Bartolomé de las Casas

For other uses, see Padre Las Casas (disambiguation).

Bartolomé de las Casas
Procurator of the Indians
Bishop of Chiapas
Term	December 19, 1543 – September 11, 1550
Predecessor	Juan de Arteaga y Avendaño
Successor	Antonio Montesino, O.P.
Orders
Ordination	1506
Consecration	March 30, 1544, by Jerónimo de Loayza, O.P.
Personal details
Born	1474 or 1484 Seville, Castile
Died	July 18, 1566 (aged 81 or 91) Madrid, Castile
Alma mater	University of Salamanca
Signature
Sainthood
Beatification	In process

Bartolomé de las Casas (Seville, 1474 or 1484 – Madrid, July 18, 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish encomendero, theologian, philosopher, Dominican friar, priest and bishop, known for his fervent defense of the rights of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, and for the controversies this unleashed.

De las Casas was a reference witness and was close to some prominent figures in the events of the discovery and Spanish conquest in America. A skillful and diligent figure, he arrived in Hispaniola as a layman, then became a Dominican friar and priest, attaining the office of first resident bishop of Chiapas, in New Spain, and was finally officially named the first "Protector of the Indians".

His extensive writings, the most famous of which are Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) and Historia de las Indias (an unpublished work, published in 1875, more than 300 years after his death, right during the propaganda campaign of the Spanish–American War), give an account of the first decades of the colonization of the Spanish Antilles that has many times been considered unreliable.

It must be pointed out that these accounts were mainly obtained as second-hand testimonies, since, contrary to what was customary among missionaries, De las Casas hardly integrated into any indigenous community, nor did he learn any of the natives' languages. However, as part of the anti-Spanish Black Legend, his writings were presented, and widely disseminated by the European powers rival to the Hispanic Monarchy, as first-person descriptions.

Although De las Casas has been praised and venerated, even by other Churches besides the Catholic one, he has also been harshly criticized for his manifest falsehoods and exaggerations. Bartolomé de las Casas went so far as to write outright absurdities, such as that Hispaniola was inhabited by several million natives, that there were twenty thousand rivers extremely rich in gold, or that the Spaniards had caused a demographic debacle in America by killing "a thousand cuentos of people (1,000 million natives) in those very great lands", something plainly and totally absurd, since the total world population at that time was around 450 million, which would be equivalent to claiming that several hundred people had somehow killed more than twice the population that existed on the entire planet.

However, this was no impediment to his writings being used to spread the anti-Spanish propaganda that was widely disseminated, especially by Spain's rivals at the time, such as England or the Netherlands, even though the actions of those same countries proved to be far more nefarious and degrading toward the local population, and even though in those countries there was no legislation of any kind protecting the natives, much less a figure such as that of the Protector of Indians, embodied by Bartolomé de las Casas himself. More recently, in the United States, starting with the propaganda campaign that preceded the war against Spain, the narratives of Bartolomé de las Casas were used as references for "studies" lacking any scientific rigor, which based their estimates of the sharp demographic decline in America after the arrival of the Europeans on the implausible figures invented by de las Casas.

Family background

Bartolomé de Las Casas was born in Seville, in the parish district (colación) of El Salvador, in the center of the city. According to some biographers, his family may have been of Jewish convert origin, although other authors stated that they were Old Christians, something he himself took pride in proclaiming on various occasions.

King Alfonso XI of Castile named a member of the De las Casas family "faithful regidor of the royal ordinances and regidor number 24 of the kingdom". This number remained linked to the family until the 17th century, with that family line succeeding one another in holding the office.

King John II gave Guillén de las Casas, "the most powerful knight of Seville", the Town of Montilla, and, by order of King Henry II of Castile, he was sent to France to obtain military reinforcements. However, Don Guillén died in the Battle of the Ajarquía of Málaga. An Alonso de las Casas was given the Castle of Priego and, for his conduct in the Battle of las Lomas, was named Knight of the King.

Childhood and youth

According to Antonio de Remesal, his first biographer, Bartolomé de las Casas was born in Seville in 1474. However, the research of Helen Rand Parish and Harold E. Weidman in 1976 determined that the most probable date of his birth was November 11, 1484, in Triana, Seville. Juan Antonio Llorente, in his 1822 compendium of Friar Bartolomé's works, says that it was in 1474 and that it was probably on August 24, since that is the day on which the martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle is celebrated, and since it was a very widespread custom in Spain to give children the name of the saint that the diocesan church celebrated on the day of their birth when they were not given the father's name, which was not done in this case because the father was named Antonio.

He may have been born in one of these three parishes: San Lorenzo, San Vicente or La Magdalena, in Seville. He was baptized in the Cathedral. He must have spent his childhood hearing much talk of the battles of the Reconquista in which his relatives had taken part, and when the Catholic Monarchs settled in Seville, his uncle Alfonso Téllez Girón de las Casas was one of the eight knights who carried the poles of the canopy under which they entered.

Very little is known about his mother and his four siblings, with whom Bartolomé spent his childhood and adolescence. At home he learned to pray, and he probably did his primary studies at the College of San Miguel. His first contacts with religious life must have been when he visited his aunt Juana, who was a nun in the Monastery of Santa María de las Dueñas. Possibly in 1490 he went to study "both laws" (canon and state) at the University of Salamanca. A relative of his was a priest at the convent of San Esteban, where Christopher Columbus was residing at that time, so he may have met him there for the first time. Columbus was also on friendly terms with the De las Casas family and had spent long periods in Seville, Friar Bartolomé's native city.

In 1492 his paternal uncle, Juan de la Peña, took part in the first voyage of Columbus, which set out from the Port of Palos (Huelva) on August 3 of that year. The expedition returned in 1493 having discovered the new route to the Indies, which generated great excitement. On his way to Badalona to present his achievement to the Catholic Monarchs, Columbus passed through Seville in March 1493 with his birds and seven Indians and stationed himself around the church of San Nicolás to exhibit them. This was witnessed by Bartolomé de las Casas.

Bartolomé's father, the merchant Pedro de las Casas, decided, together with his brother Francisco de Peñalosa, to embark with Columbus for the Indies on his second voyage, which set out from Cádiz on September 25, 1493. Later the father was accompanied by his brothers Diego and Gabriel Peñaloza. When the expedition returned, it brought back 600 Indians, and the father gave one to his son Bartolomé to serve him. However, Bartolomé used the Indian as an object of humanistic study, and asked him about his religion in order to investigate whether it resembled Christianity. As he had studied Latin in Salamanca and Seville, he made use of his knowledge of philology and Latin to study possible similarities with his language.

When Queen Isabella I of Castile learned that Columbus was making slaves of the Indians, she ordered that her subjects not be treated in this way, but rather like the other subjects of the Crown, and through the Royal Decree of June 20, 1500 she ordered that anyone who held Indians as slaves be punished with the death penalty. This deprived Bartolomé de las Casas of the service of his Indian. Columbus argued that the only Indian slaves were those who had been taken prisoner in a "just war", that their customs were pagan and sometimes cannibal, and that it was right to bring them to Castile in order to wean them from those customs. The Queen replied that he should strive to convert them to Christianity in their own lands. Isabella died in 1504, and in her will she asked that the Indians be treated well and justly, without doing them any offense.

Another aspect of Bartolomé de las Casas's life that has generated debate concerns the moment at which he made his first voyage to the Indies. In one of the Latin texts of Father Antonio Salucci, a personal friend of Friar Bartolomé, he comments that the latter traveled to the Indies for the first time, while still very young, in 1493 together with his father and his uncle, who were employed on the second voyage of Columbus, and he states that this was an anecdote he heard Friar Bartolomé himself recount. Nevertheless, his biographer Llorente is of the opinion that Bartolomé de las Casas did not embark for the first time until 1498, on the third voyage of Columbus. Other historians dispute this as unlikely, since Bartolomé would have been a student in Salamanca during those years, and hold that he did not make his first voyage to the Indies until 1502.

