Asking who was Bartolome de las Casas would be an easy question for an educated person in Spain. Here in the US, however, people are much less likely to know who de las Casas was. But they should. Bartolome de las Casas is a famous and important historical figure. He features prominently in the history of Spain’s conquest and colonization of the Americas.
What makes knowing who was Bartolome de las Casas even better is that he’s one of the good guys in history. I hope you’ll find some parts of his story uplifting.
Who Was Bartolome de las Casas in His Early Life?
Although I just wrote that de las Casas was one of the good guys in history, his story didn’t start that way. In 1502, at the age of (we think) eighteen, he sailed to the Caribbean. He was a conquistador. These were the soldiers who conquered Spain’s empire in the Americas. Although effective and experienced soldiers, they have a rather poor historical reputation. This stems from the cruelty in which they engaged while conquering the Americas. Some of this poor reputation is due to unfavorable portrayals of Spain by its enemies, of which it had many. Some of it is based in fact, however.
In any case, de las Casas was a conquistador. Between 1502 and 1513 he helped subjugate islands in the Caribbean, mostly notably Cuba. For this military service he received an encomienda. This was the right to exploit the labor of all the indigenous people who lived on a piece of land that de las Casas controlled. Although these indigenous people had some rights on paper, in practice they didn’t. Working on an encomienda wasn’t much different from being a slave.
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Did Bartolome de las Casas Support the Encomienda System?
This is where the story turns. Rather than support the encomienda system, de las Casas soon realized it was a murderous system that existed solely for exploitation. So, in 1514, he returned the encomienda to the governor. He then set sail for Spain. His mission: argue for better treatment of the Native Americans in Spain’s growing empire.
Bartolome de las Casas spent the next fifty-two years trying to make this argument. Between 1514 and his death in 1566 he wrote books, engaged in theological debate (he was ordained as a priest in 1512 or 1513 and joined the Dominican Order in 1523), and advised Spain’s monarchs about conditions in the Caribbean. Were his efforts at reform successful?
What Did Bartolome de las Casas Do to In an Effort to End the Encomienda System?
Sadly, the honest answer is no, or at least not very. De las Casas and his life’s work had little impact. The system he opposed was too profitable. The idea of rights for the native people of the Americas failed to gain much traction in Spain’s government.
Fans of de las Casas can point to glimmers of hope. De las Casas tried to found a colony in Venezuela in 1520. This colony would combine free farmers and Native Americans living together peaceably. But the colony failed. In 1544 de las Casas became the Bishop of Chiapas (present-day Guatemala). He tried hard to enforce laws reforming the encomienda system. But even his fellow Dominicans thought he’d gone too far. By 1547 he was back in Spain.
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What’s the Point in Studying Someone Who Failed?
De las Casas faced an uphill battle of the steepest kind. What he did would be like trying to convince a slaveholder in the US to free their slaves on the eve of the Civil War. But I think he still matters.
For one thing, he had the courage to go against the prevailing values of society. And he did so for humane and just reasons. Often, I hear people excuse the bad behavior of people in the past by claiming they were living out the values of their time. That may be true, but if no one ever questions that bad behavior, change for the better will never happen. Someone needs to rise above the limits of their society if that society is ever going to change. Bartolome de las Casas found the courage to do so.
He was also a patriot. One of the reasons he wrote so many books condemning Spanish atrocities in the Americas was that he feared it would bring down God’s judgment on Spain. This has parallels to reformers today who critique the questionable aspects of their society. They face a lot of opposition from established ways of doing things. But they do so to make their society truer to its values.
Finally, de las Casas believed that the lives of all God’s people mattered at a time when few others did. He ignored the lure of profit to advocate for justice. After overcoming the indifference toward other lives of his early years, he changed for the better. Even though his early career was not to his credit, historically speaking, he realized his error and tried to atone. Instead of becoming a prisoner of his failures, he rose above them and spent more than fifty years as a public figure who stood for something better.
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As always, I welcome constructive and polite discussion in the comments section. Thank you!
Hi Rob–I was curious about how de las Casa’s writings were thought about in his contemporary world and had to look up more about him. Interestingly, the EEBO lists 10 copies of English translations of his work published in the 16th and 17th centuries. The English seem (despite their own often horrible treatment of indigenous peoples) to have used his work to stereotype the Spanish as particularly bloodthirsty and cruel. Many Spanish people at the time also stated that de las Casa exaggerated his claims (primarily as to the number of native deaths that occurred). Thank you for sharing. De Las Casa is an important figure in Spanish history, although often discredited and overlooked.
Jennifer – sorry it took a while to answer this. The English, and others too, I believe, did indeed play up Spanish cruelty in the Americas in many cases; the Black Legend, as it’s called. I believe the reason many Spanish tried to discredit de las Casas is because almost no one agreed with him that the lives of Native Americans were important. It’s interesting that now, given what we know about the horrible decline in population in the Americas thanks to war and contagious disease, that scholars are realizing de las Casas wasn’t that far off, after all.