October 6th, 2020 
Read the attached documents and answer the following questions:
1. In simple terms, what does this legal document say?
2. What problems or weaknesses of the Requerimiento does the author expose?
The first attachment is the text of the document that Indians were supposed to hear before Spaniards waged a war upon them. A team of Spanish legal scholars and theologians, headed by Juan Lopz Palacios Rubios, a member of the kings Royal Council, met in 1510 to draft it. Palacios Rubios also authored other tracts supporting the legitimacy of Spanish dominion over the Americas, but even he later noted the absurdity of the way this document was used.
The second attachment is a selection from a history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas written by Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo, who took part in an expedition to the Isthmus of Panama in 1514. Oviedo was personally acquainted with Christopher Columbus and many other famous explorers conquistadors. Although this passage cast the Spaniards in a critical light, elsewhere in his history Oviedo wrote much more favorably toward the conquest and denounced the indigenous people as cannibals and barbarians, so much so that Bartolom de las Casas disputed many parts of his account.
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