Bastions of the Virgin: Francisco de Florencia’s Marian cartography of Mexico City

Abstract

The Zodíaco mariano is a well-known colonial text from New Spain, originally penned by Francisco de Florencia in the 1690s but later modified, amplified, and published by Juan Antonio de Oviedo in 1755. This essay concentrates on Florencia's contributions to this compendium of Marian images, specifically the symbolism of the four Marian bastions in the section on the Archbishopric of Mexico. It argues that Florencia invented a Marian cartography of Mexico City by drawing upon early modern Marian atlases, Marian chorography, and quadripartite descriptions of Mexico Tenochtitlan and Mexico City in colonial chronicles. The Marian bastions he imagines for the viceregal capital—the Virgins of Guadalupe, Remedies, Bala, and Piety—were shaped by both Christian astrology and cosmological visions of urban space shared by both the Mexica and Spaniards.

Keywords:

• Francisco de Florencia
• Juan Antonio de Oviedo
• Zodíaco mariano
• Virgin Mary
• New Spain
• Mexico City
• Tenochtitlan
• sacred space
• chorography
• geography
• cartography
• creoles
• Jesuits

Acknowledgements

Kenneth Mills offered generous feedback on earlier manifestations of this article during my doctoral studies at the University of Toronto. John F. Schwaller, Dana Leibsohn, and Rosario I. Granados-Salinas provided me with helpful comments as this piece transitioned from a conference paper to a journal article. And the anonymous readers gave me many fruitful suggestions to strengthen my argument. I am grateful to them all for their time and generosity.

Biographical note

Jason Dyck is a lecturer of history at Trent University Durham in Oshawa, Canada. His research focuses on colonial religion, missionary work, and sacred history in the early modern Spanish world. He is the author of Vidas de los varones ilustres. El tercer volumen de la Historia de la Provincia de la Compañía de Jesús de Nueva España, a transcription and scholarly introduction to the third volume of Francisco de Florencia’s 1694 provincial chronicle (currently under review). His articles have appeared in Estudios de Historia Novohispana and the Florida Historical Quarterly. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the life and writings of Florencia and a transcription project on the missionary histories of Juan de Albizuri.

ORCID

Jason Dyck http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8157-0125

Notes

1 Both Hernán Cortés (2002 [1520], 18, 80) and Bernal Díaz del Castillo (2000 [1632], 60, 89) reference this episode, which was later elaborated upon by Francisco López de Gómara (1511–ca. 1559) (1997 [1552], 25, 125).

2 Despite his extensive literary trail, Florencia has received limited attention in scholarship beyond his role in the development of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

3 Others suggest Marian compendiums like the Zodíaco mariano offer a ‘Marian geography’ (Alberro 1999, 189), a ‘sacred topography’ (Christin 2014, 306), or a ‘spiritual geography’ (Brading 1990, 189; 2001, 140).

4 Some of the most important studies for New Spain include Lafaye 1976; Pagden 1987; Brading 1991; Rubial García 1999; Alberro 1999; Cañizares-Esguerra 2001; Morgan 2002; More 2013; and Villela 2016. For Spanish America and the Atlantic world, see Earle 2007; Burkholder 2013; and Bauer and Mazzotti 2009.

5 Buisseret (2007, 1148, 1155) points out that map-making increased in the second half of the seventeenth century. Jesuits began to map their missionary provinces in northern New Spain and mapping La Florida became a major priority for viceregal authorities in Mexico City when René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle (1643–1687) sailed down the Mississippi River and arrived at the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico in 1685.

6 Included in this total are 238 images dedicated to Christ or the cross and another twenty to other saints. For more on the locations and origins of colonial images in New Spain, see Taylor 2016, 567–603.

7 Florencia published a menology (1671), four sermons (1680, 1682, 1683, 1685), three sacred biographies (1673, 1684, 1689), six devotional histories of Catholic images (1685, 1688, 1689, 1689, 1692, 1694), and the first volume of his provincial chronicle (1694). Lorenzo de Mendoza (fl. 17th century) and Gerónimo de Valladolid (fl. 17th century), local priests in charge of the Virgins of Remedies and Guadalupe respectively, asked Florencia to pen devotional histories of these two images. Diego Velázquez de la Cadena (b. 1638), an Augustinian provincial, requested an account of the Crucified Christ of Chalma. The Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz (1637–1699), and the Bishop of Guadalajara, Juan de Santiago y León Garabito (1641–1693), approached him to write about the Archangel San Miguel and the Virgins of Zapopan and of San Juan de los Lagos. Padres lenguas (multi-lingual priests) at the Jesuit Indian College of San Gregorio in Mexico City petitioned him to craft a new account of the Virgin of Loreto. And various Jesuit provincials ordered Florencia to write his menology, sacred biographies, and provincial chronicle.

8 According to Francisco Xavier Lazcano (1702–1762), himself a Jesuit and Oviedo’s biographer, the Zodíaco mariano was Florencia’s ‘extremely ingenious concept’ that remained in an embryonic state until Oviedo later ‘perfected’ it (1760, 340, 46).

