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La conquista espiritual de México: ensayo sobre el apostolado y los métodos misioneros de las órdenes mendicantes en la Nueva España de 1523-1524 a 1572
Ricard analiza un periodo fundamental en la formación de México posterior a la en él se lleva a cabo el choque de civilizaciones, se funden, amalgaman o yuxtaponen los elementos americanos y europeos que lo constituirán. La labor del autor es tan esclarecedora y cala tan profundamente en sus temas cardinales que merece convertirse en un clásico de los estudios históricos mexicanos.
- GenresHistory
493 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1933
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 5, 2026
If you want to watch nerds fight, ask specialists in Mexican anthropology to tell you how many natives were living in central Mexico in 1519 at the moment of Spanish contact. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 4.5 million to the widely-quoted figure of 25.2 million. Either way, it’s astonishing when you consider the scope of the task Spain set itself in Christianizing its conquests. By the lowest estimates, the friars meant to baptize the equivalent of the British Isles. By the highest, they aimed at the mass conversion of the populations of Spain and France combined.
French historian Robert Ricard’s book on the first generation of Spain’s evangelical efforts is a classic. Times have changed since the 1930s, and Ricard’s generally positive appraisal wouldn’t fly today. Current interpretations take, shall we say, a more nuanced view of this 16-century intersection of blood, gold, and faith.
That’s not to say his view is all rainbows and unicorns. He makes no secret of the fact that the friars often functioned as shock troops of the imperial order. The Church Militant is reflected in the architecture of colonial churches, which were sited in defensible positions and built to serve as fortified redoubts should the heathens backslide. Still, Ricard’s more charitable interpretation is valuable in that it allows us to see the friars as they saw themselves. They believed in the flames of Hell and the grace of God, the power of the Virgin and the works of the Devil. It would be a mistake to write them off as nothing more than exploiters in tonsures.
This is illustrated not merely by efforts to introduce literacy and establish hospitals, to build roads and sponsor morality plays, to administer the sacraments and defend their charges against depredation. Ricard points out that the catechism, translated into Nahuatal to facilitate understanding, was the same catechism used in the Iberian peninsula to instruct Spanish villagers and Muslim converts alike. This demonstrates a conviction that Mexicans were just as worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as any European.
Still, Ricard highlights two fatal misfires of the founding generation. First, low confidence in native capacity aligned with the greed of Spanish settlers to prevent the emergence of a native clergy or native entry into the monastic orders. Second, the friars first resettled natives in villages the better to oversee them, then prohibited intermixing with colonists whom they considered largely immoral and rapacious, and finally grew accustomed to unlimited domination over their flocks.
This left natives isolated from the life of the colony, subject to arbitrary rule, and ill-prepared for political independence. Along with the failure to evangelize thoroughly beyond the core territories, these flaws left the Church in Mexico struggling for centuries as a colonial fixture rather than an indigenous enterprise, part of the machinery of extraction and vulnerable to a syncretistic blending of its traditions with pre-conquest rituals.
I found this a useful and enjoyable exploration of its topic. Ricard is more enthusiastic for the program of mass conversion than I am, but for that reason provides a healthy tonic to my 21st-century Protestant cynicism. I’ll still defend the separation of church and state, but I can better appreciate what the Catholics thought they were doing — however far their efforts fell short of their hopes.
French historian Robert Ricard’s book on the first generation of Spain’s evangelical efforts is a classic. Times have changed since the 1930s, and Ricard’s generally positive appraisal wouldn’t fly today. Current interpretations take, shall we say, a more nuanced view of this 16-century intersection of blood, gold, and faith.
That’s not to say his view is all rainbows and unicorns. He makes no secret of the fact that the friars often functioned as shock troops of the imperial order. The Church Militant is reflected in the architecture of colonial churches, which were sited in defensible positions and built to serve as fortified redoubts should the heathens backslide. Still, Ricard’s more charitable interpretation is valuable in that it allows us to see the friars as they saw themselves. They believed in the flames of Hell and the grace of God, the power of the Virgin and the works of the Devil. It would be a mistake to write them off as nothing more than exploiters in tonsures.
This is illustrated not merely by efforts to introduce literacy and establish hospitals, to build roads and sponsor morality plays, to administer the sacraments and defend their charges against depredation. Ricard points out that the catechism, translated into Nahuatal to facilitate understanding, was the same catechism used in the Iberian peninsula to instruct Spanish villagers and Muslim converts alike. This demonstrates a conviction that Mexicans were just as worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as any European.
Still, Ricard highlights two fatal misfires of the founding generation. First, low confidence in native capacity aligned with the greed of Spanish settlers to prevent the emergence of a native clergy or native entry into the monastic orders. Second, the friars first resettled natives in villages the better to oversee them, then prohibited intermixing with colonists whom they considered largely immoral and rapacious, and finally grew accustomed to unlimited domination over their flocks.
This left natives isolated from the life of the colony, subject to arbitrary rule, and ill-prepared for political independence. Along with the failure to evangelize thoroughly beyond the core territories, these flaws left the Church in Mexico struggling for centuries as a colonial fixture rather than an indigenous enterprise, part of the machinery of extraction and vulnerable to a syncretistic blending of its traditions with pre-conquest rituals.
I found this a useful and enjoyable exploration of its topic. Ricard is more enthusiastic for the program of mass conversion than I am, but for that reason provides a healthy tonic to my 21st-century Protestant cynicism. I’ll still defend the separation of church and state, but I can better appreciate what the Catholics thought they were doing — however far their efforts fell short of their hopes.
January 24, 2026
FULL REVIEW TO FOLLOW: Required reading at UCLA Colonial Latin American History Seminar, and enjoyable too. The present Pope Leo XIV continued the mission of the Catholic Church in evangelizing the natives of Latin America through his work in the slums of Peru. But, how did the Church launch the first wave wave spiritual conquest, in Robert Ricard's mellifluous phrase, in converting the Indians of Mexico in the wake of Cortez's victory over the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan in 1521? Triumph in battle was easy compared to the task of winning the hearts and minds of the natives over to Spanish Catholicism, accent on the SPANISH part. The friars who came to the New World saw themselves engaged in an enterprise that was patriotic, universal, as in "Catholic", and corporate; allegiance to their own Orders---Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans and Augustans. Ricard, a fervent Catholic and Frenchman, does not see a contradiction in all this. Winning souls in the Americas was a huge part of the colonial enterprise of the Indies. The Spaniards had to get there before the Portuguese, English, Dutch and French won a constituency of souls, and Spain, newly freed from the Arab conquest, was competing with the Muslim powers as well. The spiritual conquerors of Mexico found themselves embroiled in international affairs even before they set foot in Veracruz. The Jesuits hit the ground first, since their founder Ignatius Loyola had conceived of his followers as the papal "shock troops". Their mission, that term was always used, was to convert the Indians, foster education for natives and Spaniards alike, and establish a protectorate over the Indians, that rapacious conquistadores not exploit their bodies to the detriment of their souls. Right away, the Jesuits came into conflict with Spanish landowners demanding Indian labor (encomiendas) from the Crown, and drew suspicion from the Spanish kings for insisting the Indians were theirs to protect. We may also add that friction existed on ethnic grounds. Most of the Jesuit priests were Basque, not Castilian or Catalan like their Catholic majesties Ferdinand and Isabela, or the German Charles V. On top of that, the Jesuits, to finance their proselytizing, became landowners themselves, particularly in the lucrative Mexican sugar industry. Still, they never forgot their pedagogical designs. To the Jesuits we owe the indigenous view of the conquest. They carefully preserved the language of the Aztecs, Nahuatl, and transcribed first hand accounts of the last days of Montezuma and the collapse of Tenochtitlan. After the Jesuits came the swarm of Mendicant orders waiting in line to win over the Indians. Conversion was not a simple affair. The Spaniards were used to proselytism by force on the Moors of Iberia and other purported pagans and heretics, but the Pope had ruled the indigenous of the New World fell under the category of innocents. They knew not intentional sin nor had the Gospel reached them. The proclamation of articles of the faith, read to them by a conquistador with a friar by his side, was convenient but spiritually useless. Some Mendicants took to learning Nahuatl to offer the complete catechism. Others, through the encomienda, utilized Indian labor to build churches, convents and schools. Very gradually, in keeping with Spanish laws on "purity of blood", acculturated Indians and later mestizos could serve in an auxiliary capacity to the friars and regular clergy. Was the spiritual conquest ever complete? The tug of war between the Orders, Spanish settlers and the Crown over Indian labor hastened the process of Hispanization of the indigenous in language---the loss of Nahuatl and its replacement by hybrid Spanish---dress, and consumption of Spanish goods; all of which contributed to the growth of Catholicism in the New World. The huge population decline in the native population, caused chiefly by smallpox, tilted indigenous communities towards large female majorities, and the Mendicants found it easier to recruit women than men, if only because widows had no other basis of support. Mexican Catholicism, like the Italian variety, quickly became a village saints society. The Father-Son-Holy Ghost trinity was less real to the Indians than their patron saint. After that came indigenous cults, at the top of which stood Our Lady Guadalupe. The Church conquered Mexico only to be reconquered by native patriotism. Ricard was a diligent scholar who plumbed Vatican archives, the Archives of the Indies at Seville and, most important, conducted research in the old documents of the abbeys and cofradias (saints societies) of Mexico. He was an original and founding member of institutional history in the New World. If his partisanship for the Mendicants grates, at times, it is excusable for the great treasures he found.
September 4, 2022
Es uno de los mejores ensayos que leído sobre la etnografía religiosa que hay en México desde la conquista hasta la época de la colonización. Bastante recomendable para aquellas personas que están comenzando en la historia como yo que a pesar de mi edad tengo la curiosidad de conocer más a detalle la historia de México especialmente en el aspecto religioso.
February 3, 2024
assignment
November 7, 2014
Es un trabajo destacado en una edición excelente pero, otra vez, no es para mí.
January 13, 2016
Este estudio es simplemente grandioso. Una amplísima compilación de datos con una buena narración interpretativa.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews