While his name is controversial today, Christopher Columbus set off a migration and colonization unmatched in history. For better or for worse, he literally altered the course of human history. His achievements or his crimes can be argued and debated, but his importance in the role of history is virtually without equal. On October 12th, 1492 after a long and arduous voyage across an unknown ocean, his crew threatening to mutiny if he would not turn back to Spain, he landed with his three ships on an island in the Caribbean he named San Salvador, claiming the land for Spain and the Roman Catholic Church. Life would eventually change for millions of natives, as it would open up new opportunities to a crowded and feudal Europe. Love him or hate him, Christopher Columbus altered the course of human history, forever.
While I was visiting Yuma Arizona a few years ago my gracious hosts brought me to see the Castle Dome Mining Museum at the foot of the Kofa mountains in Arizona. This is a remote, arid and desolate place where Americans traveling west came to search for gold in the 19th century. On my return from the museum to Yuma, my hosts stopped by a place seemingly in the middle of nowhere to show me about a dozen randomly placed ditches. There was a simple marker that explained what the random ditches were and why they were there. I learned that these ditches were the remains of the attempts of Spanish Conquistadores digging for gold and silver, basing their knowledge on what they learned from the natives. This area, indeed the entire southwest of the United States, was once part of the huge and expansive Spanish empire which came into existence in the New World after the conquistador Hernan Cortes conquered the empire of the Aztecs in Mexico, beginning that campaign in 1519. The Spaniards were obsessed with gold and silver which they found in great quantities in Tenochtitlan, the great seat of the Aztec empire. Eventually they would set out north seeking precious metals as well as converts to their holy faith. All the lands they passed through they claimed, and these lands would become part of the Spanish empire, then would become part of an independent Mexico and then as history would have it, part of the USA. This is all part of the sweeping panorama of history.
While I was visiting Yuma Arizona a few years ago my gracious hosts brought me to see the Castle Dome Mining Museum at the foot of the Kofa mountains in Arizona. This is a remote, arid and desolate place where Americans traveling west came to search for gold in the 19th century. On my return from the museum to Yuma, my hosts stopped by a place seemingly in the middle of nowhere to show me about a dozen randomly placed ditches. There was a simple marker that explained what the random ditches were and why they were there. I learned that these ditches were the remains of the attempts of Spanish Conquistadores digging for gold and silver, basing their knowledge on what they learned from the natives. This area, indeed the entire southwest of the United States, was once part of the huge and expansive Spanish empire which came into existence in the New World after the conquistador Hernan Cortes conquered the empire of the Aztecs in Mexico, beginning that campaign in 1519. The Spaniards were obsessed with gold and silver which they found in great quantities in Tenochtitlan, the great seat of the Aztec empire. Eventually they would set out north seeking precious metals as well as converts to their holy faith. All the lands they passed through they claimed, and these lands would become part of the Spanish empire, then would become part of an independent Mexico and then as history would have it, part of the USA. This is all part of the sweeping panorama of history.
The Spanish Conquistadores (lit conquerors) saw themselves as doing God's work. They condoned their lust for precious metals and conquest by lining the pockets and coffers of Catholic Church officials as well as acting as agents for the propagation of the faith. Spain was on the rise in world power since the expulsion of the Muslim Moors in 1492, the completion of what became known of as the Reconquista which they interpreted as God's will and their destiny. They inherited and benefited from a one time great Islamic civilization that reached a zenith of culture and intellectualism in Andalusia in the early Middle Ages. After centuries of holy war and conflict resulting in the expulsion of Muslim power which dominated for nearly 700 years, Spain expelled those who refused to convert to Christianity along with the Andalusian Jews. Some scholars put the number of those expelled at three million. Catholic Spanish noble families banned together and united under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and the banner of the Christianity. Spain became the very sword and protector of the Catholic Church, willingly fighting against the enemies of that Church, whether that enemy was the Muslim North African Moors and the Ottoman Turks or the Protestant Germans who threatened to tear Europe apart with their heretical views inspired by Martin Luther, or the ever problematic French who vied with Spain for the role of defender of the faithful. Add to this political theater of contest and contempt the neighboring Portuguese, who protected their interests with a powerful navy that ruled the seas. Now, with the discovery of the New World Spain sought to expand their power, seeking Christ's 'great reward for those who struggle tirelessly in his name'.
