In 1502, on his fourth and final voyage, Christopher Columbus happened upon a great trading canoe just off the coast of Honduras. It was ‘long as a galley’, as Ferdinand, the Admiral's thirteen-year-old son recalled, and carved from one great tree trunk. Neither its twenty-five naked paddlers nor the richly clad men who appeared to be their masters offered any resistance as the Spaniards seized the craft, and they remained paralysed with fright as the bearded strangers rifled through the cargo. It was only when some cacao beans were allowed to spill from their containers in the course of the looting that they momentarily forgot their fear, scrambling to retrieve them ‘as if they were their eyes’.

Along with the precious cacao beans were copper axes and bells; razors and hatchets of a translucent yellow stone, probably Mexican obsidian; heavy wooden war clubs studded with flints; pottery; and garments of many-coloured woven cotton.

1562 must have been something of a watershed year for the Yucatan Franciscans, a time for reviewing what were, on any score, formidable achievements. The worst excesses of the colonists had been curbed, and through the reduction of Hernández they had been taught a useful lesson as to the respect due to the Order. With the appointment of Quijada, the first resident ‘outsider’ – the judge-inspectors had been birds of passage – local control over the apparatus of the royal administration had been broken. Quijada himself was or could be made properly respectful of ecclesiastical authority. The first bishop was to be a Franciscan, and a Franciscan of impeccable credentials, seasoned in the field. And the mission – given the difficult terrain, given limited manpower, given the mere seventeen years of its existence – was thriving.

There was still only a handful of secular clergy in the province, but the population of friars had grown. Bienvenida had been twice to Spain, bringing back recruits each time. Just how many Franciscans there were in the peninsula at any time after the earliest days is uncertain, as the records have been lost, but the original eight had been joined by perhaps nine in 1549, fifteen in 1533, and ten or eleven in 1561. Death and disability must have claimed some: the sapping work and sapping heat of Yucatan took its toll. Some left: there was more movement of men between Mexico, Yucatan and Guatemala than the rigours of travel would lead us to expect.

Is it possible to discover anything of the views and experience of a people whose voices were hushed to a murmur more than 400 years ago? In the preface of his The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson declared in a splendid phrase his determination to rescue ordinary English working men and women from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity,’ and proceeded to do so. Rescuing the native peoples so casually appropriated to European uses (symbolic and material) over these last centuries presents essentially the same problems – the necessary dependence on outsider reports, for example – at an even more daunting level of intensity. Alien soldiers rarely make sensitive ethnographers. The Spaniards who conquered the peninsula, from Córdoba's ragged hopefuls to the hard men who fought the last campaigns, were concerned with survival and victory. What they saw they saw well: the shape and size of settlements; the swift obedience of commoners to their chiefs; goods produced and exchanged; how work was distributed. But it was a narrowly instrumental perspective, and one inevitably entailing distortion, as the unfamiliar was wrenched into familiar, and so potentially manipulable, forms.

It is impossible to give a ‘representative’ array of documents. As any reader of documents knows, each one both expands and modifies understanding. The reader will have reasonably easy access to some Spanish conquistador reports, to Landa's Relación, and to the scholarly translations of two Books of Chilam Balam. What follows is a sampler of less accessible documents which have figured significantly in the text, drawn from the trial records of 1562.

Franciscans were to dominate the missionary enterprise in Yucatan, as they had in Mexico. If to a twentieth-century mind the motives of a Bernal Díaz, for all their distinctive accenting, are sufficiently familiar to be intelligible, missionaries, and Franciscans, are less accessible. What would move a Spanish youth in the early decades of the sixteenth century to join the Franciscan order, and then to opt for service in a remote corner of a remote New World? What vision would lead him to those actions, and how might that vision be sustained or modified by experience in the field?

First, he would be choosing not the complete withdrawal from the world of the closed orders of monks, not the integration into the world of the secular priest working within the parish system, but membership of an institution designed to mediate between the elevated-spiritual, and the earthy-mundane. While friars of the mendicant orders maintained the prayerful discipline of monks, they also undertook preaching rounds to reanimate the faith of the people, and cultivated a popular touch.

South and west of Cuba a great limestone peninsula thrusts into the warm waters of the Caribbean. The Maya Indians who lived there called it ‘The Land of the Turkey and Deer’, for they thought it a rich place. In the early years of the sixteenth century Spaniards came; some in search of a golden kingdom, some to extend the Kingdom of God. They found a harsh and stony land which they conquered and settled nonetheless. They named it ‘Yucatan’.

