Sepúlveda on the Spanish Invasion of the Americas: Defending Empire, Debating Las Casas

This volume is a tremendous and surprising achievement. With editing and translating from three exceptional scholars across different continents during the pandemic, it satisfies experts and introduces newcomers to an interminable conflict of sixteenth-century Spain over its “Affair of the Indies” (p. 393). The book provides several key writings about conquest and more from Spanish imperial-humanist chronicler Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (d. 1573), a figure even more obscure in the Western legal and political canon than his better-known adversary, Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas (d. 1566). Sepúlveda and Las Casas, two unmitigatedly quarrelsome characters whose bitter disagreement about the meaning of Pope Alexander VI's letter of donation, Inter caetera (1493), came to a head when the Castilian court of King Charles I, also Holy Roman Emperor, summoned the junta (council) of Valladolid in 1550–51. The Valladolid junta was less a formal debate than a dispute over texts. Theologians and...