Bartolomé de las Casas

• 1. Introduction

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  Bartolomé de las Casas stood on the shores of Hispaniola in 1502 as a slave owner and land holder, his encomienda rich with gold and Indigenous labor. He would spend the next six decades trying to undo everything that moment represented. Along the way he became the first officially appointed Protector of the Indians, a bishop who denied absolution to encomenderos on their deathbeds, and a writer whose most famous book helped trigger riots across the Americas. What turned a willing participant in colonial extraction into the man the Spanish nationalist historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries would call a paranoic, a monomaniac, and a traitor? And what did he actually accomplish in fifty years of fighting?

• 2. A Colonist's Awakening

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  In 1513, Las Casas rode with Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar and Pánfilo de Narváez through Cuba as a chaplain, witnessing campaigns at Bayamo and Camagüey and the massacre of the Taíno chief Hatuey. He later wrote, "I saw here cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see." Yet he did not immediately walk away. He and his friend Pedro de la Rentería were awarded a joint encomienda on the Arimao River near Cienfuegos, one that was rich in both gold and slaves. For the next few years he lived as colonist and ordained priest simultaneously, a division that could not hold.

  In 1514, while preparing a Pentecost sermon, Las Casas was reading a passage in the book Ecclesiasticus, specifically chapter 34, verses 18 through 22, and the meaning of those lines stopped him cold. He concluded that every action Spain had taken in the New World had been illegal and constituted a grave injustice. He gave up his slaves and his encomienda and began urging other colonists to do the same. When local resistance met his preaching, he understood that the fight would have to be carried to Spain itself. In September 1515, aided by Pedro de Córdoba and accompanied by Antonio de Montesinos, he sailed for Seville.

• 3. The King, the Regents, and the Slave Proposal

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  King Ferdinand lay ill in Plasencia in the winter of 1515, but Las Casas managed to obtain a letter of introduction from the Archbishop of Seville, Diego de Deza. On Christmas Eve of that year Las Casas spoke directly with the monarch, who agreed to hear more at a later date. That date never came; Ferdinand died on the 25th of January 1516. Power passed to Cardinal Ximenez Cisneros and Adrian of Utrecht as regents for the young Prince Charles.

  On his way to meet Charles in Flanders, Las Casas stopped in Madrid and delivered to the regents his "Memorial de Remedios para Las Indias" of 1516. That document contained a proposal that would haunt him for the rest of his life: importing enslaved Africans to relieve the suffering of the Indigenous population. Las Casas made this suggestion believing, as he wrote later, that the Portuguese were not carrying out brutal and unjust wars in Africa; he assumed that African enslavement met the legal standard of a Just War. He did not yet consider slavery itself the problem. He would eventually retract this position entirely, calling both forms of slavery equally wrong and including a direct apology in his History of the Indies: "I soon repented and judged myself guilty of ignorance. I came to realize that black slavery was as unjust as Indian slavery."

  Worried by Las Casas's account of conditions in the Indies, Cardinal Cisneros dispatched three Hieronymite monks, Luis de Figueroa, Bernardino de Manzanedo, and Alonso de Santo Domingo, as commissioners. Las Casas himself was granted the official title of Protector of the Indians and a yearly salary of one hundred pesos. It was a title with almost no practical leverage against the entrenched encomenderos who surrounded the commissioners from the moment they arrived.

• 4. Venezuela and the Dominican Turn

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  After the Hieronymite commissioners proved unwilling or unable to act, Las Casas pursued a more direct experiment. He petitioned for a land grant on the northern coast of Venezuela at Cumaná, where a small Franciscan monastery and a Dominican one at Chiribichi already stood, both being harassed by Spanish slave raiders operating from the nearby island of Cubagua. Las Casas's concession was finally granted in 1520, though stripped of the gold and pearl extraction rights that might have attracted investors.

