5. Quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), Volume One, p. 519.
6. Micheline Baulant, “Le prix des grains à Paris,” Annales, 3 (1968), 538. The relationship between famine and disease, while profound, is not quite so simple as this comment suggests. For an example of more nuanced analysis of the interaction between nutritional deficiency and infection in European history, see John D. Post, “The Mortality Crises of the Early 1770s and European Demographic Trends,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 21 (1990), 29–62.
7. See, for example, material in Angus MacKay, “Pogroms in Fifteenth Century Castille,” Past and Present, 55 (1972), 33–67.
8. For one example of a historical effort to sort out deaths from disease and deaths from famine that demonstrates just how difficult a task it is, see Andrew B. Appleby, “Disease or Famine? Mortality in Cumberland and Westmorland, 1580–1640,” The Economic History Review, Second Series, 26 (1973), 403–31.
9. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 77–78.
10. Ibid., p. 487.
11. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), pp. 191–205, for this and more on the “violent manners [and] brutality of passions” that characterized urban Europe at this time. (The quotations in the text from Elias and Huizinga are on pp. 195 and 203.) Incidentally, the famous essay by Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin,” in Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 75–104, refers to an incident that occurred in Paris three centuries or so after the time we are discussing here, but a time when “the torture of animals, especially cats, was [still] a popular amusement” (p. 90). For some cogent recent comments on this article itself, see Harold Mah, “Suppressing the Text: The Metaphysics of Ethnographic History in Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre,” History Workshop, 31 (1991), 1–20.
12. Quoted in Jacques Boulanger, The Seventeenth Century in France (New York: Capricorn Books, 1963), p. 354.
13. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, pp. 98–99; H.C. Eric Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), p. 137; Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 254.
14. Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 18, 20.
15. Ibid., 21–24.
16. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), pp. 205, 216–17; Braudel, The Mediterranean, Volume One, pp. 258–59.
17. Michael W. Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500–1820 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 16–17.
18. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these practices had become so epidemic that foundling hospitals were created in European cities, but they then became little more than dumping grounds for hundreds of thousands of infants, from which few children ever emerged alive. There is a large literature on this, but see especially: Thomas R. Forbes, “Deadly Parents: Child Homicide in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England,” The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 41 (1986), 175–99; Ruth K. McClure, Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Rachel Fuchs, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth Century France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); and David I. Kertzer, “Gender Ideology and Infant Abandonment in Nineteenth Century Italy” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 22 (1991), esp. 5–9.
19. Letter of Piero Benintendi, “News from Genoa,” in Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, eds., Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), pp. 401, 402–403.
20. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 407, note 27. Boswell also quotes here from different portions of the above-cited letter.
21. Louis B. Wright, Gold, Glory, and the Gospel: The Adventurous Lives and Times of the Renaissance Explorers (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 16–17; Braudel, The Mediterranean, Volume One, p. 462.
22. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Revised Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 84.
23. See, for example, Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, passim; and R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
24. Bartholomew Senarega, De Rubus Genuensibus, 1388–1514, quoted in Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, p. 406.
25. The matter of starvation caused by inadequate supplies of grain perhaps deserves a brief digression. The French historian Pierre Chaunu has argued that the failing agricultural system of Europe, which was unable regularly to feed all but the well-to-do, acted as a spur to post-Columbian European expansion. He no doubt is correct in this, at least in part, and such New World foods as potatoes, beans, and maize have contributed greatly to European diets since the sixteenth century. But in the wake of that expansion, as gold and silver flowed in from forced-labor mines in Mexico and Peru, a terrible irony occurred: the price of grain in Europe, like everything else, spiraled upward with inflation—and the European poor continued to starve. Pierre Chaunu, European Expansion in the Later Middle Ages, translated by Katharine Bertram (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 283–88; on the importance of American foodstuffs to Old World diets, see Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), pp. 165–207; on the sixteenth century rise in prices, see Braudel, The Mediterranean, Volume One, pp. 516—42.
26. “Columbus’s Letter to the Sovereigns on His First Voyage, 15 February—4 March, 1493,” in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: The Heritage Press, 1963), pp. 182–83.
27. Ibid., p. 183.
28. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, “Sketch for a Natural History of Paradise,” in Clifford Geertz, ed., Myth, Symbol, and Culture (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971), p. 119.
