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SPAIN to the AMERICAS, to 1600 (4 of 6)

It was the policy of Spain's king to reward soldiers with land, and the soldiers were taking Indian slaves to work their land. Behind the disease, the soldiers and the wealth seekers came representatives of the Catholic Church, with the approval of Spain's monarchy, which was interested in spreading Christianity as well as its authority. The monarchy granted the Church to go to the Americas to designate where Christian missions were to be established and to be responsible for education, establish hospitals and orphanages to take care of the aged and the mentally disturbed and to convert.

In the wake of these disasters for the American Indians, Pope Paul III, in 1537, issued a series of encyclicals declaring it heresy to describe Indians as other than human. Pope Paul was eager to label the Indians as worthy of conversion, and he urged clergy and laymen to work at converting the Indians by preaching to them and by acting in an exemplary fashion. The Pope forbade the enslavement of the Indians or seizure of their property, but the Indians remained endangered as an unregulated drive for fame and fortune proved more powerful than Pope Paul's declarations. And in 1538 the pope's declarations were nullified by Spain's monarchy, which declared the pope's declaration in violation of the agreement between the monarchy and the Vatican concerning the powers of the monarchy in the Americas. 

Meanwhile Spaniards were tearing down Indian temples and destroying Indian idols, with the stones from destroyed temples often used to build Christian churches. In trying to destroy paganism the Spaniards wiped out the historical records and ancient almanacs of the Indians. The Spaniards intentionally humiliated the priests of native religions to discredit them. Those who took on the appearance of conversion put a Roman Catholic face onto their religious tradition, hanging onto their god by amalgamating him with Jesus Christ.

The gold that Pizarro found in Peru inspired Spaniards to look for it elsewhere in the Americas. A tale of the Seven Cities of Antilia had entered the imaginations of various Spaniards in the Americas -- cities believed to have been created by a group of European migrants many centuries earlier. Spain's viceroy in Mexico City, Antonio de Mendoza, sent a Franciscan monk, Marcos de Niza, and his Moorish slave-interpreter north to investigate. In what today is New Mexico the friar exercised his imagination, believing he was seeing a great city gleaming in the sun miles away, and he planted a cross and claimed the area in the name of God and the King of Spain and then returned to Mexico City.