  He committed himself to producing fifteen thousand ducats of annual revenue, rising to sixty thousand after ten years, and to building three Christian towns of at least forty settlers each. Finding fifty men willing to invest two hundred ducats each and three years of unpaid labor proved impossible. He left in November 1520 with a small group of peasants, borrowing the funds from his brother-in-law. Arriving in Puerto Rico in January 1521, he learned that the Dominican convent at Chiribichi had been sacked, that a punitive expedition under Gonzalo de Ocampo was already raiding his intended territory, and that the peasants he had brought had deserted. Early in 1522 the Native Caribs burned the Cumaná settlement to the ground and killed four of his men. Rumours spread that Las Casas himself was among the dead.

  Devastated, he entered the Dominican monastery of Santa Cruz in Santo Domingo as a novice in 1522 and took holy vows as a friar in 1523. He withdrew from public life for roughly a decade, overseeing the construction of a monastery in Puerto Plata, studying Thomist philosophy, and beginning work in 1527 on his History of the Indies. The retreat was not permanent. In 1537, he and a group of friars entered the region of Guatemala called Tuzulutlan, "The Land of War," where military conquest had failed. Through a strategy of teaching Christian songs to merchant Indian Christians who then entered the territory, Las Casas converted several Native chiefs, including those of Atitlán and Chichicastenango, and the region was renamed Verapaz, "True Peace."

• 5. The New Laws

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  When Las Casas returned to Spain in 1540, the encomienda had been legally abolished in 1523 and reinstated in 1526; a general ordinance against slavery had been reversed by the Crown in 1530. He pressed Charles V, now Holy Roman Emperor, to act again. The hearings that would lead to the New Laws began in 1542, and what Las Casas presented to the council, which included Cardinal García de Loaysa and the Count of Osorno, was a narrative of atrocities that he would publish ten years later as A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

  On the 20th of November 1542, Charles signed the New Laws. They abolished the encomienda, prohibited the use of Indians as carriers except where no other transport was available, banned the taking of new Indian slaves, and instituted a gradual reversion of existing encomiendas to the Crown upon the death of each holder. The few surviving Indigenous inhabitants of Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica were exempted from tribute entirely. The reaction in the Americas was immediate and violent: riots broke out, threats were made against Las Casas's life, and the Viceroy of New Spain, himself an encomendero, refused to implement the laws and sent a delegation to Spain to argue against them. The New Laws were repealed on the 20th of October 1545, and shots were fired at Las Casas by angry colonists. He departed his diocese of Chiapas, never to return.

  Before leaving the Americas for the last time, Las Casas was consecrated Bishop of Chiapas on the 30th of March 1544, in the Dominican Church of San Pablo. He had issued a pastoral letter on the 20th of March 1545 refusing absolution to slave owners and encomenderos even on their deathbeds, unless they had freed all their slaves and restored all seized property. Among the landowners who fell under his authority was the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo.

• 6. The Valladolid Debate

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  Back in Spain, Las Casas faced accusations that his Confesionario, with its twelve rules, amounted to a denial of the legitimacy of Spanish colonial rule. The Crown in 1548 decreed that all copies be burned. His Franciscan adversary Motolinia complied and filed a report. Las Casas responded by writing two treatises on what he called the "Just Title," arguing that the only lawful Spanish claim over New World territories rested on peaceful proselytizing, not military conquest.

  The formal confrontation came in the Valladolid debate of 1550-51. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, whose book Democrates Alter had been rejected for publication by the theologians of both Salamanca and Alcalá for containing unsound doctrine, argued that some Native peoples were incapable of self-governance, that their low level of civilization required Spanish masters, and that only Spanish power could protect weak Indians from stronger ones. Las Casas countered that the scriptures did not support general war against non-Christians; that the Indians possessed fully functional political and social structures; that peaceful mission was the sole legitimate means of conversion; and that Spanish rule was itself the greatest threat to the weak.

  The judge Fray Domingo de Soto summarised the arguments. The council deliberated for months and reached no conclusive verdict; both sides claimed victory. According to Lewis Hanke, Sepúlveda became the hero of the conquistadors, but his works were never published again in Spain during his lifetime. The Peruvian civil war between the conquistadors, led by Gonzalo Pizarro, who defeated and executed Viceroy Blasco Núñez Vela in 1546, illustrated how far the empire was from resolving the questions the debate had tried to settle.

