Justified True Belief

(●) A slave-owning colonist who changed his mind, and then spent fifty years telling his own king that the conquest of the Americas was a crime. + In 1550 the most powerful monarchy on earth stopped, called its best minds to a hall in Valladolid, and asked out loud whether the wars it was fighting in America were just. Probably no empire had ever done such a thing before, and few have done it since. The man who forced the question was a Dominican friar in his middle sixties who had once owned Indians himself. The Dominicans were an order of friars founded to preach and to study, and they turn up at every hinge of his life. For Christian readers he matters for a reason that has nothing to do with his temper, which was famously bad, or his arithmetic, which was famously unreliable. He matters because he is the hardest test case Christians have for their own claim that every human being bears the image of God. The men he argued against were not atheists. They were baptized Catholics with university degrees, and they had worked out a careful theological case that the peoples of the Caribbean and Mexico were natural inferiors whom God had made to serve. Las Casas told them that this was not a difficult question, that the Indians were rational human beings with souls and property and kings of their own, and that everything taken from them had to go back. He lost most of the political fights and won the argument. One detail is worth keeping. He did not begin as a hero. He arrived in the Indies at seventeen as a settler, took his share of forced Indian labour, held it for twelve years, and was once refused absolution by a Dominican confessor for holding it. Absolution is the forgiveness a priest declares over a penitent at the end of confession, and to be refused it was to be shut out of communion and left, on the teaching every man in that room believed, in real danger. Las Casas went and found a priest who would absolve him instead.

(●) 1484 AD: Born in Seville, into a household that already had money riding on Columbus. + Seville in the 1480s was the port through which the new world arrived in the old, and the family of Las Casas was the sort that noticed. They were merchants, probably of converso stock, which is to say descended from Jews who had come into the church, a background that in that city meant both respectability and a certain permanent watchfulness. His father Pedro sailed with Columbus on the second voyage in 1493 and came home six years later with a modest fortune and, by the custom of the day, an enslaved Taíno boy who was given to young Bartolomé as a servant. The Taíno were the people of Hispaniola and the islands around it, farmers and fishermen living under their own chiefs, and they were the first people the Spaniards met in the new world. Queen Isabella, when she learned that her new subjects were being sold in Spanish markets, ordered them freed and shipped home. The boy went back. Bartolomé was still a boy himself, and the question that would take the rest of his life had already walked through his father’s house. For a long time the date of his birth was given as 1474, which is what the older books say and what his nineteenth-century biographers repeat. In the 1970s Helen Rand Parish and Harold Weidman found a deposition he had given in a lawsuit in the Archive of the Indies in which he stated his own age, and the arithmetic moved his birth forward a decade, to 1484 and most probably to the eleventh of November. Every date that used to be calculated from 1474 shifts with it: he was seventeen when he first crossed the Atlantic, not twenty-seven, and the long conversion took ten years off a young man rather than ten years off a middle-aged one.

(●) 1502 AD: He sailed for Hispaniola and became, for twelve years, exactly what he would later spend his life denouncing. + He crossed in the great fleet of Nicolás de Ovando, the new governor, and settled into the life of a colonist on Hispaniola, the island that is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic. What that meant in practice was an encomienda: a grant of a named group of Indians to a Spanish settler, who could require their labour and their tribute and who owed them, in return, protection and instruction in the Christian faith. It was not legally slavery, and the lawyers who drafted it were sincere about the difference. On the ground, in the gold placers, which were river gravels washed by hand a basket at a time for flecks of metal, and in the cassava fields, the difference was very hard to find. The population of Hispaniola was collapsing while he farmed there. He was ordained a priest, at Rome in c. 1507 by the usual reckoning, and in 1510 he sang his first Mass at Concepción de la Vega, the first new priest to do so anywhere in the Americas. He remembered the day mostly for its embarrassments. It was smelting season, so the whole island had come into town with its gold, and the congregation pressed coins on him, which he handed over to his godfather. There was, he noted, not a drop of wine to be had on the entire island, because no ship had come from Castile in months. In 1513 he went as chaplain on the conquest of Cuba under Pánfilo de Narváez, and was paid for it with another grant of Indians. At a village called Caonao the Spaniards, who had just been fed by the villagers, drew their swords on them for no reason he could ever afterwards reconstruct. He wrote the scene down forty years later and his account still reads like a man describing something he cannot stop seeing.

