You may have heard a common version of the story of the "Controversy of Valladolid." It says that during the 16th century, a court convened by the King of Spain and staffed by Catholic priests decided that the Native Americans had no soul and that, hence, could be enslaved or exterminated at will. It is one of the many legends that surround us. The Valladolid Court of 1550-1551 actually ruled in favor of the Natives, forbidding their enslavement. But they were enslaved and exterminated anyway. The ruling of the court was distorted and turned into a propaganda piece that accused the Christian Church of being the instigator of the extermination. And many people still believe this story after nearly five centuries! But so is propaganda, one of the most powerful (and evil) technologies ever devised by humans.
Not long ago, I was taking a foreign friend to visit Piazza Signoria, in Florence, showing him the many statuary pieces lining the square. All wonderful pieces, in many ways, but also disquieting for their depiction of murder and death. Today, nobody could get away with a piece of art where a man beheads a naked woman. And yet this is exactly what one of the main pieces in the square shows to us, Perseus and Medusa, in an unbelievably cruel depiction of a murder.
As we walked past the Perseus, I told my friend, "you see, there is an invisible wall that cuts the square in two. On one side, there are older pieces of statuary, all with Christian themes: David and Goliath, Judith and Holophernes, and more. On the other side, you have pieces inspired by classical myths from the Pagan age: Hercules, Perseus and Medusa, the rape of the Sabines, and others."
It was at that point that something clicked in my mind: "why exactly does that invisible wall exist?" The question arrived together with the answer. The wall is related to the "Controversy of Valladolid," a debate requested by King Charles 5th of Spain in 1550 to decide the fate of the Native Americans. It is an event that still reverberates in our perception of history, but distorted and transformed into the opposite of what it was by propaganda. But let me start from the beginning
The 16th century had been a century of military triumphs for Europe, and for Spain in particular, with the conquest of Mexico and Perù. That had brought a question for the new rulers: what to do with the Native inhabitants? Were they to be given rights as citizens of the Spanish Empire? Or should they be enslaved for their own good? King Charles 5th of Spain, an enlightened ruler, convened a court in Valladolid to discuss it. After two years of debate, the court ruled in favor of the Natives and the King duly enacted laws banning their enslavement. But the story was not going to end there. There were enormous financial interests in Europe that dictated that the Natives should have been used as expendable, cheap labor. And it the Valladolid Court had said that it was not to be done, then down with the Valladolid Court and the Christian principles at the basis of the ruling. And down with Christianity, just as well.
It was a profound paradigm shift in European views, still reverberating in our times. Perhaps the best place to see it is just where the Perseus stands: In the Piazza della Signoria square, in Florence. In a few decades, Europe had completely switched from an art inspired by Christian principles to one inspired by Pagan ones. A reflection of the debate at Valladolid, where one of the two discussants, Juan Gines de Sepulveda cited Aristotle to argue that if civilized societies, such as the Greek and Roman ones, permitted slavery, then it could be practiced even in modern Europe.
It was a blueprint for what was going to happen, with European society starting to model itself on what Europeans thought was the ancient Greek society. One of the results was the invisible wall in Piazza della Signoria. Cellini's piece with Perseus and Medusa, brutal as it is, acquires a specific meaning when understood in the frame of the enslavement and the extermination of the Natives. The strong survive, and the weak perish. Perseus personifies the winning Europeans, Medusa the weaker Natives.
In time, the proceedings of the Valladolid Court were turned into the legend, common nowadays, that the court was charged to decide whether the Native Americans had a soul or not. Some versions of the story say that the court had decided that, maybe, they didn't have it -- they were beasts. It was probably the result of the distorted interpretation of a book by Bartolomé the Las Casas, one of the discussants at Valladolid. He described how the decisions of the court were ignored in his "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies" (1552). The book was turned into anti-Spanish propaganda by those who were actually exterminating the Natives, the British, and North European colonists. The Catholic Church received such a blow from this campaign that it never completely recovered from it.
This is one of the most evil legends around us because it condemns the honest efforts that many people of good will expended trying to save the Natives. But we still believe this ancient propaganda, nearly half a millennium later! The evil Goddess named Propaganda still deceives us.
Below,
you'll find a post by Paul Jorion that tells
the true story.
This text by Jorion was also discussed in a previous post on the collapse of science. See also this post on how the Perseus is related to Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.
The "quarrel" or "controversy" of Valladolid (1550-1551)
This text will
find its place in the panorama of anthropology that I am writing at the
moment. As this is a subject that I am new to and where I cannot avail
myself of any expertise, please be so kind as to point out to me any
factual errors I make. Thank you in advance !
