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[2832] Bartolomé de las Casas (John Phillips, trans.), Illustration The Tears of the Indians (1656), courtesy of the Robert Dechert Collection, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
While growing up and studying in the Spanish city of Seville, Casas closely followed news of the conquistadors and their exploits in the New World. His father and uncle joined Columbus’s second expedition to the Indies in 1498, and his father returned with an Arawak Indian slave who must have provided the young Casas with details about the Caribbean world. In 1502, Casas joined Nicolas de Ovando’s expedition to Hispaniola, where he participated in the brutal conquest of the Indians and received land and slave labor in return for his services under the encomienda, or slave system. After over a decade of overseeing Indian slaves, Casas experienced a dramatic change of heart, perhaps precipitated by his decision to join the Dominican Order of Catholic priests. He became convinced that the Spanish encomienda, or slave system, was unjust and unChristian, and he soon devoted himself to working toward its abolishment. While his commitment to Indian rights made him unpopular with many Spanish colonists and leaders, Casas never again wavered in his conviction that Native Americans deserved to be treated with respect and humanity. While he at one point advocated using African slaves to replace Indian labor, he later realized the hypocrisy of his proposal and renounced the idea, instead opting to oppose the enslavement of any peoples.
In 1515, Casas took his case to the Spanish court and was formally appointed “protector of the Indians.” He also attained a commission to found an experimental colony on the coast of Venezuela based on principles of peace. The colony soon floundered, and Casas returned to Hispaniola, where he served as a friar in a monastery. By the 1530s he was again drawing on his political connections to legislate for protection of Native Americans, eventually persuading Pope Paul III to denounce the enslavement of Indians and convincing Charles V of Spain to make the practice illegal in Spanish colonies. Appointed bishop to the church of Chiapas, Mexico, in 1544, Casas encountered widespread, bitter, and violent resistance to his reform efforts. When Charles V retracted the ban on Indian slavery in the Americas in 1547, Casas returned to Spain. Until his death at the age of ninety-two, he continued his crusade by serving as attorney-at-large for the Indians in the Spanish courts and by publishing moving accounts of their tragic plight.
Casas’s monumental History of the Indies and The Very Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies are among his most important writings. In these works, Casas offered a devastatingly vivid exposé of the brutality of the Spanish slave system. He also drew on his intimate knowledge of Indian culture to combat the popular argument that the natives were so docile, submissive, and mentally inferior as to be “natural slaves.” The Brief Relation was widely translated and republished throughout Europe in Casas’s lifetime, and its impassioned denunciation of the cruelty of the Spanish colonizers contributed to the perception (popular in Protestant countries) that the Spanish were especially violent and barbaric in their treatment of natives. Although he intended his work to spur reform, Casas’s participation in the creation of the so-called Black Legend of Spanish colonial atrocities served mainly to make him extremely unpopular in Spain and may have fueled the equally problematic imperial pretensions of Protestant countries such as England and the Netherlands. Colonizers from these nations self-righteously justified their own repression and exploitation of Native Americans by arguing that their methods were more humane than those of the Spanish.
Corporeal Man — Man of Instinct — Man of Feeling — Thinking Man
How do you think Casas and his critics might have been influenced by the concept of the Great Chain of Being? Where do you think most Europeans felt Indians belonged on the chain? Where would Casas place them?
[2831] Bartolomé de las Casas, Frontispiece to The Tears of the Indians (las Casas): Being an Historical and True Account of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of above Twenty Millions of Innocent People; Committed by the Spaniards (1656),
courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
The English authorities used this 1656 translation to legitimize their conquest of Spanish Jamaica. Oliver Cromwell’s nephew translated this volume.
[2832] Bartolomé de las Casas (John Phillips, trans.), Illustration from The Tears of the Indians (1656),
courtesy of the Robert Dechert Collection, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
This illustration details some of the atrocities committed by Spanish colonizers. Despite his intentions, Casas’s work ultimately helped Protestant colonizers justify their own mistreatment of native peoples; they reasoned that their actions were not as reprehensible as those of the Spanish.
[7368] Anonymous, Sheet from the Huejotzingo Codex [1 of 8] (1531),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.
In 1531, the people of Huejotzingo asked conqueror Hernán Cortés to initiate a lawsuit against the high court of New Spain concerning the unjust use of indigenous labor and tribute. As part of this petition, eight pages of drawings were made on amatl (fig bark); these drawings are known today as the Huejotzingo Codex.
[7372] Anonymous, Sheet from the Huejotzingo Codex [6 of 8] (1531),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.
In 1531, the people of Huejotzingo asked conqueror Hernán Cortés to initiate a lawsuit against the high court of New Spain concerning the unjust use of indigenous labor and tribute. As part of this petition, eight pages of drawings were made on amatl (fig bark); these drawings are known today as the Huejotzingo Codex.
[7681] Anonymous, Image of Bartolomé de las Casas (1886),
courtesy of Narrative and Critical History of America, Volume II (c. 1884-89), ed. Justin Winsor, published by Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin and Company,
The Riverside Press, Cambridge. Engraving of a young and determined-looking Casas writing at his desk, with a cross around his neck.
[9042] Laura Arnold, The Great Chain of Being (2003),
courtesy of Laura Arnold.
From the beginning of the Middle Ages through the early nineteenth century, “educated Europeans” conceived of the universe in terms of a hierarchical Great Chain of Being with God at its apex. In many ways, this hierarchy, still pervasive in Western theology and thought, stands in opposition to Native American and other belief systems that view the human and spirit worlds as co-existing on a horizontal plane.