SOURCE: Collard, Andrée. Introduction to History of the Indies, by Bartolomé de las Casas, translated and edited by Andrée Collard, pp. ix-xxiv. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971.

[In the following essay, Collard argues that Las Casas' History of the Indies, which recounts Spain's discovery and conquest of the Americas between 1492 and 1520, was the greatest and most influential attack on Spanish treatment of Native Americans.]

Roughly 500 years after the discovery of America man again accomplishes spectacular achievements in space while nations again threaten to be destroyed by their imperialistic expansion and disregard for human rights. Just as twentieth-century America has its angry voices to denounce these human failings, so Spain in the sixteenth century had Bartolomé de las Casas or Casaus (1474-1566),¹ a man whose obsession to end the Spanish tyranny in the New World evolved into a scathing attack against imperialism. Although Las Casas was among the first Europeans to understand the implications of the discovery of America and to praise Columbus for his extraordinary courage and intelligence, he saw that, on the human level, the discoverer and all who followed after him were selfish and greedy operators: their most cherished institution, the encomienda, destroys the humanity of the Indian when it does not destroy his life altogether, and their most cherished concept, that Indians are “tools of the devil,” justifies oppression and private interests as well as betrays a blind belief in Spanish superiority.

Thus, the History of the Indies is an epoch-making and controversial work. Not only does it give a lengthy and well-documented account of the Spanish discovery and conquest of the New World from 1492 to 1520; it also contains the first sustained criticism of the conquest—criticism plainly verging on the polemical—and in relating historical events, it raises much larger questions: the moral issues of war, slavery, human rights and the mission of secular government.

Las Casas intended his History to be a work of moral enlightenment and awakening, leading to political and social change. He wanted to make the Spanish reading public aware of its collective guilt for the enslavement and massacre of the Indians; he wanted his words to influence the notables of the Spanish government and the King himself. The conquest, he argues constantly, is in point of fact a mission of evangelization that has been distorted and perverted by rapacious colonists and by a vicious system of landholding. Thus, it is up to the King to take the part of the Indians against the opportunist colonizers and to abolish the exploitative encomienda, giving de facto recognition to the hard-won legal statutes (the Laws of Burgos, 1512; the New Laws, 1542) acknowledging the freedom and human rights of the Indians. This the King must do despite the poverty of the nation and despite the landholding clerics (the president and the most important members of the council of the Indies) who influence him to maintain a sinful and unjust system. Las Casas's sense of mission, dramatically manifest in his thesis, is the outcome of what might best be called a cosmic-apocalyptic world view. The History is both an indictment and a prophecy: the price of Spain's moral aberration will be nothing less than the nation's political, economic and moral suicide. “Should God decide to destroy Spain,” he wrote at the close of his life, “this history will make it clear that Spain deserved the punishment for the destruction we have brought to the Indies.”

While the religious or political affiliations of Las Casas's interpreters have often determined their judgment of him, the very nature of the History also encourages a variety of explanations. For it is a hybrid work. It contains history and autobiography, fact and myth. It relates the objective truth of verifiable happenings and the subjective truth of a man who made history and at the same time weighed it against a scale of lofty values: a man intensely involved in the cause of justice, by turns resentful and compassionate, always violent, always extreme. Thus Las Casas comes to tell the story of the discovery and conquest of the New World from many points of view and to draw from many fields in order to convince his reader of the validity of his thesis. He is a political critic, the self-appointed admonisher of King Ferdinand, of the regent Cardinal Cisneros, of the Emperor Charles V and of Philip II. He is the courtier who convinced Cisneros to appoint him protector of the Indians. And he also writes as a learned jurist who is constantly pointing out the weaknesses of the existing codes on the Indies and suggesting remedies to strengthen them. But the politician is a visionary, too: he has a grand scheme of evangelization through peace and love as against war and terror, a scheme he carried out in Venezuela and, with more success, in Guatemala. The idealistic cleric speaks as a former exploiter, for he himself was once an encomendero, and participated in the conquest of Cuba. Furthermore, fray Bartolomé is what we would call today a cultural anthropologist, for in order to discredit the prejudice against the Indians he demonstrates that the Indians indeed have a culture. Finally, Las Casas is a mythmaker. He is one of those responsible for the myth of the Noble Savage and the main contributor to the Black Legend.² All of these roles merge into his own final concept of himself as a hero: his History is as much a monument to himself as to the cause he made famous.

