Bartolomé de Las Casas

Spanish historian and explorer

• Born: August 1, 1474
• Birthplace: Seville, Castile (now in Spain)
• Died: July 17, 1566
• Place of death: Madrid, Spain

Las Casas wrote a history of the early Spanish conquests in the New World and participated in the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean. Concerned with the plight of the Caribbean Indians, he spent more than fifty years attempting to free them from their European oppressors, working to destroy the encomienda system and finding peaceful ways of converting Indians to Christianity.

Early Life

Bartolomé de Las Casas (bahr-toh-loh-MAY day lahs KAHS-ahs) was born into the family of a not very successful merchant, Pedro de Las Casas, who sailed with Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. Las Casas had witnessed the triumph of Columbus’s return to Seville from his first voyage in March, 1493. He saw service in the militia against Moors in the Granada Rebellion (1497), studied Latin and theology at the cathedral academy in Seville, and became a lay teacher of Christian doctrine.

In 1502, Las Casas accompanied Nicolás de Ovando, the designated governor, to Española. There, he participated in putting down Caribbean Indian uprisings, for which he was rewarded with a royal grant of lands and Indians (encomienda). He was successful as a planter, and he began to evangelize the Indians in his role as lay catechist. In 1506, he gave up his lands, going to Rome, where he took vows in the Order of Preachers (Dominicans). On his return to Española, in 1512, he was ordained a priest probably the first in the Americas to receive Holy Orders. He was made chaplain with the forces that were engaged in the colonization of Cuba (begun in 1511 by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, although Las Casas was there only in the last year, 1513), for which he again received a grant of Indians and lands.

Life’s Work

Perhaps it was his experiences and observations in the Cuban colonization (including the massacre of Caonao) and other military expeditions in Española, or the harsh realities of treatment of the Caribbean Indians in the mining and agricultural projects throughout the Spanish Antilles, where the number of indigenous was rapidly being depleted, or perhaps it was his position as priest and land grantee that led Las Casas to begin, at age forty, what would become his life’s work. He attributed his change of lifestyle to his meditations on chapter 34 of Ecclesiastes. In any case, he gave his encomienda holdings to Diego Columbus and began to preach against the oppression of the Indians, calling for an end to the system of expropriating their land and enslaving them. He returned to Spain to lobby on behalf of the Indians in 1515. The cardinal archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros , supported him in this crusade, naming him priest-procurator of the Indies and appointing him to a commission to investigate the status of the Indians (1516).

Las Casas developed a plan for peaceful colonization and returned to Spain in July, 1517, to recruit farmers and obtain land for the experiment. The Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain Charles V gave him permission to colonize an estate in Curmána, Venezuela (1510-1521). He later retracted a suggestion that slaves be imported for labor from West Africa. With an expression of shame, he regretted that he came so late to the realization that Africans had the same human rights as American Indians. The settlement was a failure, and Las Casas retired from public life to the Dominican monastery at Santo Domingo. It was during this time that he wrote the first draft of Historia de las Indias (wr. 1527-1561, pb. 1875-1876; partial translation, History of the Indies , 1971).

Las Casas was active in defense of the Indians in Mexico (1532) and in Nicaragua (1535-1536). During these years, he also visited and worked in defense of the Indians in Peru, Puerto Rico, and other settlements in the Spanish New World colonies. After Pope Paul III proclaimed the Indians’ rationality and equality with other men to receive instructions and the faith (June 2, 1537), Las Casas renewed his activity to colonize and Christianize the Indians peacefully. His most notable success was in Guatemala.

In 1539, Las Casas returned to Spain. He continued his writings in defense of the Indians, including Brevísima relación de la destruyción de las Indias (1552; The Tears of the Indians, 1656; also known as A Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies ). In this treatise, he placed the desire for gold and material wealth at the center of motivation for all the injustice toward the Indians. Las Casas attributed the continued injustice to the greed of those in power. Because of this greed, those in power did not support just laws; rather, they opposed them in order to continue the system and institutions that would further their material gain.

Las Casas also began his struggle for the passage of the New Laws (1542 and 1543). These laws reorganized the Council of the Indies and prohibited the oppression of, exploitation of, and cruelty toward the Indians, against which Las Casas had long crusaded. These laws also prohibited the continuation of slavery for Indians of the second generation. Las Casas found support for his position in Spain at Court, in the Church, and in the Council of the Indies. In the colonies, however, the New Laws were received with great opposition and were largely unenforced. They were revoked in part, but later the key elements were reinstated.

Las Casas was named bishop of Chiapas in Guatemala and left Spain in July, 1544, with forty-four Dominicans to establish missions there for the peaceful Christianization of the Indians. He arrived in Guatemala after many interim stops in March, 1545. He proceeded with zeal rather than with practicality to enforce the New Laws, which led to protests and demonstrations against him in the colony. He was forced to return to Spain in 1547.

At the age of seventy-five, Las Casas renounced his bishopric and continued his life of tireless lobbying and protest in the cause of the Indians. He defended the equality and dignity of the Indians against all who were bent on their enslavement and oppression. In 1550 at Valladolid, he engaged in public debate with the Jesuit Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who had maintained that the Indians were inferior to the Spaniards. The controversy, which continued through the next year, has been debated anew through the centuries since. Las Casas organized missions to be staffed by learned and religious mendicants, who would Christianize and educate the Indians.

