The Spanish conquest was driven by trade, wealth, ambition, and power, but evangelization was central to the imperial project.
Missionaries learned Indigenous languages, wrote grammars, studied local customs, and built institutions that helped spread Catholicism across the Americas. Conversion was not simply a military process. It involved preaching, education, persuasion, cultural exchange, and syncretism.
The Hispanic Monarchy even suspended conquest to debate the moral and legal legitimacy of its own expansion, producing arguments that would shape the Laws of the Indies, the School of Salamanca and give birth to human rights.
Many Indigenous peoples simply found Catholicism sufficiently compelling as an alternative to religious systems that included human sacrifice. Its rapid spread therefore reflected not only conquest, but also persuasion, conversion, theological reason and cultural adaptation.
Whatever one thinks of the conquest, reducing the spread of Catholicism in Spanish America to “blood and the sword” leaves out a major part of the historical story.