Christopher Columbus discovered and claimed a new continent, known then as a New World, for Spain in October of 1492, the same year the last Muslim ruler was expelled from Granada. Overcrowding and the disastrous effects of the Black Death in Europe coupled with the desire for spices and goods which were cut off by the Muslim east caused many in Europe to consider seeking their destiny elsewhere now that the opportunity afforded itself after Columbus' discovery, and expeditions to the New World sounded inviting. This was no simple, natural migration from one valley to the next or a move by migrating peoples from one region into another as in the past, as no maps had been charted regarding the seas nor were there accounts of earlier travelers into this unfamiliar territory. Many of those intrepid individuals who signed up for the trips still believed that the world was flat and the danger of falling off the ends of the Earth a very real possibility, not to mention sea monsters who could swallow a ship and its crew whole. When they did arrive in the new lands they met natives who were unlike anyone they ever encountered before who were at a stage of technological development that was pre Bronze Age at best. These natives had no wheels or animals to pull any kind of carriage, nor did they domesticate livestock, save for a few birds such as the turkey. The Spaniards encountered strange fruits and foods as well as strange customs and religions which they saw as exotically pagan, polytheistic and evil. These natives told stories of gold reserves underground, and tales of kings who covered their bodies in liquid gold, then swam in sacred rivers to wash it off. Gold was decoration and adornment for the Native peoples, who lacked the notion of gold as legal tender just as they lacked the idea of personal property or lands belonging to any individual. To the Spanish migrant though, gold meant riches and an end to poverty or debt for himself and his family. Better yet, bringing one's family to the new settlements in this new land translated as power, independence, autonomy and freedom. Most came to see and to return, hopefully rich with whatever they could barter or plunder, but very soon they simply came, saw, and indeed they conquered.
The conquest of the New World, like most mass migrations in the past, was bloody, as the conquerors sought gold and mineral wealth, slaves and converts to the faith. An unfortunate aspect of the migration of Europeans was disease for which the Natives, cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years, had no immunity. They died in their hundreds of thousands, if not millions, weakening their ability to fight against the invaders. Just as the Cro Magnon men caused the extinction of the Neanderthals, the Natives succumbed to a cruel fate which nature brought upon them. A number did survive but many more survived as 'mestizos' having blended with the invaders, thus creating and becoming the progenitors of a new racial entity. Attempts to enslave the Natives failed either due to their refusal to do the actual work or from dying from disease. To remedy the situation, Africans were brought over to the New World to work the sugar and tobacco plantations. Spain and Portugal were firmly entrenched and in control of their new territories by the mid 1600's AD more or less. Their languages became the official languages of the empire and their religion Roman Catholicism was the only faith tolerated, though it took on a very different look from it's European counterpart due to the ability of dedicated individual friars and priests who spoke to the Natives in their own tongues and accommodated their ancient customs to become part of new rituals with Jesus Christos 'El Salvador' at the helm.
