What were the two sides of the Valladolid debate?
First, their natural condition deemed them unable to rule themselves, and it was the responsibility of the Spaniards to act as masters. Second, Spaniards were entitled to prevent cannibalism as a crime against nature. Third, the same went for human sacrifice. Fourth, it was important to convert Indians to Christianity.
What was the significance of the Valladolid debate?
The Valladolid debate (1550–1551) was the first moral debate in European history to discuss the rights and treatment of an indigenous people by conquerors. The affair is considered one of the earliest examples of moral debates about colonialism, human rights of colonized peoples, and international relations.
What is Bartolomé de las Casas point of view towards natives?
Las Casas became an avid critic of the encomienda system. He argued that the Indians were free subjects of the Castilian crown, and their property remained their own. At the same time, he stated that evangelization and conversion should be done through peaceful persuasion and not through violence or coercion.
What is the legacy of the Valladolid debate?
The most important legacy of this moral debate is arguably how it showed that a genuine ethical concern for the colonized natives was present in the Spanish Empire several centuries before such considerations carried any real moral force for later European empires.
What was Las Casas argument?
While the Pope had granted Spain sovereignty over the New World, de Las Casas argued that the property rights and rights to their own labor still belonged to the native peoples. Natives were subjects of the Spanish crown, and to treat them as less than human violated the laws of God, nature, and Spain.
How did Sepulveda justify enslaving the natives?
The text justified theoretically following Aristotelian ideas of natural slavery the inferiority of Indians and their enslavement by the Spaniards. He claimed that the Indians had no ruler, and no laws, so any civilized man could legitimately appropriate them.
What did Bartolomé de las Casas do?
Bartolomé de Las Casas, (born 1474 or 1484, Sevilla?, Spain—died July 1566, Madrid), early Spanish historian and Dominican missionary who was the first to expose the oppression of indigenous peoples by Europeans in the Americas and to call for the abolition of slavery there.