(●) 1514 AD: Preparing a Pentecost sermon, he read four verses about stolen bread and gave away everything he owned. + The seed had been planted three years earlier and he had trodden on it. In Advent of 1511, in the thatched church at Santo Domingo, a Dominican named Antonio de Montesinos had preached to the assembled colony on a text from John: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The whole Dominican community had written the sermon together and signed it, so that no one could pretend it was one hot-headed friar. Montesinos asked the men in front of him by what right they held these people in such cruel servitude, and then, in the words Las Casas set down in his Historia de las Indias, Book III, chapter 4 (Stafford Poole’s translation), he asked: "Are they not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?" The colonists demanded a retraction. They got a second sermon instead, and a warning that the sacraments would be refused to anyone who kept his Indians. Las Casas heard all this, argued with a Dominican who refused him absolution on exactly those grounds, and then went and found a confessor who was less strict. What finally undid him was ordinary parish work. In 1514, in Cuba, he was preparing a sermon for Pentecost and searching for a text, and he came on the thirty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus, a book of the Latin Bible he preached from, which Protestant Bibles print outside the canon or leave out. The verses are these, in the old English of the King James Apocrypha: "The bread of the needy is their life; he that defraudeth him thereof is a man of blood. He that taketh away his neighbour’s living, slayeth him; and he that defraudeth the labourer of his hire is a bloodshedder." He had read that sort of thing his whole life. This time he did the sum. The bread on his table was the bread of the people dying in his fields, and the offering he was about to make at the altar was bought with it. Nor does the point hang on a book some Christians leave out: Scripture says the same thing in the books everyone keeps (Deuteronomy 24:14; James 5:4). What broke him, in the end, was not an argument. It was a text he could not get around. He went to the governor, Diego Velázquez, and handed back his Indians. Velázquez thought he had lost his mind and offered to hold the grant in trust for a few years in case he came to his senses. On the feast of the Assumption that August he stood up in front of the colonists and told them plainly that everything they held in the Indies was held by theft and that their confessions were worthless while they kept it. He was not yet thirty, and he had just made himself the most unpopular man in the Caribbean.

(●) 1522 AD: His model Christian colony was destroyed, and he vanished into a Dominican cloister for ten years. + The campaign he began that August in Cuba took him back across the Atlantic, and its first decade was spent at court, where it went better than anyone expected. He talked his way in to King Ferdinand a few weeks before the old king died, worked with Cardinal Cisneros, the regent, who was governing Spain in the king’s place, and in 1516 was given a formal royal title, Protector of the Indians, which came with a salary and almost no power. He drafted memorandum after memorandum of remedies. A commission of Jeronymite friars was sent out to reform the islands and achieved nothing at all. So he tried to prove his case by building it. In 1520 the crown granted him a stretch of the Venezuelan coast at Cumaná on which he would plant a settlement of ordinary Spanish farmers who would live peaceably beside the Indians and win them by example, with no soldiers and no slave raids. It was a serious plan, and it was wrecked by the people he had to partner with to finance it. Spanish slavers working the same coast provoked the Indians; his own men disobeyed him; and early in 1522, while he was away at sea, the settlement was burned and several Spaniards were killed. He heard about it on foot, crossing Hispaniola. Resting under a tree in the afternoon heat, he half woke to travellers telling his companions the news from Santo Domingo, which was that the priest Las Casas and his whole colony had been murdered by the Indians at Cumaná. His friends were still insisting that this was impossible when he sat up and learned that the rest of it was true. He blamed himself, not for the idea but for the company he had kept to fund it: he had gone into business with men who wanted profit, and God had let the thing fall down. In 1522 he asked the Dominicans for the habit and made his profession, the vows that bound him to the order for life, the following year. The colonists celebrated. Las Casas notes drily that they attended his entry into the cloister with the satisfaction they would have brought to his funeral. He stayed in, largely silent, for about ten years, reading theology and law and beginning the enormous history of the Indies that occupied the rest of his life.

