Church, State, and Open Space on the Frontier of the Spanish Empire: Chile, 1795

Blog post by Brittany Erwin, JCB Research Associate

By the eighteenth century, the Spanish monarchy ruled a vast empire in the Americas. It stretched far and wide, through the busy streets of Mexico City, into the tropical rainforests of the Amazon and up to the dizzying heights of Cuzco and Potosí. The Spanish American territories were significantly larger than Spain itself, covering over 13 million square miles compared to Spain’s 500,000.

Since the 1500s, the monarchy had sent tens of thousands of Spaniards to the Americas to staff its extensive bureaucracy and administer the church. However, there were never quite enough Spanish officials to devote equal attention to every part of the empire. Larger cities and busier ports took priority. More remote locations, like Chile, ended up with fewer available resources.

Located at the southern tip of the empire, and covered by steep mountains and harsh deserts, Chile was home to only a relatively thin network of Spanish colonial administrators, even into the 1700s. Spanish rule remained concentrated within a few cities in central Chile. While missionaries and military officers had founded a series of fortresses and settlements throughout the northern and southern frontiers, Indigenous communities including the Mapuche held control of much of those territories. Historical documents that survive from this period reveal that many local officials felt the pressure of this situation. Armed with limited resources, they juggled orders from the king to expand Spanish control of the region with the reality of fierce and enduring Indigenous resistance.

A Chilean missionary named Juan Ignacio Molina published a detailed exploration of Spain’s tenuous hold over Chile in 1795. His book traced the long history of Spanish rule in Chile, beginning with the violent and costly conquest of the region in the 1540s. Its final chapter takes the reader up to the present day (the late-eighteenth century).

Molina was born in Chile, and he became a Jesuit missionary as a teenager. His life experiences helped him understand Chile’s social customs and religious practices. They also gave him the opportunity to witness both the power and the limits of the Spanish government in this area. His book offers an inside look into the complexities of governing the church and the state on a so-called “periphery” of the empire.

However, Molina’s book contains more than words. Molina also included three detailed maps of Chilean territories to help illustrate the mountainous geography and track the status of Spanish rule along the frontier. After more than two centuries of warfare and fraught attempts by Spanish governors to forge alliances with Indigenous authorities, Spanish control of Chile’s northern and southern expanses remained largely confined to a tenuous network of forts and missions. This map situates several of these posts along the Bío Bío River, a contested frontier zone between Spanish-claimed territory and Mapuche lands. These regions became complex arenas of war, diplomacy, trade, and exchange.

For example, Molina’s map identifies the Plaza de Nacimiento in the bottom right corner. Nacimiento was a Spanish colonial fort and settlement established in 1603 near the confluence of the Bío Bío and Vergara rivers. Built to secure Spain’s position along the frontier with Mapuche territory, the fort was repeatedly abandoned, rebuilt, and relocated amid ongoing conflict. Its history illustrates the military strength of the Mapuche and the enduring difficulty that Spanish authorities faced in turning their territorial claims into lasting control. The historic fort at Nacimiento survives today as a restored heritage site within the town’s main plaza.

The Nacimiento fort in south-central Chile was not the only site that endured waves of Spanish settlement and repeated invasions, followed by rebuilding efforts and additional attacks. Molina chronicles the turbulent histories of more than a dozen strongholds along Chile’s periphery. His first-hand testimony, taken from his own experiences, from his conversations with Chilean officials and missionaries throughout the area, and from his own research, reveals the massive resources required to sustain Spanish rule in these territories. Molina’s description of the violence and instability of this frontier zone also exposed the consequences of the empire’s chronic shortages of manpower and supplies.

In Chile, neither the church nor the military could overcome the limits imposed by geography, scarce resources, and the enduring autonomy of Indigenous communities. The open spaces that stretched beyond Spain’s principal urban settlements in central Chile were not empty, but inhabited territories over which the monarchy struggled to establish lasting control. Molina’s maps offer a glimpse of what imperial rule sometimes looked like on the ground. It was not a uniform extension of royal and ecclesiastical authority across the whole of the Americas. Rather, it was an uneven and often precarious presence, sustained through a combination of military force, religious institutions, and negotiation.