by Hugh Thomas
These debates led to the so-called Laws of Burgos, which were promulgated on December 27, 1512. The most important items were that all Indians were to be gathered in towns and villages, and in specially built new houses; their old homes were to be burned, “so that they might lose the longing to return to them although, in the removal, violence should not be used, rather, much kindness.” (This echoed an ordinance in Ovando’s time that had not been carried out.) Spanish landowners were to pay close attention to religious instruction, such as the teaching of the creed, the importance of prayer, and of confession. Churches were to be built and supplied with the right pictures and ornaments. When an Indian died, other members of his town were obliged to attend the funeral and to follow a cross. All Indian children should be baptized within eight days of their birth; and sons of caciques should be handed over to Franciscans for four years both to be taught to read and to learn about Christianity. In Santo Domingo, they would also be taught Latin by a certain Hernán Suárez.20 A third of all the Indians were to work in gold mines, as the King desired, but care was be taken to ensure that they were neither ill-treated nor overworked. Pregnant women were not to be required to perform manual labor. All Indians were to be encouraged to marry.
Then came some prohibitions certain to be unpopular with Indians. They were not to be allowed to dance, since that might suggest a return to their old ceremonies and religions. Nor were they to be allowed to paint their bodies or to become drunk. In each new town, two inspectors would be appointed to ensure that the laws were complied with.21
Fray Pedro de Córdoba, the leader of the Dominicans in La Española and the inspiration for their brave challenge to the settlers, returned to Spain, studied these laws, and argued for amendments. Impressed, King Fernando agreed. A new committee was set up; the members were Fray Tomás de Matienzo and Fray Alonso de Bustillo.22 (Matienzo had been to Brussels in 1498 to be the confessor of the Infanta Juana and give a report on her life there.)23 Hence the so-called Clarification of the Laws of Burgos, promulgated on July 28, 1513.24 This contained provisions for the further protection of Indian children and also insisted that Indians wear clothes. Children of Indians were to be allowed to learn trades if they wished. The latter were to be asked to give nine months’ service a year to the Spanish landowners, “to prevent their living in idleness,” but for the remaining three months they would be free to work on their own farms.
In order to tell the Indians in the new territories what was being offered them by the Spaniards, Palacios Rubios was now asked to write the famous “Requirement” (the Requerimiento), apparently influenced by the experiences of Alonso de Hojeda, who had felt the need for such a thing at Cartagena de Indias in 1509. The procedure had a firm peninsular basis: a town council in a dispute with a lord might read aloud a “Requirement” against a magnate in respect of a disputed boundary. A more aggressive “Requirement” had been used in the Canary Islands when the Governor had demanded that the indigenous inhabitants accept both Castilian sovereignty and Christianity. The final text of 1513 for use in the Indies derived from a discussion at the Dominican monastery of San Pablo, in Valladolid, an edifice of the previous generation, having been built by Juan and Simón de Colonia, two architects from Cologne, father and son, who had worked previously in Burgos. Palacios Rubios argued that the Spaniards had been allocated the Indies by God, just as Joshua had procured Canaan for the Jews. So “the King might very justly send men to ‘require those idolatrous Indians’ to hand over their land to him, for it had been given him by the Pope. If the Indians were reluctant to do so, then the King could justly wage war against them, and kill or enslave those captured in arms, as Joshua had treated the inhabitants of Canaan.” But those Indians who gave up their lands should be allowed to live on peacefully as vassals.25
Present at these discussions were Conchillos and Matienzo, the King’s confessor, as well as most of the Dominican monks of San Pablo.
By the “Requirement,” the indigenous people would be asked to recognize the Church of Rome and the Pope as supreme rulers of the world and, in the Pope’s name, the King and Queen Juana as “superiors” of these islands and the tierra firme. In addition, the Indians had to allow the faith to be preached to them. If that was not accepted, the Spaniards would calmly declare:
We shall take you and your wives and children, and make slaves of them and, as such, sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command, and we shall take away your goods and do all the damage and harm that we can, as it is right to do to vassals who do not obey and who refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we emphasize that any deaths and losses which may result from this are your fault … and we request the notary present to give us his testimony in writing and we ask the rest of those present to be witnesses of this requirement.26
The document began with a brief history of the world until the gift of the Americas by Pope Alexander VI to the Catholic Kings.
