A revision of Las Casas’ biography appropriately begins with the correct date of his birth.1 In 1974, the world celebrated the supposed fifth centennial of that event, with congresses and special meetings in Spain, Mexico, France, and elsewhere, and speakers from as far away as Japan. Yet a number of scholars were already aware that the traditionally accepted date of 1474 lacked any solid foundation, and was in fact open to serious question. Now at last the records of a lawsuit, preserved in the Archives of the Indies in Seville, have yielded the first known document that establishes the true year of birth of this great humanitarian; by combining this with other information not previously studied, it is further possible to determine the month and day with virtual certainty.
Bartolomé de las Casas was born almost a decade later than has been believed—definitely in 1484 or 1485, and most probably on November 11, 1484.
The crucial document is presented here with an introduction explaining the centuries-old error, the seeming conflicts in data available till now, the conclusive new evidence, and the implications of the correct birthdate for the life of Las Casas.
I
Where did the wrong birthdate come from, and how did it gain such universal currency? No date of birth is given for Las Casas in any sixteenth-century chronicle. Evidently, 1474 was originally deduced from a passage in an early seventeenth-century work, Fray Antonio de Remesal’s Historia de la Provincia de Chiapa y Guatemala:
Don Fray Bartolomé de las Casas left the College of San Gregorio [de Valladolid] and came to Madrid. . . And Our Lord took him . . . at the end of July of 1566, and. . . he was buried in the old main chapel of the monastery of Our Lady of Atocha . . . He died at the age of ninety-two years. . .. His companion, Father Fray Rodrigo de Ladrada—whom Fray Juan de Segovia calls Elisha in his history of the Order—returned to Valladolid and ended his days in the monastery of San Pablo. . . [Italics added, here and in other quotations.]2
Las Casas did indeed die on July 18, 1566, and his funeral was on the 20th;3 and by simple subtraction, with no allowance for the time of year, this passage yields a birthdate of 1474.
Yet it is noteworthy that no such claim of longevity for Las Casas was advanced by two earlier monastic chroniclers. Fray Agustín Dávila Padilla, in his history of the Dominican Province of Santiago de México, published at the close of the sixteenth century, says nothing whatever about Las Casas’ age at death.4 Even more interesting is the account of Fray Juan de la Cruz, whose extremely rare chronicle of the Dominican Order has largely escaped the attention of scholars, though it contains the first published life of Las Casas. Printed in Lisbon in 1567, the year after Las Casas died, the work contained much oral information about contemporaries, and was actually written while Las Casas was still alive, as is evident in the key passage about his age:
Nowadays he [Bartolomé de las Casas] stays in monasteries of the Order wherever the court is, working for the good government of that land [of the Indies] . . . with the same zeal and diligence that he always had. . . like another Caleb (of whom it’s written that, being eighty-five, he was as robust and ready to fight as when he was forty), so now in his old age he works with equal diligence at the same undertaking. . . . He has with him a very religious companion, who has not been separated from his company for twenty-five years, called Fray Rodrigo del Andrada, of the same age as the Bishop . . . and considering the age of both, and the Bishop’s fervor and zeal . . . and his companion’s devotion, many nickname them Elijah and Enoch.5
This text is triply (or quadruply) significant. It is the source of Remesal’s “Elisha” [sic] phrase; it was written during the 1560s, after Las Casas had left Valladolid to be with the court, briefly in Toledo and then permanently in Madrid; it likens Fray Bartolomé’s age to that of Fray Rodrigo (who was sixty-eight when they went to Madrid, and turning seventy-four when the Bishop died); and it compares his vigor to Caleb’s at eighty-five. This would seem to imply that Bartolomé de las Casas was an octogenarian rather than a nonagenarian in his last years.6
Even more noteworthy, the birthdate of 1474, deduced from the Remesal passage, was also dubious from the very beginning. For it was flatly contradicted by Remesal himself in another passage in the same chronicle which (again by simple subtraction) yields the birthdate of 1480:
The father of Bartolomé de Casaus. . . went to the Indies in 1493 (with the Admiral don Christopher Columbus when he navigated the second time to those regions) . . . and the year 1498 he returned to his home town of Seville, and among the possessions he brought from the Indies, one was an Indian hoy the Admiral Columbus had given him, and whom he gave as a page to his son Bartolomé de Casaus, a youth of eighteen years.7
Since Fray Bartolomé is the “principal personage” in Remesal’s book, it is inconceivable that the chronicler intended to give his protagonist two different birthdates six years apart. Rather, Remesal’s total unawareness of the contradiction suggests strongly that there was some printing error in his chronicle.
