The Destruction of the Indies according to de las Casas

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Monday 11 November 2024 is the 540^th birthday of Bartolomé de las Casas (11 November 1484 – 18 July 1566), who was born in Seville on this date in 1484.

De las Casas was a younger contemporary of Machiavelli, the Florentine political philosopher, who was born about fifteen years earlier, and an elder contemporary of Franciscus Patricius, the Croatian skeptic, born 42 years later. The late medieval or early modern world that de las Casas was born into was a world that still retained its medieval appearance, but was changing rapidly. In my episode on Petrarch climbing Mount Ventoux in 1336 I talked about how some have claimed that Petrarch was already a transitional figure to modernity, while on the other hand we can find remnants of the medieval world continued well into the modern era. The medieval and modern worlds overlapped for hundreds of years, and de las Casas lived during this overlap of worlds.  

One of the most obvious signs of change was the Age of Discovery, when Columbus crossed the Atlantic, opening the New World to Europe, Vasco da Gama explored the coast of Africa, and Magellan’s expedition circumnavigated the planet. The Spanish Conquest of the New World was an unprecedented disruption in history. Two populations of humanity, of the Old World and the New, the eastern hemisphere and the western hemisphere, which had not known of each other for more than ten thousand years, were brought together suddenly, and often violently.

William McNeill and Jared Diamond have focused on the epidemiological consequences of the convergence of Old World and New World disease pools, which was catastrophic for the indigenous populations of the Americas. But there were also profound moral consequences for this disruptive convergence of planetary history, and Bartolomé de las Casas was in the thick of it as an early Spanish settler of Hispaniola, arriving in 1502, only ten years after the first voyage of Columbus. He became a Dominican Friar after having first arrived in the New World, and was a tireless advocate of the interests of the indigenous populations of Spanish conquests in the New World. He participated in the famous Valladolid debate (1550-1551), which was an official inquiry sponsored by the Spanish crown to assess the moral status of the natives of the Americas. 

When the Spanish were creating their empire in the New World, the initial actions of the conquistadors were outright military conquest, but the consolidation of political control was legalistic, and even, in a sense, conscientious. The Spanish were significantly more conscious of the moral dimension of their expansion into the Americas than other European peoples engaged in similar expansion. The problem, of course, is that their moral consciousness is not our modern moral consciousness, so it is easy to pass over Spanish moral conscientiousness without recognizing it for what it was. A consequence of this moral conscientiousness was the formal debate was held at Valladolid among the most advanced theologians of the age as to whether the natives of the Americas had souls and whether they could be enslaved or coerced into conversion.

The papal bull Sublimus Dei of 1537 was issued to confirm that the natives were rational beings. The New Laws of 1542 were issued to address the conditions of the encomienda system. We can criticize these efforts from the perspective of our contemporary presuppositions. For example, today we might ask whether the better question than whether indigenous peoples had souls and there was an obligation to covert them to Christianity, would have been whether the Native Americans and their culture possessed intrinsic value, and whether there was some obligation to preserve the intrinsic value of their way of life. But questions like these belong to our present conceptual framework and couldn’t even have been formulated within the conceptual framework of the fifteenth century.

Nevertheless, while distinctively modern concepts like intrinsic value hadn’t yet been formulated, there are perennial moral concepts present in the fifteenth century no less than in our time, to which people at the time responded. De las Casas was among those who adopted both specifically Christian concepts as well as perennial moral concepts in a scathing critique of Spanish actions in the New World. He wrote much, but is best known for his short work A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias), which was written in 1542 and published in 1552. The book was instrumental in bringing to light the abuses of the Spanish settlers in the new world and the encomienda system, in which indigenous peoples were forced to labor for Spanish masters on their estates.

One could also say that de las Casas was instrumental in founding the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty in the New World, a legend which was assiduously promoted by Protestants who were often no better in their treatment of indigenous peoples. The idea of a “Black Legend” is a historical construction of some interest. The idea was introduced to explain some of the stories of atrocities of the Spanish in Spanish America, some of which atrocity stories were known to be fabrications by the northern European Protestant powers engaged in the settlement of North America, who had an interest in demonstrating the unique cruelty and barbarity of Spanish rule in Spanish America.

Constructing Black Legends continues in our own day, with manufactured atrocities spread by social media. Mark Twain famously said that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. At the same time, there are authentic atrocities that do occur, and these appear incredible to those who aren’t living through the events, and they become the object of skepticism precisely because of false stories of atrocities that have been circulated. For the historian, this is a sticky wicket, because you need to give full due to the sufferings of those who have experienced atrocities, while not being so gullible as to fall for false atrocities spread for propagandistic reasons. Over the distance of hundreds of years it can be enormously difficult to sort out what happened and what the appropriate context should be for the interpretation of the events. We’ve seen in our own time that even questioning the validity of a claimed atrocity can be taken as an affront, and this isn’t an atmosphere in which dispassionate scholarship is going to be able to do its work. So the problems that de las Casas and others were trying to deal with weren’t new, and they’re with us still. There are no definitive answers to the moral dilemmas imposed on historians as a result of their narration of disputed and divisive events.   

