The same year Columbus sailed to Hispaniola, Alexander Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, and after Columbus’s return in 1493 from Santo Domingo, the pope issued a series of edicts giving Spain possession of the new lands (including the Inter Caetera of 1493). These new edicts augmented the earlier papal edicts of 1452 (Dum Diversas) and 1454 (Romanus Pontifex) that granted rights to Portugal. The Inter Caetera asserted Spain’s dominion over “all lands to the west and south of a pole-to-pole line 100 leagues west and south of any of the islands of the Azores or the Cape Verde islands,” which amounted to nearly half of North and South America. Alexander then brokered the Treaty of Tordesilas between Spain and Portugal in 1494, which gave the greatest share of the newly “discovered” lands to these two leading maritime nations.12
At the time of the papal bulls of 1452, 1454, and 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesilas of 1494, neither Spain nor Portugal had traveled to the territories they claimed dominion over, although Columbus had reached the Caribbean in 1492. However, in 1500 Portugal’s claims to parts of South America were established when Portuguese Captain Pedro Álvares Cabral landed in Brazil. This explains why Portuguese is today the language of Brazil, while Spanish is spoken throughout the rest of South America, Central America, and Mexico.
While some in religious and academic quarters debate whether the church actually intended to grant Spain and Portugal the right to enslave others, the fact that the Inter Caetera granted dominion over cities, camps, places, and villages, and all corresponding “rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances” leaves little doubt.
Looking further into the collaboration between the papacy and the two slave-keeping cultures, Europe was slowly emerging from the Dark Ages, and one sees how the church had grown in power through treachery, shifting political alliances, and the wholesale slaughter of its opponents. Because of the Inquisition, books and heretics had been burned and most science that contradicted church dogma had been destroyed. After a thousand years of barbarity, including crusades against Muslims, the extermination of dissenting Christians, and the destruction of the Knights Templar, the church and the invading Europeans were well prepared for dealing with the natives they encountered in the Americas.
However, after Columbus’s arrival, as described in chapter 1, the conquest of Hispaniola did not result in the large amount of gold that he was seeking. The limited amount of gold jewelry worn by the natives and presented to Columbus was the result of years of accumulation, not of the large gold deposits or significant mining operations that the Spanish had hoped for. To remedy this, Columbus tried to bring slaves back to Europe, but that failed. His gruesome policies of punishing natives also failed because it eliminated most of their existence.
Fig. 16.2. Spanish atrocities in Hispaniola. The punishment for not providing Spanish conquistadors with the minimum gold tribute was the loss of hands, or worse. (Rendering by Flemish artist Theodor de Bry)
By 1542, from a population of at least one hundred thousand, there remained only two hundred Arawaks in Hispaniola, while the rest of the dead had been replaced by an abundant supply of black slaves from Africa.
MAJOR FACTORS IMPACTING THE CONQUEST
What are we to make of the ability of the Spanish and Portuguese, followed by the English, to conquer and decimate the peoples of the Americas within fifty years of 1492? It is evident that the American conquest can be attributed to major factors that already existed or came to exist in both the New and Old Worlds, which were fueled by the ruthless Christian zeal to plunder the Americas for gold and treasure. Let’s take a closer look at these factors.
1. Technology
The Europeans had transoceanic ships, domesticated horses, steel weapons, armor, and guns. Since they had spent centuries perfecting the means of forging iron and brass for use in battle, steel swords, armor, advanced crossbows, and guns, this gave the conquistadors the winning advantage. For example, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro was able to defeat King Atahuallpa’s Incan army of about eighty thousand men with only 106 foot soldiers and sixty-two men mounted on horses. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, a remarkable scientific investigation of the “fates of human societies,” geography professor Jared Diamond notes, “Atahuallpa’s troops, without animals on which to ride into battle, could oppose [the conquistadors] with only stone, bronze, or wooden clubs, maces, and hand axes, plus slingshots and quilted armor. Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples . . . the sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest of many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both horses and guns.”13
2. Political Conditions in the New and Old Worlds
In the sixteenth century, Spain was a small, poor, and financially dependent nation, but the expansionist policies that followed Columbus’s voyages were fueled with Aztec and Incan gold. There was an economic necessity that shaped the conquest, as noted by author David E. Stannard in his damning 1992 exposé, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World.
