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How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula w

by juunpp 2y ago

How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"? If this turns out to be true, then it'd be rather embarrassing. Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either. It's certainly sketchy and not very scientific, though, per the same criticism outlined in the article. I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me.

shsbdksn 2y ago
Ill named?
- juunpp 2y ago
  Ill-named because it wasn't a reconquest of anything; Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that. It was a bunch of tribes originally, followed by the Greeks settling in, then the Romans, then the Visigoths, and then the Arabs. A mesh of many cultures until the main kingdoms united and wiped the land of "non-Christian blood". And thereafter the Spanish government has gone back and forth trying to wipe the remaining cultures in the peninsula to impose its own, as can be learned from the recent history of the past century. Nothing to be proud of, really. I actually hope Columbus turns out to be Jew so they stop talking about him.
  - LAC-Tech 2y ago
    Surely the intent of the name was a "re-conquest of Iberia from muslims by christians".
    - juunpp 2y ago
      Named by whom? The term did not even show up until the 20th century, so it wasn't the christians who named it like that. Pure Spanish myth. Oh, and the battle that started it all? Never even existed. Pure historical revisionism for nationalistic purposes with no more reality that horned vikings. There are many things wrong with the term. A "reconquest" also makes it sound like the area was under siege by the Arabs or something. But the fact of the matter is that the peninsula, except for perhaps the Basque country, has been a melting pot of cultures under the succession of rules by larger empires. It's not like those christians, or the "Spanish", held control at some point, lost it, and then got it back; they never had it in the first place or even existed as a nation. So it's just a ridiculous term altogether. https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/472055743507/historia-y-vida-reconquista-al-andalus-historia-rae-don-pelayo-covadonga.html https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574... https://blogs.elpais.com/historias/2015/04/la-batalla-de-covadonga-casi-1300-a%C3%B1os-despu%C3%A9s.html https://blogs.elpais.com/historias/2015/04/la-batalla-de-cov...
      - xeromal 2y ago
        Regardless of the term I'm glad it happened
        juunpp 2y ago
        Why?
        kyleee 2y ago
        Red wine and tapas instead of the religion of peace?
        Tainnor 2y ago
        It wasn't all sunshine and roses back then. When the Reconquista was completed, one of the first thing Spain did was expel all the Jews. Jews could in theory convert to Christianity instead, but then they became the prime targets of the Spanish Inquisition. We should be careful not mindlessly apply our modern ideas of Islam and Christianity to a completely different time period.
  - WorkerBee28474 2y ago
    You pretend like it was a bunch of villages living in happy harmony until the Catholics arrived. You're lying. It was part of the post-Roman empire, then it got conquered by Muslims, then it got re-conquered by Catholics. Hence, reconquista.
    - juunpp 2y ago
      I don't pretend or lie. Historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation with the Catholic monarchs. Spain did not exist as a nation prior to then. Hence, nothing to conquer "back", just a succession of empires and smaller kingdoms and a melting of cultures consolidating into the birth of the nation that it is today.
      - WorkerBee28474 2y ago
        What was 'conquered back' was the Iberian Peninsula. Whether or not a particular state was there at the time doesn't matter, the land and people were conquered and reconquered.
      - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
        You're making this weird semantic distinction that is irrelevant. Nobody is arguing that Spain was a single, completely unified polity before the Islamic conquests. But it was controlled by the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of Spain, and then it was conquered by the Islamic Umayyads, so the reconquista was to bring it back under Christian rule.
        juunpp 2y ago
        The semantic distinction is relevant because Reconquista, with the capital R and everything, is an ideological, propagandistic narrative by the Spanish (central government) originating in the 20th century.
        cryptonector 2y ago
        If we're going to be pedantic, the capital-R Reconquista name for the process of the -uh- re-conquest of Spain was introduced in the 19th century. And it was used throughout Latin America in elementary schoolbooks at least in the 1980s. Franco might have wanted to do some propagandizing with the term, but it was mainly seen as a non-partisan propaganda because Catholicism was a unifying force in Hispanic cultures rather than a partisan and divisive one.
  - shsbdksn 2y ago
    That's a very strange way to present Spanish history. Spain was unified province of Rome, and then its own country under the Visigoths for a total of 800 years. That's 800 years of unified governance. Spain had a common language (vulgate) and religion (various sects of christianity). We have the pre-Islamic negotiations on issues of Faith. The Visigoths were Arians but slowly became Catholics. We have the history of countless councils. Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take. And it's ridiculous to think it could have been - where did the people to fight the most powerful army of the day come from? Asturias is just not that big.
    - juunpp 2y ago
