensity of the sky. (This interpretation is derived from Wendell Clausen, A Commentary on Virgil Ecologues [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994,116–77]). Given fray Servando’s context, I believe that his use of it is more in accord with the first interpretation, since the space described is so limited.
1. On Freemasonry, see chapter 4, note 5.
2. Servando Teresa de Mier is here making a clear distinction between purity in the Peninsula and that in America, obviously favoring the latter as being more authentic, turning topsy-turvy the polemic regarding the inferiorization of those born in America (see the introduction). By attesting to the authenticity of his “well-known lineage,” he was defending the privileges of the Creole nobility, which had so little access to jobs and honors. Hence, in his Historia de la revolución de Nueva España, the reasons he adduces for justifying independence are conjoined with a defense of the Mexican aristocracy, to which he maintains he belongs because he is descended from a noble family that included among its members a governor and a presiding judge of the Inquisition Tribunal, as well as being—he claims—a descendent of Montezuma on his mother’s side. His republicanism is not open to question: the horrible impression made on him as a witness to the excesses of the “Terror” during the French Revolution made him support constitutional order and a certain religious heterodoxy, seeking in the Laws of the Indies, in Sacred Scripture, in oral tradition and in Mexican hieroglyphs age-old principles that could help in achieving the autonomy of New Spain, on the one hand, while on the other not undermining the social privileges of the Creole nobility.
3. This is a sort of nudge in the ribs, a wink on fray Servando’s part, because the gachupines continued to vaunt the superior powers of their faith in the Spanish Virgen del Pilar as compared to the local faith in the Virgin of Guadalupe. He says as much in another part of his Memoirs, directly addressing his compatriots: “Americans, idiots that we are, the Archbishop’s Europeans were making fun of us, and far from believing that the Virgin favored you more with [the Virgin of] Guadalupe than she did them with [the Virgin of the] Pillar, [this has been] one of the reasons for their persecuting me.” (M 114)
4. Juan de Solórzano Pereira, mentioned several times in this part, was a member of the Council of Castile and of the Council of the Indies. The author of Política indiana (Policy in the Indies, 1648), he advocated—among other things—equality of privileges, rights and honors for Creoles and peninsular Spaniards.
5. Count José Moriño y Redondo Floridabianca obtained his title of nobility as a reward for his diplomatic handling of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1767 and his negotiations that brought the dissolution of the Society of Jesus through a decision on the part of Rome in 1772. He was Secretary of State under Charles IV, the enlightened despot, between 1776 and 1792, bringing about reforms in vocational schools, giving capital to peasants, and strengthening Spain’s industry, agriculture and commerce.
6. On “all the absurdities and stupidities,” see the introduction.
7. Showing off his black humor, Mier is alluding here to the confusion caused by the dethronement of King Ferdinand VII and his replacement by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph I, in 1808.
1. Campomanes, the Prosecuting Attorney of the Council of Castile who provided official support and central leadership for the reform, was one of Charles IV’s “enlightened” political figures who did the most to rally the American liberals, along with the Aragonese aristocrat Aranda (Prime Minister after Floridablanca) and Floridablanca himself, a civil conservative (chapter 5, note 5); Meléndez Valdés, Cabarrus and Olavide were regarded as technicians whose knowledge of foreign technology was useful to the Spanish government. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the Minister of Justice at the end of the century, a liberal whose opposition to the Holy Office cost him his post, formed part of the same group; during his brief eight-month term in office, in 1797, he heard fray Servando’s case and granted him an ephemeral rehabilitation (chapter 1, note 1). The funeral referred to by Mier took place in 1802; see the introduction.
2. Another allusion to Mier’s aristocratic origins. see the introduction and chapter 5, note 2.
3. Although he was expert at disguises, this was one of the rare times when Mier used another name. However, he was in the habit of always retaining traces of his real identity: in this case, Ramiro de Vendes was “an exact anagram of my name”; another, José Guerra, the pseudonym with which he signed his Historia de la revolución de Nueva España, represents the beginning and end of his baptismal name, precisely the two parts of it that, along with his mother’s surname, he normally does not use.
