_ The new towns and villages enabled a specifically local Way of life and decor to evolve , even if the faith Presented was, and remained, alien. The friars laid out squares, streets and plantations, and built hospitals, convents and churches. Some of these places were huge, with 30,000 inhabitants, and involved major works. Near Mexico City, one friar, Francisco de Tembleque, took nearly two decades to build a gigantic aqueduct, 30 miles long, with 136 arches: he was the sole European engaged in this project, which worked for 126 years and is stil virtually intact. In these places, the churches, like Aztec temples, took on the dual role of fortresses; they were often built in high or defensible places, as at Tepeaca, Tochimitco and Tula, for instance - huge, crenellated masses, with a single row of high windows, square buttresses and turrets, the roof a gun-platform. They had walled exterior enclosures, which could accommodate whole populations or up to 10,000 troops. Some of these churches were gigantic. The Augustinians were the big builders. Often, three or four of them in a convent would cause thousands of Indians to set up churches bigger than Seville Cathedral. In 1554, one official, Lebron de Quinones, told Philip Il that such churches were deliberately created ‘of an extreme splendor and sumptuousness' to impress the Indians. Philip also got a complaint from the jealous cathedral chapter of Guadalajara that 'when the Augustinian friars built... a new monastery, the few natives left alive disappeared because of the splendor the friars aspire to in constructing their churches and convents.’ This was denied. The Dominicans claimed that 'we see to it that the Indians work on them with their full consent and at their pleasure, without abuse or vexation of any kind.’ It is hard to know where the truth lay, since specific charges usually flowed from inter-order rivalry, or, more often, from the hatred of the seculars. In 1561 two bishops brought a case against all three orders of friars because they had ‘inflicted and are now inflicting many mistreatments on the Indians. . . they insult and strike them, tear out their hair, have them stripped and cruelly flogged, and then throw them into prison in cages and cruel irons.’ All Christian organizations, lay or secular, flogged Indians at times. On the other hand, in some ways the Indians adapted themselves enthusiastically to mission civilization. Zummarago, writing to Charles Y, noted: ‘The Indians are great lovers of music, and priests who hear their confessions tell me they are converted more by music than by anything else.' In the enclaves, terrific religious ceremonies were developed. The Indians learned singing and especially plain-chant more easily than anything else, and they took rapidly to a wide variety of instruments - clarinets, cornets, trumpets, fifes, trombones, Moroccan and Italian flutes, drums, bowed guitars and many others. Juan de Grijalva wrote: 'There is not an Indian village even of 20 inhabitants which is without trumpets and a few flutes to enrich the services.’ It is typical of Philip II'S niggling attention to detail that he tried to reduce the numbers of singers and instrumentalists in these villages in 1561 - with no success. Equally futile were official bans on liturgical extravaganzas, including wild dancing, which grew up round religious fiestas. But if these protected enclaves were intended (and the policy of the orders was never clear, even to themselves) to produce a distinctively native and self-sustaining form of Christianity, they were total failures. They necessarily involved the concept of tutelage. Travelers could not stay there for more than two days. In Mexico, no Europeans, Mestizos, Negroes or Mulattoes were allowed to settle in them. In parts of Brazil and Paraguay, the Jesuits, with their customary efficiency, created entire colonies, or reductiones as they were called, stretching over thousands of square miles. By 1623 there were over a score of them, encompassing 100,000 inhabitants, and they continued to expand, especially after 1641 when the Portuguese authorities fore bade access to these territories and allowed the Jesuits to maintain private armies to defend them. The friars also had their armed bands, and indeed were sometimes accused of fighting pitched battles with each other, with the seculars, and with the authorities themselves. In a way this idea of protecting vulnerable natives and their way of life from intruding European civilization is a modern one: but the instinct was paternalistic and necessarily condescending. 'All the Indians’, Philip || was told, ‘are like nestlings whose wings have not grown enough yet to allow them to fly for themselves. . . religious, as your Majesty should 96