The History of the World

The History of the World · Grades 10–13 · College · University

Mexico and the Inquisition

History · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

DRAFT — CULTURAL REVIEW PENDING. These history classes are a publisher's draft blend of the Collection's history research into this history website. Cultural review precedes any public release of this strand, and Indigenous cultural review precedes any publication of this chapter. Readings carry the research labels unchanged: DOCUMENTED · DEBATED · CLAIM · OWNER'S TEACHING — and items the research could not verify are carried as NOT VERIFIED, named, never padded or silently dropped. Denial and legend material appears only as labelled EXHIBITS, answered, never as a voice of the page. This page carries no advertising.

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site's translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

For the teacher — teacher-facing guidance for this class stands in this box only; the reading below is the student reading. This box folds in the chapter's middle-grades teacher reference: no middle-grades student page stands in this set, and nothing of the Inquisition's machinery or victims is student-facing below Grade 10 — no edicts, no procedure, no torture, no autos-da-fé, no executions, no named victims' cases, no figures from the Inquisition record, no exhibit material. The middle-grades teacher holds the documented spine so guided teaching is accurate: Mexico before 1519 was a world of nations, not a single empire (the Triple Alliance was a tribute league; the Purépecha were never conquered by the Mexica; Monte Albán was founded c. 500 BCE); the invasion was a coalition war, and the conquest took generations — the Purépecha state ending by judicial killing in 1530, Nojpetén falling only in 1697; the colony's catastrophe was demographic above all, its size honestly contested; the Inquisition in Mexico was two courts, not one bonfire — the Tribunal (1571–1820) had no jurisdiction over Indigenous people, whose faith cases went to the bishops' courts, where the era's worst violence against Indigenous religion occurred; its executions were rare by the classic estimate, and its real power was discipline, stigma, property and censorship; and independence was a settlement as much as a liberation. Three errors the culture supplies, and the corrections the teacher holds: "the Spanish conquered the Aztecs" (a coalition in which Spaniards were a small minority conquered one alliance's capital, over two years, with epidemic disease decisive; other nations separately, later, or not at all); "the Inquisition executed millions" (the archive counts some 150,000 prosecuted in Spain and 3,000–5,000 executed across the institution's whole life — false as inflation, and the small figure is not an acquittal); "Mexican history begins with Cortés" (in 1519 Mexico held cities older than most of Europe's capitals and books older than printing; the Templo Mayor was excavated in the modern capital in 1978 because it had been there all along — this correction is middle-grades teaching, in the guided register of peoples, cities and continuity).

How this class is built — Indigenous testimony in the front rank

DOCUMENTED, as method. Source-family triangulation. Indigenous testimony is a witness family in its own right — for Mexico above all the Florentine Codex, Nahua elders' own account set down with Sahagún; the Lienzo de Tlaxcala; the Indigenous annals — and it stands in the front rank, not as colour around a Spanish narrative. Material that contradicts the Indigenous accounts is never written here as fact: it is logged in the EXHIBIT register (§16) as a teaching specimen of how history was rewritten, and the conflict is shown. Every load-bearing fact carries a checkable named source. Anything the research could not verify stands in the NOT VERIFIED register (§17) — recorded, never filled by inference. The machinery of persecution is described institutionally; no graphic detail is added at any level. Condemnation targets institutions, policies and acts — never peoples, nations or ancestry; the peoples in this record are survivors, witnesses and authors. A note on names: "Aztec" is the later scholarly word; the people called themselves Mexica (of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco) — this class uses Mexica, and names every people by its own name where the record gives one.

1. The peoples before the invasion — nations with their own histories

DOCUMENTED. Mexico in 1519 was not one country waiting to be discovered. It was a world of nations — city-states, kingdoms, and one tribute empire — with writing, calendars, law, diplomacy and histories of their own reaching back millennia. The invasion struck all of them, but it struck each of them separately, and each answered it separately.

DOCUMENTED — the Mexica and the Triple Alliance. The Mexica founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco — the traditional date is 1325 — and in 1428 Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan formed the Triple Alliance, the league the Spanish sources call the Aztec Empire (Florentine Codex; standard histories). The Alliance was a tribute empire, not an administered one: conquered city-states kept their own rulers and paid scheduled tribute in goods, labour and warriors. Texcoco, the Alliance's second city, was a centre of law and letters — the city of Nezahualcoyotl, ruler and poet. Tenochtitlan itself, at the invasion, held 200,000 people or more — one of the largest cities on earth, larger than London or Seville at the same date (the figure is an estimate family, not a count; NOT VERIFIED as an exact figure, NV-4). Its great market at Tlatelolco drew tens of thousands daily; its temple precinct, the Templo Mayor, was rebuilt in stages across two centuries — the buried city INAH has been excavating in the middle of Mexico City since 1978.

DOCUMENTED — the Maya. A civilisation already ancient when the Mexica were founded — the great lowland cities of the Classic age (c. 250–900) had risen and been abandoned centuries before 1519, in a transformation Mayanists still argue over, but the Maya had not vanished: in 1519 they were nations. The Yucatán peninsula was a patchwork of rival Maya city-states; the Guatemalan highlands held the K'iche' kingdom at Q'umarkaj and the Kaqchikel at Iximche; and in the Petén lakes the Itza Maya held Nojpetén — a kingdom that would still be independent in 1697 (§3). The Maya had the Americas' most developed writing system, the glyphic script, and kept books — screenfold codices of bark paper — a fact that matters in §11, because it is precisely why they were burned.

DOCUMENTED — Zapotec, Mixtec, Purépecha. In Oaxaca, the Zapotec had raised Monte Albán — founded about 500 BCE, among the earliest cities in the Americas, with some of the continent's earliest writing — and by 1519 Zapotec lords ruled from Zaachila, while Mixtec kingdoms, whose screenfold codices record dynastic genealogies reaching back centuries, held the highlands. None of these peoples was part of the Triple Alliance. In Michoacán, around Lake Pátzcuaro, the Purépecha state (the Spaniards called its people Tarascans) ruled from Tzintzuntzan — metalworkers without rivals in Mesoamerica, masters of copper and bronze (Pollard). The Mexica tried to conquer them and were beaten: Mexica campaigns against the Purépecha frontier ended in Mexica defeat, and the two empires faced each other across a fortified border until the Spaniards came. Any account in which "the Aztecs ruled Mexico" before 1519 is false to the record — the Purépecha alone disprove it.

2. The invasion, 1519–1521 — told with the Indigenous testimony in the front rank

DOCUMENTED — who tells this story. Three Indigenous witnesses stand in the front rank. Book 12 of the Florentine Codex is the Mexica account of the conquest, set down in Nahuatl a generation after the fall by elders and scholars of Tlatelolco — the sister city that fought longest — working with Sahagún; it is history told by the defeated about their own defeat, and it does not flatter them or spare the invaders. The Annals of Tlatelolco, composed earlier and closer to the events, give the same city's colder, angrier record — including its contempt for Tenochtitlan's leadership. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala is Tlaxcala's pictorial account, painted to be sent to the Spanish Crown as a brief: proof of Tlaxcalan loyalty and service, filed in a legal argument for privileges. Each witness has an interest; the method is to read them with their interests in view and against each other and against the Spanish self-reports — Cortés's letters to the king and Bernal Díaz's soldier's memoir — which are likewise briefs, for reward and for reputation (Restall).

