- published: 29 Jan 2016
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Year 1680 (MDCLXXX) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar and a leap year starting on Thursday of the 10-day slower Julian calendar.
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, or Popé's Rebellion, was an uprising of several pueblos of the Pueblo people against Spanish colonization of the Americas in the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México.
In the 1670s, drought swept the region, causing famine among the Pueblo and provoked increased attacks from neighboring nomadic tribes—attacks against which Spanish soldiers were unable to defend. At the same time, European-introduced diseases were ravaging the natives, greatly decreasing their numbers. Unsatisfied with the protection offered by the Spanish crown and disenchanted with the Roman Catholic religion it had brought along, the people turned to their old religions. This provoked a wave of repression on the part of Franciscan missionaries. While previously the church and Spanish officials tended to ignore occasional manifestations of the old religion as long as the Puebloans attended mass and maintained a public veneer of Catholicism, Fray Alonso de Posada (in New Mexico 1656–1665) "forbade Kachina dances by the Pueblo Indians and ordered the missionaries to seize every mask, prayer stick, and effigy they could lay their hands on and burn them ... In matters regarding their religion, the Pueblos of the seventeenth Century were not that different from those of today. To give up their religion would have been like giving up life itself." Several Spanish officials, such as Nicolas de Aguilar, who attempted to curb the power of the Franciscans were charged with heresy and tried before the Inquisition.