(●) 1537 AD: In a province the Spaniards called the Land of War, he proved that preaching could do what armies had not. + Out of the cloister came a book, De unico vocationis modo, arguing that God has appointed one way and only one to bring human beings to faith: convince the mind by reasons and draw the will gently. Not one soldier. The colonists in Guatemala heard the theory and made him a bet. There was a mountainous province called Tuzulutlán, so fierce and so unconquered that the Spaniards had nicknamed it the Land of War. Subdue that, they said, by preaching, and we will admit we were wrong. He took the bet, on one condition: that no Spaniard except his friars be allowed to set foot there. What happened next comes down to us mainly from Antonio de Remesal, the Dominican who wrote the province’s history eighty years afterwards from papers in the archives at Guatemala, and it is a story a novelist would be embarrassed to invent. Las Casas and three Dominican brothers put the Christian story into couplets in Quiché, the language spoken in those mountains, set them to music, taught them to four Christian Indian traders who regularly went up into the mountains, and sent the traders in to sing. The songs took. The local lord asked for the men who had written them. Within a few years there were churches in the Land of War, and no garrison, and the sinister old name was officially changed to Vera Paz, True Peace. It was in these same years that Pope Paul III issued the bull Sublimis Deus, on 2 June 1537, after Dominicans from the Indies had carried the question to Rome. A bull is a formal decree of a pope, and it takes its name from the bulla, the lead seal that hung on the document. The language of this one is flat and final: the Indians are truly men, capable of the faith, and are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and if anyone does so anyway the act is null and of no effect. The bull grounds the whole thing on the Great Commission, the charge the risen Christ gave his followers to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19), and on the observation that Christ said "all nations" without exception.

(●) 1542 AD: He read the atrocities aloud at court, got the laws he wanted, was made Bishop of Chiapas two years later, and watched the key clause revoked in 1545. + Back in Spain, he compiled the case file. The Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, is a short book with no argument in it at all: province by province, island by island, it is simply a list of what the Spaniards had done, much of it witnessed by the author. He finished it in 1542, dedicated it to the young prince who would become Philip II, and read from it at court. On 20 November 1542 the emperor Charles V signed the New Laws, which forbade the enslavement of Indians outright, forbade new grants of encomienda, and provided that existing grants would die with their holders rather than pass to their heirs. It was the abolition of the system on a thirty-year timetable. The colonists rioted. In Peru the encomenderos, which is simply the word for the men who held those grants, rose in open rebellion under Gonzalo Pizarro and killed the viceroy sent to enforce the laws; in Mexico the laws were received and quietly not applied. In 1545 the crown revoked the inheritance clause, which was the clause that mattered. The encomienda survived him by centuries. Meanwhile he had been made a bishop. He was offered the wealthy see of Cuzco in Peru, a see being the district a bishop governs, and he turned it down for Chiapas, a poor diocese on the Guatemalan frontier; he was consecrated at Seville on Passion Sunday, 30 March 1544, and sailed with forty-odd friars. His diocese greeted him with a boycott. He answered with a Confesionario, a short manual of instructions to his priests, directing them to refuse absolution to any conquistador or encomendero who would not first free his Indians and make restitution of what he had taken, and to require the promise in writing before a notary. Nothing he ever wrote caused more fury. Copies were seized, he was denounced to the Council of the Indies for denying the king’s sovereignty, and in 1547 he left America for the last time, resigning the bishopric three years later.

