Valladolid Debate — Las Casas vs. Sepúlveda
Charles V ordered a formal debate at Valladolid in 1550 and 1551 on whether the conquest of the Americas was just, and suspended new expeditions while it sat. It is probably the only case in which a European power halted a colonial enterprise to argue about its legitimacy. Bartolomé de las Casas, then Bishop of Chiapas, had spent decades pressing the crown. He had been an encomendero himself, renounced it in 1514, entered the Dominicans, and had procured the New Laws of 1542. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a humanist scholar who had never crossed the Atlantic, argued the other side from Aristotle: that some men are slaves by nature, that the indigenous peoples' human sacrifice, idolatry and cannibalism justified war against them, and that conquest was the necessary precondition for their conversion. Las Casas answered with a reading of the same Aristotle and with the evidence. He read from his own account of what had been done — his Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies — for days, argued that the indigenous societies had cities, laws, crafts and government and were therefore rational by any test, and held that faith obtained by force is worthless. The fourteen judges never issued a verdict. Both sides claimed to have won. Sepúlveda's book was refused a licence to print in Spain; the encomienda continued; and the debate did not stop the conquest. Las Casas's arguments passed into the law of nations through Vitoria and Suárez, and eventually into Grotius. The Africans being imported to replace the indigenous labour force were not discussed at all, a silence Las Casas himself came to regret in print.
- Year: 1550 CE
- Category: Cultural
