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| Non-fiction and essays |
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| University essays |
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| History Dissertation |
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| ENCOUNTER IN THE NEW WORLD: SPANISH ATTITUDES AND ACTIONS TOWARDS INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, LATE 15TH TO EARLY 16TH CENTURY |
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| Chapter One: Introduction Since the adoption of Christianity, Europe had sought to expand its borders and its religious influence. In the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries, for example, attention had been predominantly focused towards reclaiming the Holy Land. Once the New World had been discovered, the Spanish turned their attention towards the vast tracts of land that were inhabited by strange breeds of men. As the Spaniards encountered different forms of humanity - men who could not immediately be compared with European civilisation - they were generally unable to accept the Indians as they found them. Spaniards applied traditionally held doctrines and philosophical ideas to the Indians. Albrecht Classen describes this contact with the unfamiliar: Cultural clashes highlight boundaries, which again necessitate establishing a set of fundamental norms constituting the framework of the self-identity. In this sense all conflicts and encounters with the foreign are ambivalent and ambiguous: they can engender violent and vitriolic forms of hostility, rejection, and fear, and they can also trigger a quest for self-analysis, possibly producing tolerant analysis.# The Spanish encounter with the natives of the Americas exhibited both sides of Classen’s description. Some Spaniards were so horrified by native customs such as human sacrifice that they would use violent means to subdue the Indians. Comparing themselves with the Indians, the Spanish would invariably determine themselves to be superior, and therefore possessed of a manifest right to rule. On the other hand, some Spaniards saw fundamental similarities between the two peoples and identified the Indians as a form of proto-European waiting to be brought into the light. During the middle ages, Christian kingdoms had often disregarded the native populations of conquered pagan lands. The eventual conquest of the infidels was usually taken for granted.# Barely a year after the discovery of the New World, Pope Alexander VII issued bulls that declared the responsibility of the Iberian kings to Christianise the people in lands they had discovered. Again, as Muldoon notes, ‘the papacy had assumed that the conquest would be successful.’# The actual existence of native peoples in the newly discovered lands was a minor consideration. The progression towards Christianity in the New World was initiated, and it never occurred to the devout Spaniards that the Indians might not wish to become Christians. To them, as to all Europeans, Christianity was the pinnacle of civilisation, and ‘no one could “progress” past it.’# It was in the Indians’ best interest to become Christians, and the Spanish would ensure that conversion occurred, no matter how it was achieved. This study will firstly examine the significance of Bartolomé de Las Casas, a fervent proponent for peaceful treatment of the Indians, and will analyse his theoretical foundations. Chapter three will assess the significance of the ‘just war’ doctrine as promulgated by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who suggested that the idea of Aristotelian natural slavery justified the use of force to subdue the Indians. Chapter four will address the importance of the Valladolid debate of 1550, when Las Casas and Sepúlveda argued over the future course of the Spanish conquest. Chapter five will examine how the goal of Christianising the Indians developed and evolved. Finally, in conclusion, there will be an examination of the changing Spanish views of the natives they encountered. |
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