Capuchin, Order of Friars Minor

Colonial Venezuela's primary value to Spain is geographic: its long Caribbean coastline provides security from foreign enemies and pirates for the Spanish bullion fleet during its annual journey between Portobelo, in present-day Panama, and Cuba.

Venezuela's own form of mineral wealth, petroleum, had been noticed as early as 1500, but after being hastily scrutinized, the country's vast deposits are ignored for nearly four centuries.

Venezuela lacks political unity for the first two and a half centuries of colonial rule, in part because it is of no economic importance to the Spanish officials.

Before 1777, what we today label Venezuela consists of a varying number of provinces that are governed quite independently of one another.

These provinces are administered from neighboring colonies that the Spanish consider more important.

Beginning in 1526, the provinces had come under the jurisdiction of the Audiencia de Santo Domingo.

In 1550 their colonial administrative seat moves to the Audiencia de Santa Fe de Bogota, which in 1718 will be upgraded to become the Viceroyalty of New Granada.

During most of the remainder of the eighteenth century, what is today Venezuela will consist of five provinces: Caracas, Cumana, Merida de Maracaibo, Barinas, and Guayana.

Because these provinces are far from each other and from the centers of Spanish colonial rule, their municipal officials enjoy a degree of local autonomy unknown in most of Spanish America.

Agriculture has become Venezuela's chief economic activity by the late sixteenth century.

The rich farmlands of the Andean region, the western llanos, and especially the fertile valleys surrounding Caracas make Venezuela agriculturally self-sufficient, and also provide a surplus of a number of products for exportation.

Wheat, tobacco, and leather are among the early products exported from colonial Venezuela.

The Spanish crown, however, shows little interest in Venezuela's agriculture.

Spain is obsessed with extracting precious metals from its other territories to finance a seemingly endless series of foreign wars.

As a result, as late as the early eighteenth century, Venezuela will sell the bulk of its considerable surplus of agricultural goods to British, French, or Dutch traders, who, under the Spanish crown's medieval notions of commerce based on bureaucratic control and mercantilism, are labeled as smugglers.

Starting in the 1620s, cocoa becomes Venezuela's principal export for the next two centuries.

Cocoa, a powder containing a mild stimulant used in the processing of chocolate, is a native product of Venezuela's coastal valleys.

Its impact on colonial Venezuelan society is immense.

Its sizable profits attract, for the first time, significant immigration of Spaniards, including relatively poor Canary Islanders, and its plantation culture creates a great demand for enslaved Africans during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

These two population groups will complete a social hierarchy that becomes virtually a caste system.

On top is a small elite of white peninsulares (those born in Spain) and criollos (those born in America of Spanish parentage); they are followed by the white Canary Islanders, who typically work as wage laborers.

Next come a large group of racially mixed pardos, who by the late eighteenth century will make up more than half the total; they are followed by African slaves, who will constitute about twenty percent of the population; and, lastly, by the natives.

The native population, decimated by slavery and disease throughout the colonial period, will constitute less than ten percent of the total population at independence.

Forces under Diego de Losada establish the settlement of Santiago de Leon de Caracas in 1567 after more than a decade of fierce fighting with Venezuela's recalcitrant native population.

The value of Caracas lies not only in the fertile agricultural lands in its vicinity, but also in its accessibility, through the coastal range, to the seaport that will later become La Guaira.

The vast majority of what is today the territory of Venezuela is left untouched by the Spanish conquistadors.

Instead, tireless Franciscan and Capuchin missionaries explore and Hispanicize the Rio Unare Basin to the east of Caracas, the Rio Orinoco, and much of the Maracaibo Basin during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Much of the western llanos and the south bank of the Orinoco will remain unknown territory to the Spanish even at the close of the colonial period.

Palermo's Capuchin monastery has outgrown its original cemetery and monks have begun to excavate crypts below it.

In 1599, they mummify one of their number, the recently dead brother Silvestro of Gubbio, and place him into the catacombs.

This is the first of many such internments here: the bodies will be dehydrated on the racks of ceramic pipes in the catacombs and sometimes later washed with vinegar.

Some of the bodies will be embalmed and others enclosed in sealed glass cabinets.

Monks will be preserved with their everyday clothing and sometimes with ropes they had worn as a penance.

Today they provide a somewhat macabre tourist attraction as well as an extraordinary historical record.

Pope Paul's insistence of ecclesiastical jurisdiction leads to a number of quarrels between the Church and the secular governments of various states, notably Venice, where patricians, such as Ermolao Barbaro (1548–1622) of the noble Barbaro family, argue in favor of the exemption of the clergy from the jurisdiction of the civil courts.

Venice has passed two laws obnoxious to Paul, one forbidding the alienation of real estate in favor of the clergy, the second demanding approval of the civil power for the building of new churches (in essence, a Venetian stance that the powers of the church must remain separate from those of the state).

Two priests have been found guilty and committed to prison.

Paul insists that they be released to the Church.

The Venetian position is ably defended by a canon lawyer, Paolo Sarpi, who extends the matter to general principles defining separate secular and ecclesiastical spheres.

The Pope excommunicates the entire government of Venice in April 1606 and places an interdict on the city.

The rest of the Catholic clergy sides with the city, however, with the exception of the Jesuits, the Theatines, and the Capuchins, who are expelled from Venetian territories.

Caravaggio's biographer Giovanni Bellori records that the artist painted a seated portrait of Camillo Borghese as Pope, which must place the work between Borghese's election on May 16 1605 and Caravaggio's flight from Rome in May 1606 following the death of Ranuccio Tommassoni.

Masses continue to be said in Venice, and the feast of Corpus Christi is celebrated with displays of public pomp and "magnificence", in defiance of the Pope.

Within a year (March 1607) the disagreement Venice and the Papacy is mediated by France and Spain.

The Most Serene Republic refuses to retract the laws, but asserts that Venice will conduct herself "with her accustomed piety."

The Jesuits, which Venice consider subversive Papal agents, remain banned.

No more can be expected.

Paul withdraws his censure.

La Tour, finding allies in Massachusetts in the spring of 1643, leads a party of English mercenaries against the Acadian colony at Port Royal on August 6.

His two hundred and seventy Puritan and Huguenot troops kill three, burn a mill, slaughter cattle and seize eighteen thousand livres of furs, one third of the plunder going to La Tour and the rest to the Bostonians.

The Capuchins demand Paris send support for d'Aulnay.

D'Aulnay himself had returned to France to inform the government of La Tour's treason.

The court had in the spring of 1644 declared La Tour outside the law.

Several hundred people are living in Port-Royal by 1645, including Capucins, who have established a monastery here.

Capucins are also found in Acadia, in La Hève (near present day Lunenburg), ...

...Pentagoet (near Castine, Maine), and ...

...Canso (at the tip of peninsular Nova Scotia).