Bartolomé de las Casas · Politics
The great debate of 1550-51 at Valladolid: Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s case that the Indians were Aristotle’s ‘natural slaves’ whom Spain could justly conquer, and Las Casas’s five-day refutation - the first time a European empire formally argued whether its conquests were just.
Something almost without precedent happened in 1550. The Emperor Charles V, troubled by the mounting arguments about the justice of the conquest, ordered the campaigns of conquest in the Americas suspended, and summoned a council of theologians and jurists to the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid to hear the question argued out: was it lawful for the Crown to wage war on the native peoples in order to bring them under Spanish rule and the Christian faith? For an imperial power to halt its own expansion and convene a formal hearing on whether that expansion was just is extraordinary in world history. The two champions were Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, defending the conquest, and Bartolomé de las Casas, attacking it. Sepúlveda spoke first, summarizing his case in three hours. Las Casas replied by reading, over five long days, from a massive Latin treatise. No clear winner was ever declared, but the debate crystallized the deepest question the age could ask of itself.
Sepúlveda’s argument, set out in his dialogue Democrátes Segundo, offered several grounds for a just war against the Indians, woven together into a powerful whole. First, their natural inferiority: as natural slaves they ought to submit to the more rational Spaniards, and war was justified if they refused. Second, their crimes against natural law: idolatry and especially human sacrifice and cannibalism were offences so grave that other nations might justly intervene to stop them and punish them. Third, to save the innocent victims of those sacrifices from death. And fourth, to open the way for the preaching of the Gospel, clearing the ground of hostile powers so that missionaries could work. Conquest, on this account, was a righteous instrument - it civilized the barbarous, punished the wicked, rescued the innocent, and served the faith. It is crucial to see that Sepúlveda was not a crude apologist for greed; he was a serious philosopher building a moral case for empire, which is exactly what made him dangerous.
Las Casas answered each of Sepúlveda’s grounds. To the charge of idolatry and sin, he replied that unbelief is not a crime that Christians may punish by war: the native peoples had never heard the Gospel, were not subject to the Church, and could not be justly attacked for sins committed in invincible ignorance - Christ sent preachers, not soldiers, to unbelievers. To the argument about human sacrifice, he gave a startling answer: however mistaken and evil the practice, it flowed from a sincere impulse to honour the divine with what they believed most precious, and in any case the cure - a war that killed vastly more innocents than the sacrifices ever did - was worse than the disease, and no way to win souls. To the claim that conquest cleared the ground for the Gospel, he replied that it did the opposite, filling the native peoples with hatred of the Christian name (remember Hatuey). The thread tying it all together: nothing about the Indians’ condition justified making war on them, and war was in every case the enemy, not the servant, of their conversion.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that at Valladolid Sepúlveda used Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘natural slavery’ to justify conquering the Indians, and that Las Casas refuted him by denying the Indians were natural slaves, denying that sin or unbelief justifies war on them, and arguing that violence destroys the very evangelization it claims…
Leads to Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.