Columbus in Context

The Age of Discovery is actually a euphemism for the Age of Conquest II. The Age of Conquest I occurred by land; later, the Age of Conquest II occurred by sea.

The Age of Conquest I in western civilization started about the 7th Century B.C. with the Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great. Cyrus put an empire together that stretched from the Indus Valley (in what is today Pakistan) to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. A few centuries later Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire and substituted Greek rule for Persian rule. Still later, the Romans arose out of Italy, and when they were through they had conquered the entire Mediterranean basin—from Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the Atlantic Ocean, and from the Rhine and Danube Rivers to North Africa. The Persians, meanwhile, had reconquered the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates and the Indus. The Arabs poured out of the Arabian peninsula and conquered all of North Africa and Spain. They took most of the Middle East but they couldn't take Constantinople.

The Franks spilled out of middle Asia and swarmed into Western Europe where the Roman Empire settled them. Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Teutons—all invaded the Europe mainland. The Mongols invaded China, India, the Persian empire (which they virtually destroyed), and Russia (which they held in bondage for centuries.) (Total war was not invented during World War II, but by the Mongols who annihilated their enemies.)

When the Franks went on the move again they invaded the Middle East, setting up the Crusader kingdoms. Europe congealed under the Western Roman Emperors while the Eastern Empire was conquered by the Ottoman Turks, who then moved into the Balkans.

The Age of Conquest II arose after Europe was consolidated politically. It progressed steadily, but this time by sea.

Most of the conquests had conquest itself as its prime purpose and its justification. The object to get more and more obviously played a role, but for the most part it seems that the strong liked to beat up the weak, and then they took the weaker's goods. The Franks, the founders of France, burned Constantinople and with it a library treasure of the world—a library comparable to the one at Alexandria that was burned at various times by Catholic and Arabs.

In the 8th Century A.D., a rationale for conquest arose that would provide one of the main impetuses for conquest by sea. It involved the establishment of the Patriarch (Pope) of Rome as an independent historical force around 800 AD. The Pope (Patriarch) of Rome was having trouble with the Emperor in Constantinople. The trouble was bad enough that Imperial troops were sent out from Constantinople to discipline the Pope. Although the expedition was not successful, the Pope remained in a precarious position.

Meanwhile, Pepin the Short, the Mayor of the Palace to Merovigian King Childric III, the Frankish King, usurped Childric III's throne, but he feared that he did not have legitimacy. Pepin petitioned the Pope, asking him in a letter, "Is the man with the power the king, or the man with the crown?" The pope replied, "The man with the power."

It was exactly what Pepin wanted to hear and he assumed the Frankish throne. The deal was symbiotic in that the Pope was weak and needed a protector, and Pepin was a strong man and usurper who needed legitimacy. They were made for each other.

Under normal circumstances, only the Emperor in Constantinople could name a king and, in fact, the Emperor Anasthasius had named Childric III's predecessor, Clovis, some centuries before. Patriarchs (popes) did not have this kind of temporal power; only the Emperors did. However, in the case of Pope Stephen II and Pepin the Short, the Pope had a document, a grant of authority from none other than Constantine the Great himself. The document, known as the Donation of Constantine, purported to invest the Pope in Rome with the authority of the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great. Among other things it gave the Pope the right to wear the purple. Ordinarily, the wearing of the purple by others than the royal family was punishable by death. Under the terms of the Donation, the pope could call himself Supreme Pontiff (Maximus Pontiflex), the term used by all Roman Emperors, pagan, and Christian, to indicate that they were the true head of the church. (The Popes to this day claim to be the Vicar of Christ on Earth, taking their succession from Peter.)

The Donation of Constantine gave the pope the right to assign sovereignty (name kings), the same power held heretofore only by the Emperor in Constantinople. It was the exercise of this last authority that enabled Pope Stephen II to name Pepin the Short as King of the Franks. As a gesture of good will, Pepin made the Donation of Pepin—the gift to the Pope of the lands that he had conquered from the Emperor in Italy. These became the Papal States.

