Spain gets a bad rap—mostly from Anglophone writers—about the cruelty of the Conquistadors. Certainly, the Spanish in the New World were brutal, but the 16th century had their version of a Keith Olbermann—only this one people listened to.
Let’s back up before we get to the triumph and tragedy of Bartolomeo de Las Casas. In my book, American Hero, one thing is very clear; nothing is very clear.
We all know the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, sponsored Columbus’s long-cherished voyage to the West ostensibly to find a short cut to the spices, gold, and “unwashed” Asiatic souls in the East. In fact, Ferdinand had thrown the newly re-conquered Spain (from seven centuries of Muslim rule) into such a massive debt that he would envy Obama’s problems. His bribe to the Sultan of Granada to get him to abandon his beautiful city was staggering. The wail of the Sultan’s mother—“my son cries like a girl because he cannot fight like a man”—was a subterfuge to disguise her son’s greed with his cowardice. It was De Medici money from Florence that launched Columbus’s small fleet. As to why the De Medici invested in this venture, you’ll have to read my book to discover.
What motivated the Spanish had as much to do with God as with gold. True, Indians died in one of the worst massacres in history, though mostly due to the inadvertent spread of small pox. But here’s where one man gets to redirect fate. A humble friar during the First Contact, Bartolomeo de Las Casas, soon took up the Indian cause. He claimed that if you rubbed off the beads and feathers, the natives shared the same values as Christians; family, faith, good works. Las Casas convinced the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope that Indians were innocent souls hungry for Communion wafers.
Incredibly, the Spanish put down their whips and started treating Indians like human beings. Or, at least as badly as they treated themselves (another story). They baptized them. They married them. They had children together. The current mixed-ethnic population of Latin America is a testament to Spanish liberalism.
For a contrast, observe the way the British treated the natives. Indians were reviled, sequestered, betrayed, massacred, and systematically removed from the mainstream culture. Even today, Indians in the United States have lived for generations with cruel apartheid.
Las Casas should have been dancing in the streets celebrating this influential victory of human rights. Except, he wasn’t.
If the Europeans weren’t going to enslave Indians, they, being Europeans, had to enslave somebody. Guess who?
Though old and sick, Las Casas spent the rest of his life fighting the now burgeoning African slave trade, claiming that Africans were humans, too.
There’s plenty of bad rap to go around, but let’s not forget that one of the world’s first and most influential human rights activists was the Spanish monk, Bartolomeo de Las Casas.
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