Bartolome de las casas biography essays
Home / Historical Figures / Bartolome de las casas biography essays
Following an epiphany in 1514, Las Casas fought the Spanish control of the Indies for the rest of his life, writing vividly about the brutality of the Spanish conquistadors. The foundation asks that the essays and any quotations be properly attributed to our sponsorship. He even persuaded the Viceroy to convoke a separate meeting of friars who denounced Indian slavery.
Armed with these forceful resolutions, Bishop Las Casas prepared for his final return trip to Spain. He appointed a Vicar General for his diocese with a select group of friars to hear confessions according to the twelve rules that he sent under strictest secrecy in his Avisos y Reglas Para Confesores. Las Casas’ Confesionario was designed to enforce all the New Laws. The confessor was to deny absolution to anyone who profited from Indian life and land. Moreover, since these rules asserted the illegality of the encomienda system and the conquest – a defiance of royal authority, because it was the king who had granted them -- he was questioning royal authority.
The essay series is available for free distribution. He obtained a grant to try his peaceful settlement idea in the early 1520’s on the north coast of South America at Cumaná. This colony would have a minimum of force and a maximum of persuasion to allow the Spaniards to live in fruitful peace with the Indians. The project failed because of the greed for slaving in the party assembled.
He spent his initial years studying theology and law, after which he was appointed prior of an out-post on the north coast of Dominican Republic, Puerto de Plata, where he founded a new community. Prevented from returning to Spain by his Dominican superiors, he resumed his fight for the indigenous by preaching thunderously against the abuses of the slave trade. Accused of withholding deathbed viaticum from an encomendero, he was ordered back to Santo Domingo, and officially silenced by government order for two years. During this time he also began gathering materials for his Historia General de las Indias, one of the most valuable sources for the early discovery and colonization period, and from which he later took the Apologética Historia, a landmark in anthropology. About the year 1530 he began writing a Latin treatise, De Unico Vocationis Modo Omnium Gentium ad Veram Religionem, which became one of the most significant missionary tracts in the history of the Church.
This missionary effort proved very successful and is a model of his evangelization ideas in practice.
In 1540 Las Casas returned to Spain and joined other churchmen and laymen to lobby Charles V for protection for the Amerindians. Las Casas and other pro-Indian comrades successfully countered that the Indian holders did not have the money and any offer they made would be countered with a better one. Philip II, believing there were still hidden Inca treasures to be found to pay the counter offer agreed to the scheme. Yet, the whole affair of the offer and counter-offer came to nothing because the royal commission sent to investigate ended-up in such a state of corruption and fraud that the king halted it.
Inferring Las Casas’ thinking about this plan from his last two great written works, Los Tesoros del Perú and Tratado de las Doce Dudas, one is able to understand the suppositions of his position.
In his early writings, he advocated the use of Africanslavesinstead of Natives in the West-Indian colonies; consequently, criticisms have been leveled at him as beingpartlyresponsible for the beginning of the Transatlanticslave trade. The Spain on which he closed his aged eyes was a different country from that on which he had first opened them; the colonial development in America, the Reformation in Germany, the rise of England – all these and a hundred events of minor but far-reaching importance had changed the face of the world. Bartolomé de las Casas had outlived his contemporaries; he had enjoyed the confidence and respect of sovereigns: Ferdinand of Aragon, Charles V and Philip II, all of whom received his fearless admonitions. He addressed bishops, cardinals and popes, meeting personally with Julius II early in his life, corresponding with others, most notable Paul III, (who promulgated the famous Sublimus Deus).
In 1522, he attempted to launch a new kind of peacefulcolonialism on the coast of Venezuela, but this venturefailedcausing Las Casas to enter the DominicanOrder and become a friar, leaving the publicscene for a decade. He became the firstresidentBishop of Chiapas, and the firstofficiallyappointed "Protector of the Indians". Finally, in his last words, he professed that he had kept faith, during fifty years of untiring labor, with the charge that God had laid upon him to plead for the restoration of the Indians to their original lands, liberty and freedom.
Who was Bartolomé de Las Casas?
Bartolomé de las Casas, O.P., was a 16th-century Spanish historian, socialreformer and Dominican friar.
He would never see the New World again and later resigned his bishopric. By this time in his life, it seems that he understood that his true place was at court, and that there he alone could serve as the much-needed “universal procurator” of his beloved Indians. The beleaguered Bishop probably did not foresee that he would first have to serve as procurator in his own cause.