Las Casas wrote as he lived, with fervor and without respite. The History is characterized by long Ciceronian periods constantly jolted by unusual turns of phrase, colorful words, abrupt changes of tense, and the dramatic use of dialogue. Its power of speech is such that in 1555, the Franciscan fray Toribio de Benavente, better known as Motolinía, thought it necessary to warn the Emperor against fray Bartolomé's “pitiless defamation of the Spanish nation.” And in 1963, a scholar as courteous and sensible as the late Ramón Menéndez Pidal lost his objectivity when, in the name of “historical truth,” he denounced Las Casas as a paranoid and a pathological liar. What makes Las Casas's eloquence particularly compelling is its tone of anguished urgency: the reader must become morally involved, he must wake from his mental lethargy (el sueño de la razón) and oppose the colonial policy of his government by joining him, Las Casas, in the fight for the rights of the Indians, “if there are any left when I finish my history.”

Thus Las Casas writes with anger and frustration toward the men who turned Columbus's “divine exploit” into a hellish performance and his own dream of Christianization into a nightmare, though it is precisely that nightmare that propels him to fame. He is indignant because the “wise and learned men” of the King's councils make up dehumanizing codes with the result that the Indians become strangers in their own land. They go about “dispossessed of their mothers' vassals, with no memory or trace of their real identity, unremembered and unnoticed.” To say that Las Casas had no love for the Indians and merely used them as a means to self-aggrandizement is absurd. One has only to read his encounters with hungry, beaten and mutilated Indians or with Indian slaves in the market place waiting to be sold to see that their plight is indeed his plight. On the other hand, Las Casas also writes with pride and arrogance when he recounts his accomplishments, for he has a high sense of self, and he is capable of relating human tragedies with detached irony and scorn, as when he justifies the Indian slaughter of “innocent” Spaniards.

Las Casas hopes to unfold the narrative in chronological order. However, the stream of events and recollections constantly breaks his discourse, causing an impression of diffuseness and disorder. Any datum, however small, proliferates into cosmic proportions: a sugar mill leads to reflections on the Indian's gentleness and raises questions on economics, the morality of slavery, the vision of a world destroyed by a revengeful God and the theological ramifications of this concept. It is distinctive of Las Casas to proceed from the particular to the general and to apply abstract moral principles to real-life situations which he narrates with great vividness, often at the cost of exaggeration. But no one should expect accuracy in polemical writings, and the sweeping statements and prodigious numbers in the History must be taken with caution. A Spaniard on horseback may not have killed “10,000 Indians in one hour's time” but, as Américo Castro aptly puts it, Las Casas “magnifies and makes the distance between Spain and his Indies ideally abysmal” and it is in this light that both his numerical exaggerations and his love-hate relationship with Spain make the most sense.

Central to Las Casas's arguments in the History is his conviction that the Indians are human beings who live in an evolved culture, who have their own social, economic and religious institutions and who are “endowed with inner and outer senses not only good but excellent and far superior to those of many other nations.” And, in order to invalidate the claims of those who report that the Indians are a “bestial race” and in so doing justify the aims and methods of the conquest, Las Casas takes pains to describe Indian culture.³ He dwells on the high degree of social organization the Indians enjoy, their harmonious communism, their courtesy and gentleness, their hospitality. Las Casas has the insight to consider the problems of the conquest as stemming in the main from a clash of cultures, and his treatment of the Indians is intended to debunk the theories of those who would forcibly impose a European life style on the Indians “for their own good.” Thus, he combats the stereotypes created by the apologists of the conquest by presenting Indian ways of life from the Indian point of view, and demonstrating that their so-called vices “in truth were not thought of as vices by the Indians but virtues answering to a life view much closer to natural reason than that of the Spaniards.” To the charge that Indians are lazy, Las Casas answers that their rhythm of life is perfectly adapted to their climate and their delicate constitution. He denies that they are an idle lot by showing that they simply do not conceive of work the way Europeans do. If the Indians lie to the Spaniards, it is precisely because the Spaniards have taught them how to lie. Las Casas states flatly that the purported sodomy of the Indians is nonexistent. He sees clearly that the Spaniards are using the charge of cannibalism—the only legal grounds for enslaving the Indians—as the pretext for greedy depredations. In those cases where cannibalism does indeed exist, Las Casas justifies it by placing it in the context of the Indians' religious ceremonies.

