Viceroys, Encomiendas, Las Casas and the New Laws
A Government for Two Continents
By the early 1530s Spain controlled an empire so large that no single governor could oversee it from Spain. The crown had to invent a new layer of authority. The instrument was the viceroy — literally ‘in place of the king’. A viceroy held all royal power in a named territory: he commanded the army, presided over the courts, taxed, granted land and signed treaties with Indigenous peoples. In 1535, Charles V created the Viceroyalty of New Spain, with its capital at Mexico City. The first viceroy was Antonio de Mendoza, a careful administrator who served for fifteen years and centralised royal authority over the freelance conquistadors of Cortes’s generation. The Viceroyalty of Peru followed in 1542, with its capital at Lima. Underneath each viceroy sat an audiencia — a royal court of judges who heard appeals and supervised local governors.
The Viceroyalty of New Spain was established in 1535 with its capital at Mexico City and its first viceroy Antonio de Mendoza. The Viceroyalty of Peru was established in 1542 with its capital at Lima.
The Encomienda by 1540
Underneath the new viceroys sat an older system. The encomienda had begun on Hispaniola in the early 1500s and travelled with the conquistadors to Mexico in the 1520s and Peru in the 1530s. Tens of thousands of Indigenous people were now ‘entrusted’ to Spanish encomenderos. In law, the deal was that an encomendero collected tribute and labour from a named community in exchange for protecting them and instructing them in the Catholic faith. In practice, the encomienda was unpaid forced labour with a religious gloss. Encomenderos became a colonial aristocracy, enriching their families on land and labour they had not paid for.
Population collapse made the system worse, not better. As Indigenous communities shrank from disease, the same tribute demand fell on fewer people, intensifying the burden on the survivors. By the 1540s, in some areas, encomienda demands amounted to a death sentence for the workers under it.
Bartolome de las Casas
Bartolome de las Casas was the most important Spanish dissenter of the period. He was not an outsider but an insider — a former encomendero who had taken part in the conquest of Cuba (1511–15) and held an encomienda himself before his conversion of conscience. In 1514, after preparing a sermon on a passage in Ecclesiasticus, he renounced his encomienda and freed the Indigenous workers tied to it. He spent the next fifty years lobbying the Spanish crown to dismantle the system that he had once profited from.
Las Casas was not the first Spaniard to protest. The Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos had preached the famous 1511 sermon on Hispaniola — ‘Are these not men?’ — the first public Spanish protest against the treatment of Indigenous peoples. But Las Casas was the most persistent. He travelled repeatedly between the Caribbean, Mexico, Peru and Spain. He wrote a stream of memoranda to the king. He was made ‘Protector of the Indians’ in 1516, a court advocate for Indigenous causes. In 1542 he gathered his arguments into a long memorandum for Charles V called the Brevisima relacion — the Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies — describing in detail the cruelty of the encomienda and conquest.
No — the period is full of internal Spanish conflict. Velazquez against Cortes; Pizarro against Almagro; Las Casas against Sepulveda; the crown against the encomenderos. Top-band judgement answers note this. The view that ‘everyone thought like that back then’ is historically false: the first sustained European argument for Indigenous human rights was made by a Spaniard. Showing Spain wrestling with itself — Montesinos in 1511, Las Casas’s renunciation in 1514, the New Laws debate in 1542, the Valladolid debate in 1550–51 — is a more historically accurate framing than ‘Spain conquered, the Church blessed it, and that was that’.
The New Laws, 20 November 1542
In November 1542 Charles V signed the New Laws. The document was a direct response to Las Casas’s lobbying. The most important provisions were these. First, the outright enslavement of Indigenous peoples was banned: the chains came off thousands of Indigenous workers across the Americas. Second, no new encomiendas would be granted. Third, existing encomiendas would expire on the holder’s death and revert to the crown — ending the colonial aristocracy within a generation. Fourth, royal officials, judges and clergy were forbidden from holding encomiendas. The principle behind the laws was radical: that Indigenous peoples were free vassals of the crown with rights, not the property of the conquistadors who had subdued them.
The Conquistador Rebellion in Peru, 1544–48
The encomenderos in the Americas reacted with fury. The most violent reaction came in Peru. Blasco Nunez Vela arrived as the first viceroy in 1544 to enforce the laws. The encomenderos refused. They rose under Gonzalo Pizarro, the brother of the dead Francisco. In January 1546 Gonzalo’s men killed Nunez Vela at the Battle of Añaquito, and Gonzalo briefly ruled Peru as a rebel. Charles V was forced to compromise. He sent Pedro de la Gasca, a clergyman with full royal authority, who broke the rebellion and executed Gonzalo Pizarro in 1548 — but only after the Crown had quietly abandoned the inheritance clause in 1545. New encomiendas would still not be granted, but existing ones could now be inherited. The encomienda survived in weakened form for another two and a half centuries.
The New Laws of 1542 banned outright enslavement of Indigenous peoples, banned new encomiendas, and required existing ones to expire on the holder’s death. The conquistador rebellion in Peru, which began in 1544 and killed Viceroy Nunez Vela in 1546, forced the Crown to repeal the inheritance clause — and encomiendas survived in weakened form.
Significance
Were the New Laws a success or a failure? The cleanest answer is: both. As a moral and legal landmark, they were enormous. The Spanish empire was the first European empire to formally debate the rights of conquered peoples and to write into law that Indigenous peoples had legal personality. The Valladolid debate of 1550–51 between Las Casas and the theologian Juan Gines de Sepulveda — over whether Indigenous peoples were ‘natural slaves’ in Aristotelian theory — was a debate Las Casas effectively won in moral terms. As an attempt to change the daily reality of colonial labour, the laws fell short. Encomiendas continued. The mita — the Indigenous forced-labour rota in the Andean silver mines — expanded after 1573. Top-band ‘importance’ answers weigh the laws as both a real reform and a partial failure, rather than picking one side. Las Casas died in 1566 still campaigning. His Brief Account, published in 1552, was reprinted across Protestant Europe and became the basis for the ‘Black Legend’ of Spanish cruelty — a propaganda weapon that hurt Spanish reputation but also kept the moral question alive.
In 1550 Charles V did something no European monarch had done before: he ordered all conquests in the Americas to pause until the morality of the conquest itself could be debated by a panel of theologians and lawyers in the Castilian town of Valladolid. Las Casas argued that Indigenous peoples were rational, fully human beings entitled to the same protection of natural law as Spaniards. Juan Gines de Sepulveda, drawing on Aristotle, argued that some peoples were ‘natural slaves’ whose conquest by a more advanced civilisation was morally justified. The panel never issued a clean verdict, but Las Casas’s arguments were broadly accepted as having defeated Sepulveda’s. The Valladolid debate did not stop the encomienda or the silver economy — but it established a principle that would echo for centuries: that conquered peoples have rights even against the state that has conquered them.