      Hispania constituted several Roman provinces. I'm not sure what you mean by "unified". Unified legally under the Roman empire, sure, but not as a nation or even culturally. (By that token, we could say "Spain" was unified under the Arabs, too.) It is not until the marriage of the Catholic monarchs that historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation. So "reconquista" doesn't add up to reality; "unification" or "birth" would be a better term. I think your other points are fine, thanks for adding. > Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take. It was fairly a walk in the park for them; took only a decade to get the peninsula under control and venture into France, until they lost their first battle there. That, and the Basque country; nobody can conquer the Basque country, which is why they speak a non-romance language to this day, among other things.
      - anon291 2y ago
        There was no such thing as nations in the way we think about them today back then.
      - felipeerias 2y ago
        The provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the Balearic Islands and the coast south of the strait of Gibraltar, formed the Diocese of Hispania until the Germanic invasions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocese_of_Hispania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocese_of_Hispania
  - anon291 2y ago
    The Arabians were a conquering people in the peninsula. In that sense, kicking them out is absolutely a reconquista, and this sort of absolute denial of that is just flat out historical revisionism.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    Reconquista is an anachronistic concept here, but so are nations in the modern sense. Instead of looking at the wars in Iberia in isolation, it's better to consider them in the context of the wider Europe. Medieval Europeans saw Christendom as the legitimate successor of the Roman Empire. (Or at least the elites did.) Many wars were fought to expand the borders of Christendom. Some of them against pagans, and some to take back land that used to be Christian. The wars that are often called the Reconquista were part of the latter. So, in a sense, it was not about taking Spanish land back for Spain, but about taking Roman land back for Rome.
  - felipeerias 2y ago
    I've read different versions of that argument and it essentially boils down to saying that the Reconquista did not exist because there wasn't one single political entity implementing one single military plan over seven centuries. This obscures the fact that there was ample religious, social, linguistic, and even legal (Liber Iudiciorum) continuity since Late Antiquity.
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    The Iberic peninsula had been conquered by Arab Muslims, who moved into France before being pushed back. The term "Reconquista" is perfectly suited to describe what hapoened: European Christians re-conquered that land. Especially in term of Christendom this was a re-conquest.
toyg 2y ago
> since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat Actually, most Greek knowledge had fundamentally disappeared from Western Europe for centuries, even before the official dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Some of it had just reappeared in the XV century, largely through translations of Arabic books; this is why the Renaissance produced so much stuff inspired by classic material - because it was all new and exciting to the people of the period, like they'd rediscovered an ancient civilization! Also by "people" here we are literally talking about the 0.1% - educated people who could read and had access to books, which at the time were very rare and super expensive. What the vikings did was not common knowledge, because basically they didn't come back regularly and so there was no real knowledge of their actions anywhere in Europe. The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between.
- lamp_book 2y ago
  IIRC what Columbus didn't know was Eratosthones calculation of the circumference of the Earth that was <1% off, but believed Ptolemy's ~30% short estimation and figured there was no land in between Europe and the East Indies.
- juunpp 2y ago
  Thomas Aquinas (medieval Catholic philosopher) knew the Earth was round [1]. If your first point was to suggest that the roundness of the Earth disappeared with ancient Greece -- that didn't happen. Nor did the Renaissance rediscover that point, specifically. > The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between. The first point is not probabilistic. The second, sure. It's only some Americans at this point who doubt the Earth is round. [1] From Aquinas' Summa; search for "Earth": https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm (the also section has nothing to do with the Earth; he just drops that casually as an example in his reply to the objection in question.)
Tainnor 2y ago
> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me. Columbus was also famously a big idiot that just got lucky. He believed for some reason that the earth was much smaller than it actually was (contrary to established belief at the time) and that he could easily find a way to India by travelling over the Atlantic. If the Americas didn't exist, he and his crew would have died at sea. He remained convinced that the territory he discovered was part of India until his death.
- kajecounterhack 2y ago
  Not to mention that he was hugely genocidal and enslaved the Tainos; who really wants to lay claim to that.
  - juunpp 2y ago
    I don't know that Columbus was genocidal. He was a slaver, rapist, murderer, gold digger and all-round motherfucker for sure, so much so that the Spanish monarchy sent an envoy to arrest him, bring him back to Spain to be tried, and threw him in jail I think for a couple years. Aside from gold and spices sent from him back to the Spanish monarchs after his first arrival, he also sent back slaves and the queen was, presumably, utterly disgusted. But as far as I know, his exploits did not amount to "genocidal". I'm less certain about this than my other points, though. Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.
    - kajecounterhack 2y ago
