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NOTES 299in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: PantheonBooks, 1988), p. 407, note 27. Boswell also quotes here from different portions ofthe above-cited letter.21. Louis B. Wright, Gold, Glory, and the Gospel: The Adventurous Lives andTimes of the Renaissance Explorers (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 16-17;Braude!, The Mediterranean, Volume One, p. 462.22. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and theOrigins of Comparative Ethnology, Revised Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1986), p. 84.23. See, for example, Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons, passim; and R. Po-ChiaHsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1988).24. Bartholomew Senarega, De Rubus Genuensibus, 1388-1514, quoted inBoswell, Kindness of Strangers, p. 406.25. The matter of starvation caused by inadequate supplies of grain perhapsdeserves a brief digression. The French historian Pierre Chaunu has argued thatthe failing agricultural system of Europe, which was unable regularly to feed allbut the well-to-do, acted as a spur to post-Columbian European expansion. He nodoubt 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 sixteenthcentury. But in the wake of that expansion, as gold and silver flowed in fromforced-labor mines in Mexico and Peru, a terrible irony occurred: the price of grainin Europe, like everything else, spiraled upward with inflation-and the Europeanpoor continued to starve. Pierre Chaunu, European Expansion in the Later MiddleAges, translated by Katharine Bertram (Amsterdam: North-Holland PublishingCompany, 1969), pp. 283-88; on the importance of American foodstuffs to OldWorld diets, see Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological andCultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), pp.165-207; on the sixteenth century rise in prices, see Braude!, 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 onthe 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 ofParadise," 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 criticizedon this point by several writers, most recently and most harshly by KirkpatrickSale 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 Prejudicein 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.