Columbus and the Catholic Crusades

Human Quest, Jan/Feb 2002 by Fahey, Joseph J

It is astonishing to observe how many wars have been waged and how much violence has been committed in the name of Jesus Christ.

It is astonishing because Jesus himself never sanctioned violence: he stood in the Hebrew prophetic tradition which believed that the peaceful Messianic age would "bring good news to the poor," "set at liberty the oppressed," and cause nations to "beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks."

Concerning any kind of violence, Jesus urged an end to the "eye for an eye" ethic through his instruction in the Sermon on the Mount to "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who attack you."

Before his crucifixion at the hands of the Romans, Jesus bestowed "peace" upon his followers, but the supreme irony Is that the peace of Jesus has consistently been invoked by the followers of Jesus to justify the slaughter of innocents for the past seventeen hundred years. What brutal wars, pogroms, Crusades, and Inquisitions have been carried don in his name. Millions of soldiers, as they died of war wounds, devoted their last words to a prayer to this simple Hebrew pacifist, asking God's blessing on the butchery of spiritual brothers and sisters. Slavery, torture, rape, and pillage have been committed in his name. When Christians fought each other - as they frequently have - both sides claimed that Jesus had blessed their cause. Old worlds (which Christians called "new" worlds) were Invaded ("discovered") in the name of Jesus. Indigenous people, cultures, religions, and histories were sacrificed for gold, silver, and slaves on the altar of oblivion.

It is in the context of the history of Christian attitudes toward conquest and war that "High Admiral of the Sea and perpetual Viceroy and Governor of All (discovered) Islands and Continents" Christopher Columbus must be understood. With Admiral Columbus, eleven hundred years of messianic and military history arrived in what would be called the Americas on that fateful day in the fifteenth century, C.E. On October 12, 1492 the Arawak people who greeted the Spanish ships met not only Christopher Columbus. Their real encounter was with the Crusades.

Essential to understanding the Columbian Invasion of the Western Hemisphere is that combination of apocalyptic vision, messianic imperative, financial reward, and territorial expansion which characterized the medieval Crusades and Inquisitions and which molded the world view of Europeans of Columbus' age.

To understand Christopher Columbus as "Crusader," a discussion of the origins of a "just war" and the Crusade in Christian history would be helpful. While Christianity had been a pacifist religion for its first three centuries (based on the Christian Scriptures), a dramatic change occurred in the fourth and fifth centuries when Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo justified war as a Christian enterprise.

The fourth century began with the prohibition of Christian service in the Roman armies and it ended with only Christians being permitted to serve as Roman soldiers. Christian participation in war became possible when: Emperor Constantine accepted Christianity as a legitimate religion within the Roman Empire in 313; Augustine and other theologians abandoned the biblical ideal that a peaceful and socially just Reign of God was possible on this earth. Early Christian theologians came to believe that the Pax Romana (Roman Empire) was the divinely established vehicle to hasten the spread of the Pax Christians (Christian Church) throughout the entire "pagan" world.

Only when the world was totally Christianized could history be ended through the triumphant Second Coming of Christ. Apocalyptic and millenarian theology were always near the surface of Christian missionary and colonial activity. This union of God and Caesar resulted in the Christian embrace of the "just war" principles which had earlier been enunciated by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.

Some Christians believed they had to defend Caesar's realm in order to spread the realm of God to all the earth. But the cold eye of history tells us that offensive wars and invasions are always fought in the name of defense; hence, the "just war" principles have often been used to rationalize offensive or total war.

Augustine himself, for example, although he cautioned that war should be fought with a mournful attitude, nevertheless believed that the "just t war" principles could be used to justify an assault against heretics (the Donatists) as well as for the defense and expansion of the Empire. Hence, the subsequent theological, political, economic and cultural union of the Pax Romana with the Pax Christiana; along with the justification of violence in God's name made violence, repression, conquest, and war inevitable in what was to become In 800 C.E. the Holy Roman Empire. In this political, economic, and theological union of God and King were planted the seeds of the Crusades abroad (eleventh through seventeenth centuries) and Inquisitions at home (twelfth through nineteenth centuries).