Hi all
Here is some information about Andres Almonaster y Rojas, a civil servant in Spanish New Orleans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andres_Almonaster_y_Rojas
Here is a neat mention of his coat of arms, albeit without a blazon or image:
Quote:
...at the same time Almonaster presented his family’s Coat of Arms and a certificate from the King’s Chronicler certifying to the nobility of his ancestry and the antiquity of his lineage, which he ordered returned to him after being recorded and filed…
http://www.neworleanspubliclibrary.org/~nopl/inv/digest/digest56.htm
Almonaster helped pay for the rebuilding of the church that is now St. Louis Cathedral, one of New Orleans’ most notable landmarks. He is buried there, and according to this book Almonaster "was conveyed inside the Cathedral to the vault covered by the slab that to-day bears his coat of arms."
I just messaged the self stylized "Orleans Herald" on Facebook to see if he has an image of it.
Jeremy Keith Hammond;100739 wrote:
I just messaged the self stylized "Orleans Herald" on Facebook to see if he has an image of it.
Here’s his response from Facebook…
Quote:
We will have to check the cathedral for the arms of Don Andrés. They do not appear in the vault slab photos we could find. However, they are emblazoned on his portrait housed at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans. We are searching for a record of the blazon.
http://www.americanheraldry.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=1281&stc=1&d=1380123689
I can’t quite make it out.
Has any more information about these arms been found? It would be a nice additional to our Early American Arms series, and seems frustrating that they are shown in a portrait that we can’t make out very well
I suspect that Almonaster’s motivation for having his arms and status recorded and filed with the Cabildo of New Orleans can be traced to the privileges accorded to hidalgos, or untitled nobles, in the Spanish empire. Although both Spanish commoners and hidalgos used arms, hidalgos were legally entitled to monopolize municipal offices, were exempt from having to pay most taxes, couldn’t be imprisoned for unpaid debts, couldn’t be tortured or whipped if sent to jail for other offenses, and were entitled to an honorable decapitation rather than the dishonor of the gallows if sentenced to death.
These tangible benefits made hidalgo status very attractive to Spanish commoners, and the colonial authorities used this and other incentives to encourage settlement in their North American colonies, with mixed results. In 1731 sixteen families of commoners from the Canary Islands were induced to settle in what is today San Antonio, Texas. Raised to the status of hidalgos upon arrival, they took advantage of another privilege: hidalgos were forbidden from performing most forms of trade and menial labor. According to the historian Donald Chipman, "the Canary Islanders, no doubt impressed with their nobility, came to resent the hard work required in tilling the land. In a letter to the King, the Viceroy advised against sending any more Islanders to populate Texas. The viceroy insisted that the transplanted Canary Islanders had to be supervised, fed, clothed, and cared for like infants." Ennoblement as a means to promote colonization was probably more successful in neighboring New Mexico. A Royal edict from 1602 decreed that settlers in that colony could petition for hidalgo status after a minimum of five years of service, rather than immediately upon arrival.
Commoners in Spanish colonial North America consequently had financial and other incentives to claim hidalgo status, even if this was untrue. Colonial authorities, eager for financial revenue, also had an incentive to tax legitimate hidalgos like commoners. Unsurprisingly, these disputes usually ended up in the Spanish courts…specifically the Sala de Hijosdalgo, which was attached to the Royal Chancery Courts of Castile. Hidalgos at these trials were subject to a legal examination. Inquiries concerning legitimate birth, religious orthodoxy and ethnic background were made. According to the historian Elisa Ruiz Garcia, the litigants were also asked about their family coat of arms. Litigants who were successful in defending their hidalgo status were entitled to a final writ, called a carta ejecutoria de hidalguía (often emblazoned with their arms), and it is this type of document that I suspect Almonaster had registered with the municipal authorities.