Probably in 1500, Bartolomé de las Casas finished his studies in Salamanca and obtained a place as a doctrinero on the expedition to the Indies that set out from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda on February 13, 1502. For some historians he did this with the aim of accumulating merits to become a friar, while others point out that he did it in order to take charge of the landholding business that his father had left in the Caribbean. That expedition was commanded by Antonio Torres and carried Nicolás de Ovando, who was to replace Francisco de Bobadilla as Governor of Hispaniola. Bobadilla had earlier been sent as an investigating judge to look into and arrest Christopher Columbus, taking over the office of Governor and carrying out a series of policies of privatization of the discovered lands and allotment of encomiendas. Bartolomé de las Casas arrived in Hispaniola on April 15, 1502.

Among the economic activities carried out by the encomenderos, hunting and field work for their masters were the more bearable. However, the activity that most justified the Spanish presence on the island was the search for gold, and this was the hardest activity.

When the expedition arrived at the island, some ships prepared to return to Spain carrying Francisco de Bobadilla, and at the same time Christopher Columbus was approaching Hispaniola on his fourth voyage. The new governor, Nicolás de Ovando, did not allow Columbus to land. Just in those days a hurricane broke out that devastated Santo Domingo and sank the ships carrying Francisco de Bobadilla to Spain, while Christopher Columbus managed to save himself thanks to his skill as a sailor, putting in at a cove that he considered suitable for riding out the storm. The hurricane caused many deaths, and afterward the resulting unsanitary conditions brought on an epidemic. There are different versions of Friar Bartolomé's role at this moment. Some say that he was in Santo Domingo helping to heal the sick during the epidemic, others that he was inland administering his encomienda.

The war in Hispaniola

Chiefdom of Higüey in Hispaniola.

A group of Spaniards decided to go hunting, taking with them some attack dogs. These dogs came upon the Indians in the forest of Saona and attacked a local Indian chief, causing his death. The natives attacked the Spaniards, who, in the face of their fury, decided to embark back to Spain. Some time later, a group of Spaniards set up a camp in that area and were attacked with arrows by the Indians, eight of them dying. Nicolás de Ovando sent a party of 300 men to take revenge, led by Juan de Esquivel. Bartolomé de las Casas was in the party. The Spaniards won the war and the cacique Cotubanamá decided to agree to peace. The Spaniards then built a fortress in the area and left 9 people in it under the command of Captain Villamán. However, the Indians killed them all, and only one survived, who went to Santo Domingo to tell Juan de Esquivel what had happened. Cotubano persuaded the Indians of the province of Higüey to rebel. With the truce broken, a real war began that lasted 8 or 9 months. But since the Indians hid very well in the forest with their bows and poisoned arrows, it had to be fought with small contingents of men. De las Casas fought in the chiefdom of Higüey under the orders of Captain Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, and for this reason he received an encomienda in the Town of Concepción de la Vega, which he administered until 1506. Finally, after a great number of deaths on both sides, the Spaniards managed to find Cotubano's hiding place on the Island of Saona, arresting him, and he was sentenced to death by Nicolás de Ovando.

Return to Seville and journey to Rome

In 1506, Bartolomé de las Casas returned to Seville, where he received minor orders toward the priesthood. In 1507 he traveled to Rome and was ordained a presbyter, but he waited until 1510 to sing his first Mass in Concepción de la Vega.

Return to Hispaniola

Bartolomé de las Casas returned to Hispaniola in 1508. In September 1509 Nicolás de Ovando was replaced in the government of the island by Diego Columbus, son of Christopher Columbus. In Concepción, De las Casas began his work as a doctrinero, which he combined with his occupation as an encomendero.

In 1510 the Dominican Order arrived on the island, and it was ultimately the order that made the greatest contribution in favor of the rights of the Indians. The first Dominicans who came to the island were four, of whom the names of only three have been preserved: Friar Pedro de Córdoba, Friar Antonio de Montesinos and Friar Bernardo de Santo Domingo. More arrived later, increasing the number to eight. They soon began to concern themselves with the rights of the aborigines.

On the eve of Sunday, December 21, 1511, the eight members of the community prepared a sermon that Antonio de Montesinos was charged with delivering and that strongly defended the Indians. This address was given during Advent. What is known as the Advent Sermon said:

To make it known to you I have come up here, for I am the voice of Christ in the desert of this island, and therefore it is fitting that you hear it with attention, not just any attention, but with all your heart and with all your senses; this voice will be the newest you have ever heard, the harshest and hardest and most frightening and dangerous you ever thought to hear [...] You are all in mortal sin, and in it you live and die, because of the cruelty and tyranny you use with these innocent people. Tell me, by what right and by what justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? By what authority have you waged such detestable wars on these people, who were in their lands, meek and peaceful, where you have consumed such infinite numbers of them with deaths and havoc never heard of? How do you keep them so oppressed and worn out, without giving them food or caring for them in their illnesses, so that from the excessive labors you give them they fall ill and die on you, or rather, you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day? And what care do you take that someone instruct them in doctrine, and that they know their God and creator, and are baptized, hear Mass and keep feast days and Sundays? Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves? Do you not understand this, do you not feel this? How can you be in such a depth of lethargic sleep, so asleep? Be certain that, in the state in which you are, you can no more be saved than the Moors and Turks who lack and do not want the faith of Jesus Christ.

The sermon provoked great protests on the island, and Diego Columbus went to the Dominican convent to speak with Friar Pedro de Córdoba so that he would expel Friar Antonio from the island or, at least, so that the following week a milder sermon would be given to calm tempers. To everyone's great surprise, the following Sunday the sermon was much more combative on behalf of the Indians and set out five principles: that the laws of religion are above the laws of private individuals and of the State, that there are no racial differences in the eyes of God, that slavery and servitude are unlawful, that the Indians' freedom and property should be restored to them, and that the Indians should be converted to Christianity by example.

Several encomenderos and clergymen complained to King Ferdinand the Catholic and asked him to expel the Dominicans. The provincial of the Dominicans of Castile, Alfonso de Loaysa, went so far as to ask Friar Pedro de Córdoba that they abandon that attitude, because they ran the risk of the order being expelled from the New World. A representative of the encomenderos, the Franciscan Friar Alonso de Espinar, was sent from Hispaniola to Spain, and the Dominicans sent Antonio de Montesinos. King Ferdinand listened to both of them and ordered that a junta be held to study the situation of the Indians. From this junta, which met in Burgos in 1512, and from the subsequent one in 1513, came the first norms to defend the natives, and together with all the later norms they came to constitute the Laws of the Indies, the first human rights legislation in history. Their application in the New World, however, was often disregarded.

After that sermon, De las Casas was denied absolution because at that time he still kept his indigenous repartimiento.

De las Casas remained on the sidelines of this duel between friars and encomenderos, attending to his work as a doctrinero and to the management of his encomiendas in La Concepción.

Journey to Cuba

In 1511, Diego Columbus decided that it was time to explore the interior of the nearby island of Cuba. Captain Diego Velázquez Cuéllar prepared an expedition of 300 men in four ships, which set out from the Port of Salvatierra de Sabana bound for Maisí, a province in the east of Cuba, and landed at the so-called Port of La Palma.

However, the cacique Hatuey had fled Hispaniola during the war against Cotubano and had organized resistance in Cuba. The Indians began a ruthless war against the Spaniards in Cuba that lasted three months. It was necessary to Christianize them, so, at the request of Diego Velázquez, in the spring of 1512 Bartolomé de las Casas moved to the Island of Cuba as chaplain in the company of Pánfilo de Narváez. The Spaniards advanced across the island through the dense forest, conquering villages, Christianizing them and extending the dominion of Spain. De las Casas was very important in making headway among the hostile tribes, since he always sent a friendly Indian to parley with the Indians, as he did not know the native languages.

Bartolomé de las Casas baptizing prisoners in Cuba in 1511

Lieutenant Narváez went inland, with 25 soldiers, into the province of Bayamo, where they were attacked by a great number of Indians, although they managed to repel the attack. All those Indians took refuge in Camagüey, until they came to terms with the Spaniards and asked for their pardon and protection. They were pardoned and, in gratitude, the Indians gave De las Casas and Narváez some strings of rustic beads that they greatly valued.

