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bartolomé de las casas

Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, who later became Bishop of Chiapa, was born at Seville in 1474. His father went with Columbus on his second voyage in 1493, and amassed sufficient means to provide his promising son with a university education at Salamanca. He was the first priest ordained in the new world, where he went with Ovando in 1502. The sufferings of the natives under the cruelties of the first colonists, and especially the system of ripartimientos and encomiendas, so aroused the sympathies of the young priest that he dedicated his life to their defence, and was the first to bear the glorious title of Protector-General of the Indians, which Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros, regent in the absence of Charles V., conferred upon him. He was indefatigable in his crusade and not always discreet. After the failure of the native colony entrusted to him, he retired to a Dominican convent (which Order he entered) and devoted himself during many years to various compositions in vindication of the Indians and their violated rights. He enlisted his brethren of the Order in his apostolate, and never during his long and eventful life flagged in his zeal for the noble end he had set himself. After refusing the bishopric of Cuzco, the richest perhaps in the New World, he later accepted the poor diocese of Chiapa. He died in July, 1566, at the age of ninety-two, in the monastery of Atocha, at Madrid.

Las Casas barely tolerated Cortes, and, having known him as an obscure young man of no importance, courting the favour of Diego Velasquez in Cuba, he could never refrain in later years, when extraordinary fortune had elevated him at his former patron's expense, from recalling the humble origin and many doubtful transactions of the great Conqueror's youth. Indeed he treats Cortes throughout as a mere lucky adventurer. Prescott says of him that he had the virtues and faults of a reformer, being inspired by a great and glorious idea which "urged him to lift the voice of rebuke in the presence of princes, to brave the menaces of an infuriated populace, to cross seas, traverse mountains and