Las Casas's enlightened treatment of the Indians as well as his tendency to ennoble their “natural” way of life are important factors in the creation of the myth of the Noble Savage.⁴ His dialectic with contemporary authors⁵ leads him frequently to exalt Indian virtues, while his belief in his own God-sent mission of conversion and his biblical and classical knowledge dispose him to see the Indians as possessing the innate goodness of man before the Fall. Like the Arcadians of the legendary Golden Age, the Indians are untainted by the corruptions of civilization: money and power are empty concepts for them. They are innocent because they live closer to nature: Adam simply has not sinned in them. Indian culture is good because the Indians govern their personal and social relationships according to “natural reason” and “natural law.” The New World is virgin territory, unspoiled by vitiated systems and corrupt men, and it offers the chance to evangelize without changing the Indian way of life. When Las Casas compares the Indians to Greeks, Romans and Jews (as he often does) it is not because the Indians have a sophisticated civilization, but because—like their better-known counterparts—the Indians are a dignified race oppressed.

Now for the other extreme. Las Casas sees his country in the role of the aggressor. The fundamental fact about the conquest is that it is a military venture that includes the terroristic use of weapons, horses and trained dogs. The Spaniards are cruel: they exploit the superiority of their arms, physically and psychologically, and perform unnecessary acts of violence, killing “as for a joke,” inventing horrifying means of torture. As all Indians are disinterested and humble, so all Spaniards are gold-hungry and power mad. Away from the battlefield, they are lazy, vain, arrogant. If they rely exclusively on Indian labor for their mines and plantations, it is not only because it costs them nothing, but also because they themselves abhor manual labor. If townships are not prosperous and organized, the reason lies in Spanish restlessness that drives the Spaniard to abandon the newly established town and to go on to further conquests. In short, they are materialistic beasts leading reckless lives of insubordination, adultery, rape and pillage.

The exaggeration is obvious and, stated thus crudely, might lead one to think that Las Casas failed to take into account the complexity of the enterprise. It is nonetheless true that the early years of the conquest were marked by anarchy and license. In addition, many a soldier in the Indies was a professional who had fought the Moorish wars on Spanish soil and to whom Indian-Moor was an automatic association. Las Casas's charges must also be weighed against contemporary events in Spain. The Inquisition is taking harsh repressive measures against “heretics” suspected of Erasmianism and other more personal crimes, and, around 1558, is burning people of high rank at the stake in order to inspire terror. This practice coincides with the public execution of high-ranking Indians, also to inspire terror, and Las Casas's outcry against the barbarism of such methods might well be taken as an outcry against a more general Spanish intolerance. As for Indian atrocities committed on “innocent” Spaniards, which were taken as justification for Spanish methods of war, Las Casas sarcastically declares that “a nation at war with another is not obliged to discern whether an individual is innocent or guilty. … The Indians had a most excellent reason to suppose that whosoever came to their islands from Castile came as an enemy and thus could rightly resolve to kill him. But let God be the ultimate judge of this.” But what is most shocking about all Spaniards, especially the “learned men” and indeed “the whole world,” is that people encourage these goings-on by their silence and credulity, for they buy the official version of the conquest and tolerate the atrocities even after Las Casas has unveiled them. Las Casas makes it plain that he wants his readers to awake to nothing less than their collective guilt.

The New World shapes the humanitarian ideas of Las Casas and his firsthand knowledge endows his descriptions with their tone of urgency and moral intransigence. The interaction between his lived experience and his ideals is best demonstrated in his evolving treatment of slavery, for, when he first came to America, Las Casas himself profited from slaveholding, both as an encomendero and as a participant in the conquest of Cuba. Indeed, nothing in Las Casas's writings suggests that he even thought about the problems of slavery until he heard the sermons of the Dominicans, who came to Hispaniola and began preaching against the institution in 1510. The sermons Las Casas heard were to produce a delayed reaction in him, for it was in 1514 that he dramatically gave up his Cuban encomienda. Over the years, as he witnessed the continuing evils of slavery, he became more and more aroused against this institution.