In 1550 and 1551 a debate took place in the city of Valladolid in
Spain, which would go down in history as the “quarrel” or “controversy,”
bearing the name of this city in the province of Castile and Leon.
What was it about? It dealt with the Christian European civilization behaving like an
unscrupulous invader on a continent of which it knew nothing, within
populations of which it was until then unaware of the very existence,
which it then discovered in real-time as it grew. advance in the
territory of the New World, and the devastation that accompanied this
advance.
What all this meant as to how the
victors would now treat the vanquished would be the question posed in a
great debate that would cover a period of two years and where two
champions of Spanish thought at the time would face off. Great
intellectual and ethical problems had to be resolved in the scholastic
tradition of a disputatio, before the enlightened public
of what we would today call a commission, which would decide at the end
of the debate which of the two speakers was right. There were basically only church people there.
Two thinkers were on stage, both solemnly defending opposing
points of view. They clashed at the level of ideas by mobilizing all
the art of dialectics: that intended to convince, an art developed specifically for the speeches held in ancient Greece on an agora. To
defend one of the points of view, Juan Gines de Sepulveda (1490-1573) considered, in a word, that the inhabitants of the New World were cruel savages and that the question was, basically, how to save them from themselves. To
defend the opposing point of view, there was the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas
(1474-1566) who affirmed that the Amerindians were, like the Europeans,
human beings, whose differences should not be exaggerated, and
that the question was about integrating them peacefully into a Christian
society by conviction rather than by force.
The brutal conquest of Mexico took place from 1519 to 1521, it was no
less bloody than in Peru from 1528 to 1532. We are now in 1550, almost twenty
years after this last date. The situation, from the point of view of
the Spaniards, is that they have won: the huge empire of New Spain has
been conquered by secular Spain. It is a victory, even if internal
quarrels continue, on the one hand between the colonized, as at the time
of the conquest, which their incessant dissensions had fostered, and on
the other hand between the colonizers themselves, manifested by a
litany of palace revolutions and assassinations of conquistadors between
them, in Peru as in Mexico.
But the time has come for Charles V (1500-1558), “Emperor of the
Romans”, to take a break. We must think about how to treat these
conquered populations, decimated in equal parts by battles and
massacres, and by the ravages of smallpox and measles, against which the
local populations were helpless, having no immunity to these diseases
hitherto absent from the continent. It is considered today that Mexico
had some 25 million inhabitants on the eve of the first landing of the
Spaniards in 1498. In 1568, the population was estimated at 3
million and it is believed that in 1620 there were only a million
and a half Mexicans left.
The phase still to come would no longer be that of Mexico or Peru,
whose conquest was completed and where colonization was then carried out
well, but that of Paraguay, which would begin in 1585, thirty-five
years later.
Charles V, was an enlightened sovereign, like his rival François 1 st. They were contemporaries: two thinking kings, not only just kings, but men who had
questions about history, knowing that they were major players. They
shared a conception of the world enlightened by the same religion:
Catholicism. The reign of Charles V will end a few years later: in
1555. It will then be his son Philip who will become sovereign of
Spain and the Netherlands. Later, in 1580, he will also be King of
Portugal. Charles V demands that any new conquest be interrupted as long
as Las Casas and Sepulveda exchange their arguments on the question of
the status to be recognized for the indigenous populations of the New
World.
Charles V had not, however, remained indifferent to these questions
even before: already in 1526, 24 years before the Valladolid controversy,
he had issued a decree prohibiting the slavery of Amerindians
throughout the territory, and in 1542, he had promulgated new laws
which proclaimed the natural freedom of the Amerindians and obliged to
release those who had been reduced to slavery: freedom of work, freedom
of residence and free ownership of property, punishing, in principle,
those who were violent and aggressive towards Native Americans.
Paul III was the pope from 1534 to 1549. In 1537, thirteen years before
the beginning of the Valladolid controversy, in the papal bull Sublimis Deus and in the letter Veritas Ipsa,
he had officially condemned, on behalf of the Catholic Church, the
slavery of the Native Americans. The statement was "universal," that is,
it was applicable wherever the Christian world could still discover
populations unknown to it on the surface of the globe: it was said in Sublimis Deus: " and of all peoples that may be later discovered by Christians ”. And in both documents, so in Veritas Ipsa too: "Indians and other peoples are true human beings."
When the quarrel began, Julius III had just succeeded Paul III: he was enthroned on February 22, 1550.
The general principle, for Charles V, was that of aligning with
the Church policy. In the "quarrel" or "controversy" of Valladolid, one of
the moments of solemn reflection of humanity on itself, it is not the
Church, but the Kingdom of Spain, which summons religious authorities ,
experts, to try to answer the question "What can be done so that the
conquests still to come in the New World are done with justice and in
security of conscience?"