DOCUMENTED — the course of the war. Cortés landed in 1519 with a few hundred Spaniards. What the combined record shows is a coalition war: after the Tlaxcalans fought the Spaniards to a standstill, they allied with them against the Mexica, their old enemy, and Texcoco itself split, part joining the coalition. The army that besieged Tenochtitlan numbered Indigenous allies in the tens of thousands — the sources range from about 50,000 to 200,000 (NV-5) — against the few hundred Europeans. The "handful of Spaniards conquers an empire" story is the conquerors' own exhibit; see EXHIBIT E-4 (§16). Book 12 records, from inside the city: the omens the elders remembered; the massacre at the feast of Toxcatl, when Alvarado's men fell on unarmed Mexica nobles dancing in the temple courtyard — the act that turned uneasy occupation into war; the death of Motecuhzoma, on which the two witness families conflict — Spanish reports say his own people stoned him; the Nahua record says the Spaniards killed him — DEBATED: the conflict is shown, not settled, in this class; the flight of the Spaniards and their allies across the causeways — the night the Spanish called La Noche Triste; and then the epidemic. Smallpox reached the Valley in 1520 and burned through a population with no immunity; Book 12 describes the sickness and its dead in the city's own words, and it killed the war-leader Cuitláhuac, Motecuhzoma's successor, after a reign of eighty days. The coalition returned with brigantines built for the lake, cut the city's fresh water, and besieged it for some seventy-five days. Tenochtitlan fell on 13 August 1521. Its last ruler, Cuauhtémoc, was captured on the lake, held, and — in 1525, on the Honduras expedition — hanged by Cortés's order after an accusation of plotting; the Nahua record remembers the hanging as the murder of a captured king. The dead of the siege and the campaign are numbered by the sources anywhere from tens of thousands to 240,000 (NV-7): the range itself is the honest figure.

3. The invasion did not end in 1521

DOCUMENTED. The fall of Tenochtitlan is a date in textbooks; in the record it is the beginning of a conquest that ran, from the first landing in 1519, for 178 years — and in some regions was never completed in the colonial period at all.

4. New Spain — the colony, and what the catastrophe cost

DOCUMENTED. From 1535, with the appointment of the first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, the conquered lands were organised as the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Under it: the encomienda, grants of Indigenous tribute and labour to conquerors; the repartimiento labour drafts that succeeded it; the congregaciones that resettled scattered peoples into nucleated towns where they could be taxed, counted and preached to; the mission campaigns of the Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian orders; and an order of castes that ranked every person by ancestry. Indigenous communities governed themselves day to day through their own cabildos under this frame — and wrote: Nahuatl annals, wills, petitions and municipal records continue through the whole colonial period, one of the great notarial archives of the early modern world (Lockhart). The colonised did not stop being authors when they became subjects.

DEBATED — the catastrophe, taught as the scholars argue it. The demographic collapse of Indigenous Mexico in the century after 1519 is among the largest in recorded history. Cook and Borah, working from tribute lists, censuses and parish records, estimated 25.2 million people in central Mexico in 1519, falling to about 700,000–1 million by the early 1600s — a decline above 90 percent. Lower counters dispute the starting figure, not the collapse: Sanders's Basin of Mexico work supports a much smaller 1519 population; Denevan's adjusted figure stands near 11.4 million; Henige's Numbers from Nowhere attacks the conversion chains by which tribute counts become people. A defensible sentence that every school can stand behind: by the measures of every serious school, central Mexico lost the great majority of its people within a century of 1519, and the starting number — not the catastrophe — is what scholarship contests (NV-6). The killers, in the records' own order: epidemic disease above all — smallpox (1520), measles, and the two great cocoliztli epidemics of 1545 and 1576, named with the Nahuatl word because that is what the Indigenous record called them; DNA recovered from a 1545 epidemic cemetery at Teposcolula-Yucundaa in Oaxaca has identified Salmonella enterica in the dead (Vågene et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2018). Behind the epidemics stood war, famine, enslavement, mine and labour drafts, and the social shattering that made each epidemic deadlier than the last. Silver — Zacatecas (from 1546), Guanajuato, Taxco — made New Spain the Spanish empire's treasury, dug in large part by drafted Indigenous labour. And in February 1978, electrical workers in Mexico City struck the great Coyolxauhqui monolith, and INAH's Templo Mayor Project began excavating the Mexica sacred precinct where it had always been, under the cathedral city. The modern nation's capital and the Mexica capital occupy the same ground.

5. Independence, 1810–1821

DOCUMENTED. The insurgency began as a parish priest's rising: Miguel Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores, 16 September 1810, raised an army drawn overwhelmingly from the Indigenous, mixed and labouring poor, and was answered by the royalist state with war and by the Church with excommunication — and by the Inquisition with an edict of heresy (§15). Hidalgo was executed in Chihuahua on 30 July 1811; José María Morelos carried the insurgency to a congress and a constitution before his own execution on 22 December 1815; the war ground on as guerrilla resistance under Vicente Guerrero. What ended it was not insurgent victory but a settlement: when Spain's own liberal revolution of 1820 threatened the colonial elite's church and privileges, the royalist commander Agustín de Iturbide made terms with Guerrero — the Plan de Iguala, 24 February 1821, built on Three Guarantees: Religion (the Catholic Church's position protected), Independence, and Union. The Army of the Three Guarantees entered Mexico City on 27 September 1821, and Spanish rule in Mexico ended — three hundred years, almost to the day, after Tenochtitlan fell. The honest reading, which the study questions teach: independence was real, and it was also a bargain that protected the two institutions — church and army — that the insurgency had risen against; the peoples who had done most of the fighting received least from the settlement.

6. The modern nation — a brief honest arc

DOCUMENTED. Empire and republic (1821–1824): Iturbide crowned himself Agustín I (1822) and fell within a year; the federal Constitution of 1824 made Mexico a republic. Loss of the north (1836–1853): Texas broke away in 1836; war with the United States (1846–48) ended in occupation of the capital and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 2 February 1848: Mexico ceded more than 525,000 square miles — California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas's boundary at the Rio Grande, roughly half the national territory — for $15 million. A further strip followed in the Gadsden Purchase (1853). Indigenous nations of the ceded north — Apache, Comanche, Navajo, Pueblo, and many more — passed under a new empire without being asked. Reforma and the second invasion (1855–1867): Benito Juárez — a Zapotec from Oaxaca, the Indigenous president — and the liberals' Reform laws broke the Church's corporate wealth and legal privileges; the Reform War (1858–61) followed; then France invaded and installed the emperor Maximilian. The republic, restored by Juárez's armies, executed Maximilian at Querétaro on 19 June 1867. Porfiriato and Revolution (1876–1920): Porfirio Díaz's long order brought railways, foreign capital, and land concentration that stripped village lands wholesale. The Revolution that began 20 November 1910 — Madero, then Zapata's Liberation Army of the South fighting under Tierra y Libertad for the villages' stolen land, Villa in the north, Carranza and Obregón — cost, by common scholarly estimate, one to two million lives, and wrote its settlement into the Constitution of 1917: land reform and the ejido, labour rights, and the state's authority over the Church. The long century and the present: the party that became the PRI governed from 1929 to 2000; in 1968 the state shot student protesters at Tlatelolco — in the plaza of the same Tlatelolco whose elders had written Book 12 — with the death toll still contested (NV-9). On 1 January 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose in Chiapas in the name of the Maya and the other Indigenous peoples of Mexico. Mexico today counts its Indigenous peoples in sixty-eight linguistic groupings with 364 variants (INALI's catalogue), and its constitution names the nation pluricultural. The peoples of §1 are not the past of this story. They are its continuity, which is where this class's framing law requires the chapter to end.