This is a story of how the Land of the Turkey and the Deer was made into Yucatan. Proud of their exploits, the conquerors recorded them in detail, so the tale of exploration and war can be told, first, from their point of view, and in their terms – of courage, unabashed cupidity, and that extraordinary European conviction of their right to appropriate the world. Later we hear Spanish voices still, but Spanish voices raised in confused and bitter conflict, as settlers and missionary friars fought a dangerous battle for the power to determine the kind of Yucatan they would make. They fought not only over the use of land and control of labour, the conventional problems of colonial politics, but over contrary accounts of the conduct and the nature of the subject native people. In the course of that struggle about the nature of the alien and other, they were sometimes forced to unsought and profoundly disquieting discoveries about themselves – which is always a danger in the hall-of-mirrors world we make when we seek to possess the strange and make it part of ourselves.

It is worth taking some time over Landa and his Franciscans, to see how they had come to make a world in which they could act with so strong a sense of the necessity of their actions. The group was not large – those friars made uncomfortable by Landa's leadership and his vision of things had already left the peninsula – but individual psychologising cannot explain its cohesiveness and its terrible forward momentum. What was it, then, in the shared experience of the Yucatan Franciscans which made such concerted action possible, and continued to power so formidable an engine of conviction?

The classic study of the Mexican missionary enterprise is entitled The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. It is a fine title, catching the military metaphor which mediated the experience of that campaign. In the peninsula too the friars had come to conquer the land; to map and order it in the creation of their ‘Yucatan’, a very different place from the ‘Yucatan’ imagined by the lay settlers. I have already discussed how the opposition between Franciscan values and those of their lay compatriots had sharpened dangerously in the New World. These missionaries were not genial towards human frailties. The way of life they celebrated transcended and rebuked ordinary human impulses. Those who lived by the Rule did so in the sure knowledge that the way to virtue lay through the defiance of natural instincts, the more systematic and vigorous the defiance the better.

The events of 1562 probably marked a major shift in Maya evaluation of the status of the Spanish religion. Until that point, the Spanish presence was seen as temporary, and Christian teachings as little more than interesting novelties to be scanned for useful notions. That attitude changed, I think with the trials. In that three-month-long reign of terror the priests of the new religion, until then peripheral or intermittent factors in Indian awareness, came and sat down in the villages. The idols and the jewelled skulls of the ancestors were burned at their command. The violence, the sufferings inflicted by the friars, the destruction of the idols, signalled that the time of the old gods was indeed over, and the rule of the new gods had begun; when ‘the descendants of the former rulers are brought to misery; we are christianised, while they treat us like animals’. The Chumayel characterises 9 Ahau as the katun ‘when Christianity began, when baptism occurred. It was in this katun that Bishop Toral arrived here also. It was when the hangings ceased in the year of Our Lord 1546. And 7 Ahau was when Bishop Landa died …’

With the spoils of Mexico divided, Spanish interest had turned again to Yucatan. Late in 1526 Francisco de Montejo, who had served as a captain in both the Grijalva and the Cortés expeditions, obtained a charter from the Crown for the pacification of the peninsula. He proclaimed his proposed conquest throughout a Spain enchanted afresh by a New World which had already yielded one Mexico. Within a few months he had secured four good ships, cannon, excellent small arms, horses, and what he believed to be abundant supplies of meat, oil, wine, vinegar and biscuits. He had recruited a surgeon, two pharmacists, three churchmen – two seculars and a Carmelite – and several Catalan merchants, complete with merchandise to trade with the Indians and, when they should get established, with the conquistadores-turned-settler. Among the usual adventurers attracted to Montejo's standard were a few men of significant rank. When the smart little fleet dropped down past San Lúcar de Barrameda late in the June of 1527, it looked, as Montejo believed it to be, ‘the best that has come out from Castile’. Arrived in Hispaniola, the expedition was stiffened by the intake of some seasoned men, and horses enough to bring the cavalry up to fifty – an indication of the tough reputation the Maya warriors of the coastal towns had won for themselves. But there was one surprising lack. Montejo had known and spoken with Aguilar, and with Cortés’ more famous interpreter Doña Marina. He knew the ‘pacified’ Indians of Tabasco spoke a tongue intelligible to the Yucatan Maya.

