Page Title


		Non-fiction and essays

			University essays

	History Dissertation

	ENCOUNTER IN THE NEW WORLD: SPANISH ATTITUDES AND ACTIONS TOWARDS INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, LATE 15TH TO EARLY 16TH CENTURY

Chapter Two: Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Indian cause While those who sought to subjugate the Indians found their philosophical justification in Aristotle, the few Spaniards who sought justice for the Indians relied on ideas of human equality derived from Cicero. Cicero’s ‘deep and lasting belief in the moral equality of human beings’ came from ‘his view that they are all universally endowed with divine reason.’# The first writer to deny the legitimacy of Spanish conquest and conversion by force was Antonio Roselli, who in the early fifteenth century declared that the people of the Canary Islands had the natural right to defend themselves against aggression.# Cardinal Ximines, the Primate of Spain suggested that the Indians should be protected from the depredations of the conquistadores and they needed to ‘be kept in an innocent situation from which they could freely accept God’ s message when it was presented to them from above.’# The most ardent defender of Indians’ rights was Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas. His writings from the mid-sixteenth century clearly indicate his contempt and outrage at the violence and destruction carried out in the New World by the Spanish conquistadores. Las Casas was never more damning of Spanish actions towards the Indians than when he declared in 1552 that: those…pretending to be Christians have uprooted these pitiful people and wiped them from the face of the earth. First, they have waged war on them: unjust, cruel, bloody and tyrannical war. Second, they have murdered anyone and everyone who has shown the slightest sign of resistance, or even of wishing to escape the torment to which they have subjected him.# In his youth Las Casas had fought against the Moors in Granada before sailing for the New World with Columbus’s third voyage. In 1502, following successful Indian hunting expeditions, Las Casas was granted a plantation or encomienda on Hispaniola, which relied on Indian slave labour. Initially, Las Casas did not seem to regard the position of Indians as slaves as something worth protesting against. Indeed, after being ordained as a priest in 1510, Las Casas served as chaplain during the Spanish conquest of Cuba from 1512- 1514. As a reward for this service Las Casas was granted a second encomienda. Apparently, Las Casas began to be troubled about the treatment of the natives. In his later works, Las Casas would point to a sermon by Fray Antonio Montesinos at Santo Domingo in 1511 that made him fully aware of their sufferings. Montesinos spoke out against the cruelties of the Spanish and the mistreatment of the Indians.# As Anthony Pagden has suggested, however, Las Casas’s initial response following Montesinos’s sermon ‘was not aimed at the legitimacy of the Spanish occupation’ but instead targeted ‘the colonists’ abuse of their position, at the “cruel and horrible servitude” to which they had reduced the native population, and at their failure to provide the Indians with adequate religious and moral instruction.’# Perhaps the most influential part of Montesinos’ sermon was when he asked the gathered crowd ‘by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude?…Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?’# By 1514 Las Casas had formally spoken out against the Spanish treatment of Indians in the New World, though he had first to surrender up his own Indian slaves before he could preach against those still holding natives in bondage.# Following the failure to establish a Christian community among the Indians at Tierra del Fuego, Las Casas sought spiritual refuge in a Dominican monastery, where in 1522 he became a friar. The Indian question would dictate the rest of Las Casas’s life, as he struggled to gain acceptance of his views at the Spanish court. The basic philosophy underlying Las Casas’s call for the peaceful conversion of native peoples lay in his belief in fundamental human equality. Cary J. Nederman has argued that it was in the writings of Cicero that Las Casas found ‘the ascription of human equality’ which would then become the ‘cornerstone of his defence of Indian peoples against European oppression.’# Cicero had extolled the importance of virtue and reason in establishing human equality, therefore as Las Casas suggested the Indians possessed the capacity for reason, they deserved just treatment by the Spanish. Yet even in Cicero, there was justification for the legitimacy of Spanish attempts to convert native peoples, when the philosopher declared ‘there is no human being of any race who, if he finds a guide, cannot attain to virtue.’ [My emphasis added.] Las Casas saw the potential of the Indians, and with a Christian as their ‘guide’, then their path to virtue was guaranteed. # While Ciceronian ideas of fundamental equality played a crucial role in Las Casas’s thought, he also made use of scriptures and biblical commentaries. It seemed that ‘in every book he read…he found additional reasons and authorities to prove and corroborate the justice of those Indian peoples, and to condemn the robbery, evil and injustice committed against them.’