7. Spain: the founding of the Inquisition, 1478–1492

DOCUMENTED. The Spanish Inquisition was new in kind: not the medieval church's occasional inquiry, but a permanent, crown-controlled institution. In 1478, Pope Sixtus IV's bull Exigit sincerae devotionis affectus granted Ferdinand and Isabella the right to appoint inquisitors in their kingdoms — the crown asked, the papacy licensed, and the crown kept the controls. The first tribunal sat at Seville in 1480; in 1483 Tomás de Torquemada became the first Inquisitor General, and a royal council, the Suprema, governed the whole from the court (Kamen). Two precisions this class insists on, because the record does: first, its first target was not "heresy" in general but the conversos — the tens of thousands of Jews baptised under pressure across the preceding century, and their descendants — accused of judaizing: keeping Jewish practice in secret. The institution was born as an instrument aimed at one population's hidden fidelity. Second, the expulsion of 1492 was not the Inquisition's act. The Alhambra Decree (31 March 1492) ordering Spain's Jews to convert or leave was a decree of the crown. The Inquisition then policed the baptised who remained. Conflating the two is the first error of the popular record; the archive keeps them separate, and so does this class. From Spain the institution spread to the empire: tribunals in Sicily, Sardinia, the Canaries — and, in the Americas, Lima (1570), Mexico (1571) and Cartagena (1610).

8. The machinery — how it worked, institutionally

DOCUMENTED (Kamen's account, confirmed by the tribunal records themselves — a procedure whose power lay less in its punishments than in its design). The Edict of Faith. Inquisitors arriving in a district had the Edict read in every church: a catalogue of the signs of heresy — for judaizing, such signs as changing linen on Friday, abstaining from work on Saturday, turning to the wall to die — followed by the obligation, laid on every hearer under pain of excommunication, to denounce anyone, including family, within a term of grace. The tribunal thus deputised the whole population as its informants, and denunciation cost nothing and could settle any private score. Arrest and sequestration. On sufficient denunciation, arrest — and with arrest, the sequestration of the prisoner's property, inventoried at once. The accused's family could be ruined before any verdict; the tribunal's own running costs were fed from confiscations, a structural incentive the record names plainly. The secret trial. The accused was not told the charges in full, nor the witnesses' names. The defence advocate was appointed and paid by the tribunal itself, and his recognised duty typically ended at urging confession. Torture was lawful, regulated on paper, and used in a minority of cases — above all in the great judaizer waves — to extract confessions and, crucially, the names of others: the system harvested networks. The sentence and the auto-da-fé. Sentences were published at the auto-da-fé — the "act of faith," a mass public ceremony of procession, sermon and the reading of each case, staged with the full presence of civil authority: the tribunal's theatre, and deliberately so. The reconciled received penances, prison, the galleys, exile, and the sanbenito — the penitential garment painted with their offence, afterward hung in their parish church with their name, so that the stigma outlived the sentence and fell on descendants. Those condemned for obstinate or relapsed heresy were "relaxed" to the secular arm — handed to the civil power for execution, because the Church formally shed no blood. A prisoner who reconciled at the end was typically garroted first and burned after; the impenitent burned alive. Both sentences appear in the Mexican record of 1596, in one family (§13). Blood purity. Around and beneath the tribunal ran limpieza de sangre — statutes requiring proof of untainted ancestry for cathedral chapters, colleges, orders and offices — extending the tribunal's suspicion from acts to descent, and exporting itself to New Spain. Censorship. The tribunal was also Spain's censorship engine: from the Valdés Index of 1559 — some 700 titles gathered in under a year — Spanish Indexes banned categories wholesale: every vernacular Bible, Catholic or not; Erasmus entire; vernacular works of devotion; books on magic (§14 follows the Index across the Atlantic).

9. The numbers — weighed, not waved

DOCUMENTED, from the archive. The Inquisition's death toll is the most rewritten number in its whole history, rewritten in both directions, and this class prints the archive's numbers with their provenance. Prosecuted in Spain, whole institution: roughly 150,000 across three and a half centuries (García Cárcel's estimate, in Kamen). The archival database: Contreras and Henningsen's study of 44,674 cases reported to the Suprema, 1540–1700, counts 826 executed in person (about 1.8 percent) and 778 burned in effigy. The database is incomplete — whole tribunals' reports are missing — but it is a count of records, not a rhetoric. Executed in Spain, whole institution: modern archival scholarship converges on 3,000 to 5,000 (Kamen); Edward Peters's narrower reckoning counts about 3,000 death sentences carried out between 1550 and 1800. The killing was concentrated: the first decades at Seville and elsewhere (1480s–1520s), the Protestant cells of 1558–62, and the judaizer waves — not spread evenly across the centuries. For comparison the archive itself supplies: the witch trials of the rest of Europe executed on the order of 40,000–60,000 in the same centuries — the comparison does not excuse one tribunal; it locates the terror where the records locate it, and it shows that "the Inquisition killed millions" fails not as interpretation but as arithmetic (see EXHIBIT E-1, §16). What the numbers cannot measure is the institution's real weight: a population informing on itself for two and a half centuries, property seized at arrest, names hung in churches, careers closed by ancestry. The Mexican tribunal's own figures (§12) make the same point at smaller scale — few executions, a whole society disciplined.

10. First phase in Mexico — friars and bishops, 1521–1571, and Don Carlos

DOCUMENTED. Before any tribunal existed in New Spain, inquisitorial power arrived in persons. From 1524 the Franciscan mission's superiors held delegated inquisitorial faculties; the Dominicans followed. When Juan de Zumárraga, Franciscan and first bishop of Mexico, was appointed apostolic inquisitor in 1535, he exercised the power as bishop — he never erected a formal tribunal — and between 1536 and 1543 he ran a series of inquisitorial trials of Indigenous leaders, of which the Don Carlos case was the climax (Greenleaf; Lopes Don). Two cases carry the phase. Martín Ocelotl (1536) — a Nahua religious specialist and healer, tried as a nahualli and heretical dogmatiser; his trial record, published in 1912, is among the first in Mexican history in which an Indigenous man's answers survive at length, inside his accusers' paperwork. Don Carlos Ometochtzin of Texcoco (1539) — Acolhua nobility of Texcoco, grandson of Nezahualcoyotl. Denounced — by Indigenous witnesses, members of his own extended family among them — for keeping the old worship, for heretical dogmatising, and for bigamy, he was tried by Zumárraga's court, convicted, and burned at the stake in Mexico City on 30 November 1539. His trial record was published by the Mexican archives in 1910 and remains the main source for his case.

DOCUMENTED — what the authorities themselves said. The execution scandalised the Spanish authorities it was meant to serve: it was judged imprudent in Spain and in the colony, and Zumárraga was reprimanded. A royal decree of Charles V dated 15 October 1538 had already ordered that Indians not be tried before the Holy Office and that in matters of faith the bishop be their judge — a decree that both preceded the execution and framed its aftermath: Don Carlos was tried not by a tribunal (there was none) but by the bishop who was also apostolic inquisitor, and in the decades after 1539 the Crown's position hardened into the rule the 1571 tribunal would inherit (§11). Historians dispute how direct the line from this case to that rule runs (NV-11); the case's centrality to the argument is not disputed.

