Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Lost document reveals Columbus as tyrant of the Caribbean
The Guardian ^ | 07 Aug 2006 | Giles Tremlett

Posted on 08/09/2006 5:44:39 AM PDT by Marius3188

Christopher Columbus, the man credited with discovering the Americas, was a greedy and vindictive tyrant who saved some of his most violent punishments for his own followers, according to a document uncovered by Spanish historians.

As governor and viceroy of the Indies, Columbus imposed iron discipline on the first Spanish colony in the Americas, in what is now the Caribbean country of Dominican Republic. Punishments included cutting off people's ears and noses, parading women naked through the streets and selling them into slavery.

"Columbus' government was characterised by a form of tyranny," Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian who has seen the document, told journalists.

One man caught stealing corn had his nose and ears cut off, was placed in shackles and was then auctioned off as a slave. A woman who dared to suggest that Columbus was of lowly birth was punished by his brother Bartolomé, who had also travelled to the Caribbean. She was stripped naked and paraded around the colony on the back of a mule.

(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Miscellaneous; Unclassified
KEYWORDS: 1492; ageofsail; caribbean; christophercolumbus; columbus; columbusday; consuelovarela; dominicanrepublic; godsgravesglyphs
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 81-100101-120121-140141-158 next last
To: irishjuggler

Read the book and say that!!


101 posted on 08/09/2006 4:56:32 PM PDT by bert (K.E. N.P. Slay Pinch)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 100 | View Replies]

To: Marius3188
Oh, yeah... all the white men of history were horrible monsters. Did you hear about Thomas Jefferson? Raped poor Sally a million times and fathered a hundred kids by her, all of whom he either bleached to death or beat to death.<continue sarcasm>...

The world would be a lot better place without white men, I'll tell you that, them and their evil science and their evil industry and their evil medicine. Why, I'd rather be a naked, hunting-gathering savage, with a life span of 24 years, than have white men around, yessiree! </sarc>

102 posted on 08/09/2006 5:02:06 PM PDT by LibWhacker
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: muawiyah
Didn't you ever stop and ask yourself exactly why small groups of uncivilized Franks could wander about Europe and just take over?

Check your assumptions. The Franks weren't a "small group", weren't "uncivilized", and weren't "wandering" anywhere. They were the native population, descended from the Gauls, with a long history as a Kingdom under the Merovingians.

What's amazing is that a small group of uncivilized barbarians out of Arabia could destroy, subjugate and co-opt the heart and cradle of Christianity, from Anatolia through Alexandria.

And, best of all, we here at FR are NOT embarrassed to use the term "DARK AGES" because, as it happens, the climatological disaster that occurred circa 538AD actually darkened the skies.

The term doesn't derive from some climatological occurence. It derives from Victorian era historians, like Gibbons, who romanticized the Roman empire. Well, guess what? The Roman empire never "fell". It simply broke up into successor states and dwindled away, starting with Byzantium. and ending with the Visigoths absorbing the pitiful remains. In fact, one of Charlemagne's claims to authority was as the rightful successor to Rome, by authority of the Pope.

It's not a matter of "glorifying" the Franks; it's a matter of giving them, and the rest of early medieval Europeans their due. There wasn't some blank spot located between Rome and the Crusades, where time stood still.

103 posted on 08/09/2006 5:06:27 PM PDT by LexBaird ("Politically Correct" is the politically correct term for "F*cking Retarded". - Psycho Bunny)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 99 | View Replies]

To: LexBaird
You give Victorians entirely too much credit.

BTW, there was no "blank spot" either ~ just very few people. And, according to contemporary accounts the skies were noticeably darker and the Sun was always red.

According to the Bretons their first forays into Brittany (as they fled Brittain to escape the invading Angles and Saxons) revealed that no one lived there.

Their own traditions were that people lived there ~ but, alas, Merlin was forced to replant all the vinyards since without people domesticated grapes had disappeared from even the Breton march state now known as the county of Beaujolais.

I'd just bet you are one of those people who continues to believe that all that happened was the fall of Rome. In reality, Rome fell nearly a century before this event. People North of Rome began having a very difficult time making a living and finding enough to eat. Virtually every burnable thing was consumed by fires as folks sought to get warm and evade death.