The “Requirement” gave the Spaniards on sweltering riverbanks in the Indies, standing before arrays of ill-armed men and women, or before forests in which they suspected armed “cannibals” were hiding, the illusion that they had agreed with a higher authority on any action that they might want to take. It was intended as a justification for all Spanish actions in the New World: conquest, enslavement, conversion.
But what action might they take in the conquered territory of La Española, whose population now seemed to be declining? In 1514, Rodrigo de Alburquerque, a methodical lawyer from Salamanca, with the treasurer, Pasamonte, to help him, set about making another general division of the land and people on the island. Alburquerque, a relation of the royal secretary Zapata, who had probably arranged the new appointment for him, had gone to La Española with Ovando in 1502 and had been the first commander of the fortress at La Concepción. Now he had a quite new role.
This new division by Alburquerque reflected the balance of power in Spain. King Fernando, for example, was allocated 1,000 Indians, the Viceroy Diego Colón 300, his wife, María de Toledo, the same, the Columbus brothers, Diego and Bartolomeo, 200 to 300 each, the new judges and other officials, 200 each, while all magistrates, procuradores, councillors, and other officials would have fewer. And so it was, though the King received 1,503 Indians, not 1,000, and, in addition, the King’s cousin, the courtier Hernando de Vega, Viceroy of Galicia and member of the Council of the Realm, received 300. Bishop Fonseca and Conchillos received 200 each. (They would obtain similar allocations in Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico.) No religious orders received Indians. Otherwise, the distribution in practice was as expected: there were altogether 738 properties, among which a little over 26,000 Indians were to be divided.27 This did not embrace all the Indians, since slaves constituted personal property and so were not included in the division. A decree of 1514 shows that there was some anxiety about the Spanish population of the island: 250 Castilians were offered free passage to, and maintenance for a time in, Santo Domingo.28
The Repartimiento did not affect the already conquered Indians. Overwork and the collapse of traditional agriculture were all playing a part in the decline of the indigenous population. The birth rate had fallen, and suicide—rendered easy by the drinking of the poisonous juice of the bitter yucca—also played a part. The destruction of the old polities was not to be ignored. It is not obvious that disease was a factor before 1518 (when the first serious epidemic, of smallpox, occurred). But perhaps small bouts of typhoid and tuberculosis had an effect. Moving the Tainos from a familiar old village to an unfamiliar new one was, of course, another cause of their loss of faith in their future. As in other empires, the deliberate destruction of the memories of the past seemed necessary for the Spanish triumph; it was all too successful.
It is true that many Taino girls did settle down with Spanish conquistadors, partly because there were so few European women on the island. The division of 1514 suggested that half the Spaniards had indigenous wives. Many of these naturally had mestizo children
.
Another destructive element was that the coming of cattle from Europe destroyed much native agriculture, for the newly imported animals were generally allowed to roam. It was with these considerations in mind, obviously, that Thomas More, in his Utopia, first published in 1516, wrote that “these placid creatures [sheep] that used to require so little food have now apparently developed a raging appetite and turned into man-eaters. Fields, houses, towns, everything goes down their throats.” Utopia was in theory set near Brazil. But it could have been anywhere in the New World.