(●) 1550 AD: At Valladolid he answered, over five sessions, the claim that the Indians were slaves by nature, and he went on writing until his death in 1566. + His opponent was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, royal chronicler, translator of Aristotle, a Latinist so elegant that his admirers called him the Spanish Livy, after the great historian of Rome. Sepúlveda had written a dialogue defending the conquests, and Las Casas had already got it blocked from publication by having the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá examine its doctrine. The emperor, faced with a dispute this loud, suspended new expeditions and convened a junta at Valladolid, a panel of theologians and royal councillors summoned to settle a single question, and the question was whether wars of conquest against the Indians could be just. Sepúlveda opened with four reasons for making war on them. There was the gravity of the Indians’ sins, and above all their idolatry. There was the rudeness of their barbarous natures, which obliged them to serve men of higher nature such as the Spaniards. There was the ease of preaching to a people already beaten. And there was the duty to stop human sacrifice and cannibalism. The second of those is the one that mattered, and it came from Aristotle, who had taught that some human beings are slaves by nature, born to be ruled as tools are used. Las Casas then read his own defence to the junta over five sessions. The answer he gave has two halves that are still worth separating. On the facts, he had spent the better part of fifty years in the Indies and Sepúlveda had never crossed the Atlantic, and he buried him in detail: cities, laws, crafts, schools, temples, marriage customs, a whole comparative ethnography of peoples whom his opponent had described from books. Ethnography is the patient description of how a people actually lives, its courts and crops and marriages set down as they are rather than as a theory needs them to be. On the principle, he denied that Aristotle’s natural slave was a category into which whole nations could be sorted at all. As for the human sacrifice, he did not excuse it; he answered that error in religion is corrected by teaching, that a people cannot be punished by a foreign power for sins against a God they have not yet heard of, and that Spain had killed incomparably more innocents in forty years than the Aztecs had killed in a century. No verdict was ever published. Both sides claimed victory, which usually means neither got one, though the licence to publish Sepúlveda’s dialogue in Spain was never granted. Las Casas spent his last sixteen years in the Dominican college of San Gregorio at Valladolid, writing, lobbying, and acting as a one-man appeals court for anyone with a grievance from the Indies. He died in the convent of Atocha in Madrid in July 1566, in his eighty-second year. His will, drawn up in that city two years before, had already set down the verdict he wanted left behind him: that God would visit his wrath on Spain for the blood-stained riches of the Indies unless she did much penance.

What He Taught

(T1) The peoples of the Indies are true human beings, and no one’s unbelief makes him another man’s property. + It sounds too obvious to need saying, which is a measure of how much work it took to say it. The men Las Casas argued with were not denying that Indians were human in some biological sense. They were saying something more careful and much more dangerous: that these were defective humans, rational in the way children are rational, incapable of governing themselves, and therefore rightly governed by their betters, for their own good. The name for this is Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery, and it is exactly what it sounds like. Aristotle had argued in the Politics that some people are born to be ruled the way a body is ruled by the soul, and that for such people slavery is not an injury but their proper place. Sixteenth-century scholars read Aristotle the way modern scholars read a peer-reviewed journal, and Sepúlveda’s case at Valladolid ran straight through this doctrine: the Indians are barbarians, barbarians are natural slaves, therefore subjugating them is a kindness. That little argument has two moving parts, and it is worth naming them, because he went after both. The particular claim, that the Indians are barbarians, is what logicians call the minor premise. The general rule it feeds into, that barbarians are natural slaves, is the major premise. Las Casas attacked the minor premise with fifty years of eyewitness detail and then attacked the major premise outright. His Apologética historia is nine hundred pages of Aztec and Inca and Taíno civic life laid alongside the Greeks and Romans and the ancient Spaniards, and the point of it is a comparison anyone can run: if these are the marks of a barbarian, then Europe’s own ancestors were barbarians, and Rome would have been entitled to enslave them. Underneath sits the Christian claim that made the whole argument possible. One man was made in the image of God and every nation on earth came out of him (Genesis 1:27; Acts 17:26). There is no second, lesser making.

(Q) "They are likewise of a clean, unspoiled, and vivacious intellect, very capable, and receptive to every good doctrine; most prompt to accept our Holy Catholic Faith, to be endowed with virtuous customs; and they have as little difficulty with such things as any people created by God in the world." + Source: Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, opening section (MacNutt translation, 1909). The sentence is doing legal work, not paying a compliment. If the Indians are "receptive to every good doctrine," then the claim that they must be conquered before they can be taught has nothing left to stand on (T3).