DEBATED — the two readings, shown. The older reading (Greenleaf's tradition) makes Don Carlos a resister: a lord keeping his people's gods and saying so — testimony in the record has him asking who these newcomers are who "live on us" and "subjugate us," words the court wrote down as evidence and the centuries have read as defiance. The modern revision (Lopes Don) reads the same dossier and finds a Texcocan succession fight: rival kin using the new court's machinery against a lord whose authority they wanted broken, with the sexual and religious charges interwoven in local politics. Both readings agree on the documents; they disagree on what the documents were doing (NV-8).

11. The exemption, stated precisely — and Maní, its real-world limit

DOCUMENTED. This is the fact most often garbled in popular accounts, and this class states it exactly: when the Tribunal of the Holy Office was erected in New Spain in 1571, Indigenous people were formally exempt from its jurisdiction. The reasoning the age gave itself was that the Indians were neophytes — new and, in the official phrase, tender in the faith. In practice: (1) Indians' faith offences went to the bishops, judged through the episcopal court for natives (the Provisorato de Indios): idolatry, sorcery and relapse cases against Indigenous people continued all through the colonial period in those courts — the exemption moved the courtroom, it did not end the policing. (2) The tribunal's one door into Indigenous life was print: material printed in Indigenous languages fell under inquisitorial control — the Holy Office exercised jurisdiction over books in Nahuatl and the other languages, which is why a Nahua encyclopedia could be seized in 1577 while its authors stood outside the tribunal's reach (§14). (3) The arithmetic: by Alberro's estimate, the exempt Indigenous population was 75 to 80 percent of everyone in New Spain. The tribunal's writ ran over the rest — Spaniards, creoles, mestizos, Africans and their descendants — the colonial minority, and over them it ran completely.

DOCUMENTED — Yucatán, 1562: Maní. The tribunal's exemption meant little where a bishop's officers were determined. In Yucatán in 1562, the Franciscan provincial Diego de Landa, wielding episcopal inquisitorial authority in the bishop's absence, ran a campaign against Maya "idolatry" discovered in a cave near Maní: mass arrests, interrogation by the garrucha — the hoist — and, on 12 July 1562, an auto-da-fé at Maní at which the Maya's books and images were burned in a heap. Landa's own Relación de las cosas de Yucatán reports that twenty-seven books were burned there, with some five thousand cult images in the common telling (the image count is Landa's own figure; NV-10). Of all the screenfold books the Maya ever wrote, three survive entire, and a fragment of a fourth. Two records of Maní must be held together. The first is the destruction's own logic, in Landa's words in the standard translation: the books were burned because they contained "superstitions and lies of the devil," and the Maya, he wrote, "regretted [it] to an amazing degree, and… it caused them much affliction." The second is the reckoning: the arriving bishop, Francisco de Toral, hearing Maya testimony, denounced the campaign's abuses; Landa was recalled to Spain and tried for conducting an unauthorised inquisition, and the investigation that followed recorded the campaign's toll on the interrogated — modern scholarship reading the inquiry record puts the tortured in the thousands over some three months, with 158 dead in one widely used reckoning (Clendinnen; the figures' provenance is registered, NV-3). Landa was absolved, and returned to Yucatán as its bishop in 1573 — and the Relación he wrote in his disgrace remains, perversely, one of the great sources for the civilisation whose books he burned.

12. The Tribunal of the Holy Office, 1571–1820

DOCUMENTED — erection. Philip II authorised the tribunal for New Spain by royal decree of 25 January 1569 (AGN); the Suprema named Pedro Moya de Contreras as its first inquisitor. Moya arrived in September 1571; the tribunal was solemnly established on 2 November 1571, and on 4 November 1571 the first Edict of Faith was read in Mexico City's cathedral: everyone over twelve summoned, heresies catalogued — judaizing named first — six days given to confess for mercy, and every hearer sworn to denounce the suspected. In the weeks following, some four hundred denunciations opened more than a hundred investigations. Jurisdiction ran over New Spain, Guatemala and the Philippines — an ocean-spanning court sitting in Mexico City, served by comisarios in the ports and provinces, and by familiares, lay officers whose presence made the tribunal local everywhere.

DOCUMENTED — who stood before it. Over two and a half centuries the docket, as Alberro's study of 1571–1700 established, was mostly not the famous cases: offences of speech — blasphemy, heretical propositions, scandalous talk — the commonest business of the court; bigamy, prosecuted in numbers; solicitation — priests accused of using the confessional for seduction; superstition, sorcery and love magic — whose practitioners were disproportionately women of African and mixed descent, and whose files are among the richest records of those women's lives that survive; prohibited books (§14); and, at long intervals, the waves that produced the executions: the judaizer prosecutions of the 1590s and the 1640s, aimed at Portuguese New Christian networks. Executions across the whole operation: the historian Luis González Obregón's classic estimate counts fifty-one death sentences carried out in the tribunal's 235–242 years — with his own warning, preserved here as part of the figure, that the records are poor and exact numbers cannot be verified (NV-1). The tribunal's weight in Mexican life was never in its rare burnings. It was in the edicts in every parish, the comisario in every port, the sanbenitos in the cathedral, the property seized at arrest, and the knowledge that a neighbour's sentence at a dinner table could become a file in the secret archive.

13. The Carvajal family, 1579–1649 — the tribunal's most documented victims

DOCUMENTED. One family's file runs across seventy years of the tribunal's life, and because the accused wrote, it is the case in which the victims speak in the first person (Cohen; Liebman; Stavans). Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, the Elder, a Portuguese New Christian, was appointed governor of the Nuevo Reino de León in 1579 and settled Mexico's northeast frontier. His extended family included practising secret Jews; the governor himself, a Catholic of record, was arrested in 1589 charged with protecting judaizers, stripped of office and property, and died in the tribunal's prison in 1591. The arrests of 1589 took his sister Francisca Núñez de Carvajal, her children, and their circle. At the auto-da-fé of 24 February 1590 the family confessed and were reconciled — sentenced to perpetual imprisonment and the sanbenito; the dead father, Francisco Rodríguez de Matos, was punished in effigy, his remains exhumed and burned. Inside the prison the family held to their faith — writing messages of encouragement to one another, the record says, in tiny script on pear seeds — and were denounced again as relapsed. On 8 December 1596, at the great auto-da-fé in Mexico City, Francisca and her children Isabel, Catalina and Leonor, and her son Luis de Carvajal the Younger, were executed — nine of that auto's condemned burned in all, in the standard account: the mother and daughters, reconciling at the end, were garroted before the burning; Luis, refusing, burned alive. One daughter, Mariana, judged mad, was executed at the auto of 25 March 1601. The youngest, Ana, reconciled as a child in 1601, lived quietly for decades, was arrested again in the 1640s, and at about seventy years of age was executed in the great auto of 1649 — the family's file closes seventy years after it opened, in the tribunal's largest fire.

DOCUMENTED — Luis the Younger's memoir. Raised Catholic, told at thirteen by his brother that the family was Jewish, Luis became the spiritual centre of New Spain's crypto-Jews and wrote, in minute script in a book small enough to hide on his body, a spiritual autobiography — among the earliest known writings by a Jew in the Americas. When the family was arrested, the Inquisition seized the memoir and used it as evidence; after the executions it was filed away in the tribunal's archive, passing eventually to the national archive. There it sat until 1932, when it was stolen. For eighty-four years scholars worked from a transcription made shortly before the theft. In 2016 the manuscripts surfaced in the sale rooms, were identified by the collector Leonard L. Milberg, and were returned to Mexico — announced in 2017 — to the Archivo General de la Nación (Stavans). The accused's voice survives inside the persecutor's archive, and its modern history repeats its colonial one: seized, stolen, recovered, and read.

