Bartolomé de Las Casas

1484–1566

Missionary and historian

Sources

Journey to the New World. The son of a merchant who would accompany Christopher Columbus on his second voyage and a woman who owned a bakery, Bartolome de Las Casas was born in Seville, Spain, probably in 1484. He was there in March 1493, when Columbus returned triumphantly from his first voyage. Las Casas prepared for a career in the church, studying theology and law. In 1502, because of his family connections, he accompanied the first governor of the island of Hispaniola to the New World. Shortly before he left, he received the tonsure, making him a member of the clergy, but he was not yet a priest.

Native American Treatment. Upon landing in Hispaniola, Las Casas took part in a military expedition against natives who had rebelled against the Spanish demands for labor. His reward was an encomienda, a grant of land and native labor, and he immediately observed the harsh treatment of the Indians. In 1510 the first Dominican friars arrived in Hispaniola and immediately began protesting the treatment of the natives. They deeply influenced Las Casas, who was ordained a priest in 1512, the first man to receive ordination in America. He served as a chaplain to the Spanish force that conquered Cuba with much bloodshed in 1513. Stunned by the violence he saw and meditating on the Book of Ecclesiastes, he renounced his encomienda in 1514 and began to denounce the system as slavery. The other settlers opposed him vehemently, and he decided to return to Spain to press his case to King Ferdinand of Aragon.

Royal Audience. In 1515 he and several Dominicans sought an audience with the king, in which they hoped to present a wide-ranging proposal for changing the relationship between the Spanish and the Indians in the New World. They were eager to Christianize the natives but objected to the use of war and forced conversion. Las Casas also proposed using Africans as slave laborers to replace the Native Americans, but he soon repented of that idea as well and denounced all forms of slavery. When the king died in 1516 without granting an audience, Las Casas turned to the powerful chief minister of Castile, Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros, who was highly sympathetic. Cisneros approved of much of what Las Casas proposed in respect to ending the encomienda, founding free native communities, and encouraging the migration of Spanish peasants to America, but stubborn resistance from the colonists prevented their implementation. Las Casas persuaded the new king Charles I (Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire) to allow him to found a religious colony on the coast of Venezuela. In 1521 twenty-one missionaries sailed from Spain but only five reached the colony, and continued slaving raids provoked a native uprising that doomed the plan. By late 1522 Las Casas was back in Spain.

Personal Crusade. Disappointed by this failure, Las Casas decided to withdraw from the world and joined the Dominican Order, taking his vows in 1524. For six years he lived in a Dominican house in Hispaniola, devoting his time largely to writing the History of the Indies, one of the most valuable sources on the early voyages of discovery and the conquest. The continued mistreatment of the Native Americans persuaded him to return to the fray. In 1535 the king gave him a commission to investigate the Spanish conquest of Peru, but he was shipwrecked on the coast of Nicaragua, where he spent two years working to convert the natives and watching them be enslaved by colonists. Returning to Europe he went to Rome and persuaded Pope Paul III to declare in 1537 that the Indians were rational humans and equally worthy to any other people of receiving Christian instruction. The pope strongly condemned forced conversion. Las Casas began to write the many works in which he expounded those ideas. His work paid off with the publication of the New Laws in 1542, in which Charles I abolished the encomienda system and prohibited the enslavement of Native Americans. Two years later Las Casas was named bishop of Chiapas in southern Mexico. He soon found that neither the New Laws nor his new position ended the exploitation and misery of the Indians. The colonial authorities for the most part refused to implement the laws and honor his status as bishop. Badly frustrated in Chiapas, Las Casas returned to Spain for good in 1547.

Debate. Las Casas had not given up the struggle for native rights. He soon found himself in the most famous episode of his life: the debate with a noted scholar. Juan de Sepulveda defended Aristotle's thesis that some men were natural slaves and their betters had a right to enslave them, which he applied to the natives of the Americas and the Spanish colonists. In August 1550 at Valladolid the two faced off before a panel of theologians and lawyers, who were to report to the king. Sepulveda spoke for only three hours, while Las Casas went on for five days. His orations were published as In Defense of the Indians. The panel made no formal recommendation to Charles I, but the consensus of the time and since has been that Las Casas got the better of the debate. He was given oversight over the selection of missionaries sent to the Americas. In the New World, however, his work had little impact, as the colonists largely ignored the royal commands on improving the natives' treatment, threatening revolt if the king enforced his orders.

Legacy. After 1552, Las Casas spent most of his time in Valladolid, writing and editing his extensive body of works but going often to the royal court despite his age to argue on behalf of the American Indian cause. He died in Madrid while on one such mission. His dying words were an admonition to those around his deathbed to continue to work for the protection of the Native Americans. His vast writings, which probably did exaggerate Spanish cruelty in the Americas, were a major source of the “Black Legend” in which Spain was unfairly denounced for its atrocities, especially in England through its emotionally charged English translation. Although he was not a pacifist, he denounced waging war against the Indians as unjust, and he ardently affirmed that the only proper means of conversion was through persuasion and example, not by war. Especially since his labors were on behalf of a people to whom he did not belong, Las Casas serves as the model defender of human rights in history.

Sources

Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, eds., Bartolome de Las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971).

Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One; A Study of the Disputation between Bartolome de Las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda in 15 50 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).