Franciscans were to dominate the missionary enterprise in Yucatan, as they had in Mexico. If to a twentieth-century mind the motives of a Bernal Díaz, for all their distinctive accenting, are sufficiently familiar to be intelligible, missionaries, and Franciscans, are less accessible. What would move a Spanish youth in the early decades of the sixteenth century to join the Franciscan order, and then to opt for service in a remote corner of a remote New World? What vision would lead him to those actions, and how might that vision be sustained or modified by experience in the field?

First, he would be choosing not the complete withdrawal from the world of the closed orders of monks, not the integration into the world of the secular priest working within the parish system, but membership of an institution designed to mediate between the elevated-spiritual, and the earthy-mundane. While friars of the mendicant orders maintained the prayerful discipline of monks, they also undertook preaching rounds to reanimate the faith of the people, and cultivated a popular touch.