If Montejo's Spaniards were disappointed, as they moved in from the coast, with the modest size of Maya settlements, they should perhaps have wondered why there were any substantial settlements at all. The peninsula imposed narrow limits on its human users. Each milpa could be cropped only for two or three seasons before too stubborn regrowth forced its relinquishment back to the forest for seven or ten or more years. To live in a group therefore meant to spend time trekking back and forth to the milpa, as each household required access to a substantial area of land.

Colonial situations breed confusion. A favourite metaphor for the tangled miscommunications between native and outsider is a ‘confusion of tongues’, where the focus falls on the dangerous business of translation from one meaning system to another. There was certainly enough of that in the Yucatan situation, and the exploration of that dimension will be the concern of the next chapters. But colonial situations also spawn multiple realities, and that painful Assuring within the Spanish world is perhaps better caught by a different image: a hall of distorting mirrors in which each individual sees himself, as he thinks, truly reflected, while those about him are disquietingly altered into grotesques, as familiar gestures and expressions are exaggerated, parodied, even inverted. The settler-Franciscan division had always been deep; that it became deeper did not seriously threaten the sense of self of either. The case of Quijada was crueller: he found himself abandoned and left defenceless by that ‘law’ which had been his guide and shield. But it was the Franciscans themselves, causing suffering, who among the Spaniards suffered most, with the fracturing of that small intensely shared world of meanings painfully constructed through the perfected special tongue which was then used to destroy it. They had easily identified with Villalpando's unforgettable image of the Franciscan clasping the bleeding, befouled Indian in face of the homicidal rage of the Spanish settler. Then Toral had to watch settlers doing their poor best to protect wounded, weeping Indians from his Franciscan brothers' murderous anger.

Tomás López Medel was a member of the Guatemala audiencia, one of those panels of judge-administrators to whom the Crown entrusted the execution and, to a carefully limited extent, the interpretation of its law in the Indies. López Medel gave the colonists their most sustained view of the new breed of royal official. Austere, energetic, inflexible, his presence reminded them (as intended) of the formal, complex world of Spain, which distance and the disorder of faction had allowed them to forget. The new broom swept vigorously, reducing to law the previously haphazard and too often opportunistic relations between the old and the new vassals of the Crown of Castile: forcing agreement between the Spanish town councils and the friars on the amount of tribute and service to be extracted from the Indians, and fixing wage scales for the human carriers who transported most of the goods of the colony.

López Medel also turned his attention to the bringing of a more visible order and regularity to the life of the Indian villages, and here he spoke in the accents of the friars, and with their superb confidence in the power of detailed prescriptions to regulate life. There were, he noted, too many lords being offered service and deference by the commoners. Henceforth only ‘the oldest and the most virtuous’ were to continue to enjoy noble status; the surplus was thenceforth to consider themselves and be considered as commoners.