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‘Are These Not Also Men?’: The Indians' Humanity and Capacity for Spanish Civilisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Patricia Seed
Patricia Seed
Affiliation:
Associate Professer of History at Rice University, Houston.
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Extract

When on an Advent Sunday morning in 1511 Fray Antonio Montesinos uttered the phrase ‘Are these [Indians] not also men?’ he ignited a political controversy that would rage in Spain for the next four decades. And the continuing fall-out of that fiery speech still has the potential to inflame scholarly tempers and spark heated contests nearly five hundred years later. At stake for Spaniards of the sixteenth century was the way the inhabitants of the New World were to be treated. At issue for subsequent historians has been how that Spanish civilisation's treatment of the natives in the New World is to be assessed.

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Commentary
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Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , October 1993 , pp. 629 - 652
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 Hanke, Lewis, The Spanish Struggle for Justice (Philadelphia, 1949)Google Scholar; Carreño, Alberto María, ‘La irracionalidad de los indiosz’, Divulgación histórica, vol. I (1940), pp. 272–82, 328–39, 374–85Google Scholar; Hanke, Lewis, All Mankind is One (DeKalb, III., 1974), pp. 48–9 n. 20Google Scholar; O'Gorman, Edmundo, ‘La naturaleza bestial del indio’, Filosofía y letras, vols. 1 & 2 (1941), pp. 141–58, 305–1;, esp. 305Google Scholar; de Tudela, Juan Pérez, Obras escogidas de fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (Madrid, 1957), vol. I, pp. xxxi–xxxii n. 46Google Scholar; Canedo, Lino Gómez, ‘Hombres or bestias? (Nuevo examen crítico de un viejo tópico)’, Estudios de historia novohispana (Mexico), vol. I (1967), pp. 29–51Google Scholar.

2 Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias (Mexico, 1986), vol. II, pp. 440–2Google Scholar (lib. Ill, cap. iv).

3 Edmundo O'Gorman, ‘La naturaleza bestial de los indios’, esp. p. 144; Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One; Silvio Zavala, Filosofía política, p. 95. A brief history of the polemics is Benjamin Keen, ‘Introduction: Approaches to Las Casas, 1535–1970’, in Friede, Juan and Keen, Benjamin (eds.), Bartolomé, de Las Casas in History (DeKalb, III. 1971), pp. 3–63Google Scholar. See also discussion in Mechoulan, Henry, ‘Vitoria, père du droit international?’, in Actualité de la pensée juridique de Francisco de Vitoria (Brussels, 1988), pp. 11–26, esp. p. 21Google Scholar; Joe Verhoeven, ‘Vitoria ou la matrice du droit international’ op. cit., pp. 97–128.

4 Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York, 1978), p. 11Google Scholar.

5 Geertz, Clifford, ‘From the Natives' Point of View’, Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973)Google Scholar. The translation position is best exemplified by Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Nuer Religion (Oxford, 1956)Google Scholar; Zandi Witchcraft and the Oxford School of British Anthropology.

6 Bernheimer, Richard, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Bernheimer, Wild Men; Friedman, Jonathan, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 9–22, 37–58Google Scholar; Hogden, M. T., Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964), pp. 49–77Google Scholar. One of the medieval sources was Augustine's pupil Orosius (c. 385–420), Seven Books of History against the Pagans, according to de Waal Malefijt, Annemarie, Images of Man (New York, 1976), p. 27Google Scholar; , Malefijt, ‘Homo monstrosus’, Scientific America, vol. 219 (1968), pp. 112–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Cosmographie universalis (Basle, 1550). In his ‘Introduction’ to the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, (Amsterdam, 1968), R. Oehme says that Münster relied on Ptolemy for the descriptions of Africa and Asia, with some supplements for Africa from the Portuguese voyages of discovery. It contains very little on America. On p. xix Münster classified all ‘savage and barbarian’ peoples as belonging to the ‘monstrous’ races. Hogden, Early Anthropology, pp. 127–8. ‘Unnatural Conceptions: the Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England’, Past and Present, vol. 92 (1981), pp. 20–54.

