american-holocaust

THE SPAIN THAT Christopher Columbus and his crews left behind justbefore dawn on August 3, 1492, as they sailed forth from Palos andout into the Atlantic, was for most of its people a land of violence,squalor, treachery, and intolerance. In this respect Spain was no differentfrom the rest of Europe.Epidemic outbreaks of plague and smallpox, along with routine attacksof measles, influenza, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid fever, and more, frequentlyswept European cities and towns dean of 10 to 20 percent of theirpopulations at a single stroke. As late as the mid-seventeenth century morethan 80,000 Londoners-one out of every six residents in the city-diedfrom plague in a matter of months. And again and again, as with its companiondiseases, the pestilence they called the Black Death returned. Likemost of the other urban centers in Europe, says one historian who hasspecialized in the subject, "every twenty-five or thirty years-sometimesmore frequently-the city was convulsed by a great epidemic." 1 Indeed,for centuries an individual's life chances in Europe's pesthouse cities wereso poor that the natural populations of the towns were in perpetual declinethat was offset only by in-migration from the countryside-in-migration,says one historian, that was "vital if [the cities] were to be preserved fromextinction." 2Famine, too, was common. What J. H. Elliott has said of sixteenthcenturySpain had held true throughout the Continent for generations beyondmemory: ''The rich ate, and ate to excess, watched by a thousandhungry eyes as they consumed their gargantuan meals. The rest of thepopulation starved." 3 This was in normal times. The slightest fluctuationin food prices could cause the sudden deaths of additional tens of thou-