While the destruction of a civilization and a culture is a sad thing, a reality of human history, from the perspective of the historian it is an integral part of that panorama of history. We establish cultures, religions, political ideologies and standards, yet we know that as time progresses and as humanity learns new methods and sciences, we too must be willing to change with the times, as well as be willing to change our outlook. We attempt to make our world a better place for all based on the study of our past so as to implement a more beneficial and promising future. This is why the past must be maintained for the record, so we can be reminded of the wrongs committed but also the rights which individuals brought about responding to the negativity of the time. For example, while the official stance of the Catholic Church in its day sanctioned the conquest and addition of the Americas to the 'realm of Christ' and supported the slavery of Africans, individual priests and members of such orders as the Jesuits and the Franciscans, at first instrumental in converting the Native masses, inspired by their spirituality and devotion while living now in a new continent thousands of miles from Europe spoke up against the poor treatment of the newly conquered and converted people, and even founded communities in the jungles and mountains of Central and South America that were for their time progressively advanced social experiments. The priest Bartolomeo De Los Casas, inspired by the honesty and integrity of the Native Americans thought of these people as living in close proximity to God since he found them honest and charitable, thus coining the name 'Indios' or living in dios or dwelling within the very heart of God. He wrote to the Pope and complained about the harsh treatment they were being afforded by the Church's representatives, and also commented on the evil institution of slavery. Thus he strived to make the lives of the Natives better. Individual clergy took the matters of the Natives upon themselves and made their welfare priority for a missionary. Communities created in the mountains of the Andes astonished envoys from Rome who could not believe the calm, the cleanliness and virtual utopian order they saw when visiting these outposts. While the politicized Church of the time felt the need to support the power and greed of the Spanish or Portuguese crowns, these individual clergy stood on their own and actually liberated their communities from what they interpreted as hypocritical Christianity and religious imperialism. They blended European Catholic and Native beliefs and rituals, reciting mass in Native languages, composing native styled hymns set to Native musical forms and accompanied by instruments. Needless to say, a number of these missions were seen as revolutionary and dangerous, and eventually exterminated by soldiers of the crowns since they were thought to be too independent, annoyingly standing in the way of greedy designs. Down to our own time, individual priests and nuns of various Catholic orders have stood up for the rights of the common folk, sometimes paying for resistance to tyranny and dedication to their understanding of Christ and the truth by forfeiting their very lives. One Manuel Hidalgo y Costilla, a priest who became known as the father of Mexican independence organized a revolution against Spain in 1810. He was hunted down and arrested, excommunicated from the Church and executed. One need not go further than to examine the life of the renown Bishop Romero in San Salvador, a man who truly loved his congregation and his people. Assassinated in 1980 for his commitment to justice and equality in his country, his story is but one of many that still unfold to this day.
In our current time we are witnessing a largely negative approach amid popular sentiment towards the subjugation and transformation of the Americas by Europeans. There has been regular destruction of statues, memorials and other emblems of Western culture and civilization in the Americas which includes the removing of books and artwork in school libraries and museums. Many of the self proclaimed spokes persons for the disenfranchised define history as black and white, demanding due justice for the conquest and subjugation of Native ethnicities and the destruction of their cultures. They claim that these series of conquests by the Spaniards and other European colonialist nations has brought about no improvements or betterments chances and improvement in all these centuries, yet these critics could not be further from the truth. The fact remains that many improvements have been made over the centuries, especially in North America where the Anglo-American government, steeped in its tradition of rebellion against monarchy, created laws and rights that were a first in human history. The critics however lump all Western accomplishments and ills into one great box and they want to throw this great box down into the ravine of no return. This would be an academic catastrophe of tremendous and irreversible proportions. The human experience in what we call history teaches us that there are positives and negatives to any event in every time period, such as an invasion or a conquest that alters life in a grand manner, anywhere on the planet. The migration of Europeans to the New World was catastrophic for the Natives but it happened, based on the norms, mores and human needs, desires and requirements of the time. The fact remains that there were individuals who sought to make it all better though much was sadly already destroyed. Why we choose to ignore such people because they don't fit into a codified narrative based on resentment is beyond me. Rather, the critics who claim to be revolutionaries and anti fascists prefer to lump the entire spectrum of historical experience into one pile and tear down statues representative of general Western culture, because Western culture 'offends' them. By this logic, the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the 1400 year old Buddha statues in Bamiyan province because the statues offended them. The conservative Hindutva Party in India wants to tear down the Taj Mahal because the tomb, built by one of India's former imperialist Muslim Moghul rulers, offends them. Turkey's Prime Minster Erdogan has been able to change the status of a UNESCO world heritage site- Hagia Sophia was an Orthodox Church until Constantinople was captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 after which this largest church in the medieval Christian world was converted into a mosque. When Turkey became a republic in the early 1920's the mosque was designated in the 30's as a museum, acknowledging the historical significance of the building in various historic periods. The icon paintings and mosaics on the ceiling and the walls, whitewashed and covered up after the forced conversion by the Muslim Ottomans into a mosque, were uncovered for all to see and marvel at their former glory and beauty. But Prime Minster Erdogan returned the building to its use as a place of prayer for Muslims, gathering the praise of both fanatics and frustrated live-in-the-past Islamists, as well as succeeding in insulting millions of eastern Orthodox Christians as well as spitting in the faces of historians, intellectuals and lovers of the human story. Such a move is a divisive turn, not a move to create a symbiotic relationship among groups of people. In one fell swoop Erdogan extinguished pertinent history, yet unlike the dedicated Catholic priests and nuns who struggled for the Native and commoners, hasn't brought about positive social change for the people of his country quite like they did.