9 Mártir, Pedro, Décadas del Nuevo Mundo (1516), vol. III, lib, 9, cap. 3, lib. 5, cap. 2, vol. IV, lib. 4, cap. 1, vol. V, lib. 3, cap. 2 (Amazons and cannibals)Google Scholar. Oviedo, however, does not believe accounts of monstrous men, but does describe natural objects that derive from fables. Salas, Alberto María, Tres cronistas de Indias, 2nd edn. (Mexico, 1986), pp. 125–7Google Scholar. For other Spanish writers see Hanke, Lewis, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (London, 1959), pp. 4–5Google Scholar. Raleigh, Walter, The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guinea (1595)Google Scholar.

10 For accounts of these presentations see Anghiera, Peter MartyrDe Orbe Novo, trans, by Gaffarel, Paul (Paris, 1907), dec. VIII, cap. 9, p. 717Google Scholar. Bernal Díaz, cap. cxcv, ed. cited, p. 527. de Gómara, Francisco López, Historia de la conquista de México (Mexico, 1943), vol. II, cap. cxcii, pp. 185–6Google Scholar.

11 Foreman, Carolyn Thomas, Indians Abroad, 1493–1938 (Norman, 1938), pp. 8–9, 15–17Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., pp. 7–8.

13 Theodore de Bry's multivolume sets are customarily called the Grands et petits voyages for the folio size of the engravings, and were published between 1590 and 1634. The classical bibliography is Crawford, James Lindsay, Grands et petits voyages of De Bry, Linsiana, Bibliotheca, Collations and Notes, no. 3 (London, 1884)Google Scholar. For the success of the first volume see Lorant, Stefan, The New World; the First Pictures of America Made by John White and Jacques le Moyne (New York, 1946), p. 182Google Scholar. A recent analysis is Bucher, Bernadette, Icon and Conquest, trans, by Gulati, Basia Miller (Chicago, 1981)Google Scholar.

14 Mártir's, PeterDécadas del Nuevo Mundo, first published in 1516Google Scholar, is the best known presentation of the Indies as exotic. See Salas, Tres cronistas de Indias, pp. 32–3 for the consensus on this position.

15 Friedman, Monstrous Races, p. 207; Pagden, A., The Fall of Natural Man, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1986), p. 6Google Scholar.

16 Chinard, Gilbert, L'exoticisme américaine dans la littérature française au XVI° sièck (Paris, 1911)Google Scholar. Despite confusing the exoticism of the American landscape with that of the people, Hanke himself cites only Orellana's Amazons and Cieza de Leon's (like Acosta's) belief in giants. Hanke, Aristotle and the Indians, pp. 3–6.

17 Solórzano, Juan, Disputationem de Indiarum jure (Madrid, 1629)Google Scholar, lib. 2, cap. 8, nos. 4, 8 contains a summary discussion of Augustine's monsters and their relation to Spanish categories of dominion. He concludes (lib. 2, cap. 9) that no such monsters have been found (p. 340).

18 The tales of Indian overwork were reported by a remorseful encomendero who joined the Dominicans as penance not for mistreating his Indians but for having beaten his wife to death out of jealousy and suspicion. But neither Las Casas nor any other Dominicans make anything of the analogy to the way women were treated in Spanish society (Las Casas, Historia, lib. 3, cap. 3.)

19 Colección de documentos inéditos, relativos al desubrimiento, conquista y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas … de Indias, 42 vols. (Madrid, 1864–84), (hereafter CDI), vol. VII, pp. 397–430.

20 Las Casas, Historia, lib. 3, cap. 3, p. 4.

21 Las Casas's account in his Historia, lib. 3, cap. 4 has the prior of the Dominican convent affirming that the decision to preach the sermon had been made after much deliberation in the convent and agreed upon as ‘verdad evangélica y cosa necesaria a la salvatión de todos los españoles y los indios desta isla’. That Montesinos would have asked about the justice of the wars against the Indians this early in the debates is highly unlikely. See Ramos, Dimitrios et al. , La ética de la conquista: Francisco Vitoria y la escuela de Salamanca (Madrid, 1984)Google Scholar.

22 Montesinos's sermon challenged the authority of the settlers' actions in the New World, to which they responded that the Indians had been legally granted by the Crown and that what the Dominicans wanted would be a great disservice to the Crown (Las Casas, Historia, lib. 3, cap. iv, p. 441).