Here was a demographic catastrophe for which the Spaniards have naturally been blamed. They were also blamed at the time, and by Spaniards. Thus Pedro de Córdoba, provincial of the Dominicans in La Española, declared: “People so gentle, so obedient and good have been kept in excessive and unaccustomed labors.… Pharaoh and his Egyptians treated the children of Israel less badly.”29 For a time, it seemed possible to compensate for the shortage of labor by the seizure of slaves from elsewhere. On January 6, 1514, Diego Colón, with the judges of Santo Domingo and other officials, decided to finance an expedition for slaves to the three islands of the Gigantes—that is, Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire, which on July 29, 1513, had been declared, like the Bahamas, “useless isles.” The voyage was organized by Jerónimo Grimaldi, a Genoese Sevillano, helped by Diego Caballero, from Sanlúcar de Barrameda and two other merchants, Juan de Ampiés and Lope de Bardeci (who acted as notary as well as royal administrator), though one judge, Marcelo de Villalobos, was also interested. Pedro de Salazar, experienced in slaving expeditions to the Bahamas, was named captain. The ships were crewed by sailors from Santo Domingo who answered an appeal by the town crier and were told to assemble at Salazar’s house. The King approved and even instructed his representatives to assist in the costs.30
The natives on the doomed islands at first received these expeditions in peace, but when the designs of the captains became known, they fought. This served them little, and most were captured. Two hundred were sent to La Española in August 1514; Captain Salazar remained in Curaçao, and in the following months, anywhere from five hundred to two thousand Indians were sent to Santo Domingo from these islands. Two-thirds died either in the crossing or on reaching their destination. Those who survived were mostly held on a large property that Grimaldi had bought in Santo Domingo, though a few were kept in the new building of the Casa de Contratación. They were sold by auction for up to 100 pesos a head. All were branded with letters on their faces by their buyers. Judge Vázquez de Ayllón was among those who bought them eagerly.31
Meanwhile, the opposition to the status quo in the New World had gained a new leader.
Bartolomé de las Casas, one of the most interesting Spaniards in the first fifty years after the discovery of the Americas, was a native of Seville. He was born about 1484;32 he was of converso extraction and was apparently a grandson of a certain Diego Calderón, who had been burned as a Jew in Seville in 1491.33 He was the son of that Pedro de las Casas who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage of 1493. Pedro had received, in the division of Alburquerque, a grant of seven naborías and fifty-three Indians.34 Bartolomé had interesting uncles, for they included Juan de Peñalosa, the courtier who had been asked, in 1492, to read out in Palos the decree enjoining the people there to serve with Colón; Francisco de Peñalosa, also a courtier and favored by Isabel, who had been chief of the military contingent on the second voyage of Columbus and was later killed in Africa; Diego de Peñalosa, a notary; and Luís de Peñalosa, a canon of the cathedral in Seville.
Bartolomé de las Casas attended the school of San Miguel in the latter city. After that, he went to the classes of Nebrija in the cathedral school and became “a good Latinist.”35 He was in Seville to see Columbus in 1493, on his first return from the Indies with his Indian prizes, adorned with gold and pearls, with their green parrots.36 He is also said to have enlisted in the militia charged to put down the Moorish rebellion in the Alpujarra Mountains.
Las Casas went to the New World in 1502 with Ovando, at the age of eighteen, accompanying his father (who was returning to a colony that he knew). It does not seem that he went in any way as a churchman. He may have been immediately concerned with mines, perhaps the mines nearest Santo Domingo, perhaps those richer ones in the province of Cibao.37 When he arrived, he later wrote, the settlers of Santo Domingo told him that all was going well in the island and that a recent war had brought them plenty of slaves. The news caused much enthusiasm on his boat.38
Las Casas probably did not take part in the murderous expedition against Anacoana in Jaragua, though he did later write that he was united to Diego Velázquez “by the friendship that we had in the past in that island.”39 He participated, however, in the summer of 1504 with Juan de Esquivel in the subjugation of Higuey: “All these things and others far removed from human nature I saw with my own eyes.”40 He also seems to have been among the fifty men whom Esquivel took with him to Saona to destroy the native monarch, King Cotubanamá. After that, he was for a time in the business of furnishing supplies of food and clothing to the settlers.