9 The bishopric of Guatemala was raised to archdiocesan status in 1745, ten years before the Zodíaco mariano was published.

10 Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de México de la Compañía de Jesús, caja 45, ff. 1–4.

11 Taylor notes that eighty-two of the urban images in the Zodíaco mariano have origins in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

12 Florencia’s devotional histories on Marian images focus on the Virgins of Remedies, Guadalupe, Loreto, San Juan de los Lagos, and Zapopan.

13 Archivo General de la Nación de México [AGN], Jesuitas I-23, exp. 5, ff. 15–16.

14 Oviedo did the same thing with Florencia’s Menologio (1671). At the request of his superiors, he amplified the text and published it in 1747, placing asterisks beside the lives of the ninety-one Jesuits he added to distinguish his entries from those of Florencia.

15 Real Biblioteca [Madrid], Manuscritos II-2012.

16 Biblioteca Nacional de España, Sala Cervantes, MSS 12878, IIr.

17 Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia ‘Dr. Eusebio Dávalos Hurtado’ [Mexico] [BNAH], Fondo Jesuita, carpeta IX, doc. 8, f. 20v.

18 AGN, Jesuitas I-23, exp. 5, f. 16v.

19 Real Academia de Historia [Madrid], Jesuitas (Tomos), 9-3760/29, f. 4r.

20 For an extensive treatment of Florencia’s vision of La Florida and its relationship to New Spain, see Dyck 2018.

21 City views were another way in which early modern people represented their cities, which Kagan places into two categories: (1) chorographic views of the city as an architectural entity (urbs) and (2) communicentric views of the city as a community (civitas). Images of the Virgin Mary were often at the centre of communicentric views. See Kagan 2000a, 107–50.

22 Miguel Zerón Zapata’s (fl. 17th century) seventeenth-century chronicle of Puebla de los Ángeles (1945) is among the few chorographic works from the mid-colonial period.

23 For the most important studies on the Virgin of Guadalupe, see Curcio-Nagy 1996; Miranda Godínez 2001; and Granados-Salinas 2012b.

24 The one image from Cisneros’s Historia del principio missing from the Zodíaco mariano is the Virgen del Tránsito in the Hospital de los Desamparados.

25 The literature on the Virgin of Guadalupe is vast, but among the most import works in recent decades are Poole 1995 and 2006; León-Portilla 2000; Brading 2001; Taylor 2010, 97–161; and Peterson 2014.

26 The historiography on Our Ladies of Bala and Piety is limited, the best studies being two theses from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. See Ruiz Jaramillo 2007 and Mora Reyes 2015.

27 Florencia most likely incorporated his four Marian stars into his original draft of the Zodíaco mariano, which, in the 1755 edition, appear in the section covering the Archbishopric of Mexico. The prelude to this part is virtually identical to portions of chapter XXXI in La estrella del norte (176v–77v). Whether Oviedo drafted his own prelude or simply modified an existing one by Florencia, he was clearly drawing upon the work of his confrere with limited intervention.

28 The Franciscan Diego de Valadés (1533–ca. 1582) includes an engraving of Mexico Tenochtitlan in his Rhetorica Christiana (1579) that features the Templo Mayor surrounded by various bastions. Serge Gruzinski notes that Valadés fashioned the great pyramid in the form of a Roman-style cella, an architectural feature in Italian paintings designed for the Virgin and other saints (2002, 156). I thank Rosario I. Granados for pointing me to this engraving.

29 Florencia cites ‘paintings’ (pinturas) or ‘maps’ (mapas) in La estrella del norte (1688, 93r–94v), the Narración de la maravillosa aparición (1692, 69), and in the Historia de la Provincia (1694a, 214).

30 Florencia quotes Cortés’s religious homily atop the Templo Mayor in La milagrosa invención (1685, 10r), but he does so through the work of the Franciscan chronicler Juan de Torquemada (ca. 1562–1624).

31 BNAH, Fondo Jesuita, carpeta IX, doc. 8, f. 8r.

32 Mexico Tenochtitlan had four major avenues extending from its Sacred Precinct, but only three of these (Tepeyac, Tlacopan, and Iztapalapa) became causeways that connected the island city to the mainland. The fourth avenue extended eastwards towards a canoe port in Tetamazolco, which was a launching pad into Lake Texcoco. See Gardiner 1956, 33–44 and Hardoy 2007, 176–78.

33 BNAH, Fondo Jesuita, carpeta IX, doc. 8, ff. 12v, 13r.

34 Beyond Marian images, Florencia also provides mini-catalogues of miraculous crosses under the care of the Augustinians in New Spain (1689, 30–36) and images of the Archangel San Miguel in the bishopric of Puebla (1692, 162–65). Vetancurt lists twenty-eight shrines dedicated to both Mary and Christ in their Province of the Holy Gospel (1697, 127–35).

35 For other Novohispano cities with their own Marian bastions, see Victoria 1988, 109.

36 There is a growing literature on how Mexico City was shaped by indigenous conceptions of space in the early colonial period. For a few examples, see Connell 2011; Mundy 2015; and Truitt 2018.

37 BNAH, Fondo Jesuita, carpeta IX, doc. 8, f. 16r.