No report survives of the first meeting between the bishop and the Provincial. It must have had some of the quality of a tidal wave meeting a rocky coast. Toral, entering a situation charged with malice and close to hysteria, was determined to slow the onward plunge of events by introducing the bridle of legal process. That determination must have indicated to Landa the bishop's essential identification with the settlers' reading of events. Having examined the Sotuta confessions Toral confirmed Landa and his friars in their inquisitorial authority. But he absolutely prohibited any further use of torture.

The prohibition implies a degree of scepticism, even at that very early date, as to the veracity of the Sotuta confessions. Clearly the reckless use of torture could not be permitted, but under proper regulation it was a permitted instrument in the inquisitorial armoury. Toral might have hesitated to authorise its employment against neophyte Indians fallen back into idolatry, but deliberate acts of blasphemous human sacrifice would have required the sternest measures. It would seem that Toral had made an early judgment not so much from the content of the confessions, which were compelling enough, but on the man who had secured them. His prohibition, despite Landa's furious protests, remained absolute. Landa and his friars for their part refused to participate any further in the enquiry.

There began a long contest between the two men, reminiscent in its wary intensity of the Hernandez affair; although here the players were more evenly matched. Within a fortnight they communicated only through notaries.

It is most necessary to believe this. These are the precious stones which our Lord, the Father, has abandoned. This was his first repast, this balche, with which we, the ruling men revere him here. Very rightly they worshipped as true gods these precious stones, when the true God was established, our Lord God, the Lord of heaven and earth, the true God. Nevertheless, the first gods were perishable gods. Their worship came to its inevitable end. They lost their efficacy by the benediction of the Lord of Heaven, after the redemption of the world was accomplished, after the resurrection of the true God, the true Dios, when he blessed heaven and earth. Then was your worship abolished, Maya men. Turn away your hearts from your old religion.

The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel

I have suggested how their shared understanding of the past enabled the Maya to confront a dangerous present and a problematical future with something close to equanimity, and to experience subjugation without relinquishing their sense of autonomy. The Books of Chilam Balam were not only products of that stance, but also crucial vehicles for its maintenance. López Medel had noted in 1552 how obstinately the Maya lords continued to call their people together for secret meetings for the worship of their idols and the celebration of their histories, and that same complaint echoed down through the century and beyond.

Ambivalent Conquests is now fifteen years old, which is elderly in the academic world. I will not try to locate it in regard to new developments in colonial studies in Yucatan or elsewhere, partly because history, especially regional history, moves slowly; more because it is a discrete study that aimed to shed a sharp light on one particular territory, and only diffuse light beyond.

Instead I offer a short history of the transformation of a great deal of reading, thinking, and rethinking into the book you are holding in your hands. (We know too little about the biography of books.) Ambivalent Conquests was my first book. Each book teaches the writer something new, but the first teaches you the most. It grew out of a post-graduate history thesis: an inquiry into Spanish actions in colonial Yucatan a couple of decades after conquest, with the focus on the ferocious inquisition into Indian ‘backsliding’ by Franciscan missionary friars, and the Spanish settlers' attempts to stop it. The thesis ended with the prim observation that, as we have only Spanish records to work from, the world of the Mayan Indians was and must remain closed to us. One of my examiners, a man of much insight and few words, pencilled in the margin: ‘Why?’. I was taken aback. Then I thought ‘Why indeed?’; read a great deal of Clifford Geertz and other selected anthropologists; returned to those Spanish records; and, four years of happy thinking later, completed the book with a third section devoted to reconstructing what the Indians might have been up to.

The institutions evolved in the long struggle against the Moors in homeland Spain had the attraction of obvious appropriateness to the conquerors on Spain's frontiers in the Americas. In Yucatan Montejo deployed notions of government derived from Spain's medieval and unequivocally military past. His own title of adelantado, and the extensive judicial, military and executive powers which went with it identified him with the Marcher Lords of the Reconquista, who had also directly represented the Crown in their frontier zones. When Montejo exercised that authority to establish government of the new territories he drew on another institution of the Reconquista, the encomienda, used throughout Spain's American empire in its first phase. The essential form of the encomienda was simple enough. The Crown, or in this case, the Crown's delegate, granted to an individual worthy of reward the right to exact tribute and labour from a specified number of royal tributaries. In return the grantee, or encomendero, undertook to care for the material and spiritual well-being of his charges, and to maintain himself in readiness for military service. The neat economy of such a system, providing as it did instant rewards to the conquerors with instant control and exploitation of the conquered, was as irresistible in Yucatan as it had been elsewhere in the Indies: by the close of 1545 Montejo had parcelled out the native towns and villages of the peninsula in encomienda grants among his followers.