SOURCE: Hanke, Lewis. “The ‘Requerimiento’ and its Interpreters.” Revista de Historia de America, no. 1 (March 1938): 25-34.

In the following essay, Hanke argues that the Spanish Requerimiento, drafted early in the sixteenth century to justify Spain's war of conquest against American Indians, explains a great deal about attitudes towards the indigenous peoples that prevailed in the period after discovery of the New World.

“The study of human societies is not only of an almost inconceivable diversity and multiplication of aspects but is of such a nature that no man, however balanced he may be, however determined to maintain himself on the line of strict impartiality, can ever escape from the thousand biases created in him by the many particular acquired or inherited traits of his personal nature. Nor can he avoid the influence of his own theoretical ideas concerning the relative value and the comparative role of the various...