Politics
1484 to 1566, Seville, Spain
The conquest put on trial: the friar who argued that the peoples of the New World were fully rational, fully free, and no man’s natural slaves.
Start learning Bartolomé →Las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (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 L…
Las Casas’s foundational claim - that the native peoples of the Americas were fully human and fully rational, possessed of natural liberty and legitimate dominion over their own lands and rulers, and therefore no…
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 refuta…
Las Casas’s theory of missions in The Only Way (De unico modo): that there is one and only legitimate method of drawing people to the true faith - gentle persuasion of the understanding and the will - and that con…
The hardest chapter in Las Casas’s life: his early proposal to import enslaved Africans to relieve the suffering of the Indians, his later horror at what he had done, and the recantation in his History of the Indi…
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