Conquistadors

The Spaniards who invaded the Americas in the sixteenth century—known then and since as los conquistadores, “the conquerors” — were “bad” and “cruel,” led by “great tyrants.” Encountering Native Americans, who were “gentle lambs and sheep,” the conquistadors became “like fierce wolves and tigers and lions.” Or such was their characterization by the Dominican firebrand fray Bartolomé de Las Casas. His imagery caught on: he had the ear of the Spanish king, Emperor Charles V, who in 1542 approved sweeping new laws to protect his Native American subjects. Denunciations of conquistador methods were penned by others (a 1557 play by Michael de Carvajal called conquistadors “marauding wolves” and “human beasts of prey”), and anti-conquistador tales became so commonplace in the rest of Europe that the phenomenon acquired a name, the Black Legend (Las Casas 2003; Jáuregui 2008).