Beard-Pulling and Furniture-Rearranging: Conflict Within the Seventeenth-Century Audiencia of Santo Domingo

On April 8, 1626, a violent confrontation took place between the president and one of the oidores of the audiencia of Santo Domingo. According to a letter from oidor Alonso de Cereceda, President Diego de Acuña had called three of the magistrates and the fiscal of the audiencia to his residence in order to question them in private about their response to a message from Acuña's wife, doña Ana de Acuña, instructing them to release a prisoner. When Cereceda suggested that doña Ana's involvement in official business was undermining the tribunal's authority, Acuña flew into a rage and physically assaulted the oidor, punching him in the body and face and knocking his chair to the ground.¹ After the other two oidores and the fiscal pulled the two men apart, Acuña called some of the presidio soldiers into the chamber to guard the letrado officials with drawn swords. Cereceda claimed that while these other witnesses were present, Acuña "attacked me two or three more times, throwing punches at me and putting his hand to my beard for greater injury."² He was then escorted home by the sargento mayor of the presidio, while the other officials remained to calm the president. Following this altercation, Cereceda stopped attending the court's audiencia pública and acuerdo sessions in person, sending his votes with the audiencia scribes instead, until Acuña finally had him placed under arrest.³

While the physical violence of this incident was quite rare, discord among the superior ministers of the audiencia was not.⁴ Scholars of colonial administration have described a variety of quarrels involving members of colonial audiencias from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, but the roots and significance of such interpersonal conflict, especially for the coherence of the audiencia as an institution, have received less attention.⁵ As portrayed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century royal legislation, the audiencia was clearly defined as a superior court of appeal, composed of a president, four or five oidores, a fiscal, and a variety of supporting personnel. The viceregal audiencias in Lima and Mexico were larger and somewhat more complex but had the same kinds of judicial and administrative responsibilities.⁶ Yet the local population interacted with the colonial audiencia not just as an abstract, monolithic royal institution, but also as a collection of individuals who might be favorable to specific interests. Tamar Herzog has emphasized the role of secondary officials in the decision-making process in the audiencia of Quito and the importance of ties between superior ministers and local elites, and suggests that the boundaries between institution and society were largely illusory.⁷ In the seventeenth-century audiencia of Santo Domingo, it appears that the regular disagreements among the president, oidores, and fiscal had a considerable effect on the public perception of the tribunal as a corporate entity and on the way in which it dispensed royal justice to local residents. Interpersonal conflict was in fact inherent in the way colonial audiencias operated, though the individual interests of the court's personnel might raise the level of discord at times.

The encounter between Acuña and Cereceda was primarily a struggle over honor between different kinds of officials, military and letrado, but it was also related to the structure and operation of the audiencia.⁸ Cereceda's insinuation that the president, by allowing his wife to participate in the audiencia's business, was not properly controlling her was a grave insult to Acuña's masculinity, and therefore to his personal honor.⁹ It was also, despite Cereceda's later protestations of innocence, a clear provocation, as it was made in the presence of three colleagues.¹⁰ The affront was still more damaging because of Acuña's status as governor and captain-general of the island, in addition to his position as president of the audiencia. A public challenge to his decision to release a prisoner demonstrated that the letrado members of the audiencia could second-guess his authority and thus...