FACTOID #151: The five countries with the highest coffee consumption are also the five countries whose citizens trust one another the most. Coincidence? Probably.
Diego de Landa (1524 - 1579) was Bishop of the Yucatán. De Landa was in charge of bringing the Roman Catholic faith to the Maya people after the Spanish conquest of Yucatán. He left future generations with a mixed legacy in his writings which contain much valuable information on pre-Columbian Maya civilization, and his actions which destroyed much of that civilization's history, literature, and traditions.
He is the author of the "Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan" in which he catalogs the Maya language, religion, culture and writing system.
After hearing of some Maya supposedly recently converted to Christianity reverting to Idol worship, he ordered an Inquisition, followed by an auto de fe, in which all the Maya books (and perhaps 5,000 Maya) were burned on July 12, 1562.
Describing his own actions later, de Landa said that, "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction".
Only three Pre-Columbian Maya texts and fragments of a fourth survived.
Bishop Toral died in Mexico in 1571, allowing King Phillip II of Spain to appoint deLanda as the fourth-appointed Bishop of the Yucatán.
Landa also created a valuable record of the Mayan writing system, which although inaccurate was used in the decipherment of the writing system at the end of the 20th century.
At the instigation of a professor there, Knorosov wrote his dissertation on the "deLanda alphabet", a record produced by the 16th Century Spanish BishopDiegodeLanda in which he claimed to have transliterated the Spanish alphabet into corresponding Maya hieroglyphs, based on input from a Mayan informant.
DeLanda, who during his posting to Yucatán had overseen the destruction of all the codices from the Maya civilization he could find, reproduced his alphabet in a work (Relación de las Cosas deYucatán) intended to justify his actions once he had been placed on trial when recalled to Spain.
He maintained that when deLanda had commanded of his informant to write the equivalent of the Spanish letter "b" (for example), the Mayan scribe actually produced the glyph which corresponded to the syllable, /bay/, as spoken by deLanda.
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