and asked for jurisdiction on the grounds that the secular courts were not sufficiently vigilant. The request was denied. In fact, the civil authorities, under the 8th Duke of Albuquerque, had recently been extremely active, indicting a hundred men for sodomy and executing a substantial number. People accused of homosexuality were publicly executed by mass burnings in San Lázaro, Mexico City. The first known burning of sodomites in Mexico was in 1530, when they burned on the Caltzontzin pyre for idolatry, sacrifice, and sodomy. Pedro Cieza de León also tells that Juan of Olmos, principal judge of Puerto Viejo, had burned "great quantities of those depraved and demonic Indians". In 1596, the viceroy Gaspar de Zúñiga, Count of Monterrey reported, in a letter sent to Philip II to justify the increase of the salary of the royal officials, that those had seized and burned some delinquents for the unspeakable sin and other types of sodomy, although he does not give the number of victims or the circumstances of the event. In 1658 the Viceroy of New Spain, the Duke of Albuquerque, wrote to Charles II about a case of unspeakable sin in Mexico City in which he had "nineteen prisoners, fourteen of which [were] sentenced to burn". Lucas Matheo, a young man of 15 years, was saved from the bonfire thanks to his youth, but suffered 200 lashes and six years of forced labor by cannon. Among the documents sent to the king is a letter from the judge of the Supreme Court of His Majesty, Juan Manuel Sotomayor, who describes sodomy as an "endemic cancer" that had "infested and spread among the captive prisoners of the Inquisition in their individual cells and the ecclesiastical officials have also begun their own investigations". The letter from Sotomayor reports that between 1657 and 1658 they have investigated and sentenced 125 individuals, whose names, ethnicities, and occupations he lists next. The Viceroy as much as the Magistrate bases his rejection of sodomy on the Bible and religion, although they use stories sui generis, like Sotomayor, who writes "as some saints have professed, that all the sodomites have died with the birth of Our Lord Jesus". The previous case allows us to catch a glimpse of the subculture of homosexuals in Mexico City in the first half of the 17th century, since many of the accused were more than 60 years old and took