The consensus of the time held that the writing of history should be in the hands of the lettered (letrados) class and not in the hands of soldiers like Bernal Diaz del Castillo or Indians such as Guamán Poma. History writing was itself divided into several kinds: divine, human, natural, moral, and general (Mignolo, 1982: 78). History writing during the period of the conquest was practiced by men who were both soldiers and letrados. Fernández de Oviedo, who had spent some time in Italy before coming to America and was thus acquainted with Italian humanism, is the first to attempt one of these new histories with his long Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535). Oviedo wrote also as an official crown historian. He wanted to be remembered as the Pliny of the Indies. His idea of historia natural was to pull away from the medieval bestiaries and offer instead descriptions and interpretations based on eyewitness observations made in the new lands. The conqueror–historian thought that history should deal with big and important subjects. Like other cronistas, Oviedo was also trying to follow Cicero when he fashioned his historia moral in a temporal frame that organized the reporting of worthwhile events from various sources. The influence of Pliny in the arrangement of nature would determine a hierarchical model with which to view America. Thus from the start, the idea of an historia natural allowed for the classification, not just of plants and animals, but also of peoples and civilizations in an ascending ladder in which Europe would figure at the top and the Amerindians somewhere at the bottom. This classification would blend the natural with the moral and infuse all reports, letters, histories, and polemics about the new world from Oviedo to Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573), to Las Casas and Acosta in Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590).
The conquest of this continent brought about a profusion of texts beyond those identified above. Tracts, learned treatises, and even poems found an avid audience in both Europe and the colonial administrative centers. It gave rise to fierce debates about the nature of the Indians, colonial policy, and the right to wage war on civilian populations. Lawyers, jurists, academic intellectuals, crown officials, evangelizing and colonizing priests, official historians, and even Charles V himself participated. The early, prelapsarian image of the Indians created by the Italian humanists, who either worked in Spain or for the Spanish crown, soon came under attack by Spanish warriors and colonists in the Caribbean who painted their enemies as fierce, anthropophagic societies (Hulme, 1986).
The implicit critique of the conquest imbedded in the characterization of Indian societies as fresh versions of Ovid’s world by the Italians (Peter Martyr d’Anghera, Amerigo Vespucci) was not lost on the Spanish letrados or the crown. Despite the fact that by 1530 the demographic catastrophe was universally acknowledged, and despite the evidence that the Indians were exhausted by famine, slave labor conditions, and disease, Oviedo and Sepúlveda wrote stinging attacks on Indian societies. For these two members of the imperial school of cronistas, the Indians were lazy, vicious, lying, traitorous, half–witted beings given to melancholy, anthropophagy, and sodomy, among other things. The list of phobias remained expandable, as can be seen in Acosta’s rehearsal of the Indian portrait in 1590 and especially in his De procurandam indorum salute (1557), a manual for the evangelization of the Indians printed in Lima and quickly disseminated throughout the rest of the empire. Both Garcilaso and Guamán Poma would spend considerable ink and paper in responding to Acosta (Castro–Klaren, 2001).
Oviedo began making his cunning views public in various polemics and short publications. He arrived for the first time in the New World in 1514 as a notary public, and soon after participated in the bloody conquest of El Darien (Panama) in 1517. There he proudly took his booty in human flesh and himself branded the Indians to be enslaved. In 1532, after having gone to Spain to publish his Sumario de la natural historia de la Indias (1524) and to ask for royal favors, he returned to the New World. He then accepted the lifelong appointment as constable of the royal fortress of Santo Domingo and royal chronicler of the Indies (Brading, 1991: 33). Oviedo is regarded as one of the principal advocates of Spain’s imperial power. His arguments were fundamental to the cynical deployment of the idea of providential history in which Spain figures as the nation chosen by God to be universally triumphant. Along with the Spanish Neoplatonist theologians, Oviedo believed that the Emperor Charles V was indeed the new sun.
Subscribing to the same doctrine of providential history, Las Casas, a colonist and also slaveowner, suffered in 1514 a crisis of conscience. This crisis was due in part to his daily witnessing of the Caribbean holocaust, and in part to the preaching of Franciscan monks in Cuba who realized that the conquest ran contrary to almost every Christian principle. In 1531 Las Casas wrote a memorial to the Council of the Indies. There he warned Spain of eternal damnation if it did not stop the slaughter of the Indians. For years he had been intervening on behalf of the Indians as well as preparing a massive treatise in their defense and conservation.
Las Casas came from a family of conversos (Jewish people who had converted to Christianity). As an adventurous lad of 18, he arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 eager to make his fortune as a colonist. His father and uncle had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. They brought him and an (enslaved) Indian boy as a souvenir from the islands. Between 1502 and 1514 Las Casas fought as a soldier in the conquest of Cuba. In 1510 the Dominicans arrived in Hispaniola and began denouncing the Spaniards’ treatment of the Indians. They also noted the demographic collapse. Friar Antonio de Montesinos gave an impassioned sermon in 1512 in which he articulated the questions and critique that Las Casas and his followers were to repeat throughout the centuries: “Are they [the Indians] not human? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves?” (Brading, 1991: 59). The response was the official wrath of the crown and the church. More atrocities followed.
After his conversion, with the support of the Dominicans, he returned to Spain to campaign on behalf of the Indians and to build alliances, most especially with the bishop of Burgos (Castro, 2007: 63–102). Las Casas’s strategy, not unlike the advice Guamán Poma offered the Spanish king almost a century later, was to make the church and the crown realize that it was in their benefit to keep the Indians in good condition. His proposals were always reform. He wanted to improve the conditions under which the Indians were integrated, albeit more slowly and peacefully, into the strictly hierarchical colonial world that was emerging. The very title of one of his best known tracts, Memorial de remedios (1516), indicates that Las Casas’s project, heroic as it was in demanding that the power system in place recognize the humanity of the Indias, could not advocate a radical turn away from the policies of conquest and colonization. As one of his most recent analysts has put it: “What differentiates him from the rest is his willingness to reach out to offer temporary succor to those being victimized so that they could be benevolently converted, peacefully exploited, and successfully incorporated as members of the new subject–colony where existence depended on the dictates of the king in the imperial capital” (Castro, 2007: 8).
Nevertheless, Las Casas recommended the abolition of the encomienda, that is, the king’s donation of immense tracts of land