Las Casas continued to write. He also came to be an influential adviser to the Council of the Indies and at court on the many problems related to the colonies of the New World. He was a frequent witness at trials to free Indians, and much of his writing was directed to this end. He died in his early nineties in the Dominican convent of Nuestra Señora de Atocha in Madrid. The king of Spain, Phillip II, had all the works of Las Casas (published and unpublished) collected and preserved.

Significance

Las Casas lived in the transitional period from the medieval to the modern age. He was traditional in his adherence to doctrine. His writings were based on the Gospel and teachings of the Church. Yet, he had an understanding of and sensitivity to the changing world about him. He was a Christian intellectual who became a prophet in the political and economic climate of his times; his society, however, was not ready and not eager to hear his message.

He anticipated many of the principles enunciated in the Charter of the United Nations (1945) and proclaimed by Vatican Council II (1963). His preaching, his planning, his colonial enterprises, and his writings were concerned with reforming the colonial practices of his day, with preaching the Gospel by peaceful persuasion, with abhorrence of violence and oppression, and with individual liberty and self-determination as the right of all peoples. He meant his History of the Indies to be a call for social and political change. He clearly inveighed against the injustice and immorality of the colonial system and institutions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Through his writings, he inspired the nineteenth century revolutionary, Simón Bolívar, and the leaders of the Mexican Revolution in which the independence of that people was won from Spain.

Las Casas’s most important writings among the vast body of works he produced were Del único modo (wr. 1539, pb. 1942), which was on the theory of evangelization, Apologética historia de las Indias (wr. 1527-1560, pb. 1909), which was an analysis of the Indians’ abilities, and his two histories of the Indies. The last of these, according to his instructions, was not to be published until forty years after his death, although the prologue was published in 1562. Nevertheless, a manuscript was circulated even before the publication by the Academy of Madrid, 1875-1876.

His writings, while they exaggerate the plight of the Indians and the cruelty of the Europeans, have fueled the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty in the New World promulgated by Spain’s enemies and later taken up by nationalists and anticolonialists. His teachings concerning the equality of all peoples of the earth the right of all people to determine their own destiny and to have their basic needs satisfied were his most important legacy and have caused his writings to be debated throughout the world for more than four hundred years.

Bibliography

Freide, Juan, and Benjamin Keen, eds. Bartolomé de Las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971. A series of analytical essays on the life and ideology of Las Casas, on his activities and his impact on the Americas and history, and on his writings. The essays are written by authors of different nationalities and ideologies, thus bringing a variety of perspectives to bear on their subject. The text vindicates Las Casas and his ideals in the course that history has taken since his death.

González-Casanovas, Roberto J. Imperial Histories from Alfonso X to Inca Garcilaso: Revisionist Myths of Reconquest and Conquest. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1997. Examines the political and ideological functions of official historiographies of Spanish conquest in the Americas and reconquest in Iberia. Reads Las Casas’s critiques of colonialism alongside the pro-colonial writings of his contemporaries. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Hanke, Lewis. Bartolomé de Las Casas: An Interpretation of His Life and Writings. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959. Hanke’s scholarly study is a sound biography of the life of Las Casas.

Helps, Arthur. The Life of Las Casas: The Apostle of the Indies. New York: Gordon Press, 1976. A standard biography of Las Casas.

Hodgkins, Christopher. Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Study of the ways in which Protestantism became a major discourse for both justifying and condemning the early modern English colonial project. Includes a study of English representations of Spanish conquistadores and the relationship between Las Casas’s descriptions of Spanish conquest and Milton’s portrayals of satanic Spaniards. Bibliographic references and index.

Keen, Benjamin. Essays in the Intellectual History of Colonial Latin America. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. This collection includes an essay surveying 460 years of Las Casas scholarship, and another essay evaluating Las Casas’s legacy. Bibliographic references and index.

Las Casas, Bartolomé de. History of the Indies. Edited and translated by Andrée M. Collard. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Collard’s introduction provides a helpful analysis of Las Casas the man, the thinker, and the writer. Collard also answers criticisms of Las Casas.

Lupher, David A. Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Study of the influence of Roman models of empire on the Spanish imperial project. Discusses competing attitudes of Las Casas and Sepúlveda. Includes bibliographic references and indexes.

MacNutt, Francis A. Bartholomew de Las Casas: His Life, His Apostolate, and His Writings. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1972. This was the standard biography in English of Las Casas, but it has been superseded by the works of Lewis Hanke.

Remesal, Antonio de. Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1474-1566, in the Pages of Father Antonio de Remesal. Translated and annotated by Felix Jay. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Translation and commentary on a life of Las Casas written sixty years after his death. Includes bibliographic references.

Wagner, Henry Raup, and Helen Rand Parish. The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967. A critical and detailed study of Las Casas. Wagner presents Las Casas as a prolific writer, and, equally, as one of action. Las Casas emerges with tremendous stature even among the giants of the sixteenth century. Wagner includes a narrative and critical catalog of Las Casas’s writings.