Renunciation of his encomiendas

As a reward for his actions during the conquest of Cuba, Bartolomé de las Casas received in 1514 a new repartimiento of Indians in Canarreo, on the banks of the Arimao River, near the present-day Cuban city of Cienfuegos. And, together with his partner Pedro de Rentería, he had gold extracted from the river's gold deposits. He focused entirely on business and began to gain a reputation for greed. And, although he treated the Indians gently and taught them the doctrine of Christ, he ordered the Indians entrusted to him to extract gold in the mines, to plant sown fields and to do everything he wanted. In 1514 the partners decided to expand their business, and Pedro de Rentería moved to Jamaica in search of more provisions, which were already scarce in Cuba. Then three Dominicans arrived in Hispaniola: Gutiérrez de la Ampudia, Pedro de San Martín and Bernardo de Santo Domingo. They told De las Casas that they knew of him and of the efforts he had made to secure the well-being of the aborigines. This marked him deeply, and he began to reconsider the purpose of his mission in the New World. He gradually became aware of how unjust the system was and became convinced that he must "seek the divinely ordained remedy for these people".

At an Easter Mass, while in Sancti Spíritus, in central Cuba, he gave a sermon in which he condemned the mistreatment of the Indians and related experiences concerning them. This aroused criticism among the people, but this criticism was directed not so much against his preaching as against his person, since De las Casas was an encomendero, and it was not fair that he should insult a group to which he himself belonged. He then went to Diego Velázquez and told him that he no longer wished to hold encomiendas.

On August 15, 1514, the feast of the Assumption, at the age of thirty, he delivered a sermon in Sancti Spíritus in which, in the presence of everyone and of Velázquez himself, he said that he reiterated his criticisms and that he was giving up all his encomiendas. When Rentería returned and De las Casas told him of his decision, his former partner said that he supported him in his demands and would place at his disposal all the money he needed.

In 1515 he went to Santo Domingo, in Hispaniola, to speak with the Dominican Pedro de Córdoba, who listened to him gladly and told him that the powerful interests defended by the Bishop of Burgos, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, with 800 Indians in encomienda, and by the secretary Lope de Conchillos, a great landowner in the discovered lands and holder of many encomiendas, were well known. These two personages were the ones who handled affairs of State.

Universal Protector of All the Indians

In September 1515 Bartolomé de las Casas embarked for Seville together with Friar Antonio de Montesinos. The friars arrived in Seville on October 6. There they visited the Dominican convent of San Pablo, and Montesinos introduced him to his superiors, who were delighted to help him and recommended him to the archbishop of Seville, Friar Diego de Deza, the man who had helped Columbus discover the Indies. Diego de Deza, who was close to the Monarch, received a visit from De las Casas, who told him of the situation of the Indians, and Deza decided to help him. He advised him to meet with King Ferdinand the Catholic and gave him a letter of recommendation. De las Casas made his way to Plasencia, where the Court was at that moment. Thanks to the efforts of the Dominican and confessor to the Monarch, Tomás Matienzo, he managed to meet with the King. However, the King was very ill, lying in bed, and told him that he would have to postpone the decision until later.

He subsequently met with Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, who, when he heard his plea, told him that it did not matter to him in the least and that he was a fool for worrying about it. King Ferdinand planned to travel to Seville, and Deza arranged another meeting between the Monarch and De las Casas; however, the Monarch died on the way, in the Extremaduran village of Madrigalejo. Before dying, he handed the regency to Cardinal Friar Francisco Jiménez Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo. De las Casas prepared one text for Cisneros and another for Adrian of Utrecht, who was the tutor of Prince Charles, the future emperor Charles V.

In 1516, De las Casas wrote his Memorial de los Agravios, de los Remedios y de las Denuncias (Memorial of Grievances, Remedies and Denunciations), which led to the replacement of Fonseca by the Bishop of Ávila, Francisco Ruiz, and of Conchillos by the secretary Jorge de Baracaldo. The accession of Charles V to the throne allowed De las Casas to be heard at court, so that the Crown commissioned from him a plan of colonization in Tierra Firme in accordance with his proposals.

In April, Cisneros decided to send three Hieronymite friars to exercise the Governorship of Hispaniola. De las Casas was commissioned as adviser to the friars and was named Procurator or universal protector of all the Indians of the Indies, an office similar to that of the Ombudsman of Sweden, which was instituted at the beginning of the 19th century.

From that moment on, Bartolomé de las Casas was protector of the Indians on the islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, San Juan and Jamaica, as well as on Tierra Firme, in reference to the American continent. His mission was to inform the Hieronymite fathers, or the other persons who dealt with such matters, about the health and integrity of the aborigines. The Admiral and the appeal judges who were sent were to uphold this power of Bartolomé's, and disobedience to him would be punished with the payment of 10,000 maravedís.

Encomiendas

On November 11, 1516, Bartolomé de las Casas embarked together with the three Hieronymite fathers for Hispaniola. They did so in different ships. On reaching San Juan de Puerto Rico, De las Casas's ship suffered damage, and he had to prolong his stay there for two weeks. On arriving in Hispaniola, De las Casas realized that the encomenderos had won the favor of the Hieronymite fathers. The encomenderos had received them with festivities and had told them that the encomiendas were necessary, because otherwise the Native Americans would rebel, and that, moreover, they had primitive customs; and the Hieronymite fathers limited themselves to abolishing the encomiendas of those who did not live on the island.

In June 1517 he returned to Spain to tell Cisneros that things were not going as planned, and when he arrived in Seville he learned that the Cardinal was dying in Aranda de Duero. He went to speak with him, but the Cardinal, being ill, decided to postpone the decision until later, and he died in September. Prince Charles landed in Asturias and arrived with a large retinue in Valladolid. Factions soon arose to seize power. On one side were the "Castilians", headed by Bishop Fonseca and Lope Conchillos, and on the other were the "Flemings", with the Grand Chancellor of Castile, Juan Sauvage; the chief chamberlain, Monsieur de Xevres; and the private chamberlain, Monsieur Laxao. The President of all the Councils was the Grand Chancellor, and it was to him that De las Casas addressed himself, and he came to be considered one of his trusted men.

Aware that he would not manage to abolish the encomienda unless he first showed that its abolition did not mean economic ruin, he wrote the Memorial de remedios (April 1518), in which he outlined a socioeconomic plan of peaceful colonization with a clear consequence: the increase of population and wealth, although it was not easy to put into practice, since it meant a radical change of the system, with insurmountable difficulties. De las Casas planned a project to colonize aboriginal lands with farmers recruited in Spain. This was an attempt to create a peaceful colonizing experience in a territory not reached by conquistadors and encomenderos. However, he had to engage in an arduous debate with the Franciscan friar Juan de Quevedo, who had been appointed Bishop of Santa María la Antigua del Darién and spoke in favor of the encomiendas. Juan de Quevedo relied on Aristotle to argue that rude and barbarous peoples are slaves by nature. De las Casas argued that the Native Americans could be civilized in peace and with respect for their freedom, because God had given them the same talents as other human beings. In 1519 the Chancellor asked De las Casas to draft memorials to reform the legislation of the Indies; however, Sauvage died shortly afterward of an illness.

Like Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, in April 1520 Las Casas met the Totonac natives who were brought before the new monarch by Alonso Hernández Portocarrero and Francisco de Montejo, both emissaries of Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico.

A couple of months later, in Santiago de Compostela, the Council of Castile adopted the ideas of De las Casas, who was convinced that the work of conquest and colonization of America should be carried out peacefully through the proclamation and spreading of the Catholic faith. Thus, the Council of Castile authorized him to carry out the project of creating a peaceful colony in the territory of Cumaná (Venezuela), so that he might apply his theories, which consisted of settling Tierra Firme without shedding blood and proclaiming the Gospel without the clamor of arms.

These were, however, turbulent times in Spain. Toledo, Segovia, Ávila, Zamora, Salamanca and Valladolid rose up against Charles V, and this slowed the issuing of the royal decrees that Bartolomé needed for his project. In Seville, Juan de Figueroa organized a riot that was crushed the following day by his rivals, the Guzmáns. Bartolomé arrived after these events and was unable to find partners and capital for his project, and he had to content himself with taking as his crew a group of 70 rioters, convicts and outlaws who were embarking in order to flee to America. On December 14, 1520, they set out for Puerto Rico.

