The Spanish Conquest of Mexico and the Requerimiento

I. From Granada to the Indies

The conquest of Mexico took place within a generation of the fall of Granada in January 1492, described in The Granada War. Many of the institutions and attitudes of the Spanish conquerors had been shaped by the long struggle against the Muslims of the peninsula. The conquerors called the temples of Mexico mosques, mezquitas, and described the Mexica rulers in terms borrowed from the frontier of Granada. The practice of granting conquered lands and people to conquerors, the encomienda, had precedents in the Reconquista, as did the combination of royal authority, private enterprise and religious justification.

Columbus's first voyage, which set out in August 1492, brought the Spanish to the Caribbean islands. In the following two decades they settled Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba. The indigenous Taíno population of the islands was devastated by war, forced labour and, above all, diseases brought from Europe, against which they had no immunity. By the 1510s the Taíno population of Hispaniola had fallen from perhaps several hundred thousand to a few tens of thousands, and the Spanish began to import African slaves to replace them.

The papal bulls of 1493, issued by Alexander VI, granted the Catholic Monarchs dominion over the lands discovered and to be discovered in the west, on condition that they bring the inhabitants to the Catholic faith. The bull Inter caetera became the legal foundation of the Spanish claim to the Americas, and the obligation to convert the inhabitants became the justification of the conquest. The question of what rights the Spanish had over the indigenous peoples, and how those peoples should be treated, was debated from the beginning.

II. Montesinos's Sermon

The first public challenge to the treatment of the indigenous people came on the fourth Sunday of Advent, 21 December 1511, in the church of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola. A Dominican friar, Antonio de Montesinos, speaking on behalf of the small Dominican community that had arrived on the island the previous year, preached a sermon on the text from John 1:23, I am a voice crying out in the wilderness. He told the Spanish settlers, including the governor Diego Colón, that they were in mortal sin because of the cruelty and tyranny with which they treated the indigenous people.

According to the account of Bartolomé de las Casas, who recorded the sermon in his History of the Indies, Montesinos asked: by what right and with what justice do you keep these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? Are they not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves? The sermon caused a scandal among the settlers, who demanded that the friar retract. The following week Montesinos preached again and repeated his accusations.

The settlers complained to King Ferdinand, and both they and the Dominicans sent representatives to Spain. Ferdinand at first ordered the Dominicans to be silent, but he also summoned a council of theologians and lawyers to examine the question. The result was the Laws of Burgos of 1512, the first general legislation for the government of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

III. The Laws of Burgos

The Laws of Burgos, promulgated on 27 December 1512, regulated the encomienda system. They confirmed that the indigenous people were free subjects of the Crown but required them to work for the Spanish settlers, who were obliged to instruct them in the Christian faith, feed and clothe them, and treat them humanely. The laws set limits on the hours and conditions of labour, forbade the use of indigenous people as carriers, and protected pregnant women and children from heavy work.

The laws reflected the conclusions of the council at Burgos, which had accepted that the indigenous people were free but held that they could be compelled to work and to live in settlements under Spanish supervision for their own good and for their instruction in the faith. In practice the laws were rarely enforced, and the abuses continued. The Dominicans continued to protest, and the debate over the encomienda lasted for decades.

The council also considered the question of the justice of the conquest. Some of its members, including the jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios and the Dominican Matías de Paz, wrote treatises on the subject. Palacios Rubios argued that the pope, as the vicar of Christ, had authority over the whole world, including the lands of unbelievers, and that he had delegated this authority to the Spanish monarchs. The indigenous people were therefore obliged to accept Spanish rule and to allow the preaching of the faith, and if they refused, the Spanish could make war on them.

IV. The Requerimiento

From this argument came the Requerimiento, the Requirement, a document drafted by Palacios Rubios in 1513 that was to be read to the indigenous peoples before the Spanish made war on them. The document began with an account of the creation of the world and of the first man and woman, from whom all people were descended. It explained that God had given authority over all people to Saint Peter and his successors, the popes, and that one of these popes had granted the islands and mainland of the Ocean Sea to the kings of Castile.

The Requerimiento then called on the listeners to acknowledge the church as the ruler of the world and the pope and the king as its representatives, and to allow the faith to be preached to them. If they did so, they would be received as vassals and would not be compelled to become Christians. If they refused, the Spanish would make war on them, take their wives and children as slaves, seize their goods and do them all the harm they could. The deaths and losses that followed would be their own fault, not that of the king or the Spanish.

