![]() Within a hundred years, the Indigenous population of the Americas, thought to have numbered around sixty million in 1492, had fallen, through disease and hardship, to about four million.Įarly last month, when President Biden proclaimed in two written statements that the national holiday that has been celebrated, since the nineteen-thirties, in October as Columbus Day would also be commemorated as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, he noted the “devastation” that the European arrival on American shores had wreaked. Within fifty years of Columbus’s arrival, the aboriginal Taíno people, who lived on islands throughout the Caribbean and in Florida, were nearly wiped out. The native peoples of the Americas did not fare so well. In the end, however, he was freed, and his wealth was restored. Such methods earned him notoriety even among his fellow-conquistadors, and, for a time, he was stripped of his titles and properties, and was placed under arrest by the Spanish Crown. His preferred punishment for those who did not comply was, apparently, live dismemberment. These voyages were world-changing they helped spark the Age of Discovery and European settlement in the New World, and, with it, European colonialism.Ĭolumbus began enslaving the Indigenous peoples he encountered, forcing them to mine gold. As he later wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella, “I discovered many islands, thickly peopled, of which I took possession without resistance in the name of our most illustrious Monarch, by public proclamation and with unfurled banners.” In all, Columbus completed four transatlantic voyages, making landfall on Cuba, Hispaniola-home to present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic-Trinidad, the Lesser Antilles, Jamaica, and the coastline of what is now Honduras and Nicaragua, among other places. He set sail in August and, two months later, reached one of the Bahamian islands, which he duly claimed for Spain. He was to find a sea route to the Indies, conquer new lands for Spain, convert their peoples to Christianity-by force, if necessary-and bring back any riches he found. In April, 1492, buoyed by the seizure of Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to sponsor the Italian freebooter Christopher Columbus on his initial expedition across the Atlantic. Aided by the terror of the Spanish Inquisition, which Ferdinand and Isabella decreed as holy writ throughout their expanding kingdom, the reconquista led to the enforced conversion or expulsion of the Moors-Muslims-and the Jews, but most immediately it paved the way for the European discovery of the New World. ![]() It was the last Moorish redoubt in Spain to fall, after an occupation that had lasted eight hundred years, and its capture the culmination of what Spaniards refer to as la reconquista of the country. The catalyst for Spain’s shining moment was the seizure, in January, 1492, of the Andalusian city of Granada by forces fighting for the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. But the lawyer’s reaction revealed a deeper, enduring nationalistic pride in the era when Spain was a world power: before the United States took the last vestiges of its empire, after its humiliating defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898 before it lost its Latin American colonies in the national liberation revolts of the nineteenth century and before its Armada was crushed by the British, in 1588. At the time, although two decades had passed since the death of Francisco Franco, many Spaniards were still in denial about the horrors of the Civil War and the decades of Fascism that followed it. Still, his anger served as a reminder of how much of Spain’s national historiography remained unchallenged. ![]() I managed to mutter something apparently amelioratory enough for him to agree to sign the papers. Then, I asked, using the terminology common to Latin America, had his ancestors been involved in la Conquista, the Conquest of the Americas? He eyed me coldly, and said, “ Eso no fue una conquista, sino una liberación”-“That was not a conquest but a liberation.” So, in an effort to warm him up, I remarked admiringly on the furnishings, which, he proudly informed me, were family heirlooms. A sympathetic clerk had warned me that, if the lawyer did not like me, my paperwork would not move forward. He was a silver-haired man with an imperious bearing, and his office was equally intimidating, filled with antique mahogany furniture, intricately embossed with caravels, suggesting an Age of Discovery vintage. To finalize matters, I needed the signed approval of a licensed abogado, a lawyer, who, in this case, turned out to be a local grandee. ![]() In the mid-nineteen-nineties, I had to do some legal paperwork regarding an inherited property in Almuñécar, a city in Andalusia, Spain. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |