Requerimiento

Questions for Further Study

• 1.: Read the Requerimiento in conjunction with Christopher Columbus’s Letter to Raphael Sanxis on the Discovery of America. What do the two documents, taken together, tell modern readers about Spanish attitudes to the people of the Caribbean?
• 2.: What role did the rivalry between Spain and Portugal play in events as they unfolded in the New World? How might the politics of the time differed in a way that would have enabled Portugal to become the ascendant power in the New World?
• 3.: The intended audience for the Requerimiento was unable to understand it, for it was written in Spanish, which the native peoples of the New World did not speak. Thus, the document itself had little direct impact. In what sense, then, can the impact of the document be regarded as profound and far reaching? Resolve this apparent paradox.
• 4.: Compare the Requerimiento with the Diplomatic Correspondence between Muhammad al-Kanami and Muhammad Bello (1810–1812). To what extent are the two documents similar in terms of religion, specifically the issue of one culture's imposing its religious beliefs on another? How are they fundamentally different?
• 5.: A widely noted truism in the twenty-first century is that colonization of the New World by the Spanish and by Europeans in general had a devastating impact on Amerindians. How fair do you think this charge is? Do you think that colonization, or at least invasion, of the New World was inevitable? To what extent was the clash between the Old World and the New World part of a pattern of cultural clashes that took place throughout history before the concept of the nation-state was formed?