Antonio de Montesinos
Antonio de Montesinos was the Dominican friar who on the fourth Sunday of Advent 1511 preached to the colonists of Santo Domingo, the governor Diego Columbus among them, the sermon that asked by what right they held the Indians in cruel servitude, whether these were not men with rational souls, and whether the Spaniards were not bound to love them as themselves, and told them they were in mortal sin and could no more be saved than Moors or Turks; the colonists demanded his recall, he preached it again the next Sunday, the Dominicans sent him to Spain to defend it, and the Laws of Burgos of December 1512 were the crown's answer. He had come to Hispaniola in 1510 with the first Dominican mission of four friars under Pedro de Cordoba, whose community decided together on the sermon and chose Montesinos as the best preacher to give it. The text, which survives because Bartolome de las Casas, then an encomendero in the congregation, wrote it down years later, begins with the voice of one crying in the wilderness. King Ferdinand, told of it, called it a novel and groundless doctrine, and the Dominican provincial in Spain ordered the friars to stop. But Montesinos, sent home in 1512 to explain himself, reached the king, and the junta of theologians and jurists Ferdinand convened at Burgos produced the first code of Indian law, which regulated the encomienda rather than ending it and which the friars thought a defeat. Las Casas dated his own conversion to the sermon and to the refusal of a Dominican to hear his confession while he kept Indians. Montesinos went back to the Indies, accompanied Las Casas on his attempt at a peaceful colony on the Venezuelan coast at Cumana in 1521, which the Indians destroyed, and was in Spain again in the 1520s petitioning. In 1528 he went with a Welser expedition to Venezuela as its chaplain. He died there, in Venezuela, about 1540, killed, one tradition says, by a German officer whose treatment of the Indians he had denounced. The sermon is the beginning of the argument about the rights of the conquered that ran through Las Casas, Vitoria and the New Laws, and a statue of him stands on the waterfront of Santo Domingo with its arm raised.
- Lived: 1475 CE – 1540 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: friar, preacher
