The Projects

From Zaragoza Las Casas took the highway to Barcelona to work the court on his projects. The most important was a combination of two: encourage new Spanish settlers – his bring-the-honest-peasants-over scheme – with Father Córdoba’s keep-the-secular-Spanish-out version of saving the Indians. Las Casas saw no inherent contradictions in these two plans, and when he combined the two there emerged an immensely ambitious project in 1519–1520 to populate the coast of Tierra Firme. The project envisioned making the king richer, converting the Indians peacefully to Christianity, and, in the end, finally developing a “model” settlement of the Indies. Every major player in the drama would benefit.

In the meantime, reports were arriving from various expeditions to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. Reports of new and advanced – and rich – civilizations ran through Castile and Aragon, once again lighting the fires of ambition and adventure, even as the Indians of the islands perished in the holocaust of the conquest. Hernán Cortés launched his conquest of Mexico in 1519 and pushed deep into the Aztec Empire. Las Casas knew this brash, intelligent conquistador well from Española and Cuba. The immediacy of Las Casas’s mission grew with each passing day, as letters of newly discovered Indian peoples and new Indian wealth reached into Spain, from the court of King Charles to the taverns in the isolated hamlets and towns across the realm. Few were untouched by gold fever, swept along by fantastic tales.