DOCUMENTED — the Gran Complicidad and the auto of 1649. When Portugal broke from the Spanish crown in 1640, Portuguese New Christians in the Spanish world became suspects twice over — as judaizers and as the enemy's kin. From 1642 the Mexico tribunal arrested the great Portuguese merchant network of New Spain wholesale, on denunciations that ripened into the Gran Complicidad, the "Great Conspiracy" case. Its auto-da-fé, 11 April 1649, was the largest in the tribunal's history: over one hundred accused (the precise count commonly printed is registered unverified, NV-2); thirteen were burned in person; and a great company of the rest were punished in effigy and in bones, because after years in the secret prisons more of the accused had died awaiting sentence than stood alive to receive it. Ana de Carvajal was among the thirteen of 1649. After 1649 the tribunal never mounted another season like it.

14. Censorship in New Spain — the Index across the Atlantic, and the fate of the Florentine Codex

DOCUMENTED. Every book that lawfully entered New Spain came by the fleet, and the tribunal met the fleet: its comisario at Veracruz was charged to board every incoming ship, search the book cargo against the Indexes, and conduct a visita — interrogating passengers and crew about what they carried and what they had read. The practice, the records show, was inconsistent: fleets were many, books were small, and bribes and false manifests were older than the tribunal. The tribunal's first great act in Mexico was not a trial but a sweep: the visita of 1571–72 called in prohibited books across the colony, and found Spaniards in Mexico — lay and clerical, up to high officials — reading Erasmus, vernacular Scripture, and whole shelves of works the 1559 Valdés Index had banned. Mexico City had the Americas' first printing press, at work from 1539, and everything printed in New Spain printed under licence. But the censorship regime's distinctive New Spain problem was language: the missionaries themselves had put Christianity into Nahuatl and the other languages in quantity, and the Crown had already ruled, in 1555, that works written in Nahuatl required approval by an ecclesiastical language expert before they could circulate. The tribunal inherited that gate. Its exemption of Indigenous people expressly did not extend to Indigenous-language print (§11): the books of a people the court could not try were nonetheless the court's to license or seize.

DOCUMENTED — the seizure of Sahagún, 1577, the case that contains all the others. The Florentine Codex was completed in 1577, and it fell under the other machinery: it had begun to be said at court that the Historia preserved the idolatries it described, and in 1577 Philip II ordered all of Sahagún's writings sent to Spain to prevent the work's circulation. Sahagún, nearly eighty, wrote to the king asking whether the codex had arrived, and never learned; he spent his last years trying to reconstruct what he believed lost. One copy reached Florence — and it is because the Nahua testimony was confiscated out of New Spain that it survives entire, in Florence, digitised for the world by the World Digital Library and the Getty. Hold the whole shape of it: the most important Indigenous history of Mexico ever written was (1) authored by Nahua elders and scholars, (2) seized by the censorship regime as dangerous, (3) saved by the seizure's own pipeline into a Medici library, and (4) unread in Mexico for centuries. Censorship did not merely suppress books in New Spain; it decided which of the colony's books would exist at all, and where.

15. Decline and abolition, 1750–1834

DOCUMENTED. The tribunal's last century was a long diminishment: its docket thinned to minor offences and political suspicion; Enlightenment books crossed its cordon in quantity; and in its final decades it turned its machinery on the independence movement itself. In October 1810 the tribunal issued its edict against Hidalgo, charging the insurgent priest with heresies accumulated for the purpose — the Inquisition's last public act in Mexico was an attempt to anathematise a revolution. Morelos was likewise proceeded against. The end came from Spain's own liberal revolution: the Cortes of Cádiz abolished the Inquisition by decree of 22 February 1813, published in Mexico on 8 June 1813. Ferdinand VII restored it in 1814 on his return; the tribunal sat on, hollow, until the restored constitutional regime abolished it definitively in 1820 — Mexican independence followed within the year, and the new nation did not revive it. In Spain itself the final abolition waited until 15 July 1834. The last person executed under inquisitorial authority in the Spanish world was the schoolteacher Cayetano Ripoll, hanged at Valencia in 1826 by the diocesan juntas that succeeded the tribunal in all but name — the record's own coda on how institutions outlive their abolitions.

16. EXHIBITS — how this history has been rewritten, labelled and answered

Material that contradicts the documented record — above all the Indigenous witnesses — is never taught as fact in this class. It is filed here as an EXHIBIT: a specimen to be studied, with the record that answers it standing beside it.

EXHIBIT E-1 — "Fifty to sixty-eight million killed by the Inquisition." CLAIM, answered. A figure circulating in modern polemic, traced to a 2006 pamphlet estimating deaths "by the Papacy" across a millennium. Against it: the archive's own arithmetic (§9) — about 150,000 prosecuted in Spain across the institution's whole life; 3,000–5,000 executed. The exhibit's lesson is mechanical: a number manufactured by applying imaginary rates to imaginary totals can outrun any archive in circulation, and only the relaciones — the tribunal's own case files — answer it.

EXHIBIT E-2 — Llorente's ledger. CLAIM, answered. Juan Antonio Llorente, the Inquisition's own former secretary, exiled and turned critic, published the first history of the institution (1817–18) with a reckoning of 31,912 burned in person — ten times the archival figure. His history was indispensable and his numbers were wrong: a sympathetic insider's inflation, overtaken by the case files he himself had administered. Filed beside E-1 to show the rewriting runs in every direction — and that the archive, not the loudest historian, is the court of appeal.

EXHIBIT E-3 — "A land without writing." CLAIM, answered. The durable textbook picture of pre-conquest Mexico as a world of pictures without history. Against it: Maya glyphic writing; Mixtec genealogical screenfolds; the Nahua annals tradition that produced the Annals of Tlatelolco and Book 12 itself; and the Maní bonfire, which is unintelligible unless the books burned were worth burning (§11). The conquerors did not find an absence of writing. They found writing they feared, and the record of its destruction is the proof of its existence.

EXHIBIT E-4 — "A few hundred Spaniards conquered an empire." CLAIM, answered. Cortés's letters and the heroic tradition built on them. Against it: the coalition the combined record documents — Tlaxcala, the Texcocan faction, and dozens of allied nations, tens of thousands strong (NV-5), fighting a war that made sense in their politics (Restall; Lienzo de Tlaxcala). The exhibit's function is to teach students to ask of any conqueror's memoir the question Book 12 forces: who else was in the army, and why does the memoir need them invisible?

EXHIBIT E-5 — "The Inquisition in Mexico burned Indians by the thousand." CLAIM, answered — with its mirror warning. The popular picture transplants Spain's legend onto New Spain wholesale. Against it: the exemption of 1571 (§11) and González Obregón's fifty-one (§12). But the exhibit is filed with its mirror warning, because the correction is itself corruptible into a whitewash: the exemption moved Indigenous defendants into episcopal courts that tried, tortured, and — in Zumárraga's Mexico City and Landa's Yucatán — killed them (§§10–11). A student who leaves with "the Inquisition spared the Indians" has traded one exhibit for another. The record supports neither picture; it supports the two-court map, and the map is what this class teaches.

EXHIBIT E-6 — Princess Eréndira. CLAIM (legend), answered. Michoacán's beloved legend of the Purépecha princess who resisted the Spaniards on horseback. Against it: no contemporary account of her existence exists; the story surfaces centuries later (NV-12). Filed not to mock a people's symbol but to teach the difference between a nation's legend — which is evidence about the nation that keeps it — and a documented life. This class does not teach her as history.

