European explorers did not set sail with the intentions of pillaging and exploiting any natives that they came into contact with. Rather, they employed nonviolent tactics and only when those failed did they allow frustration to take its course and escalate affairs between the natives and the settlers. Matters would be much less complicated if the boundaries between good and evil were defined and concrete, but the relationship between these groups of people was more ambiguous than that. Natives found themselves being torn between two very different cultures, and regardless of its initial intention, European settlement was detrimental to the well being of indigenous people. I’m not here to argue semantics, but seizing someone else’s land and triggering massive amounts of casualties qualifies as a conquest, regardless of whether it was their original aim or not. Contrary to popular belief, the Spanish conquistadors voyage to “New Spain” was not a mission of violence and malevolence; rather it was a spiritual one, in which Friar Sahagun’s goal was to convert the Nahua (Aztecs) to accept and follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. However, the religious man learned that the task at hand was not an insignificant one, when in 1576 a massive outbreak of the plague crippled his 50-year effort. “War, slavery, overwork, and disease had wiped out huge numbers of indigenous people, the very people Sahagun had hoped would carry on the work of Christianization far into the future. Worse still, the linguistic and ethnographic work of Spanish Christians such as Sahagun revealed that Indians who had managed to survive Spanish domination had also retained their spiritual beliefs, despite the presence of friars among them.” (Overmyer-Velazquez, 74) This passage makes it clear that the intentions of Spanish conquistadors weren’t as selfish or materialistic as they were once perceived. It does not justify the poor treatment of the Nahua people, however, it reveals the true motivating force for these friars to travel to this foreign land and attempt to intervene in the