Diego de Landa

Diego de Landa was the Franciscan bishop of Yucatán who destroyed most of the surviving Maya written record and then wrote the book that made it possible to read what remained. He arrived in Yucatán in 1549, learned Maya, travelled widely and was by his own account fascinated by the civilisation he found. In 1562, on discovering that converts were still practising traditional rites, he convened an auto-da-fé at Maní. Under interrogation by torture, thousands were questioned and many died; he burned an unknown number of codices, along with cult images and altars. Only four Maya codices are known to survive anywhere in the world. He was recalled to Spain to answer for exceeding his authority, was acquitted, and returned in 1573 as bishop. While in Spain he wrote Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, a detailed account of Maya religion, calendar, agriculture and writing. In it he set down what he took to be a Maya alphabet, dictated by an informant. It was wrong as an alphabet, because Maya script is syllabic rather than alphabetic, but it was the bilingual key that eventually let Yuri Knorozov begin the decipherment in the 1950s. The Mayanist William Gates observed that nearly everything known about the Maya comes from Landa or from work made possible by him, and that he burned very much more than he saved. He was also the first European to record the Maya calendar in a form Europeans could follow, including the long count that dates events across millennia. His manuscript was lost for nearly three centuries and survives only in an abridged copy found in Madrid in 1862.

• Lived: 1524 CE – 1579 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: religious_leader