The document was to be read aloud, in the presence of a notary who would record that it had been read. It was first used by Pedrarias Dávila in the expedition to Darién in 1514. In practice it was read in Spanish to people who did not understand the language, sometimes from the ships before landing, sometimes at night outside villages that were about to be attacked, and sometimes to empty land. The chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who served as notary on the Darién expedition, recorded that he later raised the question with Palacios Rubios, and that the jurist laughed at his account of how the document had been used.

Las Casas wrote that on reading the Requerimiento he did not know whether to laugh or weep. Historians have described it as one of the strangest documents of colonial history. It reflected the legal mind of its time, which sought to give the conquest a juridical form, and the belief that the conquest was justified by the papal grant and the obligation to preach the faith. Its use continued until it was replaced by new instructions in 1573.

V. The Mexica Empire

The empire that the Spanish encountered in central Mexico in 1519 was ruled by the Mexica, a people who had settled on an island in Lake Texcoco in the fourteenth century and founded the city of Tenochtitlan, traditionally in 1325. In alliance with the cities of Texcoco and Tlacopan, the Triple Alliance formed in 1428, they had conquered much of central and southern Mexico and collected tribute from hundreds of subject towns. Tenochtitlan, with its causeways, canals, temples and markets, had a population estimated at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand, making it one of the largest cities in the world.

The Mexica religion centred on the worship of many gods, including Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the sun, and Tlaloc, the god of rain, whose twin shrines stood on top of the great temple, the Templo Mayor, in the centre of Tenochtitlan. The Mexica believed that the gods required offerings of human blood to sustain the world, and human sacrifice was practised on a large scale, especially of prisoners of war. The number of victims has been debated, and the excavations of the Templo Mayor since 1978, including the discovery of the skull rack, the huey tzompantli, in 2015, have confirmed that the scale was large.

The empire was not a unified state but a network of tributary relationships, held together by military force. Many subject peoples resented Mexica rule and the demands for tribute and sacrificial victims. Some peoples, such as the Tlaxcalans to the east of the valley of Mexico, had never been conquered and were in a state of permanent war with the Mexica. These divisions were decisive in the conquest, since the Spanish relied on indigenous allies who provided the great majority of the soldiers.

VI. Cortés and the Landing at Veracruz

Hernán Cortés, born at Medellín in Extremadura around 1485, came to Hispaniola in 1504 and took part in the conquest of Cuba under Diego Velázquez. In 1518 Velázquez, then governor of Cuba, appointed him to lead an expedition to the mainland, following two earlier expeditions that had reached the coast of Yucatán and Mexico. Velázquez then tried to revoke the appointment, but Cortés sailed in February 1519 with eleven ships, about five hundred soldiers, sixteen horses and some artillery.

On the coast of Yucatán Cortés rescued a Spanish castaway, Gerónimo de Aguilar, who had lived among the Maya for eight years and spoke their language. At Potonchán, in Tabasco, after a battle with the Maya, he received a gift of twenty women, among them a Nahua woman named Malintzin, called Doña Marina by the Spanish, who spoke both Maya and Nahuatl. Through Aguilar and Malintzin, and later through Malintzin alone when she learned Spanish, Cortés was able to communicate with the peoples of Mexico. She became his interpreter, adviser and the mother of his son Martín.

In April 1519 Cortés landed near the modern city of Veracruz. He received envoys of Moctezuma II, the ruler of Tenochtitlan, who brought gifts of gold and featherwork and asked him not to come to the capital. To free himself from the authority of Velázquez, Cortés founded a town, the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, whose council appointed him captain general under the direct authority of the king. He then had his ships disabled, so that his men could not return to Cuba.

The Requerimiento was read on several occasions during the conquest, as Cortés's instructions required. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier of the expedition who wrote his True History of the Conquest of New Spain in old age, records that the friar and the notary read the requirements at Potonchán and on other occasions before battles. Cortés also preached to the indigenous rulers himself, through his interpreters, urging them to abandon their gods and human sacrifice and to accept the Christian faith.

VII. Tlaxcala and Cholula

From the coast Cortés marched inland in August 1519 with about three hundred Spanish soldiers and several hundred Totonac allies from Cempoala, whose ruler had rebelled against the Mexica. In September he reached Tlaxcala, whose armies fought the Spanish in a series of battles before deciding to make peace and ally with them against the Mexica. The Tlaxcalan alliance was the most important of the conquest, and the Tlaxcalans provided thousands of warriors for the rest of the campaign.

