- Paragraph 1 "They Say": a summary of each author's ideas from the history readings (this paragraph should show an understanding of Chapter 2, TS, IS)
- Paragraph 2 "I Say": your response to the ideas put forth by the authors of the history readings
During Spain's colonization of the New World, there were different viewpoints concerning the treatment of the native population of New Spain. Sharp criticisms on behalf of a select few of Spaniards, illuminated the abuse, mistreatment and exploitation of the Indians by colonists from Spain. These few Spaniards, mainly Catholic priests, preached the inhumane brutality of the colonists from their pulpits in the New World. These outspoken few blamed the lustful greed of gold as the reason for colonists desensitizing themselves from their treatment towards the Indians. Returning to Spain, the brazen Dominican friar, Antón Montecino outlined to the Spanish monarchy the abuse mistreatment of the Spanish conquistadors to the Indians. However, the Spanish monarchy responded with "The Requerimiento", a document which failed to understand the true situation occuring in the New World.
In 1552,the Dominican Friar, Bartolomé de las Casas, composed a declaration outlining the development of brutality in New Spain entitled "Destruction of the Indies". In this publication, he manifested the cruelties of the Spanish conquistadors, giving an electrifying description of the firsthand accounts he witnessed. His narration describes how the conquistadors aggressively assaulted the Indians, who had given them no reason to attack and only retaliated when provoked by the conquistadors. It chronicles the desensitization of Christian men towards the Indians, who were fellow men, into believing and treating them as "not as beasts, which I cordially wished they would, but as the most abject dung and filth of the earth". Bartolomé de las Casas outlines a reason for the desentization of the conquistadors was because they turned their own animalistic slaughtering into a game between eachother, making wagers on "who should with a sword at one blow cut, or divide a man in two; or which of them should decollate or behead a man, with the greatest dexterity". These Christian men, who had justified their conquest into the New World by the spreading of Christianity, mercilessly slaughtered the Indians, that about fifteen million, according to Bartolomé de las Casas, died "without understanding the true Faith or Sacraments".
Long before Bartolomé de las Casas publicized the cruelty of the Spanish conquistadors, the outspoken Dominican friar, Antón Montecino was preaching from his pulpit in the New World directly to the Spaniards committing these atrocities. Antón Montecino blamed his Spanish parishioners in a sermon in 1511 that their lustful greed for gold had caused them to be brought into mortal sin. He boldly revealed the reason for their damnation to be their destruction of an innocent people, the native population of the Americas. Fearing for the Indians of the New World, Antón Montecino returned to Spain to illuminate the mistreatment of the conquistadors towards the Indians to King Ferdinand of Spain. However, his passionate campaigning for the rights of the Indians was met with "The Requerimiento", which was the document of King Ferdinand that concluded that the Spanish had the right and holy duty to spread the Christian Faith. It outlined that if the Indians received Christ and pledged allegiance towards Spain and and the Christian God, the Indians would be received with open arms. However, if Indians refused to be converted to Christianity, or delayed to do so in a timely manner, they themselves forfeited their rights to their lives. Those Indians that retaliated against the Spaniards or resisted or refused the domination of Spain and the Christian God, they placed the blood of their lives into their own hands and absolved the Spanish from the sin of murdering them.
In response to each of these three men's positions concerning the conquistador's treatment of the Indians and the justification for these, one must understand the miscommunication and ignorance that fueled the decisions of the Spanish monarchy and the conquistadors. The primary reason for the Spanish's conquest in the New World, or at the very least the justification for it, was clearly stated by "The Requerimiento" as the Spanish had a holy duty to educate the Indians and spread Christianity to them. However, between the pious intent of King Ferdinand in Spain and the actions of the Spanish conquistadors was thousands of miles of ocean. What King Ferdinand believed to be possible in educating the Indians was incongruous with the actions of the Spanish conquistadors. King Ferdinand's misconception of what was possible in the New World was based off trying to make a solution to a conflict he could not see, he could not witness. His decisions were purely based upon the ideas of men who had never been to the New World or men that's beliefs were fueled by their own greed.
The primary reason for King Ferdinand's misconception is that he did not seem to have a firm grasp on the cultural and language barriers that were faced between the Indians and the Spanish conquistadors. His proposal in "The Requeriminto" of gaining the allegiance of the Indians and educating them was a blatant example of how he did not realize that words spoken in Spanish by conquistadors could not be understood by the ears of the native population of the New World. The Spanish conquistadors, who had a lustful desire for gold which would bring them wealth and status, two of the very things human nature craves, turned a blind eye to properly explaining to the Indians what exactly they were signing on for. The Indians could not read "The Requerimiento" and learn the rights that the King of Spain had granted them; they did not understand when the Spaniards achieved conquest upon them that they were doing it in the name of a religion they had never heard of and knew nothing about.
Another reason for the Indian's misunderstanding of the intent of the Spaniards would be the sharp contrast between the loving Christian God of the Spanish preached by the Catholic missionaries and the greedy, lustful Spanish conquistadors. The conquistadors were driven by greed, they desired the wealth and status that Hernán Cortés had achieved. Because of this, they turned a blind eye towards their supposed religious conviction and drove through whatever was in their path and unfortunately for the Indians, they were what was in their path. Of course, when the Catholic priests attempted to explain the situation in New Spain to the Spanish monarch, King Ferdinand made a decision that was uninformed and ignorant to the decision and the conquistadors capitalized on this. The conquistadors used the rights to slaughter the Indians granted to them in "The Requerimiento" by abusing the clause that stated, "or if you maliciously delay in doing it", meaning converting to Christianity and accepting the rule of Spain. How did they abuse this clause? By not giving the Catholic missionaries the time to preach the love of the Christian God to the Indians and to inform them of their rights granted in "The Requerimiento". And it is because of this, this miscommunication and obvious abuse of interpreting rights, that the Spanish conquistadors, as Bartolomé de las Casas put it, "first assaulted the innocent sheep... like most cruel tigers, wolves and lions".
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