[6] Shortly after ordination (which, in this period, was normally conferred on aspirant Franciscans at age 25),[7] he was sent as a missionary to Nueva Galicia, a large territory in central western New Spain, the capital of which was Guadalajara and which extended north to Zacatecas and west to the Pacific.

Among his achievements during this phase of his life was his role as one of the founders of the Confraternity of Nuestra Señora de Soledad (Our Lady of Solitude), the indigenous members of which performed, on Sundays, edifying plays and scenes written in their own language by Torquemada for the purposes of inculcating in them and in spectators the Catholic faith.

The College had, however, so far declined from the ambitious plans which attended its ceremonial opening in 1536 that, by the end of the 16th century, it had become an elementary school where local Indian children learnt reading, writing, manners and good behaviour.

It was decorated with 14 paintings by the celebrated Basque painter Baltasar de Echave Orio (who is also credited with designing the retablo), alternating with carved wooden statues standing in niches.

[23] It was while he was guardian of the convent of Tlatelolco that Torquemada also put in hand the organisation of the materials he had been gathering for many years previously, and (between 1605 and 1612) their redaction into the great work he had been projecting - the history of the aboriginal nations of New Spain, and their conquest and evangelisation by the Spanish.

In addition to the voluminous unpublished writings of other Franciscans to which he had unimpeded access, Torquemada possessed many original documents acquired during his missionary work, as well as the oral testimony he had obtained from people he had encountered on his various travels.

The dispute became especially bitter under Torquemada's successor as provincial Juan López, a peninsular, with respect to whom Torquemada expressed deep-seated hostility, accusing him in private correspondence (two letters written in October 1620 to a former confrère of his, then resident in Spain) of being a liar and an hombre sin Dios (a man without God), and asserting that Hell held no man worse or more false (este mal hombre de fray Juan López .

[30] By way of providing impetus to and official sanction for Torquemada's history, fray Bernardo Salva, the Comisario general de Indias (acting by specific direction from his immediate superior, Arcángelo de Messina, the minister general of the Order) wrote a letter dated 6 April 1609 from Madrid, in which he gave written authority and instructions to Torquemada to compile a chronicle of the life and work of the members of the Franciscan Order active in New Spain, as well as a wide-ranging account of the history and culture of the peoples they had evangelised.

[31] The work is a "remarkably dense text," because of its theological digressions, contradictions, and anachronisms, since Torquemada incorporated material without resolving contradictory and competing points of view from his sources.

[34] The leading motif of Torquemada's monumental history – elaborated by him in many places, especially in the general prologue to the entire work – can be characterised as the merciful action of Divine Providence in choosing the Spanish to liberate the Indians from their subjection to the Devil who had deceived these innocent peoples into practising a religion marred by errors and polluted by abominations such as human sacrifice.

[37] His history was, of set purpose, a laborious inquiry into the truth of things, requiring (as he says in his general prologue) diligence, maturation, and the exercise of prudence in adjudicating among conflicting testimonies.

[38] It was not written as an entertainment or to satisfy mere curiosity, but with a serious didactic purpose and to edify, for he believed that the record of the events of the past constitute not only an antidote to human mortality and the brevity of life, but also a hermeneutic key to understanding the present, thereby offering man an opportunity to progress.

Contrary to a considerable body of hostile secondary discussion, critical examination of Juan de Torquemada's Monarquía Indiana indicates a surprisingly high level of workmanship in at least the first two phases.

Like others of his time, he puzzled over the problems of fitting native peopling of the New World and their development into a Biblical framework, and seldom doubted authenticity of miracles, or the Providential intervention which accounted for Cortes' Conquest as an expression of Divine Will.

But for the most part he went at his tasks with professional coolness, and a rather high degree of historiographical craftsmanship.Salva's letter of 6 April 1609 itself expressed the full ambit of Torquemada's work as eventually written, including, as regards the converted Indians: "their rituals, ceremonies, laws, governments and governors, their mode of conservation and conversation, their kings, kingdoms, cities and domains, their origin and beginnings, their division into provinces and kingdoms [sic]; the diversity of their languages, their riches and means of sustenance, their gods and worship, and, with great particularity, the manner in which friars and ministers initially converted them and how they have followed up on those conversions .

[43] The first volume comprises five books which principally treat of the creation of the world and the origin of the peoples who occupied New Spain (I, II), as well as the diverse nations constituting the Aztec Empire (III), followed by its conquest by the Spanish (IV) and its subsequent re-organisation (V).

To the second volume were assigned nine books which deal with the religion (VI-X), government (XI), laws (XII), institutions (XIII) and social and military life of the indigenous peoples together with remarks on various geographical features and their cultural relevance (XIV).

The place we know as New Spain was left almost empty.He reported that two million, mostly indigenous, people died, according to a survey conducted by Viceroy Don Martín Enríquez de Almanza.

[45] The great diversity of sources employed by Torquemada, including precious indigenous documents now lost as well as colonial texts (published and unpublished), is fully laid out in exhaustive tables of analysis for each of the books in volume 7 of the IIH critical edition, following extensive study by the research seminar conducted under the leadership of Miguel León-Portilla between 1969 and 1971.

[52] Once the work was in its final shape, Torquemada took the manuscript to Spain personally, despite the Comisario general de Indias (Bernardo Salva) having previously invited him to send it.

León-Portilla suggests these arrangements (including the choice of type and the layout) might have taken weeks at most, giving Torquemada time to visit Madrid and other places in the land of his birth.

[59] Although (as noted in the following sub-section) the greater part of the print-run of the first edition was said to have been lost in a shipwreck, the Monarquía indiana was known in Mexico as early as 1624 when it was first cited in a book published there in that year.

The errors and omissions were made good in the second edition by reference to the original manuscript which, so Franco discloses, was in the library of Don Andrés González de Barcia.

A research team was assembled under the direction of Miguel León-Portilla with the task of establishing the text (without, however, the benefit of the original manuscript, which could not be located) and of publishing it in six volumes, with (among other materials) analytic indices tracking Torquemada's sources.

According to John Leddy Phelan, writing in 1956 (second edition revised, 1970):-[66]For the historian of ideas the Monarquía indiana deserves to be restored to a position of eminence as one of the classic sources of colonial historiography.

can obscure the genuine value of Torquemada's work; that is, his extraordinary assemblage of materials available at the end of the 16th century for tracing the ancient and contemporary history of Mexico, unwittingly salvaging numerous old sources, reports, oral traditions, etc., which, without him, would have been forever lost beyond recall."

More than an historical text, Torquemada's work is a theological speculation developed in order to explain, within a western philosophical framework, the existence of the American Indians and the role that their conquest and evangelisation play in the context of the history of salvation.

A judicious and broadly positive assessment such as this was made in 1890 by the American historian and ethnologist Hubert Howe Bancroft:-[70]He rises above the mere monk chronicler and strives to interest his readers by variety of topics, as well as by treatment, which receives no inconsiderable aid from a descriptive power of rare occurrence among his confreres; other faults remain, however.

By contrast, a non-specialist (who thought Torquemada arrived in New Spain in 1583 and made other elementary mistakes about his life in the few sentences he devoted to it) offered this observation which can be taken to be representative of the opposite tendency:-[71]The value of Monarquia Indiana as a history of prehispanic Mexico and of its conquest by Cortes is marginal.

]One other work published in his lifetime is known, a hagiography of fray Sebastián de Aparicio, a Franciscan lay brother who had died on 25 February 1600 and whose reputation of exemplary living resulted in his beatification in 1789.