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Tried by an Inquisition That Should Not Have Had Him

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Tried by an Inquisition That Should Not Have Had Him

The tribunal that tried Ocelotl was not the Mexican Inquisition proper, which was not established until 1571 and which never held jurisdiction over indigenous people. It was the apostolic inquisition exercised by Juan de Zumárraga, first bishop of Mexico, who held a delegated commission from the Holy Office in Spain between 1536 and 1543 and used it against baptised Nahua found to be continuing older practice.

Ocelotl was among the first taken. He was arrested in 1536, his house searched, and objects seized as evidence: worked stones, ornaments, and painted books. More than twenty witnesses were examined over months, and the file that resulted is one of the fullest surviving records of what a Nahua ritual specialist was understood to do in the years immediately after the conquest. The series it belongs to did not last.

In 1539 Zumárraga tried Don Carlos Ometochtzin, a Nahua lord of Texcoco, for idolatry and had him burned, and the reaction in Spain was severe enough that Zumárraga was reprimanded and indigenous people were removed from inquisitorial jurisdiction altogether. The prosecutions stopped. What did not stop was the extraction of information about Nahua religion, which continued by other means for another two centuries.

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