To the South they had the Plague of Justinian.

Now, about the handful of Arabs, they were far from being uncivilized or few in number. In fact, the early Moslems readily converted the population of Petra and drew on the largest extant population base in the Middle East (outside of the city of Byzantium).

They also paid salaries to Byzantine armies who converted to Islam en masse.

104 posted on 08/09/2006 5:14:59 PM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 103 | View Replies]

To: muawiyah
You give Victorians entirely too much credit.

Maybe so. Wiki attributes the term to Plutarch. But he still used it as a pejorative comparison to the glory of Classical Rome. The article goes on to restate my position: that "Most modern historians dismiss the notion that the era was a "Dark Age" by pointing out that this idea was based on ignorance of the period combined with popular stereotypes: many previous authors would simply assume that the era was a dismal time of violence and stagnation and use this assumption to prove itself."

It has nothing to do with the weather or population.

105 posted on 08/09/2006 5:47:35 PM PDT by LexBaird ("Politically Correct" is the politically correct term for "F*cking Retarded". - Psycho Bunny)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 104 | View Replies]

To: LexBaird
Alas, it has everything to do with the weather (a Fimbul Winter for several years is one heck of a winter ~ kill you every single time). Contemporary accounts ~ of which there are doggone few ~ reveal that it was getting colder ~ MUCH colder ~ and darker.

Were you aware that the Welsh annals of the kings (of the Britons) which contain all that marvelous stuff about King Arthur also have an accounting of the initial stages of the Dark Ages ~ right there about 538-540 AD too ~ crops failed, it got cold, trees lost their leaves, people starved, the whole land was laid waste.

And that's the good part.

Bet you thought those guys were telling fairy tales.

106 posted on 08/09/2006 5:56:08 PM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 105 | View Replies]

To: bert
Read the book and say that!!

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not going to waste my time reading 50-year-old FICTION that is of so little consequence that a Google search of the title and author produces only a handful of references.
107 posted on 08/09/2006 5:59:18 PM PDT by irishjuggler
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 101 | View Replies]

To: LexBaird
BTW, dendrochronologists tell us what the tree rings say, and in this case the trees say it got really cold and nasty, and it stayed nasty for a long, long time.

Modern historians are, at best, a tertiary source, particularly when it comes to comparing their "opinions" against primary facts, to wit, tree rings.

So, clear your mind of all those "modern historians say" cobwebs and accept the fact that modern science tells us how it happened even if it cannot yet differentiate between the breakup of a comet and an explosion of Krakatoa.

108 posted on 08/09/2006 6:00:03 PM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 105 | View Replies]

To: Marius3188

Bill Bennett's book "America The Last Best Hope" says Columbus was a great man, but the last thirteen years of his life "detracted" from his accomplishments.


109 posted on 08/09/2006 6:00:14 PM PDT by AmericaUnite
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: irishjuggler

You say inconsequential and 50 years old..... the topic of the thread would indicate it was prescient.

The Catholic Church was drug through the Inquisitional mud.....is that the problem?


110 posted on 08/09/2006 6:23:18 PM PDT by bert (K.E. N.P. Slay Pinch)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 107 | View Replies]

To: bert
The Catholic Church was drug through the Inquisitional mud.....is that the problem?

Your use of "drug" instead of "dragged" speaks volumes about the intellectual capacity of anti-Catholic bigots.
111 posted on 08/09/2006 6:32:12 PM PDT by irishjuggler
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 110 | View Replies]

To: muawiyah
"Spain, to say the least, has been around a very long time ~ Trajan, the Roman Emperor, was a Spaniard."

By 800 B.C., the Phoenicians were founding colonies on the Iberian Peninsula such as Gadir (today's Cadiz) and Almuñécar. Though they called the region "i-shaphan-im", these individual city/colonies, were no more in "Spain" than Athens was in "Greece".

When Rome destroyed Carthage, it took the land and called it Hispania. It was a province, and Trajan would have considered himself a Roman, albiet from the province Hispania. But there still was no country called Spain. The Visigoths, Vandals and Alans fought over the place next, with various kingdoms occupying various parts of the peninsula from about 400 to 718 when the Moors drove the Visigoths to the north. Then the land was split into kingdoms like Asturias and Galacia, and the Omayyad Emirate of Cordova. Later, there were the Kingdoms of Navarre, Castile, Aragon and Grenada.

