An appendix to A Sickness of the Heart

2009, HarperCollins, NY, Chapter 2, pages 27-53, 1492, The Year the World Began

In the year that Columbus sailed on his world-transforming voyage of duplicity his Spanish master and mistress had final rolled back the Islamic incursion into Western Europe that had stood for over half a millennia.

This brief history is tellingly titled ‘To Constitute Spain in Service of God’ and catches the mood of a medieval state that was about to kick-start an early modern global slave empire which continues to echo in our everyday lives. Armesto takes pains to point out how modern Spain was not, which would have many implications in the century to come. My favorite nugget of perspective is the fact that 15th Century medical science did not recognize women as a separate gender, but as defective men, “nature’s botched jobs”!

The gradual conquest of the Moors and their expulsion exposes a rising Iberian power that had barely sufficient cohesion to establish national borders. The Spain of Columbus’ day had just taken generations to conquer a few small stone age islands. It becomes obvious in retrospect that any large scale exploration and conquest of new found territories would have to be conducted via gangster like cartels. Armesto does an effective sketch of a land where communication was so primitive that the government must be mobile and on the road just to administer the realm.

How does such a state finance and manage an undertaking that would be the modern equivalent of finding, conquering, and exploiting an inhabited moon?