Valladolid debate

Common card · No. 264895

The Valladolid debate (1550–1551; Spanish La Junta de Valladolid or La Controversia de Valladolid) was the first public debate in European history to discuss the morality, rights and treatment of Indigenous people by European colonizers. Held in the Colegio de San Gregorio, in the Spanish city of Valladolid, it was an intellectual and theological debate about the moral legitimacy of the conquest of the Americas, its justification for the conversion to Catholicism, and more specifically about the relations between the European settlers and the natives of the New World. It consisted of a number of opposing views about the way natives were to be integrated into Spanish society, their conversion to Catholicism, and their rights. Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas, argued that the Native Americans were free men in the natural order despite their practice of human sacrifices and other such customs, deserving the same consideration as the colonizers. Opposing this view...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Queninosta, CC BY-SA 3.0