[AlotOfReading]

The dude took slaves, instituted a brutal gold quota, hung the corpses of resistors to rot, and other cartoonishly evil things. He was such a piece of work even by Spanish colonial standards that he was hauled back to Spain and stripped of his governorship.

He was very, very far from a nice person.

[tirant]

Even by Spanish colonial standards? Those colonial standards were not at all low, they were more advanced than any of their equivalent European counterparts. Any native people were considered children of god, due to their Catholic view, and us such viewed as free people. And those were the first laws proposed already in 1513 in Burgos. More advanced laws came some decades later by Bartolomé de las Casas.

In reality the settlers were not supervised and the laws were not always followed, but they were expected by the Government back in European Spain.

[AlotOfReading]

That's whitewashing the realities, but in any case the comparison was with modern sensibilities rather than early modern Europeans'.

[huuhee3]

There is some dispute on whether all those accusations were true, or politically motivated slander. Sure he did evil things by our standards, but there's no certainty whether he was that much worse than other rulers of that time. Taking slaves and hanging people alone isn't that special for the era.

[AlotOfReading]

The things I've listed are the uncontroversial ones. He presented said slaves to the king and Queen. His own son wrote a biography lionizing his father and talking about the gold quota. We have the court records of his governorship being stripped for brutality.