29. Despite his legendary sailing skills, Columbus has been roundly criticized on this point by several writers, most recently and most harshly by Kirkpatrick Sale in The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 209–11 and 381–82.
30. Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), p. 6.
31. Ibid., p. 47.
32. Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, pp. 96, 105.
33. Arthur Helps, The Spanish Conquest in America (London: John Lane, 1900), Volume One, pp. 264–67.
34. Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p.148.
35. Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, p. 93.
36. Ibid., p. 226.
37. Ibid., p. 227.
38. Michele de Cuneo, “Letter on the Second Voyage,” in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, pp. 213–14.
39. Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 76: Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492–1616 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 118; Sale, Conquest of Paradise, p. 149.
40. Frederick L. Dunn, “On the Antiquity of Malaria in the Western Hemisphere,” Human Biology, 37 (1965), 385–93; Saul Jarcho, “Some Observations on Disease in Prehistoric North
America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 38 (1964), 1–19.
41. On yellow fever, see Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia Himmelsteib King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 31–35. On smallpox in the Americas generally, as well as on this point, see Dauril Alden and Joseph C. Miller, “Unwanted Cargoes: The Origins and Dissemination of Smallpox via the Slave Trade from Africa to Brazil, c. 1560–1830,” in Kenneth F. Kiple, ed., The African Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 35–109.
42. Francisco Guerra, “The Earliest American Epidemic: The Influenza of 1493,” Social Science History, 12 (1988), 305–25.
43. Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 33 (1976), 293–94; Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), p. 18. For a discussion of zoonotic diseases from wildlife on this question, see Calvin Martin, “Wildlife Diseases as a Factor in the Depopulation of the North American Indian,” The Western Historical Quarterly, 7 (1976), 47–62. There are some nagging problems with Guerra’s thesis that need to be addressed. Key among them concern the relatively short incubation period for influenza, which makes it unlikely that the virus could have survived the lengthy ocean voyage (unless it was kept active by passing from host to host), and the difficulty of explaining how the virus was so well contained among the sows, even if they were stored below deck, and did not spread to the shipboard humans until the ships’ arrival at the future site of Isabela. An answer to at least one of these problems may emerge from some new research on influenza suggesting that, in addition to direct host-to-victim transferral of the virus, many cases may be spread by symptomless year-round carriers of the disease in whom contagion is triggered by an unknown mechanism during so-called “flu seasons.” See R.E. Hope-Simpson and D.B. Golubev, “A New Concept of the Epidemic Process of Influenza A Virus,” Epidemiology and Infection, 99 (1987), 5–54.1 have discussed this elsewhere in Before the Horror: The Population of Hawai‘i on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu: Social Science Research Institute and University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989), pp. 74–75, and in a symposium on that book published in Pacific Studies, 13 (1990), esp. 292–94.
44. Quoted in Guerra, “Earliest American Epidemic,” 312–13.
45. Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, p. 65.
46. Fernando Colón, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand, translated by Benjamin Keen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1959), p. 170. For another instance, in which the Spanish provoked the natives to throw rocks at them, causing a Spanish retaliation that casually killed a couple of dozen Indians, see the report by Cuneo in Morison, Journals and Other Documents, p. 222.
47. Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account [1542], translated by Herma Briffault (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), pp. 54–55.
48. Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 86–87.
49. Bartolomé de Las Casas History of the Indies, translated and edited by Andree Collard (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 94.
50. Quoted in Todorov, Conquest of America, pp. 139–40.
51. Ibid., p. 139.
52. Las Casas, History of the Indies, p. 121.
53. Sauer, Early Spanish Main, p. 89.
54. Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, “The Aboriginal Population of Hispaniola,” in Cook and Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), Volume One, pp. 402–403.
55. Linda Newson, The Cost of Conquest: Indian Decline in Honduras Under Spanish Rule (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1986), pp. 107–108.
56. Saver, Early Spanish Main, p. 101.
57. Las Casas, History of the Indies, p. 111.
58. Ibid., pp. 112, 114.
59. Quoted in John Boyd Thatcher, Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Work, His Remains (New York: Putnam’s, 1903), Volume Two, pp. 348–49.
60. Las Casas, History of the Indies, p. 110.
61. Cook and Borah, “Aboriginal Population of Hispaniola,” p. 401.
62. For a list of these and other twentieth-century genocides, including estimates of numbers killed, see Barbara Harff, “The Etiology of Genocides,” in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds., Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 46, Table 3.1.
