 By way of providing impetus to and official sanction for Torquemada's history, fray Bernardo Salva, the "Comisario general de Indias" (acting by specific direction from his immediate superior, Arcángelo de Messina, the minister general of the Order) wrote a letter dated 6 April 1609 from Madrid, in which he gave written authority and instructions to Torquemada to compile a chronicle of the life and work of the members of the Franciscan Order active in New Spain, as well as a wide-ranging account of the history and culture of the peoples they had evangelised.For that purpose, as Salva wrote, Torquemada was to utilise the voluminous historical and ethnographic writings of his fellow Franciscans (now, all of them dead) to which he had access, almost nothing of which had by then been published