Bartolomé de las Casas · Politics
Las Casas’s <em>Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies</em> (1552) - the book that put the Spanish conquest itself on trial, what its indictment actually argues, why he aimed it at the Crown, and the ‘Black Legend’ it later seeded.
In 1542 a Dominican friar named Bartolomé de las Casas, who had spent forty years in the Spanish Indies, sat down to write the most damning book ever produced by a citizen of an empire against that empire. The Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies - is not a history in the ordinary sense. It is an indictment. Region by region, from Hispaniola to Cuba to Mexico to Peru, Las Casas catalogues massacres, enslavements, burnings, and famines inflicted by his own countrymen on the native peoples of the Americas. He did not write it for readers in general. He wrote it, and read parts of it aloud, for one man above all: Prince Philip, the future Philip II, whose father the Emperor Charles V held the power to stop it. The book is a weapon aimed at the throne, meant to force the Crown to see what was being done in its name and to reform the laws of conquest. It was finally printed at Seville in 1552.
The argument of the book rests on a stark moral contrast that Las Casas draws in its opening pages. On one side stand the native peoples: numberless, gentle, peaceable, quick to learn, living in ordered societies, and utterly without the means or the will to resist. On the other side come the Spaniards, whom he compares to starving beasts loosed upon a defenceless flock. Everything that follows - the hangings in lots of thirteen ‘in honour of Christ and the twelve apostles,’ the babies dashed on rocks, the caciques roasted alive - is offered as proof that the destruction was not war between equals but the slaughter of innocents. By his own reckoning, in forty years more than twelve million souls, men, women, and children, had perished unjustly. Historians treat that figure as rhetorical rather than exact, but the moral claim beneath it is the heart of the book: what happened was not conquest but annihilation.
Las Casas was no distant critic. He had come to the Indies in 1502, held an encomienda (a grant of native labour) of his own, and served as chaplain during the bloody conquest of Cuba. Then, around 1514, preparing a Pentecost sermon, he read a passage in Ecclesiasticus condemning those who offer sacrifice from the goods of the poor, and underwent a conversion of conscience. He gave up his own Indians, and spent the next half-century as the self-appointed advocate of the native peoples, eventually taking the Dominican habit and the title ‘Protector of the Indians.’ The Short Account is the distilled fury of that vocation. Its power comes precisely from the fact that its author had been complicit, had seen the machinery of conquest from the inside, and had turned against it. He wrote not to condemn strangers but to force his own civilization to look at itself.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that the Short Account was written in 1542 and published in 1552 to move the Crown, that it argues the conquest was mass murder of innocent, rational peoples rather than a glorious civilizing mission, and that its lurid catalogue of cruelty was later seized on by Spain’s enemies as the ‘Black Legend.’ Expl…
Leads to Michel de Montaigne.
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