Unfortunately, the dubious age of ninety-two and the dubious deduced birthdate of 1474 were both picked up and repeated unchallenged by various Dominican and other chroniclers and bio bibliographers who wrote about Las Casas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is understandable. Remesal’s was the first full-scale account of Las Casas’ life and drew upon many documents, and much that he wrote has been accepted uncritically until almost our own time. Further, this biography was not presented in a compact series of chapters, but was interspersed through a lengthy chronicle. The section on Las Casas’ death conveniently preceded Remesal’s extensive list and summary of Las Casas’ writings—the passage of greatest interest to bio-bibliographers—whereas the conflicting passage was buried elsewhere and went unnoticed. After a century of such repetition, the mistake was finally enshrined, so to speak, in the classic compilation of Quétif and Echard, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum—the first part of volume II, published in Paris in 1721.8
The by-then-accepted error received still wider popularization through a lavish pictorial project initiated later in the eighteenth century—the Retratos de los españoles ilustres of 1791, a portfolio of engravings of the great men of Spain from the eighth century onward, but mostly of the sixteenth and seventeenth. The fatal caption under the engraved portrait of Fray Bartolomé—a likeness reproduced countless times up to the present—reads as follows:
D. Fr. Bartholome de las Casas of the Order of Preachers, Bishop of Chiapa, a man Apostolic, and the most zealous for the wellbeing of the Indians, was born in Seville the year of 1474, and died in Madd the year of 1566.9
With no further basis, the mistaken 1474 thus became a “tradition,” repeated again and again by Las Casas’ biographers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in innumerable announcements for commemorative exercises in 1974.10
II
Coincidentally, however, during the supposed fifth centennial, three scholars, working almost simultaneously in three different countries, each challenged the wrong birthdate of 1474.
Maria Napoli, in a doctoral thesis of 1974 at the University of Salerno, drew attention to the conflicting Remesal passage that yields a birthdate of 1480, though she missed the better-known Remesal passage. But she did attempt to analyze three intriguing passages in Las Casas’ prologue to his Historia de las Indias:
A. I am a Christian, and with that a friar, and aged some years more than sixty . . .
B. I wanted to write the main things. . . which I have seen with my own eyes . . . in these Indies . . . in the space of sixty and more years. . . Nor can anyone reasonably deny that even today, which is the year of 1552, the same calamitous deeds are being committed. . .
C. I want to compare myself to . . . Diodorus and . . . Dionisius . . . [who] the one for twenty-two years and the other for thirty, saw and studied what they wrote—but I [have done so] for only a short while less, as I said, than sixty-three years (to God be given immense thanks that he has granted me such a long life), because from near the year of 500 [i.e., 1500] I have seen and gone about in those Indies. . .
Napoli pointed out a seeming dilemma in passages B and C: in 1552, only fifty years had passed since Las Casas went to America with Ovando, and only sixty since the discovery of America in 1492. So she conjectured that Las Casas was thinking of his own age in all three passages and that, accordingly, he was sixty-three in 1552 and must have been born in 1489.11
Though extremely ingenious, Napoli’s conjecture was based on incomplete data. Passage A does concern Las Casas’ age, but his point-of-reference is not the year of writing; as will be shown, he used an almost-identical phrase (“more than sixty years”) at various times till the year of his death when he was considerably older. And passages B and C, which do not concern his age but rather the time-lapse since he first saw the Indies, were originally written in 1552 and altered thirteen years later, the year before his death. For the holograph and semi-holograph manuscripts of the Historia show that Las Casas had originally written “fifty years” twice, and simply crossed out fifty both times, and wrote “sixty and more” and “sixty-three” above the line, and also inserted “to God be given immense thanks [etc.]” in the margin; he just failed to change the 1552, doubtless because it was not in figures but written out in the manuscripts.12 Nonetheless, Napoli’s ingenious if incorrect conclusion was a young scholar’s courageous challenge to a persistent error.
A more elaborate study was presented by Professor Raymond Marcus, of the University of Paris, during the meeting in honor of Las Casas held at Seville in the spring of 1974. Marcus missed the relevant passage A from the prologue of the Historia, but drew attention to both Remesal passages and other data even more intriguing—three depositions given late in life by Fray Bartolomé, with apparently conflicting statements of his age:
The first two. . . he made as a witness on behalf of his friend Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo persecuted by the Inquisition, and they have been published by Father Tellechea: in Madrid, on November 10, 1561, Las Casas said “that he is of the age of more than sixty years”; in Madrid, on November 22 of 1562, he said “that he has more than seventy years.” Before drawing any conclusion from the two declarations, it is useful to observe another published by André Saint-Lu: on April 3, 1566, in Atocha, a few months before he died, Las Casas “said . . . that he is of the age of more than forty years.”
Marcus approached this seeming dilemma from the broad cultural standpoint defined in the subtitle of his talk, “Measurement and Experience of Time in the Sixteenth Century.” On the premise that Las Casas’ declarations “constitute enigmas which declarations of other witnesses in trials of that era will help us elucidate a bit”—he analyzed statistically a volume of printed depositions from the famous Columbus family lawsuit: Out of sixty-two witnesses, forty-five gave their age as X years “more or less” (one of these also said “almost”); thirteen witnesses (including eight out of nine testifying in Santo Domingo) said they were “of the age of more than” X years; only one said specifically that he was “of the age of” X years; one said he “would be” X years “completed” [italics ours]; and one said he was “of the age of more” than X years “more or less.” In Marcus’ opinion, these depositions seem to indicate that “the men of the era did not know exactly the year of their birth” and “this ignorance” did not worry them. And he further quoted Lucien Febvre on famous persons of that era leaving us a choice of three or four birthdates, and how common folk might remember the month and day of a child’s birth but not the year.
