Los indios medievales de Fray Pedro de Aguado

The author has waded through a most interesting chapter in Latin American intellectual history, thoroughly and fascinatingly. Borja’s intent was to review the Franciscan Order’s spirituality, from the voyages of the 1200s to the colonization of the New World in the 1500s. He is interested not in the actions of the conquerors and colonists but in how the chroniclers of the Indies, most of them friars, narrated and interpreted the events of the conquest. Specifically, this work deals with the Franciscan Pedro de Aguado’s writings concerning the Spaniards’ adventures in Colombia and part of Venezuela.For Borja, the problem in using chronicles as a source for the history of the conquest lies in the conceptual distance between the sixteenth century and the twenty-first. Historiography has evolved considerably in the intervening centuries, and consequently, contemporary historians should realize that one of the common characteristics of medieval texts and of books on the conquest is the use of rhetoric to organize the material in line with medieval experiences, faith, and beliefs. Thus, the reconstruction of both classical and sixteenth-century rhetoric is essential to understand Aguado’s work, as well as others from this period. This allows us understand what the voyages of discovery meant to the chroniclers. To do it otherwise is to see only the description of events, which has made possible the “invention of history.” Hence, native populations must be seen, as written by Aguado, within the medieval framework the chronicler had in mind. Modern historians, Borja explains, have employed paradigms and concepts alien to the chronicles and thus twisted the meaning of the conquest as presented in them. Instead, historians evaluate these writings according to their own expectations.Borja chose Aguado’s work because it covers the northwestern region of South America, but also because it has been used to reconstruct the first inhabitants’ way of life. The Recopilación historical has become a foundational document upon which have been built many of the ideas of the origins of those national states (p. 6).Borja begins his interpretation of the chronicles of the Indies with the “spirituality, explorations, and writings about new worlds.” The medieval origins of his thesis reach back to the eleventh century, when Europeans began to explore beyond the boundaries of the continent. This occurred through two processes. First, mendicants began to search for new worlds with the spirituality of the mendicants’ origins in the 1200s, in the midst of a social and economic urban maelstrom. This restlessness led the Latin church to initiate a return to the original foundations of Christianity. In turn, the mendicants acquired a zest for preaching and proselytizing, which led to travel far into Asia. Franciscanism was born of two medieval ideals: its founder’s advocacy of “poverty, penitence, sacrifice, and peregrination” and the “chivalrous ideal of a wandering life in search of ‘adventures.’ ” The Franciscans changed the wandering life into peregrination and the adventure into evangelization, both of which “carried them farther than any other coeval order or any knight would have imagined.” These are the roots of the Franciscan dictum to “cover and to describe the world.”The second process involved Europe’s own mythic heritage that spilled over the borders of the continent. Through “fantasies and false expectations” of the outside world, Europeans attempted to find routes to America and India. This reached fruition in the 1400s, after four centuries of intellectual and material explorations.This is (here sketchily presented) the intellectual background that Borja uses to analyze Aguado’s work. He explains how for the chroniclers and others writing about the New World, “America became the fountainhead par excellence that harbored all vices, all virtues, while the scribes believed that that to write was to create” (p. 93). A sixteenth-century writer had to reach out to literary images originating in known cultural patterns. “The problem was even more complex, as descriptions were regulated by elaborate norms centered not on objectivity but on general ideas or properties of the subjects described” (p. 94). Thus, America was invented by modern scholars through the eyes of these early writers, whose tapestry—woven with spirituality, hope, and redemption—has been overlooked. If this step is missed, a misinterpretation of the chronicles takes place.Aguado, as well as other writers, frames the “medieval Amerind” within a rhetorical model that followed his own intentions and expectations. His work is not descriptive but rather ideological, “organized according to [his] descriptive need and intentions” (p. 95). Borja’s thesis is based on a thorough examination of a large number of studies, many of them Spanish translations from European and North American monographs. His work parallels John Phelan’s The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (Univ. of California Press, 1970). However, the intellectual background that Indios medievales presents is wider and deeper than Phelan’s. As such, Borja’s work fits very well within the historiographical chapters of Latin American history. Like Phelan’s, Borja’s book is a must-read for those who intend to interpret the early history of the continent

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