It was the assignment of sovereignty claimed by the Popes through the Donation, of Constantine that was the driving force in the Age of Discovery, or the Age of Conquest II—conquest by sea.

The Popes used the authority of the Donation of Constantine to try to get the Moors out of Spain in the 12th Century. They offered to grant sovereignty, the right to rule, to any Christian Prince who could accomplish this feat. The same authority was used during the Crusades.

By the time of Columbus, monarchs were registering their claims to sovereignty with the Papacy to establish precedence. The principle was that the Pope could grant the authority to a Christian Prince to exercise sovereignty over lands that were not ruled by Christian Princes. It is perhaps an understatement to say that this was arrogance, but the motivation for these people, the monarchs and the explorers alike, was their belief that the Pope was a direct line to God, that Christianity was the chosen religion of God, and that everyone not Christian was condemned to go to hell. Hell was seen as real and fearsome. The authority derived from the perceived relationship between pope and God was also seen as real and fearsome. Even the act of providing slaves with Christian salvation was seen as performing an act of great good.

For his day, Columbus was a businessman. He had a deal for the Queen. He would make her rich and, in the process, he would get rich himself. The deal not only included searching out a trade route but, in fact, conquering whatever lands he found. Remember, Columbus was not going to the New World for he didn't know it was there. Columbus was going to Cathay and Chipango—China and Japan—fully intending to conquer them. How do we know this? It's plain from the deal he struck with the Queen.

A great amount was known about the Earth in Columbus' day. It had been known that the Earth was round since 256 B.C. when Eratothenes measured it and found it to be 25,000 miles in circumference. Much more was known about the land than the sea on the planet, but the overall dimensions were known. The science council called by the Queen knew the dimensions of the Earth; that's why they had trouble with Columbus proposal. There had been a millennium of land exploration of the Eurasian continent. All of North Africa was known, and Arab trading caravans had been bringing gold and slaves out of Subsaharan Africa for a long time—centuries. The Arabs had a flourishing trade with India and the West Coast of Africa long before Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope. It was, in fact, an Arab navigator who showed da Gama the sea route to India.

The Polos had been to China over the land routes. They knew how far it was from Venice to Peking (Beijing). Ptolemy's. map of the world was a map of the known land surface—from Europe to Asia. The distance going east was 12,000 miles. By inference, the distance going west from Europe to Asia had to be 13,000 miles. Queen Isabella's council knew this, and they also knew that there was no known technology that would enable the sailing vessels of that day to be provisioned for so long a sea voyage. The fact that Isabella let Columbus go was foolhardy, and the fact that he went in the face of the known obstacle, a sea voyage of 13,000 miles, made him foolhardy. By the known facts it was a doomed voyage. Had the world been configured the way it was "known" to be in Columbus' time, he would have sailed into oblivion, never to have been heard from again.

So why was Columbus so willing to go, so sure of himself? He did not know about the Viking voyages to Iceland and Greenland, but he did have a narrow ocean hypothesis. That was his guiding principle. Columbus had a map of the world showing the narrow ocean but copies of it have never been found. In his mind, Columbus was on his way to the riches of Cathay. But when he made his first landfall, he didn't know where he was. He claimed it for the King and Queen of Spain anyway, fulfilling the first provision of his contract with Isabella. At the sight of land, Columbus became Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a hereditary title which his descendant in Spain, Cristobal Colon, holds to this day.

What had Columbus signed up to do and what were to be his rewards if he were successful? The following list of capitulations is quoted from Morison, Samuel Elliot, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Mass. 1942.

• (1) "Their Highnesses appoint the said Don Cristobal Colon their Admiral in and over all islands and mainlands which shall be discovered or acquired by his labor and industry, and that title with all rights and prerogatives appertaining thereunto shall be enjoyed by his heirs and successors perpetually.

