Diego de Landa

Diego de Landa Calderón, O.F.M. (12 November 1524 – 29 April 1579) was a Spanish Franciscan bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatán. Many historians criticize his campaign against idolatry. In particular, he burned Maya manuscripts (codices), knowledge of Maya religion and civilization, and the history of the American continent. Nonetheless, his work in documenting and researching the Maya was indispensable in achieving the current understanding of their culture, to the degree that one scholar asserted that, "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told." Born in Cifuentes, Guadalajara, Spain, he became a Franciscan friar in 1541, and was sent as one of the first Franciscans to the Yucatán, arriving in 1549. Landa was in charge of bringing the Roman Catholic faith to the Maya peoples after the Spanish conquest of Yucatán. He presided over a spiritual monopoly granted to the Catholic Franciscan order by the Spanish crown, and he worked diligently to buttress the order's power and convert the indigenous Maya. His initial appointment was to the mission of San Antonio in Izamal, which served also as his primary residence while in Yucatán. He is the author of the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán in which he catalogues the Maya religion, Maya language, culture and writing system. The manuscript was written around 1566 on his return to Spain; however, the original copies have long since been lost. The account is known only as an abridgement, which in turn had undergone several iterations by various copyists. The extant version was produced around 1660, lost to scholarship for over two centuries and not rediscovered until the 19th century. In 1862, French cleric Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg published the manuscript in a bilingual French-Spanish edition, Relation des choses de Yucatán de Diego de Landa.