The discovery of Santo Domingo in 1492 marks the beginning of Latin American church history. There were no priests among the one hundred men aboard the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria; nevertheless, the seamen were Spanish Christians. To be Spanish or Portuguese around the beginning of the sixteenth century meant being impregnated with that particular concept of church and state that had spawned the Crusades, with tragic consequences for the indigenous American peoples. Only ten months before Columbus's landing, Spain had expelled the Moors from Granada and thus concluded its eight-centuries-old war of liberation. Fired by the conviction that the Spanish crown was the divinely chosen instrument for the salvation of the New World, Isabel and Ferdinand, and, later, Philip, promoted the Conquest wholeheartedly. They sent fifteen hundred men in a convoy of seventeen ships on the second expedition in...