Letter 35 is the merest hint of the great campaign, carried on above all by Dominican fray Bartolome de las Casas in thousands of scalding pages, opposing not only the Franciscans, but the encomienda, the conquest, even the very notion of a Spanish civil occupation of the Indies. Renewed again and again in Spain, the debates swirled in one area after another of Spanish America, always after the conquest was well past and a Spanish presence fully established: in the Caribbean in the second decade of the century; in Mexico in the middle decades; and in Peru yet later. The attacking parties were, when not Dominicans, usually lawyers, late-comers, or people still in Spain; the defenders were Franciscans, settlers, sometimes viceroys and governors. Las Casas himself was in Spain far more than in the Indies. In view of this and also considering that former Licentiate Las Casas’ favorite genres were the treatise and the brief, not the letter, we include as representative of this kind of invective a well-known letter by Franciscan fray Toribio de Motolinia, defending views much like those of the ordinary settlers to whom most of this volume is dedicated. Fray Toribio, one of the Franciscan Twelve, changed his earlier name of Benavente to a Nahuatl form meaning ‘one who is poor or afflicted,’ since the Indians are supposed to have uttered the word repeatedly on seeing the Franciscans in their simple habits. Motolinia became one of the principal powers among the Mexican Franciscans, taking his turn in all the more important posts and becoming (as he does not fail to make clear) the best of the first generation of Franciscan writers on Nahua culture and history.

The letter is the product of a thoroughly exasperated man. Having written page on page and brought the letter to a conclusion, Motolinia got notice of yet further infuriating publications by Las Casas, and returned to write almost as much more. One understands the exasperation. The arguments were necessarily deflected ones.