(T2) What the Spaniards call conquest is robbery and murder wearing a Christian name. + There was a piece of paper called the Requerimiento, drafted by a royal jurist in 1513, which Spanish captains were required to read aloud before attacking a settlement. It explained the creation of the world, the authority of the pope, and the grant of the Indies to the crown of Castile, and it invited the listeners to submit; if they refused, the deaths that followed would be their own fault and not the king’s. It was read in Spanish, often from a ship offshore, sometimes to empty villages before dawn, occasionally to people who were asleep. Las Casas said he did not know whether to laugh at it or weep over it. That document is the whole of his case in miniature. The conquest was not lawless. It was intensely, elaborately legal, and the legality was the problem, because it gave men a set of forms to fill in that made what they were doing feel authorised. He answered by refusing the word. There was no such thing as a conquest, only invasion, robbery, and killing, and calling it evangelisation added blasphemy to the account. The distinction mattered practically: if the wars were unjust, every title derived from them was void, every slave taken in them was free, and every fortune made from them was owed back. He is often accused of hating his own country, and the accusation misreads him. He argued in front of Spanish kings, in Spanish, on the assumption that Spanish justice was real and could be appealed to. Nobody bothers appealing to a court he thinks is a fraud.

(Q) "Among these gentle sheep, gifted by their Maker with the above qualities, the Spaniards entered as soon as they knew them, like wolves, tigers, and lions which had been starving for many days, and since forty years they have done nothing else; nor do they otherwise at the present day, than outrage, slay, afflict, torment, and destroy them with strange and new, and divers kinds of cruelty, never before seen, nor heard of, nor read of." + Source: Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, opening section (MacNutt translation, 1909). The sentence that made the book notorious across Europe. Note who the wolves are: not pagans, not Turks, but Christians, arriving among people the same paragraph has just called the Maker’s own sheep.

(T3) There is one way to bring anyone to faith: persuade the mind with reasons and draw the will gently. + This is the thesis of De unico vocationis modo, and the Latin title says it exactly: de unico, concerning the one and only, vocationis modo, way of calling. Divine providence, he argued, instituted a single method for drawing all peoples everywhere and in every age to a living faith, and it works on the two things a person actually has, the understanding and the will. You give the understanding reasons it can follow. You attract the will by kindness, patience, and a life it can see. Anything else produces a frightened man who says the words, which is not a convert. The argument is not sentimental, and it is worth seeing why. A forced profession is worthless because faith is an act of the will, so coercion cannot produce the thing it is aiming at; it can only produce a counterfeit that hardens the person against the real thing later. That is why he cared so much about the order of operations. His opponents said: conquer them first, then preach, because a subdued people listens. He said: preach first, and if they receive it they will come under the crown freely, and if they do not receive it they are still not yours. He also staked his reputation on it in public, which is rarer than holding the opinion. The Land of War was the test, and four friars with a handful of songs in the Quiché tongue won a province that Spanish arms had failed to take. It is fair to say the experiment was small, that Verapaz later came under ordinary colonial administration anyway, and that one province does not prove a universal rule. It is also fair to say that he was the only man in the argument who offered to be tested.

(Q) "Once they have begun to learn of matters pertaining to faith, they are so importunate to know them, and in frequenting the sacraments and divine service of the Church, that to tell the truth, the clergy have need to be endowed of God with the gift of pre-eminent patience to bear with them." + Source: Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, opening section (MacNutt translation, 1909). A rare joke in a book with almost none in it: the new Christians ask so many questions that the priests need supernatural patience. It is also evidence, offered in the middle of a legal brief. People who have to be conquered before they will listen do not pester the clergy.

(T4) Spain’s only title in the Indies is the preaching of the gospel, and what was taken beyond it must be given back. + In 1493 Pope Alexander VI had granted the newly found lands to Ferdinand and Isabella. Las Casas never denied that grant, which surprises modern readers who expect an anti-imperialist. He accepted it, and then read it with a lawyer’s attention to its purpose, which is where his case gets its force. In the Thirty Propositions he submitted to the Council of the Indies, the chain runs like this: the pope’s charge is the salvation of souls, so he may assign a Christian prince to see that the gospel is preached in a region, but the assignment exists for the preaching and for nothing else. Native kings hold their authority by just title and may not be deposed. Neither idolatry nor any other sin gives a foreign Christian power the right to seize their lands or punish their subjects. Whatever revenue comes to the crown comes as a by-product, never as the point. Restitution is the sharp end of it, and it is why the Confesionario caused more anger than the atrocity stories ever did. Everyone knew the conquest was violent. What the manual said was that the violence had a price attached, payable now, by named men, to named people, in the presence of a notary, and that until it was paid a priest was to withhold absolution. Zacchaeus stood up in his own house and offered fourfold (Luke 19:8), and Las Casas simply held the encomenderos of Chiapas to the same standard. He held himself to it too. He spent his last years pressing the crown to restore the Inca line in Peru and compensate what had been taken there, and he was still writing about it in the year he died.