23 ‘hortamur vos…qua mandatis Apostolicis obligati estis, et viscera misericordae Domini Nostri Jesu Christi attente requirimus, ut cum expeditionem hujusmodi omnino prosequi et assumere proba menta orthodoxae Fidei zelo inendatis, populos, in hujusmodi insulis et terris degentes ad christianum religionem suscipiendum inducere…Et ut negotii provinciam Apostolicae gratiae largitate donati…omnes insulas et terras firmas’ (Inter caetera, in Hernáez, Francisco, Coleccion de bulas, breves y otros documentos relativos a la iglesia de América y Filipinas (Brussels, 1879), vol. I, p. 13)Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., pp. 12–14, 17–18.

25 Fernandez, Eloy Bullón y, ‘Et problema jurídico de la dominatión española en América antes de las Relecciones de Francisco Vitoria’, Anuario, vol. 4 (1933), pp. 99–128, esp. pp. 104–5Google Scholar. Zavala, Silvio, ‘Las doctrinas de Palacios Rubios y Matías de la Paz ante la conquista de América’, in De las islas del mar océano (Mexico, 1954), pp. ix–cxxxGoogle Scholar. Palacios Rubios summarises his defence of the Papal donation in De las islas, ch. 5, esp. pp. 128, 136.

26 White, Hayden, ‘The Forms of Wildness: Archeology of an Idea’, Dudley, Edward and Novak, Maimillian E. (eds). The Wild Man Within (Pittsburgh, 1972), pp. 3–38, esp.p. 24Google Scholar; Elliott, J. H., The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 42Google Scholar. Justinian's Institutes, book 1, tit. 2. Pagden, p. 16, appears to suggest a dichotomy between man and animal in Aristotle, but Aristotle's discussion suggests a continuum. De partibus animalium, 660a, lines 17–18, reads ‘It is in man that the tongue attains its greatest degree of freedom’. Aristotle's suggestion later in this same book (673a, line 25) does not suggest that ‘a man may sacrifice the right to be called a man’ but rather simply observes that ‘where heads are chopped off with great rapidity’ as the barbarians do, there are no reports of post-mortem speech. In the Nichomachean Ethics, 1145a, lines 24–9, Aristotle appears to have placed men on a continuum between those who were gods, and those who were brutes, with ordinary men in between. ‘If, as they say, men become gods by excess of virtue, of this kind must evidently be that state opposed to the brutish state…Now since it is rarely that a godlike man is found…so too the brutish type is rarely found among men [sic] it is chiefly among barbarians.’ Lovejoy's, Arthur history of the Platonic idea is The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1953)Google Scholar.

27 Augustine, , De civitate del, lib. XVI, cap. 8, ‘id est animal rationale mortale’. Opera omnia, vol. VII (Paris, 1841)Google Scholar. Clement of Alexandria has the rationale soul as the essence of the person. The origin of this thinking is Greek, but became transformed in Christianity. For a critique of the Greek emphasis in Christian thinking see Dwyer, John, Son of Man, Son of God (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. On the distinction between men and apes in the Middle Ages see Janson, H. W., Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages (London, 1952), pp. 74–99Google Scholar. Albertus Magnus whose De animalibus argued more than any other medievalist in favour of a connection between men and animals, nonetheless retained the Christian distinction because of reason (pp. 84, 88). Hogden argues that in England in the last quarter of the seventeenth and the first third of the eighteenth century a search began for links between man and the animals (Early Anthropology, p. 418).

28 ‘Homo bruta animalia superexcedit in hoc quod habet rationem… Ergo videtur quod, sicut bruta animalia non baptizantur…quod furiosi vel amentes carent usa rationis per accidens…non autem propter defectum animae rationalis, sicut bruta animalia’ (Summa 3a, quest. 68 art. 12, 2, and ad 2). Natural reason was deemed a characteristic of all men from early Christian time (Institutes of Justinian, book 1, tit. 2), but Aquinas emphasised the use of the term in distinguishing between ‘human’ and ‘bruta animalia’. The Institutes have natural law instilled in animals.

The earlier controversy about the meaning of ‘bestial’ seems to have revolved around the literal versus the metaphoric meaning of the word. See Hanke, Lewis, ‘Pope Paul III and the American Indians’, Harvard Theological Review, vol. 30 (1937), pp. 65–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar'; Carreño, ‘La irracionalidad’, pp. 374–8; Juan Pérez Tudela, ‘Introduction’ to Historia de las Indias. Neither interpretation explains why the question was critical to the Spanish definition of sovereignty over the New World.

