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Biography

Short Description

Bartolomé de las Casas was born in Seville, in the Crown of Castile, in 1484. His father, Pedro de las Casas, was a merchant who sailed on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage, giving the family an early connection to the transatlantic enterprise. The young Bartolomé received a humanist education in Latin in his native city. In 1502 he crossed to Hispaniola with the fleet of Governor Nicolás de Ovando, took part in campaigns against the Taíno, and received an encomienda of indigenous labor and tribute. He later joined the conquest of Cuba under Diego Velázquez and held a similar grant there. Around 1510 he was ordained a priest, among the first men to receive holy orders in the Americas, yet for several years he continued to live as an encomendero while exercising his ministry.

In 1514, while preparing a sermon in Cuba, he was arrested by a passage from the Book of Sirach condemning sacrifice offered from the goods of the poor. He underwent a conversion of conscience, surrendered his encomienda, and began to denounce from the pulpit the wars, enslavement, and demographic collapse inflicted on native peoples. Returning to Spain, he petitioned Ferdinand II, Cardinal Cisneros, and later Charles V for legal and ecclesiastical reform, and was named Protector of the Indians. In this early phase he still treated the importation of African slaves as a lesser evil that might spare indigenous lives—a judgment he later recanted with public remorse, insisting that African bondage was equally unjust. A royal experiment in peaceful colonization at Cumaná on the South American coast, mixing Spanish peasants with protected indigenous towns, collapsed amid violence in the early 1520s and left him disillusioned with purely secular schemes of reform.

In 1522 he entered the Order of Preachers at Santo Domingo and devoted himself to study, prayer, and missionary work in the Caribbean and on the mainland. His lobbying helped shape the New Laws of 1542, by which Charles V sought to halt new encomiendas, make existing ones non-hereditary, and place indigenous vassals under more direct royal protection. In 1544 he was consecrated Bishop of Chiapas, a vast diocese covering highland Maya regions of present-day southern Mexico and Guatemala. As bishop he tried to enforce the New Laws by denying absolution and the sacraments to colonists who would not free their Indians, and he convened a synod that restated indigenous rights. Settler hostility, together with resistance from parts of the clergy and the royal audiencias, made the episcopate untenable. He resigned the see about 1547 and returned permanently to Spain.

From the Dominican College of San Gregorio in Valladolid he spent his remaining decades in historical writing and legal advocacy. His Historia de las Indias, composed over many years, and the shorter Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias documented in unsparing detail the massacres, forced labor, and epidemics that had depopulated the islands and coasts. In 1550–1551 he confronted the humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in the Junta of Valladolid, arguing that indigenous nations were fully rational, that they possessed legitimate dominion, and that wars of conquest waged without just cause were mortal sins. Although the junta issued no definitive public verdict, he continued to petition the Council of the Indies against the perpetuity of encomiendas and against further wars of conquest.

Las Casas died in Madrid in July 1566 and was buried in the Dominican convent of Our Lady of Atocha; the tomb was later lost when the house was rebuilt. He never married and had no children. The Catholic Church has not beatified or canonized him, though the Dominican Order has promoted his cause and he is styled a Servant of God. Anglican and some Lutheran calendars commemorate him. His books, widely translated in Europe, became foundational both for later Catholic reflection on the rights of non-Christian peoples and, controversially, for the so-called Black Legend of Spanish cruelty. Modern historians continue to debate the rhetorical scale of some of his casualty figures while generally confirming the substance of his indictment of early colonial violence and his pioneering defense of indigenous humanity and legal personality.

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