      def genocidal: relating to or involving the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. Pedantic to say that Columbus subjugating entire people groups with mass murder doesn't qualify here. The manpower skew was huge, so how exactly did they subjugate the Tainos without genocide? 7M tainos died when all was said and done.
lamontcg 2y ago
> Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either. Presumably, if he had more evidence, he would be displaying it in order to make his case better.
imjonse 2y ago
And the edict for expulsion of practicing Jews was issued in 1492, same year of Columbus's first voyage.
amiga386 2y ago
> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. He is primarily of interest because Italian-Americans want a feeling of pride and so celebrate "one of their own", the Genovese Columbus. And America is very big and important, so whatever it cares about, a lot of other people care about. If you were Canadian instead, you'd probably be genned up on John Cabot (also Genovese) and Newfoundland and CODFISH! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds8G9sFOK5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds8G9sFOK5w] There's no point sneering that Leif Erikson got there first, Europe as a whole did not particularly know The Americas existed until Columbus confirmed it. Then they rushed to colonise it... which is where most of the Americans (and Canadians) ultimately come from. So that's why it's important to so many of them.
- grardb 2y ago
  > He is primarily of interest because Italian-Americans want a feeling of pride and so celebrate "one of their own", the Genovese Columbus. May I ask why you hold this opinion? I grew up with tons of Italian-Americans (NYC) and I can confidently say that I've never heard a single person express pride in the fact that Columbus was Italian. In fact, based on my experience, a lot of Americans—regardless of descent—think/were explicitly taught that Columbus was Spanish.
  - amiga386 2y ago
    I looked into it a few years ago when then anti-colonialists were insisting that the US should drop Columbus Day (or replace it with a Columbus' Victims Day) as they see him as a symbol of colonialism, eradication of natives, and support for slavery. You might ask "if he's so evil and wicked and wrong and everything bad about the world (and not just a convenient famous person to scapegoat for more general ills), why did anyone ask the US to have a Columbus Day anyway?" And the answer to that is Italian-Americans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day > Many Italian Americans observe Columbus Day as a celebration of their heritage and not of Columbus himself > For the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1892, following lynchings in New Orleans, where a mob had murdered 11 Italian immigrants, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration. > In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and New York City Italian leader Generoso Pope, Congress passed a statute stating: "The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation designating October 12 as Columbus Day > in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt had the removal of the designation of Italian Americans as "enemy aliens" announced on Columbus Day along with a plan to offer citizenship to 200,000 elderly Italians living in the United States > In 1966, Mariano A. Lucca, from Buffalo, New York, founded the National Columbus Day Committee, which lobbied to make Columbus Day a federal holiday > San Francisco claims the nation's oldest continuously existing celebration with the Italian-American community's annual Columbus Day Parade, which was established by Nicola Larco in 1868, while New York City boasts the largest, with over 35,000 marchers and one million viewers around 2010 So, while the Italian-Americans you grew up with may not have been one of the 35,000 marchers in NYC, I bet most of those 35,000 marchers considers themselves Italian-American. They, and all other Italian-Americans, get a federal holiday which they can use to celebrate the connection between Italy and America (if they so wish), thanks to Italian-Americans lobbying for Columbus Day since the 1800s.
aksss 2y ago
> I don’t understand boners Well, he literally got into a 70-ft wooden sailboat and crossed the Atlantic ocean with no certainty of landfall, basically sailing on spec, and because of that voyage, opened up a new hemisphere of the planet to development, and (with unfortunate but inevitable awful consequence) brought humanity together again after a substantial period of isolation. We admire the Pacific Islanders for similar navigation feats as they travelled eastward, and the Vikings for traveling westward to Greenland and America, but neither of those efforts had so profound an effect as what Columbus pulled off.
- netdevnet 2y ago
  > brought humanity together again This is such a culturally insensitive thing to say. And very ironic considering all the Americans that died during that "bringing humanity together" period and all the segregation imposed by the invaders that has been in place until not that many decades ago
  - aksss 2y ago
    What do you consider ironic about two groups of long-isolated (from each other) humans making contact and there being conflict? There are no similar events at this scale to compare to (what is your context for irony?). Looking at the smaller-scale examples, the presence of conflict seems entirely consistent, and hardly ironic. I’m guessing you’re reading “brought together” as some sort of idiom for happiness and mutual understanding. That would be an incorrect reading, in which you are adding your own meaning and assumptions to what was written. Take it more literally.
    - netdevnet 2y ago
