Unit One Summary

The effect of the Spanish missionaries zealous attempt to Christianize the pagan peoples they encountered was caused by the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Due to the new Protestant belief that indulgences were wrong and that Christian freedom was necessary, the Catholic Church lost a vast amount of their income as people converted; they needed to find a new pool of people where the Church could administer its laws and have no competition from any other branch of Christianity. The Black Death nearly a century beforehand had down sized the population of Europe by two fifths and had made society become much more materialistic, the pagan peoples in the Americas were without these distractions; and if they could be converted would give all their energy and money to worship. As the rest of Europe's national Churches were becoming less traditional in their operations, the Catholic Church in Spain had to find a large group of people in which to keep traditional worship alive. Europe changing the way in which it's main Churches were run caused the Spanish clergy to attempt to plant the seeds of strict Catholicism in the peoples of the new world.