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		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 Three: Sepúlveda, Natural Slavery and the Just War Doctrine The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw a resurgence in Aristotelian thought, which would have a significant impact on how theologians regarded the Indians. In such proponents as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Aristotle’s idea that some men are by nature slaves would justify the use of force in bringing the Indians toward the light of Christianity. In the sixteenth century, Aristotle’s Politica, which contained the theory of natural slavery, was required reading on courses in moral philosophy, which all theology students had to study.# Theologians found in interpretations of Aristotle the ‘license they sought to enslave people whose religion was not Christian and whose behaviour was not European.’# Without the Spanish to guide them, the Indians would remain in a state of inferiority, and thus it was the Spaniards’ duty to hold dominion over the natives for their own good. Racial and cultural prejudice characterised much of the early contact between the Spanish and the Indians. Partly this arose from the fact that Europeans tended to see any non-Europeans, especially non-Christians as inferior, even when they had an advanced culture, such as the Turks.# Secure in the belief that Spanish culture and religion was the pinnacle of world civilisation, many Spaniards were bound to treat the natives they encountered with contempt. Another reason why the prejudice against the foreign was so pronounced in Spain was due to the years spent fighting the Muslims in the Iberian peninsula. 1492, the year Columbus reached the New World, also saw the last Moorish kingdom crushed and Spain united as a Christian country. Together with the experience of using force for religious ends in the crusades, the religious and racial fervour that developed in wars to extend Christendom was transported across the Atlantic and applied against the native populations. While Las Casas was an outspoken advocate for fair treatment of the natives in the New World, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was fervently in favour of the Spanish conquest, regardless of the cost to the Indians. A theologian who had spent twenty years in Italy studying the works of Aristotle, Sepúlveda used the works of ‘The Philosopher’ to justify the treatment of Indians through Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery which gave sanction to a ‘just war.’ The key piece of writing produced by Sepúlveda with relation to the Indians was the polemic discussion Democrates Alter, written in 1547, which set forth his reasons for a just war against the Indians. Sepúlveda’s quest to discredit Las Casas’s ideas about Indian equality and peaceful conversion resulted in the famous Valladolid debate over what form the Spanish conquest should take. Sepúlveda’s theories were developed in the 1540s after he had returned from Italy, where he was credited with the recovery of the ‘true Aristotle.’ The theologian put such faith in Aristotle’s teachings that he declared that ‘the writings of Aristotle, whose precepts…have been received by posterity with such unanimous approval that they no longer seem to be the words of a single philosopher, but the decisions and opinions held in common by all wise men.’# Sepúlveda was convinced that if learned men considered Aristotle to be such an authority, then the average Spaniard could not argue with the ancient philosopher’s logic. Sepúlveda, however, was not the first to use Aristotle’s teachings as the basis for discussing the Indians in the New World. In 1510, John Mair, a Scottish theologian working in Paris was the first European to consider the Indians in Aristotelian terms. Mair had applied the theory of natural slavery to the natives of the Americas, and was in favour of the idea that ‘force should be used as a preliminary to the preaching of the faith.’ It was Mair who had linked the Christian Spaniards’ authority over the pagan Indians to the nature of a people who were being conquered.# Sepúlveda expanded on these initial theories of the natural authority of the Spanish over the Indians, with a full discussion on the idea of natural slavery. While Sepúlveda never visited the New World, he was able to apply his theoretical training in philosophy to the unfamiliar peoples encountered by the Spanish. From reports and accounts he read, it became increasingly clear to him that the Indians did not demonstrate significant aspects of familiar European culture and civilisation. Sepúlveda suggested that if an observer compared the ‘gifts of prudence, talent, magnanimity, temperance, humanity, and religion’ of the Spaniards with ‘those possessed by these half-men (homunculi)’ then they would ‘barely find the vestiges of humanity.’# Aristotle’s Politica had laid down the definition of those members of the human race who were deemed to be ‘natural slaves.’ According to Aristotle, natural slavery was an obvious concept: ‘that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.’ Moreover, he believed that ‘some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for the latter slavery is both expedient and right.’# This idea clearly commended itself to Sepúlveda. For him it was evident that the Indians were marked out from birth to be slaves; it needed only a short logical step to suggest that the Spanish should rule them. If the Indians were to evolve into worthwhile members of the human race, then they needed Spanish assistance - in other words, Spanish dominion. As Tzvetan Todorov suggests, Sepúlveda was convinced that ‘hierarchy, not equality, is the natural state of human society.’# For Sepúlveda, the Spaniard was superior to the Indian in terms of his capability to reason, and this in itself was enough justification for Spanish rule over the natives: the Spanish have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World and the adjacent islands, who in prudence, skill, virtues, and humanity are as inferior to the Spanish as children to adults, or women to men, for there exists between the two as great a difference as between savage and cruel races and the most merciful, between the most intemperate and the moderate and temperate and, I might even say, between apes and men.