From all the foregoing, asserted Marcus, “the conclusion can be drawn that Fray Bartolomé, like most men of the time in Europe, did not know in what year he had been born.”13
Though extremely fascinating, this data too was incomplete. Certainly, many persons of that era did not know their precise birthdates; baptismal records were not made mandatory till the Council of Trent in the second half of the sixteenth century. But (as will be seen directly) the enigmas in Las Casas’ depositions are more apparent than real. And the standard formula repeated by witnesses—“more or less” X years—does not indicate an unconcerned ignorance of their date of birth. Three concurrent depositions given by Fray Rodrigo de Ladrada, in 1562 and 1566, show that Fray Rodrigo knew exactly in what year he was born; his “more or less” clearly refers to the time of year and whether age was to be counted backward or forward from the birthday—as does the alternate formula italicized above.14 Even so, Marcus’ non-conclusion was a distinguished Hispanist’s challenge to a long-standing error.
Quite independently, Parish prepared a third study in 1974, using considerably more evidence than the other two. In addition to their data—passage A in the prologue to the Historia (examined incompletely by Napoli), and the two contradictory Remesal passages and three seemingly contradictory Las Casas depositions (examined by Marcus)—she noted apparent errors in two of these depositions, and located two other sworn statements by Las Casas in his later years, the Caleb passage in Fray Juan de la Cruz, and a passage in Remesal suggesting that the elderly Bishop was deaf.
Parish reasoned that all this data seemed to point towards a single answer. Considering the rest of passage A in the prologue—“I am . . . aged some years more than sixty and also, though not for my own merits, placed in the number of bishops”—she deduced that Las Casas was sixty-ish at his episcopal consecration in 1544—not seventy and therefore not born in 1474. Parish also deduced, from a formula used in swearing-in Las Casas, that as a retired bishop he invariably took his oath on his episcopal consecration. So she reasoned that his almost-identical phrase, giving his age as “more than sixty” was a repeated reference to his age at consecration, especially as she found this same phrase in three depositions: two in the Carranza trial, on November 10, 1561, and September 22, 1562 (the contradictory “mas de setenta” appears as “mas de sesenta” in Tellechea’s fuller printing of the same Las Casas testimony); and one on July 1, 1566, in the Cabrillo lawsuit against the crown. (And if the deaf elderly Bishop referred to his consecration in 1544, then “more than forty” in the same trial on April 3, 1566, could have been just a scribe’s error.) In her conclusion, Parish rejected the “traditional” birthdate of 1474, even hazarding the guess that ninety-two might be a printer’s misreading for the Arabic figures eighty-five borrowed from Fray Juan de la Cruz’s Caleb—and preferred the later unconfirmed birthdate of 1480 deduced from Remesal.15
III
The document presented here now sets aside all these previous deductions—1474 and 1480 (Remesal), 1489 (Napoli), no known date (Marcus), and 1480 unconfirmed (Parish)—to establish beyond question that Bartolomé de las Casas was born in 1484 or 1485.
This hitherto unpublished manuscript consists of a deposition given by the cleric Bartolomé de las Casas in a lawsuit brought by the heir of the explorer Diego de Nicuesa against the second Admiral of the Indies, Diego Columbus, son of the discoverer. The proceedings themselves, which fill a bulky legajo in the Archives of the Indies, are not without interest, especially as they concern Las Casas in a number of ways.16
Briefly, the plaintiff—Alonso de Nicuesa, resident of Santo Domingo—presented a strong substantive case but asked excessive damages. Plaintiff claimed that his brother and partner, Diego de Nicuesa, had left the island of Hispaniola in 1509 with several ships, to take up his grant as Governor of Veragua [Castilla del Oro, on the Main]. Though Governor Nicuesa’s royal contract provided that his Hispaniola estate and encomienda Indians were not to be taken from him for four years, Admiral Columbus “usurped” a cacique named Sabcedo with thirty-seven Indians. Plaintiff recovered them only two and a half years later by means of a special royal cédula, and by then “most of them had died and only six or seven were left.” Meanwhile Governor Nicuesa had sailed from the Main bound for Spain and disappeared without a trace. So on October 3, 1513, Plaintiff—as heir—sued before the island tribunal (the Audiencia plus the Judge of Residencia and the Distributor of Indians) to recover 2,000 gold pesos that he might have gained with said Indians.
The defense, by contrast, consisted of jurisdictional technicalities, and went badly from the start. Defendant repeatedly claimed that the island tribunal was not competent to hear the suit and that Plaintiff was not a legitimate party to plead; these claims were repeatedly denied, as were appeals to the crown from the adverse rulings. So the case was heard and Defendant sentenced on October 6, 1515, to pay Plaintiff “450 pesos of gold, smelted and marked, which he could have gained with the said Indians, less [i.e. after] food and costs, in all the time they were usurped.” Whereupon Defendant took a last appeal to the crown and the Council of the Indies, and the case wound up in Spain the following year, Defendant still claiming that Plaintiff could not plead as the death of Governor Nicuesa had never been established.
In final rebuttal, Plaintiff presented several witnesses to establish that Diego de Nicuesa was indeed presumed dead, and one of these was Bartolomé de las Casas. The very fact that Las Casas was called as Plaintiff’s witness is a compliment to his integrity—he was a known friend and partisan of the defendant, Diego Columbus—and to his personal knowledge of the early history of the islands and the exploration of the Main. And curiously, this particular lawsuit, which yields the correct date for beginning his life-story, documents an incident in the “destruction of the Indies” [i.e., the Indians] that was a main theme of that life.
