At the same time as Spanish and Portuguese invaders were shaping and reshaping life in the western hemisphere, religion in Europe was also undergoing drastic and even convulsive changes. Hernán Cortés (1485–1547), the conqueror of Mexico, was a contemporary of Martin Luther (1483–1547). In 1521, as Cortés was engaged in the conquest of the Aztecs, supposedly on behalf of King Charles I, Luther was confronting the same ruler, under his other title, Emperor Charles V, at the Diet of Worms. The century of the Conquista is also the century of the Reformation.

The parallelism and contrast between these two events were not lost on Spanish chroniclers of the time. Later in the same century, Friar Gerónimo de Mendieta, a Franciscan missionary in Mexico, decided to write his Historia eclesiástica indiana (Church History of the Indies). There he wrote that Hernán Cortés and Martin Luther had been born on exactly the same day – which was not true – and on that basis declared that God