an anonymous Italian conquistador, it is said that the men and women of Pánuco worship a masculine member and have erect phalluses in their temples and public plazas to worship them: "the multitude of methods used by the men to satisfy their abominable vice [is] almost too unbelievable to be sure. [...] the devil contained in their idols has possessed them. It has given them instructions to sacrifice their fellow men, to extract their hearts and to offer the hearts, as well as the blood taken from the tongue, the ears, the legs and the arms, all to the idols". Finally, he comments that "all the inhabitants of New Spain and those of other adjacent provinces ate human flesh, all commonly practiced sodomy and drank to excess", comparing some of the customs of the indigenous people with those of the ungodly saracens. In the middle of the 16th century the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo and the soldier Juan de Grijalva write about scenes of sodomy carved into the architecture, in gold jewelry, in terracota and in statues. The West Indies explorer and gold smelting manager Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés included specifics in his 1526 La Natural hystoria de las Indias (his Sumario), expanded in his Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535, further expanded in 1851 from his previously unpublished papers). Around the same time, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca writes: Isabella of Portugal, wife of Charles V, possibly driven by these accounts, banned in 1529 the planting or use of maguey for the fermentation of pulque. The queen thought that it caused "drunkenness and drove the Indians to carry out" human sacrifices and unspeakable sin. These and other accounts were converted into an authentic literary genre, circulated to the whole Peninsula, and were used to justify the idea of Empire; it was another "just cause" for the domination and occupation of the West Indies. Francisco de Vitoria, despite knowing that the indigenous people were right and that as such the emperor did not have law over them, thought that "the heathens that committed sins against nature, such as idolatry, pederasty or fornication, all those offenses to God, could have been stopped by force". Among those sins against nature was naturally sodomy, the sin against nature par excellence. The legislation was based on the different culture and its customs, among the most notable: cannibalism, human sacrifice, and