"Para todo hay remedio, si no es para la muerte." — Miguel de Cervantes
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My direct ancestors stretching back to the beginning of time share three experiences with me: birth, reproducing, and eventually, I will join their ranks in death. As I mark this all-too-brief time between nothingness and nothingness, this year I found two deathbed portraits of probable 16th century ancestors! Their lives were very different, but María de Bolaño and Pedro de la Torre left behind legacies of bitter family struggles and lasting glimpses of their final repose.
Haughty María
Thankfully and unexpectedly, Rocío Sánchez published in her blog last year the family tree of my Spanish 9th-great-grandfather, Francisco Félix de la Plata (c.1660-1731), a settler of Socorro, Colombia who was born near Sevilla but whose ancestors originated in Galicia. He descended from a Spaniard with typical pretentions of nobility — my 12th-great-grandfather, Andrés Márquez de Castropol. In 1590, Andrés and his brother filed an hidalguía petition — a ludicrous attempt to prove to bureaucrats the "purity" of their "noble" blood, so they could avoid paying commoners' taxes. Somehow, this document survived and was digitized by the University of Missouri! God knows how the Missourians came to own it.
Andrés mentioned his maternal grandparents, Ares de Omaña "El Rubio" and Mayor de Ribadeneira y Baamonde, and tracking this "blond" man and wife on Google, I found that the wills of Mayor's parents still exist! The Mariscal (Marshal) Álvaro González de Ribadeneira wrote his will in 1521, and his widow, María de Bolaño, wrote hers in 1522, and the documents are transcribed in this uploaded file, starting on page 845. The big shock is that Álvaro and María disinherited two of their daughters, my 14th-great-grandmother Mayor and her sister Teresa, for marrying lower status (desigual) men. The rejected daughters each received 5 sueldos — mere pocket change — from their father, nothing more.
María de Bolaño, who died in 1527, requested to be buried not with her husband, but in a seperate church with her parents: the Monastery of Santa María in Meira, a small town of roughly 1,800 people in Galicia, Spain!
Meira, with the Monastery of Santa María in the middle.
The blog Galicia Pueblo a Pueblo does a fantastic photographic tour of this 12th-century church, which has a typical medieval cross-shaped floor plan. By the northern wall of the left transcript (or the "left arm" of the cross shape), one can view the stone effigy of my *15th-great-grandmother, María de Bolaño, carved into the lid of her sarcophagus, where she has rested for five centuries!
María is shown resting on a pillow, wearing a simple cap and tunic, with folded hands clutching a rope (maybe a cincture?). One inscription on the sarcophagus reads "Year of Fifteen Hundred and Eighteen it was completed thanks be to God," so the carving was completed before María died, but she is depicted as either dying or laid out for burial. Below is a page from a late 15th-century illuminated French Book of Hours which apparently depicts a dying woman meeting St. John the Baptist, and you can see the woman's simple white bedclothes resemble María's outfit.
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Maybe María's dress is simple, but her sarcophagus is fancy, including the family crest combining the Bolaño family insignia of bolo (Galician bread) and lamb with the Baamonde family insignia of fish. The crest is flanked by a fruited vine and a castle with two uneven towers. Another inscription says that her parents, "Don Pedro de Miranda and his wife Doña Inés," are also buried in the sacrophagus, which seems to be set on top of two sideways stone pillars.
Pedro de Miranda, who was apparently called "the Cruel," fought alongside Pero Pardo de Cela (died 1483), a lionized Gallego knight who was executed for opposing Queen Isabel la Católica (of Columbus fame) and backing her half-sister, Juana la Beltraneja. María de Bolaño seems to have only fought with her family — besides disowning two daughters, she claimed in her will that her late husband had forced her to favor her son, the younger Pedro de Miranda, "against my will, out of reverence and fear of my husband, being constrained and pressured to do so." Once María was widowed, she drew up another will reversing young Pedro's inheritance, and set aside money for Saturday mass to be said in the Meira monastery in perpetuity, in the names of her and her parents.
Half a millennium later, María still lies with her parents, and I wonder when the perpetual weekly masses in her honor petered out. At what point did María de Bolaño pass from formidable heiress to antique curiosity?
Woeful Pedro
Pedro de la Torre a.k.a. Pedro de Torres (c.1532-1581) was an unremarkable Spanish settler of Colombia, but his brother, Diego de Torres (c.1549-1590), was a genius. They were both sons of a conquistador, Juan de Torres (died 1570), but Pedro was a legitimate son born in Spain, and Diego was an illegitimate child born to Catalina de Moyachoque, a Muisca Indian woman and the sister of the cacique (chieftain) of Turmequé. Juan brought Pedro to Colombia in the late 1550s to inherit the family encomienda (basically a plantation, enslaving local Indians), but after Juan's death Diego petitioned for his right to rule over Turmequé, not as an outsider encomendero, but as the rightful cacique, since Muisca inheritance passed from maternal uncle to nephew.