17. NOT VERIFIED register — carried whole, named

Items the research could not verify to its standard. They stand here with the reason; nothing in this class asserts any of them.

NOT VERIFIED count: 12 items (NV-1 to NV-12). EXHIBITS filed: 6 (E-1 to E-6). This class also keeps the source chapter's exclusions: no graphic detail at any level; no invented or composite testimony — Indigenous voices are quoted only where a named source carries them; chronicle reports of miracle and omen are recorded as what the witnesses believed and remembered, neither endorsed as fact nor mocked as error.

Study questions

Essay-grade questions and research prompts, worked from named evidence; no answer key. Where a question names a figure, the figure is the evidence — use it exactly as this class states it, with the kind of figure it is (a count, an estimate, an exhibit) attached. Numbers registered as unverified appear here only as labelled estimates or as exhibits, never as facts to be recalled.

Set M-1 — The peoples before the invasion: a world of nations (source: §1)

  1. The Triple Alliance of 1428 joined Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan in a tribute empire: conquered city-states kept their rulers and paid scheduled tribute. Explain what follows for the word "empire" in this history — what the Alliance could command, what it did not administer — and why a student who pictures a single administered state will misread everything that happens in 1519.
  2. Tenochtitlan held, by estimate, 200,000 people or more — among the largest cities on earth in 1519, larger than London or Seville. This class prints that figure as an "estimate family" and registers its range (NV-4). What is the difference between a census figure and an estimate family, and how should the difference change the way a careful writer uses the number in an essay?
  3. The Purépecha state of Michoacán was never conquered by the Mexica: Mexica campaigns against it ended in Mexica defeat. Take this one fact and work out what it destroys. Which common sentences about "Aztec Mexico" before 1519 does it falsify, and what map of Mexico in 1519 — how many powers, of what kinds — replaces the falsified picture?
  4. The Maya in 1519 were not a fallen civilisation's remnant but nations: Yucatán city-states, the K'iche' and Kaqchikel kingdoms of the highlands, the Itza still independent at Nojpetén. Their Classic cities had been abandoned centuries earlier. Explain why "the Maya disappeared" is a false sentence twice over — once about the Classic age, and once about 1519 — and what evidence from this class answers it each time.
  5. Monte Albán was founded about 500 BCE; Mixtec codices record dynasties centuries deep; the Mexica founded Tenochtitlan in 1325. Set the three timescales side by side and state what they do to the phrase "Mexican history begins in 1519." Whose history is erased by the phrase, and whose convenience does the erasure serve?

Set M-2 — The invasion in the front rank: Indigenous testimony (source: §2, with EXHIBIT E-4)

  1. Book 12 of the Florentine Codex is the Mexica account of the conquest, set down in Nahuatl a generation after the fall by elders and scholars of Tlatelolco. State who its authors were, in what language they wrote, and for what first audience — then explain why its judgements (on the Spaniards, and on Tenochtitlan's leadership) carry a different evidentiary weight than Cortés's letters, and a different weight again from the Annals of Tlatelolco, written earlier by the same city.
  2. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala was painted to be sent to the Spanish Crown as part of Tlaxcala's argument for privileges — a legal brief in pictures. Does a witness's interest discredit his testimony? Argue it both ways, then state the working rule this programme uses: a source's interest is read into the weighing, not used to discard the witness. Test your rule on Cortés's letters, which are also a brief — for reward and reputation.
  3. On the death of Motecuhzoma the two witness families conflict: Spanish reports say his own people stoned him; the Nahua record says the Spaniards killed him. This class shows the conflict and settles nothing. Write the paragraph a historian loyal to the record must write about this death — what may be asserted, what must be shown as conflict, and what would count as evidence strong enough to change the paragraph.
  4. Book 12 describes the smallpox of 1520 in the city's own words, and records that it killed the war-leader Cuitláhuac after eighty days of rule. A Spanish account of the siege stresses arms and generalship. Analyse what each tradition of explanation — disease in the Nahua account, arms in the Spanish one — makes visible and what each hides, and why a history of the siege needs both to be intelligible.
  5. Exhibit E-4 files the sentence "a few hundred Spaniards conquered an empire." Using the coalition the combined record documents — Tlaxcala, the Texcocan faction, allied nations in the tens of thousands (the range, NV-5) — show, step by step, how the sentence was manufactured out of a true part (the Spanish contingent's size) and a suppressed whole. Why does the conqueror's memoir need the allies invisible, and what does Tlaxcala's Lienzo gain by making them visible?

Set M-3 — The colony and the catastrophe (source: §§3–4, with NV-6)

  1. This class insists the conquest ran 178 years: Tenochtitlan fell in 1521; the Purépecha state ended in a courtroom in 1530; Yucatán's Maya fought through the 1540s; the Chichimeca War ended in a purchased peace; Nojpetén fell in 1697. Take two of those later endings and compare their mechanisms — negotiation, judicial killing, military exhaustion, naval assault — and state what the 1521-centred textbook timeline conceals about how colonial power actually worked.
  2. Cook and Borah estimated 25.2 million people in central Mexico in 1519, falling above 90 percent within a century; their critics dispute the starting figure (Sanders; Denevan's ~11.4 million; Henige's attack on the conversion chains) and not the collapse. Write this class's defensible sentence in your own words, then defend the discipline behind it: when scholars agree on a magnitude and fight over a number, what exactly may a curriculum assert, and what must it show as a fight?
  3. The epidemics have names in the Indigenous record: the great sicknesses of 1545 and 1576 are cocoliztli in Nahuatl, and in 2018 DNA from a 1545 epidemic cemetery in Oaxaca identified Salmonella enterica among the dead. Trace what each kind of evidence contributes — the annals' word, the parish counts, the archaeologists' teeth — and explain why the identification of a pathogen in a graveyard is also a fact about whose records were kept and whose were not.
  4. Under congregación and encomienda, Indigenous communities still governed themselves through their own cabildos and wrote — annals, wills, petitions, municipal records in Nahuatl across three centuries (Lockhart). Take one of those writings' survival and argue what it proves against the sentence "the conquest silenced the Indigenous voice." Then state the discipline's other half: survival in a colonial archive is not the same as freedom to speak. Hold both.
  5. In 1978 electrical workers in Mexico City struck the Coyolxauhqui monolith, and INAH began excavating the Templo Mayor beneath the cathedral city. Why does this class place an archaeological discovery of 1978 inside a history of the sixteenth century? Argue what the excavation is, as evidence: of the Mexica city, of the colony that buried it, and of the modern nation that digs.

Set M-4 — The machinery: how the Inquisition worked (source: §§7–9, with EXHIBITS E-1 and E-2)

  1. The Edict of Faith, read in every church of a district, obliged every hearer under pain of excommunication to denounce the suspected — family included — and catalogued the signs to watch for. Analyse this as social machinery: what does a state-church gain by deputising the whole population as informants, what does denunciation cost the denouncer, and what kinds of private war can be fought through a tribunal that accepts secret accusations?
  2. Arrest brought sequestration: the prisoner's property was inventoried and held, and the tribunal's costs were fed from confiscations. Follow the money through one hypothetical case from arrest to acquittal and state what the design does to the presumption of innocence — then find the same structural question in a modern institution of your choosing and argue whether the comparison holds.
  3. The defence advocate was appointed and paid by the tribunal, and the accused never learned the witnesses' names. The procedure was, by its own lights, lawful, regulated, and documented at every step. Write the essay that answers this: can a procedure be regular, recorded, rule-bound — and unjust in its design? Use the tribunal's own paper trail as your evidence for both halves of the answer.
  4. The auto-da-fé was theatre: procession, sermon, the reading of every sentence before the assembled powers of church and state, the condemned in sanbenitos painted with their offences — garments afterward hung in the parish church with their names. What is public spectacle for, in an institution whose trials were secret? Analyse the division of labour between the secret archive and the public stage.
  5. Exhibit E-1 ("fifty to sixty-eight million killed") and Exhibit E-2 (Llorente's 31,912) file the Inquisition's numbers as rewritten in opposite directions by a modern pamphleteer and by the institution's own former secretary. Against them stand the relaciones: some 150,000 prosecuted in Spain, 826 executed in person among 44,674 reported cases of 1540–1700, 3,000–5,000 executed across the whole institution. State why the archive's smaller numbers do not acquit the institution — what its true weight consisted in — and why an exaggerated number is not a harmless error in the accusers' favour: what does it hand the institution's defenders?