      I considered ironic that the user used a positive expression "humanity coming together" for what was one of the most destructive invasions in human history. I suggest you ask any native to America what they think about that term? "humanity coming together" is definitely a positive expression. The cambridge dictionary says "to help people or groups to become friendly or to do something together, especially when they would not usually do this". And if you look at the user's text the act of "bringing people together" is framed as something morally good/worthy. In this context, our explorer faced many challenges but achieved something good (i.e. bringing people together). Imagine if we used that term for other horrifying events in history where a group of people unalived a country's worth of another group of people
chipdart 2y ago
> How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"? The question is not whether Columbus was Jewish of not. The question is whether he was actually Spanish. As the article states, that's heavily disputed. From the article: > Over the centuries, it has been suggested that the explorer could have been Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or Scottish. The article leads by referring to Columbus as a son of Genoa. Then a Spanish researcher decides to claim Columbus is Spanish on Spain's national day, supposedly based on an authoritative scientific study but in spite of not presenting any evidence that supports his claim.
pvaldes 2y ago
Somebody: changes history forever. People: "booh, he is not important at all, even my cousin could have discovered a new continent"... LOL, what happened with the new generations?
- juunpp 2y ago
  We've been spoiled, walking over the puddle isn't particularly interesting anymore :) But in all seriousness, things like electricity or the atom are more interesting discoveries than a guy misjudging the size of the Earth and being lucky enough to not die halfway through his voyage paid for by two monarchs who just so happened to be looking for new enterprises to invest in.
ywvcbk 2y ago
> and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) That’s closer to a piece of historical trivia though, the Viking discovery of North America had very limited impact and nobody in Europe was aware of it or understood the significance. What Columbus did led to dozens of other expeditions almost immediately. Within a few decades the largest the New World states were subjugated by Europeans and some of the worst recorded epidemics in human history swept the continent decimating societies which hadn’t even had any direct contact with Europeans yet. He also allowed Spain to become the preeminent European power for the next century or so. How is that not extremely significant?
Affric 2y ago
Why is the ‘reconquista’ “ill named”? Also, Columbus largely made his own legend. Everyone told him he was wrong (and he was) but he just so happened to discover land people might actually want. And so he was very much vindicated by the discovery in his own eyes. And it was daring. Everyone rightly told him he was mad and incorrectly told him he would die. It was one of the craziest expeditions of all time. And because of it the Spanish Empire became one of the richest the world has ever seen, the legacy of which is still felt today. This is not to Lionise Columbus but you have to acknowledge the context of the time. Greenland and Newfoundland were not well known and are a long way from the latitude Columbus was aiming at. He was an idiot, and cruel by our standards, but he was great.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  I seriously doubt he was an idiot. But his thinking was constrained by what was known at the time and what was commonly thought to be true. Our modern thinking is also constrained by similar misjudgments, we just like to think we're smarter than that. 500 years hence, people will laugh at our idiocy.
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    Knowledgeable Europeans knew that the Earth was round and they knew its size to within a few percent. Columbus thought that the Earth was much smaller though, and in that belief "he was an idiot". It's quite possible that he was trying to make an impossible voyage seem possible, but then again, he didn't take enough provisions, and it was almost a total loss.
    - jjk166 2y ago
      This is not accurate. Everyone knew the Earth was round and had a good knowledge of the Earth's circumference, as this can be determined with geometry and some basic measurements. What was not well known at the time was the size of Asia, and specifically the distance from Asia's eastern coastline to Japan's easternmost islands, due to the lack of surveying data. Columbus grossly overestimated the size of Asia such that Japan would be approximately where North America actually is.
WalterBright 2y ago
There are many claims of discovery of the Americas (even by ice age Frenchmen), but the one that had impact was Columbus'.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- netdevnet 2y ago
  Pretty sure France wasn't a thing in the ice age
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    They were people living in what is now called France. Nova did an episode on it.
    - Tainnor 2y ago
      Yes and they weren't "Frenchmen".
      - aksss 2y ago
        Even when there was a nominal French kingdom, substantial "state" intervention was required to form a cohesive cultural identity, ironing out dramatic regional linguistic differences, systems of measurement, etc. Definitely a "beat it fit, paint it to match" kind of situation. Still, it's fun to imagine that if you time-machined back to a gallic region in the ice age, you'd come across a guy who'd strike you as remarkably "French". Like, "ohhh.. this guy." HA! I would love him as dearly as all humanity. :D
        netdevnet 2y ago
        So supressing the cultural diversity of the region? Bretons are/were likely unhappy
netdevnet 2y ago
The relevant bit is him being Spanish. That's what makes it appealing to the target audience of the article. Him not being catholic is not relevant and gets swept under the rug the same way the gypsy origin of flamenco (now considered spain's most popular form of folk music) get swept under the rug due to its popularity.

