by Marie Arana
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, instead of dedicating itself to the salvation of souls, the Church was wallowing in a mire of corruption, using believers for rank financial gain. Pope Leo X, who presided over the Church at precisely the time when Cortés was cutting a bold path into the Yucatán, had been selling two thousand church offices every year for the round sum of 500,000 ducats ($100 million today), an astounding figure, given that the entire accumulated wealth of the richest nobleman in Europe was worth a fraction of that. With the annual income from those offices, the newly established officials paid their toadies a pittance to handle spiritual tasks while they raised money for Rome and helped themselves to the difference. Violations multiplied. The archbishop of Mainz, Germany, in grievous debt because he was funding a gaggle of mistresses, tried to buy a second archbishopric from Pope Leo in order to augment his income. To raise the money, he ordered a Dominican friar to hawk indulgences: certificates that assured a buyer that his sins—and their corresponding punishments—would be reduced in the afterlife. The friar, keen to please his archbishop, set out with a clever jingle: “As soon as the gold in the basin rings / Right then the soul to heaven springs.” The faithful, eager to save their souls and buy free passage to heaven, were all too willing to pay the archbishop his fee.
The Catholic Church had become a bureaucracy, a sales operation, a vast financial network. Its goal, rather than shepherd the meek and poor, was its very own glorification. The pontiffs, each in turn, were obliged to generate the prodigious river of gold and silver it took to exalt the faith and maintain Catholicism’s primacy. In 1506 they began erecting a monument that would lend full expression to their grandeur: Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. A decade later, in 1517, a voice would rise up to decry the excesses. Enraged by the blatant venality on show, a young German monk from a small mining town compiled a document he called “Ninety-Five Theses” and nailed it to the chapel door of the University of Wittenberg. In it, he condemned the Church’s practice of selling offices and indulgences to enrich itself.
Within two months, Martin Luther’s accusations were circulating in capitals throughout Europe, aided by a burgeoning proliferation of printing presses. The schism could hardly have happened without Gutenberg’s invention. To Rome’s alarm, Luther’s complaints were convincing princes and commoners alike to abandon Catholicism and join a new, Protestant church. By 1524, as twelve ragtag Franciscans wended their way from Veracruz to Mexico City, the rebellious spirit of the Reformation was producing a dramatic change of heart in Northern Europe, threatening Catholic preeminence. The Church—and its greatest champion, Spain—rallied to defend the faith. Both needed Cortés to score a victory that would buy Catholic ascendancy, ensure Spain’s economic survival, and tighten the religion’s grip on the Old World. Rather than stamp out the corruption that had contaminated the Church for decades, however, the Reformation had the opposite effect on the scrappy religious orders in the New World: greed grew even deeper roots. If evangelism was the key to conquest, it was also the key to territorial control. All the edicts and correctives Spain might put in place were now but distant rumblings to those forging a new frontier, marching to a different tune. The ring of gold was the only sound that mattered.
Ironically enough, to many of the religious who were swept into the enterprise, the New World represented a chance for the faith to remake itself, return to its roots—an opportunity to gather a tabula rasa of fresh souls and start the Christian process all over again. But if the evangelization of the Americas was ever meant to be a happy harvest of believers, history quickly overtook that plan. There was a fortune to be had, a purse on offer. Soon after the arrival of the Franciscan delegation, the conquistadors established a Christianizing routine—an armed spiritual conquest—that would be marshaled henceforward throughout the hemisphere.
It began with the requerimiento, the statement read out to villagers, declaring Spain’s divinely ordained right to appropriate any territory of the New World, subjugate and enslave its inhabitants, and, if necessary, wage war and kill. In 1513, just as Michelangelo’s magnificent fresco of the creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was shown for the first time—just as Bartolomé de las Casas was coming to the conclusion that three million Indians had already died in the conquest, and just as Vasco Núñez de Balboa expanded the scope of the invasion by reaching the Pacific coast—the Spanish Crown decided something needed to be done about the dying. It had assumed, and few argued against it, that lands inhabited by a lesser race belonged to no one. The New World had been there for the taking. Only a full twenty years into the conquest did the question about natives’ rights arise.