29 Acosta says that the Church of Christ saves everyone up to animals. De procuranda, book 1, cap. 7, p. 139. Friedman, Monstrous Races, pp. 178–96. Hogden confuses the animal/human distinction with general issues of human social and political hierarchy (pp. 389ff.).

30 The exception is the much cited 1517 Parecer of Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón, ‘Mejor les es ser ombres siervos que bestias libres’ and ‘dexar estar los yndios a la continua en sus tierras…siempre serian bestias condenadas para el ynfierno’ reproduced in Giménez Fernández, pp. 573–90, esp. 581, 586.

31 Palacios Rubios establishing precedence for dominion over infidels in general described ‘Los Saracenos que como animales carentes de razón, adoran a los ídolos, despreciando al verdadero Dios’ (pp. 81, 103). Francisco Vitoria in his Commentaries on the Secunda Secundae of Aquinas said ‘et sic […] insulani, quodam modo bestiales et incapaces doctrinae’.

32 ‘Libel I say [it is] defaming men as beasts, lacking in reason…as brute animals incapable of learning and full of heinous sins’ (Aqui se contiene una disputa, in Bartolomé de las Casas, Tratados, ed. Hanke, Lewis (Mexico, 1956), p. 445)Google Scholar.

33 Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 48–9, n. 20; Edmundo O'Gorman, ‘La naturaleza bestial del indio’, esp. p. 305; de Tudela, Juan Pérez, Obras escogidas de fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (Madrid, 1957), vol. I, pp. xxxi–xxxii note 46Google Scholar; Lino Gómez Canedo, ‘¿Hombres or bestias?’ pp. 29–51.

34 The only exception appears to have been the encomenderos of the Caribbean who apparently insulted their workers by calling them ‘dogs’ (Altamira, ‘Leyes de Burgos’ ley 24, p. 39). But the terms ‘dog of a Moor’ or ‘Moorish dog’ were insults used against newly converted people in sixteenth century Spain, and signified that they were non-believers, i.e. that their faith was insincere rather than that they lacked humanity. Castro, Américo, The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton, 1956), p. 228Google Scholar.

35 White, ‘The Forms of Wildness’, p. 4. Pérez Tudela's argument that discussions of the Indians’ ‘nature’ refer to a state rather than an unchangeable nature is fundamentally correct (pp. xxi–xxxii n. 46).

36 ‘Carta que escribieron varios padres de la órden de Santo Domingo residentes en la isla Española a Mr. de Xevres’, [1516] in CDI, vol. VII, pp. 397–430. In this letter the Dominican friars use ‘hábil’ for the ability to receive the faith. Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 174 adds ‘civilization’, a word not used in sixteenth-century Spain.

37 Las Casas writing the Historia de las Indias during the 1550s, uses ‘capacity’ to refer to their potential for Christianisation, as does Father Acosta later that century in De procuranda indorum salute; Recop. Lib I tit. i leyes iii, xix. Recop. Lib I tit. 1 ley v uses ‘habilidad y suficiciencia’ (1563, 1568).

38 The subsequent debate over their ‘nature’ as barbarians is described in Pagden, Anthony, The Fall of Natural Man, rev. edn. (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar.

39 Hanke, All Mankind, p. 145.

40 ‘The insane and mentally deficient lack the use of reason accidentally because of some impediment of a bodily organ, but not for lack of a rational soul as is in the case with brute animals’ (Summa, 3a q. 68 ad 2). ‘Sugirió a no pocos españoles, y aún a algunas personas tenidas del vulgo por sabias, que los indios americanos no eran verdaderos hombres con alma racional, sino una tercera especie de animal entre hombre y mono.’ Moya, Juan José de la Cruz y, Historia de la Santa y Apostólica provincia de Santiago de Predicadores de México en la Nueva España [1756/1757] (Mexico, 1954–1955), vol II, chap. 7, p. 46Google Scholar.

