Rome Declares the Peoples of the Americas Free

Bartolomé de Las Casas tells how the Dominican friars of Hispaniola agreed on a sermon, signed it, and gave it to Antonio de Montesinos to preach on the fourth Sunday of Advent before the governor, the king’s officials and the lawyers of Santo Domingo. In Las Casas’s telling the preacher asked them by what right they held the Indians in so cruel a servitude and made war on peoples who had lived peaceably in their own lands, and whether these were not men with rational souls. The leading settlers demanded that he retract, Las Casas says, and none, as far as he later learned, was converted (Las Casas, History of the Indies 3.3–4). His book places these events in 1511 (Las Casas, History of the Indies 3.1).

On 2 June 1537 Paul III issued the bull Sublimis Deus from Rome (Paul III, Sublimis Deus dating clause (Latin text, p. 430)). It argues that since Christ told his preachers to teach all nations, all are capable of receiving the faith, and it blames the enemy of the human race for inspiring those who say that the Indians of the west and the south may be treated like dumb brutes, as if incapable of the faith. The pope declares that “the Indians are truly men”, able to understand the Catholic faith and eager to receive it; that they and all peoples whom Christians may later discover “are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ”; that they are not to be enslaved; and that anything done to the contrary is null. They are to be converted by preaching and by the example of a good life (Paul III, Sublimis Deus paragraphs 1–4).

Five years later the New Laws of Charles V ordered that no Indian be made a slave for any cause, whether war, rebellion or ransom, and that those held without title be freed (New Laws of the Indies fol. 5v). They also forbade new grants of Indians to settlers and ordered existing grants to pass to the Crown at the holder’s death (New Laws of the Indies fol. 7r). Las Casas, finishing his Short Account in December 1542, wrote that the killing and oppression were then at their height in every region where Spaniards were (Las Casas, Short Account pp. 411–412). In notes added in 1546 he says that the settlers resisted the new laws, in Peru by open revolt, and that where they had ceased to kill by the sword they killed slowly by forced service (Las Casas, Short Account pp. 413–414).

In 1550 Charles V summoned theologians and jurists to Valladolid to hear Las Casas and the royal chronicler Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (Las Casas, Disputation with Sepúlveda title page). According to the record that Las Casas printed, Sepúlveda contended that the conquests of the Indies were lawful, and Las Casas that they had been and could only be tyrannical, unjust and wicked (Las Casas, Disputation with Sepúlveda title page). Las Casas summarizes his opponent’s case in two claims: that the wars made on the Indians were just, and that the Indians were bound to submit to the Spaniards as the less understanding to the more prudent (Las Casas, Disputation with Sepúlveda argument (opening summary)).