BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS (Seville 1484- Madrid 1564)
Author: Julio J. Henche Morillas
Taken from https://heroesdecavite.es/bartolome-de-las-casas/
Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope
Father Bartolomé de las Casas (Dominican friar, preacher, writer and iheologian) was born in Seville at the Plaza de Colación del Salvador, probably in 1484 although some date his birth in an earlier year, and died at the Royal Basilica of Atocha in Madrid on July 18, 1566. His father, Pedro de las Casas, joined Christopher Columbus´ second voyage to the Indies in 1493 and sailed back to Spain to return later to America with at least some of his children among which was Bartolomé. In February 1502, they embarked at Sanlucar de Barrameda in one of the 32 ships of the fleet of Nicolás de Ovando, who had been named governor of the Antilles, and which was the first great expedition of Spanish settlers, amounting to about 2500 people, women and children among them.
At the Caribbean city of Hispaniola, Bartolomé worked as a farmer of his own lands and took part in armed actions with his father, be they to protect the lands where they had settled or to begin new expansion explorations on the island. Whether what contributed in his conscience to become an ordained priest in some future time were these events, which caused a deep impression on him, or it was the fact that he came in contact with Dominican priests, particularly Father Antonio de Montesinos, who delivered an energetic sermon during the mass of Advent of 1510, we don't know.
In 1513 he was granted an encomienda concession with Indians to work on his land, but the Dominican order, with which he had ever greater contact sowed doubts on the convenience of the encomienda, even when there was a just juridical title for it. Beginning at that moment, he seems to have adopted a decisive commitment to defend the Indians and to fight without compromise against all military and civil powers in the Indies; even though such attitude was not exclusively of Bartolomé de las Casas but also of the Dominican order itself, which made common cause of it. He undertook trips to Spain in September 1515 where he obtained recommendation letters to visit King Ferdinand the Catholic but the King died in January 1516, for which reason he was well received and well attended to by Cardinal Cisneros and Cardinal Adriano de Utrecht who empathized with his reflections.
In 1520, he requests from Emperor Charles the Fifth, and the latter grants him a "Capitulation and Settlement" for 300 leagues between Honduras and the Guiana out of the 1,000 leagues he had requested to carry out his colonization plans, where no Spaniard, be he civilian, soldier, or settler could enter without his permission. The destination of its settlers was Santa Fe de Chiribichi where a multitude of Spaniard settlers soon died, among them one Franciscan and four civilians that accompanied him, but Bartolomé de las Casas spared his life because he was away on a trip to Santo Domingo. His "Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias" ("A short account of the destruction of the Indies") overused by supporters of the Black Legend about Spain, must be understood to be with this purpose: to be granted the exclusive concession over territories by manifesting improbably high numbers of victims that no one can take to be true (Lewis Hanke, Pelham Box). To his contemporary conquistador of New Spain, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the number of deaths referred to by De Las Casas in his account "would not have been possible even if the indians had been handcuffed."
After this personal failure he was consecrated Dominican friar in 1522 and, supported by his religious condition, he undertook a doctrinal and theological war that raised enormous polemics at the time, since he considered himself to be vehement and unstoppable, both in his ends and in his means, to attain his objectives which were no other than obtaining from the King monopolies for the religious orders, with the end of administering territories in America, with the exclusive way of making soft evangelizations" for the pacific conversion of indians, and would do nothing more than exclude other settlers that failed to obtain his authorization. The concession model for new territories with exclusion faculties was nothing other than the development of an idea engendered by Cardinal Cisneros himself and Adrian of Utrecht along with jurist Palacios Rubio, of great prestige at the time and outstanding architect of Ferdinand the Catholic´s "Leyes de Burgos" of 1512, of separating republics of free indians from other communities controlled by royal functionaries.