At the start of the History he still accepts slavery as an institution and believes that slave trading is legitimate as long as their is a “just” cause for enslaving people—that is, the capture of prisoners in political wars. In all other cases slavery is “damnable,” even when it is the outcome of religious zeal: “What right or reason can justify so many offenses, deaths, enslavements, and the scandalous loss of so many lives the Portuguese caused among those poor people [Black Africans] even though they had become Moslems? Only because they were infidels? Surely this is great ignorance and damnable blindness.” Yet Las Casas has no compunction about recommending that Spain buy Negro slaves to replace the dying Indians on the grounds that Blacks are stronger and thus better able to endure the climate and hardships of forced labor, assuming of course that those slaves are legitimately acquired. However, as more and more Black slaves keep pouring into the New World and he witnesses their plight, he comes to realize that the Black slaves' sufferings are no different from those of the Indian slaves and he rejects slavery altogether as immoral. Indeed, Las Casas sees his former position as a result of his own blindness and he implores God's forgiveness, since he considers that he himself has been guilty of complicity in “all the sins committed by the Portuguese and the Africans, not to mention our own sin of buying the slaves.”

However much Las Casas's views on Black slavery may have changed, his position on the Indians was always the same. In his mind there had never been any justification for their enslavement, since Spain's war against them was an unjust war. Cutting through the thin juridical distinction between slavery and servitude, Las Casas viewed the Spanish exploitation of native lives and labor as outright slavery. “How free is an allotted man when night and day he is subject to the orders and the will of another man who stands next to him all the time?” Las Casas therefore advocates the abolition of the encomienda as the system responsible for the existence of de facto slavery. Over the years he experiences a growing frustration with Spanish economic institutions in the New World and the toll of innocent lives they take. He is made increasingly bitter by the failure of his efforts to convince the King, the governors of the Indies, the public and the slaveholders that slavery is indeed scandalous. He is so aroused against the slavery of the Indians that, as Bishop of Chiapas, he invites the reprisals of the Inquisition when he goes one step further than the Dominicans: he enjoins the priests under his authority not only to refuse absolution to but also to excommunicate slaveholders who will not give up their slaves and make restitution to the Indians (1545).

Las Casas's criticism of slavery reflects the enlightened Spanish legal tradition, the main expression of which is found in the Siete Partidas (compiled in the thirteenth century), which under the code of slavery provides for slaves' civil rights. This liberal tradition is being reinforced by the strong influence of Erasmian humanism in Spain which stresses the Pauline view of humanity—all people are God's people. In dealing with the Indians, the Spaniards have failed to respect the God-given “natural rights of man” (derecho natural de las gentes). They have violated the Indians' territory, liberty and persons. Since all men are free and since they have the right to be governed for their own good, the King, who may not dispose arbitrarily of persons and property without incurring the risk of the peoples' right to depose him, should abolish the unjust encomienda system. The student of the evolution of natural law theory, both in its moral and juridical applications, can only be surprised by the advanced nature of Las Casas's thought, which develops and concretizes the thought of Erasmus and of the distinguished jurist and contemporary of Las Casas, fray Francisco de Vitoria, on the rights of kings and peoples. By constantly exposing the failure to enforce existing statutes dealing with slavery and the inadequacy of new statutes concerning the Indians, Las Casas tries to salvage the humanity of the American Indian at a time when Europe is arguing about whether or not the natives are capable of being saved. And in so doing, he lays bare the European hyprocrisy which postulates the universality of humanism while denying it in the American colonies.

Las Casas also grasps the politico-economic implications of the conquest, and his writings contain a good measure of political criticism as well as positive suggestions for the government of the Indies. He predicts that the conquest will lead Spain to ruin because the Indies bring too much wealth—hence corruption—to Spain. But more practical considerations also dictate his criticisms of the conquest: first, the colonists want only to acquire personal wealth—gold, silver and pearls—and to spend it on “vain and lavish” things; second, the colonists go back to Spain with their riches and fail to invest them in other enterprises in the Indies, especially agriculture, which Las Casas considers a dangerously neglected part of the New World's economy; third, as heavily taxed as the gold is, the Crown mismanages this new-found source of income and remains militarily vulnerable and riddled with debts; fourth, despite the increase in certain commodities (sugar, for example), prices are spiraling upward and inflation is having a debilitating effect on the Spanish economy.

