The Requerimiento 1513

[Mike Fowler]

The Spanish Requirement of 1513 (Requerimiento) was a declaration by the Spanish monarchy, written by the Council of Castile jurist Juan Lpez de Palacios Rubios, of Castile's divinely ordained right to take possession of the territories of the New World and to subjugate, exploit and, when necessary, to fight the native inhabitants. The declaration was made on behalf of Ferdinand II of Aragon and his daughter, the Queen regnant Joanna of Castile.

The Requerimiento (Spanish for "requirement" as in "demand") was read to Native Americans to inform them of Spain's rights to conquest. The Spaniards thus considered those who resisted as defying God's plan, and so used Catholic theology to justify their conquest.[1]

In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which legitimized the slave trade, at least as a result of war. It granted Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce war-conquered "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery.[2] As such, the Dominican friars who arrived at the Spanish settlement at Santo Domingo in 1510 strongly denounced the enslavement of the local Indigenous residents. Along with other priests, they opposed the native peoples' treatment as unjust and illegal in an audience with the Spanish king and in the subsequent royal commission.[3]

Comparing the situation in the Old World and New World: in Spain's wars against the Moors, the clerics claimed that Muslims had knowledge of Christ and rejected Him, so that waging a Crusade against them was legitimate; in contrast, in Spain's wars against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Native Americans, wars against those who had never come into contact with Christianity were illegitimate. Responding to this impeding clerical position, the Requerimiento was issued, providing a religious justification for war against and conquest of the local populations of pre-existing residents, on the pretext of their refusing the legitimate authority of the Kings of Spain and Portugal as granted by the Pope.

So, the Requerimiento emerged in the context of moral debates within Spanish elites over the colonization of the Americas, and associated actions such as war, slavery, 'Indian reductions', conversions, relocations, and war crimes. Its use was criticized by many clerical missionaries, most prominently Bartolom de las Casas.

The colonization of the New World by European adventurers was "justified" at the time on spiritual and religious grounds. In the conquest of the Americas, the Christian duty to evangelize nonbelievers took the form of conversion of Indians and other pagans at the hands of Roman Catholic priests.[citation needed]

To the European mind, the lands of the New World belonged to no one and could, therefore, be seized. The radical differences in thought and behavior of the Aztec and Mayan states, with their worship of entirely new, fierce gods, human sacrifice and complete unfamiliarity with European styles of diplomacy[further explanation needed] created a sense that conquest was not a war between states but the conquering, by a civilized, society against a ferocious, barbarous enemy. Moreover, since the native population was non-Christian, the Europeans' Christian religion conferred upon them the right and indeed the obligation to take possession of the lands and the people in the name of God and the throne.[citation needed]

More particularly, Catholic theology held that spiritual salvation took precedence over temporal and civil concerns. The conversion of pagan natives to Christianity was the rationale for and legitimized Spain's conquests. Thus "informed" by the Spanish, the Native people of the land had to accept the supremacy of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown. The state was authorized to enforce submission, by war if necessary.[citation needed]

The European view of the inherent right to conquest and domination in the New World was captured in a declaration addressed to Indian populations known as El Requerimiento (The Requirement). The document was prepared by the Spanish jurist Juan Lpez de Palacios Rubios, a staunch advocate of the divine right of monarchs and territorial conquest. It was first used in 1514 by Pedrarias Dvila, a Spanish aristocrat who had fought the Moors in Granada and later became Governor of Nicaragua.

The Spanish Requirement, issued in the names of King Ferdinand and Queen Juana, his daughter, was a mixture of religious and legal justifications for the confiscation of New World territories and the subjugation of their inhabitants. At the time, it was believed that Native Americans resisted conquest and conversion for one of two reasons: malice or ignorance. The Requirement was putatively meant to eliminate ignorance.