Thus, testifying as a virtual eyewitness, Bartolomé de las Casas confirmed the approximate date when Diego de Nicuesa and his expedition left Hispaniola. He also gave his private views on Nicuesa’s chance of survival and confirmed what was believed on Hispaniola about Nicuesa’s fate. Ironically, the testimony of Las Casas and other final witnesses clinched the case for Alonso de Nicuesa, who won a favorable judgement on December 7, 1516, compensating him for the used-up Indians.
A most interesting sidelight on Las Casas’ testimony is his own practically definitive account of the Nicuesa story, written later in his Historia de las Indias. Obviously from personal acquaintance— they both went to Hispaniola on the same expedition and lived in the same town of Concepción—he describes the explorer as an hidalgo and fine horseman, who gained great wealth from the labor of the Indians on the island, and then returned to Spain to arrange for encomiendas to last one lifetime, and obtained a grant for himself. Next follows a gossipy circumstantial account of the preliminaries and sailing of the Nicuesa expedition, even telling how Las Casas personally went to Yaquimo and saw the 1,000 hams to be sent on as provisions. Later in his chronicle, Las Casas gives a long and harrowing narrative of the adventures and hardships of Cosa, Ojeda, and Nicuesa on the Spanish Main, drawn from relations of survivors and other sources. Finally, he tells how Nicuesa, his expedition decimated, sailed from the Main on March 1, 1511—“and he never appeared again, nor any man of those who went with him, nor [was it known] how nor where he died.”17 Compared to these thirteen chapters, Las Casas’ testimony in the Nicuesa lawsuit is brief indeed, only part of a page.
Yet this short deposition contains priceless personal information given under oath by Bartolomé de las Casas. Called and presented as a witness in Madrid, on September 19, 1516, Las Casas was identified as a “cleric of the Diocese of Seville.” (This does not mean, as has been asserted, that he was ordained in Seville. As a cleric or secular priest who lived in the Antilles before the constitution of dioceses there, Las Casas was technically attached to the Sevillian archdiocese, the metropolitan See for the Indies; he was also, of course, a native of that city, where he stayed with his family on returning to Spain.)18
Then, on the same day, the cleric Las Casas took his oath as a witness—swearing, as the scribe recorded, “by God, and by the sacred orders [preliminary, priesthood] he had received, and by the Holy Gospels” to tell the truth. And finally, the record reveals that he gave this categorical answer: “When queried on the general questions, he said that he is of [the age of] thirty and one years.” Since, therefore, Bartolomé de las Casas most solemnly swore that he was 31 on September 19, 1516, he must have been born in 1484 or 1485, depending on the month and day of his birth.19
IV
How can one go about pinpointing this month and day? One scholar’s sweeping assertion that
according to data contained in his own works or in other reliable documents, Bartolomé de las Casas was born in Seville in 1474 [sic!], almost certainly in the month of August and perhaps on the twenty-fourth day . . .
proves, upon examination, to rest merely on the traditional error, plus the unstated fact that August 24 is St. Bartholomew’s Day.20 Many children were indeed named after the saints of their birthdays, but many more were not, and the coincidence of onomástico and cumpleaños cannot be taken for granted.
Much stronger evidence points to an entirely different date, November 11, St. Martin’s Day. Remesal supplies the information:
The Bishop [Bartolomé de las Casas] never lacked money for so many and such long trips . . . for giving alms . . . and for leaving income for so honored a memorial as the one he established in the College of San Gregorio—leaving income for the support of eighteen poor students, called “porcionistas” [pensioners or boarders], who are chosen for the course in arts, six dialecticians, six logicians, six philosophers, who are on service for that renowned house. In recognition of this foundation, at the Mass which is said for him in the chapel of the College on St. Martins Day the students chant the responses with lit candles in their hands.
Since Las Casas died two days before St. Margaret’s Day, July 20, and the academic year began on St. Luke’s Day, October 18, neither date coincides with his annual requiem.21 And there seems to be only one obvious reason why the taper-lit mass for Las Casas was sung every year on St. Martin’s Day: it must have been the date of his birth.
Other evidence tends indirectly to support this strong inference— Las Casas’ own way of referring to these two saints’ days in his Historia. About his name-day, he writes once of Councillor Palacios Rubios going “to the Mesta, which is held in Berlanga in August on the day of Saint Bartholomew,” but refers to the incident again without mentioning the month. On the other hand, he seems to show an unconscious predilection for specifying the day and date of St. Martin’s:
D. [The cleric Casas] and the Fathers of St. Hieronymus. . . sailed at the same time, on separate ships, from the port of San Lúcar, on St. Martins Day, which is the 11th of November, the year of 1516.
E. [With his peasants] the cleric [Casas] left from San Lúcar de Barrameda, raising sail St. Martins Day, the 11th of November of that same year of 1520.
