Since the discovery of the Caribbean and South America, these territories had been progressively ruled all along the sixteenth-century by Spanish settlers, who looked for labour forces to exploit the new lands for revenue of the Crown and for themselves; and also by missionaries sent by the Crown and the Church to Christianize the Indians. This conquest of the New World had been considered as an extension of the reconquest of Spain, also, the Spanish government wished these new territories to be integrated smoothly and peacefully into the Spanish system of government, and so, that is why Spanish settlers and missionaries had been sent. At the same time, however, ecclesiastics and the Castilian government agreed that the conquest should be done in respect of the rights of the natives and prevent the plundering of the conquerors. As a result, many questions about the way Spanish people should treat the natives of the Caribbean and South America aroused along the sixteenth-century and led to many debates between the advocates of the Indian cause and the defenders of the conquest.As a result, we will examine each of these themes and see why they triggered off a debate and what the arguments of both parts were.
[...] Las Casas claimed at the junta of Valladolid that the Indians were able of becoming Christians since he noticed in his studies of Indian culture a high spirit of religious devotion which, according to him, could be directed to the service of the God. Indeed, the Spanish Crown and the Church considered since the beginning of the conquest that their role was to Christianize and civilize the Indians so as to include them into the Spanish Empire. The papal bulls, Inter Caetera and Eximiae devotionis dated from 1493 and issued by Pope Alexander VI, described the papal responsibility of converting the unbelievers of the new-found lands but it did not deal directly with the rights of the infidels, that is to say with the way the Indians should be brought to the Christian faith in respect with their rights. [...]
[...] But no answer was given to this question and along the sixteenth-century, Spanish settled in the New World where they established encomienda in which they used Indians as free labour forces or became slave- hunters without caring about the rights of the natives. This situation aroused the criticism of ecclesiastics such as the Dominican Antonio de Montesino and Bartolomé de Las Casas who advocated that the Indians were human being and should be treated as such. By contrast, ecclesiastics such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdes and Juan Gines de Sepúlveda argued that the natives were inferiors to Spanish people and ‘slaves by nature'. [...]
[...] In Sepúlveda's opinion, the Indians were barbaric, uninstructed in letters and the art of government and cruel. He explained their character by the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery according to which one part of mankind is set aside by nature to be slaves in the service of masters born for a life of virtue. Thus, he described the Indians as sub-human who, for their own welfare, were obliged by the natural law to obey those who were superior in virtue and character and he compared this situation to the relation between animals to human being or as children to adults. [...]
[...] But above all, he denounced in his book the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indians the way the conquistadors dealt with the Indians. He confined himself to the “Spanish's policy” towards the natives and placed an emphasis on the consquistadors' atrocities, especially those committed without any motive but seemingly from sadism. Thus, we can read of children being killed or mutilated, of innocent people roasted over fires and of women being raped or murdered. Finally, he finished his pamphlet by stressing the impacts of such atrocities on the Indian culture, saying: “Thus they have dislocated and destroy the patterns of indigenous culture. [...]
[...] Finally, he concluded that it was just to Christianize the Indians by such a violent way since it was the only way they would accept it and it was in agreement with the Holy Scripture to treat the infidels like that. However, Las Casas opposed that method of conversion because it was contrary to the Christian doctrine, that such a conversion by force or fear could not be valid and because it would lead the Indians to associate Christianity with repression and violence and thus drove them away from the true faith. [...]
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