LAS CASAS, Babtolomé de (1474-1566), for some time bishop of Chiapa in Mexico, and known to posterity as “The Apostle of the Indies,” was a native of Seville, where he was born in 1474. His father, one of the companions of Columbus in the voyage which resulted in the discovery of the New World, was rich enough to be able to send him to Salamanca, where he graduated. In 1498 he accompanied his father in an expedition under Columbus to the West Indies, from which he returned in 1500; and in 1502 he went with Nicolas de Ovando, the governor, to Hayti, where eight years afterwards he was admitted to priestly orders, being the first person to receive that consecration in the colonies. In 1511, the conquest of Cuba having been resolved on, he passed over to that island to take part in the work of “population and pacification,” and in 1513 or 1514 he witnessed and vainly endeavoured to check the fearful massacre of Indians at Caonao. Soon afterwards there was assigned to him and his friend Renteria a large village in the neighbourhood of Xagua, with a number of Indians attached to it in what was known as “repartimiento” (allotment), and like the rest of his countrymen he sought to make the most of this opportunity for growing rich, but at the same time he occasionally celebrated ma?s and preached. Soon, however, having become deeply convinced of the injustice and other moral evils connected with the repartimiento system, he began to preach against it, at the same time giving up his own slaves. With the consent of his partner he resolved to go to Spain in the cause of the oppressed natives, and the result of his representations was that in 1616 Cardinal Jimenez caused a commission of three Hieronymites to be sent out for the reform of abuses, Las Casas himself, ...with the title of “protector of the Indians” being appointed, with a salary, to advise and inform them. This commission had not been long at San Domingo, however, before Las Casas became painfully aware of the indifference of his coadjutors to the cause which he himself had so closely at heart, and July 1517 found him again in Spain, where he developed his scheme for the complete liberation of the Indians,—a scheme which not only included facilities for emigration from Spain, but was intended to give to each Spanish resident in the colonies the right of importing twelve negro slaves. The emigration movement proved a failure, and Las Casas lived long enough to express his sorrow and shame for having been so slow to perceive that the Africans were as much entitled to the rights of man as were the natives of the New World. Overwhelmed with disappointment, he retired to the Dominican monastery in Hayti, where he joined the order in 1522, and devoted eight years of extreme seclusion to the acquisition of that store of classical and scholastic learning which appears so curiously in all his writings. About 1530 he appears to have revisited the Spanish court, but on what precise errand or with what result is not known; the vagueness and confusion of the records of this period of his life extends to the time when, after visits to Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Guatemala, in the cause of religion and of his order, he undertook an expedition in 1537 into Tuzulutlan or the Tierra de Guerra (“Land of War”), the inhabitants of •which were, chiefly through his tact and skill, peaceably converted to Christianity, mass being celebrated for the first time amongst them in the newly founded town of Rabinal in 1538. In 1539 Las Casas was sent to Spain to obtain Dominican recruits, and through Loaysa, general of the order, and confessor of Charles V., he was successful in obtaining many royal orders and letters which were supposed to be favourable to his enterprise, among others that which prohibited for the time being the entrance of any lay Spaniard into Tuzulutlan. During this stay in Europe, which lasted more than four years, he more than once visited Germany to see Charles, whom the business of the empire was detaining there; he also (1542) wrote his Veynte Iiazones (“Twenty Reasons ”) in defence of the liberties of the Indians and the Brevisima lielacion de la Destruycioη des las Indias, the latter of which was published some twelve years later, and has since been translated into several European languages. In 1543 he refused the Mexican bishopric of Cuzco, but was prevailed upon to accept that of Chiapa, for which he sailed in 1544. Thwarted at every point by the officials, and outraged with passionate hatred by his countrymen in his attempt to carry out the “new laws” which his humanity had procured (see the “Remedios que refirio” in the Seville edition of his Obras, 1552), he returned to Spain and resigned his dignity three years afterwards (1547). In 1550 he met Sepulveda in public debate on the theses drawn from the recently published Apologia pro Libro de Justis Belli Causis, in which the latter had maintained the lawfulness of waging unprovoked war upon the natives of the New World. The course of the discussion may still be traced in the account of the “Disputa” contained in the t‰∙αs(1552). In 1555 Las Casas successfully remonstrated with Philip II. against the financial project for selling the reversion of the “encomiendas,”—a project which would have involved the Indians in hopeless bondage. In July of the following year he died at Madrid, whither he had gone to urge (and with success) the necessity of restoring a court of justice which had been repressed in Guatemala.
A Histοriα de las Iηdias was left by Las Casas to the convent of San Gregorio at Valladolid, with directions that it should not be printed for forty years. Herrera, however, was permitted to consult it for his Historia General (1601). It afterwards lay neglected until the Royal Academy of History took it up with an intention of publishing it. That intention was afterwards abandoned; Prescott, who appears to have seen the MS., hopes that it may yet be given to the world. Sketches of the life of Las Casas have been given by Llorente and by Quintana. The English reader will find adequate notices in the appendix to bk. ii., chap, viii., of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, and in the copious monograph of Sir Arthur Helps (Life of Las Casas, 1868).
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