Mijin
November 29, 2023, 3:06pm
212
Firstly, no-one has limited this to empires except you. You’ve limited it to empires because conveniently it means we don’t need to compare Columbus to the Arawaks who he was butchering.
Secondly, no, it’s at least debatable whether Columbus was particularly evil, even by the standards of the time:
The enslavement of conquered peoples was nothing unusual in the Old World, regardless of who those people were or even the color of their skin. Even so, under most conventions of Columbus’s time, religious conversion was seen as an alternative for conquered peoples. Notably, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Spanish monarchs who dispatched Columbus to the New World, specifically instructed him to “abstain from doing” harm to the natives he encountered.
Columbus did not heed this command. Instead, he established a proto-encomienda system rife with forced labor and rape. Whereas many other European explorers tried to work with natives or focused on converting them to Catholicism, Columbus immediately planned how he’d make the native Taino people “good servants” when he first encountered them in 1492. He made thousands of them servants, mutilating slaves and either gifting or selling women and girls into sexual slavery. The rumors of Columbus’s offenses against the natives, including torture, were so obscene that Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Francisco de Bobadilla to investigate his behavior in Hispanola.
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