Bartolome de Las Casas | A Man Before His Time

Christ seeks souls, not property. He who wants a large part of mankind to be such that he may act as a ferocious executioner toward them, press them into slavery, and through them grow rich is a despotic master, not a Christian; a son of Satan, not of God; a plunderer, not a shepherd.

- Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, 1548 -

Typically, we open each podcast with a story or an event witnessed by our subject. But after reading the horrific accounts described in Bartolomé de Las Casas’ works, I cannot bring myself to start this new year with them. The violence and degradation that came to the New World with the Spanish conquerors in the 16th century are, in this historian’s opinion, matched only by the systematic genocide of the 20th century. To do them justice would give you, our wonderful audience, nightmares—though we will address them in our discussion next week to perhaps spare the dreams of younger listeners.

Bartolomé de Las Casas was born in Spain in 1484 into a wealthy merchant family. At the age of eighteen, he emigrated with his father Pedro to the new Spanish colony on Hispaniola (the island that is today divided between the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Pedro de Las Casas obtained a large farm, or hacienda, from the governor along with dozens of slaves. As landowners, the family participated in terrible slave raids across the West Indies to bring thousands of poor souls to the colonies, where they worked as chattel. Bartolomé was disturbed by what he saw, and the horrors set him on a path toward vocal opposition to his government’s inhuman policies toward Native Americans.

Life in the New World

In 1506, Bartolomé returned to Spain to complete his religious instruction and was ordained as a priest a year later. He then re-crossed the Atlantic on an expedition with some Dominican friars and arrived in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Spanish West Indies. The clerics were shocked at the treatment of indigenous peoples on the island, and they decided to take action by denying the sacrament of confession to Spanish slaveowners. The Church responded by refusing confession to the protesting friars, but they pressed forward. This checked Las Casas’ spirits a bit, and he appeared to have had a change of heart for a time. In 1511, one of his comrades, Antonio de Montesinos, delivered a scathing sermon against the encomienda, the Spanish slave-labor system. Las Casas replied in writing supporting the status quo, which probably saved him from being defrocked. Governor Diego Columbus, son of the famous explorer Christopher, complained to the Spanish government about these meddlesome Dominicans, and they were recalled home—but Las Casas remained behind.

Now back in the government’s good graces, Las Casas spent his time hearing confessions, delivering sermons, and running the family hacienda. A new opportunity for financial gain soon presented itself, the conquest of Cuba, and the young cleric joined the expedition. Its leader, Diego Velázquez de Cuellar, welcomed priests into the army to provide spiritual guidance to his troops. The campaign was long and difficult but successful in the end, and Las Casas witnessed several battles and again saw the unspeakable horrors of the Spanish conquest.

One account from Las Casas’ writings brings the true nature of Spain’s actions into sharp relief. Early in the conquest of Cuba, an indigenous leader from Hispaniola called Hatuey had escaped his home to warn the Taíro people of Cuba what to expect once the Spaniards arrived. In his “Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” Las Casas describes a scene between Hatuey and some Taíro leaders shortly after his arrival. The chief showed them piles of gold and precious gems and then said:

Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they fight and kill; for these they persecute us. That is why we have to drive them into the sea. They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they steal our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters. Incapable of matching us in valor, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break.

Hatuey’s call to arms went unheeded by the Taíno, and he was eventually captured and brought before Velázquez for summary judgment. When the Spanish leader pronounced the sentence of death, a priest spoke to Hatuey and urged him to accept Christ in his final moments. Las Casas tells us what happened: “Thinking a little, [Hatuey] asked the religious man if Spaniards went to heaven. The religious man said yes…The chief then said without further thought that he did not want to go there but to hell so as not to be where they were and where he would not see such cruel people.” Las Casas then offered his own commentary, “This is the name and honor that God and our faith have earned.

It took Las Casas about a year to process what he had seen in Cuba. While preparing a sermon in 1514, he read a passage in the Book of Sirach: “The offering of him that sacrificeth of a thing wrongfully gotten is stained, and the mockeries of the unjust are not acceptable. The Lord is only for them that wait upon him in the way of truth and justice.” These words seem to be the turning point in Las Casas’ view of Spain’s actions and the slavery-based encomienda. He began thinking of ways to convince the Spanish king to end the brutality in the New World, and alongside his onetime-opponent, Friar Montesinos, he left for Spain filled with a sense of purpose.