Now the sailing of passage D did occur on St. Martin’s Day, but that of passage E actually took place on December 14; and the mistaken repetition, along with the stressed references to St. Martin’s being the 11th of November, could well be what is now called a “Freudian slip.”22
In addition, with November 11, 1484 (and not August 24, 1485) as Las Casas’ birthday, it is suddenly possible to reconcile the two conflicting passages in Remesal and point both of them to a correct year. For the event which Remesal describes as taking place in 1498—Pedro de las Casas’ return from the Indies—actually took place in 1499.23 And Remesal’s text apparently contains not just one printer’s misreading of Arabic numbers, but two common misreadings: Las Casas was correctly fifteen (not eighteen) in 1499, and correctly eighty-two (not ninety-two) in 1566. (Anyone who has worked with manuscripts of this period knows how difficult it can be at times to distinguish between the Arabic figures for 5, 8, and 9; often, a painstaking scholar can determine the right figure only by consulting, for instance, the numeration of the next folio. In this case, the printer had no guide, and neither had Licentiate Francisco Murcia de la Liana, who compared Remesal’s printed and handwritten texts for obvious errata.)24
Further, a November 11, 1484 birthdate immediately clarifies Las Casas’ declarations late in life. Having been consecrated bishop right in his sixtieth year, he would naturally be—with his consecration as the point-of-reference—“more than sixty” in his depositions as retired Bishop of Chiapa. And fresh evidence suggests that the firm decision not to tell his age (and an occasional “more than forty” as a mark of annoyance!) most probably date from an unpleasant incident soon after retirement when he was forced to testify against his will.25
One wishes for an actual baptismal record, but few if any were kept in that period. Surviving parish archives in the oldest churches of Seville contain only random registers of the sixteenth century, with just scattered entries for the end of the fifteenth; none have been found for the 1480s.26 Lacking any convincing indicator of a different birthday, it seems safe to accept November 11.
So all available evidence for the month and day—the annual requiem mass on St. Martin’s Day, the pointed references to that saint’s day and the apparent “Freudian slip” in the Historia, the reconciling of conflicts in Remesal and the clear explanation of the late depositions—plus the categorical certainty of the year from the cleric Las Casas’ sworn statements in the Nicuesa lawsuit—everything points to November 11, 1484, as the correct birthdate of Bartolomé de las Casas.
This raises a final question. What impact does the newly established correct birthdate have on the revision of Las Casas’ biography? To answer concisely, it shows him to have been a decade younger— and a far more reasonable age—at all the major and minor events of his life.
He was a child in his ninth year (not a youth in his nineteenth) when he saw the Indians brought to Europe by Columbus after the voyage of discovery. He was only ten (not twenty) when his father first sailed to the Indies, and sixteen (not twenty-six) when his father sailed again with Bobadilla. He was a young man turning eighteen (not twenty-eight) when he went to the New World in 1502. He was ordained to the priesthood in his twenty-third year, not in his thirty-third, and entered the Dominican Order in his thirty-eighth year, not in his forty-eighth. He was consecrated a bishop in his sixtieth year, not in his seventieth. He wrote the prologue to his Historia in 1552, during an extended stay in Seville, when he was sixty-eight (not seventy-eight) and revised it thirteen years later when he was eighty-one—and fairly close to the age of his seventy-three-year-old companion Fray Rodrigo (not almost two decades older).
Born on November 11, 1484, Bartolomé de las Casas died on July 18, 1566, in his eighty-second year (not his ninety-second); by the standards of that era, when life expectancy was much shorter than now, eighty-two was very old. He had returned to Spain in September, 1515, at the age of thirty (not forty) to begin his lifework of defending the American natives. The following year, on September 17, 1516, when only thirty-one (not already forty-one), he was prophetically appointed Protector of the Indians—giving his sworn deposition exactly two days later in the Nicuesa lawsuit against the second Admiral.27 He died, still laboring at the same heroic task, a half century later—by the standards of any era, a long and productive life.
Deposition of the Cleric Bartolomé de Las Casas Given in Madrid on September 19, 1516
For the revision of key portions, see Parish, Las Casas as a Bishop: A New Interpretation based on Holograph Petition in the Hans P. Kraus Collection of Hispanic American Manuscripts (Washington, 1976); also, Parish and Weidman, Las Casas en México (Madrid, forthcoming).
El Presentado fray Antonio de Remesal, O.P., Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de Chyapa y Guatemala de la Orden de nuestro glorioso padre Sanoto Domingo: Escrivense juntamente los principios de las demas Provincias desta Religion de las Yndias Occidentales, y lo secular de la Governacion de Guatemala (Madrid, 1619 [1620]), lib. 10, cap. 24, § 4-6, p. 668a.
The dates of Las Casas’ death and funeral emerge from four documents. Although Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz, his executor, noted that “the Bishop of Chiapa . . . died on St. Margaret’s day, June 20” (John Carter Brown Library, Providence, ms. of Las Casas’ De thesauris. . ., fol. 229), St. Margaret’s of course falls on July 20; in the Cabrillo lawsuit, Las Casas himself testified on July 1, 1566, but on July 18, the third witness referred to him as “the Bishop of Chiapa, deceased” (AGI, Justicia, leg. 290, Crown witnesses, pza. 2a, fols. 4 and 6v); and Gaspar Testa, the notary who drew his will, certified that “in the year sixty-six, I saw . . . Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Bishop of Chiapa, dead in the Monastery of Our Lady of Atocha . . . and a following day (otro día siguiente), twentieth of the said month, his body was laid out (depositado) in the main chapel of said monastery” (quoted in Manuel Giménez Fernández, “Ultimos días de Bartolomé de las Casas,” Miscellánea Paul Rivet: octogenario dictata [México, 1958], p. 714 and note 8). So Las Casas died the day before the eve of St. Margaret’s, and his funeral—“attended by all Madrid,” says Remesal—was on that conspicuous saint’s day.
El Maestro fray Augustín Dávila Padilla, O.P., Historia de la fundacion y discurso de la Provincia de Santiago de Mexico, de la Orden de Predicadores, por las vidas de sus varones insignes, y casos notables de Nueva España (Madrid, 1596), lib. 1, caps. 97-103.
