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CF 3333 Clash of Cultures

Covey: Notes on Religious Aspects of Spanish Conquest (4 October 2005)

1469: Ferdinand II (Aragon) and Isabella I (Castile) marry, and their unified Catholic kingdom begins the final process of consolidating control over a united Spain. At the time, Spain had large populations of Jews and Muslims, and had been the only multiracial and multireligious country in Europe. Ferdinand and Isabella mobilized Catholic sentiment to advance their expansion program, casting their kingdom as the defender of Christianity against the infidel.

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!

1478: Ferdinand and Isabella a papal bull from Sixtus IV, setting up the Spanish Inquisition, a secretly-run royal court established to maintain the purity of Spanish Catholicism and fight the supposedly dangerous influence of Jewish converts (conversos). The Inquisition tried and executed thousands of people and had the power to ban publications deemed unacceptable.

1492:

Granada, the last Moorish kingdom in Spain, is defeated.

Tomás de Torquemada, the head of the Inquisition, convinces Ferdinand and Isabella to expel Jews from their kingdom—170,000 Jews are forced to leave.

Christopher Columbus lands in the Caribbean.

1494: The Treaty of Tordesillas divides the world between Spain and Portugal for missionary work. Pope Alexander VI grants Ferdinand and Isabella the title "Catholic" rulers.

1499-1500: When Granada is conquered, the Moors surrender when offered generous terms, including religious freedom. After mass forced conversions, the Moors living in Spain rebel, and are defeated, then given the choice to accept Christianity or be expelled from Spain.

1500: Christopher Columbus begins to compile his Book of Prophecies. In it, he describes how his voyages of exploration were guided by God to reveal the populations of the world that required conversion to Christianity, and to allow Spain to retake Jerusalem from the east and fulfill biblical prophecies. Based on his calculations, Christ would return in the year 1656, and Columbus’ discoveries were the first important development to make this possible.

Columbus says: "With a hand that could be felt, the Lord opened my mind to the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies, and he opened my will to desire to accomplish the project…." He states that for Christ to return that biblical prophecies must be fulfilled, and that "I believe that there is evidence that our Lord is hastening these things. This evidence is the fact that the Gospel must be proclaimed in so many lands in such a short time."

At the beginning of its imperial expansion, Spain—which had until recently been multiracial and multireligious—saw itself as the champion of Catholicism, with a God-given responsibility to convert the peoples of the Americas. The Spanish Inquisition had purified Spanish Catholicism, and Spain had no doubts about its religious mission.

But what temporal power was it invested with to carry this mission out? This was a question that was argued at the Spanish court, and it involved a number of theological and philosophical questions, including:

1. The human nature of Native Americans

2. The just nature of war in the New World

3. The limits of temporal authority over newly discovered regions

Two features of conquest emerged to maintain a religious air to the temporal act of conquest: the encomienda system, and the Requirement.

The encomienda was in theory a system where a Spaniard was entrusted (encomendado) with a number of natives whom he was supposed to teach proper Christian doctrine. In return they would provide for his support. In practice this operated as a kind of slavery, and in 1511 priests the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos denounced the system from the pulpit.

The Requirement was a statement that was to be read to native people that informed them that they must acknowledge the dominion of the Catholic Church, the Pope, and the King, and must permit the preaching of Christianity. Failure to do so would justify forcible conquest, the enslavement of women and children, and seizure of property. The Requirement was established as a prerequisite for conquest, but was not usually read in good faith. It was based on the ideas of Martin Fernandez de Encisco, who wrote in 1513 that "the king might very justly send men to require these idolatrous Indians to hand over their land to him, for it was given him by the pope. If the Indians would not do this, he might justly wage war against them, kill them and enslave those captured in war, precisely as Joshua treated the inhabitants of Jericho."

Discovery and conquest in the Americas inspired a wave of Catholic missionaries to send priests to the New World. While religious authorities, philosophers, and humanists debated the justification of Spanish conquest, the religious orders—Franciscans, Augustinians, Dominicans, and Mercedarians—arrived and began the process of learning native languages and customs. They stood up against the worst abuses of the encomienda system, with Montesinos as the first noteworthy critic of the system. Religious figures in Peru in the first years after the conquest were intent on learning native languages and customs so as to missionize local populations more effectively. In the highlands they learned Quechua and began to send reports back to Spain and the Vatican. Religious instruction was more tolerant and syncretic, with Christian concepts couched in terms of native ideas (e.g., Viracocha and God; noqanchis v. noqayku).

A higher profile figure in this critique was Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had held an encomienda in the Caribbean before becoming a priest. He eventually became the bishop of Chiapas in Mexico, where he denounced Spanish violations of native human rights, going so far as to deny communion to those who did not treat natives humanely.

Las Casas was perhaps the first human rights activist in the modern world, and he wrote a treatise called A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, in which he chronicled the worst abuses of the Spaniards in the New World. This book became popular in countries where the Reformation was accentuating political rivalries with Spain—especially in the Netherlands and England. It was the source of the leyenda negra (Black Legend) of inhumane Spanish colonial practice in the Americas.

Las Casas returned to Spain to use his influence to fight Spanish colonialism. As late as the 1560s he was arguing that Spain had no right to receive economic benefit in Peru, and that the Inca ruler-in-exile should be made king over the whole country. There were debates in Spain that pitted Las Casas and his allies against humanists who argued that Spain had the right to conquer native peoples in order to convert them. The culmination of this debate was in 1550, when the emperor Charles V suspended further conquest until a just way of carrying them out could be determined. Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda met in Valladolid to present their cases for and against conquest. In his later years, Las Casas used reports from Peru to write a history of the Incas that he said demonstrated that they practiced civilized government, making Spanish conquest morally problematic.

The Pizarro expedition of 1532 encountered the Inca empire at a time when Spain was struggling with issues of human rights and the issue of just conquest. Shortly after the conquest, the religious orders began to send representatives to Peru, among them the newly-formed Jesuit order, which was founded in 1540 by the Spaniard Ignatius of Loyola (with permission of Pope Paul III) with the express intent of ensuring Catholic orthodoxy.

The Counter-Reformation as Excuse to Consolidate Religious and Administrative Authority

The influence of Las Casas in Protestant states led to the use of counter-Reformation forces to consolidate colonial administration in the New World. In Peru, there was a major native uprising in the 1560s called Taki Onqoy (The Dancing Sickness), which Spanish authorities blamed on Inca priests still living independently in the jungle not far from Cusco. Authorities in Spain felt that Las Casas’ writings had harmed Spain’s missionary territory, and they criticized the flexible nature of missionary teaching in many parts. The rebellion of the Low Countries put Spain in the position of fighting a Protestant rebellion in the territory it controlled, and there was concern for maintaining religious and temporal authority over Peru, which was supplying massive amounts of silver that helped to fund religious wars against Protestants and Muslims.

Shortly after Las Casas died, the Spanish king Philip II sent Francisco de Toledo to Peru as Viceroy with a mission of discrediting the history of Las Casas. Toledo brought the Spanish Inquisition with him and used it to crack down on native religious practices, as well as to censor dangerous books. Toledo acquired as many works of Las Casas as he could find and destroyed them. The instruments of the counter-Reformation were used to consolidate Spanish administrative authority, and to impose a more orthodox Christianity. Religious figures worked to eradicate native religious practices, conducting extirpations of idolatry in the early seventeenth century.