It is heartbreaking that the television film “La controverse de
Valladolid” (1992), by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, with Jean-Pierre Marielle
in the role of Las Casas and Jean-Louis Trintignant in that of
Sepulveda, as well as the novel by Jean- Claude Carrière, from whom it
was inspired, took such liberties with historical truth that it was
affirmed that the central question in the quarrel was to determine
whether the Amerindians had a soul. No: this question had been settled
by the Church without public debate thirteen years earlier. Sublimis Deus affirms
that their property and their freedom must be respected, and further
specifies "even if they remain outside the faith of Jesus Christ", that
is to say that the same attitude must be maintained even if they are
rebellious to conversion. It is written in the Papal Bull Veritas Ipsa that
Native Americans are to be “invited to the said faith of Christ by the
preaching of the word of God and by the example of a virtuous life. »In
1537: thirteen years before the commission met.
The question of the soul of the Amerindians was of course raised in
Valladolid, but in no way to try to resolve it: on this level, the issue was
closed. In reality, it had been resolved in the real world by the Spanish
invaders: it would have been possible to summon young men and women of
mixed race in their twenties to Valladolid, including Martin, son of
Ernan Cortés and Doña Marina, “La Malinche”:
living proof that the human species had recognized itself as “one and
indivisible” in the field and that the question of whether these people,
whom their mother could accompany if necessary, dressed in Spanish
fashion, and most often militants of Christianity in their actions and
in their words. Whether or not they had a soul, would have been an entirely abstract and
ridiculous question, the problem having been solved in the facts: in the
interbreeding which took place, in this reality that men
and women have recognized themselves sufficiently similar not only to
mate and immediately procreate, but to sanctify their marriage, in a
sumptuous way for the richest, according to the rites of the Church.
Circumstances, it must be emphasized, the opposite of the rules that were followed in North America, while in the case of Protestant settlers in their
almost all - except Quebec - from the end of the 16th century.
The meetings in Valladolid were eld twice over a month, in 1550
and then in 1551, but most of the texts available to us are not
transcripts of the debates: they are correspondence between the parties
involved: Juan Gines de Sepulveda, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and the
members of the commission.
Las Casas had first been himself an encomendero, a slave
settler: he led plantations where Native American slaves were originally
found, plantations in which, reacting to the Church's commands to give
back their freedom to the natives enslaved, he had replaced on his own
authority the labor of Amerindian slaves that he ceased to exploit with
other laborers: blacks imported from Africa. This will be a great regret in his
life, he will talk about it later. Most of the encomenderos were
not as attentive as Las Casas to instructions from the mother country
or the Vatican. Already in 1511, in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Antonio
de Montesinos, who exercised a decisive influence on Las Casas, refused
the sacraments and threatened with excommunication those among them
whom he considered unworthy. Here is his famous sermon:
"I am the voice of the One who cries in the desert of
this island and that is why you must listen to me with attention. This
voice is the freshest you have ever heard, the harshest and the most
tough. This voice tells you that you are all in a state of mortal sin;
in sin you live and die because of the cruelty and tyranny with which
you overwhelm this innocent race.
Tell me, what right and what justice authorize you to keep the
Indians in such dreadful servitude? In the name of what authority have
you waged such hateful wars against those peoples who lived in their
lands in a gentle and peaceful way, where a considerable number of them
were destroyed by you and died in yet another way? never seen as it is
so atrocious? How do you keep them oppressed and overwhelmed, without
giving them food, without treating them in their illnesses which come
from excessive work with which you overwhelm them and from which they
die? To put it more accurately, you kill them to get a little more gold
every day.
And what care do you take to instruct them in our religion so that
they know God our creator, so that they are baptized, that they hear
Mass, that they observe Sundays and other obligations?
Are they not men? Are they not human beings? Must you not love them as yourselves?
Be certain that by doing so, you cannot save yourself any more than the Moors and Turks who refuse faith in Jesus Christ. "
Las Casas' reflection led him to give up this role of planter and he
took a step back for several years. Charles V then offered him access
to vast lands in Venezuela on which he could implement the policy he now
advocated towards the Amerindians: no longer the use of force, but the
power of conviction and conversion by example. Las Casas was a
Thomist. Following the line drawn by Thomas Aquinas, he read in human
society a given of nature. It is not a question of a cultural heritage,
that is to say of the fruit of the deliberations of men, but of a gift
from God, so that all societies are of equal dignity, and a society of
Pagans is no less legitimate than a society of Christians and it is
wrong to attempt to convert its members by force. The propagation of
the faith must be done there in an evangelical way, namely by virtue of
example.