by juunpp 2y ago

shsbdksn 2y ago

Ill named?

juunpp 2y ago
Ill-named because it wasn't a reconquest of anything; Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that. It was a bunch of tribes originally, followed by the Greeks settling in, then the Romans, then the Visigoths, and then the Arabs. A mesh of many cultures until the main kingdoms united and wiped the land of "non-Christian blood". And thereafter the Spanish government has gone back and forth trying to wipe the remaining cultures in the peninsula to impose its own, as can be learned from the recent history of the past century. Nothing to be proud of, really. I actually hope Columbus turns out to be Jew so they stop talking about him.
- LAC-Tech 2y ago
  Surely the intent of the name was a "re-conquest of Iberia from muslims by christians".
  - juunpp 2y ago
    Named by whom? The term did not even show up until the 20th century, so it wasn't the christians who named it like that. Pure Spanish myth. Oh, and the battle that started it all? Never even existed. Pure historical revisionism for nationalistic purposes with no more reality that horned vikings. There are many things wrong with the term. A "reconquest" also makes it sound like the area was under siege by the Arabs or something. But the fact of the matter is that the peninsula, except for perhaps the Basque country, has been a melting pot of cultures under the succession of rules by larger empires. It's not like those christians, or the "Spanish", held control at some point, lost it, and then got it back; they never had it in the first place or even existed as a nation. So it's just a ridiculous term altogether. https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/472055743507/historia-y-vida-reconquista-al-andalus-historia-rae-don-pelayo-covadonga.html https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574... https://blogs.elpais.com/historias/2015/04/la-batalla-de-covadonga-casi-1300-a%C3%B1os-despu%C3%A9s.html https://blogs.elpais.com/historias/2015/04/la-batalla-de-cov...
    - xeromal 2y ago
      Regardless of the term I'm glad it happened
      - juunpp 2y ago
        Why?
        kyleee 2y ago
        Red wine and tapas instead of the religion of peace?
        Tainnor 2y ago
        It wasn't all sunshine and roses back then. When the Reconquista was completed, one of the first thing Spain did was expel all the Jews. Jews could in theory convert to Christianity instead, but then they became the prime targets of the Spanish Inquisition. We should be careful not mindlessly apply our modern ideas of Islam and Christianity to a completely different time period.
- WorkerBee28474 2y ago
  You pretend like it was a bunch of villages living in happy harmony until the Catholics arrived. You're lying. It was part of the post-Roman empire, then it got conquered by Muslims, then it got re-conquered by Catholics. Hence, reconquista.
  - juunpp 2y ago
    I don't pretend or lie. Historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation with the Catholic monarchs. Spain did not exist as a nation prior to then. Hence, nothing to conquer "back", just a succession of empires and smaller kingdoms and a melting of cultures consolidating into the birth of the nation that it is today.
    - WorkerBee28474 2y ago
      What was 'conquered back' was the Iberian Peninsula. Whether or not a particular state was there at the time doesn't matter, the land and people were conquered and reconquered.
    - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
      You're making this weird semantic distinction that is irrelevant. Nobody is arguing that Spain was a single, completely unified polity before the Islamic conquests. But it was controlled by the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of Spain, and then it was conquered by the Islamic Umayyads, so the reconquista was to bring it back under Christian rule.
      - juunpp 2y ago
        The semantic distinction is relevant because Reconquista, with the capital R and everything, is an ideological, propagandistic narrative by the Spanish (central government) originating in the 20th century.
        cryptonector 2y ago
        If we're going to be pedantic, the capital-R Reconquista name for the process of the -uh- re-conquest of Spain was introduced in the 19th century. And it was used throughout Latin America in elementary schoolbooks at least in the 1980s. Franco might have wanted to do some propagandizing with the term, but it was mainly seen as a non-partisan propaganda because Catholicism was a unifying force in Hispanic cultures rather than a partisan and divisive one.
- shsbdksn 2y ago
  That's a very strange way to present Spanish history. Spain was unified province of Rome, and then its own country under the Visigoths for a total of 800 years. That's 800 years of unified governance. Spain had a common language (vulgate) and religion (various sects of christianity). We have the pre-Islamic negotiations on issues of Faith. The Visigoths were Arians but slowly became Catholics. We have the history of countless councils. Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take. And it's ridiculous to think it could have been - where did the people to fight the most powerful army of the day come from? Asturias is just not that big.
  - juunpp 2y ago
    Hispania constituted several Roman provinces. I'm not sure what you mean by "unified". Unified legally under the Roman empire, sure, but not as a nation or even culturally. (By that token, we could say "Spain" was unified under the Arabs, too.) It is not until the marriage of the Catholic monarchs that historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation. So "reconquista" doesn't add up to reality; "unification" or "birth" would be a better term. I think your other points are fine, thanks for adding. > Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take. It was fairly a walk in the park for them; took only a decade to get the peninsula under control and venture into France, until they lost their first battle there. That, and the Basque country; nobody can conquer the Basque country, which is why they speak a non-romance language to this day, among other things.
    - anon291 2y ago
      There was no such thing as nations in the way we think about them today back then.
    - felipeerias 2y ago
      The provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the Balearic Islands and the coast south of the strait of Gibraltar, formed the Diocese of Hispania until the Germanic invasions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocese_of_Hispania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocese_of_Hispania
- anon291 2y ago
  The Arabians were a conquering people in the peninsula. In that sense, kicking them out is absolutely a reconquista, and this sort of absolute denial of that is just flat out historical revisionism.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  Reconquista is an anachronistic concept here, but so are nations in the modern sense. Instead of looking at the wars in Iberia in isolation, it's better to consider them in the context of the wider Europe. Medieval Europeans saw Christendom as the legitimate successor of the Roman Empire. (Or at least the elites did.) Many wars were fought to expand the borders of Christendom. Some of them against pagans, and some to take back land that used to be Christian. The wars that are often called the Reconquista were part of the latter. So, in a sense, it was not about taking Spanish land back for Spain, but about taking Roman land back for Rome.
- felipeerias 2y ago
  I've read different versions of that argument and it essentially boils down to saying that the Reconquista did not exist because there wasn't one single political entity implementing one single military plan over seven centuries. This obscures the fact that there was ample religious, social, linguistic, and even legal (Liber Iudiciorum) continuity since Late Antiquity.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  The Iberic peninsula had been conquered by Arab Muslims, who moved into France before being pushed back. The term "Reconquista" is perfectly suited to describe what hapoened: European Christians re-conquered that land. Especially in term of Christendom this was a re-conquest.