They reached Puerto Rico on January 10, 1521. There they received news that Alonso de Ojeda had begun a slave hunt on Tierra Firme that had enraged the aborigines, and that for this reason the Chiribichi and Macarapana Indians had murdered all the Dominican friars who had settled in Cumaná, a territory of present-day Venezuela. The Viceroy of Hispaniola, Diego Columbus, ordered Gonzalo de Ocampo to teach the aborigines a lesson. Ocampo's expedition arrived with 300 soldiers at San Juan de Puerto Rico, where De las Casas was able to learn of the Viceroy's plans. However, De las Casas spoke with Ocampo and told him that he could not carry out a military expedition to those lands because they had been granted to him by Royal Decree. Ocampo verified the validity of De las Casas's documents, but decided to ignore him. De las Casas went to Santo Domingo to speak with Diego Columbus so that he would give validity to his titles in the New World, and he left his crew of farmers in Puerto Rico. However, De las Casas's 70 partners, seeing the turn events were taking, decided to enlist with Juan Ponce de León to explore Florida.

De las Casas was received coldly in Hispaniola. There it was agreed to give him a couple of caravels to go to Cumaná, where he was to settle. In addition, his mentor Friar Pedro de Córdoba died on May 4, 1521. After taking part in his funeral, on July 30, 1521, he set out for Puerto Rico with his two caravels, the Concepción and the Sancti Spíritu. Traveling with De las Casas were his second-in-command, Francisco de Soto, his chaplain Blas Hernández and his assistant Juan de Zamora.

Days earlier, the expedition of Juan Ponce de León had come to an end because the Indians had attacked the Spaniards in Florida, killing Ponce de León with an arrow. However, once in Puerto Rico, the farmhands refused to accompany them. There they had been told that Bartolomé was a swindler who wanted to work them to death and that if they stayed on the island they would have access to land and to Indians who would work for them. Nevertheless, he decided to go to Cumaná anyway. There he was well received by the Franciscans. Ocampo's soldiers, who were in a nearby camp they called Nueva Toledo, did not take it well, because with De las Casas there their slave hunting was over. The soldiers then moved to Hispaniola, from where they continued to make raids in search of slaves in De las Casas's lands. This caused the Guaiqueríes to rebel, and Bartolomé, aware of the danger the Christian settlement faced, went to ask for help in Santo Domingo in December 1521. However, a storm broke out and his ship ended up at Yaiquimo, on the opposite side of Hispaniola.

The Indians took advantage of De las Casas's absence and attacked and burned the mission on January 10, 1522, and on his return they killed Francisco de Soto, the Franciscan Friar Dionisio and the artilleryman Artieda, while the rest of the Christians were able to escape to the Araya Peninsula, from there to Cubagua and then to Santo Domingo. De las Casas walked from Yaiquimo to Santo Domingo and, on his arrival, learned of the failure of his mission and accepted the advice of Friar Domingo de Betanzos to enter the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo.

In the convent he continued to share in and improve the work of many clergymen who had been carrying out legal studies in the School of Salamanca on the just titles that the Crown of Castile held in the New World and on the civil status that should be granted to the natives, as free men —and not slaves— of the Castilian Crown. At the same time he criticized many aspects of the colonization of America, among them the encomienda system. He withdrew to devote himself to the study of theology, philosophy, and canon and medieval law, and began to write his Historia de las Indias.

In 1523, after spending a year as a novice, he made his profession in the Order of Preachers, or Dominican friars. In 1526 he wrote to the President of the Audiencia, Alonso de Fuenmayor, pleading on behalf of the aborigines. To satisfy the Archbishop, the superiors of the convent sent him to another convent, that of Puerto de la Plata, in the north of the island. He arrived there in 1527 and devoted three years to study and meditation.

The Bishop of Mexico, Friar Juan de Zumárraga, and the Bishop of Tlaxcala, Friar Julián Garcés, appointed him reformer of the Dominican Order in the New World. In November 1531 he landed in Veracruz, together with Friar Tomás de Berlanga and the President of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, Don Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenreal. However, the Dominicans of Mexico obtained the support of the city's Cabildo and imprisoned him, then sent him back to Hispaniola.

In 1524 the Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies had been created to take charge of all matters related to policy in America. Its president was Friar García de Loaysa. After his expulsion from Veracruz, De las Casas wrote a long letter to this body. That letter was the seed of another work, De Unico Vocationis Modo.

The rebellion of Bahuruco

However, in 1534 the authorities needed Friar Bartolomé. The cacique Bahuruco, who had been baptized as Enrique and educated by the Franciscans, passed into the encomienda of a Spanish hidalgo surnamed Valenzuela, who had estates in San Juan de la Maguana. Tired of the humiliations of his master, who took away his mare and his wife, he went out into the forest, where he joined a group of rebel Indians. He managed to defend himself against the attacks sent against them and set up a kind of "independent republic" over an area of thirty leagues. The native chiefs Ciguayo and Tamayo followed Enrique's example and decided to organize raiding parties against the Spaniards, attacking all of them, military or civilian. His rebellion lasted ten years.

Nicaragua

For the services rendered, the Audiencia lifted Bartolomé de las Casas's confinement, allowing him to accept the invitation of Friar Tomás de Berlanga, who had just been made Bishop of Peru. Both embarked for Panama, intending then to continue overland to Lima, but in the course of the voyage a storm carried the ship to Nicaragua, where he decided to settle in the convent of Granada. This was the land of the Indies that he liked most, and in 1535 he proposed to the King and the Council of the Indies to begin a peaceful colonization in unexplored areas of the interior. However, despite the interest shown by the councilors of the Indies Bernal Díaz de Luco and Mercado de Peñaloza, he could not do so because the Fonseca clan, enemy of the Protector, was still at court.

In the face of the authorities' hostility, De las Casas decided to leave Nicaragua and went to Guatemala.

Guatemala

In November 1536 he settled in Santiago de Guatemala. Months later Bishop Juan Garcés, who was a friend of his, invited him to move to Tlascala. Later, he moved back to Guatemala.

On May 2, 1537, he obtained from the Governor, the licentiate Alfonso de Maldonado, a written commitment, ratified on July 6, 1539, by the Viceroy of Mexico Antonio de Mendoza, that the natives of Tuzulutlán, when conquered, would not be given in encomienda but would be vassals of the Crown.

De las Casas, together with other friars such as Pedro de Angulo and Rodrigo de Ladrada, sought out four Christian Native Americans and taught them Christian songs in which basic matters of the Gospel were explained. He then led a party that brought small gifts to the Indians (scissors, bells, combs, mirrors, glass bead necklaces...) and impressed the cacique, who decided to convert to Christianity and to be a preacher to his vassals. The cacique was baptized with the name Juan. The natives consented to the construction of a church, but another cacique named Cobán burned the church. Juan, with 60 men, accompanied by De las Casas and Pedro de Angulo, went to speak with the Indians of Cobán and convinced them of their good intentions.

Subsequently, the Dominicans established seats for their doctrinas in the villages of Rabinal, Sacapulas and Cobán, from which they directed the peaceful conquest of Vera Paz.

Interview with King Charles I of Spain

Another transatlantic voyage brought Friar Bartolomé de las Casas back to Spain in 1540. In Valladolid he visited King Charles I of Spain and V of the Holy Roman Empire. Emperor Charles, who among his many titles had been "Catholic King" since 1517, concerned about the situation of the aborigines in America and lending an ear to the demands of De las Casas and to the new ideas of the law of nations spread by Francisco de Vitoria, convened the Council of the Indies through the Valladolid Commission or Junta of Valladolid. Among the commissioners were the most important theologians and jurists of the European world of his time.

New Laws

Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. 1552 edition.

As a consequence of what was discussed, King Charles I promulgated the New Laws on November 20, 1542. They prohibited the enslavement of the Indians and ordered that all of them be freed from the encomenderos and placed under the direct protection of the Crown. They further provided that, with regard to entering lands not explored until then, two clergymen should always take part, who would see to it that contacts with the natives were carried out peacefully, giving rise to the dialogue that would foster their conversion. The New Laws were one of the most important contributions to the law of nations made by King Charles I as a result of his conversations with Friar Bartolomé de las Casas.

At the end of that same year, Las Casas finished writing in Valencia his best-known work, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, addressed to Prince Philip, the future King Philip II, who was then in charge of the affairs of the Indies.