Just as social thought does not bloom in a political vacuum . . . neither do institutions come into being and sustain themselves without the inspiration of economic or political necessity. In sixteenth-century Spain, as we have seen that necessity was created by an impoverished and financially dependent small nation that made itself into an empire, an empire that engaged in ambitious wars of expansion (and vicious Inquisitorial repression of suspected non-believers within), but an empire with a huge and gaping hole in its treasury: no sooner were gold or silver deposited than they drained away to creditors. The only remedy for this, since control of expenditures did not fit with imperial visions, was to accelerate the appropriation of wealth. And this demanded the theft and mining of more and more New World gold and silver. . . .
As with Hispaniola, Tenochtitlan, Cuzco, and elsewhere, the Spaniards’ mammoth destruction of whole societies generally was a by-product of conquest and native enslavement, a genocidal means to an economic end, not an end in itself. And therein lies the central difference between the genocide committed by the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British America extermination was the primary goal, and it was so precisely because it made economic sense.14
Moreover, as outlined above, the church had become the centralized de facto government of Europe and was capable of bringing the monarchies together while providing a religious rational for conquest. Represented by the invading army of Christians, churchmen worked with the conquistadors to demand converts and their share of the loot.
On the other hand, the two largest and most centralized governments in the Americas—the Aztecs and the Incas—were, as mentioned, politically weak when the Spanish arrived. In Mexico, Cortés was able to secure cooperation and political support from the enemies of the Aztecs, who joined Cortés in his assaults on the Aztec capital. The Inca realm was also divided following the smallpox death of King Huayna Capac. Atahuallpa, the new king, was vulnerable following his victories over his half brother in a civil war, so Pizarro was able to exploit the situation just as Cortés had done with the Aztecs.15
The centralized political and social structures of the Incas and Aztecs also worked against them in their encounters with the Spanish. In both regions, the king was thought to have godlike qualities, and after the executions of Montezuma and Atahuallpa their subjects grew incredibly fearful so that many tribes could not overcome a sense that it was futile to resist the Spanish.
Underlying all these tragedies, there was a permissive philosophy of war and conquest imbued in the Europeans that empowered them to guiltlessly take advantage of naïve indigenous peoples. Montezuma greeted Cortés and then allowed himself to be kidnapped in his own court. Pizarro in Peru copied his predecessor’s tactic and captured Atahuallpa in a surprise attack, with the result that within a year, the greatest civilization in South America was reduced to a Spanish mining operation, with gold and silver heading back to
Europe to finance the wars of the Spanish king.
3. The Wholesale Burning of Books and Records
The Spanish conquistadors’ efforts to destroy the indigenous cultures were supplemented by massive burnings of the libraries of the Aztecs, Incas, and Maya that were conducted by the churchmen sent to the Americas with the mercenary armies. The first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumarraga, along with fellow religious fanatics, burned all the records found in Tlateloco in the main square, along with twenty thousand “idols” and numerous works of art. They also went on to destroy the five hundred temples that had housed these items.
The most infamous Spanish bishop, Fray Diego de Landa, followed Zumarraga’s lead and completely destroyed the Mayan libraries of the Yucatan in 1562. So thorough was the destruction that only three codices survived. Then, in 1566, Landa was to write his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (among different translations, “On the Things of Yucatan”). “We found a large number of their books of these letters, and because they did not have anything in which there was not superstition and falsehoods of the devil, we burned them all, which they felt very sorry for and which caused them grief.”16
Later, in Peru, the fanatical head of the Jesuit College, Pablo Jose de Arriaga (A.D. 1564–1622) was just as thorough as Landa in systematically destroying historical records, including the Incan imperial archives containing their history, philosophy, science, religion, and astronomy.
Thus, as a result of the church’s destructive religious zeal, some of the world’s great depositories of ancient writing were destroyed and lost forever. This simple approach became the church’s strategy for many decades, as the military and political arms of the church were encouraged to find and destroy manuscripts wherever and whenever they could find them.
4. Disease
It is often argued that the genocide was not intended but was actually an unintended consequence of the spread of disease. A similar argument is promoted by the church regarding the institution of slavery (i.e., that it was an unintended effect “of the times”). Another “unintended” consequence was the introduction and consequent mass deaths from the diseases the Spanish imported.
