New Spain - Timeline (Expand All)
1453: Romanus Pontifex, papal bull of Pope Eugenius, authorizes
subjugation and colonization of African nations by Portuguese traders. Establishes authority of papal grants and emphasizes benign, paternal qualities of Christian authority, the aim of which is conversion of infidels. (Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed. European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648. Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1917) <https://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/indig-romanus-pontifex.html> [Display Quote]
1485: Columbus's proposal to Spanish Crown to find a westward spice route to the Indies. Spanish Crown convenes ecclesiastical commission at University of Salamanca, presided over by Hernando de Talavera, Queen Isabella's personal confessor, to discuss Columbus's propositions.
1491: A second ecclesiastical committee meets and finds Columbus's ideas consistent with Holy Writ.
1492: Spain defeats Moors at Granada – Spain expels infidels (Muslims and Jews).
1492: Columbus's first voyage to New World. Columbus lands at Guanahani, in the present-day Bahamas, which he claims and names as San
Salvador. First contact with Arawak natives. (Dunn and Kelley) <https://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/columbus1.html> [Display Quote]
1493: The Inter caetera Bulls of Pope Alexander VI give Spain title to Columbus's discoveries. <https://www.kwabs.com/bull_of_1493.html> <https://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/indig-inter-caetera.html> [Display Quote]
1493: Columbus's second voyage to New World and first colonization venture on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Santo Domingo).
1494: Treaty of Tordesillas adjusts papal line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese possessions in the New World.
1498: Columbus's third voyage to the New World.
1499: Gold mining begins on Hispaniola.
1500: Queen Isabella terminates Columbus's governorship because of his mistreatment of natives (and her fears of papal retribution).
1501: New governor Nicolás de Ovando initiates system of encomienda. Literally translated as "charge, commission, or patronage," the encomienda granted groups of Indian slaves to Spanish encomenderos, who used them as forced labor according to a feudal, medieval system and mentality.
1502: Columbus's fourth voyage to the New World.
1503: Queen Isabella's "Decree on Indian Labor" authorizes forced labor of natives by Spanish. (Parry and Keith) [Display Quote]
1511: As told by Bartolomé de Las Casas, in Hispaniola Friar Antonio de Montesinos preaches a sermon accusing encomenderos of sinful behavior toward Indians and threatening to withhold confession and absolution from colonists who mistreat natives. (Parry and Keith) [Display Quote]
1512: Council of Burgos drafts Laws of Burgos (1513) – first piece of colonial legislation. Granted use of forcible means to coerce Indian subjugation when necessary. Among the items legislated were diminished legal status of Indian tribal culture, forced relocation of native populations, and the forbidding of nakedness. (Parry and Keith) <https://www.college.emory.edu/culpeper/BAKEWELL/texts/burgoslaws.html> [Display Quote]
1512-1513: Shortly after the Burgos junta, the following two documents examining Indian dominium are drafted: De Dominio Regum [On Royal Dominion] by Matías de Paz and De Insulis Oceanis [Of the Ocean Isles] by Juan López de Palacios Rubios. Both texts are available in Spanish in the following volume: Lopez de Palacios Rubios, Juan. De las Islas del Mar Océano [Of the Ocean Isles]; Contient également [Also Containing] Paz (Matías de). Del Dominio de los Reyes de España sobre los Indios. [Concerning the Rule of the Kings of Spain over the Indians.] Trans. Agustín Millares Carlo. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1963.
1513: The Requerimiento, charter of conquest, drafted by Juan López de Palacios Rubios (council to King Ferdinand). Literally translated as "request, demand, or summons," the Requerimiento warned natives of their options: submission or annihilation. In a practice that becomes a parody of justification, this document is read in Spanish to uncomprehending Indians before Spanish attacks upon them. The practice of reading the Requerimiento aloud is not abolished until 1556. (Parry and Keith) <https://www.dickinson.edu/~borges/Resources-Requerimiento.htm> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requerimiento> [Display Quote]
1518: Bartolomé de las Casas secures a royal order authorizing social experiments known as reducciones [reductions]. New World missionary friars establish communities of free Indians, with an emphasis on conversion rather than on labor. Many said to have failed due to native resistance or indifference.
1520-22: >Discovery and conquest of México by Hernán Cortés.
1521: Las Casas conducts his own social experiment at Cumaná on the north coast of South America.
1532: Franciscus de Victoria (1480-1546) delivers lecture "De Indis Noviter Inventis" ["On the Indians Lately Discovered"]. Argues for Indians' natural rights to dominium (property and lordship). Dismisses title by discovery. Argues that Indians too are bound by natural law and therefore must receive conquerors. (see 1539) <https://www.constitution.org/victoria/victoria_.htm> <https://www.healingtheland.com/resources/discovery/relectio.html>
1537: Sublimis Deus, papal bull of Pope Paul III, establishes the rights of Indian peoples to liberty, property, and dominium as Church Law. Argues for peaceful conversion. (Parry and Keith) <https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul03/p3subli.htm> [Display Quote]
1539: Section I of Franciscus de Victoria's "De Indis Noviter Inventis" ["On the Indians Lately Discovered"] delivered separately as "De Indis" ["On the American Indians"]. (Vitoria)
<https://www.constitution.org/victoria/victoria_.htm> <https://www.healingtheland.com/resources/discovery/relectio.html> [Display Quote]
<https://www.constitution.org/victoria/victoria_.htm> <https://www.healingtheland.com/resources/discovery/relectio.html> [Display Quote]
1542: New Laws (Leyes Nuevas) forbid Indian slavery and outlaw inheritance of encomienda. (Parry and Keith) [Display Quote]
1545: Charles V revokes inheritance clauses of New Laws that would have phased out encomienda system.
1550: Debate at Valladolíd between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on Indian capacity. (see essay by Anne DeLong) [Hide Quote]
Sepúlveda's position: Citing Aristotle and St. Augustine among others, Sepúlveda argues in favor of waging war against the Indians to forcefully convert and subjugate them and to punish their infractions against natural law.Las Casas's position: Las Casas challenges Sepúlveda's charges of the barbarous nature of the Indians and their commission of crimes against natural law. Argues against forceful conversion and punishment of natural law transgressions. Also attacks authority of Sepúlveda's sources.
Texts of the Valladolid Debate:
Sepúlveda - "Apología del libro de las justas causas de la guerra" ["Defense of the book on the just causes of war"] – Sepúlveda's summary of his book Demócrates Segundo [Demócrates II] printed in Rome in 1550. Summary translated to Spanish by Angel Losada in 1974.
From Sepulveda, Demócrates Segundo: "In prudence, talent, virtue, and humanity they [the Indians] are as inferior to the Spaniards as children to adults, women to men, as the wild and cruel to the most meek, as the prodigiously intemperate to the continent and temperate, that I have almost said, as monkeys to men."
Las Casas – In Defense of the Indians – first drafted c. 1548-1550 and presented at Valladolid as the Apología (Defense). Translated to English by Stafford Poole in 1974.
From Las Casas – In Defense of the Indians – first drafted c. 1548-1550 and presented at Valladolid as the Apología (Defense). Translated to English by Stafford Poole in 1974: "[T]hey [the Indians] are of such gentleness and decency that they are, more than the other nations of the entire world, supremely fitted and prepared to abandon the worship of idols and to accept, province by province and people by people, the word of God and the preaching of the truth."
1552: Las Casas publishes Brevíssima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias [A Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies], an exposé of inhumane treatment of natives by Spaniards, which becomes known as The Spanish Cruelties when translated into English, the basis for the Black Legend against the Spanish conquistadors.
1556: The practice of reading the Requerimiento is abolished.