Las Casas's viewpoint on the government of the Indies results from his profound analysis of the political realities of the early stages of the conquest. From the beginning, the seeds of genocide and exploitation were sown, and, although he holds Columbus in high esteem, Las Casas does not hesitate to blame the admiral's “ignorance of the law” for the abuse that was to characterize the Spanish administration of the Indies. The actual institution of the encomienda is the work of the governor of Hispaniola, Ovando, who, acting without authorization from the Crown, introduced “the disorder of this pestilence … [which] spread to San Juan, Jamaica, Cuba and the continent.” Las Casas also makes it clear that the early license and anarchy, together with the lack of advocates for the Indian cause in Spain, were responsible for the later spoliation and depopulation of the Indies. He reports the frequent rebellions of Spaniards against their commanders and describes the outrageous disorganization of the Spanish administration in the New World, where favoritism and personal interests pass before the interest of the nation. All these crimes remain unpunished because the King is kept ignorant of the actual situation in the Americas. Indeed, it was partly because of the influence of Las Casas that legal measures were taken to correct some of the Spanish abuses; to minimize his importance is perhaps to dismiss too easily the whole question of the role and influence of the political critic.

In the power conflict between the Crown and the colonists, Las Casas casts himself in the role of the protector of the Indians and the conscience of the King in order to oppose the colonists' destructive appetite for power. For example, in the story of Enriquillo (Bk III, Chs. 125-127) he intends to show that the civil rights of the Indians, guaranteed by Spanish law, are denied and that the Indians have no recourse in justice against the colonists. Obviously, the Audiencia—the instrument of the Crown responsible for rendering and enforcing justice in the Indies and thus maintaining the Crown's control over the colonists—is inoperative when the rights of the Indians are at stake. The story of Enriquillo also points out indirectly what Las Casas's treatment of the Dominicans' preaching points out directly: the missionaries, especially the Dominicans, do and should play a political role by pacifying colonist and native and by representing the interests of the Indian in the policy-making organs of Spain. So then, Las Casas's political criticism is in the main intended to bring about the reform of the actual administration of the Indies by redefining the King's prerogatives. The King should by no means think that his universal sovereignty is not compatible with the sovereignty of the “natural lords of the Indies” (the Indian nobles). Rather, he should consider the Indies to be a “true Spanish province,” governed by native kings paying tribute and pledging allegiance to the Crown. With the passing of time, however, after years of frustrated efforts to persuade the Spanish rulers that such a program is desirable, Las Casas comes close to recommending that Spain leave the Indies alone altogether, as in his letter of 1544 to the future Philip II against the presence of Christians—old or new—in the Indies.

The interaction of Las Casas's lived experience with his high sense of evangelical mission shapes his theology, especially in its teleological manifestations. The discovery of the Indies, Columbus's “divine exploit,” is an event of major import in God's scheme, comparable in importance only to the birth of Christ. Indeed, the discovery is another major step in the revelation of Christianity to the multitudes, and Las Casas envisages the New World as a vast continent ready for evangelization, an untilled vineyard of the Lord. For him the Indies are in every sense of the phrase a New World; and, as Silvio Zavala points out, he sees that history is realizing itself in the westward thrust of civilization. The discovery of America is not to be judged as the discovery of just another island in the Atlantic, nor evaluated in terms of the Crown's income; it must be seen in the light of both history and eternity. Thus Las Casas enjoins his countrymen to realize that whatever happens in the Indies—from the sinking of a ship or an ant invasion to major disasters—is not the outcome of blind chance or coincidence, but is indeed shaped for a purpose. This rather orthodox view of the existence of evil in the world includes the concept of God as the dispenser of justice, a God who permits the destructive outbreak of evil in the Indies because He intends to turn Spain away from its ambitions and iniquities or to punish Spain for them. And since all people are God's people, He may have wished to predestine the suffering Indians to sit at His right hand when the final judgment comes: “It may be that once God has exterminated these people [the Indians] through our cruel hands, He will spill his anger over us all … inspiring other nations to do unto us what we have done unto them, destroying us as we destroyed them, and it may be that more of those whom we held in contempt will sit at the right hand of God than there will be of us, and this consideration ought to keep us in fear night and day.”

Las Casas saw in the Indies first an opportunity for evangelization similar to the one that challenged St. Paul, with whom the Spanish priest identifies, and second the opportunity to revivify the pristine form of Christianity before it became institutionalized and acquired temporal interests. Since, in all likelihood, Las Casas himself came from a family of converted Jews, he was particularly sensitive to the indignities of forced conversions. He also opposed mass conversions (such as those practiced by Motolinía in Mexico) because they are an insult to man's intelligence and interfere with his freedom of choice. Las Casas, then, develops an art of conversion based on the teachings of St. Paul, which is at the same time a bitter attack against Spanish methods. Religion is a private matter and it is imperative that Spain understand that “nobody can want to leave of his own free will that which God gave him over the ages, the religion sucked in the cradle and authorized by his elders”; or again, how can Christians be so foolish as to think that they can sell Christianity when their actions belie the very essence of Christianity: “a religion rooted in their hearts by centuries of devotion, reverence and rituals is not erased by ten words Cortés might have said, chewing and mispronouncing them at that, especially when Indians held the Spanish to be their major enemy.” Las Casas would approach the Indian with love and respect for his beliefs and his rites, and reason alone could bring the Indians to the Faith, of their own free will, after years of communication with and understanding of Christians. But Las Casas was enough of this world to understand that these lofty ideals would not be carried out unless he also demonstrated that it was economically beneficial to the Crown to allot the money and resources to convert the Indians peaceably. Therefore, his schemes for conversion always contain their measure of practicality. And he says, referring to himself: “The clergyman's maxim was that unless the solution worked for as well as against the Spaniards, the Indians would never be saved, and knowing this for certain from his long experience, he founded the freedom and conversion of Indians on the pure material interests of those who were to help him achieve his goal.” We see that much as Las Casas feels himself turned toward other-worldly goals, he is deeply aware of his existence here and now. The interrelation of these two forms of consciousness creates an agonizing conflict within him: Las Casas lives simultaneously on two planes that constantly tug at each other and torment him.

The tension between now and hereafter also molds Las Casas's view of history. If God's ultimate design remains unknown to man, it is nonetheless man who by his actions determines the present, which in turn determines the future. Thus, the present takes on an all-important dimension: it is of utmost urgency that the deed be “right” and that the historian set it down in order to rescue it from distortion and oblivion. “My eyes saw all these and other things so alien to human nature that now I fear to tell them, not believing myself, as if perhaps I had dreamed them.” Or: “Who will believe this? I myself an eyewitness writing this, I can hardly believe it.” While Las Casas stressed the incredible horror of events, his insight into the value of the present along with his conviction that the discovery of America was a unique and dramatic moment in human history motivated him to preserve a mass of letters and manuscripts written by the makers of history themselves. But for his transcriptions, the journals of Christopher Columbus would have been lost to posterity.

The function of the historian is to interpret and judge events, for history is a court of world opinion and the act of writing history creates that opinion. The historian is not only the creator of the national image, but also of individual fame. And, while the historian must be learned in all domains, since there is unity in all knowledge, it is best that he should have lived the events he recounts. All theories, ancient and modern, crumble before the reality of experience, which, together with reason, is the criterion of truth. History, then, is a weapon of political warfare and its validity is the truth of experience. The reader must understand that, of all the contemporary accounts of the New World, Las Casas's history is the true account: he alone can claim forty-five years of participation in the American reality and at the same time he alone is moved by the right intentions.

Las Casas was exquisitely aware that the New World gave obscure men the opportunity of finding and enacting their destiny: Columbus, Cortés, Hojeda, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Bartolomé de las Casas … But what distinguishes Columbus and Las Casas from the other actors who thrust themselves into the center of history is that God chose the admiral to be “caudillo and leader of this divine exploit” and the priest, “through whom God was fighting,” to be the conscience and judge of Spain (“No one spoke on behalf of the Indians until God gave them someone to enlighten [the Spaniards] and the world”). In fact, the stories of Columbus and Las Casas—as recounted by the latter—show striking parallels: both are heroes, pioneers, hated by the majority; both win their cases at court after long battles against ignorance, prejudice, privilege; both confront kings and noblemen who see them as enemies, outsiders; both encounter the same mixture of encouragement and insults from the Spanish monarchs and grandees.