Fray Juan de la Cruz, O.P. Coronica de la Orden de Predicadores, de su principio y successo hasta nuestra edad, y compilada de historias antiguas: Acrecentaronse muchas cosas de memorias antiguas de la Orden por diligencia de algunos religiosos del convento de Lixboa de la Provincia de Portugal, a cuyas manos vino la cronica, y la hizieron estampar, Partes Primera y Segunda. (Lisbon, 1567)—parte I, lib. 4, cap. 39, “De fray Bartolome de las Casas, Obispo de Chiapa” (fols. 220-222), fol. 222ab.
In calling this author “Fray Juan de Segovia,” Remesal apparently uses his family name rather than his name in religion. For Fray Rodrigo’s age, see infra, note 14. Las Casas’ moves can be documented: On December 14, 1560, the King ordered a Toledo official to pay the cost of lodging the Bishop of Chiapa at court; the court moved permanently to Madrid in 1561, and Las Casas was there at least by November 11 of that year, when he testified in the Carranza trial. See Antonio Maria Fabié, Vida y escritos de fray Bartolomé de las Casas, 2 vols, in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, toms. LXX-LXXI (Madrid, 1879), I, Ap. XVIII, 561; and José Ignacio Tellechea Idigoras, ed., Fray Bartolomé Carranza: Documentos históricos, 3 vols. in Archivo Documental Español, toms. XVIII, XIX, XXII (Madrid, 1962, 1963, 1966), I, 335.
Remesal, Historia de Chyapa y Guatemala, lib. 2, cap. 10, § 2-3, pp. 59b-60a. For errata in the numbering of this chapter, see infra, note 24.
Jacques Quétif, O.P., and Jacques Echard, O.P., Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum recensiti, Notisque historicis et criticis illustrati, 3 vols. (Paris, 1719-1723), tom. II, pars I: 1499-1639 A.D., “F. Bartholomaeus de Las Casas,” 192b-195b. The critical sentences on pp. 192b and 193a read: “Natus est Bartholomaeus anno circiter MCCCCLXXIIII . . . & exsequutus est ad obitum usque circa finem julii anni MDLXVI quo aetatis XCII abiit ad superos. . .”
The 114 [118] plates in the Retratos de los españoles ilustres, con un epítome de sus vidas (Madrid, 1791-1818 [1882]) are unnumbered, since the engravings and accompanying printed text were issued in non-chronological order to be rearranged later. The caption under Las Casas’ picture, thirty-seventh in the final list, reads:
D. Fr. Bartholome de las Casas Del Orden de Predicadores, Obispo de Chiapa Varon apostolico, y el mas zeloso de la felicidad de los Yndios. Nació en Sevilla el ano de 1474, y murió en Madd el de 1566.
The “tradition” was summed-up by Wagner: “Bartolomé de las Casas was born, according to his biographers, in Seville in 1474. For the [this] date, there are no documents, either baptismal certificate or first hand record.” Henry Raup Wagner and Helen Rand Parish, The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (Albuquerque, 1967), p. 1. For the names of these biographers and dates of their works, see infra, notes 13 and 20.
Maria C. Napoli, “I primi anni della conquista spagnola del Nuovo Mondo negli scritti di Bartolomé de las Casas” (Tesi di Laurea, Università degli Studi, Salerno, September 1974), pp. 3-9. For passages A, B, and C, see Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 3 vols. (México and Buenos Aires, 1951), I, 12, 19, 22. The elided form “500” for 1500 in passage C is typical of Las Casas’ style—cf. “el año de siete, digo quinientos y siete” in his Apologética historia sumaria, 2 vols. (México, 1967), II, 161.
Las Casas’ extensively rewritten holograph manuscript of his Historia de las Indias, libs. 1-3, is in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, ms. res. 21—23. The semi-holograph manuscript—an amanuensis’ “clean” copy of libs. 1 and 2, with Las Casas’ holograph corrections and further changes—is in the Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Colección Muñoz, sign, antigua A/74 and A/75 (toms. XLVII and XLVIII, Catálogo nos. 310 and 311). Passages B and C are in the holograph ms. on fols. 13 and 14v; in the semi-holograph, on prologue fols. 16 (olim 15) and 19 (olim 18).
Napoli, who had no access to the manuscripts, could not find any evidence of rewriting in the smooth syntax of the printed text. Lewis Hanke had earlier called attention to the rewriting of passage C in the semi-holograph ms.—see his “Las Casas, historiador,” prologue to the Historia de las Indias (1951 edition, cited in note 11 supra and throughout these notes), I, xxxiii. But Napoli, using only a later edition of the Historia (Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, tom. XCV, Madrid, 1957), lacked this information.
Raymond Marcus, “Sobre el nacimiento de Las Casas (Medida y vivencia del tiempo en el siglo XVI)” in Estudios sobre fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Anales de la Universidad Hispalense, ser. Filosofía y Letras, no. 24 (Seville, 1974), pp. 17-23, main quotations from pp. 20 and 22. The opening pages of this essay review the acceptance of “A tradition without serious foundation” by Losada (1970), Menéndez Pidal (1963), Giménez Fernández (1956), Fabié (1879), and Quintana (2nd ed., 1842), and point out that Wagner “apparently saw the problem but wasn’t interested in it.” The closing pages interpret the claim of longevity and long experience with which Las Casas ends the prologue to his Historia: his first sight of the Indies and his conversion to reform were standard points-of-reference in his writings.
