The Native American Holocaust
Sex, Race and Holy War - 2

The Native American Holocaust - Sex, Race and Holy War - 2

On the level of everyday life, we saw in an earlier chapter the atrocious conditions under which most of the peoples of Europe were forced to live as the late Middle Ages crept forward. It was only a hundred years before Columbus's mid-fifteenth-century birth that the Black Death had shattered European society along with enormous masses of its population. Within short order millions had died-about one out of every three people across the entirety of Europe was killed by the pandemic-and recovery was achieved only with excruciating slowness. "Those few discreet folk who remained alive," recalled the Florentine historian Matteo Villani, "expected many things":

They believed that those whom God's grace had saved from death, having beheld the destruction of their neighbours . . . would become better conditioned, humble, virtuous and Catholic; that they would guard themselves from iniquity and sin and would be full of love and charity towards one another. But no sooner had the plague ceased than we saw the contrary . . . [People] gave themselves up to a more shameful and disordered life than they had led before.... Men thought that, by reason of the fewness of mankind, there should be abundance of all produce of the land; yet, on the contrary, by reason of men's ingratitude, everything came to unwonted scarcity and remained long thus; nay, in certain countries . . . there were grievous and unwonted famines. Again, men dreamed of wealth and abundance in garments . . . yet, in fact, things turned out widely different, for most commodities were more costly, by twice or more, than before the plague And the price of labour and the work of all trades and crafts, rose in disorderly fashion beyond the double. Lawsuits and disputes and quarrels and riots rose elsewhere among citizens in every land.

Modern historical analysis has, in general terms, confirmed Villani's description, with one important difference: it was far too sanguine. For example, although wages did increase in the century immediately following the explosion of the plague in the middle of the fourteenth century, after that time they spiraled drastically downward. The real wages of a typical English carpenter serve as a vivid point of illustration: between 13S0 and 1450 his pay increased by about 64 percent; then his wages started falling precipitously throughout the entirety of the next two centuries, at last bottoming out at approximately half of what they had been at the outbreak of the plague in 1348, fully three centuries earlier. Meanwhile, during this same period, prices of foodstuffs and other commodities were soaring upward at an equivalent rate and more, ultimately achieving a 500 percent overall increase during the sixteenth century.

The combination of simultaneously collapsing wages and escalating prices in an already devastated social environment was bad enough for an English carpenter, but English carpenters were by no means poorly off compared with other laborers in Europe-and other laborers were positively well off compared with the starving multitudes who had no work at all. At the same time that the Black Death was wiping out a third of Europe's population, and bouts of famine were destroying many thousands more with each incident, the Hundred Years War was raging; it began in 1337 and did not end until 1453. And while the war was on, marauding bands of discharged soldiers turned brigands and highwaymen-aptly named ecorcheurs or "flayers"-were raping and pillaging the countryside. Finally, the requirements of a war economy forced governments to increase taxes. Immanuel Wallerstein explains how it all added up:

The taxes, coming on top of already heavy feudal dues, were too much for the producers, creating a liquidity crisis which in turn led to a return to indirect taxes and taxes in kind. Thus started a downward cycle: The fiscal burden led to a reduction in consumption which led to a reduction in production and money circulation which increased further the liquidity difficulties which led to royal borrowing and eventually the insolvency of the limited royal treasuries, which in turn created a credit crisis, leading to hoarding of bullion, which in turn upset the pattern of international trade. A rapid rise in prices occurred, further reducing the margin of subsistence, and this began to take its toll in population.

In sum, all the while that the popes and other elites were indulging themselves in profligacy and decadence, the basic political and economic frameworks of Europe--to say nothing of the entire social order--were in a state of near collapse. Certain states, of course, were worse off than others, and there are various ways in which such comparative misery can be assayed. One measure that we shall soon see has particular relevance for what happened in the aftermath of Columbus's voyages to the New World ~s the balance and nature of intra-European trade. In England and northwestern Europe generally legislative and other efforts during this time

Discouraged the export of raw materials such as wool in the case of England and encouraged the export of manufactured goods. Thus, by the close of the fifteenth century Britain was exporting 50,000 bolts of cloth annually rising to more than two and a half times that figure within the next five decades. Spain and Portugal at the same time remained exporters of raw materials (wool, iron ore, salt oil and other items) and importers of textiles hardwares and other manufactured products. The Iberian nations with their backward and inflexible economic systems were rapidly becoming economic dependencies of the expanding-if themselves still impoverished-early capitalist states of northwest Europe.

