Diego de Landa

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Diego de Landa

Diego de Landa (born November 12, 1524 , † 1579 ) was Bishop of Yucatán and proselytized the indigenous Maya . He is known for having burned all tangible manuscripts in the Maya script and thus valuable documents on the history and culture of the Maya . Later he tried in his justification Relación de las cosas de Yucatán ("Report on the things of Yucatan") a reconstruction of this script, the so-called Landa alphabet, which - despite Landa's completely wrong understanding of the writing system - an important one in the 20th century Aid for deciphering Mayan writing.

Life

Diego de Landa was born on November 12, 1524 in the Castilian town of Cifuentes de la Alcarria near Toledo, the son of a respected aristocratic family. As a younger son, de Landa was chosen by his parents for monastic life according to the custom of the Spanish aristocracy at the time. He entered the Franciscan monastery of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo as a novice . He was ordained a priest at the age of 25 . He then asked his superiors to be sent to America as missionaries .

When Diego de Landa came to Yucatán in 1549, its conquest by Francisco de Montejo (1479–1553) ( Viceroy of New Spain , Antonio de Mendoza ) had already been completed seven years. In the year of his arrival, Landa was appointed Deputy Guardian of the city of San Antonio de Yzamal , which was built on the ruins of the pre- Hispanic city ​​of Izamal . In 1552 he took over as Guardian. There he had the San Francisco Monastery built for the Indians from the stones of an old Maya temple, which was one of the first monasteries on the Yucatán Peninsula . During this time he also ordered the construction of the Mother of God Church for the Indians.

He then made several trips through the Yucatán, which brought him into conflict with the Spanish colonial rulers. The proclamation of the Gospel through mass conversions met the resistance of the colonial rulers, who stayed away from Christian worship and accused the Franciscan order of wanting to appropriate the treasures of the country and to want to rule the country. In 1561, Diego de Landa was appointed Provincial of the Franciscan Order for the religious province of San José, which included Yucatán and Guatemala. As the highest religious authority in the region, de Landa exercised the office of inquisitor and enlisted the support of secular authorities to persecute the Indians who he believed were guilty of heresy.

Diego de Landa gained notoriety when he cracked down on the Maya who refused to convert to the Christian faith and instead wanted to stick to their religious rituals. This culminated in an autodafé that was held on July 12, 1562, in which de Landa had everything written in Maya as well as the religious images and symbols of the Mayas burned in front of the Franciscan monastery of San Miguel Arcángel in Maní because of his religious fervor . The consequence of this book burning is that only (parts of) four Maya codices have survived, which today give us a little insight into the Maya past. In his work Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan de Landa describes the events of Maní as follows:

“When the people were educated in the religion and the young men were taught usefully, as we have said, they were deceived by the priests who had them in their idolatry and also by the chiefs, so that they again worshiped idols and sacrifices that consisted not only of incense but of human blood. The monks made an ecclesiastical investigation and asked the chief judge for help, they arrested many and carried out trials, and a car dairy was held in which they put many on display scaffolding, put their penitent's hats on them, whipped them, shaved them off put some of them in the penitent shirt for a while. Others, deceived by the devil, hanged themselves out of gloom and together they all showed great repentance and a will to become good Christians. "

On another mention of the process, de Landa says:

"We found a large number of books with these letters on them, and because they did not contain anything that was free from superstition and the deceptions of the devil, we burned them all, which the Indians deeply regretted and lamented."

After the Maní Autodafé, the Spanish colonial rulers questioned the legal basis of the inquisitorial powers exercised by Diego de Landa. Bishop Fray Francisco de Toral formally accused de Landa of having usurped episcopal power in his heresy trials and the Autodafe. (see also: Bernardino de Sahagun )

To defend and justify himself, Diego de Landa first traveled to Mexico and then returned to Spain in 1563. The West India Council referred the process to Pedro Bobadilla , Provincial of the Franciscan Order of Castile . The trial against de Landa was to take six years. In 1566 - during the trial - de Landa began to write his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán as a memorandum, following the example of other travelers.

Upon examining the conduct of de Landas, it was found that he was in accordance with a 1522 bull issued by Pope Hadrian VI. acted, in which the Pope gave the mendicant orders active in America episcopal powers if there was no resident bishop in the province concerned. With this affirmation of the authority and prerogatives of the Order, the measures taken by Diego de Landa were seen not only as sensible, but even cautious. In 1569, de Landa was acquitted of all charges.

Due to this new situation, Diego de Landa was appointed Bishop of Yucatán on October 17, 1572, to succeed Francisco del Toral, who died in 1571 . The West India Council turned to Philip II and this to Pius V , who determined de Landa for the office, which was in the bulls of the new Pope Gregory XIII. from 15./16. November 1571 was confirmed. In 1573 de Landa received the episcopal ordination by the Archbishop of Seville , Cristóbal de Rojas y Sandoval , and took up his new office in Mérida , which he held until his death in 1579.

plant

Landa wrote his work, the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán , in Spain around 1566, presumably on the basis of records already made in Yucatán and documents taken with him about the Inquisition trials. He also processed oral information from Indians, some of which are known by name from the noble families. These included Juan Nachi Cocom and Gaspar Antonio Chi . He also quotes from the Spanish reports available at the time by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo , Bartolomé de Las Casas and, above all, Francisco López de Gómara . Colonial writers have made extensive use of Landa's account in their own writings. For example Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas in his extensive Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano and Diego López de Cogolludo (1613–1665) in his Historia de Yucatán .

The original manuscript is considered lost. The existence of the original in Yucatán in 1581 is documented. An edited copy of the Relación was only discovered in 1863 by an administrative officer in the Madrid Biblioteca de la Academia de Historia inside another bound manuscript. It is clearly a shortened copy in the handwriting of three people. For example, the manuscript refers to a drawing that is not included. The Relación manuscript was first published in 1864, and was considered the most comprehensive source on Mayan culture and history by the early 20th century. According to recent investigations, the manuscript that has been preserved is a random compilation of three or four unknowns.

literature

Works:

Web links

Commons : Diego de Landa  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John F. Chuchiak: In Servitio Dei Fray Diego de Landa, the Franciscan Order, and the Return of the extirpation of Idolatry in the Calonial Diocese of Yucatán, 1573-1579. In: The Americas , Vol. 612, No. 4, 2005, pp. 611–646 ( Article PDF ( Memento of March 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), 644 kB; on clio.missouristate.edu).
  2. ↑ a b lit. Landa: Relación de las cosas de Yucatán ; German edition Report from Yucatán. Reclam 1990, ISBN 3-379-00528-2 , p. 135.
  3. ↑ Miguel Rivera Dorado: Introducción, In: Diego de Landa: Relación de las cosas de Yucatán , ed. by Miguel Rivera Dorado, Historia 16, Madrid 1985, ISBN 84-85229-62-2 , pp. ???.
  4. ^ Alfred M. Tozzer: Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan . Cambridge, MA, Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology - Harvard University 1941, pp. Vii – xviii.
  5. ^ Alfred M. Tozzer: Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan. Cambridge, MA, Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology - Harvard University 1941, pp. 3–208.
  6. ↑ Mattew Restall, John F. Chuchiak IV: A reevaluation of the authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. In: Ethnohistory , vol. 49 (2002) pp. 651-669.
personal data
SURNAME Landa, Diego de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish bishop of Yucatán
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1524
PLACE OF BIRTH Cifuentes
DATE OF DEATH 1579