Liberty Matters
Vitoria, Las Casas, and the Americas
In his essay “Prequel to Liberty in Spanish America,” Dr. Paul Schwennesen rightly points our attention to the contributions that key 16th century Spanish figures made to the broader 18th century transatlantic Enlightenment, most especially their contribution to the concept of liberty, property rights, and freedom of conscience. Though the Spanish enlightenment is usually dated to the early 18th century, when the failing Hapsburg dynasty gave way to Bourbon royalty. Schwennesen explains, though, that the 18th century Spanish enlightenment was preceded by influential 16th Spanish intellectual powerhouses, members of the “School of Salamanca, principally Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana and political philosopher, jurist, and cleric, Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, the founder of the so-called “School of Salamanca.”
He also calls upon Spain’s 16th century literary giant, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, whose magnum opus and wildly popular Don Quixote provides a literary indication of the importance of liberty in Spain, with its “common-sense” appeal to limitations on power and property rights. Schwennesen rightly notes that Cervantes was “ahead of his time.”
In his appeal to Cervantes, and as he probably knows, Schwenessen needn’t have stopped with Don Quixote. Undoubtedly, he is familiar with Cervantes’ appealing Exemplary Stories, most often overshadowed by Don Quixote. This collection of short studies was precocious as well. For example, “Rinconete and Cortadillo” is the tale of two homeless teenagers who join a band of juvenile petty thieves in Seville, the entrepôt between Spain and the Americas. While at first the two enjoy the unrestrained freedom with their new friends, they ultimately realize there is a difference between “liberty” and “libertine” and so they set out to find meaningful authority in their lives.
In addition is Cervantes’ relatively unknown deathbed saga, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story, often simply called the Persiles, which he completed only three days before his death and considered it his most important work. Schennesen notes the importance of the influence of the Catholic church, not only on Vitoria and Mariana, but we can say on Cervantes himself who became a Third Order Franciscan several years before his death. The Persiles relates a journey to Rome where the protagonists provide yet another meaningful perspective on an experience of liberty that is subordinate to one’s spiritual obligations. The two protagonists are “led by destiny and choice to the holy city of Rome, and until we reach there, we have no identity at all nor any liberty to use our free will. If Heaven leads us to walk that holy ground and worship its sacred relics, then we’ll again be able to exercise our now restrained wills. . . . “
Schwennesen further argues that along with provisions, horses, and weaponry, the conquistadors brought, however imperfectly, a notable principle of liberty to the Americas. Here, his argument becomes more challenging as he himself acknowledges that he is swimming upstream against conventional notions of ruthless invaders, pictured lyrically in the Procol Harum ballad, “Conquistador.” Composer and front man Gary Brooker says the title figure “reeks of purity.” Never mind Booker’s mispronunciation of the song title, the song has aged well.
Conquistador your stallion stands in need of companyAnd like some angel's hallowed brow you reek of purity
I see your armour-plated breast has long since lost its sheen
And in your death mask face there are no signs which can be seen
As evidence of the liberality of the conquest of Mexico and Central America, the author notes the role of Bartolomé de las Casas who was appointed to oversee the welfare of the indigenous New World peoples. It was his role to document “infractions” committed by the Spaniards against the natives, although “infractions” seems quite the euphemism.
Since Schwennesen has invoked the Spanish friar in support of his thesis, he is, so to speak, “fair game. “ The title of Las Casas’ well-known, bitter history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas is A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which he wrote in frustration at his ineffectiveness in carrying out his duties to prevent violence, conquest, slavery, and genocidal murder. It was his final, desperate attempt to stop the Spanish inhumanity in the new world.
