The Desire for Evangelism Among the Conquistadors, Part I
The following is a guest submission by Dr. Daniel T. L. Moore.
Historians have focused upon the conquistadors of Portugal and Spain for quite some time. It has a long history of extensive study, and it is well-known in the academic and popular spheres of historical research, including in the arena of popular culture, that many people are well familiar, for example, with the names of Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes. An example of the conquistadors’ fame even in popular culture can be found in the 1990 thriller movie, “The Hunt for Red October,” where one of the main characters, a Russian naval captain named Marko Ramius, refers to Cortes’ legendary order of burning his ships after they landed in Mexico.[1] However, one side of the history of the conquistadors needs to be told that often gets overshadowed by their misdeeds. That side of the conquistadors is their desire for the natives they encountered to obtain salvation in Christ. Even though this topic deserves a book length analysis, I will offer at least a brief discussion upon the matter, for it needs to be told. As a caveat, this does not whitewash any of the evils that the conquistadors performed in their own lives or on the natives they conquered. Nevertheless, it does offer credence to the fact that the conquistadors, a lot of them sincere Catholics, wanted souls to be saved. For the sake of brevity, this will be part one of several posts about the desire of evangelism among the conquistadors.
One of the first conquistadors from the Iberian Peninsula was Prince Henrique of Portugal, better known as Prince Henry the Navigator.[2] Even though he did not personally participate in the voyages to the Canary and Madeira Islands and Africa during the 15th century, he, nonetheless, funded the voyages of conquest to these lands between the 1420s and 1460s.[3] The Portuguese chronicler and courtier to Henrique, Gomes Eannes de Azurara, documented in 1453 that one of the purposes for the Portuguese voyage to Guinea, on the continent of Africa, “was…to make increase in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ and to bring all souls that should be saved.”[4] Azurara further stated, with a positive tone, that he witnessed “so many men and women” in Guinea come to Christ and that “their children and grandchildren” after them were “true Christians.”[5]
Christopher Columbus, the most famous of all the conquistadors, expressed in his writings the desire to evangelize the people he would meet on his journey west before he even set out on his first voyage.[6] He wrote to King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile in August of 1492 that they were, “as Catholic Christians…who love[ed] and promote[d] the holy Christian faith…determined to send [him]…to see the said princes, people and territories, and to learn their disposition and the proper method of converting them to our holy faith.”[7] In the following year, Columbus sent another letter to the king and queen after he returned from his first voyage of discovery and explained that the natives he encountered seemed to possess amongst themselves the same culture and “language,” which would prove “very propitious for the realization of what [he] conceive[d] to be the principal wish of [his] most serene King, namely, the conversion of the [native] people to the holy faith of Christ.”[8] Columbus again expressed this godly desire when he wrote to Luis de Santangel that in light of the triumph of his first voyage one of the reasons the monarchs of Aragon and Castile and “all Christendom should rejoice and give solemn thanks to the holy Trinity” was that there was an “addition of as many people to our holy faith.”[9]
Columbus did not change his position on evangelism when he wrote in 1498 a requirement that his son, Diego, “or whosoever” came “after him,” to maintain “four good professors of theology” on Hispaniola in order “to convert to [the] holy faith the inhabitants.”[10] He further concluded that as the profits rose on the island so should “the number of teachers and devout persons” rise, with the purpose of leading the natives of Hispaniola to salvation in Christ “which no expense should be thought too great.”[11] In the same year, Columbus even told Ferdinand and Isabella in a letter to them that he himself preached to the natives about the “holy faith and of the belief in the holy mother church.”[12]
This can be seen during the famous conquest of Mexico, or what the Spanish called “New Spain,” with the conquest led by Hernan Cortes. Cortes was tasked by his commander, Diego de Velazquez, in the year 1519 to make a voyage “of exploration and trade” on the coast of Mexico.[13] According to historian Thomas Benjamin, Cortes, on the other hand, had a different plan and desired to go to Mexico with the intentions of establishing “a colony” and overpowering “a native kingdom.”[14] However, it seems, through the writings of Cortes and those with him, that another purpose was on their minds.