toyg 2y ago

> since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat Actually, most Greek knowledge had fundamentally disappeared from Western Europe for centuries, even before the official dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Some of it had just reappeared in the XV century, largely through translations of Arabic books; this is why the Renaissance produced so much stuff inspired by classic material - because it was all new and exciting to the people of the period, like they'd rediscovered an ancient civilization! Also by "people" here we are literally talking about the 0.1% - educated people who could read and had access to books, which at the time were very rare and super expensive. What the vikings did was not common knowledge, because basically they didn't come back regularly and so there was no real knowledge of their actions anywhere in Europe. The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between.

lamp_book 2y ago
IIRC what Columbus didn't know was Eratosthones calculation of the circumference of the Earth that was <1% off, but believed Ptolemy's ~30% short estimation and figured there was no land in between Europe and the East Indies.
juunpp 2y ago
Thomas Aquinas (medieval Catholic philosopher) knew the Earth was round [1]. If your first point was to suggest that the roundness of the Earth disappeared with ancient Greece -- that didn't happen. Nor did the Renaissance rediscover that point, specifically. > The consensus at the time, among the learned (i.e. Catholic Church and a few scientists with royal patronage here and there) was that the Earth was probably round, and probably small enough that you could maybe sail all the way to China and India from the edge of Europe - but they had no idea that there was land in between. The first point is not probabilistic. The second, sure. It's only some Americans at this point who doubt the Earth is round. [1] From Aquinas' Summa; search for "Earth": https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm (the also section has nothing to do with the Earth; he just drops that casually as an example in his reply to the objection in question.)

Tainnor 2y ago

> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me. Columbus was also famously a big idiot that just got lucky. He believed for some reason that the earth was much smaller than it actually was (contrary to established belief at the time) and that he could easily find a way to India by travelling over the Atlantic. If the Americas didn't exist, he and his crew would have died at sea. He remained convinced that the territory he discovered was part of India until his death.

kajecounterhack 2y ago
Not to mention that he was hugely genocidal and enslaved the Tainos; who really wants to lay claim to that.
- juunpp 2y ago
  I don't know that Columbus was genocidal. He was a slaver, rapist, murderer, gold digger and all-round motherfucker for sure, so much so that the Spanish monarchy sent an envoy to arrest him, bring him back to Spain to be tried, and threw him in jail I think for a couple years. Aside from gold and spices sent from him back to the Spanish monarchs after his first arrival, he also sent back slaves and the queen was, presumably, utterly disgusted. But as far as I know, his exploits did not amount to "genocidal". I'm less certain about this than my other points, though. Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.
  - kajecounterhack 2y ago
    def genocidal: relating to or involving the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. Pedantic to say that Columbus subjugating entire people groups with mass murder doesn't qualify here. The manpower skew was huge, so how exactly did they subjugate the Tainos without genocide? 7M tainos died when all was said and done.