41 ‘Memorial de fray Bernardino de Manzanedo sobre el buen régimen y governo de los indios’ [1518], in Manuel Serrano y Serrano, Los origénes de la dominación española, pp. 567–75. Letter from the Treasurer of Puerto Rico [1517], ibid., pp. 575–7. See also the Hieronymite interrogatory in CDl, vol. xxxiv, pp. 201–29 and the response of Cardinal Cisneros in Giménez Fernández, pp. 637–48. Fernández-Santamariá, J. A., The State, War and Peace: Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance 1516–1559 (Cambridge, 1577), pp. 235–6Google Scholar characterises this as the core of Sepúlveda's position.

42 CDI, vol. VII, pp. 397–430, esp. 418 (1516). The Dominican friars use ‘habil’ for the ability to receive the faith.

43 Letter from Alonso de Haro, royal treasurer on Puerto Rico, to Crown, 21 Jan. 1517, in Serrano, pp. 575–7.

44 ‘Rogamos y encargamos … que se administre a los Indios que tuvieren capacidad el Santísimo Sacramento de la Eucaristía’ (emphasis added) (Recop. lib. I tit. i, ley xix (1578)).

45 Las Casas, Historia, lib. 3, cap. ix, p. 462. de la Hera, Albert, ‘El derecho de los indios a la libertad y a la fe’, Anuario de historia del derecho españnol, vol. 26 (1956), pp. 115–17Google Scholar argues for this as the principal way in which asseverations of ‘animal’ nature were understood.

46 ‘No es gente capaz ni de juicio natural para rescibir la fe ni las otras virtudes de crianza necesaria a su conversión y salvación’ (Ortega, Angel, La Rábida, vol. II (Seville, 1925), pp. 306–309, esp. 308)Google Scholar.

47 Giménez Fernández, Bartolomé de Las Casas, pp. 637–48, esp. p. 646.

48 Ibid.

49 For the Hieronymite inquiry see Hanke, Giménez Fernández, Serrano Sanz; CDI, vol. VII, pp. 11–12, 445–6; Las Casas, Historia lib. 3, cap. 8, p. 456–7, cap. 13, pp. 475–8. Altamira, Rafael, ‘El texto de las leyes de Burgos de 1512’, Revista de historia de Ameŕica, vol. I (1938), pp. 5–79Google Scholar.

50 For Paraguay see Rene Hort's ‘Earthly Paradise or Community of Indians? The Myth of the Paraguayan Jesuit Missions’, unpub. paper.

51 ‘Para paliar su tiranía, dieron en decir que los indios no eran hombres verdaderos sino una especie de salvajes en algo parecidos al hombre’ (Cruz y Moya, Historia, II, cap.7. P. 47).

52 Salas, Tres cronistas de Indias, pp. 119–20; Icabalcezta, Joaquín García, Don Fray Juan de Zummárraga, primer obispo y arzobispo de México (Mexico, 1947)Google Scholar, chap. 10. Vera, Josefina Vásquez, ‘El indio americano y su circunstancia en la obra de Fernández de Oviedo’, Revista de Indias, nos. 69 & 70 (1957), PP. 469–510, esp. 495–7, 502Google Scholar; Alonso de la Vera Cruz, vol. II, p. 573; v Arce, Juan Avalle, Las memorias de Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 1974)Google Scholar. Such kinds of accusations were endemic in the Americas. See René Horst, ‘Earthly Paradise or Community of Indians? The Myth of the Paraguayan Jesuit Missions’, unpub. paper.

53 Peter Martyr, De orbe novo, Dec. VII, cap. 4, pp. 603–4, repeated by Antonio Herrera, Dec. III, lib. 8, cap. 10.

54 Letter from Pedro de Gante to Philip II (25 June, 1558) about Nahuan commoners: ‘la gente común estava como animales sin razón indomables que no los podiamos traer al gremio y congregación de la iglesia ni a la doctrina ni a sermón, sino que huían desto como el demonio de la cruz’ (Fr. Fidel de J. Chauvet, Cartas de Fr. Pedro de Gante, O.F.M. (Mexico, n.d.), pp. 39–52, esp. 45–6).