In October the Spanish and their allies reached Cholula, a sacred city and a centre of pilgrimage for the god Quetzalcoatl. Claiming that he had learned of a plot by the Cholulans and the Mexica to ambush his army, Cortés assembled the nobles of the city in a courtyard and had them killed, and the Spanish and Tlaxcalans sacked the city. Several thousand people died. The massacre of Cholula was condemned by Las Casas as an example of the cruelty of the conquerors, while Cortés and his defenders presented it as a necessary act of self-defence.

VIII. Moctezuma and Tenochtitlan

On 8 November 1519 Cortés entered Tenochtitlan along the southern causeway and was received by Moctezuma. The Spanish were astonished by the city. Bernal Díaz wrote that it seemed like the enchantments described in the romances of chivalry, and that some of the soldiers asked whether what they saw was a dream. Moctezuma lodged the Spanish in the palace of his father, Axayacatl.

The question of why Moctezuma admitted the Spanish to his city has been much debated. Later sources, especially the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún's informants and Cortés's letters, suggested that Moctezuma believed Cortés to be the god Quetzalcoatl returning from the east, or an emissary of a returning ruler. Modern historians, such as Matthew Restall and Camilla Townsend, regard this story as a post-conquest invention and suggest that Moctezuma received the Spanish as foreign ambassadors, according to Mexica diplomatic custom, while seeking to learn about them and to control them.

A week after his arrival Cortés seized Moctezuma and held him prisoner in his own palace, ruling through him. He demanded gold and tribute, and ordered that the images of the gods in the Templo Mayor be replaced by Christian images. In May 1520 Cortés left the city to confront an expedition sent by Velázquez under Pánfilo de Narváez, which he defeated and incorporated into his own force. In his absence his lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado massacred Mexica nobles during the festival of Toxcatl in the courtyard of the Templo Mayor, and the city rose against the Spanish.

IX. The Noche Triste

When Cortés returned to Tenochtitlan in June 1520, he found the Spanish besieged in the palace. Moctezuma was brought onto the roof to calm the people and was struck by stones; he died a few days later, either from his wounds, according to the Spanish, or killed by the Spanish, according to some indigenous sources. His brother Cuitlahuac was chosen as ruler and led the attack on the Spanish.

On the night of 30 June 1520, the Spanish attempted to escape from the city along the western causeway to Tlacopan. They were discovered, attacked from canoes on both sides of the causeway, and suffered heavy losses. Between four hundred and six hundred Spanish and several thousand Tlaxcalan allies were killed, many of them drowned under the weight of the gold they carried. The Spanish called the night the Noche Triste, the sad night.

The survivors retreated around the northern shore of the lake towards Tlaxcala. At Otumba, on 7 July 1520, they were confronted by a large Mexica army and won a victory when Cortés and a group of horsemen charged the Mexica commander and seized his standard. The Spanish reached Tlaxcala, whose rulers decided to remain loyal to the alliance.

X. Smallpox

In the months after the Noche Triste, an epidemic of smallpox swept through central Mexico. The disease had been brought by a member of Narváez's expedition, an African man, according to the Spanish sources, and it spread rapidly among the indigenous population, who had no immunity. Cuitlahuac died of it in late 1520, after a reign of eighty days, and was succeeded by his cousin Cuauhtémoc.

The epidemic killed a large part of the population of Tenochtitlan and the surrounding region. The Florentine Codex, compiled by Sahagún from the accounts of Nahua informants, describes the suffering of the people: many died of hunger because there was no one to care for them, and the sores covered their faces and bodies. The epidemic was the first of a series that reduced the indigenous population of central Mexico, for which estimates for 1519 range widely from about five million to twenty-five million, to little more than one million by 1600.

XI. The Siege of Tenochtitlan

Cortés spent the second half of 1520 and the early months of 1521 rebuilding his forces in Tlaxcala. He received reinforcements from Cuba, Jamaica and Spain, and he won over or conquered the towns around the valley of Mexico. He had thirteen brigantines built in Tlaxcala, under the direction of the shipwright Martín López, carried in pieces over the mountains by thousands of Tlaxcalan porters, and assembled at Texcoco on the eastern shore of the lake.

