american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 207appearance, the sins of the natives were the same--lust, gluttony, carnality,and all the other untamed and un-Christian pleasures of the flesh thatlong had been the distinguishing characteristics of wild men and the monstrous,beastly races.Some of this had been heard before, of course, during the long centuriesof holy war with the Muslims and the equally holy persecution of theJews. But in associating the Indians with wild men and the monstrousraces described in the works of Pliny and John Mandeville something newwas being added-the question of race, the question of the native peoples'very humanity. For while those like Senor Coma of Aragon were drawinga parallel between darkness of flesh and commitment to cannibalismwhileColumbus and others were expounding on an opposite relationship(but one with identical consequences) involving light skin, intelligence, andcloseness to God-still more Spaniards were locating evidence for the Indians'alleged inferiority within their very biology, in what was said to bethe "size and thickness of their skulls," writes J.H. Elliott, "which indicateda deformation in that part of the body which provided an index ofa man's rational powers," and which could be used to support the increasinglypopular idea that the Indians were made by God to be the "naturalslaves" of the Spanish and, indeed, of all Europeans. 34In the preceding chapter we noted that race is an ancient Western conceptand that skin color has long been one of the many characteristics withwhich it has been associated. ("It is significant," writes David Brion Davis,for example, that during the thirteenth-century slave trade "Sicilian officialsqualified the general designation for 'Moor' or 'Saracen' with theLatin terms for 'white,' 'sallow,' and 'black.' " Adds Elena Lourie, alsowriting of the thirteenth century: "Only with great difficulty, after he hadalready been sold as a Muslim slave, did a 'very black man,' 'with thickfeatures,' prove to the authorities· that he was in fact a good Catholic.") 35For most of the duration of this idea's existence, however, race was notseen as an immutable phenomenon. Skin color, for instance, commonlywas viewed as environmentally changeable and, as we have seen, even semihumanmonstrosities-such as the dog-headed beast who became St.Christopher-were susceptible to favorable transformation. Such permutabilityof human essence was thoroughly compatible during Christianity'sreign in Europe with the Church's fervent crusade to bring all the world'speople under its heavenly wing. However, a little more than a centurybefore Columbus put to sea on his journey that would shake the world,cracks began to appear in the edifice of Christianity's racial ecumenism.The cause of the problem was slavery.The booming slave trade in the fourteenth-century Mediterranean was atleast a two-way operation. That is, while Christian Europeans were buyingshiploads of captured infidels, Muslims were doing the same thing-except