Except he wasn’t exceptionally bad. You’re repeating false statements without evidence.
I’ll note that the guy who wrote the scathing report about Columbus’s actions was also the guy sent to take Columbus’s prestigious position (after Columbus asked for an assistant due to medical issues). Call me a cynic but I’m a little skeptical that the report would be unbiased and without exaggeration.
This doesn’t swing me into some “Columbus was a fine chap” camp. There’s plenty of middle ground allowing Columbus to be a dick AND for the guy taking his governorship to try to impress the crown with how he’s a much better choice.
Selling (or giving to his men) children for sexual slavery is, in fact, “exceptionally bad”, even for the time. I’ve seen little to suggest that this was a widely condoned practice at the time.
I question that actually happened to a large degree as you’re stating it, and sexual abuse of children was extremely common in that era. The children who worked on ships for example were basically constantly sexually assaulted. Sexual abuse of slaves is intrinsic to slavery, and slavery was common before Columbus and common after him. The concept of children being particularly heinous targets of sexual abuse is a very modern philosophy, in the past it was considered common to use children for sexual gratification. Also remember, women were commonly expected to be married and sexually active at an age we’d consider “child” in 2015.
Aside from his boatload of men buying children for sex?
Leahcim probably had it best: He was worse than your average tapas vendor from Barcelona but not much worse than your average conquistador or adventurer hired to go get rich across the oceans.
Some of the conquistadors overthrew entire large Empires and killed thousands of people with their own soldiers, that at least on an “objective scale” is a lot worse than the small-scale stuff Columbus was involved in.
People just don’t seem to understand that “weaker peoples” were not believed to have rights at this time. While some Europeans would’ve objected to “institutionalized” abuse of a weaker Christian people, even that was kind of a farce. During the 30 Years War, which happened long after Columbus had died, atrocities of all kind were common place–and sometimes among allies. In one account an allied army crossing Prussian territory was responsible for mass-rapes, killings, and pillaging–and of a country they were allied with, because armies gonna rape and kill. When an enemy force came through it was far, far worse.
My simple point is humans are a brutal, nasty species. Only through great effort and achievement have we started to rise above that a tad bit. Five hundred years ago there’s no such thing as a good guy. We can either pick a date and say “everyone before then is a monster and should never be mentioned again” or we can argue that we put people in the context of their time.
Hitler stands out because his lifetime intersected with the era when a lot of that stuff became deeply unacceptable, and some of the specific aspects of his genocides (the factory-style death camps, for example) were technically unprecedented. But the general concepts of Hitler’s behavior would be fairly par for the course in the past, Hitler just had better technology to carry it out.
You raise some good points, but there have always been conscientious objectors. There were good guys, and they did judge people according to standards reasonably in line with our own modern notions of right and wrong. We know about a handful of prominent ones, but it stands to reason they weren’t the ones writing the books, and are therefore historically unrepresented. I’m not sure we can say that to judge Christopher Columbus is to judge everyone. Everyone was not down with this shit.
An imperfect parallel would be for history to judge our time by the actions of the people currently in power. The actions of many powerful entities of today are not in line with what the average person finds morally appropriate. But I highly doubt people 500 years from now will understand that.
There were plenty of Jesuit priests (and others) at the time (and the predecessors of the Jesuits, which began in 1540) who advocated for humane treatment of native peoples. Those were the good ones – maybe even the best at the time. But they weren’t some incredibly rare breed of human in the 15th and 16th centuries – lots of people agreed with them, most likely. We don’t have opinion polls of the time, so we have to estimate.
But if Columbus was just ‘in the middle’, or so, then who the hell was bad? How can you get worse than what Columbus did? It’s not reasonable to me that Columbus was at the top (meaning the largest cluster in the middle) of a bell curve of 15th century morality – if so, and the kind Jesuits/equivalent were at the ‘good’ end, who in gods name was at the ‘bad’ end, and what horrors were they doing?