A Spanish conquistador who journeyed with Cortes named Bernal Diaz del Castillo wrote in 1519 that after Cortes and his forces landed in Mexico and received yet again Aztec diplomats with gifts and news, which proved negative, of seeing Emperor Montezuma of the Aztec Empire the Spanish participated in “the hour of Ave Maria” and knelt before a makeshift cross, reciting the Hail Mary.[15] Upon seeing these acts of Christian piety, the Aztec diplomats asked the Spanish the reason for their devotion and kneeling “before that pole” to which Cortes told the expedition’s priest, Father Bartolome de Olmedo, that now was the time to preach the gospel to the Aztecs.[16] Father de Olmedo obliged and proclaimed, with the help of interpreters, to the natives that the Spanish “were Christians” and declared the meaning of the cross, Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension for the redemption of mankind, and the final judgment.[17] Castillo recorded that the natives understood what the priest said and stated that they would tell Emperor Montezuma what they heard.[18] Cortes then proclaimed to the Aztecs that one of the causes for the Spanish monarch to send Cortes and his force to the shores of Mexico was to declare to the natives to forsake their fabricated “religion,” including the sacrificing of people to their false gods and the abduction of humans.[19] He further urged that they should “erect crosses…in their towns and on their temples, and also the figure of the holy Virgin, with her most excellent Son, then God would bestow great blessings on them.”[20]
Cortes wrote very similar sentiments himself. After the Spanish entered the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan, Cortes wrote in great detail to Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, who was also the king of Spain, about the Aztecs’ evil practices of mutilating their bodies and performing human sacrifices to their false gods, even murdering their children in these sacrificial rituals.[21] Cortes went on to report to the emperor that the Aztecs sacrificed in a “year” up to “fifty persons in each [of their] temple[s]” and, by rough calculations, the Aztecs, seeing that their empire was vast and must “have [had] many temples,” had to offer “three or four thousand” every “year,” which included men, women, and children.[22] Yet, instead of telling the emperor that he intended to slaughter the Aztecs for these wicked practices, Cortes entreated his sovereign to “consider…whether” that the Aztecs’ ways of false worship needed to be stopped, “for certainly [the] Lord God would be well pleased if by the hand of Your Royal Highnesses these people were initiated and instructed in our Holy Catholic Faith.”[23]
Cortes further stated that they expressed such deep faithfulness to their false gods that “if they were to worship the true God” in the same fashion then the Aztec people “would perform many miracles.”[24] Not stopping there, Cortes explained that it was by the providence of God that the Spanish entered these new lands in order that Emperor Charles would receive “much merit and reward” from God “by commanding that [those] barbarous people be instructed and…be brought to the True Faith.”[25] Cortes even purported that if they had men who were more equipped in the Aztec language and in the instruction of the gospel then when the Aztecs were told “the error of their ways and the nature of the Truth Faith” there would have been a massive conversion of the natives to Christ.[26] Even though Cortes articulated that if any natives who did not reject their evil lifestyles, “after having first been admonished,” then the pope needed to give authorization for them to be “punished,” Cortes still suggested to Emperor Charles to “send a report to the [pope]” in order that effort would be placed in bringing the Aztecs to Christ.[27]
Far from expressing hate towards the natives and a desire to simply conquer and steal gold, Azurara, Columbus, Cortes, and Castillo related the desires for the spread of the gospel and the reformation of the Aztecs’ society. They wanted the natives to embrace Christ and forsake evil. Although there were other reasons for the Spanish to be in the New World, the spread of the gospel most certainly was on the top of their list. This will be discussed further as we explore further into the history of the conquistadors’ desire for evangelism amongst the natives in part two of this series.
[1] Food for Watch, “The Hunt For Red October (1990) – Officer Dinner scene,” YouTube, June 4, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAFiunCSiTU.
[2] Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and Their Shared History, 1400-1900, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 76.
[3] Ibid, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81.
[4] Benjamin, The Atlantic World, 77. Gomes Eannes de Azurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, (New York, NY: Burt Franklin, 1896), 29, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35738/35738-h/35738-h.htm.
[5] Azurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 29, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35738/35738-h/35738-h.htm.
[6] Christopher Columbus, Writings of Christopher Columbus: Descriptive of the Discovery and Occupation of the New World, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, (New York, NY: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1892), 28-29. Note: Columbus thought that he was going to discover Eastern Asian, for he did not know that the American continents were there; and, even to his dying day, he thought he found the Orient (Benjamin, The Atlantic World, 95).
[7] Ibid, 28-29.
[8] Ibid, 43.
[9] Ibid, 65.
[10] Columbus, Writings of Christopher Columbus, 103.
[11] Ibid, 103, 104.
[12] Ibid, 147.
[13] Benjamin, The Atlantic World, 133.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, Vol. I, (London, UK: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844), 93.
[16] Castillo, The Memoirs of the Conquistador, Vol. I, 93.
[17] Ibid, 93-94.
[18] Ibid, 94.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Hernan Cortes, Letters from Mexico, ed. and trans. Anthony Pagden, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 35.
[22] Ibid, 35, 36.
[23] Cortes, Letters from Mexico, 36.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid, 36-37.
Dr. Daniel T. L. Moore earned his B.S. in History (2019), M.A. in History (2021), and Ph.D. in History (2025) from Liberty University. During his Ph.D. studies, he converted from Reformed Protestantism to Catholicism, along with his seven living siblings, instrumentally being brought in by their father who reverted to the faith. His dissertation is titled “‘Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam: The Religious and Political Missions of the American-Catholic Military Chaplaincy during the Mexican-American War,” which will be taken and published as his first book. He also runs a scholarly YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@TheSt.BedeCenter), Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/thestbedecenter/), and Substack account (https://substack.com/@thestbedecenter), named The St. Bede Center, where he posts Catholic and Catholic-related history content for academics and history buffs to learn and enjoy alike. He is also a freelance writer for 1Peter5, with his first article to be published this April, a history teacher for Scholè Academy, and a freelance editor for Arouca Press. He lives in North Carolina with his large family.
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