The heir of a family of merchants from Seville, De las Casas immigrated to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with the expedition of new governor Nicolás de Ovando, who carried the first orders from Queen Isabella I to actively promote the already popular intermarrying between Spaniards and indigenous in order to accelerate Christianization and give cohesion to the conquered land. Despite this custom of bedding natives, however, enslaving them was not illegal in Spain yet, and De las Casas soon started working as a slave raider and an encomendero or landowner in Cibao. However, after a travel to Spain to study and be ordered as a priest, he had the chance to witness the preaching of Antonio de Montesinos, the original defender of the indigenous, who preached against the Spanish colonists for their abuses and slavery. Although De las Casas was not immediately convinced, he eventually had a change of heart and converted to Montesinos' cause.
Speaking directly to the regent of Spain, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, De las Casas and Montesinos denounced the mistreatment of natives and proposed that, as enslavement of indigenous had been forbidden by the 1512 Laws of Burgos, black slaves bought in Africa could replace them as workforce (a stance which sounded well at the time but which De las Casas later regretted). Cisneros acquiesced and sent Bartolomé back with an embassy that tried to put order in Hispaniola, but it was a failure due to poor management. Finding little support in the court of the now adult king, Charles V, De las Casas decided to take the matter on his own hands, and with the support of Christopher Columbus' son Diego, he built a settlement in Cumaná (modern day Venezuela) where he could enforce his views. Unfortunately, luck escaped De las Casas again, as conflicts between conquistadores and the aggressive Caribe tribe led the latter to massacre and burn down the settlement. Devastated, De las Casas became a Dominican friar and abandoned his work for some years.
He returned to action in 1531, when he started touring through the ever expanding empire to protest against all the abuses he heard, and soon found his own bitter rival in a fellow defender of the Indians, the Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente, also known as Motolinía: among other things, De las Casas accused him of half-assing Christianization via forced mass baptisms, while Motolinía accused De las Casas of being a liar and a slanderer and the period equivalent to a keyboard warrior. Their efforts, however, reached the prestigious School of Salamanca, whose headmaster Francisco de Vitoria, yet another man involved with the protection of the indigenous, who eventually advised King Charles to abolish the encomienda system in his 1542 New Laws. However, this caused a literal revolt among landowners, and in order to settle down the problem, the king summoned the Valladolid Debate, a meeting of Salamanca masters in which the topic would be treated. De las Casas successfully defended his views against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a partisan of the White Man's Burden, and was solidified as the official protector of the Indians of the empire, after which De las Casas went to publish his most famous work, the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (currently published in English as A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies). He would die ten years later.
The Short Account is possibly the biggest point of controversy about De las Casas, by virtue of being a problematic work for all sides involved. It's been argued that De las Casas was trying to write such a dark, rueful chronicle of the Spanish abuses that any sane people who read it would quickly convert to his cause, and in order to do so, he exaggerated to a mindboggling degree all the real abuses he knew. In the book, he claims unironically that the Spaniards murdered a full billion of indigenous (that is, about twice the entire world's population at the time) and, despite openly admitting he did not witness many of the facts described, he then goes on a long parade of crimes of cartoonish proportions and creativity, claiming among other things that the Spaniards massacred villages literally as a pastime, built mansions in order to fill them with natives and burn them down, invented a variety of gruesome methods to entertain themselves killing native women and children, and even promoted cannibalism among the indigenous themselves so they would get fed easily. Paradoxically, De las Casas also goes to endorse himself the natives' Human Sacrifice on the basis it's their own version of Mass, at the same time adhering tightly to an awkward Noble Savage thesis centuries before Rousseau wrote it.
While De las Casas' work was instrumental in securing the attention of the Hispanic Monarchy to the topic, his quirky version of history infuriated almost all the mainstream chroniclers of the Indies, among them Motolinía, Bernardino de Sahagún, Pedro Cieza de León, Bartolomé de Albornoz, Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, and even Bernal Díaz del Castillo, an early conquistador that would write his autobiography, The True History of the Conquest of Mexico, to refute the Stupid Evil image of the conquest that was being promoted by De las Casas. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, himself a mestizo, would come to the extent to claim that Las Casas was an agent of Satan in a mission to spread chaos. Indeed, the book would also end up giving an unvaluable lot of fuel to the anti-Spanish propaganda born during the wars in Europe, being soon re-edited in English, French, Dutch and the language of any other nation at odds with Spain at the time, and receiving a popular set of gruesome illustrations by Dutch artist Theodor de Bry (who notably had to draw the indigenous as Caucasian people because he did not know how did Amerindians look like).
With ith the inaction of a Spanish crown that cared very little about such things, the book and its artwork would end up accepted like gospel as the proof of the extent of the Spanish debauchery – for many, tainting the noble intentions De las Casas might have had. The debate about it, especially indigenistas and hispanistas, is still raging.
In fiction
Live-Action TV- He's played by Óscar Rabadán in Carlos, rey emperador.