# Sepúlveda was keen to emphasise the difference between civil slavery - as a state brought upon captives in war or as punishment for a crime - and the Indians’ natural slavery. Sepúlveda suggested that a jurist saw slavery as an ‘accidental thing, born of superior strength and from the laws of men’ while, for the philosopher, slavery meant ‘inferior intelligence along with inhuman and barbarous customs.’# Sepúlveda was keen to suggest that the Indians were clearly slaves in the second category. He continued to note that the Indians were already subject to their own kings and rulers, and suggested replacing these infidel masters with just Christian rulers who were ‘cultivators of human virtues and the true faith.’# In this way, Sepúlveda was part of the Spanish impulse to establish rule over people, through the spreading of the gospel by any means necessary. The extension of the natural slavery doctrine was the belief in a ‘just war’ to civilise the natives. The Spanish used language that could establish the immorality and barbarity of the Indians, which was apparent in their customs of human sacrifice and even cannibalism. While such practices did occur, to accuse all Indians of lacking any rudiments of humanity or civilisation was to deny them any semblance of equality and protection. According to Cocker, these ‘misrepresentations were a vital element not just during the initial military conquest, when they inspired European combatants with a sense of moral crusade and ensured its widest possible sanction by the home audience, but they were equally important in the ensuing centuries of political and economic exploitation.’# The primitive nature of the Indians justified their forcible subjugation to Spanish rule in the early sixteenth century. Much of Democrates Alter was designed to emphasise the differences between Indians and Spaniards, the one barbarous and even cannibalistic, and the other civilised and spreaders of the true faith. Pagden suggests that while Sepúlveda ‘never denied that some Amerindians possessed notable technical and social skills,’ these were rendered irrelevant by ‘incontrovertible proof of cannibalism and human sacrifice.’# In another indication of the sheer barbarity of the Indians before the arrival of the Christians, Sepúlveda said that the Indians had ‘waged continual and ferocious war upon one another with such fierceness that they did not consider a victory at all worthwhile unless they sated their monstrous hunger with the flesh of their enemies.’# The very suggestion of cannibalism was enough to justify conquest of the Indians, to bring forth the light of Christianity to the heathens who committed the gravest of sins. If the Indians refused to convert and swear allegiance to the Spanish Crown, then the Spaniards could legitimately declare a ‘just war’ against the recalcitrant natives.# The Requerimiento of 1510 was one of the first attempts at implementing a doctrine of ‘just war’ in the New World. The document was read out to natives, in Spanish, suggesting that they should willingly submit to the authority of Spain and the Christian Church, and if they refused, then the responsibility would be theirs for any subsequent bloodshed. Palacios Rubios, author of the Requerimiento, had announced that ‘it is just to vanquish the infidel in order to free Christians from danger’ and that ‘heathen dwelling in Christian kingdoms may be expelled if it was feared that they might act against the Catholic faith.’# Therefore by the time Sepúlveda came to write down his own justifications for war against the Indians, he had considerable precedent. Sepúlveda indicated that Aristotle himself had suggested some wars were ‘just’, and that they included the ‘conquest by arms, if no other way is possible, of those who by natural condition must obey others and refuse to do so.’# As natural slaves, the Indians should obey the Spaniards, and if they tried to resist, then the Spanish were perfectly justified in using force of arms to bring them to heel. In the 1530s, Dominican Francisco de Vitoria wrote treatises that were opposed to war against the natives for war’s sake. He did however consider it just if the natives ‘sought to prevent the Spaniards from living among them in peace, opposed the preaching of the gospel, or tried to return converts to idolatry.’# Many Spaniards believed that if force could be used to protect Christians or keep Indians converted, then it might just as readily be applied to make the Indians into Christians in the first place. While Vitoria denied the legitimacy of forced conversion, he was capable of ‘admitting force readily and perhaps cynically when needed to defend agents of the faith against the aggression of their unwilling beneficiaries.’# Even the conqueror of the Aztecs, Hernán Cortés, was keen to bring the word of God to the people he ‘encountered’. He was not, however, adverse to using ‘native priests’ to tend the freshly built Christian shrines, and often used the names of native deities for Christian saints. Thus he sought to Christianise through the ‘symbolic manipulation of pre-existent pagan customs.’# A more common approach in Spanish thinking, however, proclaimed that ‘If the Indians resisted the preaching of the Gospel, they might lawfully be subdued by force of arms.’ It was a ‘duty of civilising a barbarous people’ that provided valid cause for the Spanish conquest.# Cortés’s actions in Mexico serve to illustrate Sepúlveda’s ideas towards the Indians. The expressed goals of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the view of Cortés and Bernal Díaz was the need to eradicate Indian religions and Christianise the natives. The price the Indians would pay for this enlightenment, however, was rampant disease, destruction, and death. Once Cortés’s initial attempt to seize Tenochtitlan from the Aztecs peaceably ended in miserable failure, he returned with a large army of native allies and a realisation that ‘the conflict was inevitable and had to be without quarter.’