@coldjoint,
As I said, I was reading the 16th century documents and modern typescrippts of them (if you've ever tried reading 16th cent. handwriting you'f know why there were modern transcripts). As far as I know a lot of thm have never been published. The archives are in a colonial prison in Mexico City retrofitted with modern desks and chairs and lampps and such (no general computers when I was there. If you're ever in the DF when I'm there, i'll yske you thdre.. I remember thd monks and priests tseemend to be all the time telling the indio women that sleeping with them was just like having sex with god or jesus and a lot of women believed them, The Mexican Inquisition was all over their asses for tht. Priestly celibacy wasn'y big in colonial mexico. Just a qick internet search gave me some info on treatment of women.The Spanish Conquest, in addition toe the brutal treatment meted out by the Spanish conqstadores was probably the largest genocide in history. The natives had been separated from Europe for w5ooo years and they had no resistance to the pox-ridden Europeans who were carriers of all those diseases. Columbus started out by enslaving the native caribs but his men brought the mass disease, and by the time the conquistadores got their thirty years later, Mexico and Peru had been wracked by euroopean disezses which destroyed a lot of the political structure, killing leaders and wiping out orderly lines of dsuccesion and socil control.. Within two cntureis it's estimated that 90% of the inhabitants had died, a population in totl not unlike Europe at the time. the largest genocide in history, even if unwitting. That's also why the pilgrims had ll that land open in new englans, because plagues had recently swept thru, decimating the native tribes and leving only scattered survivors. Enslavemnt, brutal spnish-led conquest, whzt amounted to a death sentence for the native miners who were forced to work in the mines, the silver mines in peru as tribute labor. brutal barbaric Christian lea enslavement, of half the world. Islam had nothing on them.
Oh, the bit about women enslaved:
http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/ask-us/women-and-the-conquest
