In the city of Izamal, opposite the entrance to the Franciscan monastery of San Antonio de Padua, stands a statue of Brother Diego de Landa. Landa was one of the first Franciscan bishops of Izamal and Yucatan and is one of the most famous figures in the early colonial history of Yucatan.

The statue is rather plain, with a small plaque bearing a strange inscription:

“Brother Diego de Landa

A controversial strict provincial. A fanatical destroyer and tireless builder. Light and shadow. He persecuted the Maya as an inquisitor. As a bishop, he protected them from Spanish planters. He was responsible for the auto-da-fé of Mani and the ‘Report on the Affairs of Yucatan.’ An outstanding historian, a prominent figure of the second half of the 16th century.”

Who was this man and what is he famous for?

Diego de Landa Calderón was born on March 17, 1524, in the Spanish town of Cifuentes and came from the noble Calderón family. He was educated at a Franciscan monastery, and in 1547 he took monastic vows at the Franciscan monastery of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo. He lived in Madrid for about a year, then accepted an offer to become a missionary to the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula, recently conquered by Spanish conquistadors. By 1549, he was sent to Yucatan as a missionary along with four other Franciscans. De Landa quickly distinguished himself and almost immediately became the assistant to the head of the newly founded monastery of San Antonio in Izamal. He was a teacher to children of noble Maya families who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. De Landa understood that using the Maya language would speed up this process. He decided to develop his own “Maya alphabet.” With the help of educated representatives of the noble Maya tribes, De Landa managed to correlate Maya hieroglyphs with Spanish letters. He did not know that the Maya script was not alphabetic but logosyllabic. The indigenous helpers sometimes recorded not the pronunciation of Spanish letters but their names. In total, De Landa recorded 27 signs which he believed corresponded to Spanish alphabet letters, plus 3 signs used in examples of word writing. Besides this, he actively participated in creating a Latin script for the Yucatec language, which likely became the first Latin script for the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. De Landa’s research later became the key to deciphering Maya writing by the Soviet scholar and ethnographer Yuri Knorozov.

For centuries, Yucatan was the center of the Maya civilization. In 1526, the general captain and governor of Yucatan was appointed conquistador Francisco de Montejo. However, the conquest of the peninsula proceeded slowly. Only in 1540, after several failed attempts, Montejo managed to capture it. Control over indigenous lands was quite tenuous. In response to killings, abuses, and oppression by the conquistadors, the local population staged large-scale uprisings. De Landa wrote that the conquerors burned Indians alive in their homes, cut off their limbs, hanged mothers from trees and children from their legs. Missionary monks defended the indigenous people. The bishopric in Yucatan was established in 1519 but existed only on paper until the mid-16th century. The first mission arrived on the peninsula in 1545, and three years later it was reinforced by Spanish monks, including De Landa. The monks not only baptized the indigenous but also established schools for them and informed them about the rights granted to the native population of America by the Spanish king.

“The only force at that time capable of tempering the cruelty and greed of the conquistadors were the missionaries. Moreover, the clergy became the only representatives of the intellectual elite of 16th-century Europe in the New World,” wrote the eminent domestic Maya scholar Yuri Knorozov in the preface to Galina Ershova’s book “Friar Diego de Landa.” Speaking about De Landa, the historian noted his “modesty and self-denial.” The young monk quickly learned the Maya language. He ventured deep into the jungle to preach. De Landa’s spiritual zeal was appreciated — he rapidly advanced in his career and eventually became the head of the province. “Diego de Landa came to America not to conquer lands but to preach Christianity. He tried to resist the reckless onslaught of the conquistadors, which left no chance for the survival of the indigenous community. At the same time, by nature, he was a scholar,” said Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor of RSUH Galina Ershova, director of the Knorozov Mesoamerican Center. However, not all historians agree with this assessment of De Landa’s activities. Some researchers consider him the “gravedigger” of Maya culture.

He was the author of a work containing invaluable knowledge about Maya civilization to this day, converted indigenous people to Christianity, and enlightened them. Yet he also established the Inquisition in Yucatan and burned indigenous manuscripts at an auto-da-fé, thereby destroying much of the Maya literary heritage. He was both a monk and an ethnographer and became the second bishop of Yucatan. To this day, Diego de Landa Calderón remains one of the most controversial historical figures.

In 1553, De Landa became abbot of San Antonio and later the “guardian” of the Yucatan mission. In 1561, after the dioceses of Yucatan and Guatemala merged into one, he became head of the Franciscan order in this province.

That same year, in the monastery of Mani, the capital of one of Yucatan’s provinces, it became known that indigenous people converted to Christianity had returned to their pagan rituals and crucified an infant. However, the indigenous only wanted to “send his soul to the gods with a message.” They framed their ritual as much as possible in Christian form and compared it to the story of Christ’s crucifixion. Colonial authorities, however, did not want to understand the subtleties of Maya religious beliefs and demanded the harshest punishment. There were strong political reasons for this. From the beginning, the conquistador rulers of Mani, to avoid direct interference in their affairs, declared loyalty to the new authorities and paid all taxes diligently. But Francisco Montejo, who led the conquest of Yucatan, wanted to claim these fertile and densely populated lands for himself and sought a pretext to send his troops into the settlements of Mani. Thus, the demand to severely punish the apostates became an excellent cover for “justified” intervention.