Facing Las Casas, Sepulveda stood: an Aristotelian philosopher who
found in the texts of his mentor, not a justification for slavery,
absent in fact from the texts of the Stagirite, but the description and
the explanation of the slave society of ancient Greece,
represented as a functional set of institutions: a legitimate model of
human society. Sepulveda considered slavery, obedience to orders given,
to be the status that suits a people who, left to themselves, commit, as
we can observe, nameless abominations. Sepulveda finds argument in the
atrocities committed, in particular the uninterrupted practice of human
sacrifice, for which the populations brutally enslaved by the dominant
society of the moment, constitute an inexhaustible source of victims, but
also their anthropophagy, as well as their practice of incest. in the
European sense of the term: fraternal and sororal incest within the
framework of princely families in Mexico, "incestuous promiscuity" if
you will, in the pooling of women among brothers, a difficulty that the
Jesuits later encountered in the case of the Guaranis of Paraguay, which
they will resolve by banning the “longhouse”, the collective dwelling
of siblings.
Las Casas responded to Sepulveda by stressing that Spanish
civilization is no less brutal: "We do not find in the customs of the
Indians of greater cruelty than that which we ourselves had in the
civilizations of the old world." Very diplomatically, he draws his
examples from the past and says "formerly:" "In the past, we manifested a
similar cruelty", highlighting for example the gladiatorial fights of
ancient Rome. He also drew an argument from the monumental
architecture of the Aztecs as proof of their civilization.
If the two points of view differed, and even if their positions were considered diametrically opposed, the two parties agreed on the fact
that the invaders not only have rights to exercise over the Amerindians
but also duties towards them, and in particular, in the context of the
time and the question to be answered. There is no dispute between them
as to the duty to convert: this is the dimension strictly speaking
"Catholic" from the very framework of the debate. Their difference lies
in their respective recommendations of the methods to be used: peaceful
colonization and exemplary life for Las Casas and, for
Sepulveda, institutional colonization based on coercion, given the
brutal features of the very culture of the pre-Colombian populations.
Let us remember that the context was extremely brutal texts on both sides. Las Casas, at the end of his life, will write a small book
devoted only to the atrocities committed by the conquistadors, a small
book that propaganda consistently used against Spain to advantage its rivals: the Netherlands, France and England, although this does
not mean that these nations will not also be guilty of the same crimes
in the territories that they will annex in their business colonial.
Mutual surveillance therefore of European nations vis-à-vis possible
abuses committed by others, from a diplomatic perspective of foreign
policy.
The controversy officially ended in 1551 when Charles V, on the
recommendations of the commission, formalized the position defended by
Las Casas. It will therefore be by invoking the Gospels and by example
that conversion will have to continue and not at the point of the sword.
A victory which, however, will not immediately have enormous
consequences on the ground, any more than the papal bulls had had before
it. The encomenderos will only weakly respect the injunctions
coming from the mother country. Wars between Amerindian tribes will
continue despite the presence of missionaries and a small military
contingent. The Bandeirantes of Sao Paulo will organize raids, supplying the encomenderos with prisoners, who will be on the plantations, as many de facto slaves. Etc.
A year after the controversy was over, in 1552, Las Casas undertook to write his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias ,
the very brief account of the destruction of the Indies, which will
therefore be his testimony on the destructions and the atrocitie, of the
colonization of New Spain by the Spaniards.
When, from the end of the same century, missions are founded in
Paraguay, called "Reductions", it will be in the exact line of the
proposals of Las Casas.
It will be essentially Las Casas who will obtain, thanks to his
vibrant plea in favor of the local populations, that the question of
slavery would be closed once and for all in Central and South America: there
will be no indigenous slaves, Amerindians will be considered as full
citizens and, as an unexpected consequence, since the Church has not
pronounced on the question of knowing whether Africans could be enslaved
or not, the Spanish and Portuguese authorities will consider that the
decision in favor of the position of Las Casas opens suddenly the
possibility of a systematic exploitation of the African populations to
draw from them the stock of slaves required by the plantations of the
New World. It is Las Casas who will be in a way responsible for an
acceleration of the slavery of Africans insofar as the authorities, both
civil and ecclesiastical, by discouraging the enslavement of the
Amerindians, will indirectly encourage the planters to turn, as a
replacement, towards the slave trade in African blacks, a situation in
which Las Casas found himself at the time when he was encomendero. In
his correspondence, at the end of his life, he bitterly regretted having been indirectly the cause of an aggravated enslavement of
Africans.
The sincere concern of Bartolomé de Las Casas to spare the
Amerindians, will have preserved them from the even more tragic fate of
their brothers and sisters of North America within the framework of an
essentially English colonization at the start, made of spoliation and
genocide, without any interbreeding.
