of the people conquered by the Aztec Empire varied to a great extent. For example, Bernal Díaz del Castillo speaks of homosexuality among the ruling classes, prostitution of young people, and cross-dressing in the area of Veracruz. The yauyos had prostitution houses full of men with painted faces and women's clothing. The Toltecs, elsewhere, were extremely tolerant of homosexuality. The conquest Since the first contacts of the Spanish with the indigenous people there was established the equivalence of Indian, cannibal, and sodomite. It was a doctor accompanying Columbus, Diego Alvarez Chanca, in a letter from 1494, who first gave news of that. He spoke of the Carib custom of capturing young men to those who removed all the masculine organs. These developed "feminine characteristics and the Caribbeans employed them for the practice of sodomy in a manner similar to that which the Arabs enjoy their young people like eunuchs and two-spirits. ... A time grown men, the Caribs kill them and eat them." In 1511, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera published his De orbe novo decades, with the information that he was able to get about the first explorers thanks to his friendship with Isabella I of Castile. D'Anghiera told how Vasco Núñez de Balboa, during his exploration of Quarequa, in the Isthmus of Panama, in 1513, upset with "a brother of the king and other young men, obliging men, [who] dressed effeminately with women's clothing [... of those which the brother of the king] went too far with unnatural" temerity, threw forty of them as food to the dogs. D'Anghiera continues his story saying that the indigenous people's "natural hate for unnatural sin" drove them so that, "spontaneously and violently, they searched for all the rest that they would know who were infected". After all, D'Anghiera mentions that "only the nobles and the gentlemen practiced that kind of desire. [... The] indigenous people knew that sodomy gravely offended God. [... And that these acts provoked] the tempests that with thunder and lightning so frequently afflicted them, or the floods that drowned their fruits that had caused hunger and sickness." In an account on the indigenous people realized in 1519 for the council of the town of Veracruz to report to Charles I, attributed to Hernán Cortés, it is mentioned that they had "managed to know for certain that they are all sodomites and practice that abominable sin". In another account from