Valladolid debate
Held in the Colegio de San Gregorio, in the Spanish city of Valladolid, it was a moral and theological debate about the conquest of the Americas, its justification for the conversion to Catholicism, and more specifically about the relations between the European settlers and the natives of the New World.
Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas, argued that the Native Americans were free men in the natural order despite their practice of human sacrifices and other such customs, deserving the same consideration as the colonizers.
Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar from the School of Salamanca and member of the growing Christian Humanist movement, worked for years to oppose forced conversions and to expose the treatment of Indigenous people in the encomiendas.
[6][4] Though Las Casas tried to bolster his position by recounting his experiences with the encomienda system's mistreatment of the Indigenous people, the debate remained on largely theoretical grounds.
Sepúlveda took a more secular approach than Las Casas, basing his arguments largely on Aristotle and the Humanist tradition to assert that some Indigenous people were subject to enslavement due to their inability to govern themselves, and could be subdued by war if necessary.
[1] Las Casas objected, arguing that Aristotle's definition of the barbarian and natural slave did not apply to Indigenous peoples, all of whom were fully capable of reason and should be brought to Christianity without force or coercion.
[4] Sepúlveda put forward many of the arguments from his Latin dialogue Democrates Alter Sive de Justi Belli Causis,[7] to assert that what he saw as the barbaric traditions of certain Indigenous peoples justified waging war against them.
[9] Las Casas was prepared for part of his opponent's discourse, since he, upon hearing about the existence of Sepúlveda's Democrates Alter, had written in the late 1540s his own Latin work, the Apologia, which aimed at debunking his opponent's theological arguments by arguing that Aristotle's definition of the "barbarian" and the natural slave did not apply to Indigenous people, who were fully capable of reason and should be brought to Christianity without force.
The debate cemented Las Casas's position as the lead defender of the Indigenous peoples in the Spanish Empire,[3] and further weakened the encomienda system.
[4] Both Sepúlveda and Las Casas maintained their positions long after the end of the debate, but their arguments became less significant when the Spanish presence in the New World became permanent.
It also helped convince more missionaries to come to the Americas to study the indigenous people, such as Bernardino de Sahagún, who learned the native languages to discover more about their cultures and civilizations.
[21] Las Casas's ethical arguments offer a reflection on the question of jurisdiction, asking whether law can be applied internationally, especially in so-called 'rogue states'.