Diego spent the latter half of his life before colonial and Spanish officials, had two audiences with King Felipe II(!), and suffered multiple imprisonments, but never fulfilled his perceived birthright. Many histories, including Max Deardorff's A Tale of Two Granadas, tell Diego's full story, but the main point is Diego represented the rising population of mestizos (mixed Spanish and Indigenous descent), and Spanish authorities feared he was likely to rebel, since he was too Indigenous to be a proper encomendero and too Spanish to be a proper cacique. Diego wrote multiple petitions, arguing that he was a proper Christian and loyal subject of the king, but was forced to live out his days in Spain, to avoid lifelong prison or execution in Colombia. Mestizos had the last laugh, as they steadily rose in the colonial hierarchy and finally gained the upper hand after independence.
Monument to Diego de Torres in the main plaza of Turmequé, Colombia (Dreamstime.com)
It's unclear how I'm exactly related to this Torres family. My 11th-great-grandmother, Beatriz de Torres, was described as a "mestiza of Turmequé" by the colonial-era genealogist Juan Flórez de Ocáriz. Beatriz lived long enough to gift livestock to her newborn great-granddaughter, Marcela de Rueda Sarmiento, in the 1640s (as cited in the probate case of Marcela's father). The historian Raimundo Rivas said in his 1938 book Los fundadores de Bogotá that Diego's brother, Pedro de Torres, had an illegitimate daughter named Beatriz, and my best guess is that Pedro's daughter is the same as my ancestor Beatriz. Other online genealogies guess that Beatriz is Diego's sister, but there's no proof of that theory.
All this to say, if Pedro is my ancestor, then a remarkable depiction of his death survives, possibly drawn by his brother, Diego de Torres! In his petitions to Spanish authorities, Diego showed off his top-notch Renaissance education, including rhetoric, learned citations, hand-drawn maps of Andean Colombia, and an astounding sepia ink drawing from c.1584 showing Diego right before his escape from jail, juxtaposed with his dead brother Pedro, surrounded by mourning family and friends. The art historian Patricia Zalamea Fajardo's essay "The Drawings of the Cacique de Turmequé" notes that if Diego did draw the picture, it predates the oldest surviving signed portrait from South America, which dates to 1597.
Diego de Torres (shown imprisoned in the center) drew the vigil for his dead brother, Pedro de la Torre!
Zalamea Fajardo notes that this drawing's sophisticated "continuous narrative" combines two separate events — Pedro's death in prison in Tunja in November 1581 and Diego's escape from prison in February 1581 — to reinforce "Diego’s identification as both victim, witness, and active claimant." The vigil around Pedro in the foreground "demands that we join in, together with the other figures, as mourners and witnesses to this unjust death."
The mourners are not stylized figures but carefully labeled individuals. The weeping women on the right are Pedro's mother, aunt, two sisters, and a niece. The six children are Pedro's legitimate children: Juan, Alonso, María, Isabel, Francisco, and Pedro. (Beatriz, an illegitimate daughter, is not shown.) The three men, Pedro Martínez de Salazar, Diego de Vergara, and Juan Prieto Maldonado, were all imprisoned alongside Pedro de Torres. Two men are shown in chains around their legs and Juan Prieto cries and clutches a handkerchief, like Pedro's sister at the far right. It's a vivid picture of what people wore at the time, but Pedro de Torres is disturbingly nude, save for shackles around his ankles.
Close-up of Pedro de la Torre
"Pedro de la Torre, regidor [councilor]," as my possible 12th-great-grandfather is labeled in the drawing, at first warred and then reconciled with his brother Diego, and the pair gained influential political enemies. Diego wrote that Pedro "died a violent death, blinded and with his hands amputated," according to Zalamea. The mourning men have hair and beards, but Pedro is hairless, perhaps hinting at his weakened, deprived state. While Diego did not depict the full horror of Pedro's final mangling, a crucifix on his chest reinforces his death's cruelty and the robed female mourners invoke Pietà scenes of the Virgin Mary and dead Jesus. Diego wrote directly on the drawing of Pedro's body that he died "in your [royal] service," and Pedro's captors refused to give him last rites as he died. Pedro is surrounded by two lit candles and his six children, reduced to the size of lapdogs to stress their helplessness. The bleak vigil takes up the entire page, and the only indication of the broader world is Diego's cell in the background.
Detail of Diego's self-portrait as prisoner, on the cover of Deardorff's book.
Diego showed himself right before he escaped from jail, dressed as a proper Spaniard including neck ruff and hat, weighed down by a chain around his waist, seeing the friend who would lead him away. He wrote that two years after fleeing jail, he still suffered from open sores and injuries received in custody. Amazingly, Diego earned his second audience with King Felipe II in October 1584, and presented the king with his published book, Memorial of Grievances, detailing his case and mistreatment. The Council of the Indies acquitted Diego of charges of mutiny and rebellion in 1587, but barred him from returning to Colombia or receiving the title of cacique. Diego died in Spain, leaving behind a Spanish wife and young Spanish-born children.
María left behind her sense of false humility, piously lying atop her family crest. Pedro left behind a visual record of his injust death. When death comes for us, what messages can be derived from our thousands of selfies and tagged photos?
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.
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