Bartolomé de las Casas

What the author of this modest volume hopes to contribute to the field of Lascasian studies, fallow since 1992, he does not disclose. The book lacks a preface, and the introduction lacks a thesis. The implied thesis, that the lifework of Bartolomé de Las Casas satisfies the definition of a prophet, is not so much argued as stated. The author sweeps cogent historiographical discussions and important dates into his notes and fills his text with homilies on the subject of religious conversion. In company with other scholars, he believes that Las Casas experienced two such changes of direction, the first in 1514, when he dedicated his life to the defense and peaceful evangelizing of American Indians, and the second in 1522, when he decided to enter the Dominican Order.During Las Casas’s lifetime, those who were profiting by Spain’s discoveries and brutal conquests in the Americas, from the king on down, were attacked, in conscience and in purse, by a series of prophets. The Dominican Antón Montesino mounted the first challenge in Santo Domingo with his inflammatory “Cry in the Wilderness” Advent sermon (1511). When the Laws of Burgos (1512) did nothing to remedy the abuses, the 30-year-old Las Casas appeared on the scene, a sevillano trained in canon law and sickened by the bloody campaigns he had witnessed — and profited by — in Hispaniola and Cuba. His tract-length blueprint for reform, Memorial of Remedies, led Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros to appoint him Protector of the Indians and advisor to the three Jeronymites sent to investigate the management of the Indies. Impatient with the friars’ methods, Las Casas obtained a grant to colonize a region in Cumaná (1519 – 21) and illustrate peaceful conversion. Without financial backing, Las Casas sacrificed his principles to recruit colonists, and his failure to effect a peaceful conquest was made all the more bitter by news of the success of Hernán Cortés’s wildcat expedition to Central Mexico, which the author does not mention. Chastened, Las Casas entered a Dominican monastery and buried himself in theological studies.Years later, he resurfaced on Hispaniola to assist in the peaceful conclusion of the Enriquillo uprising (1533), which inspired his missiological treatise, The Only Way to Draw All People to a Living Faith. On the strength of this treatise and of his credentials in canon law and theology, he attended a conference in Oaxaca on Indian baptism, slavery, and conversion. His ideas on these subjects are detectable in the papal bull Sublimus Deus (1537), which endorsed human rights in Europe while Francisco Pizarro and his lieutenants spread havoc in Peru. In Salamanca, the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria expounded Thomist theories of natural rights in an important series of lectures on “The Things of the Indies” (1539). The Dominican Las Casas, in Spain to lobby the Emperor Charles V to roll back the conquest, produced the polemic, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which Spain’s enemies would subsequently seize upon as fodder for the Black Legend.The emperor’s New Laws (1542) meant to phase out the encomienda led to settler rebellions and were revoked within three years. Las Casas, appointed Bishop of Chiapa in 1544, traveled to Guatemala with royal backing to convert a Land of War into a Land of Peace (Verapaz). But his efforts to reform society by episcopal fiat, expressed in Twelve Rules for Confessors, backfired, and he returned to Spain to work on his massive General History of the Indies. The emperor called his feisty prophet out of retirement to debate the morality of the conquest with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda at Valladolid (1550), declaring a moratorium on conquest until the judges should declare a winner. Without waiting for their decision, Las Casas published his arguments, In Defense of the Indians.The author treats Las Casas’s thought as an unfolding revelation, as the priestly agitator moved from advocating African slavery to denouncing slavery of any kind, and from seeking the Crown’s backing for reform to calling down the wrath of God upon monarch and nation for not rewinding 70 years of history. He regards Las Casas’s sequent careers as incidental to his true calling — that of a prophet prepared to challenge authority on behalf of his beloved Indians at any time, in person or in print.The book does not pretend to be a biography of Las Casas, on whose life Helen Rand Parish’s introduction to Bartolomé de Las Casas: The Only Way (1991) remains the latest word. It does not revive the debate about Las Casas and the Black Legend, quiescent since Lewis Hanke and Benjamin Keen declared a moratorium in the pages of the Hispanic American Historical Review (1971). It is not primarily a study of Las Casas’s evolving thought nor of the political impact of his writings, like David Brading’s “The Unarmed Prophet,” in The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State (1991), 58 – 78. Much less is it a critique of Las Casas’s writings, acts, and legacy, like Daniel Castro’s impressive Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (2007).As a summary of Las Casas’s life and thought, this volume is clear, succinct, and intended for a particular kind of classroom. At fundamentalist institutions, religion is understood to be an intellectual activity that leaves room for individual insights and projects, such as this author’s thoughtful study of a sixteenth-century Roman Catholic priest. Outside their walls, however, there is little call for a book in which religion and history go hand in hand

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