History of the Indies
The history of the first decades of Spanish rule in the Caribbean and on the mainland by Bartolomé de Las Casas, who lived through them. Book 3 gives his account of the sermon of Antonio de Montesinos.
Las Casas gathered material for the History over many years and, according to his translator Francis A. MacNutt (Bartholomew de Las Casas, 1909), began to put it into its present form about 1552 or 1553, relying on memory where his papers had been lost. It remained in manuscript until this edition of 1875. He was living in the Indies in the years he describes in book 3, and he tells of the Dominicans’ protest as one who knew the men; of the effect of the sermon he reports what he “afterwards understood”.
It is the principal narrative of the sermon of Antonio de Montesinos, and it was written decades afterwards. The words he gives the preacher are his reconstruction, though he says that the sermon had been written out and signed by all the friars beforehand. The History is a participant’s memoir with a cause to plead, the same cause as the A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.
Cited in
- 2 June 1537, firm date