To this day I keep assigning Fray Bartolome de las Casas’ A Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies. The description of the Spaniards’ violence towards the indigenous population of the Caribbean is so brutal that it is hard to move the students away from that and into the significance of his account.
It is also difficult for some graduate students to move beyond some of the hyperbole in the manuscript (which ironically mimics the Conquistadors’ own ala Greek-hero hyperbolic rhetoric) and fully understand the significance of the Brevísima relación de la devastación de las Indias, originally published in 1542.
It is well known that de las Casas wrote this narrative as a way to expose the abuses committed by the Spaniards and that of other Europeans settling in the Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere’s mainland– the so-called New World. So why do we keep reading and teaching it?
It is not because it triggered Black slavery in the Americas, because, quite frankly, it did not.
Black Africans were being enslaved and transported to the Americas before Bartolomé de las Casas published his writings.
The Portuguese controlled much of the early transatlantic slave trade, and it was so lucrative that, combined with the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of the Western Hemisphere, the demand for labor made the forced transportation of enslaved Africans highly likely, with or without de las Casas. His writings did not create the trade.
Instead, de las Casas’s account is important because he argued—and attempted to demonstrate—that the “Indians” had given the “Christians” (the Spaniards) no “just cause” to wage war against them.
That was a crucial distinction. If the Spaniards had no just cause to wage war, then their claims to those lands and their right to subjugate the Indigenous peoples could be challenged. His arguments opened the door for other European powers to question the legality of the Spanish conquest and, by extension, the legitimacy of the Crown’s sovereignty over those territories.
In other words, even before the Protestant Reformation fractured Western Christendom, there were already theological and legal grounds upon which Spain’s and Portugal’s competitors could challenge the legitimacy of their overseas empires.
This is important because, through the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, Pope Alexander VI had effectively divided much of the non-Christian world between these two Iberian global powers (Spain and Portugal).
According to the treaty, lands west of an imaginary line 370 leagues (approximately 1,185 miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands could be claimed by Castile and Aragon (Spain), while lands to the east could be claimed by Portugal, subject to the treaty’s terms.
The original demarcation line, established by the papal bulls of 1493, had been set 100 leagues (approximately 320 miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands. The Portuguese were dissatisfied with that arrangement and negotiated a new boundary in 1494.
The rest of Western Europe was hardly pleased with either arrangement—and understandably so. Why should the pope have the authority to divide the world between Spain and Portugal, effectively granting these two monarchies a privileged position in the race for overseas empire?
Britannica: Treaty of Tordesillas
This broader framework is known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which established a spiritual, political, and legal justification for claiming and colonizing lands inhabited by non-Christians.
Its formal development predates Columbus’s voyages and can be traced to the fifteenth-century papacy, including Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 bull Inter Caetera. But its origins go back further, to a period when Western Christian Europe was searching for new routes to Asian markets and expanding its overseas ambitions.
Consider the historical context. Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The event did not suddenly create European exploration, which was already underway, but it reinforced the strategic and commercial incentives to seek alternative routes to Asian markets.
Portugal, in particular, was committed to exploring the African coastline, rounding the continent, and gaining access to the Indian Ocean trade.
In this context, Pope Nicholas V issued Dum Diversas on June 18, 1452, authorizing Portugal’s King Afonso V (known as the African or el africano– following the ancient Roman tradition of bestowing regional names to the commanders and leaders who conquered them) to conquer Saracens (Muslims) and pagans and consign them to “perpetual servitude.”
This was followed by Romanus Pontifex in 1455, which reinforced Portugal’s claims and privileges concerning its expansion along the African coast and its efforts to establish an overseas empire.
These papal bulls, together with Inter Caetera and the Treaty of Tordesillas, became part of the religious and legal framework used to justify European conquest and colonization—not only in the Americas but elsewhere in the world.
It is no wonder that other European powers resented Pope Alexander VI’s decision to divide much of the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal. In effect, these arrangements gave the two Iberian monarchies a privileged position in overseas expansion, while leaving their European competitors on the sidelines.
We must also remember the pope’s place in the political and religious order of medieval and early modern Europe. The Catholic Church was not simply a religious institution; it was deeply intertwined with the political, legal, and diplomatic systems that governed European affairs.