The book was quickly translated into the major principle European languages and was dedicated to the Hapsburg Prince Phillip II, later to become King Phillip II. According to the book’s preface, it is the “anatomy of a genocide” and upon publication was quickly translated into every major European language. In his prologue, Las Casas explains his motivation in writing the account to Prince Phillip. It is in the hope of preventing
“[a]ny repetition of the atrocities which go under the name of ‘conquests‘ [which], if no move is made to stop them, will be committed time and again, and which are of themselves iniquitous, tyrannical, contrary to natural, canon, and civil law, and are deemed wicked and are condemned and proscribed by all such legal codes. I therefore concluded that it would constitute a criminal neglect of my duty to remain silent about the enormous loss of life . . . and so resolved to publish an account of a few such outrages (and they can be only a few out of the countless number of such incidents that I could relate) in order to make that account the more accessible to Your Highness.”
Las Casas’ account is difficult reading. His recount of atrocities on the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) rivals the terror that Iris Chang recounts in the disturbing The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II about the Japanese invasion of the ancient city in 1937-1938. Las Casas writes,
They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, sliced open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of the axes.
The Dominican continues,
They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while threw them over their shoulders into a river. . . . They slaughtered anyone and everyone in their path, on occasion running through a mother and her baby with a single thrust of their swords.
The Spaniards combined inhumanity with sacrilege “erecting especially wide gibbets on which they could string their victims up with their feet just off the ground and then burn them alive thirteen at a time, in honour of our Saviour and the twelve Apostles.”
In Cuba, the Spaniards indulged in “the same outrages, the same wanton destruction the same wholesale slaughter, the same atrocities as they had elsewhere” such that “it is beyond human capacity to compile an accurate log” of the atrocities. In the Province of Nicaragua, natives were enslaved and literally worked to death so that the population of the island was reduced from hundreds of thousands to five or six thousand.
Las Casas records similar episodes in “The Province and Kingdom of Guatemala,” “The Province of Cartagena,” “The Kingdom of Venezuela,” “The Great Kingdoms and Provinces of Peru,” “The Kingdom of Venezuela,” “The Mainland in the Region Known As Florida”—and more. The author concludes that it was “a chaos worthy of Lucifer himself” and just as damning, “the Spanish have taken no more trouble to preach the Christian faith to these peoples than if they had been dealing with dogs or other animals.”
Comparatively unknown is “La Conquista Erótica de las Indias” (“The Erotic Conquest of the Indias”) by Argentinian Ricardo Herren, which he subtitles “La maratonica actividad sexual de los conquistadores españoles segun las mismas cronicas de la epoca” (The Marathon-like Sexual Activity of the Conquistadors According to the Records of the Period Itself.”). It was not unusual for one Spaniard to sire dozens of children in the Americas. That libidinous activity, he explains, was shared by the enlisted and officers alike, so that, in a relatively short time, the DNA of the Americas was permanently altered.
Schwennesen acknowledges that “[t]here were enormous moral failings, to be sure and the point here is not to whitewash examples of deplorable illiberal acts;” however, he still maintains that [d]espite the evidence he provides he insists that the Spanish were “surprisingly respectful toward the peoples they were so evidently bent on conquering.” Once again, “surprisingly respectful” seems, to put it charitably, euphemistic. Schwennesen admits, “Whether this is a “whitewash” or not would require more exploration, more study, and more debate.” Indeed. He cites the statements of disapproval by Spanish royalty and asserts they were not cynical.” But some were. The trials of a few, for example, Coronado, were noteworthy, but were they sincere, or just staged for public consumption? Schwennesen also acknowledges that “such defenses might seem suspiciously convenient and self-serving to modern ears.” It seems that, to the degree that liberty was imported to the America’s it was far “more honor’d in the breach than in the observance,” to put it mildly.
The reader is indebted to Dr. Paul Schwennesen for drawing attention to the contribution of Mariana and Vitoria. I’m especially grateful for his inclusion of Francisco de Vitoria because only a short time ago, I served on a dissertation defense committee for a student at La Universidad Francisco de Vittoria, a fine, private, Catholic, institution in Madrid. I am one of those who am far too ignorant of these Spanish intellectuals’ contribution to the Enlightenment, and to the American Founding and I am now committed to reading Mariana’s history of Spain and several of Vitoria’s works as well.
Whether the Spanish conquest of the Americas is the best forum to pursue this interest seems an open question.
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