population centers favored by the Inca. Visitors to colonial Lima tended to remark on the elaborate dress of its inhabitants and its multitude of churches, monasteries, and convents. It was recognized for the impressive baroque mansions that surrounded the city center, such as the Torre Tagle palace, built in the early eighteenth century for a Spanish marquis, celebrated for its typical carved stone portico and Moorish-style enclosed wooden balconies. Lima was also known for its lavish festivals: the Spanish technocrats Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa (who traveled throughout Spanish America from 1735 to 1746) were especially impressed with the pageantry surrounding Lima’s viceroy. They reported that Antonio de Mendoza had a personal militia of 210 men: 160 cavalry who wore blue and red uniforms with silver accents, and fifty Spanish troops dressed in blue suits and waistcoats made of crimson velvet with gold trim. On the day the viceroy made his official entrance into the city, the streets were hung with vibrant tapestries, and local artisans erected an impressive triumphal arch over the Rimac River. Next to it, municipal workers built a special grandstand so that the highest dignitaries could enjoy a parade featuring local militia troops, secondary school and university students, and civil servants. The parade route ended at Lima’s cathedral, where the new viceroy would meet the archbishop and cathedral canons and receive a ceremonial golden key to the city.39
He was not greeted with such pomp, but when Martínez Compañón stepped into Lima’s plaza mayor for the first time, he found himself in the symbolic and cultural center of Spanish life in Peru. The plaza was home to the cathedral, the viceregal palace, and a famous fountain featuring eight lions with water trumpeting from their mouths. His eyes would have fixed on the cathedral’s elaborate façade, featuring delicate Corinthian columns made of stone imported from Panama. He would have entered the cathedral for the first time through the main of the three doors facing the plaza—the so-called portada del perdón, or door of pardon. Looking up, he would have seen the soaring Gothic arches that supported the weight of the roof. Plated in gold, these intersected in a crossed design that recalled the starry night sky.
When Martínez Compañón—or Limeños, for that matter—tired of liturgical celebrations, their city also offered many venues for proper European-style amusements. These included theaters, where comedic productions were reputedly “as good as what you see in Madrid or Naples”; a cockfighting coliseum, a circular amphitheater with nine grades of spectator seating; and lively cafés where city dwellers could enjoy coffee, tea, chocolate, traditional yerba maté, and even games of billiards. A cathedral canon was unlikely to attend comedies or cockfights or to play billiards; but like many Limeños, Martínez Compañón may have frequented the city’s cafés, especially to enjoy a cup of his favorite beverage: hot chocolate prepared in the typical style of the late eighteenth century, with chocolate shavings flavored with sugar and cinnamon.40
While chocolate was one of the few earthly pleasures that the Bishop enjoyed, he likely would have been far more interested in Lima’s vibrant intellectual life. The city was home to the University of San Marcos—the oldest in South America—as well as more innovative institutions such as the Convictorio Carolino, where students learned experimental science, and the Colegio de San Carlos, where Newtonian physics found a place on the curriculum the same year that Martínez Compañón arrived in Peru. Lima also had a growing community of naturalists. Cosme Bueno published his yearly almanac, Conocimiento de los tiempos, there. The city was the home of Hipólito Unanue, a naturalist who proposed that cultivating commerce based on Peru’s rich natural resources could benefit the viceroyalty. Another local scientist, José Eusebio Llano Zapata, sent a manuscript detailing the natural resources of Peru, titled Memorias histórico, físicas, crítico, apologéticas de la América Meridional, to the king in 1761. In 1787, Lima’s first Spanish-style economic society was founded. This same group would later become the Sociedad de Amantes del País (Lovers of the Country) and publish the Mercurio Peruano (1791–1794), which frequently commented on scientific matters. In 1792, Padre Francisco González Laguna oversaw the founding of Lima’s own botanical garden.41
Although all this surrounded Martínez Compañón, his chances for engagement would have been limited by his duties inside the walls of the cathedral. As chantre, or musical director, he was one of the most important members of the cabildo or cathedral chapter of dignitaries. These men met directly with the archbishop on a regular basis, exercised power on his behalf in his absence, and oversaw religious services. Martínez Compañón was responsible for supervising the musical accompaniments to liturgy, including chanting, singing, and instrumental music. Much of his work would have taken place in or near the cathedral’s impressive choir stall, one of the oldest and best preserved in all Peru. Built in the early seventeenth century, this large wooden structure features ornate chairs for each choir member. Situated at ground level alongside the cathedral’s main altar, the severe wooden seats are dominated by the carved relief figures of saints that stand behind them.42
Though records reveal nothing further about Martínez Compañón’s duties as chantre in Lima, we know that during his visita, the Bishop taught Gregorian chant to seminary students in Piura, Lambayeque, and Cajamarca. He also recorded musical notations and lyrics when visiting communities throughout Chachapoyas, Otusco, and Cajamarca. The songs he collected ranged from Christmas carols to music for a Chimú dance performed with violin accompaniment. As with the illustrations that made up the nine volumes of watercolors, he gathered these songs from vernacular sources; they were mostly “simple” folk songs dismissed as such. Today, ethnomusicologists praise the entire collection, especially the “Chimú tune,” which is the only known surviving musical notation in the Mochica language (extinct today and, even in 1644, spoken by only forty thousand people). The Bishop thought to preserve several musical instruments in his collection, including a “copper tambourine with seven jingle bells, a little hen, and four Indians dancing,” in which one of the human figures carried “in his hand an axe like those that … the Indians use to dance [with today].”43 Likewise, many of the watercolor images include musical instruments or people playing them, especially during Carnival.
In addition to his musical duties in the cathedral, Martínez Compañón was tasked with compiling a master list of chaplaincies and charitable endowments. The two massive volumes that resulted were an early indication of his organizational abilities: indexed like a modern-day address book with tabs separating the letters, the capellanías books listed by surname the individuals who had made the bequests, and for what purpose. He recorded that Miss Maria Theodora, for instance, had in 1740 established a chaplaincy based on the value of her country home outside Lima. With these funds, she supported a licentiate named Lorenzo de Azogue.44
In Lima, Martínez Compañón cultivated a close relationship with Archbishop Antonio de Parada, who soon thereafter rewarded him with additional responsibilities. By 1770, Parada had named him rector of Lima’s Saint Toribio Seminary, a position that he retained until his departure for Trujillo in 1779. Although the majority of the documents from his time there are lost, we do know that while at the seminary, Martínez Compañón worked tirelessly to organize and improve, soliciting permission and funding for several structural improvements to the building, including more student rooms and easier access to water in the cooking area. Years later, when he was founding his own seminary in Trujillo, he hoped for the boys there to wear purple sashes similar to those that the Lima students had worn.45
In 1772 and 1773, the cathedral hosted the Sixth Provincial Church Council of Peru, in which canons, bishops, and the archbishop debated how they would implement Charles III’s modernizing ecclesiastical reforms and how they would handle the aftermath of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Peru five years earlier. Martínez Compañón was named consultant, canon, and secretary of the council. He would have observed and perhaps even participated in heated discussions about the preparation of primary school teachers (they had to be well trained in Catholic precepts), the importance of repetition in teaching doctrine to Indians (adults were to study every Monday and Friday; children were to study every day), and the necessity of teaching Indians to speak fluent Spanish, so that “they will be more easily and better taught in the subjects of religion
