Settlers to the text 'l am a voice crying in the wilderness’ in which he demanded: ‘By what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such horrible servitude? . _ Are these not\ men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?’ The first batch of twelve Franciscans arrived in Mexico in 1526: within thirty years there were 380 of them, plus 210 Dominicans and 212 Augustinians. By this time, it was claimed the Franciscans alone had baptized over five million natives, considerably more than the entire population of England at that time. There is no means of checking these figures or even of knowing how they were compiled. The whole conversion process was an extraordinary mixture of force, cruelty, stupidity and greed, redeemed by occasional flashes of imagination and charity. We have a copy of the first address by the original twelve Franciscans: 'We do not seek gold, silver or precious stones: we seek only your health.’ Some Indians were baptized immediately after submission. Papal efforts to restrict defec tive ceremonies of baptism were failures. The catechism process was rudimentary. Moreover, we have an Episc opal edict of 1539 forbidding missionaries to beat Indians with rods, or imprison them with irons, 'to teach them the Christian doctrine’. In Mexico there were six main languages and many minor ones, none of which the missi onaries spoke at first. One witness, Munoz Camargo, says they pointed to the earth, fire, toads and snakes to sugge st Hell, raised their eyes to Heaven, then spoke of a single God. More systematic conversion was attem pted by seizing children, teaching them at missionary schools, and then using them as interpreters and proselytes . The Aztecs were polytheists, practicing human sacrifice and, in some areas, ritual cannibalis m; but there were also points of comparison with Christianity - their chief god was born of a virgin, they ate pastry images of him twice a year, they had forms of baptism and confession, and a compass-point cross. Yet there was no attempt to build on these foundations. contrary to early Christian practice and, indeed, to the instructions of Gregory the Great. From the time of Juan de Zumarraga, first Bishop of Mexico, a great destroyer of religious antiquities, a systematic attempt was made to erase all trace of pre-Christian cults. Writing in 1531, he claimed that he personally had smashed over 500 temples and 20,000 idols. (It is true, of course, that temples were sometimes used as fortresses.) Little resistance is recorded. Some idols were taken away and hidden, and Indians refused to reveal them even under torture. But there is only one case in which they seem to have argued with the missionaries on theological grounds, defending their own religion. Usually they retreated to more remote areas, and only when this was impossible did they stage revolts. In settled areas, they were liable to prosecution by the Holy Office for concubinage, bigamy or heresy. Thus a chief was accused in 1539 of concubinage and idolatry; arms and idols were found in his house: and his tenyear-old son, as often happened in Inquisition trials, gave evidence against him. The chief, Ometochtzin, known as ‘Don Carlos Mendoza’, said in his deposition that the various orders of friars and seculars had different dress and rules; that everyone had his own way of life; so had the Indians, and they should not be obliged to give it up; he also argued that many Spaniards were drunkards and scoffed at religion. He was condemned to death. Efforts were undoubtedly made to convey the subtleties and truth of Christianity. In teaching his converts, Maturino Gilberti tried hard to distinguish between devotion and image-worship - later he thought this was the chief reason why he was suspected of Protestantism. Francisco de Bustamente railed against the cult of the Virgin, because of the polytheistic confusion it produced. Most priests did not bother much. Luis Caldera, a Franciscan, who spoke only Spanish, taught the doctrine of Hell by throwing dogs and cats into an oven, and lighting a fire under it: the howls of the animals terrified the Indians. The difficulty was that the more imaginative or sensitive missionaries nearly always got into trouble with their superiors, ecclesiastical or secular. The most remarkable of the sixteenth century Franciscans, Barnadino de Sahagun, who spent over sixty years in Mexico, argued that it was vital to study the 'spiritual maladies’ and ‘the vices of the country' in order to effect Christianization. He employed native assistants and an original methodology to compile a gigantic Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana, those twelve volumes covered the religion, customs, constitution, intellectual and economic life, flora, fauna and 94