Antonio de Montesinos
The Dominican friar who, as Las Casas tells it, preached at Santo Domingo in Advent 1511 against the Spanish settlers’ treatment of the Indians.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, who calls him fray Antón Montesino, describes him as the chief preacher among the Dominicans of Hispaniola after their vicar, sharp in rebuking vice and forceful in the pulpit. The friars agreed on a sermon about the treatment of the Indians, all signed it, and the vicar, Pedro de Córdoba, ordered Montesino to preach it on the fourth Sunday of Advent. By Las Casas’s account he asked the settlers by what right they held the Indians in servitude and whether these were not men with rational souls, and the governor and royal officials afterwards demanded that he retract (Las Casas, History of the Indies 3.3–4). Las Casas’s book places these events in 1511 (Las Casas, History of the Indies 3.1). See Rome Declares the Peoples of the Americas Free.
In the timeline
- 2 June 1537, firm dateRome Declares the Peoples of the Americas Free
In the bull Sublimis Deus Pope Paul III declares that the peoples of the Americas are truly human, capable of the Christian faith, and not to be enslaved or deprived of their property. Las Casas and the Crown’s own laws show that enslavement went on.