Pacificación y conquista en la Historia General y Natural de las Indias de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo

Abstract

Our purpose is to demonstrate that the episodes narrated in Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo’s Historia General y Natural de las Indias hold the ideal of conquest through peaceful means. The Christian empire of Carlos V became widely influenced by the ideals of the humanist branch of the European thought. Erasmus of Rotterdam was insistent about the need of peace for the relationships between Christian people or susceptible of Christianization people. Oviedo, a great reader of writers of the Humanism, uses the principle of peace to build the exemplarity of the characters in his Historia . In the First Part above all –from which we will analyze particularly the rebellion of cacique Enriquillo–, the narrative plots are usually a succession of triumphs of the harmony between Spanish conquerors and Indians who admit the universal power of the emperor and the “truth” of the catholic faith. However, Oviedo refers to the “pacification” of the American Indians, that usually cloaks the sense of a “conquest war” and that is far from the humanist ideal of peace. Thus, this paper is focused on the “implicit utopian proposals” in the textual surface of the historical text.