Hispaniola Island (Caribbean, now the Dominican Republic and Haiti). Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican priest, in a sermon during Mass, referring to the Native Americans, asks: “Tell me, by what right or according to what justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery?” “Are they not men?” The sermon causes a stir in the world that has always been associated with the Church of Rome. To remedy this, the Spanish resort to a formula (requerimiento) read aloud to every native they encountered, demanding that they recognize the Church of Rome and the king or queen; otherwise, there would be war without borders. Naturally, it was a mere formality, as the natives would have been unlikely to understand the formula. A court intellectual, Gines de Sepulveda, who would never set foot in the Americas, declared that the natives were as distant from the Spanish as monkeys from men, and therefore did not even deserve to be conquered. The Spanish, in fact, unlike what would happen with the English colonists, did not move to the New World with their families: they were missions and armies of only men.
