Good vs bad

I don't think that in the book Ambivalent Conquests Clendinnen thinks there are some good and some bad people in the conquest. She paints the Mayans somewhat as victims. She talks about the few books that the Mayans left behind and in the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel the Mayans said that all their sickness and misfortune was due to the Spanish and Christianity (154). That the Mayans were victims of the Friars as well. But Clendinned also shows that the Mayans were strong and still kept their political and religion while trying to convince the friars that they had converted to Christianity (170). Meanwhile she paints the friars as monsters who were distorting Christian ideals. Clendennin calls the friars "monstrous inversions of the Franciscan ideal; missionaries as brutish as the worst pagans; men enslaved by the passions of anger, pride, and cruelty, and their chief's ferocious self-righteousness and lust to dominate"(128). Those are very strong words to describe the friars. I think she sees the Spanish settlers as somewhere in the middle. They did use the Indians for their own advantage taking their tributes and using them for labour. But the Spanish did try to help when the friars started torturing the natives. The Spanish saw how far the friars were going and tried to stop. All three of these groups were complicated and had different motives for their actions. I think the friars started out with good intentions (as good as anyone trying to make others conform to your ways can be). The friars were trying to save the souls of the Indians I just think that power and the thought of being betrayed by the people they were trying to help made the friars bitter. I think that Mayans weren't really victims they kept their religion and political structure. While they tried to get the Spanish and the friars to believe that they converted. From our point of view today the Spanish and the friars were the bad ones because they conquered the Mayans and forced them to convert to their religion.