american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 187The political implications of this escalating fever of both disquietudeand anticipation grew out of the fact that Joachim and those who werepopularizing his ideas placed the final struggle between ultimate good andultimate evil after the blissful Golden Age. Thus, "Joachim's central messageremained his affirmation of a real-though incomplete-achievementof peace and beatitude within history," a belief that, in the minds of many,"was quickly vulgarized into dreams of world-wide empire." 116 DifferentEuropean nations and their leaders, naturally, tried to claim this mantleandwith it the title of Messiah-Emperor-as their own. But a prominentfollower of Joachim in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, Arnoldof Villanova, had prophesied that the man who would lead humanity toits glorious new day would come from Spain. As we shall see, Columbusknew of this prophecy (though he misidentified it with Joachim himself)and spoke and wrote of it, but he was not alone; for, in the words ofLeonard I. Sweet, as the fifteenth century was drawing to a close theJoachimite scheme regarding the end of time "burst the bounds of Franciscanpiety to submerge Spanish society in a messianic milieu." 117To a stranger visiting Europe during these years, optimism would seemthe most improbable of attitudes. For quite some time the war with theinfidel had been going rather badly; indeed, as one historian has remarked:"as late as 1490 it would have seemed that in the eight-centuries-old strugglebetween the Cross and the Crescent, the latter was on its way to finaltriumph. The future seemed to lie not with Christ but with the Prophet." 118At the end of the thirteenth century Jaffa and Antioch and Tripoli andAcre, the last of the Christian strongholds in the Holy Land, had fallen tothe Muslims, and in 1453 Constantinople had been taken by Sultan MuhammedII. Despite all the rivers of blood that had been shed since thedays of the first Crusade, the influence of Christianity at this moment intime was confined once again to the restricted boundaries of Europe. Andwithin those boundaries things were not going well, either.Since the late fourteenth century, when John Wyclif and his followersin England had publicly attacked the Church's doctrine of transubstantiationand claimed that all godly authority resided in the Scriptures and notto any degree in the good offices of the Church, the rumblings of reformationhad been evident. In the fifteenth century the criticism continued,from a variety of directions and on a variety of matters. On one side, forinstance, there was John Huss, an advocate of some of Wyclif's views anda critic of papal infallibility and the practice of granting indulgences. Forhis troubles, in 1415 Huss was burned at the stake-after the Inquisitorsfirst stripped him of his vestments, cut the shape of a cross in his hair, andplaced on his head a conical paper hat painted with pictures of devilsfollowingwhich war broke out between Hussites and Catholics, war inwhich politics and religion were inextricably intertwined, and war thatcontinued throughout most of the fifteenth century. 119 From another direc-