55 ‘Hubo gente, y no sin lettas, que puso duda en si los indios eran verdaderamente hombres, de la misma naturaleza que nosotros; y no faltó quien afirmase que no lo eran, sino incapaces de recibir los Santos Sacramentos de la Iglesia’ (Padilla, Agustín Dávila, Historia de la fundación y discurso de la Provincia de Santiago de México de la Orden de Predicadores [1596], lib. 1, cap. 30. 3rd edn. (Mexico, 1955)Google Scholar. Also letter of Bernardino Minaya, in Hanke, Lewis, Estudios sobre Bartolomé de Las Casas (Caracas, 1968), p. 76Google Scholar.

56 Alberto María Carreño, ‘La irracionalida d de los indios’, pp. 272–82, 328–39, 374–85, esp. 383–4. A recent advocate of this position is Lino Gómez Canedo, ‘Hombres o bestias?’, pp. 45–6.

57 Vela, Gregorio Santiago, Ensayo de una biblioteca iberoamerkana de la orden de San Agustin (Madrid, 1913), vol. I, p. 34Google Scholar; also Giménez, Introducción al estudio, p. 15. Santiago Vela cites as defenders of Indian ‘capacity’ for the sacraments the Augustinian friars Juan Bautista de Moya, Alonso de la Veracruz, Nicolás de Agreda and Friar Agurto.

58 Hanke, L., The First Social Experiments in America: a Study in the Development of Spanish Indian Policy in the Sixteenth Century (Glouster, Mass., 1964), p. 78Google Scholar.

59 ‘Le hice saber del derecho y la capacidad de los indios para ingresar al Cristianismo. El Cardenal me contestó que yo estaba engañado, que los indios no era más que papagayos’ (Fray Bernardino Minayo, quoted in Hanke, Estudios sobre Bartolomé de Las Casas, pp. 76–7).

60 Ricard, Robert, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, trans. Simpson, Lesley Byrd (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 91–2Google Scholar. On Peru see ‘Memorial que Don Francisco de Toledo dio al Rey Nuestro Señnor del estado en que dejó las cosas del Perú’ (1581–2), in Hanke, Lewis (ed.), Los virreyes españoles en América durante el gobierno de la casa de Austria, vol. CCLXXX (Madrid, 1978), p. 131Google Scholar; Letter, Bartolomé Hernández, S.J. to Juan de Ovando, President of the Consejo de Indias (Lima, April 19, 1572), appendix v of Acosta De procuranda, pp. 642–53, 644.

61 Paso y Troncoso, Papeks de la Nueva España, vol. XV, pp. 162–5.

62 Paso y Troncoso, Papeles, vol. III, pp. 93–6.

63 Padilla, Historia, lib. I, cap. 42–3, pp. 132–49, esp. 141; Hernáez, vol. I, pp. 56–63.

64 CDI, vol. VII, pp. 397–430, esp. 428 (1516). They claimed the Spaniards ‘used them like brute animals’: ‘por aprovechar de ellos y para que mejor nos sirvamos de ellos como bestias y animales sin razón hasta acabarlos con trabajos, vejaciones, y servicios escesivos’ [ sic] (Vasco de Quiroga, ‘Información en derecho sobre algunas provisiones del Real Consejo de Indias’, CDI, vol. X, pp. 333–513, esp. 367, 383–4).

65 ‘Attendentes Indos ipsos, utpote veros homines, nonsolum christianae fidei capaces exsistere, [existere: Hernáez] sed ut nostris [nobis: Hernáez] innotuit ad fidem ipsam promptissime currere’. de la Hera, Alberto, ‘El derecho de los indios a la libertad y a la fe’, Anuario de historia del derecho español, vol. 26 (1956), 89–181, esp. 162Google Scholar; Hernáez, Bulas, vol. I, pp. 102–3. Lewis Hanke, ‘Pope Paul III and the American Indians’, pp. 65–102. English translation by Hanke, All mankind, p. 21; Spanish translation, Cuevas, Mariano (ed.), Documentos inéditos del sigh XVI para la historia de México, 2nd ed. (Mexico, 1973), pp. 84–6Google Scholar.

66 Casa, Las, Entre los remedies (1552), p. 695Google Scholar. The only evidence that this opinion was ever labelled ‘heretical’ comes from Las Casas's own account in the Historia de lasIndias, lib. 3, cap. 99, of a meeting of theologians in Salamanca in 1517 who declared that insisting the Indians were incapable of the faith was heretical. But the Pope in Subliminus Deus does not specifically declare the proposition heretical.

