Spiritual piracy seems a strange analogy with which to compare the activities of the Jesuit missionaries who left Spain to evangelize the Americas and the Orient. Given the persistent trouble since the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caused to the transatlantic Armadas by English, French and Dutch privateers, this choice of comparison would appear to carry oddly negative associations. Yet the cultural popularity in the Hispanic world of what we might now call ‘anti-heroes’ had already a long tradition; in the sixteenth century many found tales of the infamous pícaros highly entertaining. Moreover, chronicles of conquest combined elements of medieval romances and more modern picaresque literature in larger-than-life tales of conquistadors. These originally poor men were considered valiant, won riches and fame, and conquered vast empires. In addition to this tradition, a by-product of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo's attempts to centralize and strengthen the crown's administrative control over the Peruvian viceroyalty was the deliberate re-writing of the Andean past to transform the Incas from justly ruling monarchs into usurping tyrants who were legitimately overthrown by the conquistadors.

The greatest and most unjust tyrant, however, was considered to be none other than Satan himself and, as such, the above quotation is revealing of Hispanic perceptions of ‘the Indies’. With the optimistic humanism of the sixteenth century a mere memory in the seventeenth, it was commonly thought that, prior to the Spanish conquest, the devil ruled the Americas, keeping the souls of its inhabitants enslaved and destined for eternal torment and misery. ‘Soul-pirates’, such as the Jesuits and other missionaries, therefore acted legitimately to despoil this tyrant usurper of what he wrongfully held for his own.