Santiago Region Metropolitana Chile
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The Inca Tupac Yupanqui advances the southern border of the empire over a thirty year period to the Santiago region of modern Chile.
It regulates and allocates labor, distributes land, grants monopolies, sets prices, licenses industries, concedes mining rights, creates public enterprises, authorizes guilds, channels exports, collects taxes, and provides subsidies.
Outside the capital city, however, colonists often ignore or circumvent royal laws.
In the countryside and on the frontier, local landowners and military officers frequently establish and enforce their own rules.
The economy expands under Spanish rule, but some criollos complain about royal taxes and limitations on trade and production.
Although the crown requires that most Chilean commerce be with Peru, smugglers manage to sustain some illegal trade with other American colonies and with Spain itself.
Chile exports to Lima small amounts of gold, silver, copper, wheat, tallow, hides, flour, wine, clothing, tools, ships, and furniture.
Merchants, manufacturers, and artisans become increasingly important to the Chilean economy.
Mining is significant, although the volume of gold and silver extracted in Chile is far less than the output of Peru or Mexico.
The conquerors appropriate mines and washings from the native people and coerce them into extracting the precious metal for the new owners.
The crown claims one-fifth of all the gold produced, but the miners frequently cheat the treasury.
By the seventeenth century, depleted supplies and the conflict with the Araucanians reduce the quantity of gold mined in Chile.
Compared with its counterparts in Peru and Mexico, the church in Chile is not very rich or powerful.
On the frontier, missionaries are more important than the Catholic hierarchy.
Although usually it supports the status quo, the church produces the most important defenders of the indigenous population against Spanish atrocities.
The most famous advocate of human rights for the native Americans is a Jesuit, Luis de Valdivia (no relation to Pedro de Valdivia), who struggles, mostly in vain, to improve their lot in the period 1593-1619.
Large landowners become the local elite, often maintaining a second residence in the capital city.
Traditionally, most historians have considered these great estates (called haciendas or fundos) inefficient and exploitive, but some scholars have claimed that they were more productive and less cruel than is conventionally depicted.
The haciendas initially depend for their existence on the land and labor of the indigenous people.
As in the rest of Spanish America, crown officials reward many conquerors according to the encomienda system, by which a group of native Americans is commended or consigned temporarily to their care.
The grantees, called encomenderos, are supposed to Christianize their wards in return for small tribute payments and service, but they usually take advantage of their charges as laborers and servants.
Many encomenderos also appropriate native lands.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the encomenderos fend off attempts by the crown and the church to interfere with their exploitation of the indigenous people.
Peninsulares and criollos dominate the tiny upper class.
Miscegenation between Europeans and the indigenous people produces a mestizo population that quickly outnumbers the Spaniards.
Farther down the social ladder are a few enslaved Africans and large numbers of native Americans.
The second Spanish expedition from Peru to Chile is begun by Pedro de Valdivia in 1540.
Proving more persistent than Almagro, he founds the capital city of Santiago on February 12, 1541.
Valdivia manages to subdue many northern natives, forcing them to work in mines and fields.
He has far less success with the Araucanians of the south, however.
Valdivia (1541-53) becomes the first governor of the Captaincy General of Chile, which is the colonial name until 1609.
In this post, he obeys the viceroy of Peru and, through him, the king of Spain and his bureaucracy.
Responsible to the governor, town councils known as cabildos administer local municipalities, the most important of which is Santiago, which will become the seat of a royal audiencia from 1609 until the end of colonial rule.
Seeking more precious metals and slave labor, Valdivia establishes fortresses farther south.
Being so scattered and small, however, they prove difficult to defend against Araucanian attack.
Valdivia finds small amounts of gold in the south, but he realizes that Chile will have to be primarily an agricultural colony.
Spaniards led by Pedro de Valdivia have begun the establishment of several settlements in Chile, including, on February 12, 1541, the city of Santiago del Nuevo Extremo (“Saint James of the New Frontier”), formerly inhabited by the Picunche people, and located on the Mapocho River at the northern end of the fertile Central Valley.
Valdivia has chosen the location because of its moderate climate and the ease with which it could be defended—the Mapocho River splits into two branches and rejoins further downstream, forming an island.
The city is destroyed on September 11, 1541 by the Indian forces under the chief Michimalonco, which leads to the Arauco War, a long conflict between colonial Spaniards and the Mapuche people of the region of Araucanía.
The survivors remove to a small island and await relief from their Spanish compatriots in Peru.
Quickly rebuilt, Santiago is today the capital of Chile, and the center of its largest conurbation (Greater Santiago).
Pedro de Valdivia and the beleaguered settlers of the destroyed new town of Santiago have meanwhile held out on their small island for two years against the Araucanians.
A Spanish relief force finally arrives in 1543 from Peru.
A discontented faction from Chile had managed, despite Valdivia’s support of Gasca, to have him tried in Lima, accused of tyranny, malfeasance of public funds and public immorality.
One of the charges leveled against him was that he, being married, openly lived with Inés de Suárez "...in the manner of man and wife and they sleep in one bed and they eat in one dish..." In exchange for being freed, and for his confirmation as Royal Governor, he had agreed to relinquish her and to bring to Chile his wife, Marina Ortíz de Gaete (who only arrives after Valdivia's death in 1554.
He was also ordered to marry off Inés, which he does, upon his return to Chile in 1549, to one of his captains, Rodrigo de Quiroga.
As recognition for his services, Valdivia is finally appointed as adelantado and wins the royal assent to his coveted title of Governor of Chile, returning to the settlement with his position and prestige considerably strengthened.
Construction begins on Santiago’s cathedral in 1558.