• (2) "The said Don Cristobal is appointed Viceroy and Governor-General over all such mainlands and islands as he shall discover or acquire in the said seas, and he may nominate three candidates for each office, from which the Sovereigns will select one.

• (3) "He shall take and keep a tenth of all gold, silver, pearls, gems, spices and other merchandise produced or obtained by barter and mining within the limits of these domains, free of all taxes.

• (4) "Any case involving such merchandise or products will be adjudicated by him or his deputy as Admiral.

• (5) "He is giving the option of paying an eighth part of the total expense of any ship sailing to these new possessions, and taking an eighth of the profits.

• Whereas you, Cristobal Colon, are setting forth by our command...to discover and acquire certain islands and mainlands in the ocean sea...it is just and reasonable that since you are exposing yourself to this danger in our service, you be rewarded therefor...it is our will and pleasure that you the said Cristobal Colon after you have discovered and acquired the said islands and mainlands...or any of them, shall be our Admiral of the said islands and mainlands which you may discover and acquire, and be empowered henceforward to call and entitle yourself Don Cristobal Colon, and his heirs and successors forever may be so entitled, and enjoy the offices of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Viceroy and Governor of the said islands and mainlands."

On October 12, 1492, Columbus made a landfall on Watling Island. In subsequent days and weeks, he found a large island which he called Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and founded the first colony. He sailed around Cuba and thought it was Chipango-Japan. After his first season of exploration he sailed north to catch the prevailing westerlies and set a record for an Atlantic crossing that stood until the 20th century. Columbus' first landfall upon his return to Europe was in Portugal, where he was detained by the King who was suspicious of his motives and whatever claims he might have established for the Spanish monarchy in the "Western Ocean."

As it turned out, Spain and Portugal did have competing claims, but when they were set before the Pope, it was agreed that the world would be divided between Spain and Portugal along a line in the Atlantic Ocean set by the Pope. In a later treaty, Spain and Portugal redrew the line. The first line gave Portugal no lands in the New World for it was in the middle of the ocean. The line agreed upon later by the two nations gave Portugal Brazil.

If you focus on the New World as I did when I first heard this-story, I thought, "What a deal. Spain gets most of the New World and Portugal gets a lot of ocean." Not so. Portugal's share of the world was to be Africa, India, the East Indies, and China. However, there was some uncertainty with the latter because no one knew, at that time, where the line came down on the other side of the world. The reason Columbus was sailing west in the first place was because the Portuguese were sailing east. So China and Japan would be the furthermost east and, therefore, the nearest west of the known world; and that's where Columbus thought he was when he found Cuba. That he was wrong was discovered early on, but what a mistake!

The Portuguese continued their eastward progress and, as we know, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and on to India. When he arrived at Calcutta the potentate in charge of the city could not understand why he had come. Vasco da Gama told him that he had come to trade and was told in return that he had nothing they wanted. Vasco da Gama left, returned with three armed vessels, and proceeded to bombard the city, whereupon the potentate agreed that they did want to trade with da Gama after all. As indicated earlier, these routes between Africa and India were well known to the Arabs. The result of Vasco da Gama's discovery was to push the Arabs out of the trade between the Orient and Europe.

We know from subsequent history that England conquered India and the Dutch took over the East Indies, pushing Portugal to a distant third in the trading. In one of Columbus' early dispatches home he said that the natives were docile and would make good slaves. Slavery was very much a business in Columbus' time. Considered on either moral or religious grounds, it was considered a step up on the Christian scale, for the "heathen" who became slaves. The average Christian of the time, (and this included many among the Catholic clergy), had no thought of the theological concept of orthopraxy (that is, correctness in practice or behavior as taught by Christian scripture), as being on a par with the theological concept of orthodoxy (that is, correctness of doctrine, which included the idea of individual salvation). The thinking was simply that a "saved" slave would go to heaven whereas an "unsaved" heathen, no matter how happy on Earth, would go to the everlasting fires of hell. So in late Medieval Europe, slavery could be rationalized as a boon to the heathen. Slavery went bad for the Indians and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V abolished it. The substituted, modified system of serfdom was then established. At this time the importation of slaves from Africa was begun.

