What follows is an examination of the most significant body of that literature, keeping in mind that it is but a small percentage of the whole.īiographies of Las Casas have appeared with regularity since the late 16th century when a fellow Dominican, Agustín Dávila Padilla, published his Historia de la fundación. . . Over the five centuries since his life, students of Las Casas-historians, philosophers, lawyers, political scientists, and theologians-have contributed a voluminous literature exploring his life and contributions. He stressed such strikingly modern political and theological doctrines as the equality of all people and the right of self-determination. He was in fact the conscience of the Conquest, the very antithesis of the conquistador, and, in doing so, Las Casas lay the basis for the modern human rights movement. He left an immense body of writing, testifying to his multiple roles of chronicler, historian, theologian, activist, and reformer. He became a priest and later a friar in the Dominican order, and he devoted his life to defending the Amerindians from within the principal theological doctrines of Christianity that emphasized love and equality and, in doing so, indicted his fellow countrymen for their callous, sinful behavior. There he witnessed the brutality of the conquistadors exploiting the Tainos of that island with unbridled ruthlessness and later recorded it all in a book that kicked off the Black Legend, the indictment of Spain’s warriors for barbarity and inhuman excesses that eventually caused-along with new European diseases-the virtual extermination of the island’s inhabitants. Born in Seville, he traveled early to the New World in 1502 to the island of Española (today Dominican Republic/Haiti). Modern Western civilization as we know it grew out of this Encounter, and Las Casas engaged kings and emperors, warriors and priests, popes and the grandees of Spain and Europe as he crisscrossed this Atlantic world and fought for the Amerindians in the forums of power across Spain and the Indies. While not standing alone, Las Casas challenged the conquest with passion and commitment and emerged as the greatest defender of Amerindians in this unique period when two of the world’s greatest civilizations-the European and those of the Americas-clashed and merged following Columbus’s discovery of the “new” world, styled as such because its existence was unknown to Europeans. Columbus and the conquistadors who followed him strode over Amerindian peoples, from the islands of the Caribbean to the great complex Aztec (Nahua) and Inca empires of Mexico and Peru, and subordinated them to Spanish sovereignty and dominion in a cruel and barbarous fashion. After Christopher Columbus there is no more prominent figure in the Spanish conquest of the Americas/the Encounter than the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas (b. 1485–d. 1566).
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