When I stood at those great ditches in Arizona, I stilled myself for a moment or two and tried to feel the events that took place there five centuries earlier. I pictured in my mind the conquistadors, some on their horses, giving orders to their men and to the Native Indians who were forced to dig and look for the gold. In my mind's eye I saw the banners of the Spanish empire, the symbols of the house of Castile and Aragon fluttering in the dry wind, as well as golden or silver crosses held aloft and the woven flags that were carried depicting the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, or San Diego, the patron saint of Espana, these relics and artifacts carefully and jealously guarded by friars and priests who also came along on the expedition with Bibles under their arms so as to convert the heathen, grim faced and fiery eyed as they became after preaching sermons of holy war to retake Spain back from the Muslim Moors or counter the forces of the growing Protestant Reformation back in Europe. The Spanish nobility was seeking gold,, the common soldiers were seeking their destiny, a new life in a new world, while the priests were seeking souls for the glory of God and his church. What a vision, from another time and age, as the people who arrived here were representatives of what was perhaps the most powerful entity on the planet. None of them were immortal, none were perfect and certainly a great many people suffered on their account in their pursuit of gold and souls. But they were were here and they stayed, affecting and altering history forever. They are gone now and we know now that it is wrong to imitate or replicate their ways.
Rather than destroy their memory or cause them to disappear, we can actually learn from these intrepid people, and the people they affected. Think of it; they came from across an unknown ocean, sailing in rather small ships to a land they knew nothing of previously. They faced adversities yet conquered all before them. Then, from their base in central Mexico they set out north into yet more unfamiliar territory exploring the land, its fauna and learning about the Native peoples. Yes, they were seeking for selfish reasons but they did this, and eventually they would build new cities and plant grape vines in fertile valleys. Cattlemen would level the arid land and plant imported grasses so as to allow cattle to graze, only to see their grass dry up after a few decades in the arid southwestern soil, thus being forced to learn humility from an expansive and unforgiving terrain. This was their experience, and their experiences are recorded for all time for us, the hearers of their tales. If for nothing else, we must all agree that these Spaniards were intrepid and daring individuals, among the most daring men whom ever lived. The reasons that caused them to be so intrepid and daring- overcrowded cities, the effects of the plague, incessant wars and strife, starvation and poor harvests...are worth the effort to further study. Humanity migrates en masse for various reasons and have done so throughout history. For this reason if for no other, their memory must be preserved as part of our story. Their story is also ours, as we all are the heirs of yesteryear.
Christopher Columbus changed the course of human history, regardless of what we think of him. We cannot go back in time to turn realities around. Human beings migrate for a multitude of reasons. In any mass migration there will be conflicts with the native population the migrants come into contact with. Just as the Spaniards came into conflict with the native populations, so too these native populations came into conflict with the migrating Aztecs or other Native ethnic groups who lived in the continent long before the coming of the Europeans. The Aztecs, once a migratory tribe of little significance, boasted of the nations they annihilated or subjected to their rule. The emperor Monteczuma was a cruel tyrant, but his story needs to be preserved for history. Mass sacrificial rituals, one example though perhaps exaggerated, was said to include some 80,000 victims. Ritual sacrifice was terrible aspect of Aztec culture. The invaders did put an end to this practice, even though these same invaders annihilated millions through the use of the sword and especially through disease. The world changed for the Natives, for better or for worse, but change it did. We need to know what happened so as to study human nature. Canceling history cancels any chance for understanding who and what we are. All stories must be preserved and told.
