The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part 1: Erasmus, Luther and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (6)
The Dispute on the New Laws
This review of Sepúlveda’s early writings is intended to avoid some possibilities of confusion. He opposed the ideas of Erasmus, but that was during his Roman period. America didn’t come into it. Where Erasmus himself was concerned, one could say that America was an irrelevance. What concerned him was Christian Europe, as it had developed through the ages, and the classical antiquity behind it. He had no time for another continent.
In the Cambridge History of Latin America we are told that “Fr. Bartolomé de Las Casas himself (was) deeply influenced by the humanistic spirit of Erasmus and by Thomas More’s Utopia”. (57) Even Juan Friede, a much more informative writer, jumps to similar conclusions. Noting the support which Las Casas received at the imperial court, Friede attributes it to humanist revulsion against the creation of a kind of serfdom in America: “(Charles V) and his advisers had grown up in the atmosphere of Renaissance humanism, a “modernism” of broad European vision in which the encomienda, with its medieval features of lordship and paternalism, must have seemed strange if not repugnant”. (58) If there was evidence for such statements, one might have expected Bataillon to discover it. He mentions Las Casas a couple of times, but never as an erasmian. In fact, he specifically says that none of the Spanish erasmians took up the cudgels against Sepúlveda, and one does not find them getting involved in the debate about war with the Indians. (59) (As for Thomas More, his Utopian humanists justify wars of conquest against peoples who are thought to be making insufficient use of their lands – the Cambridge writer appears not to know this.(60))
In short, in the Spanish polemic “humanism” was represented by Sepúlveda, who advocated violent colonial conquest. His opponent Las Casas, who stood for peaceful cooperation and mutual respect between peoples, took his intellectual inspiration from quite different sources, as I will show later on.
For some years after his return to Spain, Sepúlveda seems to have written little. Possibly he was giving more attention to economics. He spent much of his time on the family estate near Córdoba, where “I am almost become a farmer” (1544). (61) Besides that, he was on the lookout for ways of enriching himself by trafficking in church sinecures. According to Angel Losada, “a visit to the Public Archives in Córdoba would make anyone believe that Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda did nothing else in his life except buy, sell, rent out and accumulate ecclesiastical benefices”. (62) (Erasmus would have been disgusted!)
But in the early 1540s a tremendous controversy flared up in Spain about the government of the American colonies. What provoked it was the New Laws for the colonies, which Charles V, under the influence of Las Casas, issued in 1542. Juan Friede gives a succinct description of what was at issue. The New Laws “rigorously prohibited Indian slavery, with no exceptions; they abolished the Indian’s personal service in all its forms; and they established regulations of decisive importance concerning the encomienda, the basic regulatory institution between the Spaniards and the Indians. In the relation between these two social groups, the encomienda was (highly important)... by forcing their coexistence, it created permanent contact between two races, civilisations and cultures. Its legal content might vary, but in colonial practice, and especially in the first half of the sixteenth century, it allowed the Spaniard to exercise direct and practically unlimited power over the Indian...
The New Laws of 1542 all but abolished the encomienda and envisaged a plan that would make all encomienda Indians direct vassals of the crown.” (63) (Encomienda might perhaps be translated as “labour trust”: a given number of formally free Indians were entrusted to a Spanish colonist for compulsory labour and christianisation.)
The colonists responded to the New Laws with fury (and in Peru with outright rebellion) and launched a frantic campaign in Spain for their abolition. Sepúlveda, who had met some of the returned colonists including Hernán Cortés, (64) thought he could make a decisive intervention in the dispute and win intellectual eminence in his homeland. Proud of the dialogue he had written against Christian pacifism (Democrates, 1535), he had the idea of writing another with the same three characters: “Leopold, a German, somewhat influenced by Luther, Alfonso Guevara, a Spaniard and an old soldier, and Democrates, a Greek, to whom I give the principal part in the discussion”. (65) Now was the time to exploit the superior training in philosophy he had gained in Italy: Aristotle must be given his say! He thought he could pretty well decide the point at issue, as he explains in his dedication: “I have thought it useful to bring the same three characters together for a discussion in my garden... so as to offer a crowning and conclusive contribution to the controversy we have engaged in over the right of war”. (66) However, it was not as easy to settle the mind of Spain as he imagined.