67 Vicente, Luciano Pereña, ‘La soberanía de España en América según Melchor Cano’, Revista española de derecho internacional, vol. 5 (1956), pp. 893–924, esp. 907Google Scholar. Francisco López de Gómara, Historia de la Conquista de México, dedication, p. 36.

68 Item No. 7, ‘Todos [miembros de la junta] dixeron que no ay dubda de aver capaçdad y sufiçiençia en los naturales y que aman mucho a la doctrina de la fe y se a hecho y haze mucho fruto.’ Text of 1532 junta's conclusions in Llaguno, José A., La personalidad juridica del indioy el III Concilio Provincial Mexicano (1585), pp. 151–4Google Scholar. A provision of the 1546 junta says that the Indians ‘para ser verdaderamente xptianos e políticos, como hombres razonables que son’ (CDI, vol. XXIII, 542–3).

69 de Acosta, José, De procuranda indorum salute, reproves those who insist on Indian incapacity, pp. 89 ff. In his Historia naturaly moral de Las Indias (Mexico, 1962)Google Scholar he combats the idea that the Indians are brutal and bestial people without understanding (p. 90).

70 Dictamen de Fray Bernardino de Cárdenas sobre que no se venda chicha ni vino a los indios (1639), CDI, vol. VII, pp. 496–514, esp. 497; Acosta, Deprocuranda, lib. 3, cap. 22.

71 Cook, Sherbume F. and Borah, Woodrow, Essays in Population History, vol. II, Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley, 1974), pp. 76–7, 332Google Scholar.

72 Instrucción a Nicolás de Ovando, 16 Sept. 1501 in CDI, vol. XXXI, pp. 15–16.

73 This is the opening quotation in the compilation of laws governing the New World, the Recopilación de las leyes de Indias as well the opening line of Francisco Vitoria's De indis.

74 Bodmer, Beatriz Pastor, The Armature of Conquest (Stanford, Calif., 1992), pp. 210–11Google Scholar.

75 de Alva, Jorge Klor, Nicholsom, H. B., Keber, Eoise Quiñones (eds.), The Word of Bernardino de Sahagúln: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico (Albany, N.Y., 1988)Google Scholar.

76 Pagden, 2nd ed., p. 6.

77 Pidal, Ramón Menéndez, The Spaniards in their History, trans. Starkie, Walter (London, 1950), p. 130Google Scholar; Hanke, Lewis, Aristotle and the American Indians: a Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (London, 1959), 107–16Google Scholar. ‘No other nation made so continuous or so passionate an attempt to discover what was the just treatment for the native peoples under its jurisdiction than Spaniards’ (Hanke, Aristotle, p. 107).

78 Seed, Patricia, ‘Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires’, William and Mary Quarterly, no. 49 (1992), 188 nn. 16, 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Seed, ‘Taking Possession and Reading Texts’, pp. 183–209; Winthrop's, JohnHistory of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed. Savage, John (Boston, 1825), vol. I, p. 290Google Scholar; Cotton, John, The Bloody Tenent Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb, orig. pub. 1647 (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. For the continued use of this strategy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see Washburn, Wilcomb, ‘The Moral and Legal Justifications for Dispossessing Indians’, in Smith, James Morton (ed.), Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), pp. 26–32Google Scholar.

80 Cohen, Felix, Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Washington, D.C., 1942), pp. 153–6Google Scholar; Robinson, W. Stitt (ed.), Virginia Treaties, 1607–1722 (Washington, D.C., 1983), vol. IVGoogle Scholar, Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607—1789, pp. 17, 21, 67—70, 223.

81 Hening, William Walter, The Statutes at Large. Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia (New York, 1823), vol. I, pp. 323–6Google Scholar. On the voluntary nature of religious association in Anglo-America see Axtell, James, Beyond 1492: Encounters of Colonial North America (New York, 1992), pp. 115–7Google Scholar.

82 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, The Spaniards in Their History, p. 130; Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, pp. 107–116.

83 Seed, Patricia, ‘No Perfect World: Colonial Origins of the Contemporary Predicaments of Aboriginal Communities in the Americas and Australasia’ Address to ‘Fourth World Conference’, University of Essex, 11 1992Google Scholar.