Set M-5 — The Tribunal in New Spain: two courts, one family, the great auto (source: §§10–13, with NV-1, NV-8, and EXHIBIT E-5)

  1. State the exemption of 1571 exactly as this class states it: no inquisitorial jurisdiction over Indigenous people; their faith cases to the bishops' courts; the tribunal's one door into Indigenous life being print in Indigenous languages. Then map New Spain's population onto it — Alberro's 75 to 80 percent exempt — and explain why "the Mexican Inquisition" is therefore a wrong name for most of what policed Indigenous religion, and what the right map looks like.
  2. Don Carlos Ometochtzin was tried in 1539 — before any tribunal existed — by a bishop who was also apostolic inquisitor, and burned on 30 November 1539; the Crown's 1538 decree had already ordered Indians judged by bishops, not the Holy Office. Reconstruct the case's legal position precisely: who tried him, under what authority, and why the authorities in Spain judged the execution imprudent. Then weigh the two scholarly readings of the same dossier — Greenleaf's tradition (the resister keeping his people's gods) against Lopes Don's revision (a Texcocan succession fight run through the new court) — and state what evidence would discriminate between them, or show that the dossier supports a layered verdict.
  3. Exhibit E-5 pairs two false pictures: "the Inquisition burned Indians by the thousand" and its mirror, "the exemption spared the Indians." Refute the second with this class's own record — Zumárraga's trials; Landa's Maní campaign of 1562, conducted under episcopal authority, thousands interrogated under the hoist, the books burned in one heap on 12 July 1562. What does Maní prove about where the exemption's protection ended — in law, and in Yucatán?
  4. The Carvajal file runs 1589 to 1649: reconciliations in 1590; the executions of 8 December 1596, where those who reconciled at the end were garroted before burning and Luis, refusing, burned alive; Mariana in 1601; Ana, reconciled as a child, executed in 1649 at about seventy. Luis's memoir was seized and used as evidence against him. Analyse the category that governs the whole file — relapse: why did a first reconciliation, meant as mercy, function in the machinery as the mechanism that made the second arrest capital? And what does it mean for a court when its best evidence is the accused's own spiritual autobiography?
  5. This class measures the tribunal's Mexican weight with González Obregón's estimate — fifty-one death sentences carried out in over 235 years — and prints his caveat with the figure (NV-1). Pair that with the auto of 11 April 1649: over one hundred accused, thirteen burned in person, and more of the accused dead in the secret prison awaiting sentence than alive to receive it. Write the measured verdict this set has been building toward: where did the tribunal's power over Mexican life actually lie, if not in its executions — in years, property, ancestry, speech? Support every claim from this class.

Set M-6 — Independence and the unfinished settlement (source: §§15, 5–6)

  1. In October 1810 the tribunal issued its edict against Hidalgo, charging the insurgent priest with heresy. The Inquisition's last public act in Mexico was an attempt to anathematise a revolution — three years before the Cortes of Cádiz abolished it (1813), ten before its definitive abolition (1820), eleven before independence (1821). Analyse the timing: what was the tribunal defending by 1810, and what does its choice of weapon — a heresy edict against a political rising — reveal about the institution it had become?
  2. The Plan de Iguala (24 February 1821) settled independence on Three Guarantees: Religion, Independence, Union — the Church's position protected, the army's commander made emperor within the year. Set the settlement beside the insurgency's eleven years, fought largely by the Indigenous, mixed and labouring poor. Who received what from the bargain of 1821, and what remained owed? Argue from this class's arc, and carry your answer forward: identify two later moments in the chapter (1848; 1910) where the unpaid bill of 1821 presents itself again.
  3. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (2 February 1848) Mexico ceded more than 525,000 square miles — roughly half its territory — to the United States for $15 million. The Indigenous nations of the ceded north passed under a new power unconsulted. Write the paragraph on 1848 that this chapter's method requires: the treaty as a transaction between two empires over the heads of the nations whose land it was, with the evidence this class supplies and the peoples named.
  4. Benito Juárez, a Zapotec from Oaxaca, carried the Reform that broke the corporate power of the colonial Church; the French-imposed emperor Maximilian was executed at Querétaro on 19 June 1867; the Revolution of 1910 wrote land and labour into the Constitution of 1917, with Zapata fighting for the villages' stolen land. Take the whole arc from 1521 to 1917 and argue the chapter's thesis in your own words: that Mexico's modern history is the long settlement of the conquest's questions — land, church, and the standing of the Indigenous nations — and that the settlement is not finished. Your essay must use at least one fact from each century.
  5. Close the set where the chapter closes. In 1968 the state shot students at Tlatelolco, in the plaza of the city whose elders wrote Book 12; in 1994 the Zapatista rising in Chiapas announced the Indigenous peoples' own account of the unfinished settlement, in their own voices; INALI counts sixty-eight linguistic groupings in Mexico today. The framing law of this curriculum requires the strand's final word to be continuity, not disappearance. Audit this set against its own law: does the record as you have studied it end in continuity — and what, concretely, in the evidence (the annals, the codex in Florence, the excavation of 1978, the voices of 1994) carries that ending?

Set totals: M-1 — 5 · M-2 — 5 · M-3 — 5 · M-4 — 5 · M-5 — 5 · M-6 — 5. 30 questions.

How this record is studied — the College and University method

The chapter's College and University method piece stands here as this class's final section: the documents themselves are the objects of study. Its NOT VERIFIED register (§17) is part of the course material — a method unit that hides its sources' open edges teaches a false method.

College — reading an Inquisition trial record

Method question: the tribunal wrote everything down in order to convict. How does a researcher read its paperwork so that the file testifies about the world it policed — and about the accused, who never held the pen?

