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252 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
LAS CASAS: I hate the word "conquest." It makes me think of scattered entrails, stolen lands, triumphant soldiers. I prefer--"evangelizing," "civilizing."Jean-Claude Carriere's play The Controversy of Valladolid considers, specifically, the question of whether the natives whom the Spanish and Portuguese found when they "discovered" and subsequently conquered America were actual human beings or not. The Papal Legate sent from Rome to the Spanish capital in 1550 to settle this question suggests two other possibilities at the outset--that the Native Americans might be "a distinctly other species, or even subjects of the devil himself."
SEPULVEDA: Christ loves this fight! He loves this conquest! Or why else would He allow it?