The siege of Tenochtitlan began in May 1521. The Spanish, with about nine hundred soldiers, eighty horses and some artillery, were supported by tens of thousands of indigenous allies from Tlaxcala, Texcoco, Huexotzinco, Chalco and other cities. The allies may have numbered as many as two hundred thousand, though the figures are uncertain. The brigantines controlled the lake and cut off the city's supplies, and the Spanish and their allies advanced along the causeways, destroying the buildings of the city as they went in order to deprive the defenders of cover.

The defence of Tenochtitlan under Cuauhtémoc lasted nearly three months. The Mexica fought from the rooftops and canals, captured Spanish soldiers and sacrificed them in view of their comrades. The city suffered from famine, thirst and the continuing effects of smallpox. On 13 August 1521, the feast of Saint Hippolytus, Cuauhtémoc was captured in a canoe while attempting to escape, and the city surrendered.

The Nahua account preserved in the Florentine Codex describes the end of the siege: broken spears lie in the roads, the houses are roofless, the walls are red with blood, and the water has turned to brine. A poem in Nahuatl, the Cantares Mexicanos, laments the destruction of the city. Tenochtitlan was largely destroyed, and the Spanish built Mexico City on its ruins, with the cathedral beside the site of the Templo Mayor.

XII. The Franciscan Mission

In 1524 a group of twelve Franciscan friars, known as the Twelve Apostles of Mexico, arrived in New Spain under the leadership of Martín de Valencia. Cortés received them with great ceremony, kneeling before them in the presence of the indigenous nobles to demonstrate the honour due to the clergy. The Franciscans were followed by the Dominicans in 1526 and the Augustinians in 1533. The mendicant orders took charge of the conversion of the indigenous population.

The friars baptised hundreds of thousands of people in the first decades. The Franciscan Toribio de Benavente, called Motolinía, claimed that more than five million had been baptised by 1536. The friars built convents with large open chapels, where great crowds could attend mass, and they taught in schools for the sons of the indigenous nobility. The college of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, founded in 1536, taught Latin, rhetoric, philosophy and music to Nahua students, some of whom became collaborators of the friars in their studies of Nahuatl language and culture.

The friars' view of their mission was shaped by apocalyptic and millenarian ideas. The Franciscans, influenced by the reforms of Cisneros and the writings of Joachim of Fiore, believed that the conversion of the peoples of the Americas was a sign of the approaching end of the world, when the gospel would be preached to all nations, as foretold in Matthew 24:14. Some of them hoped to build in Mexico a church resembling the church of the apostles, free from the corruption of Europe.

XIII. The Destruction of Images and Codices

The friars and the Spanish authorities sought to destroy the indigenous religion. Temples were demolished and their stones used to build churches, images of the gods were broken or buried, and priests were persecuted. The first bishop of Mexico, the Franciscan Juan de Zumárraga, reported in 1531 that the friars had destroyed more than five hundred temples and twenty thousand idols. He also had indigenous codices burned, though the extent of this destruction has been debated.

In 1539 Zumárraga, acting as apostolic inquisitor, had Carlos Ometochtzin, the lord of Texcoco and a baptised Christian, tried and burned for idolatry and for urging his people to return to their old religion. The execution caused a scandal in Spain, and Zumárraga was reprimanded. The indigenous peoples were later removed from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition when it was established in Mexico in 1571.

At the same time some friars studied the indigenous cultures in order to understand and combat their religion more effectively. Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan who came to Mexico in 1529, spent decades collecting information from Nahua elders and compiled the General History of the Things of New Spain, the Florentine Codex, in Nahuatl and Spanish with nearly two thousand illustrations. The work is the most important source for Mexica religion, society and the history of the conquest from the indigenous point of view.

XIV. Scripture in Nahuatl

The friars translated catechisms, sermons and parts of the Bible into Nahuatl and other indigenous languages. The Franciscans produced translations of the Gospel and Epistle readings for the liturgy, the Psalms and other Biblical texts. Sahagún and his Nahua collaborators produced the Psalmodia Christiana, printed in Mexico in 1583, a collection of songs in Nahuatl for the festivals of the church year. The printing press was introduced to Mexico in 1539, the first in the Americas.

