When the Inquisition was brought to the New World, it was employed for many of the same reasons and against the same social groups as suffered in Europe itself, minus the Indigenous to a large extent.

Almost all of the events associated with the official establishment of the Palace of the Inquisition occurred in Mexico City, where the Holy Office had its own major building (which is now the Museum of Medicine of UNAM on República de Brasil street).

Spanish Catholicism had been reformed under the reign of Isabella I of Castile (1479– 1504), which reaffirmed medieval doctrines and tightened discipline and practice.

She also introduced the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1478 with the permission of Pope Sixtus IV, combining secular and religious authority.

The objective of Christian conversion was to strengthen alternative sources of legitimacy to the traditional authority of the tlatoani, or chief of the basic political unit of the city-state.

[1] Franciscan friars began the work of evangelization in the mid-1520s and continued under the first Bishop of Mexico, Fray Juan de Zumárraga in the 1530s.

Much of appreciation of the indigenous religion was helped by the fact that many parallels could be drawn between the gods and the cults of the saints as well as the Virgin Mary.

[1] The native population more easily adjusted to aspects of Catholicism that were similar to their previous beliefs, including the notion of the intertwining of religious and secular authority.

Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún suspected it was a post-Conquest adaptation of the Aztec cult of Tonatzin, a mother goddess.

[citation needed] However, the archbishop of Mexico, Fray Alonso de Montúfar, who was a member of the Dominican Order, promoted the cult.

[citation needed] There was even some speculation in the early colonial period that the Nahua god Quetzalcoatl was being refashioned as the Apostle Thomas.

One of Bishop Zumárraga's first acts as episcopal inquisitor was the 1536 prosecution of a Nahua man, baptized Martín, with the indigenous name of Ocelotl ("ocelot").

The failure of this Maya movement prompted more aggressive evangelization, with the Franciscans finding out that despite their efforts many traditional beliefs and practices survived.

Under the leadership of Fray Diego de Landa, the Franciscans decided to make an example of indigenous people they considered back-sliders without regard to proper legal formalities.

[1] While there were many allegations against and executions of “crypto-Jews,”[14] a large majority of cases brought to the Inquisition concerned sorcery or magic, and thus blasphemy and collusion with the Devil.

[citation needed] The Inquisition in peninsular Spain was generally uninterested in and highly skeptical of accusations of witchcraft.

Some upper class women tried to avoid conviction by "proving" that the supposed magic of which they were accused was in fact a female delusion.

[15] Within ethnically mixed communities, the types of "magic" women of Hispanic America would use with a fair amount of frequency were, to an extent, a folkish variation of Catholicism[according to whom?

The types of magic practiced included "sorcery," which authors such as Laura de Mello e Souza define as needing a pact with the Devil.

[17] For women, across class and ethnicity, an aim of magic was frequently to change the balance of power within the marital sphere or create a situation where one might find a husband.

Marina, as a beata (a woman who was beatified), was well known in her neighborhood for experiencing religious raptures and trances in which she communicated with saints and Christ himself.

When women would use these magic practices, often they would be so moved by the "evil" of their actions they would turn themselves in through confession, coming before Inquisitors crying in such a way they were frequently forgiven for their crimes.

[15] When Holy Office of the Inquisition had been established in New Spain in 1571, it exercised no jurisdiction over Indians, except for material printed in indigenous languages.

[13] Historian Luis González Obregón estimates that 51 death sentences were carried out in the 235–242 years that the tribunal was officially in operation.

Having made a name for himself, he brought a number of his family members over from Spain to live in the frontier state of Nuevo León.

Later, on 8 December 1596, most of his extended family, including his sister Francisca and their children, Isabel, Catalina, Leonor, and Luis, as well as Manuel Díaz, Beatriz Enríquez, Diego Enríquez, and Manuel de Lucena, a total of nine people, were tortured and burned at the stake on the Zócalo in Mexico City.

The most famous, a nephew, Luis de Carabajal the younger, a leader in the community of crypto Jews, tried to kill himself by jumping out a window to avoid further torture but was burned at the stake in 1596 with the rest of his family.

Although 99 of these managed to disappear, the Royal Criminal Court sentenced fourteen men from different social and ethnic backgrounds to death by public burning, in accordance to the law passed by Isabella the Catholic in 1497.

The central target was Fray Diego Rodriguez (1569–1668), who took the First Chair in Mathematics and Astronomy at the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico in 1637, and tried to introduce the scientific ideas of Galileo and Kepler to the New World.

When academics worked to hide books banned by the Holy Office's edict in 1647, the Inquisition required all six booksellers in the city to subject their lists to scrutiny under the threat of fine and excommunication.