# This extensive reading added to Las Casas’s first hand experiences of the brutalities of Spanish policy and, in his mind at least, offered further evidence of the moral right of his own position, and the immorality of the Spanish actions. In his Short account of the destruction of the Indies, Las Casas recounted scores of atrocities committed by the Spanish against the Indians. It was an indictment of Spanish actions, which portrayed the conquistadores as people who would ‘tear the natives to shreds, murder them and inflict upon them untold misery, suffering and distress, tormenting, harrying and persecuting them mercilessly.’# Las Casas described protests by Indians against Spanish exploitation through the encomienda, an aspect of Spanish-Indian relations with which he was all too familiar. He recalls that on Cuba ‘Men and women hanged themselves and even strung up their own children. As a direct result of the barbarity of one Spaniard (a man I knew personally) more than two hundred locals committed suicide, countless thousands all dying in this way.’# In Las Casas’s opinion, the claim to have known the perpetrator ‘personally’ adds weight to his argument. Further damnation of the Spanish comes from what Las Casas regards as their ‘lust for gold’, which even the Indians themselves recognised. Las Casas recounts the opinion of an Arawak leader on Cuba, who apparently said that ‘[The Spanish] have a God whom they worship and adore, and it is in order to get that God from us so that they can worship Him that they conquer us and kill us.’ Las Casas then points out that the Indian was standing next to a basket of gold at the time and declared ‘Here is the God of the Christians.’# For Las Casas it was this desire for riches that had clouded Spanish judgement in relation to the Indians, and obscured the true purpose of their mission in the New World: Christianising the natives. Yet while conversion of the pagans was essential to the greater equality between Indian and Spaniard, Las Casas did not believe that forced conversion was justifiable. In the Apologetic History published in 1552, Las Casas attempted to demonstrate how the Indians could be regarded, on some levels at least, as equal to Europeans. One way in which he does this is to compare the natives of the New World with civilisations in Europe’s pre-Christian past. He suggests that ‘there is no nation (excepting that of the Christians) which does not possess and suffer many and great defects, and is barbarian in its laws, customs, way of life and government.’# Indeed, with their ability to recognise divinity, albeit a misguided, polytheistic non-Christian view, the Indians were at least equal to the Romans and Greeks, who also worshipped a pantheon of gods. Las Casas even suggested that the Indian gods were better than the gods of ancient Europeans: the nation which has elected virtuous men as God or gods, though it might have erred in not selecting the true God, has a better concept and estimation of God and more natural purity than one which has selected and accepted for God or gods men known to be sinful and criminal. The latter was the case of the Greek and Roman states, while the former is that of all these Indian nations.# The Greeks and Romans formed the basis of much of what was considered ‘civilised’ in Europe; thus Las Casas suggested that the Indians were at least their equal, if not better, and therefore, equally capable of becoming full members of the human race. As well as comparisons with ancient European civilisations, Las Casas - following Cicero - sought to affirm the fundamental human equality of Indians through their possession of reason. In the early part of the Apologetic History, Las Casas discussed the conditions which must be fulfilled to allow humans to ‘enjoy full intellectual capacity’, following this with a ‘demonstration that the Indians possess these physical qualities.’# Las Casas suggested that some of the Indians were ‘endowed in full perfection for political and social life and for attaining and enjoying that civic happiness which in this world any good, rational, well-provided and happy republic wishes to have and enjoy.’# Las Casas argued that if the Indians could be seen to possess the same innate qualities deemed necessary for civilisation among European peoples, then they deserved to be treated as equals. The only significant aspect of their lives that was lacking was worship of the true God. Yet even in this respect, according to Las Casas, the Indians had shown such promise in choosing virtuous men for their gods that their acceptance of Christianity would be a mere matter of careful guidance in the right direction. A further aspect of Las Casas’s defence of the Indians lay in refuting claims that they were mere barbarians who needed to be eradicated from the New World. In the Apologetic History, Las Casas not surprisingly made reference to the world he knew: Europe, and attempted to differentiate between types of barbarians. As incomprehensible language is one of the hallmarks of the barbarian, Las Casas noted that ‘Just as we consider these people of the Indies barbarians, so they, since they do not understand us, also consider us barbarians and strangers.’ Moreover, the Indians, for Las Casas, exhibited many aspects of what Europeans would consider ‘civilisation’, including professions, abundant deposits of provisions and especially the ‘three types of prudence: the monastic, by which man knows how to rule himself; the economic, which teaches him to rule his house; and the political, which sets forth and ordains the rule of his cities.’ With such advanced characteristics of civilisation, Las Casas was in no doubt that the Indians were in fact men, and barbarians only in the ‘broad sense’ through ‘their lack of the holy faith.’# Once the natives had received instruction in Christianity, Las Casas felt certain they would become full members of humanity on a par with the Spanish. While Las Casas managed to achieve the promulgation of laws restricting the implementation and granting of encomiendas, in some ways, his crusade began too late to achieve lasting change. The New Laws of 1542, which challenged the encomienda system were designed to prohibit Indian slavery, and in Peru, to strip troublesome encomenderos of their lands.# Indeed, the laws stated that ‘for no cause of war nor any other whatsoever, though it be under title of rebellion, nor by ransom nor in other manner can an Indian be made a slave, and we will that they be treated as our vassals of the Crown of Castile since such they are.’# Yet, these laws proved so unpopular among the conquistadores that civil war threatened in Mexico and Peru, and the viceroy of Peru was killed when he attempted to implement such pro-Indian measures. Nevertheless, Las Casas was determined to influence changes in the Spanish treatment of the Indians. After the failure of the New Laws, Las Casas returned to Spain permanently in 1547 and focused on writing. As Hanke suggests, Las Casas felt that the only way to affect change in the New World was to convince Spaniards that the conquest was a great evil with dire consequences for Indians. He ‘became convinced that the kings of Spain and their advisors in the Council of the Indies would remedy the evils of the New World, once they knew about them and came to realise that divine and natural law was being broken.’# At this point Las Casas felt that he could best serve the Indian cause by putting his experiences of the New World into print. The late 1540s to the early 1560s saw Las Casas produce many works about the Indians, including the Apologetic History, and the mammoth History of the Destruction of the Indies, finally completed in 1561. He employed legalistic arguments concerning the Indians’ rights to persuade the bureaucrats who governed Spanish action in the New World through the Council of the Indies.# Despite this intellectual output, Las Casas did not achieve his ultimate goal of peaceful conversion of the natives. Despite Las Casas’s efforts, the conquest had proceeded practically unhindered in the sixteenth century. While Mexico and the Aztecs had fallen to Cortés, the Inca in Peru had succumbed to Pizarro and wherever the Spaniards went, their invisible companion - disease - followed them. Wagner has suggested the unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable futility of Las Casas’ fight: ‘At the start of his crusade there was a bare chance that his principles might have been accepted. But as the conquest proceeded, covering larger and larger territory and producing more and more revenue, the prospects of drastic change dwindled.’# The predominant legacy of Las Casas was his challenge to the prevailing ideas of Indians being less than human, barbaric and savage. His opposition to the continuing conquest was made on a basis of the fundamental equality of the Indians, and their potential to receive the Christian faith. Yet even Las Casas was constrained by his inevitably Eurocentric outlook on life. Rarely did he accept the Indians’ practices as meritorious in their own right, but rather for their approximation to Spanish civilisation. Ultimately, European Christian society was for Las Casas the pinnacle of civilisation, and until the Indians had reached that point, they would always be subordinate in their comparison with the Spanish. Mark Cocker suggests that even though Las Casas was ‘intent on justice’ he worked within the overall European framework of tribal dispossession and ethnocide. Typically, while he abhorred the cruelties inflicted by his fellow countrymen, he never questioned the Spanish right to possession of the Americas. Nor did he challenge the orthodox Christian view that the conversion of native Americans was a necessary and laudable objective.# Las Casas may have accepted the Indians’ equality on the level of natural rights, but he could not admit parity between Indian and European religion or culture. The consequence of his Eurocentric attitude suggested that the Indians had potential only in the sense of being promising candidates for conversion.

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