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114 introduction w hen Herbert Bolton published his classic narrative history of the coronado expedition in 1949, he included in it a list of “lost documents ” relating to the expedition. these were documents known, on the basis of references to them in other surviving documents, to have been written but not known to have been preserved. 1 included among the nearly 70 documents on Bolton’s list were two described as “King’s letter to coronado,” one supposedly dated June 11, 1540, and the other, June 21 of the same year. in his brief comments in the entries for these documents, Bolton conjectured that the two might actually represent only a single manuscript. 2 nearly 50 years later, in the catalog for the December 1995 auction at christie’s in new york, there appeared a stunning announcement. item 58 among the many offerings was described as a “manuscript letter signed on behalf of King charles v by francisco de Loyasa [sic], president of the council of the indies to francisco vasquez [sic] de coronado, madrid: 21 June 1540.” 3 in response to the catalog announcement, a santa fe, new mexico, textile dealer, mark winter, put together a group that hoped to make the winning offer at the auction. when bids for the letter soared far beyond the auction house’s estimated sale price, winter and his group dropped out, leaving the document to another private collector. not long after the conclusion of the auction, however, winter was contacted by the document’s former owner. His message to the disappointed bidder was that he still owned a second manuscript, thought at the time to be a draft of the letter that had sold at auction. And he wanted to sell, this time for a fixed price, no bidding or haggling. winter and his partners were interested. in an effort to confirm for themselves the manuscript’s authenticity, they asked us to look the document over. we said we would, and a few days later it arrived by delivery service. we then transcribed and translated the document, compared it with a photograph of its former companion document, which had sold during the auction, and noted any oddities or apparent discrepancies between the two. there had been little reason to suspect the genuineness of the manuscript, and our study of the text and scribal usage (our area of particular competence) raised no doubts about the document as a sixteenth-century artifact. in the end, our principal concern was over the document’s provenance and how it had come to be for sale at all, since all the rest of the surviving documentary record of the coronado expedition resides in public institutions. specifically, we worried that it had been stolen. Although our curiosity about its origin was never fully satisfied, we were convinced that the document had probably never been in the possession of a public archive or other such institution. the winter partnership did subsequently purchase the document, and it is lodged in santa fe, with some hope that eventually it will be added to the permanent collection Document 10 The King’s Confirmation of Vázquez de Coronado’s Appointment , June 11, 1540 private collection King’s Confirmation of Appointment, June 11, 1540 115 of the museum of new mexico. its text and translation are published here for the first time. our initial examination and continuing study of the single-folio manuscript have revealed a number of significant facts about it. As is clear both from the handwriting and the signature at the bottom right corner of folio 1r, it was prepared in the ciudad de méxico by Antonio de turcios, chief escribano of the royal audiencia there. rather than being a draft of the auctioned letter, it is a copy of it, made once the original had reached nueva españa from spain, likely in the fall of 1540. that means that the expedition, having departed from the ciudad de méxico ten months or more before the arrival of the letter, had not awaited receipt of the king’s confirmation of vázquez de coronado’s appointment as captain general. this procedure was neither particularly unusual nor an overstepping of authority; the resident viceroy had full power of the monarch in most matters, including an appointment such as this one. even the viceroy, though, was constrained to obtain license from the king before launching a major expedition of conquest and reconnaissance. following a lengthy legal wrangle with other contenders...

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