In 1526, after having completed his demanding religious formation, he was designated prior of a convent he was to build at Puerto de la Plata in 1526, and there he starts to write "History of the Indies". From 1530 to 1532, he devotes himself deeply to his denunciation sermons, and in 1534 he accompanies Dominican Friar Tomás de Berlanga to evangelize Peru where civil war and struggles were at their peak, being forced to return from the Equator to the shores of Costa Rica, apparently for reason of climate impediments. In 1537 he is named defender of the Indians at the Diocese of Mexico and that same year the Emperor grants him again, with Friars Luis Cáncer, Pedro de Angulo and Rodrigo de Andrada, who became known as "the four of Santiago" in reference to the capital of the territory, an exclusive evangelization territory in Teziutlán of Guatemala called "Tierras de Guerra" ("War Territories"). He again fails to attend to the evangelization personally, which is carried out by Friar Luis de Cáncer, notwithstanding the intelligent planning the four carried out making use of christianized Indian merchants, through which they attained their acceptance in the territory, the experiment again ended up badly, with the sacrifice and death of 33 friars and of many native converts to christianity at the hands of other indians.
Bartolomé de las Casas, more disposed to the political activity of persuasion than to the personal evangelization of the territory, devotes himself to add letters and memorials and to resort again to seek contact with Emperor Charles V, achieving access to the Kng himself in Valladolid through the good office of the Dominican president of the Consejo de Indias, Friar García de Loaysa, achieving, after having his reports and those of the royal commissioners sent to the Indies been read, the promulgation of "the new laws for the good treatment and conservation of the Indians" which is an additional step of magnitude to guarantee the protection of the Indians, as well as the extinction of the encomiendas, which resulted in bringing about other grave problems of insurrection in Peru and Mexico because they extinguished the right of hereditary transmission of the encomiendas to their sons, so that an uprising of Spaniards was produced, which had to be calmed down by the use of force (the execution of three notables such as Gonzalo Pizarro, Francisco Girón and Francisco Sánchez) and by negotiation with other rebels.
In 1544 he is named Bishop of Chiapas and departs from Sanlúcar de Barrameda with 46 friars to strengthen his Diocese. In 1550 the Assembly of Valladolid is called by Emperor Charles V, also known as the "Controversy of Valladolid", in which the moral legitimacy and continuance of expansion in America is subjected to debate, a unique event which has had no equal in any other empire. This controversy ended up with a heated hostility between Ginés de Sepúlveda and De las Casas. The latter made everything possible to prevent publication of Sepúlveda's "Democrates Secundus" a work that justified the conquest of America. Las Casas renounced to the Diocese of Chiapas (where he had had very scarce presence) and Ginés de Sepúlveda denounces him for high treason. From 1552 on, he devotes himself to the activity of writing his main work, basing himself on the extraordinary document repository maintained in the Dominican Convent of San Pablo in Seville, advocating for the substitution of Indians in America by men of the black race for the heaviest types of work, which facilitated the exploitation of this race, particularly by the Portuguese. Being conscious of the great injustice that had been created, he also published works against the immoral treatment of the black race.
It is important to emphasize that he met clear opposition from other religious men highly regarded by the natives themselves and with real attachment to the lands of the New World, such as Friar Toribio de Benavente, also known by the Indians as "Motolinía" meaning poverty in the náhuatl language. This friar wrote to Emperor Charles V on January 2, 1555 telling him: "I am amazed how Your Majesty and your Council could have suffered so much a man so annoying, restless, inopportune, boisterous, and pettifogger, wearing a religious habit, so uneasy, so badly brought up, slanderer and harmful and so fidgety ...he spent time at the monastery of Santo Domingo, and soon was fed up, turned to laze around and go on with his hubbub and misgivings, always writing about other people´s lives and processes, looking for evils and crimes that all over this land the Spaniards had committed, to aggravate and denigrate all the evils and sins that have taken place. And in this he seems to have taken the position of our adversary, though he thought himself to be more zealous and just than the rest of Christians, and more than the religious. And here he scarcely had anything to do with religion."
In 1560 he moved to the Royal Basilica of Atocha in Madrid where the court of Phillip II had been established, to continue with his labor of persuasion at the highest spheres. Being mortally ill in July 1566, he declares in favor of attributing to the Crown the village of Cobán in Guatemala to deprive the encomenderos of it. On july 13, while lying on his deathbed, his memorial and evangelical testament is read at the Consejo de Indias in which his life in favor of the Indians is summarized and so are his last wishes, of supporting the young churches in the New World. He dies in the cited Royal Basilica on July 18, 1566.