Fray Rodrigo de San Vicente de Ladrada testified once in the Inquisition trial of Carranza and twice in the Cabrillo lawsuit against the Crown, each time accompanying Las Casas. Fray Rodrigo said on December 2, 1562, that he was sixty-nine; on April 3, 1566, that he was seventy-three “poco mas o menos”; and on July 1, 1566, that he was seventy-four “poco mas o menos.” See Tellechea, ed., Carranza: Documentos históricos, III, 416; and AGI, Justicia, leg. 290, Crown witnesses, pza. la, fol. 125v, and pza. 2a, fol. 4. Similarly, testifying with Las Casas as a hostile witness for Hernando Pizarro, Fray Rodrigo said on October 4, 1550, that he was fifty-eight “poco mas o menos”—AGI, Justicia, leg. 1164, Recusation vs. Councillor Velásquez, fol. 33v.
See also Appendix infra, Interrogatory, Question 2: “syete años poco mas o menos” for an interval of six years and ten months since Nicuesa’s sailing on November 20 or 22, 1509 (cf. Las Casas, Historia, II, 378).
Parish, Las Casas as a Bishop, first version, footnote 3. See Remesal, Historia de Chyapa y Guatemala, lib. 10, cap. 24, § 1, last par., p. 666a, on Fray Rodrigo’s deafness; the Bishop was the older of the two, since Fray Rodrigo was born in 1493, the year young Bartolomé saw the Indians brought to Spain by Columbus. (Cf. note 14 supra and Las Casas, Historia, I, 332.)
Las Casas gave evidence four times in the Carranza trial: on November 7, 1559, to help disqualify the Grand Inquisitor; on November 10, 1561, to answer questions from the tribunal about current gossip concerning the trial; and on September 22 and 25, 1562, as a character and defense witness for Carranza. Tellechea has published two versions of Las Casas’ testimony: abridged texts, lacking the opening and closing formalities, included in tomos I and III of his Carranza: Documentos históricos; and complete texts as Apéndices I-IV of a special study, “Las Casas y Carranza: Una página amistosa olvidada,” in his El Arzobispo Carranza y su tiempo, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1968), II, 49-62. Las Casas’ full testimony shows that he “swore by his consecration to tell the truth” (Ap. I, p. 49); that he twice specifically gave his age as “more than sixty” (Ap. II, p. 54, and Ap. III, p. 55), and finally repeated “what he had said” thereon three days earlier (Ap. IV, p. 59).
In 1566, the year of Las Casas’ death, he and Fray Rodrigo testified twice in the Cabrillo lawsuit, each time swearing on their sacred orders, etc. On July 1, Las Casas again said he was “more than sixty”—AGI, Justicia, leg. 290, Crown witnesses, pza. 2a, fol. 4. On April 3, his appearance opens with a statement that “the Bishop and his companion are very old and ill as is well-known in this Royal Council,” and closes with the incongruous “more than forty”—AGI, Justicia, leg. 290, Crown witnesses, pza. la, fols. 124 and 125. For a more likely explanation of this phrase see infra, note 25 and corresponding text.
AGI, Justicia, leg. 1 is a bundle of neatly-sewn piezas or sections in logical and chronological order; Las Casas’ testimony is in the final pieza. This legajo was first cited, but not studied, by Manuel Giménez Fernández in Bartolomé de las Casas, II: Capellán de S.M. Carlos I, poblador de Cumaná, 1517-1323 (Seville, 1960), notes 2287 and 2885, crediting the location of the Las Casas document to a student, Enrique Otte.
Historia de las Indias, lib. 2, caps. 52, 57-67, and 69—cf. Nicuesa’s departure and disappearance, II, 378 and 439. The cleric Las Casas’ own trip to Yaquimo (II, 378) is one of many passages in his writings that suggest he was in the provisions business during his early years in the islands.
See Las Casas, Historia, III, 107, on his arrival from the Indies in 1515. In his works, he repeatedly calls himself “natural de Sevilla,” most explicitly in the still-unpublished Dedication of Doce dudas to Philip II: “I am a native of these your kingdoms . . . [of] Seville, where I was born.” (JCBL, ms. of De thesauris. . ., fol. 135v, and cf. Historia, II, 385 and 531.) Witnesses gave their birthplace and/or residence.
See complete text in the Appendix.
Manuel Giménez Fernández, “Fray Bartolomé de las Casas: A Biographical Sketch,” in Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, eds., Bartolomé de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and his Work (DeKalb, Illinois, 1971), p. 67. Supporting notes refer to general Las Casas bibliographies by Hanke-Giménez and Marcus, the edition of Las Casas’ works by Pérez de Tudela Bueso, and a prior repetition of the unfounded tradition by Giménez Fernández himself (1953). Cf. supra, note 13, last sentence, on the references in Las Casas’ writings, which never indicate his age.
Elsewhere, Giménez Fernández merely “conjectures” that Las Casas was born in August, from the custom of naming a child for the saint of its birth or baptismal day—“La juventud en Sevilla de Bartolomé de las Casas,” Miscelánea de estudios dedicados a Fernando Ortiz, 2 vols. (Havana, 1956), II, 679-680.