Back in Spain in 1547, Las Casas encountered accusations concerning his now public Confesionario. His defense against charges of high treason from his detractors, for his confessors manual, reached its climax when he debated the humanist Juan Ginés Sepúlveda. In his counterattack Las Casas challenged Sepúlveda’s Democrates Secundus, a tract that justified waging war in the process of the conquest in order to “christianize” the peoples of the Americas. Las Casas debated Sepúlveda at the Junta de Valladolid of 1550-1551 where the judges of the exchange were a panel of fourteen distinguished religious and laity, of whom four were fellow Dominicans. Sepúlveda appeared the first day and gave a three-hour summary of the doctrine of his Democrates Secundus to the Junta. For the next five days, Las Casas offered his rebuttal, Argumentum Apologiae, countering that, even if some of the Indians were guilty of human sacrifice and cannibalism, it could be explained as a rational step in the development of religious thought.[38] Although no verdict was handed down, the royal cédulas of the Council of the Indies continued to apply the thesis of Las Casas.[39] Even so, as a result of Las Casas’ refutation of his opponent, he was successful not only in stopping the publication of Sepúlveda’s work, but also in making a stronger case than ever for his peaceful and just means of evangelization. Following this time of debate, he rewrote and published the previously confiscated Confesionario along with other missionary tracks and had them distributed in the Americas.
During this final stage of his life; while still very active at court he continued adding to his impressive list of written works, an essential part of his advocacy on behalf of the Indians. He resumed labor on his monumental Historia de las Indias, something he worked on until the end of his life; he also published in 1552 what is perhaps the most widely read and known of his works, the Brevíssma Relación de la Destruición de las Indias. Enjoying remarkable freedom to criticize the crown and its policies, even though alienated from and the object of hostility of many his countrymen, he was never silenced. There were some Spaniards in America who had wanted him retired to a monastery, and some had even expressed regret that Las Casas had not been lost by shipwreck on his way to Chiapa. Even so, the crown continued to hear his advice, and he enjoyed a reputation for honesty and as one having influence at Court.
His dedication, experience and knowledge of the New World, and his contacts were unparalleled. And at the age of eighty he would need them all in the last great battle of his career against the Peruvian Indian holders who wanted to buy Indians in perpetuity from the crown for eight million gold ducats. The debt-ridden Spanish crown of Philip II saw the offer as too good to refuse.
Later in life, he retractedthoseearlyviews as he came to see all forms of slavery as equally wrong. In 1515, he reformed his views, gave up his Indianslaves and encomienda, and advocated, before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on behalf of rights for the natives. In the depths of discouragement, he left his work and entered the Dominican Order on the Island of Hispaniola in 1522 at the age of 36.
Scholars call his entrance into the Dominican Order the second conversion of Las Casas.
He wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542, a shocking catalogue of mass slaughter, torture and slavery, which showed that the evangelizing vision of Columbus had descended under later conquistadors into genocide. Dedicated to Philip II to alert the Castilian Crown to these atrocities and demand that the Indians be entitled to the basic rights of humankind, this passionate work of documentary vividness outraged Europe and contributed to the idea of the Spanish 'Black Legend' that would last for centuries.
Las Casas wanted to remove them from individual encomiendas and place them in self-sustaining villages, known as the corregimientos or crown free towns. However Cisneros’ tenure as regent was cut short, he died November of 1517. After the deaths of King Ferdinand and Cardinal Cisneros, Las Casas sought the support of the new Flemish-born Spanish king, Charles -- Charles I (Spain, 1516-1556) = Charles V (Holy Roman emperor, 1519-1558) -- , the grandson of the Catholic monarchs.
With letters from the Flemish Franciscans in Hispaniola, Las Casas won speedy approval from Charles for another of his early schemes, colonization by farmers instead of soldiers.
This effort ranked as the supreme achievement of his career. But even before the New Laws were promulgated, his enemies moved to get him away from court, insisting that it was his duty to accept a bishopric and help enforce the new ordinances. Las Casas resisted this proposal, especially the wealthiest see of Cuzco, but finally he accepted the impoverished diocese of Chiapa – it contained his own tierra de guerra experiment, now called the tierra de vera paz. His friends impressed on him that, by accepting the miter, he would automatically be free from the vow of obedience and could use the ecclesiastical arm to enforce the New Laws.
His nearly forty years of experience in the Americas made him an informative and convincing source for the king to trust.
Near the very end of his life, he sent a letter to the new Pope Pius V, begging him to condemn conquest as a means of conversion.