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ALESSANDRO GERALDINI VS RODRIGO DE FIGUEROA
Geraldini’s positions on the relationship between the native Antillean population and the Spanish who
landed in the Americas are interesting to ponder.
A man of his time, Alessandro Geraldini could not be, and was not, opposed to slavery as a theoretical
concept. In fact, he considered it useful from a “methodological” standpoint: enslaving indigenous peoples
enabled Europeans to convert them to Christianity, which was otherwise impossible (ep. 19.26–27). He the-
refore asked the Council of the Indies to put him, as bishop, in charge of delegating slaves who were already
baptized, on the pretext that terrible crimes had been committed by those who were responsible at that time
(ep. 16.1). The issue that arose was that the children of
caciques
, the rulers of the indigenous peoples, needed an
education. Royal officials normally entrusted this to private teachers, but he argued that “these teachers [did]
not act out of any concern for their students, but only in accordance with their salary.” The bishop thus asked
for permission to manage and intercede in the teachers’ work (“to be permitted to correct the teachers if they
[did] not perform their jobs well and, if they [were] totally inept, to eliminate them,” ep. 16.4).
6
On the other hand, he fully perceived the socioeconomic advantage of low-cost work in that difficult and
complicated world. As a bishop with considerable debt, he asked the Council of the Indies to “grant him up to
one hundred native slaves” (ep. 16.5) and for permission “to bring thirty or forty Ethiopians to the island,” that
is, slaves from Africa (ep. 16.6). He also asked his niece Elisabetta,
7
who had just moved to Hispaniola with her
husband, to consign him slaves owned by a man named Ávila, who had collaborated with the commission of
the Order of Saint Jerome and remained on the island (ep. 18).
Geraldini was strongly opposed to the prevailing slave administration methods and to the handling of Na-
tive American affairs, in general. Even in his literary work, he had no shortage of words condemning slavery,
as we see clearly, for example, in
Itin.
V 33.
His grievances in this regard are severe and explicit. He speaks of nothing less than genocide (one million
deaths!) perpetrated by the Spanish against the indigenous peoples: “… by God, eternal and immortal, they
have exterminated over one million men: a previously unknown crime, a crime unheard of before, a crime
that had never been seen!” (
Itin.
XVI 27); “The Spanish, since the Ligurian Columbus died, discoverer of the
equatorial regions, have killed more than one million of these good people, who would have converted to our
faith with due diligence” (ep. 19.22). The affliction of the indigenous peoples mostly stemmed from the strug-
gles, labor, and hunger they suffered in the mines where they were forced to work; however, it also derived
from so much gratuitous violence itself: “Another constituent of these men, on the other hand, was taken to
remote places in the mountains [where they] fed only on crabs [and] died under stress, or with no rest throu-
Amelia (Terni),
eastern panorama.
© Andrea Vierucci