#this short story takes place in Italy in 1542

[austin-friars]

Short Story Snippet - Of Natural Sin

A conversation in 1542, between a soon to be married woman, and her friend and priest - who is gay and a bastard.

[everythingtimeless]

So the wounded knee massacre was Columbus’ fault?

Columbus wanted to prove that the earth was round and not flat as was believed at that time, so he planned to sail to india but he needed the necessary funds to get there. For years he applied to spain, portugal, france and england only to be turned down each time. Until in 1492 spain agreed to fund his expedition. He was an explorer, not a mass murderer. Don’t blame him for the for what the conquistadors and the english and not to mention the amerian white people did to the indigenous folk!!

Welp.

Well, you came here, my friend, so we’re gonna have to have a little talk.

First of all: no. The world was not believed to be flat at the time, and had not been for a while. It was believed to be smaller than it was, and the “mappa mundi” had placed Jerusalem at the center of the world and comprised parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe, which were all that they were aware of. The ideas of “terra australis” and “terra incognita,” while they became more developed in the 15th and 16th centuries, were not unknown to them – i.e. undiscovered southern land, or somewhere beyond the bounds of the known. The ancient Greeks were well aware that the earth was spherical, and in remote eighth-century Northumbria, the Venerable Bede, writing his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, is likewise well informed of astronomical details:

Because Britain lies almost under the North Pole, it has short nights in summer, so often at midnight it is hard for those to say whether evening twilight which still lingers, or morning dawn has come, since the sun at night returns to the east through the regions to the north without passing far below the horizon. For this reason the summer days are extremely long. On the other hand the winter nights are of great length, namely eighteen hours, doubtless because the sun has then departed to the region of Africa. In summer too the nights are extremely short; so are the days in winter, each consisting of six standard equinoctial hours, while in Armenia, Macedonia, Italy, and other countries in the same latitude the longest day or night consists of fifteen hours and the shortest of nine (p. 10).

Meanwhile, Portolan charts had first appeared in about the end of the thirteenth century, the first maps expressly intended for use in navigation, and were so accurate that they were considered a state secret for seafaring nations. This was before the Mercator projection, which appeared in 1569 – so yes, don’t come at me (a medievalist) and inform me that the Dark Ages People thought the world was flat and Columbus had to enlighten them and somehow had to valiantly Prove this to a bunch of backwards hicks. You are incorrect. Let us move on.

Next: … I’m sorry, there’s no other way to say this, but Columbus was both an explorer AND a mass murderer. The two are not incompatible. Let’s start with a primary source: the sixteenth-century Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas’ Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, or A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, or Mirror of the Cruel and Horrible Spanish Tyranny Perpetrated in the Netherlands [New World], by the Tyrant, the Duke of Alba, and Other Commanders of King Philip II. There are problems with Las Casas’ work, not least because he advocates enslaving blacks in place of Indians and because he believes the Indians are worthy of saving because they’re not Muslims, but he sailed to Hispaniola in 1502 and was an eyewitness to the ruthless colonial regime that Columbus had installed there as the first provincial governor. He wasn’t writing in the first instance about Spanish conquistadors following Columbus’ example; he was writing about the man himself.

Even the historian SamuelEliot Morison, writing an admiring biography of Columbus in 1942, could not entirelygloss over the details. Morison admits, “Everynative of fourteen years of age or upward who submitted (as the onlyalternative to being killed) was required to furnish every three months aFlanders hawk’s bell full of gold dust […] the system was irrational, mostburdensome, impossible, intolerable, says Las Casas.” (p. 491.) In 1955, Morison rephrased that estimate more strongly: “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.” Indians who could not meet gold quota had their hands cut off and were left to bleed to death. Brevísima relación exposes an extensive and unrepentant system of torture, murder, andmutilation employed against the native peoples by the Spanish invaders, and spearheaded by Columbus himself. All in all, thehistorically responsible estimates for the death toll during Columbus’ rule arriveat a figure of at least seven and a half million Indians. The number could wellbe much higher. (It has been subject to a sustained project of “recounting” and “revision” precisely because the reinvention of Columbus as a mythical American hero did not sit quite easily with the idea that he was a mass murderer). 

So apparently, we shouldn’t blame Columbus for… the entire system he started and participated in at every opportunity? Between 1496 and 1500, the Taino population dropped from eight million to about three million (in! four! years! – see pp. 44-47) under Columbus’ rule. Las Casas, writingBrevísima relación in 1542, forwarded an estimate of at least twentymillion Indian deaths already. When the Spanish were challenged for relying solely on the religious andcanonical law of the Alexandrine papal bulls (which we discussed in the 1x11 post) to justify their political conquests andabuses, King Ferdinand appointed a pair of legal scholars to draft the Requierimiento, the document that laidout a so-called secular strategy for the justification and accomplishment ofthe colonial process. In this, nothing was changed but the varnish over thereligious rhetoric. Moreover, while this theoretically made it necessary for the Indians to consentto being dominated and enslaved by the Spaniards, it was the epitome of legalfiction. Not only was the proclamation read in an alien foreign language oftenfar away from actual Indians, any sign of resistance justified “[taking] you,your wives, and your children, and [making] slaves of them […] and we shalltake away your goods and shall do to you all the harm and damage that we can.” In addition, in a sad moment of the kind of linguistic games familiar toimperial projects everywhere, in 1573 the Spaniards outlawed the word“conquest” altogether as a description of what they were doing, and orderedthat it be replaced with “pacification” instead. (p.218)

In addition, Columbus faced censure and concern in his own day for the tyranny of his regime, was recalled back to Spain as a result, and a document unearthed from the Spanish archives in 2006 confirmed him as “a greedy and vindictive tyrant who saved some of his most violent punishments for his own followers.” It was written by Francisco de Bobadilla, his successor as governor of the Indies, and contained the testimony of 23 eyewitnesses against the cruelties instituted by Columbus and his brothers. Oh, and he started the transatlantic slave trade by sending mass numbers of Indian captives back to Spain.

Long story short: Christopher Columbus was a monster, and we have learned a history that taught us otherwise for a sustained and extensive justification of a profoundly colonialist and imperialist framework that has ignored, overlooked, and whitewashed the deaths of Native people for centuries. He directly started the policy of Spanish genocide (side note: is anyone observing the violence of the Catalan referendum and actually being surprised that Spain The Original Colonial Power is doing this? Because I’m not), exploitation, extortion, slavery, and sadism that was replicated by his successors, by the English settlers in North America, and then by the independent American government throughout the 18th and then 19th centuries in particular. So yes.

Thank you, and have a good day.