Transforming Discoveries 41ientOy which required that Indians accept both Spanish rule and Christian
ity. The conquistadors built new towns, placing the church, town hall, and
prison around a central marketplace (plaza)y as towns developed on a rec
tangular grid plan.
In return for the pope’s blessing of the colonial enterprise, missionaries
began to arrive in the Americas, hoping to convert the Indians to Chris
tianity. The harsh reality of the colonial experience for the natives, how
ever, was largely untempered by the good intentions of some, but not all,
of the missionaries. “For this kind of people,’’ snapped a Portuguese priest
in Brazil in 1 563, “there is no better way of preaching than the sword and
the rod of iron.’’ A Spanish judge in Mexico said of his people that they “com
pelled [the Indians] to give whatever they asked, and inflicted unheard-of
cruelties and tortures upon them.’’
Spaniards, Portuguese, and other Europeans sought to impose their cul
ture on the peoples they conquered, although Christian teaching made only
limited headway in India and virtually none in China. Unlike its view of
Muslims, the Church did not consider Indians infidels, but rather as inno
cents who could be taught Christian beliefs. “Are these Indians not men?”
asked a Dominican priest in Santo Domingo in a sermon to shocked
colonists in 1511, “Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to
love them as you love yourselves?” A papal pronouncement depicted the Indi
ans as “true men... capable not only of understanding the Catholic faith,
but also, according to our information, desirous of receiving it.” The
Spaniards already had experience in dealing with the diversity of language
and culture on the Iberian Peninsula, although nothing like what they found
in the Americas. In the 1590s, a Franciscan friar boasted that he had built
over 200 churches and baptized more than 70,000 Indians. In Latin Amer
ica, Christian belief sometimes merged with local religious deities, customs,
and shrines to create a distinctive form of Christianity.
Obligatory labor service, brutally enforced, first formed the relationship
between rulers and the ruled. The crown of Castile established a system of
encomienda, by which Spanish settlers would hold Indians “in trust,” but not
their lands. They could exact tribute in kind or labor. The system gradually
ended and a wage system—not much better—came into place. Moreover,
repartimiento allowed royal officials to force Indians to work for specific peri
ods. In Central America, Spanish colonists invoked the medieval Christian
concept of a “just war” against “heathens” as a justification for enslavement.
The Church and the crown periodically tried to protect the Indians
against the harsh treatment accorded them by many of their Spanish coun
trymen in the name of profit. Bishop Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566),
whose father had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the Amer
icas and who had himself been a conquistador before becoming a priest,
spoke out against the treatment of Indians. He saluted the “marvelous gov
ernment, laws, and good customs” of the Mayas of Central America, whom