The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part two: Bartolomé de Las Casas as colonial reformer (5)
Retiring from the world
In 1520 Las Casas was given royal permission to colonise northern Venezuala with actually working Spanish peasants along a stretch of 270 leagues, with an option to extend his triumphal progress right down the west coast of South America. In the meantime, orders were sent to the authorities not to carry out violent actions of any kind against the Indians in the territory to be colonised. All that remained was to find the peasants and transport them. Las Casas was fortunate in that he managed to organise an amnesty for any recruit who had been involved in the recent revolt of the Comuneros (against the new king Charles V and his Flemish court, in defence of traditional regional rights). With this incentive he made up his numbers.
When he arrived in Puerto Rico with 70 peasants, he found that an army was just about to set off to attack Indians in his allotted territory. Reacting to raids by Spanish slavers, the Indians had killed some Dominican priests, and now there would have to be retaliation. Las Casas left Puerto Rico and went to Hispaniola to try to stop this vicious circle. Having patched up a compromise, he returned to Puerto Rico, to find that his peasants had vanished: they had quickly acquired a better appreciation of American possibilities and were off to seek their fortunes. Las Casas went to a Franciscan monastery as a temporary base, but even there he could not escape from the spiral of violence. After conflicts between the Spanish and the Indians, the Indians attacked the monks and killed some of Las Casas’ few followers; the Spanish then began a large-scale slave-taking trawl through the territory. The attempt at peaceful colonisation was an unmitigated disaster.
Las Casas then retired from the world for the best part of ten years. The Dominicans of Hispaniola were anxious for him to join their order, and in 1522 he did. He seems to have spent the next few years quietly studying. As he must soon have realised, the Dominicans could give him the intellectual weaponry to argue the case of the Indians with anyone, on any theoretical level. From 1527 he began writing his History of the Indies. In the early 1530s he returned to the great Spanish argument, which hadn’t ceased.
His first ambitious theoretical work, which he wrote in the 1530s, was entitled On the Only Method of Attracting All Peoples to the True Religion. The only method was the peaceful method. Among other things, Las Casas draws upon historical precedent, taking the examples of France, Spain and England, to argue that peaceful conversion is not just not exceptional, it’s actually the norm. Looking at the chapters of the book that have survived, one finds that his main authorities are the Old and New Testaments, St. Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, the canon law decretals and the Roman civil law, and Aristotle. Apart from that he cites Boethius, Bede, the various Church Fathers, occasionally Cicero, occasionally some other scholastic theologians such as Scotus or Gerson, and a few other well-established writers of the past. Those seem to be enough. The speculations about Thomas More’s Utopia and so on, which his most recent biographer Lawrence A. Clayton (an irritating professor who is trying too hard to impress his students) keeps forcing into his muddled narrative, are based on nothing. Las Casas never seems to refer to contemporary writers, as his editor Lewis Hanke points out. (23) They would appear to have nothing to contribute to the earth-shaking argument he’s making: that what we consider the most precious things in culture can be transmitted to those who don’t have them without forcing them down their throats.
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