In 1519 the Spanish governor of Cuba, Diego Velásquez, commissioned a military expedition to the mainland of Mexico. Its task was to search for gold and to secure slaves. Velásquez appointed Hernán Cortés, a young nobleman and member of the Santiago de Cuba town council, to command the expeditionary force. However, rather than following Velásquez’s orders to establish a trading port on the Mexican east coast, Cortés instead led his troops into the mountainous interior, where they waged an assault on the wealthy urban cultures of the Mesoamerican highlands. On August 23, 1521, after a ferocious four-month siege, the Aztec...

One fundamental error in reconstructing the history of the Conquest of Mexico is the assumption that a monolithic Christianity encountered a generically uniform Amerindian culture. This misunderstanding has contributed to a vast literature on the successes and failures of the Christian evangelization of Mexico. Yet though Mexico today must be considered a Catholic country, in some areas of both the remote highlands and the sprawling metropolis of Mexico City the pre-Columbian religion is still very much alive. Thus it seems that the evangelization was both a success and a failure. In the sixteenth century two unique understandings of transcendence—Christian...

The Chichimec clans that entered Michoacán in the thirteenth century fused their tough, nomadic way of life with the culture of the farming people around Lake Pátzcuaro. The hunters from the north were a resourceful group and quickly appropriated the cultural heritage bequeathed to the region by the paradigmatic civilization of Teotihuacán and Tula.The Chronicles of Michoacánrecounts how these people imagined themselves in relation to the sacred world around them. The Purhépecha-Chichimec believed that they lived in a precarious cosmos dominated by the struggles between order and chaos, and light and darkness.

The Purhépecha’s sacred world was quite...

In order to better understand Vasco de Quiroga and his work in Mexico it is necessary to comprehend the panorama of historical forces that influenced his formation. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain had just emerged from eight centuries of warfare against Islam. Behind the militant Christian imperialism of the sixteenth century, however, stood the diverse cultural history of the Iberian Peninsula and a vast field of heterogeneous experiences. Yet Spain’s divergent historical experiences merged in this period, known as the Reconquista, to create a unified national identity.

In the long struggle for political dominance in the peninsula,...

By the late fifteenth century Roman Catholicism had become the spiritual and philosophical foundation of Spanish culture. The aggressive zeal of the medieval faith, which had propelled the Iberians through the long struggle of repossessing the land, erupted in a tempest of religious passion. The militancy of Iberian Christianity would have long-lasting implications for the people of the “New World.”

The political unification of the peninsula under the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella was not duplicated in religious culture. A powerful orthodox church was arrayed alongside a variety of heretical groups and religious ideas. This theological diversitymay be attributed to...

In 1519 Diego Velásquez, governor of Cuba, planned an expedition to the mainland of Mexico. The expedition was charged with searching for gold, securing slaves, and establishing a trading port on the Mexican coast. Hernán Cortés, a town councilman andencomendero, was appointed commander of the operation. Instead of establishing a coastal trading port, however, Cortés led a sortie into the interior, where he encountered the wealthy urban cultures of central Mexico. On August 23, 1521, after a fierce four-month siege, the last Aztec king, Cuauhtemoctzin, surrendered the great city of Tenochtitlán to Cortés and his Amerindian allies. With the...

The aim of the sixteenth-century evangelization project was to establish the millennial kingdom of God in the “New World.” The missionaries hoped to accomplish this goal by isolating the Amerindians into towns calledrepúblicas de indios, orcongregaciones. In the towns the natives would be governed by their own laws and guided by the spiritual direction of the friars. The mendicants’ rationale for adopting this policy was to better protect the Amerindians from exploitation by lay Christians and to facilitate their conversion to Christianity.

In the sixteenth century a brand of apocalyptic mysticism resurfaced in Spanish religion. It was especially...

Vasco de Quiroga’s longest written work carries the full titleInformación en derecho del licenciado Quiroga sobre algunas provisiones del Real Consejo de las Indias(Information on the law by the licentiate Quiroga concerning certain provisions of the Royal Council of the Indies).¹ The document demonstrates that a variety of religious, social, and legal concepts influenced the cultural synthesis that took place in Michoacán. Quiroga and the mendicants had come to the “New World” with a worldview patterned in part by their personal experiences and by the intellectual and religious currents prevalent in Spain. Both the bishop and the mendicant...

Quiroga states inInformación en derechothat the purpose of isolating the Purhépecha intorepúblicas de indioswas to reshape their behavior. Close supervision would allow the clergy to monitor the process of converting the Amerindians to Christianity. In employing the republican town model Don Vasco selected an ancient symbol of Europagan and Christian origin. The pagan sources of this symbol reach back to the Greek ideal of thepolisand the idea of the enlightened rule of an elite group of males who strive for intellectual excellence. The root Christian meaning of the idea of the republic is found...

Don Vasco de Quiroga spent his last years in Michoacán making pastoral visits to the many institutions he helped establish. In 1563 he became ill and entered the hospital of Santa Fe de la Laguna to convalesce. The frail patriarch prepared his last will and testament in Pátzcuaro on January 24, 1565. TheTestamentois a precise document in which Quiroga meticulously outlines the transfer of his pastoral responsibilities and the legacy of his favorite projects. Almost all of theTestamentodeals with the administration of thepueblo-hospitals, the Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo, and the Cathedral of Santa Ana....