 The crypto-Protestant parents were taxed to pay for the Catholic institutionalization and education of their 289 children.During the European colonization of the Americas, forced conversion of the continents' indigenous, non-Christian population was common, especially in South America and Mesoamerica, where the conquest of large indigenous polities like the Inca and Aztec Empires placed colonizers in control of large non-Christian populations.Historians broadly agree that most native populations that converted did so under the threat of violence, often because they were compelled to after being conquered, and that the Catholic Church cooperated with civil authority to achieve this end.