As has been said, the church followed close upon the heels of the conquerors and there seems to have been little love lost between the priests and the soldiery, both jealous of power and wealth. With the forces of the elder Montejo was only one cleric, Francisco Hernandez, chaplain of the expedition, who later attributed the failure of the venture to the lack of priests. Before the real conquest by Montejo the younger, it became necessary for Antonio de Mendoza, who was viceroy of all New Spain, to carry out the orders he had long before received from Queen Juana to the effect that priests should be sent to Yucatan—one of the conditions upon which the province had been granted to Montejo.
Mendoza had no choice but to send priests from other Spanish possessions under his command, as there were none in Yucatan. For this duty Fray Jacobo de Testera, who held a high clerical office in Mexico, volunteered. In 1531 he and three other priests arrived at Champoton and, having asked leave of the Indians to enter the country, made an auspicious beginning. But they soon lost the good-will of the natives because they insisted on burning the idols, and, on finding they were making no progress, became disgruntled and returned to Mexico. In 1536 another band of friars essayed the task of Christianizing Yucatan, but after proselyting for two years they returned to more settled Spanish dominions.
The conquest actually effected, after the founding of Valladolid in 1541 and Mérida in 1542, a church was built in the latter city and in 1544 Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas and his Dominican friars came to Yucatan and gradually spread the creed of the Cross throughout the land. But while we speak of the conquest as becoming an accomplished fact with the founding of the two principal cities of Valladolid and Mérida, it was not until more than eighty years later that the whole country was pacified, and during this time the Itzas in the southern part of the country remained unconquered and un-Christianized. These eighty years constitute a long period of guerilla warfare and sporadic attempts on the part of the Spaniards to conquer the stubborn Itzas and efforts of the priests to convert them, and, throughout, showed a lack of concord between the military and the church. At one time two native Christians set up claims as pope and bishop respectively and gained a considerable following.
As has been mentioned earlier in this work, some of the Maya tribes never were conquered; they do not, to this day, pay taxes to or otherwise concern themselves with the Government of Mexico. Catholicism, generously mixed with the old paganism, has, however, permeated their villages.
Whatever we may think now of the means and methods followed by the old padres in bringing the heathen to the Christian faith, we can but admire and reverence their motives, for no earthly reward could possibly compensate for the incredible hardships despite which these zealots persevered. Only a stanch, all-abiding faith, supreme over mundane things, could have carried on.
CHAPTER XI
THE FINDING OF THE DATE-STONE
“ALWAYS in my earlier days in my City of the Sacred Well,” says Don Eduardo, “the question was in my mind as to the age of the city. Every carved stone I found, I scanned eagerly for some clue and I should say, perhaps, right here, that while we can often gain only an inkling of the meaning of the Maya hieroglyphs and in some cases no understanding at all, the date-glyphs are plain sailing. We can read them, I think, as readily as we would read dates written in English. With but a little training any one may do this.
“But though I looked on engraved stones by the hundreds, there were no dates. Again and again I questioned the natives: ‘When do you think these buildings were erected and who built them?’ Invariably came the patient answer, ‘Quien sabe?’—‘Who knows?’