The Spiritual Conquest Reexamined: Baptism and Christian Marriage in Early Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Abstract

A corpus of six Nahuatl-language household censuses from the Morelos region, ca. 1535-40, collectively titled the Libro de Tributos, gives unique insight into aspects of conversion, particularly baptism and Christian marriage, from an indigenous point of view. The data on individuals’ baptismal status and, to a lesser extent, the number of couples joined in Christian marriage, can be analyzed to trace the contours of the spiritual conquest in a central Mexican region approximately 20 years after the fall of Tenochtitlan. Divorce was permissible, and so was marriage to more than one wife simultaneously. The mendicants tried to institute the Christian sacrament of marriage, but they were far less successful, even superficially, than they apparently were with baptism. Language may be an indicator of shifts in native perceptions of what constituted marriage. The paucity of positively identified Christian marriages in the Morelos censuses is difficult to interpret.