I am often tempted to imagine colonists in Spanish North America coming to the New World searching for increased economic opportunities who, in order to get a fresh start, reinvented themselves and their background to obtain greater legal freedoms. Although both Spanish commoners and hidalgos used arms, it is conceivable that a commoner in some distant American outpost without arms might adopt arms in order to adopt and make convincing the persona of an hidalgo. I like to imagine arms in this instance helping defend and shield oneself against things like judicial torture in the old west.
Unlike France, where something like 80% of all arms registered in the late 17th century were owned by commoners, in Spain close to half of the nobility do not use arms but of the arms used in Spain it has been estimated that over 90% are those of the nobility (both titled and non-titled). The arms found in the "carta ejecutoria de hidalguia" (if there is one) are not certified to belong to the petitioner as these documents only explore the pertitioner’s claim to nobility. Often the coats of arms on such documents were those of unrelated families which bore the same surname, or where blazoned incorrectly.
Indeed! And according to the historian Richard Kagan many recipients of cartas ejecutorias de hidalguia weren’t even hidalgos:
Quote:
...a panel of four magistrates heard cases filed by hidalgos whose claim to nobility was in doubt. These hidalgos had either to present a royal patent of nobility or produce witnesses willing to swear that they were indeed noble. As one might expect, considerable corruption was involved in these pleitos de hidalguía. Many litigants forged royal patents, the authenticity of which the officials had to determine. More frequently, would-be nobles produced friends and relatives to testify on their behalf. There is also some evidence to suggest that many of the witnesses who participated in these cases were paid professionals, hangers-on who were ready, as long as the price was right, to certify claims to a person’s ancient nobility…Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500-1700. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.
You say they weren’t hidalgos, but do we know what exactly "executory" mean in the name of the document, "executory letter of nobility?" It sounds like a final judicial judgment on the matter, that would make it so even if it weren’t so already, like a court judgment that makes a final decision on ownership of property. Even if the decision is wrong, at some point it becomes final.
I think it roughly translates as an enforceable or final writ. I guess a better way for me to have said it is that some individuals entered the Sala de Hijosdalgo as commoners and emerged with recognition as hidalgos (albeit with questionable evidence). Mauricio Drelichman’s article "Sons of Something: Taxes, Lawsuits and Local Political Control in Sixteenth Century Castile" offers much more detail about the legal process: http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Economic-History/drelichman-051109.pdf
It seems to me that the courts (and the king) must have known what was happening. Perhaps it could be explained away as corruption, but it also seems plausible that the Spanish state (like other European states) recognized the need for some kind of mechanism to incorporate "new men" into the elite. Given that the king’s financial interest was in minimizing the numbers of hijosdalgo, it seems that there must have been some countervailing interest being served, other than venality, if the system was "abused" as widely as the scholars say.
Doing a little reading, I find it interesting how closely the things the tribunals looked at for proof of nobility paralleled the things the Court of Chivalry in England looked at in judging who was a gentleman when that status was under dispute, and that the kings of arms looked at in deciding whether a particular individual was worthy of a grant of arms: local repute, offices held (in England, in local government; in Spain, lay offices in the church), with whom one associated (in Spain, to what confraternities did you belong, for example), and with what families yours intermarried.
According to Drelichman’s article:
Quote:
...when an hidalguía was challenged, usually by a town council that tried to collect direct taxes from its holder, the individual claiming to be an hidalgo could only affirm his status by suing the town in one of the two Royal Chancery Courts of Castile, which resided at Valladolid and Granada…the town council, together with the king’s prosecutor (who intervened ex-officio in all lawsuits of hidalguía), would try to show that the claimant or his ancestors were not hidalgos…[there are] 42,313 [surviving hidalgo] cases filed with the Valladolid Chancery Court [that date]...between 1490 and 1834…
It would be fascinating to learn whether or not communities like St. Augustine, New Orleans, Santa Fe and others along the frontier saw similar trials during the colonial period. If so, were the cases heard in Valladolid, Granada or some other place like Mexico City? If there were such trials, and if the records survived, and if (that is a lot of if’s) some of the trials touched upon armorial evidence (as stated by the historian Elisa Ruiz Garcia), then such records could form an interesting chapter in the history of American heraldry.