Bishop Diego de Landa
Attribution:
Kwalbolt
Bishop Diego de Landa
Bishop and Mayanist
De Landa was one of the first Bishops to live among and study the ancient Maya civilization, and has a left a very mixed legacy from his experiences.
Born in Cifuentes, Guadalajara, Spain, he became a Franciscan monk in 1541, and was soon sent as one of the first Franciscans to the Yucatán, in modern day Mexico. He was charged with bringing the Roman Catholic faith to the Maya peoples after the Spanish conquest of Yucatán in the 16th century. He worked diligently - brutally, even - to buttress the order’s power while converting the indigenous Maya.
His zealous hatred of what he perceived to be the Mayas’ pagan idolatry resulted in his most notorious actions – ordering the burning of a disputed number of Maya codices (Landa admits to 27, other sources claim “99 times as many”) and approximately 5,000 Maya cult images were burned. These actions passed into the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty and fanaticism in the Americas. Only three Pre-Columbian codices, containing rare examples of Maya writing, are known to have survived.
The Inquisitions Landa led in Maya lands were notoriously cruel, bloody and controversial. Yet, his catalogue of the Maya language, religion, culture and writing system Relación De Las Cosas De Yucatán is about as complete and important a treatment of the Maya people as exists, and has been called an “ethnographic masterpiece.”
De Landa died in Mexico in 1571. Ironically, despite his loathing for Maya writings and its propagation of their religion, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán created a valuable record of the Mayan writing system, which – despite its inaccuracies – was later to prove instrumental in the decipherment of the writing system by 21st century scholars such as Yuri Knorozov.
