The Laws of Burgos (), promulgated on 27 December 1512 in Burgos, Crown of Castile (Spain), was the first codified set of laws governing the behavior of Spaniards in the Americas, particularly with regard to the Indigenous people of the Americas ("native Caribbean Indians"). They forbade the slavery of the indigenous people and endorsed their conversion to Catholicism. The laws were created following the conquest and Spanish colonization of the Americas in the West Indies, where the common law of Castile was not fully applicable.
The scope of the laws was originally restricted to the island of Hispaniola but was later extended to the islands of Puerto Rico and Santiago, later renamed Jamaica. These laws authorized and legalized the colonial practice of creating , where Indians were grouped together to work under a colonial head of the estate for a salary, and limited the size of these establishments to between 40 and 150 people. They also established a minutely regulated regime of work, pay, provisioning, living quarters, and diet. Women more than four months pregnant were exempted from heavy labor.
The document also prohibited the use of any form of punishment by the , reserving it for officials established in each town for the implementation of the laws. It also ordered that the Indians be catechized, outlawed bigamy, and required that the huts and cabins of the Indians be built together with those of the Spanish. It respected, in some ways, the traditional authorities, granting chiefs exemptions from ordinary jobs and granting them various Indians as servants.
They were amended and improved in the Laws of Valladolid the following year, 1513.
The limited fulfillment of the laws sometimes led to protests and claims. Sometimes they were seen as a legalization of the previously poorer situation, which created momentum for reform, later carried out through the ("New Laws") in 1542, a new set of stricter regulations about life in the New World including the rights of indigenous peoples, as well as the Laws of the Indies, to encompass the Papal bull and all edicts.
Generally, these laws are considered to be precursors of the declaration of human rights and international law.
Origins
Cardinal Archbishop Domingo de Mendoza of Seville heard reports of the abuse of the Americas' Indians and sent a group of Dominican missionaries to Hispaniola to stop the maltreatment. They could not legally stop it, but missionaries made complaints and stirred up a debate that the settlers feared would make them lose their property interests; Fray Antonio de Montesinos preached to the colonists that they were sinning and did not have the right to force the Indians to serve them, claiming they should only be converted to Christianity.
The colonists disagreed and decided the best way to protect their interests was to come together as a group and choose a Franciscan Friar named Alonso de Espinal to present their case to King Ferdinand II of Aragon and his daughter Queen Joanna of Castile, the co-rulers of Spain, and refute Montesinos's accusations. The colonists' plan backfired, though, and Spain was outraged by the cases of maltreatment of the Indians. To solve the moral and legal question, the rulers commissioned a group of theologians and academics to come up with a solution.
Dominican Friars, under the sponsorship of Diego de Deza, supported the scientific examination of Christopher Columbus's claims for exploring the West that Columbus presented to then Queen of Castile, Isabel I of Castile and her husband, King of Aragon Ferdinand II of Aragon. After 1508, the friars made the case to defend the aboriginal American Indians from becoming serfs or slaves of the new colonists.
The friars and other Spanish academics pressured King Ferdinand II of Aragon and his daughter, now the ruling Queen of Castile, Joanna I of Castile, to pass a set of laws to protect the rights of the natives of the New World, which were to become the 1512 Laws of Burgos. In Burgos, on 27 December 1512, thirty-five laws were put into effect to secure the freedom of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and to enforce Indian Reductions rules governing conversions.
Summary
It declared that the Indians are free people; that they ought to be instructed in the Christian faith; that they might be ordered to work, but so that their working should not hinder their conversion, and should be such as they could endure; that they should have cottages and lands of their own, and time to work for themselves; that they should hold communication with the Christians; and that they should receive wages, not paid in money, but in clothes and furniture for their cottages.