lamontcg 2y ago

> Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either. Presumably, if he had more evidence, he would be displaying it in order to make his case better.

imjonse 2y ago

And the edict for expulsion of practicing Jews was issued in 1492, same year of Columbus's first voyage.

amiga386 2y ago

> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. He is primarily of interest because Italian-Americans want a feeling of pride and so celebrate "one of their own", the Genovese Columbus. And America is very big and important, so whatever it cares about, a lot of other people care about. If you were Canadian instead, you'd probably be genned up on John Cabot (also Genovese) and Newfoundland and CODFISH! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds8G9sFOK5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds8G9sFOK5w] There's no point sneering that Leif Erikson got there first, Europe as a whole did not particularly know The Americas existed until Columbus confirmed it. Then they rushed to colonise it... which is where most of the Americans (and Canadians) ultimately come from. So that's why it's important to so many of them.

grardb 2y ago
> He is primarily of interest because Italian-Americans want a feeling of pride and so celebrate "one of their own", the Genovese Columbus. May I ask why you hold this opinion? I grew up with tons of Italian-Americans (NYC) and I can confidently say that I've never heard a single person express pride in the fact that Columbus was Italian. In fact, based on my experience, a lot of Americans—regardless of descent—think/were explicitly taught that Columbus was Spanish.
- amiga386 2y ago
  I looked into it a few years ago when then anti-colonialists were insisting that the US should drop Columbus Day (or replace it with a Columbus' Victims Day) as they see him as a symbol of colonialism, eradication of natives, and support for slavery. You might ask "if he's so evil and wicked and wrong and everything bad about the world (and not just a convenient famous person to scapegoat for more general ills), why did anyone ask the US to have a Columbus Day anyway?" And the answer to that is Italian-Americans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day > Many Italian Americans observe Columbus Day as a celebration of their heritage and not of Columbus himself > For the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1892, following lynchings in New Orleans, where a mob had murdered 11 Italian immigrants, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration. > In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and New York City Italian leader Generoso Pope, Congress passed a statute stating: "The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation designating October 12 as Columbus Day > in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt had the removal of the designation of Italian Americans as "enemy aliens" announced on Columbus Day along with a plan to offer citizenship to 200,000 elderly Italians living in the United States > In 1966, Mariano A. Lucca, from Buffalo, New York, founded the National Columbus Day Committee, which lobbied to make Columbus Day a federal holiday > San Francisco claims the nation's oldest continuously existing celebration with the Italian-American community's annual Columbus Day Parade, which was established by Nicola Larco in 1868, while New York City boasts the largest, with over 35,000 marchers and one million viewers around 2010 So, while the Italian-Americans you grew up with may not have been one of the 35,000 marchers in NYC, I bet most of those 35,000 marchers considers themselves Italian-American. They, and all other Italian-Americans, get a federal holiday which they can use to celebrate the connection between Italy and America (if they so wish), thanks to Italian-Americans lobbying for Columbus Day since the 1800s.

aksss 2y ago

> I don’t understand boners Well, he literally got into a 70-ft wooden sailboat and crossed the Atlantic ocean with no certainty of landfall, basically sailing on spec, and because of that voyage, opened up a new hemisphere of the planet to development, and (with unfortunate but inevitable awful consequence) brought humanity together again after a substantial period of isolation. We admire the Pacific Islanders for similar navigation feats as they travelled eastward, and the Vikings for traveling westward to Greenland and America, but neither of those efforts had so profound an effect as what Columbus pulled off.

netdevnet 2y ago
> brought humanity together again This is such a culturally insensitive thing to say. And very ironic considering all the Americans that died during that "bringing humanity together" period and all the segregation imposed by the invaders that has been in place until not that many decades ago
- aksss 2y ago
  What do you consider ironic about two groups of long-isolated (from each other) humans making contact and there being conflict? There are no similar events at this scale to compare to (what is your context for irony?). Looking at the smaller-scale examples, the presence of conflict seems entirely consistent, and hardly ironic. I’m guessing you’re reading “brought together” as some sort of idiom for happiness and mutual understanding. That would be an incorrect reading, in which you are adding your own meaning and assumptions to what was written. Take it more literally.
  - netdevnet 2y ago
    I considered ironic that the user used a positive expression "humanity coming together" for what was one of the most destructive invasions in human history. I suggest you ask any native to America what they think about that term? "humanity coming together" is definitely a positive expression. The cambridge dictionary says "to help people or groups to become friendly or to do something together, especially when they would not usually do this". And if you look at the user's text the act of "bringing people together" is framed as something morally good/worthy. In this context, our explorer faced many challenges but achieved something good (i.e. bringing people together). Imagine if we used that term for other horrifying events in history where a group of people unalived a country's worth of another group of people

