arm bands with tufts of quetzal feathers, the golden arm bands, the bracelets, the golden bands with shells … and the turquoise diadem, the attribute of the ruler. They took it all.
The military conquest of the Aztecs was completed by 1521. Cortés, as governor of the province of New Spain, then began dividing up the most valuable resource, the indigenous population, through the institution of the encomienda. The encomienda had first appeared in fifteenth-century Spain as part of the reconquest of the south of the country from the Moors, Arabs who had settled during and after the eighth century. In the New World, it took on a much more pernicious form: it was a grant of indigenous peoples to a Spaniard, known as the encomendero. The indigenous peoples had to give the encomendero tribute and labor services, in exchange for which the encomendero was charged with converting them to Christianity.
A vivid early account of the workings of the encomienda has come down to us from Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican priest who formulated the earliest and one of the most devastating critiques of the Spanish colonial system. De las Casas arrived on the Spanish island of Hispaniola in 1502 with a fleet of ships led by the new governor, Nicolás de Ovando. He became increasingly disillusioned and disturbed by the cruel and exploitative treatment of the indigenous peoples he witnessed every day. In 1513 he took part as a chaplain in the Spanish conquest of Cuba, even being granted an encomienda for his service. However, he renounced the grant and began a long campaign to reform Spanish colonial institutions. His efforts culminated in his book A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written in 1542, a withering attack on the barbarity of Spanish rule. On the encomienda he has this to say in the case of Nicaragua:
Each of the settlers took up residence in the town allotted to him( or encommended to him, as the legal phrase has it), put the inhabitants to work for him, stole their already