This then was the Old World on the eve of Columbus's departure in 1492. For almost half a millennium Christians had been launching hideously destructive holy wars and massive enslavement campaigns against external enemies they viewed as carnal demons and described as infidels- all in an effort to recapture the Holy Land and all of which, it now seemed to many, effectively had come to naught. During those same long centuries they had further expressed their ruthless intolerance of all persons and thugs that were non-Christian by conducting pogroms against the Jews who lived among them and whom they regarded as the embodiment of the Antichrist imposing torture exile and mass destruction on those who refused to succumb to evangelical persuasion. These great efforts too, appeared to have largely failed. Hundreds of thousands of openly practicing Jews remained in the Europeans' midst, and even those who had converted were suspected of being the Devil's agents and spies treacherously boring from within them.

Dominated by a theocratic culture and world view that for a thousand years and more had been obsessed with things sensual and sexual, and had demonstrated its obsession in the only way its priesthood permitted-by intense and violent sensual and sexual repression and "purification"-the religious mood of Christendom's people at this moment was near the boiling point. At its head the Church was mired in corruption, while the ranks below were disappointed and increasingly disillusioned. These are the sorts of conditions that, given the proper spark lend themselves to what anthropologists and historians describe as "millenarian" rebellion and upheaval or revitalization movements." In point of fact this historical moment seen m retrospect, was the inception of the Reformation which means that it truly was nothing less than the eve of a massive revolution. And when finally that revolution did explode, Catholic would kill Protestant and Protestant would kill Catholic with the same zeal and ferocity that their common Christian ancestors had reserved for Muslims and Jews.

"Don't let them live any longer the evil-doers who turn us away from God " the Protestant radical Thomas Muntzer soon would be crying to his followers. "For a godless man"--he was referring to Catholics--has no right to live if he hinders the godly.... The sword is necessary to exterminate them.... If they resist, let them be slaughtered without mercy.
And, again and again, that is precisely what happened: Catholics were indeed slaughtered without mercy. The Church, of course, was more than eager to return such compliments in deed as well as in word. Thus, for instance, Catholic vengeance against Calvinists in sixteenth-century France resulted in the killing of thousands. Infants were stabbed to death, women had their hands cut off to remove gold bracelets, publishers of heretical works were burned to death atop bonfires made from their books. The treatment of Gaspard de Coligny, a Protestant leader was not atypical after murdering him the Catholic mob mutilated his body, cutting off his head, his hands, and his genitals-and then dragged it through the streets, set fire to it and dumped it in the river.... [B]ut then deciding that it was not worthy of being food for the fish, they hauled it out again ... [and] dragged what was left of the body to the gallows of Montfaucon, 'to be meat and carrion for maggots and crows.' Such furious rage continued well into the seventeenth century, as, for example, in the Catholic sacking of the Protestant city of Magdeburg, when at least 30 000 Protestants were slain: "In a single church fifty-three women were found beheaded," reported Friedrich Schiller while elsewhere babies were stabbed and thrown into fires. "Horrible and revolting to humanity was the scene that presented itself," Schiller wrote, "the living crawling from under the dead, children wandering about with heart-rending cries, calling for their parents; and infants still sucking the breasts of their lifeless mothers.

And this was Christian against Christian. European against European. "Civilized" against "civilized." There were all Europeans knew "wild" races, carnal and un-Christian and uncivilized who lived in as yet unexplored lands on the far distant margins of the earth. Some of them were beasts, some of them were human, and some of them hovered in the darkness in between. One day--perhaps one day soon--they would be encountered and important decisions would then have to be made. If they possessed souls, if they were capable of understanding and embracing the holy faith, every effort would be made to convert them--just as every effort had always been made to convert Muslims and Jews. If they proved incapable of conversion, if they had no souls-if they were, that as children of the Devil-they would be slain. God demanded as much.

For this era in the history of Christian Europe appeared to many to be the threshold of the end of time. Three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse clearly were loose in the land: the rider on the red horse who is war, the rider on the black horse who is famine; and the rider on the pale horse, who is death. Only the rider on the white horse-who in most interpretations of the biblical allegory is Christ-had not yet made his presence known. And, although the signs were everywhere that the time of his return was not far off, it remained his godly children's responsibility to prepare the way for him.

Before Christ would return, all Christians knew, the gospel had to be spread throughout the entire world, and the entire world was not yet known. Spreading the gospel throughout the world meant acceptance of its message by all the world's people, once they had been located-and that in turn meant the total conversion or extermination of all non-Christians. It also meant the liberation of Zion, symbol of the Holy Land, and it likely meant the discovery of the earthly paradise as well.

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