At first, De Landa managed to hush up the matter of the crucifixion. The monks understood that faith could not be changed by force. But a few months later, students of the school brought “idols and bones” to the Mani monastery. This indicated that the indigenous continued to perform their pagan rituals. The case became public, and the monastery’s superior was forced to start an investigation. When the prisons filled with “apostates,” the superior informed De Landa in Merida.

Due to the close attention of the Spanish administration to the Franciscan mission, De Landa was forced to head the Inquisition in Mani. At the end of 1562, the auto-da-fé took place. Shorn indigenous people in penitential clothes were sentenced to fines and flogging and were required to attend Sunday mass at the monastery for two weeks. The bones of baptized deceased indigenous who had returned to paganism were burned. To be fair, in Europe, people were often burned alive at auto-da-fé, so the punishment for the Maya was not as harsh as it could have been. Moreover, it is believed that during this public trial, numerous idols, cultural monuments, and Maya manuscripts were also destroyed in the Inquisition’s fire, constituting the majority of the indigenous literary heritage.

Galina Ershova disagrees with this assessment of the events: “The version that De Landa burned people and priceless monuments was put forward by his enemies trying to discredit him. But this is nothing more than a black legend. No one was burned alive, and the destroyed statues were not ancient but modern reproductions.” However, by De Landa’s own admission, Maya cultural monuments were indeed destroyed — in addition to several thousand figurines, 27 books on deer skin were burned.

The then bishop of Yucatan and head of the Franciscan order was extremely displeased with this, and in 1564 Landa went to Spain to report on his activities. He was acquitted and even gained the king’s support but returned to Yucatan only in 1573, where he was appointed the second bishop of Yucatan. This work remained for a long time the only source of information about all aspects of Maya life. In 1572, the King of Spain sent a presentation to the Pope for De Landa’s appointment as bishop of Yucatan. The Holy See supported him.

In Yucatan, De Landa built schools and churches and developed an alphabet for the indigenous based on the Latin script. He died on April 29, 1579. According to experts, despite accusations against the bishop of persecuting indigenous people and destroying their cultural monuments, he made a significant contribution to preserving Maya history and the development of Yucatan. According to Dmitry Belyaev, an employee of the Knorozov Mesoamerican Center, De Landa played a specific but very important role in the history of the Maya people. According to him, De Landa’s task as bishop of Yucatan was to Christianize the indigenous and combat their old beliefs. But compared to other Spanish church figures, he did this quite carefully. “De Landa did a lot to preserve the history and customs of the indigenous. His works became one of the cornerstones of Maya cultural studies,” Belyaev concluded. He died in the San Francisco monastery in Merida, “surrounded by an aura of sanctity.”

De Landa is known not only as a connoisseur of the Maya language. He supplemented the Yucatec grammar created by Luis de Villalpando, wrote a catechism and a collection of sermons in the Maya language. All this knowledge was included in De Landa’s most important work — “Report on the Affairs of Yucatan.” De Landa wrote it in Spain in 1566, and judging by the text, he worked on it for at least 15 years. Some calendar notes he cited were dated 1553. The work contained detailed records about the nature, terrain, customs, and traditions of the Maya, their religion and rituals, chronology, and social structure. He wrote about the Christianization of the indigenous:

“The vices of the indigenous were idolatry, divorce, public orgies, buying and selling of slaves. They began to hate the brothers who dissuaded them from this. But besides the Spaniards, the greatest trouble, though secretly, was caused to the monks by the priests who lost their service and income from it.

The method used to enlighten the indigenous was to gather the little children of lords and the most noble people and place them near the monasteries in houses that each settlement built for their own, where all the natives of each locality lived together. Their fathers and relatives brought them food.

Together with these children gathered those who converted to Christianity, and thanks to these frequent visits, many with great piety asked for baptism. These children, after learning, were tasked with informing the brothers about idolatry and orgies. They broke idols, even those belonging to their fathers. They taught divorced women and orphans, if they were made slaves, to complain to the brothers, and although threatened by their own, they did not stop, answering that they honored them, as it was for the good of their souls.”

Returning to Merida, Landa took the manuscript with him. There he made a copy and sent it to Spain. The full text of the manuscript was used by many researchers and scholars, including Diego López de Cogolludo, author of the “History of Yucatan” and De Landa’s first biographer. Diego de Landa’s “Report on the Affairs of Yucatan” is the main source on the history and ethnography of the Maya during the Spanish conquest. Landa was rightly called the “original historian” (historiador primordial) of Yucatan. His work reflected all aspects of ancient Maya life. The information he provided is confirmed by other Spanish sources, texts in the Maya language, and archaeological research. No other 16th-century source can compare with Landa’s work in the richness and diversity of material.

Sources:

https://russian.rt.com/science/article/612300-episkop-landa-maya

https://diletant.media/articles/34741663/