II.
BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS: A BRIEF OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE AND LABOR
Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of
hands, or a grief
that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
Bartolomé de las Casas
was born in Sevilla Spain in 1484 to a farming and merchant family – a background
that proved valuable in his understanding and critique of the effects of the conquest.[2] In 1490 he
saw for the first time in Seville the Spanish monarchs, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
This distant encounter in his early childhood was followed later in life by many
other personal meetings with Spanish royalty. On March 31, 1493, at the age of nine,
he witnessed Columbus’ parade through Seville following his maiden voyage to the
Americas. On Palm Sunday, in the midst of the celebration of Holy Week festivities,
seven Taino Indians were passed through the streets along with brilliant red and green
parrots and masks intricately made with tiny shells, and beautiful artifacts of beaten
gold plates. This was Las Casas’ initial experience with the Amerindians.[3] The
excitement generated in the populace as a result of this display motivated Bartolomé’s
father and uncle, along with many others to join Columbus on his second journey to the
Americas later that same year.
During the next five
years, with his father away, Bartolomé studied Latin and his letters, perhaps at the
cathedral school in Seville of the famous latinist and grammarian Antonio de Nebrija.[4] When his
father returned in 1498 with newfound wealth, Bartolomé told him he wanted to be a
priest, whereupon the elder Las Casas sent his son to the best college in Spain at the
time, Salamanca, to study canon law in preparation for the priesthood.[5] In fact
according to Helen Rand-Parish, Las Casas received two degrees in canon law, a
bachillerato at Salamanca and a licenciatura at Vallaldolid. Yet he completed
his academic career in stages, obtaining his second degree after his initial trip to the
Americas.[6]
Even so, before his first trip to the Americas in 1502, Bartolomé was most
certainly skilled in Latin, a valuable sixteenth century intellectual ability.[7] Francis
Augustus MacNutt says the following regarding Las Casas’ academic abilities:
The training that he received in the
Spanish schools and the University, and which he afterwards perfected by the studies he
resumed after his profession in the Dominican Order, rendered formidable as an advocate
one whom nature had endowed with a rare gift of eloquence, a passionate temperament, and a
robust physical constitution which seems to have been immune to the ills and fatigues that
assail less favored mortals. Ginés de Sepúlveda, whose forensic encounter with Las
Casas was one of the academic events of the sixteenth century, described his adversary in
a letter to a friend as “most subtle, most vigilant, and most fluent, compared with
whom Homer’s Ulysses was inert and stammering.”[8]
Before finishing his
initial studies, at the age of eighteen, he embarked on his first trip to the Americas,
traveling to the Island of Hispaniola. It appears that he received minor orders and
the tonsure in Seville shortly before leaving for the Indies on February 13, 1502.[9] He arrived
on April 15, 1502, in Santo Domingo, the place where he lived and labored for the next
five years before again returning to Spain. While working holdings of lands and
Indians, his own and those of his merchant father, he also traveled the island as a
provisioner to the Spanish soldiery.[10] During this early period, while accompanying two
different military expeditions of Governor Ovando, he observed the tragic massacre of a
large group of Indian leaders on the island. The young Las Casas deplored all
the killings and was horrified by what he witnessed of these atrocities.[11]
Moreover, while traveling as a provisioner he also began to see first-hand the
conditions to which the Indians were being subjected and the disruption of native life
caused by the Spanish enslavement of the indigenous to mine for gold.
Notes
