A royal order turns forced labour into forced tribute

The encomienda was a grant from the Spanish crown giving a settler the right to take labour from a named group of indigenous people. Its stated justification was Christianisation. Its working purpose was to supply hands for the mines and the cattle ranches, to raise silk, and to feed the encomendero along with the workers in the towns. On the islands of the Caribbean the settlers pushed it so hard that the population it rested on died out. In 1549 a royal cedula changed what an encomienda could demand, moving the obligation from labour to tribute. Wallerstein reads that as a move away from something close to slavery towards a system in which the threat of force stayed in the background while the crop still had to be grown and sold. When the change cut the labour supply too far, Spain compelled wage work outright, called the cuatequil in Mexico and the mita in Peru. Every step was taken by law, and every step kept the estates supplied.

The Lisbon Inquisition set up its commissioner's office in Salvador in 1549. Every case from the Portuguese empire was handled from the metropole, unlike the Spanish system with its regional tribunals at Lima and Cartagena. Anyone wishing to denounce a neighbour went to the commissioner, who investigated and sent his findings across the Atlantic. If Lisbon declined to prosecute, and it usually did, the report was copied into the prosecutor's notebooks, a standing record of the cases that went nowhere. The inquisitors cared about judaizing and heresy. Of the 143 Bahian cases that reached full trial between 1593 and 1687, not one concerned sorcery or anything close to it, and only two involved people of African descent at all. Denunciations of African healers existed in the notebooks well before that date. The gap between what colonists reported and what Lisbon would try is why the archive has the shape it has.

Afonso of Kongo died late in 1542. His son Pedro held office briefly and was pushed out in 1545 by Afonso's grandson Diogo. Pedro took asylum in a church in the capital and went on organising from inside it with supporters who held office around the kingdom. In 1550 Diogo opened a judicial inquest into what Pedro had been doing, and because the papers were later sent to Portugal to secure an extradition they survive. One intercepted letter has Pedro urging his cousin Rodrigo de Santa Maria to act at once, since Diogo had arrested Rodrigo's sister and put her under guard together with Pedro's own sister Caterina, and had arrested another of Rodrigo's sisters elsewhere. Caterina held a title marking her as head of a descent group traced back to the kingdom's founder. She was sister to one claimant and aunt to the other, which made her a possible bridge between them. Taking such women out of circulation cut the last line along which a losing faction could still negotiate.

In 1544 Spanish officials on Hispaniola reported that the indigenous population had effectively ceased to exist. Fifty-two years had passed since Columbus anchored off the northern coast. Inside one long lifetime a society of hundreds of thousands of people, organised into chiefdoms with their own leaders, farming systems, ceremonial centres and trade links across the islands, had been reduced to a handful of survivors absorbed into colonial households. Nothing on that scale had happened in the Atlantic world before. What the report meant in practice was that the labour question was settled. Spanish Hispaniola would run on Africans from then on, and it did, for the two and a half centuries that followed. The island's later history, French Saint-Domingue, the revolution and the republic, takes place on ground whose original population had been erased before the French arrived. Haiti keeps the Taino name for the island. It is the largest thing the Taino left in the world.