Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T14:01:46.807Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - The Burning Church

Native and Spanish Wars Over the Mission Enterprise

from Part III - A Fraying Fabric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2019

Ryan Dominic Crewe
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Denver
Get access

Summary

In the late-sixteenth century, a spate of violent incidents brought disrepute upon the mission enterprise in New Spain.Spanish churchmen lamented that some of their peers were inciting natives to disobey, resist, and even burn the churches of their ecclesiastical rivals.Spaniards spilled much ink in reporting these unseemly clashes in their correspondence and chronicles.Less reported are the many similar confrontations that occurred simultaneously in indigenous communities.Such was the worldly power of the mission enterprise that those Spanish churchmen and native rulers who did not have access to it jostled, often violently, to possess it.This chapter situates these curious episodes in the broader context of a series of political crises that shook the mendicant-indigenous mission enterprise to its very foundations in the 1570s and 1580s.It examines the politics of secularization, conflicts among indigenous jurisdictions for control of the mission Church, and the many points of cross-influence between Spanish and indigenous rivalries.As a result this chapter finds a mission enterprise that began to decline not solely due to Spanish political changes that undercut mendicant power, but rather because this weakening of mendicant power in the Spanish realm interacted with the on-going fragmentation and atomization of indigenous polities.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Mexican Mission
Indigenous Reconstruction and Mendicant Enterprise in New Spain, 1521–1600
, pp. 199 - 227
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • The Burning Church
  • Ryan Dominic Crewe, University of Colorado, Denver
  • Book: The Mexican Mission
  • Online publication: 13 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108602310.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • The Burning Church
  • Ryan Dominic Crewe, University of Colorado, Denver
  • Book: The Mexican Mission
  • Online publication: 13 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108602310.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Burning Church
  • Ryan Dominic Crewe, University of Colorado, Denver
  • Book: The Mexican Mission
  • Online publication: 13 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108602310.007
Available formats
×