Codified universal human rights

Isabel promoted women’s education.  She studied assiduously for her own education and ensured a good education was available to her daughters and to other women in Spain and the Americas.  She appointed women as professors in universities.  Beatrice Gallando (b.1475) studied Latin classics in Salamanca.  Isabel named her Professor of Latin for the Royal Court.  Isabel was certain of a woman’s capability and right to rule.   Before her death she gave firm instructions that if she should die before her husband, her daughter “the Princess has to come to take possession and governance of these kingdoms as proprietary señora, that they then will be hers, and that without her the Prince has no part, nor will he be received in any manner.”

The Catholic Kings opposed slavery.  After the Canary Islands had been discovered Isabel and Ferdinand gave orders that the Guanches, the inhabitants, should be treated like subjects of Castile.  This was the practice the Queen would apply, by means of her Will and Codicil, to the many millions of Indians of Spanish America.

Queen Isabel sent instructions to Ovando, the Governor of Hispanola, saying: “because we have been informed that some Christians of the islands, especially those of Hispaniola, have taken Indian’s women, daughters and things against their will, as soon as you arrive, you will give the order to return all that was unjustly taken, and you will enforce this on the pain of strict punishment, so that in the future, no one will dare to do such a thing.”

The first stone building the Spaniards constructed in the Americas was not a fortress, a church or a residence but a hospital which on the instructions of Queen Isabel of 29^th March 1503 was to be “where the poor will be received and cured, Christians as well as Indians.”  She decreed that “each town should be obliged to have a church, chaplain and hospital: the children should be educated in Christian faith: together with the church a house should be built to where the children can go twice a day, and where the chaplain not only teaches them to read and write, but also to make the sign of the cross and learn the Our Father, Hail Mary, the Creed and the Salve.”

On her deathbed Isabel’s dictated her Last Will and Codicil, saying: “…no consent nor place is given for the mistreatment of the Indian natives and inhabitants of said Indies and Mainland, already gotten and still to gain, to their persons or their possessions, but it is so ordered that they be well and justly treated and if they receive any grievance that it be remedied, and that it be provided for…”  Following this last will, in which she commanded, asked and implored pity for her new subjects, Isabel’s successors created the ‘Leyes de Indias’ (Laws of the Indies) an admirable corpus of legislation comprising some 6,000 laws which strongly underlined the dignity, rights and defence of American Indians.

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