Christopher Columbus changed the course of human history, regardless of what we think of him. We cannot go back in time to turn realities around. Human beings migrate for a multitude of reasons. In any mass migration there will be conflicts with the native population the migrants come into contact with. Just as the Spaniards came into conflict with the native populations, so too these native populations came into conflict with the migrating Aztecs or other Native ethnic groups who lived in the continent long before the coming of the Europeans. The Aztecs, once a migratory tribe of little significance, boasted of the nations they annihilated or subjected to their rule. The emperor Monteczuma was a cruel tyrant, but his story needs to be preserved for history. Mass sacrificial rituals, one example though perhaps exaggerated, was said to include some 80,000 victims. Ritual sacrifice was terrible aspect of Aztec culture. The invaders did put an end to this practice, even though these same invaders annihilated millions through the use of the sword and especially through disease. The world changed for the Natives, for better or for worse, but change it did. We need to know what happened so as to study human nature. Canceling history cancels any chance for understanding who and what we are. All stories must be preserved and told.
I have always been interested in history. When I was very young, around seven years of age, I started my love affair with history through the medium of television. A film, Captain From Castile starring Tyrone Power, Jean Peters and Caesar Romero was being broadcast on TV. The film, from a Eurocentric perspective no doubt, told the story of one such Spanish captain (Tyrone Power) who joins Hernan Cortes (Caesar Romero) on his expedition to Mexico. All the characters of any great story are there; the good people and the evil ones, the charitable and the greedy, the seekers of immortality and those escaping some dark secret past, as well as priests both compassionate and fanatical as per the thinking of the era. The ending of the film was quite exciting. The entourage of adventure seekers from Spain, along with their new native Tlaxcalan allies march off to seek their destiny. With a rousing blare of war trumpets and the roll of drums Cortes orders his men forward, in this film to the music of composer Alfred Newman and his stirring composition 'Conquest', concluding with a view of the fabled city of Tenochtitlan, the goal of the Conquistadores, in the distance. Whatever these men were in real life, and I have already enumerated their many faults, we cannot argue with the fact that they were daring, intrepid and brave. They are gone now, but they have contributed to our history by being as daring and fearless as they were in their day. They need not be overly glorified for their successes which displaced and oppressed their subjects, or criticized for their failures as human beings but their memory should be preserved for who they were and their indomitable human spirit despite their many faults and trespasses. They were and remain part of the panoramic sweep of history. We may also wish to mention an interesting Native woman character in this saga named Malitzen, who has come down to us in Mexican popular culture to be known as La Malinche, the bad one, often defined as a traitor to her people for assisting Cortes in his exploits. She was a Nahua slave of the Aztec emperor Monteczuma whom she personally despised. She escaped from his bondage and when the Spaniards arrived she saw a chance for liberation by arranging a meeting with the party of Hernan Cortes, for whom she would eventually serve as his interpreter, conveying his words from Spanish to Nahuatl. Whatever we might think of Malitzen, she was a human being with a story of her own and certainly was a strong, independent and powerful personality. Would it be wise to cancel her memory just because she doesn't fit into our narrative? The story of this amazing woman deserves to be told, recounted and passed on.
Enjoy the stirring music and the ending scene from the film that inspired me to become the seeker of history that I am, the classic 1947 film Captain From Castile. This final scene truly captures the spirit of the age- the heart and soul of the Conquistadores, those intrepid and daring seekers after gold and souls, fame and fortune, many escaping some undesirable past they wanted to forget. The stirring, accompanying music for this scene was written by composer Alfred Newman and appropriately entitled 'Conquest'. This is the beginning of the story of the opening of a New World.
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Copyright 2022, Ismail Butera
