516 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
Hundreds of churches sat on or near the ruins of pyramid mounds that had been the
foundations of ancient Mexican and Mayan temple shrines. Often, in fact, these
ruins provided the building materials for the new colonial structures. Mexico’s Na-
tional Cathedral was built close to the very foundation of the central temple of what
had been Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. Mexico City, the economic hub of Spain’s
massive New World operation, had a major university, numerous seminaries, con-
vents, hospitals, plazas, and palaces, all situated in a neatly conceived grid plan. An-
tigua, Guatemala, also resembled a Renaissance template of ordered colonial life,
housing the convent headquarters of a number of religious orders that had the mis-
sion of evangelizing America for the Crown. Vast tracts of Mexico and Guatemala
had been granted as encomiendas,along with their surviving Indian communities, to
soldiers and servants of the conquest. Silver mines, cattle ranches, and great estates
had emerged in the countryside, all staffed by forced Indian labor (for details, see
Chapters 4 and 5).Implementing the Missionary State
The cost of all of this to the Indians of Mesoamerica had been exceedingly high.
The physical structures of their temple centers, their books and art forms, lay in
ashes and ruins, and their population had been reduced by more than 90 percent,
from an estimated 27,000,000 in 1521 (a figure disputed by some scholars) to around
1,200,000 by 1600. European-introduced diseases, to which Mesoamericans were not
resistant, along with the abuses of forced labor and forced relocation, were factors
in this demographic cataclysm that far outweighed outright slaughter (see the In-
troduction and Chapter 4). The demographic decline was a matter of practical con-
cern to the Spaniards, for they, unlike the Puritans in North America, needed both
bodies and souls of Indians to fulfill the ambitious goals that the Crown had set for
itself in America.
The Laws of the Indies, promulgated in 1542, specifically stipulated that all rep-
resentatives of the Crown in America were de facto bearers of responsibility for the
missionary enterprise; this responsibility could not be separated from the more prag-
matic goals of the political and economic agenda. Therefore, all Crown officials were
formally obliged to encourage and support the “spiritual conquest” of America by per-
suasion and nurture, for the pope had declared in a bull entitled Sublimus Deusthat
Amerindians were humans with souls worthy of cultivation and redemption who
could not be legally or justly enslaved. Although the discrepancies between this ideal
on the one hand and local practice on the other were surely great, it was neverthe-
less the case that the Crown was deeply concerned with carrying out the duties of
Spain as a “missionary state.” This intention was perhaps nowhere in Spanish colo-
nial history better symbolized than in the triumphal arrival in Mexico of twelve Fran-
ciscan priests (popularly known as “apostles”) in 1524. In a great state ceremony,
they were received by their compatriots as the very architects of a millennial kingdom,
the New Jerusalem on earth. This earthly Christian community, heralding the return
of Christ on earth, would be achieved by the conversion of the masses of natives into
Christians.