if there's one thing you learn from my twitter feed, let it be that "you gotta judge them by the standards of their time" is easily done, because for every chronicle of colonial Spaniards' genocidal actions there's a contemporary who petitioned the Crown to punish their crimes

everybody knew, everybody always knew

anyway today i'm reading diego de landa and even for the genre i specialize in this is hard to take

might start blogging through comps in lieu of tweeting because all of this merits deeper consideration

Francisco de Toral, bishop of Yucatán, writes to the king demanding the removal of Diego de Landa and his fellow missionaries, March 1, 1563:

“Instead of catechesis, these wretches have had torture...and so there is no Church, spiritually speaking.”

Of course, I found this in a book from 1978 that concludes: “The mentality of that age made the missionaries incapable of religious toleration,” so the fallacy is rather persistent.