58 CHAPTER 3 THE CONQUEST OF AMERICA
accompanied by an expansion of mental horizons
and the rise of new ways of viewing the world that
signifi cantly contributed to intellectual progress.
One of the fi rst casualties of the great geographic
discoveries was the authority of the ancients and
even of the church fathers. Thus the Spanish friar
Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), writing on
the traditional belief in uninhabitable zones, man-
aged in one paragraph to demolish the authority of
Saint Augustine and the ancients, who, “after all,
did not know very much.”
The discovery of America and its peoples also
produced disputes about their origins and nature
that led to the founding of anthropology. The desire
to prove the essential humanity and equality of these
indigenous Americans inspired some sixteenth-
century Spanish missionaries to make profound in-
vestigations of their culture. One of the greatest of
these friar-anthropologists was, again, Bartolomé
de Las Casas, one of whose works is an immense
ac cumulation of ethnographic data used to dem-
onstrate that indigenous Americans fully met the
requirements laid down by Aristotle for the good
life. Las Casas, resting his case above all on experi-
ence and observation, offered an environmentalist
explanation of cultural differences and regarded
with scientifi c detachment such deviations from
European standards as human sacrifi ces and ritual
cannibalism.
Refl ections on the apparent novelty and
strangeness of some indigenous ways, and the ef-
forts of friar-anthropologists to understand and
explain those ways, also led to the development of
a cultural relativism that, like the rejection of au-
thority, represented a sharp break with the past.
Las Casas, for example, subjected the term barbar-
ian to a careful semantic analysis that robbed it, as
applied to advanced cultures like the Aztec or the
Inca, of most of its sting. Michel de Montaigne, who
avidly read accounts of indigenous American cus-
toms, observed in his famous essay on native Bra-
zilians, “Of Cannibals,” “I think there is nothing
barbarous and savage in this nation, from what I
have been told, except that each man calls barbar-
ian whatever is not his own practice.”
The discovery of America and its peoples also
inspired Europeans who were troubled by the social
injustices of Renaissance Europe to propose radical
new schemes of political and economic organization.
In 1516, for example, Thomas More published Uto-
pia, which portrayed a pagan, socialist society whose
institutions were governed by justice and reason,
so unlike the states of contemporary Europe, which
More described as a “conspiracy of the rich” against
the poor. More’s narrator, who tells about the Utopi-
ans and their institutions, claims to be a sailor who
made three voyages with Amerigo Vespucci. The
principal source of More’s ideas about the evils of
private property and the benefi ts of popular govern-
ment appears to be a key passage about indigenous
customs and beliefs in Vespucci’s Second Letter:
Having no laws and no religious doctrine, they
live according to nature. They understand
nothing of the immortality of the soul. There is
no possession of private property among them,
for everything is in common. They have no
king, nor do they obey anyone. Each is his own
master. There is no administration of justice,
which is unnecessary to them....
But if the Discovery had a benefi cial impact on Eu-
ropean intellectual life, refl ected in the new rejec-
tion of authority, the growth of cultural relativism,
and the impulse it gave to unorthodox social and
political thought, it also reinforced the negative
European attitudes of racism and ethnocentrism.
The great Flemish mapmaker Abraham Orte lius
gave clear expression to these attitudes in his
1579 world atlas. To the map of Europe, Ortelius
attached a note proclaiming Europe’s historic mis-
sion of world conquest, in process of fulfi llment by
Spain and Portugal, “who between them dominate
the four parts of the globe.” Ortelius declared that
Europeans had always surpassed all other peoples
in intelligence and physical dexterity, thus qualify-
ing them to govern the other parts of the globe.
The broad vision of Las Casas, who proclaimed
that “all mankind is one,” and of Montaigne, who
furiously denounced European savagery and pro-
posed a “brotherly fellowship and understanding”
as the proper relationship between Europeans and
the peoples of the New World, was not typical of con-
temporary thinking on the subject. Colonial rivals
might condemn Spanish behavior toward indige-
nous Americans, but they usually agreed in regarding
them as tainted with vices and as “poor barbarians.”