colonists to pass their lands to their heirs.
In 1544, he was appointed as the bishop of
Chiapas, where his primary task was to see
the New Laws enforced. In 1547, when the
ban on inheritance was rescinded, he re-
signed this office. In 1550 Las Casas re-
turned to Valladolid, Spain, to take part in
a famous debate with the scholar Juan
Gines de Sepulveda on the future of the
encomiendasystem of slave-worked plan-
tations. Speaking for five days, Las Casas
succeeded in having Sepulveda’s book,
which advocated outright war against the
Indians, suppressed. In 1552 Las Casas
chronicled the cruelty of theencomienda
system in his most famous work,Brief Ac-
count of the Destruction of the Indians.He
also wrote a comprehensive history of the
Spanish conquest,History of the Indies,as
well as a book detailing the lives and cul-
ture of Native Americans,History of the
Indians, in which work he showed that the
Native American subjects of Spain should
enjoy the same rights and freedoms as
their European conquerors.
SEEALSO: Columbus, Christopher; Cortes,
Hernán; exploration
Lasso, Orlando di ............................
(1532–1595)
Composer born in Mons, in the county of
Hainaut, a city of the Low Countries then
under the rule of Spain. A tradition says
that Lasso was kidnapped several times as
a boy for his beautiful singing voice. At
the age of twelve, he traveled to Italy,
where he worked at the Gonzaga court in
Mantua and also studied composition in
Milan and Naples. In the 1550s he worked
in Rome, first in the service of Cosimo de’
Medici and then as choirmaster of the Ba-
silica of San Giovanni di Laterano. He re-
turned to the Low Countries after this en-
gagement and was hired by Albrecht V, the
duke of Bavaria. By this time his composi-
tions were known throughout Europe, and
he was considered the finest musician and
composertocomefromtheLowCoun-
tries. Lasso was appointedkapellmeisterby
Albrecht V, and he would serve in this post
at the ducal court in Munich, Bavaria, for
the rest of his life. His fame attracted many
young musicians to Bavaria to study with
him; Pope Gregory XIII knighted him and
Emperor Maximilian II rewarded him with
a title of nobility. Although many kings
invited him to their courts, he preferred
the Bavarian court, where he remained the
unquestioned master of a dedicated group
of singers and instrumentalists. He was
expected to write music for special occa-
sions and ceremonies, train young singers
for performance in the choir, and com-
pose settings of the Mass. The duke
granted Lasso a lifetime appointment, as
well as a generous budget for perfor-
mances, instruments, and musicians, and
the Bavarian court became a bustling cen-
ter of music during the late Renaissance.
Lasso was a master of many different
musical forms, including sacred masses,
hymns, and motets, as well as secular mad-
rigals and chansons(songs) written in
Latin, Italian, French, and German. He set
the poetry of the Italian writers Petrarch
and Ludovico Ariosto to music, as well as
a verse from the ancient Roman author
Virgil. One of his songs was included by
William Shakespeare in the playHenry IV,
Part II. Lasso wrote four passions—a
capella(voice only) settings of the four
evangelical books of the New Testament—
that combine plainsong chant (single-line
melodies) with passages of multivoiced po-
lyphony, of which Lasso is still considered
the absolute master of all Renaissance
composers. He wrote in the many differ-
ent musical styles and forms that he en-Lasso, Orlando di