Noted Latin American scholar Lewis Hanke wrote a book on las Casas’ work as an historian, Bartolomé de las Casas, historian; an essay in Spanish historiography, as well as another work on las Casas, Bartolome de Las Casas: An Interpretation of his Life and Writings. In the former book, Hanke recounts las Casas’ early interest in the New World:

“Las Casas was a youth of eighteen when Columbus first set sail to the west, precisely the age to be thrilled by the freshness and the greatness of the enterprise, and he seems to have followed the unfolding of the drama with the ubiquitousness of a reporter. He was present in Seville when Columbus returned in triumph from his first voyage, with seven Indians, brightly beplumed parrots, Indian masks cleverly contrived from fishbones, and ‘a large quantity of gold, including samples of finely wrought work.’ Las Casas also saw the ecclesiastical ornaments presented by Queen Isabella for the new churches in the Indies, just before Columbus left on his second voyage. When this expedition returned to Seville, Las Casas was there then, too, and saw the India, one of the first two ships built in America by Columbus after storms had destroyed his Spanish vessels. And he also saw Columbus at that time ‘dressed in a brown habit similar to that of a Franciscan, for he was very devout’.”

Not only was las Casas interested in the Americas early on, but he lived longer than most of the  Spanish who traveled to the New World, and he brought the perspective of decades of experience to his historical writings. For all the admiration that Hanke expresses for las Casas’ work as an historian, Hanke called A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies “his propaganda tract, not really a history at all.” In this book, de las Casas resembles Procopius, who is remembered not for his official histories, but for his scandalous Secret History. But it is the Brief Account that has been most influential, and most read of the works of de las Casas. Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean are presented by las Casas as natural Christians who require only minimal religious instruction to be brought within the fold of the Church:

“The natives tractable, and capable of Morality or Goodness, very apt to receive the instill’d principles of Catholick Religion; nor are they averse to Civility and good Manners, being not so much discompos’d by variety of Obstructions, as the rest of Mankind; insomuch, that having suckt in (if I may so express myself) the very first Rudiments of the Christian Faith, they are so transported with Zeal and Furvor in the exercise of Ecclesiastical Sacraments, and Divine Service, that the very Religioso’s themselves, stand in need of the greatest and most signal patience to undergo such extream Transports. And to conclude, I myself have heard the Spaniards themselves (who dare not assume the Confidence to deny the good Nature praedominant in them) declare, that there was nothing wanting in them for the acquisition of Eternal Beatitude, but the sole Knowledge and Understanding of the Deity.”

The perspective of de las Casas, then, is not the intrinsic value of their way of life, or any kind of implicit title to the lands they occupied, but their readiness to adopt Christianity, for which de las Casas believed they had a natural predisposition to accept. When the papacy issued the bull Sublimus Dei of 1537 that native peoples were rational beings, and the Spanish had a religious obligation to win their souls for the church, de las Casas was in agreement with the hierarchy of the church and its official pronouncements. Where he disagreed with officialdom was with the means and methods of bringing rational beings into the church. That souls should be saved he did not question—this was the basis of his work—but how souls should be saved was the real problem. It was the Spanish, for de las Casas, who failed to measure up to their faith. De las Casas portrayed the predations on the native peoples by the Spaniads as being like wild animals:

“The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention'd, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher’d and harass’d with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred. Nay the Isle of Cuba, which extends as far, as Valledolid in Spain is distant from Rome, lies now uncultivated, like a Desert, and intomb’d in its own Ruins.”

And he concludes his tract implicitly contrasting the falseness of the Spanish to the innocent ingenuousness of the indigenous people:

“The Spaniards first set Sail to America, not for the Honour of God, or as Persons moved and merited thereunto by servent Zeal to the True Faith, nor to promote the Salvation of their Neighbours, nor to serve the King, as they falsely boast and pretend to do, but in truth, only stimulated and goaded on by insatiable Avarice and Ambition, that they might for ever Domineer, Command, and Tyrannize over the West- Indians, whose Kingdoms they hoped to divide and distribute among themselves. Which to deal candidly in no more or less intentionally, than by all these indirect wayes to disappoint and expel the Kings of Castile out of those Dominions and Territories, that they themselves having usurped the Supreme and Regal Empire, might first challenge it as their Right, and then possess and enjoy it.”

These themes of de las Casas are still with us today in discussions of human rights, indigenous rights, colonialism, paternalism, conversion, and historical objectivity.

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