Las Casas influenced the promulgation of the New Laws, but he did not approve of them, since, despite their undoubted advances, they maintained the encomienda, albeit under certain conditions. In 1543 he wrote to the Emperor denouncing what still remained unjust with regard to the freedom of the Indians. His complaints were examined and taken into account, and some supplementary provisions were included in the Laws. They were so unexpected for conquistadors and encomenderos that their application had to be deferred, but their content gradually took hold and, with their humanitarianism, increasingly influenced the Hispanics of the New World.

Bishop of Chiapas

He was offered the bishopric of Cusco, extremely important at the time, but Las Casas did not accept, although he did take charge of the bishopric of Chiapas in 1543.

He was consecrated Bishop of Chiapas in the former Dominican convent of San Pablo, in Seville, the present-day church of the Magdalena, on March 30, Passion Sunday, 1544. Pando Miranda says that "there were flowers and many lights of candles in the convent church, clouds of incense, gold and silks in the sacred vestments of the consecrating bishops, who were those of Córdoba and Trujillo, and a nephew of Cardinal Loaisa". As bishop he devoted himself to recruiting a good number of missionaries, most of them Dominicans from the convent of San Esteban in Salamanca, to accompany him on his journey to Chiapas.

He left Seville and arrived in Santo Domingo on September 8, 1544, with thirty missionaries. They were received with hostility by some settlers in America, who thought that his writings were full of falsehoods that had managed to deceive the King. On December 14, 1544, he left Santo Domingo for Chiapas. On January 19, 1545, he landed in San Lorenzo de Campeche, where he also endured the hostility of the settlers and of the governor, Francisco de Montejo. From this city, and after spending a few days in Tabasco, he made his way to Ciudad Real de los Llanos de Chiapas.

After the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés, the city had come under the government of Captain Diego de Mazariegos, who governed with a certain diligence, with rules such as maintaining adequate public sanitation and not allowing pack animals to roam loose. Mazariegos also concerned himself with the Indians: he gave them land in ownership and told them that if any Spaniard was interested in it he could pay them for it; he made sure that their weekly rest days were respected; and he created a school that the children of the chiefs and caciques could attend. A church was built in the city, the church of the Annunciation, which came under the authority of the Bishop of Tlaxcala, but with the growth of the city it became a diocese, its first Bishop being Don Juan de Arteaga, and his successor Bartolomé de las Casas himself.

However, when De las Casas arrived, the city was no longer governed by Mazariegos; the Indians' lands had passed into new hands, and the Indians were subjugated without anyone taking their interests into account. It was at the end of February 1545 that Bartolomé took office, and on March 20 he published a letter in which he declared that absolution would be denied to all settlers who did not return to the Indians what they had obtained through the encomiendas. Everyone opposed him, but De las Casas found the support of the Dominican missionaries and of the cleric Juan de Parera.

To ensure compliance with the New Laws, the licentiate Francisco Tello de Sandoval was sent to the Indies. He landed at San Juan de Ulúa and then headed for Mexico City, where he lodged in a Dominican convent. There were many Spaniards opposed to the regulations, such as the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, and a delegation was sent to speak with the Monarch so that he would abolish the New Laws. The New Laws met with difficulties in their definitive application, above all with regard to the inheritance of the right of encomienda.

Bartolomé de las Casas was summoned by Francisco Tello to Mexico City and had to leave, leaving Canon Juan de Parera in his place. In May 1546 he arrived in Mexico City in the company of his friend Rodrigo de Ladrada. In the city he joined an Episcopal Junta in which the bishops of Mexico, Tlaxcala, Guatemala, Michoacán and Oaxaca took part. In this Junta they debated about the Native Americans, and the thesis of De las Casas prevailed regarding the capacity of the aborigines and the duties they had toward the Crown.

Return to Spain

Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, painted by Félix Parra in 1875 for the International Exhibition of Santiago de Chile.

Francisco Tello decided to suspend the application of the New Laws until the matter of the delegation that had gone to speak with the Monarch was resolved, and news would arrive that the King was suspending the provisions concerning inheritance, allowing encomiendas already granted to be passed on.

De las Casas decided to return to Spain in 1547 to fight for the well-being of the Indians from the metropolis. He embarked at Veracruz, stopped over in the Azores, then landed in Lisbon and went on to Salamanca. In August 1550 he submitted his irrevocable resignation as Bishop of Chiapas and succeeded in having one of his disciples, Friar Tomás Casillas, appointed to replace him.

On March 10, 1551, Bartolomé was named beneficiary of the inheritance of Don Juan de Écija, and he used this money to secure his own maintenance and that of his friend, the confessor Rodrigo de Ladrada, for the rest of their days at the Dominican College of San Gregorio in Valladolid.

In Valladolid, between 1550 and 1551, he held a debate with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda called "The Valladolid controversy", which dealt with the legitimacy of the conquest. Who won this controversy has been disputed, since both considered themselves the winner; however, Ginés de Sepúlveda's works did not obtain authorization to be published.

In 1552 he arrived in Seville, where he published several of his works. He was accompanied by 20 missionaries whom he had been able to recruit and who set out on the Armada's expedition to Puerto de Caballos. These missionaries carried De las Casas's Seven Treatises.

In one of his works, entitled Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, he makes a rather critical allusion to the Requerimiento of 1512, a document written by order of Ferdinand II of Aragon to be used as an official proclamation in the context of the Laws of Burgos. The Requerimiento (drafted by Juan López de Palacios Rubios) was prepared as a response to the debate that arose over the justice of the conquest of America, following the sermons of the Dominican Friar Antonio de Montesinos, delivered on the island of Hispaniola in December 1511. This Requerimiento was also heavily criticized as ineffective by other contemporaries, such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, and Bartolomé de las Casas refers to it as follows:

And because the most pernicious blindness that those who have governed the Indies have always had, down to today, in arranging and ordering the conversion of those peoples ... has reached such depth that they have imagined and practiced and ordered that requerimientos be made to the Indians that they come to the faith and give obedience to the kings of Castile, or else war will be made on them by fire and blood, and they will be killed and taken captive,...

— Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias

Death

The last years of Bartolomé de las Casas were spent in Madrid. He stayed at the convent of San Pedro Mártir and then at that of Atocha, accompanied by his friend Friar Labrada. In 1561 he finished his Historia de las Indias and gave it to the College of San Gregorio, stipulating that it could not be published until forty years had passed. In fact it was not published for 314 years, until 1875. He also had to defend himself repeatedly against accusations of treason: someone, possibly Sepúlveda, denounced him to the Spanish Inquisition, but nothing came of the case. De las Casas also appeared as a witness in the Inquisition's case against his friend Archbishop Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda, who had been falsely accused of heresy. In 1565 he wrote his last will, transferring his immense library to the college.

Friar Bartolomé de las Casas died in 1566. He was buried in the Basilica of Our Lady of Atocha. He had previously arranged for his body to be buried in the convent of San Gregorio in Valladolid, but when in the 17th century his remains were about to be moved to that city, the place reserved for the burial of Bartolomé de las Casas had been occupied by a cleric who died there. Owing to the successive renovations of the basilica of Atocha and a fire that devastated it in 1936, his remains have been lost.

Veneration

In 2001 the Catholic Church began his canonization process, thereby considering him a Servant of God.

For its part, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America also includes him in its calendar of saints, and the Church of England remembers him by setting July 20 as his day of commemoration.

Thought

Monument to Bartolomé de las Casas in Seville (Spain).

Together with Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas is considered one of the founders of modern international law and a great protector of the Indians and a forerunner of human rights alongside the Portuguese Jesuit António Vieira. Although from opposing perspectives, both he and Vitoria dealt with the problem around which the law of nations emerged in the modern era: the definition of the relations between the European empires and the peoples of the New World. This task required the creation of a legal framework broad enough to be valid at the same time for Europeans and aborigines. The legal tradition used for this purpose was precisely that of natural law, which was taken from medieval law and Stoic philosophy. De las Casas considered that the Indians had the use of reason, just as much as the ancient Greeks and Romans, and that as rational creatures they were human beings. As such, the natives were sheltered by natural law and were holders of the rights to liberty and to name their own authorities.