# Cortés replaced a policy of conciliation with one of brutal extermination, a bloody example of Sepúlveda’s just war doctrine. Cortés seemed to have resolved that if the Aztecs could not be persuaded to give up authority over their lands and swear unquestioning loyalty to the Spanish crown, then force could be employed to subjugate them. He declared that ‘I also purposed to enslave the Mexicans in order to intimidate them, for there are so many of them that, if I should not punish severely and cruelly, they would never mend their ways.’# Such words were used to justify terror tactics that included the public burning of Aztec officials, and as the fight entered the Aztec capital itself, the systematic levelling of whole areas of the city. The Spaniards demonstrated a willingness to accept any number of Indian casualties in order to achieve their goals. The Indians ceased to represent people worthy of admiration, and became expendable subjects of the Spanish crown. One event that illustrates the more violent effects of Spanish ‘just war’ actions was the massacre at Cholula in 1519. There is some divergence in accounts of the massacre. On one hand was Las Casas, who tried to use the Cholula incident as further evidence of Spanish brutality, while on the other, Bernal Díaz attempted to defend the conquistadores’ actions. For once, it was Las Casas who could not rely on first-hand experience, as he had not been present at Cholula. Spaniards such as Díaz claimed that ‘in return for our coming to treat [the Cholulans] like brothers, and tell them the commands of our lord God and the King, they were planning to kill us and eat our flesh, and had already prepared the pots with salt and peppers and tomatoes.’# The Spaniards claimed they had foiled an Indian plan to ambush them while they slept in Cholula, and instead had sprung a trap of their own, killing perhaps 3000 Cholulans to quell the uprising.# This would probably have been an acceptable use of force in Sepúlveda’s opinion. The Aztec account, however, claimed a Spanish attack provoked by the Spaniards’ Tlaxcalan allies: ‘Suddenly there were knifings, there were sword strokes, there was death. The Cholulans had suspected nothing. They faced the Spaniards without swords or shields. And so by treachery they were slain.’# Moreover, Aztec images such as Fig. 1, show heavily armed Spaniards attacking and mutilating the Cholulans, with the Tlaxcalan allies looking on and directing the massacre. It corroborates the Aztec account of unarmed Indians falling beneath the Spanish weapons. The truth of the encounter probably lies somewhere between these two extremes, as both accounts were written in an effort to absolve the author’s side of responsibility while blaming the other side. The significance of the Cholula massacre lay in its ability to inspire fear in the Indian population still hostile to the Spanish. While there was little chance the entire Aztec Empire would bow down before the Spaniards after such an event, there was much more probability that smaller Indian tribes, already subjects of the Aztecs, might realise the power of the Spanish and assist them in their quest for overthrowing their Aztec rulers. Díaz deplored Las Casas’s claims that the Spanish massacred the Cholulans for ‘no reason at all, or just to amuse ourselves.’ Instead, Díaz claimed that the killings were necessary because ‘if we had not inflicted that punishment, our lives would have been in great danger…And if we had been so unfortunate as to be killed, this New Spain of ours would not have been conquered so rapidly.’# Again it was a case of the greater good being served at the cost of Indian deaths: the replacement of Aztec authority with Spanish dominion, which would help provide salvation for the Indians the of removal of idolatry and replacement of native beliefs with the gospel. As the massacre of Cholula demonstrated, universal salvation sometimes required the sacrifice of Indians who had not yet had the chance to hear the word of God. The massacre at Cholula was a realisation of the theories espoused by Sepúlveda. Cortés saw the Indians as a threat to Spanish plans in the New World, and dealt with them through force, a practical example of Sepúlveda’s just war doctrine. Sepúlveda’s ideas of the natural inferiority of the Indians, as demonstrated by their barbaric customs and lack of European forms of civilisation, were widely held among those in the New World actually conducting the conquest. Despite the fact that Sepúlveda’s treatise was suppressed until the nineteenth century, the conquest did not stop. This reflects what Muldoon characterised as the ‘wide gulf between the way the government at home perceived the progress of the conquest and the way it actually took place on the frontier.’# The interests of the government, clearly, were often incompatible with those of the conquistadores. The government sought peaceful treatment of Indians, while conquistadores like Cortés did not shy away from using violence to achieve their ends. Sepúlveda’s significance, ultimately, does not derive from the way his views shaped the thinking of others. Rather Sepúlveda reflected the prevailing views among Spanish soldiers and colonists who were actually dealing with Indians in the New World. Silvio Zavala suggested that in the Spanish conquest ‘political arguments were employed which open the chapter of modern imperialism.’ For Zavala these arguments included ‘the distinction between superior and inferior beings and the justification of the dominion of civilised peoples over the natives of other lands’ which could ‘legitimately be established by force if necessary.’# These points correspond closely with Sepúlveda’s theories, and implicitly reinforce their historical significance.

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