(Q) "I invoke all the hierarchies and choirs of angels, all the saints of the Celestial Court, all the inhabitants of the globe, and especially those who may live after me, to witness that I free my conscience of all that has been done; and that I have fully exposed all these woes to his Majesty; and that if he abandons the government of the Indies to the tyranny of the Spaniards, they will all be lost and depopulated." + Source: Las Casas, closing address to the junta at Valladolid, 1550 or 1551 (MacNutt translation, 1909). He is about sixty-six and speaking to the most learned assembly his country could gather. Notice whom he calls as witnesses: the angels, the saints, everyone alive, and then the people who will be born after he is dead. That last clause is a man deliberately putting his case on the record for a court that has not convened yet.

(Q) "It has brought great infamy on the name of Jesus Christ and of the Christian religion, entirely hindering the spread of the faith and irreparably injuring the souls and bodies of those innocent peoples. I believe that because of these impious and ignominious acts, perpetrated unjustly, tyrannously, and barbarously upon them, God will visit His wrath and ire upon Spain for her share, great or small, in the blood-stained riches, obtained by theft and usurpation, accompanied by such slaughter and annihilation of those peoples, unless she does much penance." + Source: Las Casas, his last will and testament, Madrid, 1564 (MacNutt translation, 1909). Dictated at seventy-nine, with two years left to live, by a man who knew exactly what a will is for. The first sentence is the one to sit with. His deepest charge against the conquest was never that it was cruel, though he had catalogued the cruelty for fifty years. It was that it was killing the mission: "The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you" (Romans 2:24). Take that charge seriously and the rest follows, because what the conquest was spending was not only Indian lives. It was the credit of the gospel among the people who lived through it.

What Came of His Fight

(†) The theologians of Salamanca took up the question he was raising, and out of their answer came the beginning of international law. + The eyewitness material coming back from the Indies landed on the desk of Francisco de Vitoria, the Dominican who held the chief chair of theology at Salamanca and the founder of what historians call the School of Salamanca. Here was a professor with no stake in the Caribbean at all, working from the reports in front of him. In 1539 Vitoria delivered a relectio, a formal public lecture reviewing a year’s teaching, under the title De Indis, On the Indians. He worked through every title Spain had claimed and dismissed most of them: the emperor is not lord of the whole world, the pope has no temporal power over unbelievers, discovery gives no title to land that already has owners, and refusing to accept the faith is not a cause for war. The Indians, he concluded, were veri domini, true owners, of their lands and goods before the Spaniards arrived and after. What Vitoria built on that is the part that outlived the quarrel. If Christians and unbelievers alike hold real rights, then there must be a law binding between peoples who share no religion and no sovereign, a ius gentium, a law of nations, grounded in the nature human beings have in common. Francisco Suárez developed it; Hugo Grotius, a Dutch Protestant lawyer writing eighty years later, built his own law of war and peace on the same footing, and modern international law traces its line back through them. It is a strange and cheering fact that the discipline which now judges empires was worked out by Catholic friars in the middle of the age of conquest, prompted by the reports their own brethren were sending home from the Indies. The same current runs through the church’s own acts. Paul III’s Sublimis Deus in 1537 had already settled the doctrinal question in Rome: the Indians are truly men, they are not to be deprived of liberty or property, and contrary acts are void. The New Laws of 1542 wrote a version of it into Spanish statute. Neither stopped the encomienda, and it would be sentimental to pretend otherwise. Both put on the record, permanently, what the church had said when the money was on the other side.

