New Worlds and Th eir Challenges 121renowned champion of the rights of the native populations of the New
World. Originally from a prominent merchant family of Seville, he emi-
grated with his father to Hispaniola in the West Indies in 1502, during his
teens. Th ere, he became a plantation own er, employing local Indians as slave
labor and even participating in military expeditions and slave raids against
the Indians. But his life’s vocation was to lie in a dramatically diff erent di-
rection. In 1510, he became a priest, the fi rst to be ordained in the New
World. Th e decisive change in his life, though, took place the following year,
when he attended an eloquent sermon by a Dominican friar named Antonio
de Montesinos, who denounced mistreatment of the native peoples of the
Americas by the Spaniards. Las Casas was thereby inspired to enter the
Dominican order himself and to make the welfare of the Indian population
the great mission of his life.
On other side of the debate, and favoring the dilatatio doctrine, was a fa-
mous classical scholar named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Originally from
Córdoba in southern Spain, Sepúlveda moved to Italy, where he attained
great prominence. His skills as a classicist brought him, in 1526, the post of
offi cial translator for the papal court, charged with rendering the writings of
Aristotle into polished Ciceronian Latin. For centuries to come, his transla-
tion of the Politics would be the standard one in Eu rope. On returning to
Spain, he also translated Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. He encountered trou-
ble with the church, however, with the writing of a work called Demo crates se-
cundus (subtitled “Just War against Barbarians”) in 1544. In this work, he
followed Mair in endorsing the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery and
asserting its applicability to the native populations of the New World—
which, like Mair, he never personally visited. As this position was contrary to
offi cial church doctrine, it was swift ly condemned and denied publication by
the theology faculties of the Universities of Salamanca and Alcalá, although it
circulated widely in manuscript form. It also earned Sepúlveda a gift of two
hundred pesos worth of jewels and clothing from grateful readers in Mex-
ico. Following this rejection by the two universities, he wrote to Charles V’s
son Philip (the future king of Spain, then ser ving as regent of Castile) in 1549,
demanding a public debate on the subject.
Th e offi cial purpose of the Valladolid conference— it was not actually a
legal trial— was to decide on the best method to be employed for the conversion
of the Indians. But it was clear that the crucial point of contention between