Maybe Columbus was “in the middle” in terms of morality as far as New World explorers and conquistadors – but that places him in the company of monsters, it seems to me. It’s not reasonable to believe that most Europeans at the time were 100% okay with child rape and brutality to the point that they’d actually engage in it personally, as Columbus did.
Running the Inquisition?
Good answer!
The bad would’ve been those who violated the norms of their time/place. Henry VIII would be a good example, he frequently ignored a very long history of certain rights of Englishmen during his reign. He executed mass numbers of people (estimates are as high as 70,000) with virtually no real trials.
I don’t see much evidence that Christopher Columbus was violating the norms of his times. Citing the Jesuits as representative of cultural norms in the 15th/16th century is extremely inaccurate, the Jesuits for most of their history were wildly divergent in their beliefs and behaviors from the rest of Catholicism (sometimes called heretical) and were not representative of society as a whole. Plus, St. Loyola didn’t found the Society of Jesus until 1540, and its predecessor group 8 years prior to that. Columbus had been dead for decades at that point.
And like I said, on the numerical scale from the poll, relative to his time, I do view Columbus as a -1. Not one of the “good guys” and not “neutral” but not the “worst” either. He was unsavory, but wasn’t considered then similar to how we look at people like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, or Joseph Kony in the 20th/21st century.
Right. Saying that Columbus was on par with other Conquistadors and Pirates is like saying Hitler was on par with other high Nazi officials and dictators.
Columbus was a horrible person, not by moderns standards, but by the standards of his time. The notion that people of the past didn’t understand it was wrong to murder and enslave and rape and torture and steal is nonsense. If people 3000 years ago didn’t think murder and stealing were wrong, why did they make laws against it? Why is “thou shalt not kill” one of the ten commandments?
All through the middle ages knights and bandits marched through the countryside robbing and murdering and raping the peasants. And all through the middle ages everyone complained about how terrible it was. A peasant who saw his neighbor get killed by a knight didn’t think to himself, “Eh, weak people SHOULD get trampled by the strong”. Of course if he was in the position of the knight maybe he’d do the trampling too. And he probably would, it’s not like the people of ancient times were a different species, they were the same sort of people as us, except with different life experiences. Put you or me in Germany in 1930 and we’d probably go along with the crowd, even though there were some people who didn’t. Why do I think we’d go along with the crowd? Because that’s what most people back then did.
See, even a concentration camp guard is a human being. Most people, even concentration camp guards aren’t simple sadists. Yes, if you actually are a sadist you’ll try to find a way to get that camp guard job. And when you get that job, you’re going to torture the hell out of people. Having a job like that brings out the worst in people, even normal people, and it allows horrible people free reign to commit horrors. Put a sociopath in a camp guard uniform and you’ll see rape, murder, and torture. Put the same sociopath in a corporate project manager’s suit and you’ll see people being forced to work unpaid overtime on Christmas, people screwed out of credit for projects they worked on, people fired to bump up the stock price, and dubiously scored golf games.
Now, back to Columbus. He was a horrible person by the standards of his time. He’s not responsible for the genocide of the Americas, he’s only responsible for the things he actually did. Did he kill as many people as Hitler? What did Hitler do? Hitler gave orders and people carried out the orders. Without people ready and willing to carry out the killing, Hitler’s just another blowhard in a Bavarian beer hall. Columbus wasn’t just another guy. To lead a crew of bloodthirsty pirates you have to be an even more bloodthirsty pirate.
So anyway, Columbus might be as evil as Hitler, but there were probably hundreds or thousands of German camp guards and stormtroopers and gestapo actually more evil than Hitler. There were probably hundreds or thousands of murderous psychopaths more evil than Hitler in the US Army. Hitler wasn’t an extreme outlier of evil, he’s not a monster, he’s a typical asshole who finagled himself into a position of power and drowned the world in fire and blood. Just like your horrible Uncle Jimmy would do, if anyone were stupid enough to make him the leader of a powerful country. The difference between your Uncle Jimmy and Hitler is that when Uncle Jimmy starts talking about invading Mexico, people are going to look at him like he’s crazy and tell him that’s not how it works. When Hitler invaded Poland the German people clapped and cheered.
