Why was bartolomé de las casas important

Bartolomé de Las Casas ( – ), known as the Apostle of the Indies, was a 16th centurySpanishpriest and writer, and the first Bishop of Chiapas, Mexico.

Bartolome de las casas mini biography The Insular Cases: History and Significance. In , Las Casas wanted to try again to demonstrate that Indigenous people could be interacted with peacefully and that violence and conquest were unnecessary. The second was a change in the labor policy so that instead of a colonist owning the labor of specific Indians, he would have a right to man-hours, to be carried out by no specific persons. OCLC

Las Casas was the Dominican priest who condemned the treatment of Indians in the Spanish empire. His widely disseminated 'History of the Indies' helped to establish the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty.

Biography

Bartolome de Las Casas was born in Seville, Spain in He was there when Christopher Columbus went to Seville in after Columbus' first trip to the Americas.

His father, Pedro de las Casas, and his uncle went to the Americas in the second voyage of Columbus that left in November

With his father, he went to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in together with Nicolás de Ovando, the new governor of the island. In he went to Rome, Italy, where he became a Catholicpriest.

He went back to Hispaniola in and moved to Concepción de la Vega, in the Cibao valley, and got an encomienda (land with the indigenous people living there).

Then he went in to Cuba and the governor Diego Velázquez gave him an "encomienda".

Bartolome de las casas mini biography in english Las Casas was disappointed and infuriated. Las Casas had become a hated figure by Spaniards all over the islands, and he had to seek refuge in the Dominican monastery. In the Catholic Church , the Dominicans introduced his cause for canonization in Harvard Human Rights Journal.

But soon Las Casas began to understand that the native people (Taínos in Cuba and Hispaniola) were treated as slaves in a very bad way, and he began to defend the native people.

Las Casas became the first official priest in the New World in

In he went to Hispaniola, and from there to Spain to defend the native people of the Americas.

From to , and with the title Protector of the Indians, he tried to develop a model settlement in northern Venezuela to protect the native people but the experiment failed. From there, he went to Hispaniola, joining the Dominican Order (an order of Catholic priests) in

He stayed in the city of Santo Domingo until when he was sent to Puerto Plata, on the northern coast, to found a new religious community and where he began to write his History of the Indies.

He became Bishop of Chiapas, Mexico, from to He wrote a book about the abuse of Indians called A short account of the destruction of the Indies.

The book was finished in but it was not released as a book until It is his most famous book.

John cabot After several months of negotiations Las Casas set sail alone; the peasants he had brought had deserted, and he arrived in his colony already ravaged by Spaniards. This required the establishment of self-governing Indian communities on the land of colonists — who would themselves organize to provide the labor for their patron. During this time the Hieronimytes had time to form a more pragmatic view of the situation than the one advocated by Las Casas; their position was precarious as every encomendero on the Islands was fiercely against any attempts to curtail their use of native labor. Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day.

He went to Spain and he stayed here until he died in 17 July in Madrid.

Works

Some of his more important written works are:

• Historia de las Indias ("History of the Indies")
• De Unico Vocationis Modo Omnium Infidelium ad Veram Religionem, known in Spanish as Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión,
• Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias ("A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies"),
• Apologética historia sumaria ("Apologetic History")
• De thesauris

• Bartolomé de las Casas, Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Paperback).

  Translated by Nigel Griffin. Penguin Classics; 1st ed edition (September 8, ) ISBN:

• Bartolomé de las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies, a Brief Account. Translated by Herma Briffault. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, ISBN:

Images for kids

• Reconstruction of a Taíno village from Las Casas's times in contemporary Cuba

• Contemporary portrait of the young Emperor Charles V

• Cover of the New Laws of

• The Church of the Dominican Convent of San Pablo in Valladolid where Bartolomé de Las Casas was consecrated as Bishop on March 30,

• The façade of the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid, where Las Casas spent his final decades

• Cover of the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (), Bartolomé de las Casas

• Cover of the Disputa o controversia con Ginés de Sepúlveda (), Bartolomé de las Casas

• Fray Bartolomé de las Casas depicted as Savior of the Indians in a later painting by Felix Parra

• "Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, convertiendo a una familia azteca", by Miguel Noreña

• Monument to Bartolomé de las Casas in Seville, Spain.

• Residencial Las Casas in Santurce, San Juan

See also

In Spanish: Bartolomé de las Casas para niños