The Council of Trent and the Spanish Index of 1559 restricted the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. In 1576 the Inquisition ordered the confiscation of Scripture translations in indigenous languages, and the Third Mexican Provincial Council of 1585 limited their use. The history of Bible translation in the Americas is discussed in The Bible in the Atlantic Colonies. A complete Nahuatl Bible was not printed until the modern period.

XV. Bartolomé de las Casas

Bartolomé de las Casas, born in Seville in 1484, came to Hispaniola in 1502 as a settler and held an encomienda. He was ordained priest and took part in the conquest of Cuba as a chaplain. In 1514, while preparing a sermon on the text of Ecclesiasticus 34, which declares that the offering of one who sacrifices from ill-gotten goods is tainted, he became convinced that the treatment of the indigenous people was unjust, gave up his encomienda, and began a lifelong campaign on their behalf.

Las Casas became a Dominican in 1522 and spent the rest of his life writing, preaching and lobbying the Spanish court. He attempted to establish peaceful colonies in Venezuela and Guatemala, where conversion would be achieved by persuasion alone, and he wrote a treatise, The Only Way of Attracting All People to the True Religion, arguing that the gospel must be preached by peaceful means, following the example of Christ and the apostles, who sent the disciples like sheep among wolves, as in Matthew 10:16.

His Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written in 1542 and printed in 1552, described the atrocities of the conquerors in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and Peru in stark terms. It was translated into Dutch, French, English, German and Latin and became a central text of the so-called Black Legend, the image of Spanish cruelty propagated by Spain's enemies. Historians regard Las Casas's figures as exaggerated, but his account of the treatment of the indigenous people is supported by many other sources.

XVI. Vitoria and the School of Salamanca

The Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria, professor at the University of Salamanca, examined the legal basis of the conquest in his lectures On the Indians, delivered in 1539. He rejected the claim that the pope had temporal authority over the whole world, or that he could grant the lands of unbelievers to Christian rulers. He also rejected the claim that the emperor was lord of the world, and that the indigenous people could be deprived of their lands because of their unbelief or their sins.

Vitoria argued that the indigenous peoples had true dominion over their lands and their rulers had legitimate authority. The Spanish could have just titles to intervene in the Americas only on grounds such as the natural right of communication and trade, the right to preach the gospel without obstruction, the protection of converts, and the protection of the innocent from tyranny, including human sacrifice. These arguments, which drew on natural law and the law of nations, made Vitoria one of the founders of international law. His work is part of the history described in Bible Scholarship in Salamanca.

The emperor Charles V was displeased by Vitoria's lectures and ordered that the professors of Salamanca should not discuss the subject without permission. Yet the debate continued, and the arguments of Vitoria and his students influenced the legislation of the Crown.

XVII. The New Laws of 1542

In 1542, under the influence of Las Casas and the Dominicans, Charles V promulgated the New Laws, which forbade the enslavement of indigenous people, ordered the release of those held as slaves without just title, and provided that the encomiendas should not be inherited but should revert to the Crown on the death of the holders. The laws were intended to bring the encomienda system to an end within a generation.

The New Laws provoked fierce resistance in the colonies. In Peru the settlers rose in rebellion under Gonzalo Pizarro, who killed the viceroy Blasco Núñez Vela in 1546. In Mexico the viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and the royal visitor Francisco Tello de Sandoval suspended the application of the laws to avoid a similar revolt. In 1545 Charles revoked the provision on the inheritance of encomiendas, though the prohibition of indigenous slavery remained.

XVIII. Sublimis Deus

The question of the nature of the indigenous peoples was addressed by Pope Paul III in the bull Sublimis Deus of 1537. Some settlers had argued that the indigenous people were incapable of receiving the faith, and that they could therefore be treated as beasts of burden. The pope, at the request of the Dominican Bernardino de Minaya and the bishop of Tlaxcala, Julián Garcés, declared that the indigenous peoples were true men, capable of understanding the Catholic faith, and that they were not to be deprived of their liberty or their property, even if they remained outside the faith.

The bull quoted the command of Christ to the apostles to go and make disciples of all the nations, in Matthew 28:19, and argued that all people are capable of receiving the faith. It declared that the indigenous people were to be invited to the faith by preaching and by the example of good lives. Charles V, who regarded the bull as an infringement of the rights of the Spanish Crown under the patronato, obtained a brief in 1538 that annulled the penalties attached to related documents, and the bull's legal force in the Spanish territories was limited, though its teaching was frequently cited.