Remesal, Historia de Chyapa y Guatemala, lib. 10, cap. 24, § 6, last par., p. 670b. A uniform academic calendar was apparently in use in this period: compare Valladolid Statutes of 1505, stat. 121, sentence 1 and stat. 125, August and October fiestas, in Mariano Alcocer Martínez, ed., Historia de la Universidad de Valladolid (Valladolid, 1918), pp. cxvii and cxx—with Salamanca Statutes of 1561, tit. 11, par. 1, in Enrique Esperabe Arteaga, ed., Historia pragmática e interna de la Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca, 1914), p. 228.
See Historia, III, 120 and 137-138 on the Mesta (Spain’s livestock association, then presided over by the oldest-ranking member of the Royal Council); and III, 139 and 364, passages D and E on the sailings. The sailing date of the Hieronymites is verified by their letter on the eve of departure, cf. Colección de documentos inéditos de Indias, 1st series, 42 vols. (Madrid, 1864-1884), VII (the Las Casas Volume, 1867), 390; that of the cleric Casas, with some of his peasants, by two payment records in AGI, Contratación, leg. 4675, fols. 135v and 143. “Freudian slip” is a modern term for a subconsciously motivated minor error —such as, in this case, a slip of the pen (lapsus calami).
In the Historia, Las Casas gave full details on the loading and return of two distinct convoys from Hispaniola to Spain: In 1498, five vessels brought a cargo of Indian slaves for sale (II, 72-73, 81-82, 88-89, 91, 210); in 1499, two vessels, which endured great storms, brought returning colonists with Indian slaves given them as gifts by Columbus (II, 93-95, 103, 108, 172). His father returned in the 1499 convoy and gave him the gift-slave, as Las Casas clearly specified in Entre los remedios. . .el octavo (Seville, 1552), Primera razón, fol. iiii, and his Historia, II, 172-173. But while heavily rewriting the latter work, Las Casas inadvertently made a marginal insert at the sailing of the earlier convoy (holograph ms., lib. 1, fol. 406v), saying “en los quales fue mi padre . . . y pasaron grandes trabajos y peligros”—a clear reference to the “travails and dangers” of the later convoy. Remesal, unaware of the two convoys or the mistaken insert, apparently picked up and repeated the undetectable slip (lib. 1, opening of renumbered cap. 154 in the “clean” manuscript).
Errata listed on p. [iv] contain only missing words and wrong words, and cite one passage to be replaced with a correction. No attention is drawn to the printer’s problem with numbers: page numbers 617-620 and 657-670 appear twice, and the second set of each must be labelled bis; misprinted page numbers abound—20 for 21, 21 for 25, 22 for 26, 73 for 83, 178 for 168, 177 for 173, 198 for 204, 521 for 525, 523 for 527, and 766 for 566; sections and chapters are also misnumbered in text and index.
Remesal may have picked up Las Casas’ age—fifteen, misread or misprinted eighteen—from the complete manuscript of the “Sixteen Remedies,” which he evidently saw in the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid. Cf. Historia de Chyapa y Guatemala, lib. 10, cap. 24, § 7, pars. 1 and 4, pp. 668b and 669b.
In 1550-1551, Hernando Pizarro—Francisco’s brother, long imprisoned by the Council of the Indies for executing Almagro and further suspected of poisoning his accuser—attempted to disqualify Councillor Gutierre Velasquez. Las Casas twice refused a summons from Hernando, declining to testify against the Councillor and claiming episcopal privilege, but on the third try was ordered to cease excusing himself. (AGI, Indiferente General, leg. 424, lib. 22, fols. 216, 234-234v, 244-244v.) The Bishop finally appeared as a hostile witness, stoutly defending Licenciado Velásquez’ rectitude and impartiality, denying knowledge of almost all the allegations in the Interrogatory, repeatedly expressing the belief that they were “false” and “false testimony” and “contrary” to known fact and to the opinion of upright persons. And to the general questions he replied [angrily?] “that he is more than forty years of age”! (He was actually going on sixty-six.) AGI, Justicia, leg. 1164, Recusation vs. Councillor Velásquez, fols. 32-33. (The authors thank Lewis Hanke for reminding them of this deposition, cited but not analyzed in no. 321 of his Bartolomé de las Casas: Bibliografía crítica. . ., with Giménez Fernández, Santiago, 1954.)
Of Seville’s ancient parochial archives (now being restored and described under the leadership of Professor Francisco Morales Padrón) the authors inspected those in El Sagrario, San Andrés, Santa Ana, Santa Maria Magdalena, and San Lorenzo; Andrés Ferreras de Codes, Assistant Archivist of the Archdiocese of Seville, kindly completed the survey.
See Las Casas, Historia, III, 135-136, Cardinal Cisneros’ order sending him to the Indies with the Hieronymite Commission, and his simultaneous appointment as Procurator or Universal Protector of the Indians.
Author notes
Helen Rand Parish is a Research Associate in Latin American History, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Harold E. Weidman, S.J., who contributed the summary and transcription of the new documentation from the Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, is a member of the American Division of the Jesuit Historical Institute, Rome. Both authors wish to thank Raymond Marcus, compiler of the forthcoming Bartolomé de las Casas: Nueva bibliografía crítica, for suggesting that they reexamine this AGI legajo on their recent research trip to Spain—a trip made possible, in part, by a grant from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society.
