In August 1550, fourteen theologians gathered inside the grand hall of the Colegio de San Gregorio in the Spanish city of Valladolid. They had been summoned by their king, Charles I (who was also Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, made holy by the Pope), to hear a debate about the human rights (or not) of the Native Americans in the Spanish colonies.
Before the junta, or jury, were two more men – humanist scholar Juan de Sepúlveda and Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. Each would take a side in the debate and any decision resulting from their efforts would affect the lives of men and women living then and millions yet to be born.
Ever since the discovery of the New World by Columbus at the end of the fifteenth century there had been pain in the hearts of some – and not just those conquered and colonized. While it is easiest to think of cruel and murderous conquistadors, bent on pillage and extortion as many of them were, there were also souls among those Europeans who were prompted to ask questions about what it meant, after all was said and done, to be human.
In 1511 another Dominican friar, Antonio de Montesinos, had watched the rapaciousness of the conquerors on the island of Hispaniola and declared: I am the voice crying in the wilderness…. the voice of Christ in the desert of this island … you are all in mortal sin … on account of the cruelty and tyranny with which you use these innocent people.’ Are these not men?’ he asked. ‘Have they not rational souls? Must you not love them as you love yourselves?’
From the beginning of the colonization there had been that system of encomienda, whereby Spanish nobles were granted, by the king, little kingdoms of their own and rights to the labour of the native people living there. They had wanted slaves, and while encomienda dealt the cards slightly differently for the sake of some or other propriety, the hand amounted to the same for those under the yoke.
Back in Spain, back in the grand hall in Valladolid, Sepúlveda made arguments about a place and people he had never seen. He was all theory and book learning. He reached back in time to the thinking of Ancient Greece, and Aristotle of Athens, who had decided some men were meant to rule while others were lesser and meant to be slaves. Those ‘savages’ in the New World were cannibals, said Sepúlveda. They made sacrifices of each other and tore out living hearts, which was true. Such behaviours made it plain those creatures were of the lesser sort Aristotle had had in mind when he defined ‘natural slaves’. As well as being enslaved, Sepúlveda continued, they should be forcibly converted to Christianity. Those savages were idolators and sodomites, he stated, the lowest of the low. Indeed, he added, Spain was justified in making war upon them, ‘in order to uproot crimes that offend nature.
While Sepúlveda had no personal experience of America or Americans, Bartolomé de las Casas was different. His father had been a friend of Columbus. Las Casas himself had been on Hispaniola at the beginning of it all and, as a young man, had taken part in slave raids. He had owned slaves of his own. When that Dominican friar Montesinos had asked ‘Are these not men?’ Las Casas had answered that no, they were not. Later, and in the manner of St Paul on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from his eyes. In time he became a Dominican friar himself and for the rest of his life he campaigned for the rights of the natives as fellow human beings. In 1537 he was instrumental in persuading Pope Paul III to pass the bull Sublimis Deus that declared the native people rational beings.
In 1542 he was part of the drafting of the so-called New Laws, intended to end the encomienda system altogether. By 1550 King Charles was minded to go so far as to summon the junta at Valladolid, to hear yet more about the great philosophical question of the age: how was European man to conceive of those he had found on the other side of the ocean?
It was the duty of every man, said Las Casas, to protect the vulnerable.
He had read as much in Ecclesiasticus: Deliver him that suffereth wrong from the hand of the oppressor…’ More wisdom he quoted, from Church Fathers St Augustine, greatest Christian thinker after St Paul, and also St John Chrysostom, who had hated the abuse of power and the neglect of any needy or suffering: ‘Do you pay such honour to your excrements as to receive them into a silver chamber pot, when another man made in the image of God is perishing in the cold …?’
The junta sat in 1550, and then again the following year. In the end, their judgement was … that there was no judgement. They favoured neither argument strongly enough and so each side claimed a victory of sorts. The encomienda system had been stalled a little while, but soon regained its old momentum. What was certain was that Bartolomé de las Casas emerged, and was regarded ever after, as that most staunch of all the defenders of the native peoples of the Americas. All of this happened long before the British emerged as the kings of the Atlantic slave trade.
What mattered, what is momentous, is that the doubt was there at the beginning of European contact with the New World – doubt about such treatment of fellow man. It would not be until the nineteenth century and William Wilberforce and the Abolition Movement he represented that slavery would be undone. But even as enslavement began, and all the while the horror unfolded, there were plenty who knew that it was wrong.
Source ~ “The Story of The World in 100 Moments” by Neil Oliver