Let’s assume that Columbus’ actions were considered run-of-the-mill during this day.
Why does that preclude us from saying he was a sadistic asshole?
If Columbus-style sadistic assholery was pervasive back then, all that means is that humanity was a sucky lot back then. It doesn’t mean the sadistic assholery was any less horrible. It also doesn’t mean the sadistic assholes can’t be judged as such.
A million years from now, someone might judge me as a evil because I’m a pet owner who eats meat. So what? It will make no difference to me whether future people fail to appreciate my positive contributions because they are offset by the crime of carnivory. Once I die, I accept that my legacy will be subject to different interpretations as time marches on. It’s how the world works.
So I’m hard pressed to see the problem with judging historical figures using the standards of our time. If we’re supposed to celebrate and honor people like Columbus for their massive achievements, then it follows that we should also be allowed to criticize them for their equally massive crimes. And yet it is only with the criticisms that we’re treated to “don’t judge historical figures because standards change, man!” Hogwash.
Exactly. We’re not taking about the Stone Age here. If our standards for morality were that different from then, it is unlikely we’d still be able to relate to Shakespeare and others. And yet we still can readily distinguish their villains from their heroes. Things ain’t changed that much.
What is telling is that the same atrocities in Columbus’ time are hardly unheard of today. Does anyone deny that human trafficking is a global problem? We condemn those who practice this rather easily, without fretting over whether these predators come from communities where kidnapping girls and selling them for sex is considered normal.
Yet the Spanish crown, who had laws against robbing, enslaving and murdering your Spanish neighbor, continued to send conquistadors to rob, enslave and murder the indigenous people of Mexico, Central and South America. It’s almost as though they had different standards back then.
It doesn’t. But the OP specifically stated that we view and rate him through the lens of his era. If everyone back then was a sadistic asshole then his actions are unremarkable.
Lots of people back then mistreated natives from other lands. Very few of them (inadvertently or not) opened a couple continents to European exploration and changed the course of civilization.
Also, I keep referencing the Spanish crown since they financed Columbus and seized a majority of the New World. But, as mentioned, Portugal, France and England all had similar views of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. So, for a period where murder, rape, etc of your fellow countryman was prohibited every major European power with a stake in the Americas had pretty much the same government sanctioned stance towards how to act among the American natives. Columbus was hardly unique in any regard.
His contemporaries largely thought him a bad dude, and this by the standards of his time.
The Spanish in his little colony complained about his cruelty, incompetence, and nepotism, towards both the Spanish colonists and the natives (however hypocritically). As a result of these complaints, he was arrested and hauled back to Spain in chains. The monarchs eventually freed him, but firmly prohibited putting him pack in charge of the colony.
The allegations of his (and his brothers’) behavior during his colonial governorship make for gruesome reading, and I don’t think it is a defense to claim standards were different - because these reports led directly to his deposition and arrest. Evidently, the authorities did not approve of his behavior; according to the “standards of the day”, he was worthy of arrest, not reward (though in consideration of past services, the only punishment, besides being hauled back in chains, was to prohibit him from governing).
Edit: this is interesting and recently discovered:
That’s not quite how it went down. You are giving the Spanish ( actually Castilian in his context ) crown far too much credit for centralization and organization. Many of the conquistadores were essentially freebooters and adventurers operating either without any specific authorization or with very little. They tended to be brought to heel by the government ( partially ) after the fact. And said government often did try to limit the damage they caused in the aftermath, though usually without a great deal of success. Colombus was not vastly worse than, say, the Pizarro brothers. But all of them were a cut below polite society.
From your article:
Yeah, once again, reports written by the guy who got his governorship. If the Spanish monarchy gave two shits about cruelty towards the natives, Pizzaro would have been tossed into the deepest hole in Spain and been cemented over. The crown was so “horrified” by Columbus that they gave him back his money and funded another voyage for him. It’s called “politics”.