So Las Casas comes to see himself as a historical figure and to project himself as such by telling about Las Casas, seen by Las Casas. As the narration proceeds, he becomes conscious that he himself is a character in the drama, and by the third book he is decidedly writing his own story: “he” and “I” now regularly alternate when he talks about the clergyman. The “he” is used when he recounts those of his acts destined to transcend time, while the “I” telescopes past happenings into the present and expresses his conscience and emotions: “I could cry when I think that the clergyman Casas had to reproach Bono, whom he had known well.” One can scarcely reproach Las Casas for being too modest: he knows only too well that he is both an intelligent and crafty man and a self-made wielder of power. He dramatizes himself as a figure who, without any of the social advantages, has risen to a position where he can chide great and powerful men and see his admonitions taken seriously enough to deserve special meetings and discussions in the highest councils of the land: “He saw himself in the midst of a most learned and illustrious group, among enemies and friends. … You should have seen how the clergyman answered and satisfied everyone's questions, always standing up for himself. Antonio de Fonseca was dumbfounded.” And yet to say that Las Casas was a hypocrite or a madman is to ignore the fact that he was well aware of himself, as well as of the image he wanted to project to his contemporaries and across the ages. Said to be too prosperous and too diligent in the management of his encomienda, Las Casas—who was by then a clergyman—arranged a most theatrical renunciation of his earthly goods. Said to be ambitious of worldly honors, he refused the lucrative bishopric of Cuzco, later to accept the impoverished diocese of Chiapas (only because Charles V insisted).

The complex nature of the man is also reflected in his love-hate relationship with Spain. As Américo Castro has stated, Las Casas was torn all his life between his pride in belonging to the most powerful nation on earth and his shame at having been born a nobody and perhaps a relative of the victims of the Inquisition. We might add that when he dissociates himself from the brutality and atrocities of the Spanish oppressors, Las Casas writes of them as “they,” “the Spaniards,” “the Christians.” But when he talks about the nation's greatness or its collective guilt, then he writes “we.” As Montaigne was to say so judiciously, the living of a historical event and the writing of a history book tell you who you are.

Notes

1. Late in life, Las Casas added “or Casaus” to his name and explained it as being the spelling of his noble French ancestors in the Canaries, a claim now proven false. The obscurity that surrounds his life before reaching America has long puzzled every student of Las Casas and has led many to suspect that he came from a family of converted Jews. So far, the only clue to this problem is a document found by Claudio Guillén and reprinted in “Un padrón de conversos sevillanos (1510),” Bulletin Hispanique, LXV (1963), 49-98, which suggests the possibility of a family relationship between our Las Casas and several other Las Casases of Seville, converts and victims of the Inquisition.

2. In 1565, Girolamo Benzoni published his experiences of fourteen years of bloody campaigns with Benalcázar to Ecuador and Colombia. This, together with Las Casas's Very Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies and the blood-chilling scenes in the History (available in MS form in the sixteenth century), supplied the main ammunition to the foreign detractors of Spain who instigated the so-called Black Legend. The extent of the popularity of the Very Brief Relation may be judged by the number of first translations: Flemish, 1578; French, 1579; English, 1583; German, 1597; Latin, 1598; and Italian, 1626.

3. The magnitude of this task caused Las Casas to separate his description of the “perfection of Indian societies” into another volume entitled Apologetical History, originally conceived as an integral part of the History of the Indies.

4. It is important to point out that Montaigne, whose essay On Cannibals (I, 31) was also to play such a vital role in the creation of the myth of the Noble Savage, was well acquainted with sixteenth-century Spanish histories of the New World and that much of his information about the Americas may have come directly or indirectly from Las Casas (see Montaigne, Essais, ed. Maurice Rat, 2 vols. [Paris, 1962], I, 233, 712).

5. Las Casas's main target is Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (Natural History, 1526), but others are alluded to directly and indirectly throughout the History, especially Cortés's biographer and historian Francisco López de Gómara (General History of the Indies, 1552) and the humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who wrote a formal apology of colonialism based on the Aristotelian justification of slavery—“The Just Causes of War Against the Indians” (1548).