XIX. The Valladolid Debate

In 1550 Charles V suspended new conquests in the Americas and summoned a junta of theologians and jurists at Valladolid to consider the justice of the wars of conquest. The two principal speakers were Las Casas and the humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who had written a dialogue, Democrates Alter, defending the conquest.

Sepúlveda, drawing on Aristotle's doctrine of natural slavery, argued that the indigenous peoples were barbarians, inferior in reason, and that it was just for the Spanish to rule them for their own good. He also argued that war was justified to end idolatry and human sacrifice, and to remove obstacles to the preaching of the gospel. He cited the wars of Israel against the Canaanites, as in Deuteronomy 20:16-18, and the parable of the great supper, in which the master orders his servant to compel people to come in, in Luke 14:23, an interpretation that Augustine had applied to the coercion of heretics.

Las Casas replied in a long Apologia, read over five days, that the indigenous peoples were not barbarians in Aristotle's sense, since they had cities, laws and arts, and that war was not a lawful means of spreading the faith. He argued that the wars of Israel were a special command given to Israel and not a precedent for Christian rulers, and that the parable of the supper referred to inner persuasion by grace, not external force. He also argued that the evils of human sacrifice did not justify a war that would cause far greater deaths.

The junta met in two sessions, in 1550 and 1551, and did not reach a formal verdict. Each side claimed victory. The debate did, however, influence the Ordinances of 1573 issued by Philip II on new discoveries and settlements, which prohibited the use of the word conquest and required that new territories be brought under Spanish rule by peaceful means, though in practice the use of force continued on the frontiers.

XX. The Inquisition in Mexico

Before the formal establishment of the Inquisition in Mexico, inquisitorial powers were exercised by the friars and bishops. Between 1536 and 1543 Zumárraga held about 150 trials, including those of indigenous people accused of idolatry and Spaniards accused of blasphemy, Judaising and Lutheranism. The tribunal of the Holy Office was established in Mexico City in 1571 under the inquisitor Pedro Moya de Contreras, with jurisdiction over Spaniards, mestizos and Africans, but not over the indigenous people, who remained under the jurisdiction of the bishops.

The Mexican Inquisition prosecuted conversos accused of secret Judaism, among them members of the Carvajal family, including Luis de Carvajal the younger, who was burned in 1596. The history of the conversos who left Spain and Portugal for the Americas is part of the story told in The Expulsion of 1492 and Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Luis de Carvajal wrote memoirs and prayers drawing on the Hebrew Scriptures, especially the Psalms and the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:2-17, which survive in the records of his trial.

XXI. The Conquest in Memory

The conquest of Mexico was remembered differently by the conquerors, the friars and the indigenous peoples. Cortés's letters to Charles V, printed in Seville and elsewhere from 1522, presented the conquest as a service to God and the Crown. Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés's chaplain, wrote a history in his praise in 1552, and Bernal Díaz wrote his True History partly to correct Gómara and to give credit to the ordinary soldiers.

Indigenous accounts were preserved in the Florentine Codex, the Annals of Tlatelolco, the Lienzo de Tlaxcala and the writings of mestizo and indigenous historians, such as Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl of Texcoco and Diego Muñoz Camargo of Tlaxcala. Many of these accounts emphasised the role of their own peoples as allies of the Spanish. The historian Miguel León-Portilla collected Nahua accounts of the conquest in The Broken Spears, first published in 1959, which brought the indigenous perspective to a wide readership.

XXII. The Legacy of the Requerimiento

The Requerimiento has become a symbol of the legal formalism of the Spanish conquest. It sought to give a legal and religious basis to the use of force, by presenting the indigenous peoples with a choice between submission and war, framed in terms of a history that began with the creation in Genesis 1:1 and continued through the authority of Peter and the popes. Its critics, beginning with Las Casas, regarded it as a mockery of justice, since it was read in a language the hearers did not understand.

The debate it provoked within Spain was, however, also significant. The sermons of Montesinos, the writings of Las Casas, the lectures of Vitoria and the Valladolid debate represent a sustained examination by Spanish theologians of the justice of their own nation's conquests. Historians such as Lewis Hanke have described this as the Spanish struggle for justice in the conquest of America. The same questions, about the relation between conversion and force, recur in the history of the Spanish wars in the Philippines, discussed in The Spanish–Moro Wars, and in the earlier history of the Iberian peninsula, described in The Granada War and The Morisco Revolt and Expulsion.

XXIII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.