Appeal Concerning the Priests

Overview

About thirty pages, an excerpted appeal from the Andean nobleman Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s enormous illustrated letter to King Philip III of Spain, composed over decades in the early seventeenth century and completed around 1615, a document of roughly twelve hundred pages combining written argument with hundreds of Guaman Poma’s own drawings that was never actually delivered to the king and lay unknown in the Danish royal library until its rediscovery in 1908.

This excerpt focuses on Guaman Poma’s most sustained and specific indictment within the larger work, a parish-by-parish, priest-by-priest catalogue documenting what colonial clergy in Peru actually did to the Andean communities placed under their spiritual authority, written by an author who identifies himself throughout as a sincere, practicing Christian rather than an opponent of the faith he sees the clergy themselves betraying.

What happens

The catalogue of abuses. Guaman Poma proceeds systematically through the colonial clergy’s actual conduct, documenting specific, named patterns of abuse, priests extorting unpaid labor and cloth from their Andean parishioners, beating and imprisoning those who dare to complain, keeping women and fathering children despite their vows, selling the sacraments for personal profit, and seizing the property of the recently dead.

Rejecting the isolated-incident defense. By cataloguing these abuses parish by parish and priest by priest rather than presenting isolated anecdotes, Guaman Poma builds a cumulative case that these were not exceptions committed by a few bad individuals but a systematic pattern enabled by the colonial clerical system’s actual structure and the distance of any effective royal oversight.

Distinguishing faith from its administrators. Throughout the appeal, Guaman Poma insists that his complaint targets specific corrupt men rather than Christianity itself, a faith he professes sincerely and repeatedly, arguing that these priests’ actual conduct makes genuine Christian community life and practice impossible for the Andeans they are supposed to serve and instruct.

The direct appeal to the king. Guaman Poma addresses King Philip III directly, building his argument on the premise that the abuses he documents continue specifically because the distant Spanish crown remains genuinely unaware of them, and that presenting the king with accurate, detailed information would itself be sufficient to prompt royal action against the offending clergy.

A letter never delivered. Despite the decades of labor and the considerable rhetorical care Guaman Poma invested in making his case persuasive to its intended royal reader, the completed letter never reached Philip III or any subsequent Spanish monarch, remaining unknown to history until a scholar rediscovered the manuscript in Copenhagen’s royal library in 1908.

How to read it

Read the appeal’s parish-by-parish cataloguing structure as a deliberate rhetorical strategy rather than simple repetition; Guaman Poma builds his case precisely by refusing to let any single abuse read as an isolated incident, accumulating specific, named instances until the pattern itself becomes the argument.

Pay close attention to how carefully Guaman Poma distinguishes his critique of specific corrupt clergy from any critique of Christianity itself, a distinction crucial to understanding his actual rhetorical position as a sincere Christian convert seeking reform rather than a critic of colonial religion as such.

Notice the appeal’s underlying assumption about royal ignorance, that Philip III would act against these abuses if he genuinely knew about them, and consider what this assumption reveals about how colonial subjects like Guaman Poma understood, or hoped to understand, the relationship between distant royal authority and local colonial administration.

Consider the appeal’s eventual fate, composed with tremendous care over decades yet never delivered and unknown for nearly three centuries, as relevant to how you weigh its rhetorical strategies; Guaman Poma wrote persuasively for a royal reader who, as it happened, never received the document at all.

Read this appeal alongside Broken Spears, the Nahua accounts of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, to compare how two indigenous authors writing from within different colonial contexts, decades apart, documented and interpreted the specific harms of Spanish colonial rule for very different intended audiences.

Questions it raises

• Does Guaman Poma’s insistence that his complaint targets corrupt individual priests rather than Christianity itself represent genuine theological conviction, strategic rhetorical necessity given his royal Christian audience, or some combination of both? How should a reader weigh these possibilities?
• What does the appeal’s underlying assumption, that royal ignorance rather than royal complicity explains the abuses’ continuation, suggest about the actual relationship between distant imperial authority and local colonial administration in early seventeenth-century Spanish America?
• How does Guaman Poma’s parish-by-parish cataloguing method function rhetorically compared to a more narrative or anecdotal approach to documenting abuse? Does this systematic structure make the appeal more persuasive, or does it risk numbing a reader to the specific human suffering each entry represents?
• Given that the completed letter never actually reached its intended royal reader, how should a modern reader’s knowledge of this eventual fate shape their understanding of the appeal’s original rhetorical strategies and assumptions about its likely reception?
• What does Guaman Poma’s dual identity, indigenous Andean nobleman and sincere Christian convert, contribute to the appeal’s specific credibility and rhetorical force that a purely external critic of colonial Christianity could not have achieved?
• How does this appeal’s eventual rediscovery in 1908, nearly three centuries after its composition, complicate or enrich its status as a historical document? Does a text unknown to its intended audience for centuries still function as the persuasive appeal its author designed, or does it become something else entirely once read only by later scholars?