In the face of the whitewashed and Christianized version of the conquest, David Stannard insightfully writes,
From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives. Although at times operating independently, for most of the long centuries of devastation that followed 1492, disease and genocide were interdependent forces acting dynamically—whipsawing their victims between plague and violence, each one feeding upon the other, and together driving countless numbers of entire ancient societies to the brink—and often over the brink—of total extermination.17
Jared Diamond amplified these thoughts with a comment in Guns, Germs, and Steel. “The grimmest examples of germs’ role in history come from the European conquest of the Americas that began with Columbus’s voyage of 1492. Numerous as were the Native American victims of the murderous Spanish conquistadores, they were far outnumbered by the victims of murderous Spanish microbes.”18
Diamond also identified microbes from livestock and animals as another origin of the diseases that Europeans brought. Others researchers added insights, including Charles C. Mann, author of 1491:
Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in constant contact with many animals. They domesticated only the dog; the turkey (in Mesoamerica); and the llama, the alpaca, the Muscovy duck, and the guinea pig (in the Andes). In some ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in domesticated milk-giving animals. But this is guesswork. The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest.19
Diamond discusses the results in the Mississippi Valley. It was not so much the “little ice age,” a cooling of the north Atlantic region that began in the thirteenth century, that affected the peoples of that region, but the fact that “throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600s, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River.”20
5. Ruthlessness, Guile, and Greed
If there was a tradition among the conquistadors, it was the unscrupulous will and commitment to the mass murder of tens of thousands of human beings. This policy of genocide was born out of the events mentioned earlier: the centuries of wars against the Muslims, the extermination of the Cathars and the Knights Templar, and of course the many results of the Inquisition. Thus, it is no surprise that the primary triad of Spanish conquistadors, Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro, all exhibited an insatiable drive for conquest that was emboldened by a “divine” destiny that each considered his own. Their resilience, resourcefulness, and daring were driven by their ruthlessness and greed for gold and power.
The untold atrocities committed by the Spanish, Portuguese, and later the English struck fear into the native populations and served notice that cooperation and conversion to Christianity was a better course than opposing them. But as the native populace soon found out, being baptized Christian was no protection at all. In his essay “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?” Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and reformist, made this point when he remarked, “The [Catholic] Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out; by this means they secured that these infants went to heaven.”21
While the massacres and barbaric behavior of the conquerors and the scope of personal as well as cultural tragedies associated with the complete decimation of native populations were described in detail by Spanish chronicles in letters, diaries, and official reports, they are not generally known and are often ignored by the nations that now worship Columbus as a hero.
6. The Catholic Whitewash of History
In my travels I discovered how Catholic influence and the legacy of the Spanish conquest remains strong, particularly in New Mexico. Spanish-style churches, names of locations, and family traditions are commonplace. The people of Spanish ancestry often exhibit a sense of humility, respect, and friendliness not common to other areas of the country, so one might think that all of these unfortunate events that occurred in unenlightened, previous times are justified or unintended, as the Catholic Church has maintained regarding genocide, slavery, and disease. Such apologetics promote a simplified and falsified history that conceals and protects the guilty.
Perhaps hoping that salvation can follow a confession as it does for his flock, in a 2007 speech to the Brazilian people, Pope Benedict exposed the non–mea culpa rationale of the church’s rulers regarding the people it had conquered and enslaved in the Americas.
Christ is the Saviour for whom they were silently longing. It also meant that they received, in the waters of Baptism, the divine life that made them children of God by adoption; moreover, they received the Holy Spirit who came to make their cultures fruitful, purifying them and developing the numerous seeds that the incarnate Word had planted in them, thereby guiding them along the paths of the Gospel. In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture. . . .
The wisdom of the indigenous peoples fort
unately led them to form a synthesis between their cultures and the Christian faith, which the missionaries were offering them. Hence the rich and profound popular religiosity, in which we see the soul of the Latin American peoples. . . . All this forms the great mosaic of popular piety, which is the precious treasure of the Catholic Church in Latin America, and must be protected, promoted, and, when necessary, purified.22
AFTERMATH: THE IMPOSITION AND MAINTENANCE OF THE COLUMBUS MYTH
I began this chapter by asking, “What is being covered up?” The answer is not simply the unconscionable genocide of indigenous peoples. The real cover-up is the continuity of the forces, ideologies, and institutions that were operationally behind the conquest of the Americas, with the same agendas enacted today by corporations and governments that are driven by the same goals and purposes that dominated the Old History.
Through ideological reinforcement, a racist Christian ideology has been promoted among leading academic institutions to maintain the Columbus myth and the “manifest destiny” ideology. Gunnar Thompson has written that the Columbus myth is “the principle bastion of white racism in American academia.” He emphasized that
ethnocentric bias in anthropology and history has produced the worst kind of institutionalized racism: religious doctrine and bigotry have been cloaked in the presumed respectability of science. . . . This dogma has been advanced by major encyclopedias, history books, and movies. Museum curators and educators follow the Smithsonian lead in proclaiming Columbus responsible for introducing the Old World and the New World in a cathartic cultural event called “the Great Colombian Exchange.” Consequently, a brutal period of native genocide is concealed behind euphemistic slogans of manifest destiny.23
Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers Page 31