“Protector of the Indians”

Las Casas arrived in Spain in late 1515 and secured an audience with the dying King Ferdinand. The monarch seemed open to Las Casas’ ideas about reform in the Spanish colonies, though his ministers worked behind the scenes to turn public support against the priest—after all, the encomienda was bringing mountains of treasure into Spanish coffers. Ferdinand died before Las Casas could convince him to make any changes, and he turned his attention to the men who now ruled in the name of the not-of-age Prince Charles. The regent, Ximenez Cardinal Cisneros, listened to Las Casas’ stories of abuse and agreed that something had to be done. After nearly a year in Spain, the priest got his wish when Cisneros named him “Protector of the Indians” and sent him and three other officials back to the New World to make whatever changes he thought were necessary.

Of course, the regent’s commission had to compete with facts on the ground. Las Casas was delayed briefly, and Cisneros’ three commissioners arrived in Santo Domingo first. Their announcement of an end to the encomienda led to a massive outcry by landowners across the West Indies. When Las Casas disembarked his ship two weeks later, a furious mob met him at the docks and hurled abuse and rotting fruit at him. His new role as protector meant he would advise the governor of the West Indies on Native affairs, but he could not implement policy on his own. Governor Diego Columbus always sided with the landowners, his friends, and political allies. Las Casas’ hoped to give the indigenous peoples land to farm in their own communities as subjects of the Spanish Crown rather than slaves on the haciendas. The commissioners tasked with helping him instead blocked this reform at every turn, and Las Casas grew angrier by the day. His popularity plummeted across the West Indies, and he began to receive death threats. Eventually, he decided to return to Spain and report personally to Cardinal Cisneros that the commissioners had betrayed him. (Ironically, only weeks after his departure, Governor Columbus adopted his reforms on those officials’ advice.)

Cisneros was too ill to meet with Las Casas, so the priest tried to persuade the young King Charles instead. He met with the new sovereign for the first time in November 1517 at Valladolid and outlined two new ideas to end the oppression of Native Americans. The first was a suggestion to replace indigenous laborers with imported black African slaves—showing that Las Casas did not oppose slavery in principle but merely the abuse that often followed it. King Charles rejected this out of hand as too expensive, so Las Casas then proposed recruiting poor Spanish peasants to emigrate to the West Indies. They would receive a cash advance from the royal treasury and their own land to farm, and they could keep a majority of the profits from their work. The king approved, and Las Casas spent the next year trying to find peasants willing to move to the West Indies. His success was limited by behind-the-scenes machinations among the ruling Spanish elites (who earned plenty of money already from the encomienda and opposed any changes) and news of increasing violence in the colonies. Ultimately, very few peasants joined Las Casas’ scheme, and those who did were either mistreated by the landowners and returned to Spain or else died savage deaths in Native raids.

Reversals and Victory

These were the hardest years of Bartolomé de las Casas’ life, and failures seemed to build on one another. He tried to fund his own colony in modern-day Venezuela (and the idea that Diego Columbus embraced, probably to get the irritating protector out of his hair), only to see it raided by pirates and then destroyed in a Native attack. Whispers in dark corners became public attacks on his character and his piety; he was denounced by fellow clergymen and ministers of the highest rank as deranged and perhaps even demon-possessed. His writings and sermons grew more self-righteous as he fended off personal and theological attacks, but he never abandoned his cause. Las Casas knew he was right, that the abuse of indigenous peoples had to end, and that reform by edict from Spain was the only way.

In 1522, Las Casas withdrew from public life and entered a Dominican monastery in Santo Domingo. He became a friar a year later and spent a decade isolated from events in the wider world. As violence spread across the Spanish colonies, especially during the Spanish conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés, the minor reforms under Columbus gave way to a return of the encomienda. Las Casas spent his days writing letters and working on his masterpiece, History of the Indies until he felt led by God to return to the “rhetorical battlefield.” He spent much of the 1530s traveling across Latin America and to Spain urging his countrymen to attempt conversion without coercion and to improve the physical lives of Natives instead of enslaving them.

Victory finally came in 1542. Las Casas journeyed to Spain to again plead his case to Charles, who was now Holy Roman Emperor and far older and more mature than at their first meeting. Five years earlier, Pope Paul III had written Sublimis Deus, a bull that forbade the enslavement of indigenous peoples anywhere in the world because they were rational human beings deserving of respect, freedom, and property rights. This led to a rising wave of public support for Native rights. Combined with the growing military threats to Spanish power in Europe from France, Great Britain, and the Ottoman Empire, events forced Charles finally to agree to needed economic and social reforms in his colonies. Las Casas presented his “Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies” as a speech before the imperial court, and he insisted once again that the encomienda had to end and Natives be freed. Emperor Charles signed the “New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians” in November 1542, more than a quarter-century almost to the day after Las Casas had first raised the issue with his grandfather, King Ferdinand.