To assuage the potential fallout, the Crown resolved that in all future sorties, conquistadors were to read out a pronunciamento allowing Indians to surrender peacefully to Christ and Spain, thereby absolving Spain of any crimes of violence. The requerimiento prefaced every attack, and it began with a seemingly innocuous disquisition on all the Catholic angels and holymen, including Saint James and Saint Peter, but it ended with an unmistakable threat: “If you do not comply—if you pit yourself against me—I swear that with God’s help I shall engage all my powers against you, make war on you wherever and however I can, subject you to the yoke, force you to obey the Church and his Highness, and I will take you, your women, and your children and make you all slaves to sell or dispose of as his Highness sees fit, and I will take all that you own, and inflict every ill and possible harm.”
Shouted from great distances—at times only mumbled—the declaration was little more than noise to the Indians who heard it, incomprehensible babble, hardly distinguishable from the barking of dogs. Some came to the cross peacefully; many resisted vehemently. In the end, in the face of guns, cannon, horses, and a raging disease, field after field fell to the soldiers of Jesus.
THE CONQUEST OF THE INDIAN SOUL
I find only one fault, o most Christian of kings, with your Indies. And it is that they are populated by vile people, stained and suspect.
—Gaspar Pérez de Villagra, 1610
The vanquished were assigned directly to encomiendas: land entrusted to conquistadors, officials, or priests. Confused, disoriented, afraid—often separated from their children and families—they were counted, herded, given Spanish names, told through halting translations that they belonged to a distant god, a distant king. Their owners, the encomenderos, were now free to demand tributes, or taxes, from them: these could be paid in labor or gold, and, in return, Indians were promised protection and a Christian hereafter. In practice, however, little was given. The encomiendas were outright land grabs. Spaniards simply appropriated whole territories, enslaved any and all who lived on them, hunted down fugitives, and forced their captives to work their mines in treacherous, often fatal conditions, with no attention to spiritual matters. “In the nine years of his government of this island,” one friar said of the royal governor of the West Indies, “he was no more interested in the indoctrination and salvation of the Indians than if they were sticks and stones, or cats and dogs.” And yet the governor had been dispatched precisely to correct the egregious injustices against Indians meted out under Columbus. Abuses were so dire—death and disease so rampant—that the priests who accompanied the conquistadors began to send word back that, for all the high-flown claims about curbing abuses and spreading the gospel of Christ, the system of subjugation had grown more brutal, more inhumane.
Bartolomé de las Casas had not been raised to see the conquest from an Indian point of view. On the contrary. His father, a merchant who had joined Columbus’s second voyage in hopes of bettering his lot, surprised his young son by returning with a slave as a souvenir. The Indian Juanico, who was promptly put in the service of Bartolomé, had been a gift from none other than Columbus. A few years later, in 1501, Bartolomé joined the priesthood as a sweet-faced novice of eighteen and sailed to Hispaniola with his father. We know little about his first years there, except that the Church had not quite tak
en root. There was no established path for a young cleric. Like everyone else, he was expected to help establish a colony, hunt slaves, and contribute to the budding economy.
A few years later, Bartolomé made a brief visit to Rome and was ordained as a Dominican friar before he returned, making him the first priest to preach his inaugural mass in the Americas. Granted his own encomienda and a wealth of slaves, he became a prosperous plantation owner, often finding himself party to slave raids against the Taíno to augment the ever-dwindling workforce. So entrenched was he in the slave economy that a flock of Dominican priests who arrived some years later, denied him—and all slaveowners, for that matter—the right to confession. One of the Dominicans, appalled by the heartlessness he was witnessing, the unbridled disease, scolded his fellow Spaniards in a fiery Christmas sermon: “Tell me by what right, what writ of justice, do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude?” the priest shouted, red faced. “On what authority have you waged such despicable wars against these peaceful and meek people . . . to work them to death, kill them outright, in order to wrest and amass your daily gold?” In the presence of none other than Christopher Columbus’s son Diego, the Dominican railed on and on, accusing all Spaniards in that little church of having lost every shred of conscience they’d ever had—that they were blind, steeped in sin, headed perilously for hellfire.
