There are few people in history who have been as dynamic, impassioned, or active as Bartolomé de las Casas, who would go on to become Bishop of Chiapas, Mexico. He petitioned kings, governors, and popes. He argued with Renaissance scholars, spoke with Indigenous resistance fighters in the mountains, inspired young friars to join his work in the Americas, and endlessly enraged conquistadors. Abandoning his wealth, he took the poor habit of a Dominican friar and steeped himself in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and the scriptures.

He was not an easy man. Prone to exaggeration, he often inflated the numbers of Indigenous killed by the Spaniards. His outrage boiled over in an endless stream of polemics, but also found its way into his anthropological works, histories of the Spanish in the Americas, philosophical arguments, and guides for confessors. He crisscrossed the Atlantic multiple times, traveled to Mexico City, Cuba, and Hispaniola, and attempted to start a cooperative community for Spanish and Indigenous farmers in Venezuela. Kings wrote laws inspired by his writing, and the pope issued decrees based on his ideas.

A slaveholding colonizer becomes a defender of the Indigenous.