The New Laws banned the enslavement of indigenous Americans and gradually abolished the encomienda—when their current owner died, the haciendas would revert to the Crown instead of passing on to heirs. Unfortunately, neither side was happy with the emperor’s decree. Spanish colonial governors, all of whom profited by the encomienda, simply ignored the laws for several years, and Las Casas was frustrated that maltreatment by landowners would continue for decades until they all died off. He also worried that the emperor might be convinced to alter or abolish that part of the law (which came true only three years later). The New Laws were an important step toward ending state-sanctioned oppression in the Americans, but more was still needed. Sadly, Bartolomé de las Casas would not live to see the final end to Native enslavement, which continued into the 18th century, making him truly a man before his time.

Legacy: The Valladolid Debate

Las Casas became bishop of Chiapas in southern Mexico in 1545 and continued his work against the landowners from this new post. He quickly became embroiled in controversy for refusing sacraments to slaveowners who were defying the New Laws. As before, he never wavered even amidst new threats against his life. After learning that his message was starting to fade in the clamor of politics at the imperial court, he left Chiapas in late 1546 and returned to Spain once again. There, his words and deeds brought about fresh accusations of heresy, but the indefatigable monk persisted.

One of his leading opponents in the question of indigenous rights was Juan Givés de Sepulveda, a doctor of theology who had written widely in support of “just wars” against the heathen Natives of the New World. These works also created serious concerns among those in power, but Las Casas’ opponents championed Sepulveda as their hero against the Protector of the Indians.

In 1550, Las Casas and Sepulveda appeared together before a council of jurists and theologians in Valladolid. They were there to debate the moral questions surrounding the treatment of Native populations. Las Casas’ arguments included his own eyewitness accounts and drew on the pope’s decree in Sublimis Deus that these people were rational beings who should be treated as equals with the colonists. He wanted them evangelized and brought to Christianity peacefully instead of by force. Sepulveda countered by pointing to the barbaric practices of many indigenous societies—idolatry, human sacrifice, and cannibalism—and insisted that Christians had a duty to destroy any group whose customs offended God. Both men used Scripture and secular philosophy in their presentations, often citing the same passages but with wildly different interpretations. In the end, the judges failed to declare a winner, and both Las Casas and Sepulveda claimed victory.

Las Casas spent the rest of his life working to improve a lot of Native Americans from his new home in Valladolid. He lobbied Emperor Charles repeatedly to abolish the encomienda once and for all, but the emperor and the monk both died more than a century before its end in 1712 under King Philip V. Las Casas continued to publish until the end of his life, and most of his works are available in English today and make for fascinating, if heartbreaking, reads.

What are we to make of the events Bartolomé de las Casas witnessed? His work was largely incomplete at the time of his death in Madrid in 1566, and generations passed before true equality became law in Spanish America. Las Casas was a man of contradictions when examined through our modern moral lens, a champion of the oppressed whose family owned slaves and who believed he could end it by importing African slaves to Spanish colonies. He was, perhaps, more similar than he would ever admit to the soldiers who stole, raped, and murdered their way across a continent under the banner of mankind’s Savior. (Though, it must be said that Las Casas repented of his support for African slavery and denounced it repeatedly later in life, while few of the Spanish conquerors ever showed remorse.) He also shared the flawed humanity of many people more familiar to history students, men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who founded a country on the principle that “all men are created equal” while owning other human beings.

If there is one universal truth in history, it is that people are far more complicated than we often think. Modern entertainment likes to create perfect heroes and evil villains in black-and-white molds, but there are a million shades of grey across the pages of history. It is easy to praise men like Las Casas for their high-minded principles or demonize them for their moral compromises or evil words and deeds. And it is right to do so. But as we judge others with the benefits of hindsight and a broader view of morality and history than they possessed, we ought perhaps to remember that none of us is perfect, that we all have our flaws, contradictions, and maybe even sins. We, too, will be judged one day. It might be a good idea to recognize ourselves in people like Bartolomé de las Casas, learn from them, and examine our own hearts and minds for contradictions in our beliefs and our actions. At least, that’s what I’m going to try to do.