chipdart 2y ago

> How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"? The question is not whether Columbus was Jewish of not. The question is whether he was actually Spanish. As the article states, that's heavily disputed. From the article: > Over the centuries, it has been suggested that the explorer could have been Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or Scottish. The article leads by referring to Columbus as a son of Genoa. Then a Spanish researcher decides to claim Columbus is Spanish on Spain's national day, supposedly based on an authoritative scientific study but in spite of not presenting any evidence that supports his claim.

pvaldes 2y ago

Somebody: changes history forever. People: "booh, he is not important at all, even my cousin could have discovered a new continent"... LOL, what happened with the new generations?

juunpp 2y ago
We've been spoiled, walking over the puddle isn't particularly interesting anymore :) But in all seriousness, things like electricity or the atom are more interesting discoveries than a guy misjudging the size of the Earth and being lucky enough to not die halfway through his voyage paid for by two monarchs who just so happened to be looking for new enterprises to invest in.

ywvcbk 2y ago

> and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) That’s closer to a piece of historical trivia though, the Viking discovery of North America had very limited impact and nobody in Europe was aware of it or understood the significance. What Columbus did led to dozens of other expeditions almost immediately. Within a few decades the largest the New World states were subjugated by Europeans and some of the worst recorded epidemics in human history swept the continent decimating societies which hadn’t even had any direct contact with Europeans yet. He also allowed Spain to become the preeminent European power for the next century or so. How is that not extremely significant?

Affric 2y ago

Why is the ‘reconquista’ “ill named”? Also, Columbus largely made his own legend. Everyone told him he was wrong (and he was) but he just so happened to discover land people might actually want. And so he was very much vindicated by the discovery in his own eyes. And it was daring. Everyone rightly told him he was mad and incorrectly told him he would die. It was one of the craziest expeditions of all time. And because of it the Spanish Empire became one of the richest the world has ever seen, the legacy of which is still felt today. This is not to Lionise Columbus but you have to acknowledge the context of the time. Greenland and Newfoundland were not well known and are a long way from the latitude Columbus was aiming at. He was an idiot, and cruel by our standards, but he was great.

WalterBright 2y ago
I seriously doubt he was an idiot. But his thinking was constrained by what was known at the time and what was commonly thought to be true. Our modern thinking is also constrained by similar misjudgments, we just like to think we're smarter than that. 500 years hence, people will laugh at our idiocy.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  Knowledgeable Europeans knew that the Earth was round and they knew its size to within a few percent. Columbus thought that the Earth was much smaller though, and in that belief "he was an idiot". It's quite possible that he was trying to make an impossible voyage seem possible, but then again, he didn't take enough provisions, and it was almost a total loss.
  - jjk166 2y ago
    This is not accurate. Everyone knew the Earth was round and had a good knowledge of the Earth's circumference, as this can be determined with geometry and some basic measurements. What was not well known at the time was the size of Asia, and specifically the distance from Asia's eastern coastline to Japan's easternmost islands, due to the lack of surveying data. Columbus grossly overestimated the size of Asia such that Japan would be approximately where North America actually is.

WalterBright 2y ago

There are many claims of discovery of the Americas (even by ice age Frenchmen), but the one that had impact was Columbus'.

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netdevnet 2y ago
Pretty sure France wasn't a thing in the ice age
- WalterBright 2y ago
  They were people living in what is now called France. Nova did an episode on it.
  - Tainnor 2y ago
    Yes and they weren't "Frenchmen".
    - aksss 2y ago
      Even when there was a nominal French kingdom, substantial "state" intervention was required to form a cohesive cultural identity, ironing out dramatic regional linguistic differences, systems of measurement, etc. Definitely a "beat it fit, paint it to match" kind of situation. Still, it's fun to imagine that if you time-machined back to a gallic region in the ice age, you'd come across a guy who'd strike you as remarkably "French". Like, "ohhh.. this guy." HA! I would love him as dearly as all humanity. :D
      - netdevnet 2y ago
        So supressing the cultural diversity of the region? Bretons are/were likely unhappy

netdevnet 2y ago

The relevant bit is him being Spanish. That's what makes it appealing to the target audience of the article. Him not being catholic is not relevant and gets swept under the rug the same way the gypsy origin of flamenco (now considered spain's most popular form of folk music) get swept under the rug due to its popularity.