He left La Española in 1506, intending to take orders, and he was in Rome, no less, in early January 1507. There he saw a fiesta of flutes, as always celebrated on the thirtieth day of that month, “with great licentiousness, attended by men dressed as women, masked and dancing.…”41
Las Casas returned to Santo Domingo in 1509, by then a priest, probably with Diego Colón, for he wrote that he observed the departure of Nicuesa for the mainland. Perhaps for a time he was again concerned with agriculture on his father’s farm near the River Yasica. Later, possibly in 1510, he presided over a Mass at Concepción de la Vega: it was the first time in the Indies that a recently consecrated priest had celebrated his first Mass there, and for that reason, Diego Colón attended the occasion.42 Las Casas was friendly with Don Diego ever afterwards. He also made friends with the Dominicans who arrived in September 1510, and probably met Fray Pedro de Córdoba in Concepción in November. He was with Pánfilo de Narváez in Cuba in 1511 (see chapter 23).
Las Casas went from Cuba to Santo Domingo between August and September 1515 and then sailed for home on the Santa María de Socorro, the royal pilot Diego Rodríguez Pepiño’s vessel, in the company of Fray Gutierre de Ampudia, who had recently led a small mission of religious men to Cuba. He reached Seville on October 6 and, armed with a letter from Archbishop Deza, saw the King in Plasencia, which Fernando reached on November 28.43 Las Casas told the Catholic King that the Indians of the New World would all die unless something was done to save them. The senior secretary Conchillos tried to divert attention from the issue, and Bishop Fonseca supported him. The King, however, promised to see Las Casas again in Seville. With that “the apostle of the Indies,” as Las Casas soon became known, had to be satisfied.44 To have seen the King was anyway a great step forward.
It is impossible to know how much of the controversy now beginning as to how to treat the Indians was followed by the King himself. He had been present for part of the discussions in Burgos, but he had then continued his usual travels around Spain, as he and his wife had always done. For example, in 1510 he spent some months in Córdoba, and then he moved to Écija, Carmona, La Rinconada, and Seville, where he remained from late October to early December. Always he would have with him his trusted staff of secretaries, above all now Pérez de Almazán and Conchillos, as well as the councillors Zapata and Galíndez de Carvajal, and a few other advisers, such as Fonseca and Hernando de Vega. In these years, substantial payments were made to courtiers and others for distinct services, including a million maravedís a year to the Duke of Alba.45
Thanks to his courtiers, Fernando’s mind was kept principally on matters other than how to treat the Indians—his wars in Navarre or Italy, for instance.
Fernando’s failure to have an heir by his second wife, Germaine, also caused him distress. In fact, Germaine gave birth to a son in 1509, but he lived only for a few hours. Neither
Fernando nor anyone in Spain relished the idea of the throne of the united country, which he and Isabel had established and to which Granada had been added, passing to a foreign dynasty, the Habsburgs. Yet his only two male grandchildren, Charles and Fernando, the children of the incapable Juana, were of that imperial family.
Fernando had also to consider the war in Africa, where Cardinal Cisneros had mounted a major campaign to expand Spanish influence in the western Maghreb. That was a continuation of his desire to fulfill the terms of Queen Isabel’s will, which called on Spain to establish her presence not in America but in Africa. In May 1509 at Ascension, the Cardinal, advised by a Genoese commander, Girolamo Viannello, entered Oran with an army, having found both the money and the men for the expedition in territory that belonged to his archbishopric. The chief captain was Pedro Navarro, previously known as the conqueror of Vélez de la Gomera, another strongpoint on the coast of North Africa. Entering Oran, the Cardinal joyfully recited Psalm 115: “Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.…”46 There is a fine fresco depicting the scene by Juan de Borgoña in the Mozarabic chapel in the cathedral of Toledo. Afterwards, Diego Fernández de Córdoba, a kinsman of the Gran Capitán, took over as commander of the new possession.
Cisneros returned home with many Moorish slaves as well as a troop of camels laden with gold and silver, not to mention a collection of Arabic books, some dealing with astrology and medicine, as well as some baths, and also keys and candlesticks that had been used in the mosque. Some of these things can still be seen in the church of San Ildefonso in Alcalá.47 But a defeat followed at Las Gerbes, where the son and heir of the Duke of Alba was killed. Fernando was tempted by the idea of going himself to Africa to avenge the setback. But he did not, being still far more concerned with Italy. He never devised a strategy for the colonization of North Africa and continually argued with Cisneros over the latter’s plan to conquer the Maghreb up to the edge of the Sahara.
