Bartolomé de las Casas
1484 CE–1566 CE · Seville
Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) was a Spanish Dominican friar, bishop, and historian who became the foremost advocate for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Americas during the era of Spanish colonization. A former encomendero who underwent a radical conversion of conscience in 1514 while in Cuba, he spent decades lobbying the Spanish Crown for legal protections for Native Americans, producing the landmark legal-theological treatise In Defense of the Indians and the harrowing eyewitness account A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. His 1550–1551 Valladolid debate against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, in which he argued that indigenous peoples possessed full rational humanity and natural rights, stands as one of the earliest formal human-rights proceedings in Western history. Appointed Bishop of Chiapas in 1544, he departed his diocese by 1546–1547, finding enforcement of his reforming ideals impossible, and formally resigned the see in 1550, but continued writing and lobbying in Spain until his death. His thought is widely recognized as a foundational source for twentieth-century liberation theology.
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Old enough to watch Columbus come home
Bartolomé de las Casas, who would later become a prominent defender of Indigenous peoples, was a boy of about eight in Seville in the spring of 1493 when Christopher Columbus paraded through the city on his return from the first Atlantic crossing. His own father sailed on Columbus's second voyage later that year.
How we know
Las Casas born Seville 1484; Columbus's return parade through Seville, spring 1493; his father Pedro sailed on Columbus's second voyage (September 1493).
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SevilleסיביליהAndalusia — pre-expulsion Castilian center
What they did here
Born in Seville on November 11, 1484; his father Pedro and three uncles sailed with Columbus on the second voyage (1493), drawing the family into the colonial enterprise.
About Seville
Seville, on the Guadalquivir River in southwestern Spain, is the capital of Andalusia. Known to the Romans as Hispalis, it was the see of Archbishop Isidore (c. 600-636), the encyclopedist of Visigothic Spain. After the Muslim conquest it was called Ishbiliya; it flourished as a centre of Andalusi learning and in the twelfth century became a seat of the Almohad state, whose minaret survives as the Giralda, and Ibn Rushd served as a judge there. Castile captured the city in 1248. Its large Jewish community was devastated by the 1391 massacres, which began in Seville under the agitation of Archdeacon Ferrand Martinez. From 1503 the Casa de Contratacion gave Seville a monopoly on trade with the Americas.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Bartolomé de las Casas’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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