LAS CASAS, BARTOLOME DE (1474-1566), bishop of Chiapas, known to posterity as the "Apostle of the Indians," was born in Seville in 1474, of noble family; and educated at the University of Salamanca. In 1510 he took holy orders, the first to be granted in the New World, and as a member of Diego Velasquez's colonizing expedition to Cuba in 1511-12 tried vainly to check the massacre of Indians at Caonas.
In 1514 he became suddenly convinced of the unextenuated evil of the repartimiento system (allotment of Indians for forced labour), and in 1515 he went to Spain to plead the cause of the Indians before the king (Ferdinand the Catholic). Despite the opposition with which he was confronted from a powerful vested interest in high places, he persisted, and on the death of the king in Jan. 1516, the regent, Cardinal Jimenes de Cisneros, placed him at the head of a commission of Hieronymite fathers to inquire into the means of alleviating the wrongs suffered by the Indians. When the commission arrived at Hispaniola, Las Casas' zeal rebelled at the caution of his colleagues, and he returned to Spain in 1517. Las Casas vigorously pressed his cause with the advisers of the new king, Charles V. He drew up a plan for colonizing the Indians, advocating the importation of negro slaves. The plan failed, and he soon repented the fallacy of substituting negro for Indian slavery. His attempt to found a model colony on the mainland (Cumuna) was defeated through the rapacious brutality of the conquistadors from the islands, and in 1522 he retired to a Dominican convent in Hispaniola.
In 1530 he returned to Spain and obtained a royal cedula pro hibiting the enforcement of slavery in Peru, which he delivered in person. His mission concluded, he converted a fierce tribe of Indians in the interior of central America (Tuzutlan), founding the first example of what was to become a system under the Jesuits. It was during this period (c. 1535) that he wrote the
treatise De unico vocations modo. In 1539 he was sent by his order to gather Dominican recruits in Spain and wrote his best known work-Brevisima relacion de la Destruycion de las Indias occidentales and in 1542 his V eynte Razones in defence of the liberties of the Indians. The emperor, perhaps to get him out of the country, offered him the diocese of Cuzco; this he refused, but accepted the arid bishopric of Chiapas (in Southern Mexico), to which he was confirmed in 1544. When he reached his diocese, he encountered immediate opposition : disloyalty on the part of the clergy, hostility on that of the authorities. He left for Spain in 1547 and surrendered his episcopal dignity. In 155o he met the famous scholar Gines de Sepulveda in an open debate on the thesis of the enslavement and destruction of aboriginal peoples. Soon afterward he retired from politics, but in 1555 he followed Prince Philip to England to thwart an attempt on the part of the colonists to obtain the prince's assent to the perpetual bondage of the Indians. Most of his last days were spent in the convents of San Gregorio at Valladolid and of the Atocha in Madrid, where he died in the latter days of July, 1566, one of the few humane and kindly figures in the history of the Spanish conquests ih America. Much biographical material appears in his Obras (1552) his Historia de las Indias was not published until 1875-76.
See also: Sir Arthur Helps, Life of Las Casas (1868) ; F. A. Mac Nutt, Bartholomew de las Casas (19°9). (W. B. P.)