63. Inga Clendinnen, “The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society,” Past and Present, 107 (1985), 44–89.
64. Ross Hassig, Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), p. 237.
65. Ibid., pp. 241–42.
66. Hernan Cortés, Letters from Mexico, translated and edited by A.R. Pagden (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971), p. 249.
67. Inga Clendinnen, “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico,” Representations, 33 (1991), 70, 78; Hassig, Aztec Warfare, pp. 242–43.
68. Bernardino de Sahagún, Conquest of New Spain, [1585 edition] translated by Howard F. Cline (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989), pp. 76–77.
69. Ibid., pp. 78–89.
70. David Henige, “When Did Smallpox Reach the New World (And Why Does It Matter)?” in Paul E. Lovejoy, ed., Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin African Studies Program, 1986), pp. 11–26.
71. Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés: The Life of the Conquerer by His Secretary, translated and edited by Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 204–205.
72. On the impact of smallpox in the struggle for Tenochtitlán, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), pp. 35–63.
73. Clendinnen, “Tierce and Unnatural Cruelty,’” 83.
74. See Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).
75. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521, translated by A.P. Maudslay (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928), p. 545.
76. Cortés, Letters from Mexico, pp. 252–53.
77. Ibid., pp. 257–62.
78. Ibid., p. 263.
79. Pedro de Cieza de León, The Incas, translated by Harriet de Onis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), p. 180.
80. Quoted in William Brandon, New Worlds for Old: Reports from the New World and Their Effect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe, 1500–1800 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986), p. 159. See also Brandon’s brief further comments, pp. 159, 205. For some recent discussion on exaggerated estimates of human sacrifice in the New World, in India, and in Africa, see Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1517–1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Nigel Davies, “Human Sacrifice in the Old World and the New: Some Similarities and Differences,” in Elizabeth H. Boone, ed., Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 1984), pp. 220–22; James D. Graham, “The Slave Trade, Depopulation, and Human Sacrifice in Benin History,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 5 (1965), 317–34; and Philip A. Igbafe, Benin Under British Administration (London: Longman, 1979), esp. pp. 40–49, 70–72.
81. Miguel Leon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), p. 140.
82. Cortés, Letters from Mexico, pp. 265–66.
83. France V. Scholes, “The Spanish Conqueror as a Business Man: A Chapter in the History of Fernando Cortés,” New Mexico Quarterly, 28 (1958), pp. 11, 16, 18, 21. Scholes calculated Cortés’s net worth after the
conquest of Tenochtitlán to have been “at least $2,500,000” in 1958 currency; according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, that is the equivalent of more than $10,000,000 in 1990.
84. Quoted in Pedro de Alvarado, An Account of the Conquest of Guatemala in 1524, ed. Sedley J. Mackie (Boston: Milford House, 1972), pp. 126–32.
85. For these and other enumerations, see Daniel T. Reff, Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991), pp. 194–242.
86. Crosby, Columbian Exchange, p. 50; Newson, The Cost of Conquest, pp. 109–110, 127.
87. Diego de Landa and Lorenzo de Bienvenida are quoted in Grant D. Jones, Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule: Time and History on a Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), pp. 42–43.
88. Alonzo de Zorita, Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico: The Brief and Summary Relation of the Lords of New Spain, translated by Benjamin Keen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), p. 210.
89. There is a photograph of this façade in Robert S. Weddle, Spanish Sea: The Gulf of Mexico in North American Discovery, 1500–1685 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1985), between pages 158 and 159.
90. This handful of examples, from a seemingly endless library of such tales, comes from William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth Century Central America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 44–45, 61, 268; Zorita, Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico, p. 210; Jones, Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule, pp. 42–43; and Alvarado, An Account of the Conquest of Guatemala, p. 129.
91. John Grier Varner and Jeannette Johnson Varner, Dogs of the Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), pp. 192–93.
92. Ibid., pp. 36–39.
93. Peter Martyr, quoted in Todorov, Conquest of America, p. 141.
94. Sherman, Forced Native Labor, pp. 64–65. On repeated branding as slaves were passed from one owner to another, see Donald E. Chipman, Nuño de Guzmán and the Province of Panuco in New Spain, 1518–1533 (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1967), p. 210.
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