Essay On Bartolome De Las Casas

People in the 16th Century.
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the New World it brought huge wealth to the Spanish Monarch. The conquest that that followed reached out over central and southern America and brought large amounts of gold and silver with it. However, along with these rich lands that the Spanish took over the native inhabitants of the New World also lived. Instead of been able to welcome the Spanish conquistadors, their land was taken and soaked of its riches, along with their population significantly decreasing due to massacres that the Spanish forced on them. The remaining survivors were put into forced labour where they worked in the mines and on the land.
Bartolome de las Casas saw this at first hand when he travelled

This is an important matter as Las Casas was one of the first people to turn against the methods of spreading the Christian religion throughout the 16th century. Although Bartolome de las Casas did not stop the treatment that occurred to the New World people, he did debate and raise the issue of forced labour, religious ideologies and ‘just war’ that led to this treatment of the natives, as a result of Spanish exploration in the 16th

In Hispaniola where he first set foot he stated that the Spanish ‘forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant woman who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces; slicing open their bellies with swords… cut an individual’s head from their body and on occasion running through a mother and her baby with a single thrust of their swords’ . This gives a good indication of the cruel ways in which they treated the natives. However the question must be answered, why did the Spanish treat the natives this way? Once the Spanish reached the Indies the first thing they had on their mind was to take over the lands in order to gain wealth and power from the native people as they believed they were superior to the indigenous beliefs of the Indians. The Spanish conquistadors were also ordered by Queen Isabella to spread the word of Christianity to the natives while taking over the lands, however this is where las Casas disagreed with the type of force that was used and suggested that ‘war is not a suitable means of spreading Christ’s glory and the truth of the gospel, but rather for making the Christian name hateful and detestable to those who suffer the disasters of war. So war against the Indians, which we call the Spanish conquistas is