(†) He is the standing answer to the claim that nobody back then knew any better. + The most common defence of historical atrocity is that everybody thought that way at the time, and it is worth being honest about how much weight that defence can bear. Sometimes it bears a good deal. In the case of the Spanish conquest it bears none, and Las Casas is the reason. The moral case was made, in public, in the language and the categories of the men who were doing it, in their own lifetime, by one of them, to their faces, and the case was heard at the highest level and partly enacted into law. Whatever else the conquistadors were, they were not men without an alternative on offer. That is why he keeps turning up wherever Christians argue about whether their faith licensed the conquest or indicted it. The honest answer is that it did both, in different hands, at the same time, out of the same Bible. One thing has to be added to that, though, and it is the thing that decides the question: the indictment was the better reading of the Bible, and plenty of men alive at the time knew it. The Short Account was translated into Dutch, French, English, German and Latin within fifty years and used as propaganda by every rival Spain had, which is a fact about those rivals rather than about the book; its author wrote it for his own prince, in Spanish, to be acted upon, and it was. The church has gone on reckoning with him. His cause for canonization has been opened and he carries the title Servant of God, which is the first formal step on the long road to being declared a saint. The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, who entered the Dominicans himself late in life, spent years on him and published the result as Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ, a title that says where he thought Las Casas had found Christ and where the church still has to look for him. Twentieth-century popes have cited the Salamanca theologians when the church speaks about the rights of peoples, and the road from Sublimis Deus to modern Catholic social teaching runs directly through the argument Las Casas started.

(†) Where he fell short: he proposed African slaves as a remedy, and he counted the dead like a prosecutor. + Two things on his own record need saying at full strength, and the first is the graver. - The African slaves. In the memoranda he pressed on the court between 1516 and 1518, looking for any arrangement that would get the Indians off the mines, Las Casas proposed that Spanish settlers be licensed to import African slaves instead. He did not invent the Atlantic trade, which the Portuguese had been running for seventy years and which was already reaching the Caribbean; his suggestion was one item in a long list and it was probably not decisive. None of that is the point. He proposed it, and it was wrong, and he is the one who said so. Writing his Historia de las Indias decades later he set it down in the third person, as though prosecuting himself: "The cleric Las Casas first gave this opinion that license should be granted to bring negro slaves to these countries [the Indies] without realising with what injustice the Portuguese captured and enslaved them, and afterwards, not for everything in the world would he have offered it, for he always held that they were made slaves by injustice and tyranny, the same reasoning applying to them as to the Indians." He added that he feared neither his ignorance in the matter nor his good intention would excuse him before the judgment of God (Historia de las Indias, Book III, chapter 129, MacNutt translation, 1909). The passage is his, unforced, written when nobody was accusing him, and as far as the record shows his enemies never raised it against him, because it had not occurred to them that there was anything to raise. He saw the principle, in the end, better than his century did. He simply saw it late, and at other people’s expense. - The arithmetic. The Short Account says twelve million dead and more in places, and the numbers cannot be defended. Modern estimates of the population of Hispaniola in 1492 run from a few hundred thousand to a few million, with the collapse driven mainly by smallpox and measles, which no one in the sixteenth century understood. William Prescott gave the verdict in his History of the Conquest of Mexico, and it is fair: "The wild extravagance of his numerical estimates is of itself sufficient to shake confidence in the accuracy of his statements generally." Prescott added the sentence that matters just as much, that the naked truth was too startling in itself to demand the aid of exaggeration. Fair too is the related charge that his picture of the Indians as uniformly gentle lambs, true enough of the Taíno villages he first knew, was stretched to cover peoples of the mainland for whom it was not true at all. The catastrophe was real and his eyewitness reports of particular atrocities have held up; the totals were an advocate’s totals, and they handed his opponents an easy way to dismiss everything else he said. It is a useful warning for anyone who argues for a good cause: an exaggerated number is not a stronger argument, it is a loaded weapon left where the other side can pick it up. Neither item touches the substance of what he taught, and both are in the record because he put them there. A man who writes down his own worst advice in a book he expects to outlive him is not a man who needs defending from it.