4. Mier confesses that he has mistakenly boarded the wrong ship and thus happens to witness the famous battle off Cape Trafalgar, between Cádiz and the Strait of Gibraltar, on October 21,1805. His count of the number of warships is less than the one recorded in historical documents (one less than thirty-three royal vessels, the sum total of the Franco-Spanish fleet), and for obvious reasons he devotes more attention to the Spanish aspect of the battle. He mentions neither the French, commanded by Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, nor the twenty-seven ships commanded by Horatio Nelson, whose death, however, he does mention. The encounter was to give England naval primacy for a century, but Mier, being too close to events, regards it merely as part of Bonaparte’s strategy for invading Spain; the event itself merits only this one paragraph in his account.
5. Mier could have known of this episode only long after it had happened. In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte, pressured by the Parliament of France, was forced to abdicate. In Rochefort he tried to board ship and sail to the United States, but a British squadron kept all vessels from leaving port. Napoleon sought the protection of the English government. He boarded the Bellerophon, but none of the allied countries wanted to see him land in America, preferring to send him back to France to be tried and executed; the British also refused to allow him into the country and decided to banish him to the island of Saint Helena. It was at that moment that Napoleon uttered his famous phrase “I appeal to history!”
1. Napoleon kept both Charles V and Ferdinand VII in exile to ensure that Joseph Bonaparte remained on the throne of Spain.
2. At the moment when Mier embarked with Javier de Mina in order to fight for independence in what was to be the revolutionary debacle of Soto de la Marina, Mina was already the “famous author of the first history of the Insurgency led by Father Hidalgo, a book that violently attacked the atrocities committed by the royalists, set forth convincing arguments to deny the legitimacy of the Spanish government and once again upheld the thesis of the evangelization of Mexico before the arrival of Cortez.” (Brading, Mito y profecía, 64)
3. Manuel Mier y Terán, a politician from Chiapas, fought for Mexican independence and the protection of its territories against the expansionist advance of the United States along the border.
4. The antimonarchical revolutions had in fact begun in Spain, forcing Ferdinand VII to adopt, around 1820, the liberal constitution enacted less than a decade before in his name and in his absence. The abolition of the Holy Office was also about to be proclaimed in Mexico.
5. “The lords with the blue cuffs” is a reference to the Inquisition authorities.
6. The allusion to the Venadito (literally, “Little Stag”) is ambiguous: at first sight it would appear to be an ironic nickname given the viceroy; but fray Servando finished writing the Manifesto very close in time after Javier de Mina’s execution in a settlement called Venadito. Since Mier insisted that any accusation against him must be political in nature and not place his religious faith in question, I am of the opinion that the paragraph alludes to his run-ins with Mina and the impossibility of having proof of them at hand at the time of the accusations. Cf. the following paragraph: “Up until the 27th of October [1817], the date on which he was taken prisoner and executed in Venadito, Mina waged a brilliant military campaign, captured San Felipe, threatened León and created great consternation in powerful places, thereby recreating that atmosphere of fear that had accompanied the victories of Morelos a few years before. Mina’s defeat did not keep one of Morelos’s former lieutenants, Vicente Guerrero, from renewing the struggle in the south of the country, winning a series of victories in 1819.” (Cited in Lafaye, Quetzalcóatland Guadalupe, 195).
7. The “green candle” is an allusion to the candles used before the Tribunals of the Inquisition, when, at the time judgment was rendered and the verdict announced, the person accused of heresy made his profession of faith “with a green candle in hand.” (See Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, VI, 229).
8. The “black tribunal” was that of the Church and the “blue tribunal” that of the Inquisition. Fray Servando is here accusing the archbishop and other such authorities of inculcating fanaticism in believers, etc.; hence I do not believe that he is referring to a civil tribunal. His argument with the tribunal is precisely the fact that he wishes to be treated as a citizen and be judged by a civil or military tribunal according to the provisions of the Constitution. He is doubtless referring to the Constitution adopted in 1812 by the Cortes rebelling against the power of Napoleon in Mexico and in Spain; this Constitution, though annulled by Ferdinand VII, was fully restored in 1820 by the king himself. Mexican independence is in part the product of the restitution of this liberal Constitution. What is most important in this instance is the fact that in this Constitution the clergy was left with no representation in the government—such representation was exactly what Mier was seeking in order to resolve his case.