His contribution to the theory and practice of human rights can be seen in his work Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, which, having been written in the mid-16th century, constitutes the first modern human rights report. In it he describes the atrocities to which the natives of the Americas were subjected by the Spanish conquistadors. One paragraph can give an idea of the events this book narrates:

Another time, this same tyrant went to a certain town called Cota, and took many Indians and had fifteen or twenty lords and chiefs torn to pieces by the dogs [fed to them], and cut off a great quantity of hands of women and men, and tied them on some cords, and hung them lengthwise from a pole, so that the other Indians might see what they had done to those, in which there must have been seventy pairs of hands; and he cut off many noses of women and children.

In his Historia de las Indias he developed much more extensively the atrocities described in the Brevísima.

Conflict with Toribio de Benavente

Dominicans and Franciscans disputed the ownership and exploitation of new lands and disagreed on theological matters. Motolinía accused Bartolomé de las Casas of being an excessive idealist, of not wanting to help and teach the natives in the way he himself did, of being anti-colonial, of being a disturber of order, who "thus disturbs and destroys the government here", as he stated in his letter to Charles V.

Experts such as Jorge García Castillo have argued that the disputes between Motolinía and De las Casas seem to be of a political rather than a theological nature; but, for his part, Motolinía, through his letter to Charles V, stated that conquest was a necessary means for the conversion of the natives to Christianity. However, in that same epistle the friar also explains to the Emperor how to make the conquered lands into a new independent nation under a Catholic ruler. Motolinía did not reject forced religious conversion. On this, Motolinía himself wrote: "let the Holy Gospel be preached throughout all these lands, and those who will not willingly hear the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ, let it be by force; for here that proverb applies: better good by force than bad by choice".

Toribio de Benavente spoke of him as follows, writing to Charles I:

Indeed, on the strength of a few little canons that this Las Casas heard, he dares a great deal, and very great seems his disorder and small his humility; and he thinks that everyone errs and that he alone is right [...] I marvel how Your Majesty and those of your Councils have been able to endure for so long a man so tiresome, restless, importunate, rowdy and litigious, in religious habit, so unsettled, so ill-mannered, so insulting and harmful and so without repose.

In his Historia de los indios de la Nueva España (History of the Indians of New Spain):

This Las Casas is not right to say what he says, and he is a hireling and not a shepherd for having abandoned his sheep in order to devote himself to denigrating others […]. The conquistadors and encomenderos and the merchants he often calls tyrants, robbers, violators, ravishers; he says that always and every day they are tyrannizing the Indians […]. On the strength of a few little canons that this Las Casas heard, he dares a great deal, and very great seems his disorder and small his humility; and he thinks that everyone errs and that he alone is right, for he also says these words, which follow to the letter: all the conquistadors have been robbers, ravishers and the most outstanding in evil and cruelty that ever were, as is now manifest to the whole world: all the conquistadors, he says, without excepting any.

Las Casas and the slavery of Black Africans

For quite some time Las Casas advocated bringing Black slaves to America to replace the Indians in the hardest labor. However, in the last third of his life he repented of this and also condemned the slavery of Black people because "the captivity of the Black people is as unjust as that of the Indians". Apparently the trigger for his change of attitude was a visit he made in 1547 to Lisbon —then the principal European slave-trading port— during which Portuguese Dominicans informed him about the brutal capture of Black slaves on the African coasts —and provided him with books on the Portuguese conquests in Africa and Asia—. He was also influenced by the case of the Black freedman Pedro Carmona of Puerto Rico, who had been sold back into slavery along with his wife and whom he helped to file an appeal before the Council of the Indies around that same time —he even paid the bail so that he could leave prison, having been declared a "fugitive slave"—.

But, unlike his denunciation of indigenous slavery, Las Casas did not manage to make "his defense of Black slaves reach much further", as Magdalena Díaz Hernández has pointed out, mainly because his Historia de las Indias (a work he completed between 1555 and 1561), in which he devoted six chapters to the subject, would not be published until 1875, owing to the express prohibition by King Philip II, son and successor of King Charles, on printing any book relating to the Indies under the most severe penalties, including death. In those six chapters Las Casas refutes the claim that the Black people captured in Africa had been taken as the result of a just war (which would "justify" their enslavement), arguing instead that what was waged there were "cruel wars, massacres, captivities, total destructions and annihilations of many towns of safe and peaceful people... who never challenged them, nor did them injury, nor war, nor harmed the faith, nor ever thought of hindering it".

But despite this position against the slavery of Black people, the view still predominates that Las Casas, who "fought so hard for the dignity of the Indians, nevertheless did not include Black people in that struggle", as is stated in the book by José Antonio Marina and María de la Válgama entitled La lucha de la dignidad (The Struggle of Dignity) and published in 2002, and this despite the fact that in 1952 the Cuban Fernando Ortiz had already published La leyenda negra contra fray Bartolomé de las Casas (The Black Legend against Friar Bartolomé de las Casas) and the Spanish Dominican Isacio Pérez Fernández in 1995 Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, de defensor de los indios a defensor de los negros (Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, from Defender of the Indians to Defender of Black People).

Works

Dispute or controversy with Ginés de Sepúlveda contending over the lawfulness of the conquests of the Indies.

• Memorial de remedios para las indias (1518), also known as Los quince remedios para la reformación de las Indias.
• Historia de Indias (1527–1547)
• Apologética historia sumaria (1536)
• De único vocationis modo, known in Spanish as Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión (1537)
• Memorial de los remedios (1542)
• Representación del Emperador Carlos V (1547)
• Treinta proposiciones muy jurídicas (c. 1548)

In 1552 he returned to Seville, where he published books he had been writing previously:

• Principia Quaedam (1552)
• Brevíssima relación de la destruyción de las Indias, compiled by the Bishop Don Friar Bartolomé de las Casas or Casaus, of the Order of Saint Dominic (1552)
• Tratado sobre los indios que se han hecho esclavos (1552)
• Octavo remedio (1552)
• Avisos y reglas para confesores (1552)
• Aquí hay una disputa o controversia entre Fray Bartolomé de las Casas [...] y Doctor Ginés de Sepúlveda (1552)
• Tratado comprobatorio del imperio soberano y el principado universal (printed in 1553)
• Sobre el título del dominio del Rey de España sobre las personas y tierras de los indios (c. 1554)
• Memorial-Sumario a Felipe II (1556)
• Tratado de las Doce Dudas (1564)
• Petición de Bartolomé de las Casas a su Santidad Pío V sobre los negocios de las indias (1566)
• De regia potestate
• De thesauris

Historia de las Indias

De las Casas began composing a Historia de las Indias in Hispaniola in 1527. He worked on it over the following 35 years, more intensively after his return to Spain in 1547. He wanted to narrate the history of the continent up to the mid-16th century, but the manuscript text that survives, in three volumes, only reaches 1520, which has led some researchers to posit that a fourth volume, now lost, may have existed. De las Casas bequeathed the original unpublished manuscript of his Historia to the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid in November 1559, with the instruction that they not allow it to be published until at least 1600. Nevertheless, over the following decades partial copies of the manuscript circulated in Spain and abroad. At the beginning of the 17th century the chief chronicler Antonio de Herrera made extensive use of De las Casas's work to write his Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos.

In the 18th century the historian Juan Bautista Muñoz, who had been commissioned by the government to write a Historia del Nuevo Mundo that never saw the light, found copies of the first two volumes of De las Casas's manuscript in an archive. Around 1820 Muñoz's papers passed to the Royal Academy of History, which reviewed them. In 1821 the academicians ruled against the publication of De las Casas's Historia "because of the prolix and inopportune digressions that make its reading heavy and tedious, and because, always contradicting the right of the Spaniards to the conquest and perpetually incriminating their conduct, it seemed that in present circumstances its publication would be neither advisable nor opportune, nor would it be becoming to the nation to authorize it". At that time Spain was immersed in the Hispanic American wars of independence. Several decades later, in 1856, a new generation of academicians recommended the publication of a critical edition of the manuscript, "illustrated in the manner that truth demands and that the honor of those first conquistadors calls for".

The first printed edition of the Historia de las Indias was finally published in Madrid in 1875 in five volumes. Other editions appeared in the following decades. De las Casas's autograph manuscript is preserved in the National Library of Spain.

Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias

This is a book published in 1552 by the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, the principal defender of the natives in America during the 16th century.

La Brevísima is a work dedicated to Prince Philip, and its general theme is the denunciation of the effects that colonization by the Spaniards had on the natives in the Americas. In addition, it served to humanize the conquest through a political, legal and religious transformation, drawing on a Spanish legal context.

Coinciding with the negotiations between the new governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Alexander Farnese, and the leaders of the provinces of Flanders who signed the Union of Arras, the first French edition of the "Brevísima" appeared in Antwerp. The Flemish Protestant who translated the text gave it a long but very pointed title: "Tyrannies et cruautés des Espagnols perpétrées ès Indes occidentales, qu'on dit le Nouveau Monde, brièvement décrites par l'évêque don frère Barthélemy de Las Casas ou Casaus, de l'ordre de saint Dominique, traduites par Jacques de Migrode pour servir d'exemple et d'avertissement XVII provinces du país" (Tyrannies and cruelties of the Spaniards perpetrated in the West Indies, called the New World, briefly described by the bishop ... Bartolomé de las Casas, of the order of Saint Dominic, translated by Jacques de Migrode to serve as an example and warning to the 17 provinces of the country). The strategy consisted of frightening the Flemish with the idea that coming to terms with the Spaniards meant dealing with oppressors of nations, as they had shown in the Indies, and that they would soon do the same to them.

In 1659 the book was expurgated by the Jesuit qualificator of the Holy Office Francisco de Minguijón, and it was finally prohibited by the Spanish Inquisition the following year —108 years after its publication—.

Quotations

"For all the nations of the world are men, and of all men and of each one of them there is one definition, no more, and this is that they are rational; all have their understanding and their will, and their free will, since they are formed in the image and likeness of God" Apologética historia sumaria, II, (OC. 7. 536-537)[2]

"Subjects are not under the power of the one who commands, but of the law, since they are not under a man, but under just law. From which it follows that although kings have citizens and subjects, these are not fully and properly their possessions" De regia potestate (OC, 12, 35)

"The true and necessary way of preaching the Gospel is that which persuades the understanding with reasons, and gently attracts, moves and induces the will" De unico vocationis modo (OC. 2, 17).

Criticism

Although he advocated the defense of the indigenous peoples of America, his defense of the indigenous Africans has been questioned, even though he supposedly also wrote a short work titled Brevísima relación de la destrucción de África as part of the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, against the mistreatment of the African population and against abuses by Portugal. This work was conveniently discovered in 1875, right during the campaign of Propaganda in the Spanish–American War.

Regarding the indigenous Africans, Frías (1983) says:

De las Casas lodged his complaints before the Flemish councilors who at that time surrounded the Emperor Charles V, proposing to them that the labor of the Indians be replaced by that of the Blacks, of whom some small lots had already been taken to the Antilles.

Later on, he retracted this position, since he considered both forms of slavery to be equally wrong.

The figures of native deaths provided by Bartolomé de las Casas have been considered completely implausible by the American historians John Tate Lanning and Philip Wayne Powell, the Argentine Enrique Díaz Araujo and the Spaniard Elvira Roca Barea. However, the historian Esteban Mira Caballos considers that they correspond to reality. Demographic studies such as those carried out on colonial Mexico by Sherburne F. Cook in the mid-20th century suggested that the decline in the first years of the conquest was truly drastic, ranging between 80 and 90%, due to many different causes but all of them, ultimately, attributable to the arrival of the Europeans. The main and overwhelming cause was disease introduced by the Europeans. Various historians have also pointed out that the exaggeration and inflation of figures was the norm in 16th-century accounts, and both the contemporary detractors and supporters of De las Casas were guilty of similar exaggerations.

Enrique Díaz Araujo also criticizes the lack of plausibility of De las Casas's geographical descriptions, as, for example, when he states that on Hispaniola there were twenty thousand rivers extremely rich in gold.

Toribio de Benavente (Motolinia), a contemporary Franciscan missionary and advocate of forced religious conversion who came into conflict with the Dominican Las Casas, called him a "liar" and a "slanderer". This was because he showed strong irritation at what Las Casas was conveying to the Crown. In response, he wrote the «Letter to the Emperor», in which, in addition to leveling very harsh judgments against the person of Bartolomé de Las Casas (stating that Las Casas's rejection of the post of Bishop of Chiapas was for objectionable reasons, as he was planning to become Procurador en Cortes and to be chosen Protector of Indians, which would explain the "mercenary" zeal of his writings), he puts forward several arguments questioning Las Casas's claims, in which he also defends the Mexican conquistador Hernán Cortés, the legitimacy of the encomienda and of the Spanish conquest of America (stating that the Spaniards did not usurp the Mexica Lordship, but rather that the Aztecs had usurped the sovereignty of other Indians, and thereby explaining the Spanish alliances with the Indian auxiliaries, whose lords swore obedience to the King of Spain through lawful means of natural law), and he adds a postscript in which he set out to refute what he considered exaggerations and falsehoods about slavery and the Repartimiento de indios. In response to the accusation that the Spanish authorities or the collaborating Caciques had been «executioners, heartless, inhuman and cruel», he acknowledges that, alongside the bad ones, there are «many other good Christians, pious and charitable», showing optimism about the social work of the colonial institutions, largely owing to the influence of the Catholic Church.

«...I then said to de las Casas: what? Father, do all your zeal and love that you say you have for the Indians end in bringing them along laden and going about writing the lives of Spaniards and wearying the Indians, so that your charity alone brings along more Indians laden than thirty friars? And since you neither baptize nor instruct a single Indian, it would be well for you to pay all those you bring along laden and wearied (...) and it is no wonder that de las Casas does not know it, because he sought to know only the bad and not the good, nor did he have any rest in this New Spain, nor did he learn any Indian language, nor did he humble himself or apply himself to teaching them. His occupation was writing up proceedings and sins that the Spaniards have committed everywhere: and this is what he greatly exaggerates, and certainly this occupation alone will not take him to heaven. And what he thus writes is not all true nor well verified (...) indeed, the Indians of this New Spain are well treated, and have less in levies and tribute than the Farmers of old Spain, each in his own way; I mean almost all the Indians, because there are a few towns whose assessment was made before the great pestilence...»

Ramón Menéndez Pidal, in his work El Padre Las Casas: su doble personalidad, accuses him of having promoted the Black Legend. This position is shared by Julián Marías, who stated in España inteligible "on the null documentary value of the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, its partisanship and its demented exaggeration". The Chilean historian Pedro Godoy Perrín stated: "The erosion of our identity begins early with the Black Legend. Father Bartolomé de las Casas gives it shape. The emancipators use it to legitimize the break with Madrid." Marcelo Gullo is also a detractor of Las Casas's work, calling him "sensationalist" and saying that he "denies the existence of mass human sacrifices". The historian Olivera Ravasi maintains:

Something that draws attention is that Las Casas always prides himself on having been a direct witness of what happened, which is why his accounts enjoy so much authority. Throughout his writings one normally reads the following phrase: «I saw», a phrase that, coming from a priest and bishop, makes his testimony almost an oath (…). There is a constant in the writings of Fray Bartolomé: Las Casas always speaks vaguely and imprecisely. He never says when or where such horrors were committed, nor does he take care to establish that (if they existed) they were an exception to the rule.(...) In his sadly famous Brevísima he invents the indigenous «genocide». First it is 12 million dead, then he raises the figure to 15 million and ends up rounding it to 24 million. Even settling for the 15 million, the Spaniards would have had to kill 375,000 Indians per year, that is, well over 1,000 a day. These figures are impossible, even after the invention of gas chambers and the other practices of modern genocide. Nevertheless, the legends of Fray Bartolomé will give rise to several propagandists of the Black Legend continuing to claim to this day that the American population collapsed with the arrival of the Spaniards."

The American historian William S. Maltby and the Mexican Guillermo Macías, among others, hold a more lenient judgment, considering that his inaccuracies were mostly accidental, owing to his extreme devotion to defending the rights of the Indian:

"somewhat hyperbolic", De las Casas: "His figures are not real, nor are the massacres he recounts, which so inspired Bry. What is true in Fray Bartolomé is discovered after tempering his zeal. He was a good friar, sincere in his defense of the Indian, but he exaggerated a great deal in order to be heard by the Emperor"

— Guillermo Macías

«no self-respecting historian can today take seriously the unjust and wild denunciations of Las Casas» and he concludes: «All in all, we must say that this religious man's love of charity was at least greater than his respect for the truth.»