Not until 1492 did Spain was we know it today come into being. Even then, it was called The Crown of Aragon or Aragonese Empire. By 1512, most of the kingdoms of present-day Spain were politically unified. The region was known as "Spain" (España). It was a geographic term that was more or less synonymous with Iberia, not the present-day state called Spain. There was no "King of Spain" until 1837.
112 posted on 08/09/2006 6:56:56 PM PDT by SoCal Pubbie
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 74 | View Replies]

To: SoCal Pubbie
Not quite sure what point you are trying to make. Usually you guys try arguing that the Visigothic Kingdoms were some sort of superpower.

As everybody knows the Galicians controlled ALL of the North Coast and most of the West Coast of the Iberian peninsula. Celt-Iberians controlled the interior. A variety of other people controlled other sites, and depending on the ebb and flow of fortune and disease, different regions dominated at different times.

However, the use of the word "Spain" is an affectation in the English language that allows us to refer to what is quite clearly a socio-political region as well as a geographical expression.

You can call it Iberia or whatever you wish, but we all know where it's at.

And no, the Visigothic Kingdoms weren't really serious entitites ~ Galicia, though was, as were the three states founded by King San Cho Noe I ~ Castile, Leon and Carvajal.

Together, through time, those three states wrested "Spain" from the hands of the Moors and others, and all of that was done without the assistance of the English.

113 posted on 08/09/2006 7:07:17 PM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 112 | View Replies]

To: muawiyah
Who's "you guys"?

My point is simple, and you know it. You were in error to refer to the King of Spain hundreds of years before the nation of Spain even existed.
114 posted on 08/09/2006 8:14:34 PM PDT by SoCal Pubbie
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 113 | View Replies]

To: SoCal Pubbie

Who referred to the "King of Spain"? I refered to the "Governor General".


115 posted on 08/10/2006 5:59:36 AM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 114 | View Replies]

To: muawiyah
Alas, it has everything to do with the weather

No, it doesn't. It has to do with denigrating the period in comparison to Classical Rome. The concept you seem to have of "conditions were so primitive outside of Spain that I doubt "Europeans", as a whole, could come to a resolve about anything other than building more dongeons" is simply in error.

The idea of five hard years in the mid-500s determining what the Franks were doing in 730 is silly. A longer "small ice age" in the 16th through 18th centuries didn't stop the Renaissance and Enlightenment, nor did the massive die off of population in the plague years stop late Medieval civilization. In both cases the hardships spurred new social development.

116 posted on 08/10/2006 7:38:50 AM PDT by LexBaird ("Politically Correct" is the politically correct term for "F*cking Retarded". - Psycho Bunny)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 106 | View Replies]

To: LexBaird
You really don't know what a Fimbul Winter is do you?

It's not a "mini ice age" Fur Shur.

117 posted on 08/10/2006 7:40:41 AM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 116 | View Replies]

To: Marius3188

He was a white male....so he had to be a bad guy..


118 posted on 08/10/2006 7:43:17 AM PDT by thinking
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: LexBaird
BTW, about that "spur" part you put in there ~ let's add = "half a millenium later".

The Chinese got off the dime faster ~ only took them 300 years to do a fundamental economic recovery.

Boys at Mecca were virtually untouched by the whole thing, but Byzantium seems to have had one serious economic catastrophe for about 80 years.

Yup, most of Europe was pretty much like Africa circa 1300 ~ but even worse ~ the only folks left were those who lived on or very near the ocean; e.g. the Friesians, the Irish, the coastal Britons, the Sa'ami, the Romans, etc.

It took quite a while to repopulate the Continent and retrieve civilization from the ruins.

119 posted on 08/10/2006 7:45:53 AM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 116 | View Replies]

To: muawiyah

Excuse me. Post number 97- the "Moslem governor of Spain" There was no such place.


120 posted on 08/10/2006 8:48:30 AM PDT by SoCal Pubbie
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 115 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 81-100101-120121-140141-158 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson