Diego de Landa

Most Reverend Diego de Landa
Bishop of Yucatán
Church	Catholic Church
Diocese	Diocese of Yucatán
Predecessor	Francisco de Toral
Successor	Gregorio de Montalvo Olivera
Orders
Consecration	1573 by Cristóbal Rojas Sandoval
Personal details
Born	November 12, 1524 Cifuentes, Alcarria, Spain
Died	April 29, 1579 Yucatán
Nationality	Spanish

Diego de Landa Calderón (12 November 1524 – 29 April 1579) was a Spanish bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatán. He left future generations with a mixed legacy in his writings, which contain much valuable information on pre-Columbian Maya civilization and his actions, which destroyed much of that civilization's history, literature, and traditions. He is a major figure in the "Black Legend".

Born in Cifuentes, Guadalajara, Spain, he became a Franciscan monk 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 and was discovered by the 19th-century French cleric Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1862, who published the manuscript two years later in a bilingual French-Spanish edition, Relation des choses de Yucatán de Diego de Landa.

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