At first, Las Casas was taken aback by those accusations and defended the conquistadors. After all, the expeditions had been charged with bringing the Lord’s Gospel to this wild frontier, and popes and kings had blessed the enterprise. But before long, the friar found himself contemplating the Dominican’s fevered words. In 1513, just as the requerimiento was issued, he set out on the expedition to conquer Cuba along with Cortés, Diego Velázquez, Pánfilo de Narváez, and others who would eventually bring the island’s Taíno population to virtual extinction. It was there as the expedition’s chaplain, witnessing the wanton brutality, the serial burnings at the stake, the horrifying atrocities, the butchering of thousands—“without provocation or cause”—that Las Casas began to doubt Spain’s civilizing mission. Rewarded for his part in the conquest with a gold mine in Cuba, even more slaves, and a picturesque encomienda overlooking the Arimao River, he settled into the quiet life of a hacienda owner, but he couldn’t help weighing the contradictions between his religious vows and the inhumanities he had witnessed.
He had been present at the massacre of Caonao. He had seen the Indians come forward with baskets of bread and fish even as the conquistadors sharpened their swords on stone. That day, seven thousand were killed, most of them as sport—disemboweled, maimed, mauled—fleeing with their innards in their hands. He had watched a circle of his comrades send a dog against a helpless Indian and roar with merriment as he screamed for mercy, gutted before their eyes. He had looked on as slaves were forced to march 250 miles to mine gold. Whipped to work harder, they either died on their way home, or arrived—damaged and undernourished—unable to consummate their marriages. Babies were born stunted, if they were born at all. Men infected their villages with pox. The race wasted away, unable to meet the quotas.
Within a year, Las Casas was converted, radicalized, surprising his fellow haciendados by announcing that he would henceforward dedicate himself to the welfare of the conquered. The transformation was swift, startling: in blazing, indignant sermons and ferocious dispatches to the corridors of power in Valladolid, he excoriated his countrymen for the cruelties of the slave hunt and the rigors of the encomienda. He vowed to bring an end to their crimes. As for the claim that Spain was bringing the Christian religion to a profane and unruly world, Las Casas answered that if war were truly necessary to convert Indians, it would be more Christian to leave them alone.
If no one in the colonies was listening, at least the Church began to pay attention. For his forceful, unflagging advocacy, the Church eventually proclaimed Las Casas Protector of the Indians. For fifteen more years, he made a Herculean effort to travel to as many outposts as he could, preaching his message of leniency for the Mayans, the Nahua, the Inca, the Taíno—wherever conquistadors had raised crosses of conquest. He took his missionary work to the coast of Venezuela, where he attempted an experiment to convert natives by peaceful means. Those efforts failed, largely because Spaniards were so hostile to them; and because the new landowners—who had the most to lose—had begun to proclaim him mad, freakish, a demon in the flesh. All the same, he carried on, pledging himself to the Dominican order, which had inspired his change of heart in the first place. His travels took him to Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, and then back to Mexico, where he narrowly escaped assassination. His work did not go unheeded: as a result of his petitions, a landmark papal bull was issued, proclaiming the Indian a man like any other, capable of Christianization. Not everyone was convinced.
If only by virtue of unflagging persistence, the friar eventually won his young king’s ear. King Carlos I, Holy Roman emperor and impressionable young man of nineteen, found Las Casas’s accounts of the atrocities compelling, horrifying. As the brash, quick-tempered priest with the piercing eyes recounted the barbarities, the adolescent king couldn’t help but empathize. The slave trade that had flowed from Africa to Europe long before his reign had made house servants of its black captives—chambermaids, cooks, stable boys, valets—it had not necessarily reduced them to punishing, homicidal labor. This brutality, this carnage, was something new, altogether vile. Even as he grew older, amassing the riches and power that New World silver bestowed on him, King Carlos never stopped listening to the wiry, indefatigable priest.
There was good reason to listen. The atrocities had only multiplied since the deaths of King Carlos’s grandparents Ferdinand and Isabella. With the colonization of Mexico and Peru, the genocide along the Río de la Plata, the bloodletting in the highlands of Bogotá—the growing consolidation of Spanish power across the hemisphere—Indians were dying off in alarming numbers. The decimation was evident everywhere: in the Caribbean, the isthmus, Mesoamerica, the Andes. The indigenous had fought back valiantly and given as much as they got; they had not succumbed as abjectly as some chroniclers have claimed. But there was no denying the calculus: population losses were so dire that another massive plunder, the Atlantic slave trade, was soon put into place to offset the shortage of laborers. Las Casas himself, in a moment of desperation, had suggested it. The shipping magnates of Europe’s great nautical powers—Portugal, England, Holland—now leapt into that market with entrepreneurial gusto. Millions of black Africans were rounded up, shoved into the holds of ships, and sent off to die en route or labor in a cruel New World. Five million would be sent to Brazil; almost one and a half million to Spanish America. The mathematics couldn’t have been clearer: Europe was growing rich on the backs of dead Indians, the commerce of black flesh, the pumped-up exploitation of the Indies, and an ever-expanding demand for silver and gold.
A priest called it all into question. Somehow Las Casas had managed to enter—physically, mentally, spiritually—the Indian experience, to see the onslaught as they did. As impossible as it was for a European to fully comprehend the indigenous world view, he had studied it as few others had, and his crisis of conscience went on to unleash a tempest of hostilities. In the New World, Las Casas was reviled by the encomenderos, the landed rich, the influential traders, the powerful conquistadors whose profits depended on a slave economy. Ironically, even Motolinía, one of the Twelve Apostles of Mexico—a ragtag Franciscan who had gone on to be named guardian of the Convent of San Francisco—became one of Las Casas’s fiercest critics, demanding that his Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies be censored and the Dominican locked up in a monastery where he could do the ongoing conquest no further harm. They called Las Casas an Indian lover, an Indian puppet, a traitor to his race: “a grievous man, restless, importunate, turbulent, injurious, and prejudicial.” In time, he become known as the author of the “Black Legend,” the damning, exaggerated notion that Spain was mo
re cruel and hateful than any other European nation marauding the Southern Hemisphere for mammon and slaves. The English, French, and Dutch, especially—including adherents of Lutheranism—latched on to the “Black Legend” and promoted it eagerly in a campaign to smear Spain, topple its vast global power, and malign Spaniards as a sadistic race and Catholicism as a corrupt religion.
By then, the debate on whether Indians were human or beasts of burden was raging in Europe, argued by philosophers, clerics, and lawmakers alike. Were the inhabitants of the New World even worth the arduous effort of Christianization? Could you physically force a lower race of man to join the higher realms of the spirit? In the midst of this furious war of words, King Carlos decided to suspend all future conquests until such questions were settled. Toward that end, he convened a conference in Valladolid’s Colegio de San Gregorio, a glorious fifteenth-century triumph of stone, carved—absurdly enough—with statues of wild-eyed, hirsute beast-men cowering under fair-faced knights wielding swords and shields. It was there in those vaulted halls that Las Casas vied in long, spirited debates against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the Crown’s official historian, a widely respected scholar and proponent of Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery. According to Aristotle’s Politics, especially as most colonial powers chose to interpret it, some races by virtue of superior intellect were born to rule, while others, of crude, limited powers of reason, were fit only to serve them.
Sepúlveda had just produced a treatise in which he argued that war against the peoples of the New World was perfectly justified because they practiced abominable acts of cannibalism and human sacrifice. Following that logic, if Spain went to war against the defilers and won, it had every right—according to rules of combat—to enslave them. Sepúlveda went on to say that it was then incumbent on the Spanish Church, as an institution sworn to evangelization, to impose Christianity forcibly on those conquered pagans: to resort to the law of compelle intrare, a grotesquely distorted interpretation of Jesus’s words, “compel people to come in that my house may be filled,” by which Spain argued that it was perfectly justified in compelling heathen to “come in,” accept the faith, and believe. Hadn’t the fiendish Aztecs sacrificed twenty thousand souls a year, displaying their monstrous trophies on colossal racks? Hadn’t the wicked Incas reveled in incest? Hadn’t the diabolical Caribs roasted their enemies in big clay pots and feasted ghoulishly on their bones? And all that before the arrival of the Spaniards? At the core of Sepúlveda’s conviction, naturally, was that a Spaniard was superior to an Indian—culturally, intellectually, corporally—and that though an Indian might not be a monkey, exactly, he was certainly a primate of an inferior order. As one contemporary historian comments: all this from a man who had never set eyes on the race.