In the late 19th Century the Pope was stripped of his temporal powers 'by the Laterean Treaty of 1870. The Papal States were incorporated into the newly formed nation of Italy, and the Pope retained his temporal authorities only within the Vatican. It is no comfort to know that the Donation of Constantine was found to be a forgery. Gibbon attributed it to the "infamous Isidore," and says nothing more of its authorship. For all that it changed the world the Donation might as well have been real, for there certainly will be no going back and undoing 500 years of history whose major events were the result of that forgery. The only place the European settlement failed was with Japan. When the Emperor and the Shogun became convinced that the Jesuits other Christians were in Japan for political rather than religious reasons, they deported all the Jesuits, executed every Christian they could find, and closed the country to all outsiders. Not until 1853 was Japan reopened, and then by Commodore. Matthew C. Perry, with a show of force.

Discovery never was a principle. Discovery, under the authority of the Donation of Constantine, was conquest—conquest that recognized indigenous sovereignty only to the extent that it didn't interfere with the conquest.

President Andrew Jackson ordered the removal of Indians from eastern United States to the west in the face of a Supreme Court order that forbade him to do it. He should have been impeached and removed from office for such an outrage, but the country agreed with him. The Trail of Tears was the result.

Native populations all over the world were cruelly exploited under the terms of the Donation of Constantine. American Indians and aborigines were abused, and Africans were enslaved by the mutual agreement of the European powers. India was conquered and plantation labor was instituted all over the conquered lands to promote the trade interest of European nations. The British, French, and Dutch vied with Portugal and Spain for control of the mainlands and islands, as well as the sea lanes that connected them.

People like Columbus were soon pushed out of the way when the scale of these discoveries was realized. For all his troubles Columbus was deprived of his title of Governor General, and he spent the rest of his life in misery trying to obtain from the Spanish Crown what he thought was his rightful due from his discovery and his contract with the Crown. It was just too much to give one man. Columbus doesn't need our sympathy, for he was rewarded, even if not at the level he thought just. He does, however, require our understanding. Columbus did not bring evil to the New World; Columbus brought European culture to the New World. The Christian doctrine of imposing Christian sovereignty on non-Christian peoples was not invented by Columbus. He was merely an instrument in the process, an instrument hoping to be richly rewarded for advancing the interests of the Spanish monarchy.

The specific claim of sovereignty of the territory that became the United States comes from Henry VII of England who established the claim to North America. Henry VII for taking the side of the Pope in the dispute with Luther. The United States derived its individual sovereignty from the Treaty of Paris, where Great Britain ceded the lands she held in the thirteen colonies to the United States of America, as the colonies called themselves. The life-giving document of our nationhood is the Declaration of Independence, since it established us as a nation for the reasons and under the conditions specified. We made our first attempt at self-government with the Articles of Confederation, and then replaced them with the Constitution.

We cannot go back and undo the Donation of Constantine nor any of the mischief it created. Nor would we probably want to even if we could for, after all, it was a 1000 year policy. The important thing is to see Columbus in the context of world domination by European powers, and not in the isolation of the discovery of the New World. The discovery and conquest of the New World was epochal. It was a watershed in history. It was the basis of our nationhood. Those same forces were loosed over the whole world at the same time. In the long run, it might turn out that we might not even have been the the main act.

The most important, job now is not to look back either with satisfaction or in anger, but to look forward. We have the gift that makes us free—the Declaration of Independence. We have a Constitution that has kept pace with the evolution of our republican system. A lot of people have benefited from the system that arose from these documents. It is now time to see that the the benefits from this system flow to all the the citizens sovereign of the nation. That will be most easily done when the the citizens sovereigns can freely exercise their unalienable rights.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1991
Institute for domestic Tranquility