Richard E. Greenleaf

The Inquisition and the Indians of New Spain: A Study in Jurisdictional Confusion

The question of the jurisdiction of the Holy Office of the Inquisition over the native populations in New Spain and the rest of the empire has been one of controversy and confusion since the earliest days of the conquest. The perplexing problem of enforcing orthodoxy among the recently converted Indians was linked with the debate over whether or not the Indian was a rational human being who had the capacity to comprehend the Roman Catholic faith and enjoy the full sacramental system of the Church. As in the case of the rationality controversy, the position of the Indian vis-a-vis the Holy Office of the Inquisition was not resolved articulately, and after the first decades of the spiritual conquest the question took on added importance as the Mexican clergy discovered recurrent idolatry and religious syncretism among their flocks.

The Mexican Inquisition and the Indians: Sources for the Ethnohistorian

The Holy Office of the Inquisition in colonial Mexico had as its purpose the defense of Spanish religion and Spanish-Catholic culture against individuals who held heretical views and people who showed lack of respect for religious principles. Inquisition trials of Indians suggest that a prime concern of the Mexican Church in the sixteenth century was recurrent idolatry and religious syncretism. During the remainder of the colonial period and until 1818, the Holy Office of the Inquisition continued to investigate Indian transgressions against orthodoxy, and to provide the modern researcher with unique documentation for the study of mixture of religious beliefs. The “Procesos de Indios” and other subsidiary documentation from Inquisition archives present crucial data for the ethnologist and ethnohistorian, preserving for him a view of native religion at the time of Spanish contact, eyewitness accounts of post-conquest idolatry and sacrifice, burial rites, native dances and ceremonies as well as data on genealogy, social organization, political intrigues, and cultural dislocation as the Iberian and Mesoamerican civilizations collided. As “culture shock” continued to reverberate across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Inquisition manuscripts reveal the extent of Indian resistance or accommodation to Spanish Catholic culture.

Mexican Inquisition Materials in Spanish Archives

Although ninety per cent of the documentation of the Mexican Holy Office of the Inquisition is to be found in the Archivo General de la Nacion in Mexico City, a critical group of manuscripts must be consulted in Spain if the researcher is to study the Mexican institution effectively. These records are contained in the archive of the Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisicion and in the plethora of royal documents emanating from and arriving in the Council of the Indies. Unfortunately the manuscripts are scattered among the three great archives in the Iberian peninsula: Archivo de Simancas at Valladolid, Archivo Historico Nacional in Madrid, and Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla. The Simancas and Sevilla documents on the Mexican Inquisition are relatively sparse; but the AHN houses the extant archive of the Suprema and is a required visit for any investigator in Mexican Inquisition materials from 1571 to 1820.

The Inquisition Brotherhood: Cofradía de San Pedro Martir of Colonial Mexico

As part of its religious, social and political mission, personnel of Mexicos Holy Office of the Inquisition were organized into a brotherhood, the Cofradia de San Pedro Martir, patron saint of the Inquisition. Although the Inquisition had functioned in New Spain from 1522, the brotherhood was not formally established until 1656. San Pedro Martir differed in many respects from other urban and rural confraternities in the viceroyalty. An outgrowth of Cruce-signati in the medieval inquisition, the Cofradia founded by Pope Innocent IV in 1252 after the murder of Inquisitor Peter Martir of Verona, came to Spain in the late fifteenth century. In the Iberian peninsula “Colegios de Familiares” formed and later developed into Cofradias whose membership was drawn from the Familiatura , a body of non-salaried Inquisition police known as Familiares.

Francisco Millán Before the Mexican Inquisition: 1538-1539

Within the last decades considerable material has been written about Jews before the Mexican Inquisition. All of the studies mention in passing the most famous trial of a Jew before the Inquisition of Bishop Juan de Zumarraga (1536-1543), but no scholar has published a detailed analysis of this proceso of Francisco Millan. The paleography of the document is difficult and the pagination runs to some one hundred folios; however, it is worth the effort to examine this trial in order to obtain a vivid first-hand picture of Mexican Judaism of the 1530’s. The format of this analysis and commentary will follow the organization of the original trial record.