A member of the conquistador's force would read El Requerimiento in Castilian before a group of Indians on the shore, who, with or without translation, remained uncomprehending. All the region's inhabitants were thus considered to have been advised of Spain's religious and legal rights to conquest and forewarned of the consequences of resisting. The true nature of the Spanish Requirement, however, was one of absolution; the symbolic act of reading the document relieved the crown and its agents from legal and moral responsibility for the conquest, enslavement and killing of Native Americans. Readings were often dispensed with prior to planned attacks.

As the Spanish Requirement matter-of-factly sets forth, so brazenly from five centuries' retrospect, God created heaven and earth, and the first man and woman from whom all are descended. God directed St Peter to establish the Roman Catholic Church. St Peter's descendant, the Pope, lives in Rome. The Pope has given the New World territories to the King of Castile and directed the conversion of the Indians. If they listen carefully, the Indians will understand and accept what is happening as just; if not, Spain will make war on them.

Here what the document does is to create an ontology into which these new lands and their peoples fit; it is creating a place for them in the existing Spanish and European political structure and Christian belief structure.

Many critics of the conquistadors' policies were appalled by the flippant nature of the Requerimiento, and Bartolom de las Casas said in response to it that he did not know whether to laugh or to cry. While the conquistadors were encouraged to use an interpreter to read the Requerimiento, it was not absolutely necessary, and in many cases, it was read out to an uncomprehending populace.

In some instances, it was read to barren beaches and empty villages long after the indigenous people and communities had left, to prisoners after they were captured, and even from the decks of ships once they had just spotted the coast. Nevertheless, for the conquistadors, it provided a religious justification and rationalization for attacking and conquering the native population. Because of its potential to support the enrichment of the Spanish royal coffers, the Requerimiento was not generally questioned until the Spanish crown had abolished its use in 1556.[7]

The Spanish Requirement or Requerimiento was a document intended to be read out to and agreed upon by indigenous peoples during the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Created in 1513, the document outlined the history of Christianity, the superiority of the pope, and the obligation from this day onwards for all indigenous peoples to submit themselves to Spanish royal authority.

The European colonization of the Americas began in 1492 and the landing of Christopher Columbus (l. 1451-1506) in the Caribbean. Although Columbus and the Spanish monarchy were actually interested in finding a direct sea route to China and the spices of the East, the chance discovery of the islands of the Caribbean was exploited for all it was worth. Backed by a papal bull that justified conquest and with their rivals the Portuguese dealt with in the audacious 1484 Treaty of Tordesillas, the Spanish Crown was keen to get colonizing.

In this process of colonization, indigenous peoples were robbed, tortured for their valuables, and dispossessed of their land. Thousands were killed in warfare and resistance, many were simply murdered. Even those who survived then had to face the fatal threat of European-born diseases. The conquistadors on the ground may not have cared very much about the human cost of their adventures, but there were some voices of protest back in Spain in both the Church and the government. For many figures in higher authority, conquest was not only an opportunity to gain resources, it also brought a duty to teach indigenous peoples the fundamentals of Christianity. The official line was that native peoples who peacefully accepted the Spanish monarch as their new ultimate overlord should be given in return the opportunity to save their souls and be provided with protection from physical harm and abuse. To make these concepts clear for both conquerors and conquered, in 1513 the Spanish Crown tasked the noted jurist Juan Lpez de Palacios Rubios with creating an extraordinary document, the Requerimiento.

The Requerimiento allowed many to ease their guilt at the tremendous destruction of conquest. Arguments like the lack of technological advancement in the cultures that were attacked, the interpretation that rulers governed only through a system of tyranny, that non-Christian rulers could not possibly hold any authority from God to rule, along with the growing evidence of the more dramatic elements of indigenous religious practices like human sacrifices and occasional cannibalism, were all held up as a justification that Spain was bringing light to a dark corner of God's kingdom. The conquest of the New World came to be viewed in a similar light to the Crusades. The Requerimiento offered the indigenous people a peaceful solution to a new political, military, and religious reality, if they chose to reject it, then the Spanish were, they thought, legally and morally justified in pursuing whatever means possible to complete their aims of conquest.

3a8082e126