"An Atlantic of New Christians: The Politics of Conversion in the Canaries, Granada, and Mexico, 1470-1540"

Ryan Dominic Crewe

This paper charts the emergence and development of conversion to Christianity as a temporal instrument of peace among indigenous political hierarchies, Spanish missionaries, and civil officials, using three case studies from the first decades of Spanish expansion.  Native elites throughout the Atlantic basin faced similar Spanish terms of peace that required them to convert, acknowledge the legal and fiscal authority of the Crown, and submit their communities to long-term programs of religious and social transformation.  This conversion policy emerged on the Spanish Atlantic frontier among the Canary Islanders (1470 –1500) and became a fundamental element of Spanish sovereignty in the conversion of the Moors of Granada (1500–1510).  The case of Mexico (1520–1535) was the most emblematic and ex-tended political process of conversion in the early Spanish Atlantic.  These three cases share two underlying factors.  First, native elites confronted the same network of Observant Franciscans operating on Iberian frontiers in the midst of hostilities.  Second, all three areas share comparable agreements, known to historians of Granada as “Pacts of Conversion,” which outlined rights, protections, and obligations to native elites and their communities as New Christians under Spanish rule.  I examine evidence of these agreements in post-conquest indigenous litigation, claims for privileges, and histories from all three locales, in addition to Spanish civil and ecclesiastical sources.  This frontier practice bound indigenous New Christians and Spaniards in a political relationship that constituted new societies in the early Spanish Atlantic and enabled the expansion of transoceanic missionary enterprises.

[WP #0603]