• 7. The Books and Their Consequences

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  A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies was written in 1542, sent to the then-Prince Philip II, and published in Seville in 1552. Las Casas described it as motivated in part by fear that Spain would face divine punishment. The account was among the first by a Spanish colonial writer to depict the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples systematically, and it was largely responsible for the adoption of the New Laws. Its first translation appeared in Dutch in 1578, during the religious persecution of Dutch Protestants by the Spanish crown; French and English editions followed in 1578 and 1583 respectively, and a German edition appeared in 1599. The book was put to use as political ammunition by groups hostile to Spain for reasons of religion and imperial rivalry. In Spain, the first edition after Las Casas's death was published in Barcelona during the Catalan Revolt of 1646; it was banned by the Aragonese inquisition in 1659.

  The artist Theodore de Bry later depicted Las Casas's descriptions in copper plate engravings, which became primary vehicles for what historians call the Black Legend, the tradition of characterizing the Spanish empire as uniquely brutal. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Spanish nationalist historians such as Menéndez y Pelayo and Menéndez Pidal constructed what they called a White Legend in response, calling Las Casas a paranoic, a monomaniac, and a traitor.

  His Apologetic History of the Indies, originally conceived as a chapter of a larger work, became a comparative ethnography arguing that Indigenous peoples of the Americas were as civilized as the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, and more civilized than some European peoples. Scholars have characterized it as an early contribution to the discipline of anthropology. His History of the Indies, begun in 1527 and finished in its final form in 1561, was signed over to the College of San Gregorio with a stipulation that it not be published for forty years; it was not actually published for 314 years, appearing in 1875. It also preserved Las Casas's copy of Columbus's 1492 diary from his voyage to the Bahamas, the original of which was subsequently lost.

• 8. Legacy and Controversy

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  Bartolomé de Las Casas died in Madrid on the 18th of July 1566. In the years immediately following his death, his ideas became taboo in Spain. The accounts of his enemies, Lopez de Gómara and Oviedo, circulated widely across Europe while Las Casas was reframed as a dangerous extremist.

  The most persistent criticism in subsequent centuries focused on his early suggestion to substitute African for Indigenous labor. The abolitionist David Walker called him a wretch motivated by greed alone. John Fiske, writing in 1900, denied that Las Casas's suggestions materially affected the development of the slave trade. Sylvia Wynter argued the opposite: that Las Casas's 1516 Memorial was the direct cause of Charles V granting permission in 1518 to transport the first four thousand enslaved Africans to Jamaica. The debate among historians has not been resolved.

  Daniel Castro, in his 2007 book Another Face of Empire, argued that Las Casas was more a politician than a humanitarian and that his liberation schemes were always paired with plans to make colonial resource extraction more efficient. He further argued that Las Casas never recognized that replacing Indigenous religion with Christianity was itself a form of colonialism. Others found Castro's reading anachronistic.

  Modern historians tend to discard Las Casas's specific population figures while accepting his general picture of a violent conquest. Demographic studies of colonial Mexico by Sherburne F. Cook suggested population declines of between 80 and 90 percent in the first years of conquest, driven primarily by European disease but with violence as a contributing factor. The broader legal record supports Las Casas's account: the Dominican friars Antonio de Montesinos and Pedro de Córdoba had documented extensive violence from the very first decade of colonization, and perpetrators themselves sometimes reported massacres in full.

  In 1848, Ciudad de San Cristóbal, the capital of the Mexican state of Chiapas, was renamed San Cristóbal de Las Casas in honor of its first bishop. The Dominicans introduced his cause for beatification in the Catholic Church in 1976, and the formal process began in 2002. The Centro Fray Bartolomé de las Casas de Derechos Humanos, an ecumenical human rights institute, was established in San Cristóbal de las Casas in 1989 by Bishop Samuel Ruiz. Las Casas also appears on the Guatemalan quetzal one centavo coin, in Alta Verapaz, the territory his missionaries once renamed from "The Land of War" to "True Peace."