The shadow of Saint Francis

“Historiography was the most copious and highest-caliber intellectual work in New Spain,” wrote Don Luis Gonzálezy González in Modales de la cultura mexicana. “A notable part of that task is made up of the letters and the accounts of the conquest. Only a small portion is the product of Creole resentment. Another part was done by the chroniclers of the Indies and the king’s officials and was at the service of the interests of the Crown. The best slices of that formidable intellectual enterprise, the great majority of the historical works of the 16th century in Neo-Spanish, were histories at the service of Christianity, not to serve the empire without end, and even less to consolidate the nation made by the conquerors Cortés, Guzmán and the Montejos and acclaimed as their own by the Creoles. In the struggle between the Crown, the friars and the sons of the conquerors for the possession of the past of New Spain, the friars won. Unlike the people of the conquest, these friars are not content with writing self-panegyrics, chronicles and reports, nor do they merely relate what they did, saw and suffered. The friar historians collect, criticize and interpret historical sources, go beyond the autobiographical, write history – although not disinterested history. They all seek in the knowledge of the past the benefit for present and future evangelization.

He also warns that “the missionary school reached and monitored the Indian historiographical current, and Indian historians such as Fernando Tezozomoc, Diego Muñoz, Cristóbal del Castillo, the author of the Codex Xolotl, Pablo Nazareo, Alonso Vegerano, not only wrote histories to clarify the greatness of where they came from, but also to contribute to the tasks of the evangelizers.”

With natural lucidity, amiable erudition, and astonishing clarity and simplicity, in The History of God in the Indies, which is, among many other things, a history of history and the end of history, Doña Elsa Cecilia Frost recognizes that “it is surprising that, months before the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Friars Minor were already preparing for an evangelizing mission to the new lands. At least this is what can be deduced from the date of the bull that two prominent Franciscans obtained from Leo X: April 25, 1521.”

Although some Franciscan friars had already ventured into these lands, the first Franciscan mission to New Spain was formed in 1523. Saint Francis, he says, “waited until he had twelve companions to begin ‘the publication of the evangelical life’ because that was ‘the number that Christ took into his company to convert the world,’ so Brother Francisco de los Ángeles (general minister of the Franciscans) formed the mission with twelve friars,” who landed 500 years ago, on May 13 or 14, 1524 in Úlua.

“Once in the capital of New Spain, they took a step that, depending on how you look at it, could be entirely logical or, on the contrary, something so senseless that only a miracle could have brought it to a successful conclusion. What they did, as is known, was to ask Cortés to gather the chiefs and priests of the Indians to have a discussion with them.”

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