Valladolid dispute
The dispute of Valladolid ( Junta de Valladolid ) is the name given to the dispute between the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas and the secular priest and humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in the Spanish city of Valladolid over the enslavement of the Amerindians in 1550/51.
history
Las Casas and other thinkers of late Spanish scholasticism made the Spanish crown under Charles V aware of the aggression against the Native Americans . The papal bull Sublimis Deus of 1537 had already dealt with the riots during the enslavement of the Amerindians by the Spaniards and pointed to the human dignity of the Amerindians or granted them a number of basic rights such as freedom and property . King Charles V ordered the violent acts to be stopped and a junta (jury) to be convened, the subject of which was the question of the legitimacy of the enslavement of native Amerindians in the New World. The jury was made up of recognized scholars of the time, including well-known theologians such as Bartolomé de Carranza , Melchior Cano and Domingo de Soto . The venue for the two meetings from August 15 to probably September 15, 1550 and from April 11 to May 4, 1551 was the Dominican monastery Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid .
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who represented the interests of the Spanish settlers and landowners who benefited from the encomienda system in Valladolid , saw the Amerindians as barbarians and natural slaves and sought - building on the Aristotelian thinking of natural law - to prove the inferiority of the Amerindians: through their natural order on slave labor he saw enslavement and slave service justified by conformity with natural law. In this way they could be subjected to enslavement and war if necessary.
Las Casas, who is close to the school of Salamanca and characterized by humanistic thinking, campaigned for the publication of the cruel treatment of the native Amerindians by the Spanish encomienda system. He also argued naturally against the enslavement of the Amerindians, whom he viewed as freeborn people. For Las Casas, the Aristotelian speech of the "barbarians" or "natural slaves" was not applicable in the case of the Amerindians, since they, unlike the previous ones, have already come to the full use of reason and are therefore to be led to the Christian faith without coercion or coercion. Las Casas also responded to de Sepúlveda's objection, according to which the inferiority of the Amerindians through the unnatural crimes of cannibalism and idolatry committed by them was evident. Furthermore, the idea of man being made in the image of God was an important part of his argument.
Although Las Casas repeatedly tried to substantiate his point of view with personal experience reports, the disputation stagnated on a theoretical level.
The outcome of the disputation remained open; the opponents later both claimed to have won the trial. Neither of the two had succeeded in fully implementing their intentions and in moving the Spanish crown to the intended political decisions: Neither could Las Casas bring about the immediate end of the Spanish war of conquest in the New World; the general abuse of the Amerindians by the Spanish conquerors was not stopped. De Sepúlveda was still able to prevent the new legislation of the Leyes Nuevas introduced in 1542 and influenced by Las Casas , which were driven by the efforts of the Spanish crown to weaken the rights of the encomiendas or to bring the encomenderos better under their control.
Following the disputation, Bartholomé de Las Casas wrote Aqui se contiene una disputa . It contains the arguments that he probably presented in excerpts in the disputation.
reception
A Belgian-French film production from 1992 entitled La Controverse de Valladolid with Jean-Pierre Marielle in the leading role deals with the subject of the disputation and the person of Las Casas' .
The ORF also made a television film about the disputation in 1992 under the title Bartolomé de Las Casas (written and directed by Michael Kehlmann ). The basis was the novel Las Casas before Charles V by Reinhold Schneider .
literature
- de Las Casas, Bartolomé: Disputation of Valladolid in: Selection of works. Ed. V. Mariano Delgado . Vol. 1: Mission theological writings. Studies by Mariano Delgado, Horst Pietschmann and Michael Sievernich SJ. Translations by Pruno Pockrandt and Henrik Wels. Paderborn 1994, pp. 336-436.
- Eggensperger, Thomas: The influence of Thomas Aquinas on the political thinking of Bartolomé de Las Casas in the treatise “De imperatoria vel regia potestate”. A theological-political theory between the Middle Ages and modern times. Lit-Verlag, 2001
- Runde, Ingo: Francisco de Vitoria and the dispute about the legal title of the Conquista in the New World , Duisburg 1994