— William Saunders Maltby

In response to some hypotheses that Las Casas would have found himself in the pressing need, even obliged, to exaggerate the events of the Spanish conquest of America in order to be heard by the Kings and the Spanish Cortes, such assertions have been questioned by authors such as Jean Dumont on the grounds that he became a close friend of important figures such as Charles I of Spain.

"The phenomenon of Las Casas is exemplary since it represents the confirmation of the fundamental and systematic character of the Spanish policy of protection of the Indians. From 1516, when Jiménez de Cisneros was appointed regent, the Iberian government shows itself in no way offended by the denunciations, at times unjust and almost always wild, of the Dominican. Father Bartolomé was not only never the object of any censure, but the monarchs and their ministers received him with extraordinary patience, listened to him, ordered that juntas be formed to study his criticisms and his proposals, and also to launch, at his suggestion and recommendation, the important formulation of the "New Laws". What is more: the Crown imposes silence on the adversaries of Las Casas and of his ideas."

— Jean Dumont

For their part, authors such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal have speculated on the possibility of some psychological defect in Las Casas, accusing him of having a "double personality" and comparing his defense of the Indian with that of Francisco de Vitoria, in order to demonstrate his lack of intellectual integrity and possible mental instability, inasmuch as the latter was not so obsessively violent in accusing conquistadors and encomenderos, nor constantly romantic in exalting the Indians to levels contradictory with reality, which would reveal in Las Casas a paranoid state of hallucination or a mystical exaltation, with the consequent loss of the sense of reality. He concludes that the biographers of Bartolomé de las Casas would not notice this because of the myth he posthumously became in the dominant historiographies:

«Las Casas contradicted himself… he is an anomalous mind that psychologists will have to study».

— Ramón Menéndez Pidal

On the other hand, historians such as Pierre Chaunu, Vittorio Messori or Philip Wayne Powell would regard him as the root of all the most popular anti-Catholic and Hispanophobic hoaxes about the Spanish conquest of America, which would be condensed into the Spanish Black Legend (above all after the engravings of Theodor de Bry based on his work):

"Bartolomé de Las Casas, hero of the Hispanophobes from the mid-16th century to the present day, is the person most responsible for our distorted views of the Spaniards and their role in America. This Spanish bishop, so often sanctified in literature for four centuries and placed today in a saint's niche of anti-Spanish propaganda, did more than any other individual to stain the name of a people and of a nation ―his own. Surely these were not his intentions, since he could not have guessed how much his work would serve foreign purposes; but his writings remain close to the heart and center of the denigration of Spain. He is, among other things, a magnificent case study for assessing the long-term damage that an irresponsible zealot can do when exploited by the manufacturers of propaganda directed against his own house (...) The controversy over the merits and defects of Bartolomé de Las Casas will no doubt continue forever, in the first place, because there will always be people who will believe in his total condemnation of the Spaniards and because there will be others who will recognize and censure without reservation the evident prejudice and fanaticism that guided his tongue, his personality and his pen. There are those who respect Las Casas, overlooking the injustice of his methods, in order to treasure as a relic the nobility of his cause, and there are those who for centuries now, without much concern for the cause, the methods or the true facts, delight solely in elevating Las Casas to the category of hero of anti-Spanish propaganda"

— Philip Wayne Powell

See also

• Valladolid debate
• Spanish conquest of Venezuela
• A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
• Capitulations of Tezulutlán
• Monument to Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Seville)
• Spanish Black Legend
• Sources on the first voyage of Columbus

Bibliography

• BATAILLON, Marcel; SAINT-LU, André (1994) El padre Las Casas y la defensa de los indios, Globus Comunicación, ISBN 978-84-88424-47-1
• BORGES, Pedro (1990) Quién era Bartolomé de las Casas, Madrid, ed. Rialp col. <Libros de historia, nº33> ISBN 84-321-2670-5
• CASAS, Bartolomé de las (1) (1999) Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, Madrid, ed. Castalia, translation by Consuelo Varela, ISBN 84-7039-833-4
• CASAS, Bartolomé de las (2) (1966) Los indios de México y la Nueva España Mexico, ed. Porrúa, prologue and biography by Edmundo O'Gorman, ISBN 970-07-4977-0
• Díaz Hernández, Magdalena (2016). "El pensamiento de Bartolomé de las Casas sobre la esclavitud de los negros en América". Imagen e identidad de Andalucía en la Edad Moderna. Universidad de Almería (in español).
• GIMÉNEZ FERNÁNDEZ, Manuel (1971) Bartolomé de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and his Work, "Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas: A Biographical Sketch", ed. Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, Collection spéciale: CER, Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, pages 67–126, ISBN 978-0-87580-025-7
• HERNÁNDEZ, Bernat (2015), Bartolomé de las Casas, Taurus / J. March (Españoles eminentes) ISBN 978-84-306-1681-7
• Iglesias Ortega, Luis (2003). "Bartolomé de Las casas, defensor de los negros". La Aventura de la Historia (in español) (58): 50–54.
• IGLESIAS Ortega, Luis (2007) Bartolomé de las Casas: Cuarenta y cuatro años infinitos Seville, ed. Fundación José Manuel Lara, ISBN 978-84-96824-11-9
• LLORENTE, Juan Antonio (1822) Vida de don Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Obispo de Chiapa, en América, in: Colección de las obras del venerable Obispo de Chiapa Don Bartolomé de las Casas, Defensor de los Americanos. Volume One. Paris, at Casa de Rosa, bookseller. Online book
• MENÉNDEZ PIDAL, Ramón (1963) El padre Las Casas: Su doble personalidad Madrid, ed. Espasa Calpe, col. «Grandes Biografías»
• MIRA CABALLOS, E. (2009): Conquista y destrucción de las Indias. Seville, Muñoz Moya Editor.
• PÁRAMO ORTEGA, R. (2011). "Bartolomé de las Casas: en busca del rostro amable de la Conquista". In: Teoría y crítica de la psicología, 1
• PAVÓN CUÉLLAR, D., CANTORAL POZO, A. and JUÁREZ SALAZAR, E. M. (2011). "La psicología crítica de Fray Bartolomé de las Casas: caracterización apologética de los indígenas y elucidación lógica del racismo". In: Teoría y crítica de la psicología, 1
• PÉREZ FERNÁNDEZ, Isacio (1984) Fray Bartolomé de las Casas: Brevísima relación de su vida, diseño de su personalidad, síntesis de su doctrina, Salamanca, ed. San Esteban, ISBN 84-7188-151-9
• THOMAS, Hugh (2007) La conquista de México, Mexico ed. Planeta, ISBN 970-690-163-9
• BEUCHOT, MAURICIO, Bartolomé de las Casas, el humanismo indígena y los derechos humanos, in Anuario Mexicano de Historia del Derecho, No. 6, 1994, pp. 37-48
• SÁNCHEZ, ALFONSO (2004). Todas las gentes del mundo son hombres El gran debate entre Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566) y Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490-1573). Anales del seminario de Historia de la Filosofía. 21, 91-134. Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
• FABIÉ, ANTONIO (1879). Vida y escritos de Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Obispo de Chiapa. Madrid: Imprenta de Miguel Ginesta.
• GARCÍA, EMILIO. Bartolomé de las Casas y los derechos Humanos. 81-114. Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
• DÍAZ ARAUJO, ENRIQUE. Las Casas, visto de costado: crítica bibliográfica sobre la leyenda negra. Fundación Francisco Elías de Tejada y Erasmo Pèrcopo, 1995.
• WAYNE POWELL, PHILIP. Árbol de odio. Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas S. A., Madrid, 1972.

External links

• Bartolomé de las Casas at the Real Academia de la Historia
• Complete biography of Bartolomé de las Casas on the Dominicans' website
• Digitized works of Bartolomé de las Casas in the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library.
• Digitized works of Bartolomé de las Casas in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain.
• Contributions of Bartolomé de las Casas to indigenous rights on Academia.edu