Justifying Conquest

The immense riches Spain reaped from its New World empire came largely at the expense of Native Americans. A few individual Spaniards raised their voices against the brutal exploitation of the Indians. Their criticisms prompted the Spanish monarchy to formulate an official justification of conquest that, in effect, blamed the Indians for resisting Spanish dominion.

DOCUMENT 1

Montecino’s 1511 Sermon

In 1511, a Dominican friar named Antón Montecino delivered a blistering sermon that astonished the Spaniards gathered in the church in Santo Domingo, headquarters of the Spanish Caribbean.

Your greed for gold is blind. Your pride, your lust, your anger, your envy, your sloth, all blind. … You are in mortal sin. And you are heading for damnation. … For you are destroying an innocent people. For they are God’s people, these innocents, whom you destroyed. By what right do you make them die? Mining gold for you in your mines or working for you in your fields, by what right do you unleash enslaving wars upon them? They have lived in peace in this land before you came, in peace in their own homes. They did nothing to harm you to cause you to slaughter them wholesale. …

Are you not under God’s command to love them as you love yourselves?

Are you out of your souls, out of your minds? Yes. And that will bring you to damnation.

SOURCE: Zvi Dor-Ner, Columbus and the Age of Discovery (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 220–21.

DOCUMENT 2

The Requerimiento

In 1512 and 1513, King Ferdinand met with philosophers and theologians, and concluded that the holy duty to spread Christianity justified conquest. To buttress this claim, the king had his advisers prepare the Requerimiento.

According to the Requerimiento, Indians who failed to welcome Spanish conquest and all its blessings deserved to die. Conquistadors were commanded to read the Requerimiento to the Indians before any act of conquest.

On the part of the King … [and] queen of [Spain], subduers of the barbarous nations, we their servants notify and make known to you, as best we can, that the Lord our God, living and eternal, created the heaven and the earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and we, and all the men of the world, were and are descendants. …

God our lord gave charge to one man called St. Peter, that he should be lord and superior to all the men in the world, that all should obey him, and that he should be the head of the whole human race, wherever men should live … and he gave him the world for his kingdom and jurisdiction. …

[The Pope] who succeeded that St. Peter as lord of the world … made donation of these islands and mainland to the … king and queen [of Spain]. …

So their highnesses are kings and lords of these islands and mainland by virtue of this donation; and … almost all those to whom this has been notified, have received and served their highnesses, as lords and kings, in the way that subjects ought to do, with good will, without any resistance, immediately, without delay, when they were informed of the aforesaid facts. And also they received and obeyed the priests whom their highnesses sent to preach to them and to teach them our holy faith; and all these, of their own free will, without any reward or condition have become Christians, and are so, and their highnesses have joyfully and graciously received them, and they have also commanded them to be treated as their subjects and vassals; and you too are held and obliged to do the same. Wherefore, as best we can, we ask and require that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the ruler and superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the king and queen [of Spain] our lords, in his place, as superiors and lords and kings of these islands and this mainland … and that you consent and permit that these religious fathers declare and preach to you. …

If you do so … we … shall receive you in all love and charity, and shall leave you, your wives and your children and your lands free without servitude, that you may do with them and with yourselves freely what you like and think best, and they shall not compel you to turn to Christians unless you yourselves, when informed of the truth, should wish to be converted to our holy Catholic faith. … And besides this, their highnesses award you many privileges and exemptions and will grant you many benefits.

But if you do not do this or if you maliciously delay in doing it, I certify to you that with the help of God we shall forcefully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods and shall do to you all the harm and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their highnesses, or ours, or of these soldiers who come with us.

The Indians who heard the Requerimiento could not understand Spanish, of course. No native documents survive to record the Indians’ thoughts upon hearing the Spaniards’ official justification for conquest, even when it was translated into a language they recognized. But one conquistador reported that when the Requerimiento was translated for two chiefs in Colombia, they responded that if the pope gave the king so much territory that belonged to other people, “the Pope must have been drunk.”

SOURCE: Adapted from A. Helps and M. Oppenheim, eds., The Spanish Conquest in America and Its Relation to the History of Slavery and to the Government of the Colonies, 4 vols. (London and New York, 1900–1904), 1:264–67.

Questions for Analysis and Debate

How did the Requerimiento address the criticisms of Montecino? According to the Requerimiento, why was conquest justified? What was the source of the Indians’ resistance to conquest?

What arguments might a critic like Montecino have used to respond to the Requerimiento’s justification of conquest? What arguments might the Mexican leader Montezuma have made against those of the Requerimiento?

Was the Requerimiento a faithful expression or a cynical violation of the Spaniards’ Christian faith?

CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA

How did the Spanish view the conquest of the Americas?