The pope claimed spiritual authority over Western Christendom, and papal decisions could carry enormous political consequences. A monarch who defied the pope risked excommunication, which could undermine his legitimacy, weaken his political position, and provide rivals with grounds to challenge his authority.
The relationship between papal authority and royal power was complicated, of course, and monarchs did not always fully submit to Rome. Nevertheless, the pope’s endorsement could provide a powerful source of legitimacy.
But here is where de las Casas’ writings becomes especially important. If the Spaniards had committed acts that violated the principles of just war—and they had—then other Christian Europeans could use those violations to challenge Spain’s claims. They could argue that the conquest was illegitimate, that the Spanish Crown had no just title to the territories it claimed, and that Spain’s conduct provided grounds for opposing its imperial ambitions.
That is one reason de las Casas’s writings were so useful to Spain’s competitors. His arguments could be turned against the Spanish Empire by powers seeking to weaken its claims, expand their own influence, and gain access to territories and resources that Spain considered its exclusive domain.
Spain’s competitors developed and deployed what became known as the Black Legend: a body of anti-Spanish propaganda that portrayed Spain as uniquely cruel, fanatical, and tyrannical in its treatment of Indigenous peoples. The point is not that Spanish brutality was invented. It was not. The point is that Spain’s enemies could emphasize Spanish atrocities while presenting their own imperial projects as more humane, more civilized, and thus more legitimate.
If it sounds as though Spain’s rivals were claiming to care about the well-being of the “Indians” and wanted to save them from tyrannical Spanish rule, that is because competing empires have long accused one another of oppressing people while claiming to wage war in the name of liberation.
Make no mistake: Spain was brutal. This is not an apology for Spanish colonialism. But so, too, would be the English, French, Dutch, Danish, and Portuguese empires, followed eventually by the Anglo-American empire, as they continued the conquest and colonization of the Western Hemisphere, Asia, and Africa.
None of these powers consistently rejected the underlying principle that Christian European discovery could establish a superior claim to lands inhabited by non-Christian peoples. In practice, rival empires challenged Spain’s exclusive claims while preserving—and adapting—the same basic logic of dispossession for their own purposes.
Indeed, the Doctrine of Discovery did not disappear with the end of the Spanish monopoly or the decline of papal political authority. It became embedded in other legal and political traditions, including that of the United States.
In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court invoked the doctrine in Johnson v. McIntosh, helping establish a legal framework that privileged European-derived claims to Indigenous lands over the sovereignty of Indigenous nations.
As summarized by Steve Newcomb in Five Hundred Years of Injustice: The Legacy of Fifteenth Century Religious Prejudice, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall argued that European Christian nations had assumed “ultimate dominion” over American lands during the “Age of Discovery”. Indigenous peoples, he reasoned, retained a right of occupancy but had lost the right to complete sovereignty as independent nations.
In practical terms, this meant that Indigenous nations could be deprived of their ability to exercise full sovereignty over their territories, while the United States claimed ultimate authority over the land.
The irony is difficult to miss. A doctrine developed in fifteenth-century Europe to justify Christian expansion and competition between empires survived the Reformation, the decline of papal political authority, the age of revolutions, and the emergence of the United States as an independent republic. It was adapted to a new political and legal system and used to justify the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.
And that brings us back to de las Casas. His writings mattered not because they caused the transatlantic slave trade, but because they exposed the contradictions in the moral and legal arguments used to justify the Spanish conquest. At the same time, those arguments could be appropriated by rival powers whose concern for Indigenous peoples was often inseparable from their own imperial ambitions.
The larger lesson is that imperial powers can condemn the abuses of their rivals without rejecting the principles that make empire possible. They can denounce another empire’s cruelty, invoke justice and humanity, and promise liberation—all while preparing to claim the same lands, exploit the same resources, and impose their own authority over the same peoples.
That is the historical context we must keep in mind when examining de las Casas, the Black Legend, the Doctrine of Discovery, and the competing European global empires that emerged during the Age of Exploration.
And this is why I love history. There is nothing new under the sun as the Book of Ecclesiastes reminds us.