  1. The anatomy of a proceso. Take the published trial record of Don Carlos Ometochtzin (1539; printed 1910 from the archive) and map its parts: denunciation, testimony of witnesses, the accused's declarations, the fiscal's charges, the sentence. For each part state whose hand produced it, in what language the proceeding moved (and through what translation, where the witness spoke Nahuatl), and what the genre of that part allowed to be said. The deliverable is the map, with the file's translation layers made visible — not a summary of the verdict.
  2. The provenance chain of one fact. This class asserts that Don Carlos was burned on 30 November 1539. Build the chain link by link — trial record (1539) → archival survival → the 1910 publication → Greenleaf's studies → modern accounts → this chapter's dossier — and mark each link: what it transmits faithfully, what it can distort, and what a researcher consults to test it.
  3. Reading answers against questions. In inquisitorial procedure the record preserves the accused's answers inside the court's questions, formulas and charges. Working from any published Mexican case (Ocelotl, 1536; Don Carlos, 1539; a Carvajal hearing of the 1590s), demonstrate the method of extraction: how do you recover what the accused was trying to say from a transcript engineered to establish what the court needed him to have said? State the method's limits as carefully as its powers — where does recovery end and ventriloquism begin?
  4. The archive's shape as evidence. The tribunal's records survive in the Archivo General de la Nación (Ramo Inquisición): thousands of files, but thinnest exactly where the institution was most informal — the episcopal phase, the provinces, the cases settled by fear without paperwork. Write the researcher's caution: what does the surviving archive's density map (thick on Mexico City judaizers, thin on Indigenous episcopal justice) do to histories built from it? Use the two-court map (§11) as your worked example.
  5. Denunciation as data. The tribunal ran on denunciations — costless, secret, and serviceable for private quarrels. Lopes Don reads the Don Carlos dossier as a Texcocan succession fight conducted through the new court; the older scholarship read a resister's trial. Take the denunciation layer of one case and work it as social data: who denounced whom, what did the denouncers stand to gain, and what does the pattern establish about the community the court was policing — independent of whether the charges were true?
  6. The exhibit audit, first form. Exhibit E-2 files Llorente's 1818 reckoning (31,912 burned in person) against the relaciones database (826 in person among 44,674 reported cases, 1540–1700). Reconstruct how each number was produced: one by a former secretary writing from memory, notes and polemic in exile; one by counting the tribunal's own annual case reports. Then state the audit's verdict in the form this programme requires — not "Llorente lied," but the exact account of what each instrument measured and where each fails.

University — the accused's voice in the persecutor's archive

Method question: the two greatest Indigenous-and-victim testimonies of this history — Book 12 of the Florentine Codex and the memoir of Luis de Carvajal — survive because the powers they indict seized, filed and preserved them. What kind of evidence is a voice that lives inside its persecutor's archive?

  1. The memoir as evidence against its author. Luis de Carvajal wrote his spiritual autobiography in minute script, hid it on his body, and intended it as a testimony of faith; the Inquisition seized it, prosecuted him with it, executed him, and archived it (Cohen; Stavans). Analyse the document's triple life — devotion, evidence, archive — and write the citation ethics it imposes: when a historian quotes the memoir, whose act is being quoted, and what apparatus must accompany the quotation so that the archive's violence in preserving it is neither hidden nor allowed to swallow the voice?
  2. Theft and return: the manuscript's modern provenance. The memoir was stolen from the national archive in 1932; for eighty-four years scholarship worked from Alfonso Toro's pre-theft transcription; the manuscripts resurfaced in the sale rooms, were identified by Leonard Milberg, and were returned to Mexico in 2016–17. Treat the modern history as a source-criticism problem: what is the evidentiary status of a text known for most of its scholarly life only through a transcription of a stolen original? What did the original's recovery confirm, what could it have overturned, and what does the episode teach about archives as property?
  3. Book 12 as three texts. The Florentine Codex's conquest book speaks in three registers at once: the Nahuatl column (the elders' account), the Spanish column (Sahagún's summary-translation, which at points softens, omits and reframes), and the images (the tlacuilo painters' own narration). Work one episode — the Toxcatl massacre or the fall of the city — across all three and write the collation: where the Spanish column departs from the Nahuatl, what does the departure evidence? Then assess Sahagún's 1585 Relación de la conquista, his own revision of the account in a more Spanish key: what does an editor's second version do to the first version's standing as testimony?
  4. Weighing the conqueror's chronicle. Set Cortés's Second Letter on one event — Cholula, or the entry into Tenochtitlan — beside Book 12 and Bernal Díaz. The programme's method (triangulation; the Indigenous account governing in conflict) is a ruling, not a discovery: state exactly what the rule settles (whose framing governs the curriculum's telling) and what it does not settle (any single fact). Then do the work: on your chosen event, show which particulars each source family establishes, which it cannot, and where the Indigenous account's governance is a judgement about authority rather than about evidence.
  5. The destroyer as ethnographer. Landa's Relación is a primary source for Maya civilisation written by the man who burned the Maya's books at Maní, surviving only in an abridged copy of a lost original, published two centuries after his death. State the full chain of its mediation and then confront the problem whole: the Relación is simultaneously (a) evidence of Maya life, (b) the destroyer's self-justification, and (c) a copyist's abridgement. Develop the reading protocol such a source demands — and apply it, critically, to the parallel case of Sahagún.
  6. The numbers audit, full form. The population of central Mexico in 1519 stands in this curriculum as an open fight: 25.2 million (Cook & Borah) against roughly 11 million (Denevan) against lower archaeological reckonings (Sanders), with Henige attacking the conversion chains themselves. Reconstruct one chain entire — tribute register → tributaries → households → persons, with every multiplier named — and identify the exact assumption at which the schools diverge. Conclude with the methodological verdict this class models: the collapse is certain, the count is contested, and a curriculum honest about both teaches more catastrophe, not less. Compare, in closing, the manufacture of Exhibit E-1's "fifty to sixty-eight million" — a number with no chain at all — and state the difference between a contested estimate and a fabricated one.

Unit totals: College — 6 · University — 6. 12 method questions.

Sources

Sources for every claim in this reading stand in the research file behind this class, whose sources table is the authority: FC — the Florentine Codex, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, compiled from the testimony of Nahua elders and the Nahua scholars of the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, working with Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, c. 1545–1577 (World Digital Library; Getty Research Institute's Digital Florentine Codex); LT — the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (INAH); AT — the Annals of Tlatelolco; GREENLEAF — Richard E. Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century (1969) and Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536–1543; LOPES DON — Patricia Lopes Don, Bonfires of Culture (2010) and her 2008 study of the 1539 Don Carlos trial; KAMEN — Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (1997; 4th ed. 2014); ALBERRO — Solange Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 1571–1700 (1988); COHEN — Martin A. Cohen, The Martyr (1973); LIEBMAN — Seymour B. Liebman, The Jews in New Spain (1970); STAVANS — Ilan Stavans, The Return of Carvajal (2019); CLENDINNEN — Inga Clendinnen, "Disciplining the Indians" (Past & Present, 1982) and Ambiguities of the Sacred (1990); CB / critics — Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History (1971–79), with William T. Sanders, William M. Denevan (ed.), The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, and David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere (1998); LOCKHART — James Lockhart, After the Conquest (1992) and We People Here (1993); RESTALL — Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003) and When Montezuma Met Cortés (2018); TOWNSEND — Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun (2019); POLLARD — Helen Perlstein Pollard, Tariacuri's Legacy (1993); AGN — Archivo General de la Nación (Ramo Inquisición); INAH — Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, the Templo Mayor Project; CE — Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), an institutional source used as one, its dates checked against the scholarship above.

Read beside this class: The Peoples at Depth II: Inuit, Maya, Mexica, Inca · California — The Mission System in Its Own Registers · The Destroyed Record as Evidence · The Chronology — The Whole History in Order of Time

All Senior History Classes

Record: this class rests on the Collection's research file Research Dossier — The History of Mexico and the Spanish Inquisition (study_materials/mexico_history_inquisition/RESEARCH_DOSSIER.md), with its governing README (README_GOVERNING.md), its senior set (grades-10-12_mexico_and_the_inquisition.md, the 30 study questions carried above), its college/university method piece (college_university_method.md, carried as the final section, "How this record is studied"), and its middle-grades teacher reference (middle-grades_teacher_reference.md, folded into the teacher box only — no middle-grades student page stands in this set). Draft for the owner's approval.