“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two/Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
We all remember that. But after that basic date, things get a little fuzzy. Here’s what they didn’t tell you–
Most educated people knew that the world was not flat.
Columbus never set foot in what would become America.
Christopher Columbus made four voyages to the so-called New World. And his discoveries opened an astonishing era of exploration and exploitation. His arrival marked the beginning of the end for tens of millions of Native Americans spread across two continents.
Once a hero. Now a villain.
You can read more about Christopher Columbus, his voyages and their impact on American history in Don’t Know Much About History and Don’t Know Much About Geography.

The story of “Isabella’s Pigs,” and the role of Queen Isabella in the making of the New World, is depicted in America’s Hidden History

Don't Know Much About@ History: Anniversary Edition

On March 31, 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand issued the royal edict that forced Jews to convert and be baptized or leave Spain.

Born in April 1451, this remarkable queen was the daughter of Castille’s King Juan. She came of age in a Europe with one foot in the medieval age and one in the blooming Renaissance. The modern nation called Spain did not yet exist at Isabella’s birth and her adolescence came during the Moorish occupation of Granada, the southernmost region of Spain and the last bastion of Islamic power on the Iberian peninsula. In Isabella’s century, there was only one goal, one holy quest –la Reconquista and the removal of the “heathens.”

After her father’s death, the convent-educated Isabella was brought to the court of her older half-brother, King Enrique IV, a notoriously open homosexual and childless. Named heir to Castille’s throne, she set out to find a husband herself, and settled on a match with her second cousin, Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon.

Younger than Isabella by a year, the prince was in modern parlance, “a hunk.” The tall, blue-eyed beauty Isabella and the muscular Ferdinand would have been People magazine’s dream Royals.

In 1469, the 18-year-old Isabella wed 17-year-old Ferdinand, with an assist from a papal dispensation that allowed the marriage despite their close blood ties. Rodrigo Borgia, the most infamous of that notorious family, had arranged for the “Bull of Dispensation” that enabled the cousins to marry and he was rewarded with a dukedom for his eldest son. Father of Lucrezia Borgia, Rodrigo Borgia was elevated as Pope Alexander in fateful 1492.

As part of their unprecedented “pre-nup,” Isabella held equal authority –an astonishing role for a woman in those times. Their shared power was expressed in an official motto, Tanto monta, monta tanto –Isabel como Fernando. (“It comes to the same thing, Isabel is the same as Fernando.”)

Supported by Spain’s powerful clerics, Ferdinand and Isabella aimed to unite Spain. Late in 1491, with an army that bridged the medieval world of armored knights and lancers with the new era’s first artillery weapons, they surrounded Granada. A force of some eighty thousand men, including ten thousand knights, began the siege that would complete la Reconquista in January 1492.

But ridding Spain of the Moors was only part of their holy war. In their quest for a kingdom free of heathens and heresy, los reyes catolicos viewed Jews and other “unbelievers” as another threat. In 1478, they had brought the Inquisition –the “Holy Office”– back to Spain, urged on by clerics who claimed that many of the Spanish Jews who had converted –conversos– secretly continued practicing their religion, posing a grave threat to Christianity. The notorious court that imprisoned, tortured or killed those suspected of heresy was led by Isabella’s confessor, Tomas de Torquemada, a descendant of a converso himself whose name became synonymous with the Spanish Inquisition’s worst excesses.

Torquemada wrote the royal edict of March 31, 1492 that ordered the Jews from Spain, unless they were baptized. Over time, some thirteen thousand people were found guilty of carrying out secret Jewish practices, often making their confessions after torture. During this time, at least 2,000 people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition. Thousands of others were imprisoned or had their properties confiscated. The number of Jews expelled from Spain is uncertain, and old estimates ranged from 200,000 to as many as 800,000. Contemporary historians argue that such numbers were exaggerated by centuries of English propaganda aimed at Spain and Roman Catholicism –the so-called “Black Legend.”

Some of those expelled Jews found a welcome, although an expensive one, in Rome where Pope Alexander received them, as long as they could meet his price for sanctioning their conversions.

To Isabella, the Inquisition was a useful political tool as well, consolidating the power of the “Catholic monarchs.” As James Reston, Jr. wrote in Dogs of God, “Of particular interest to Ferdinand was the provision in the pope’s bull which authorized the crown to fine the culprits and confiscate their holdings, and to deposit the sizable proceeds into the hard-pressed royal treasury.”

In other words, the Spanish Inquisition and the banishment of the Jews financed the war against the Moors. It would also help underwrite the voyages of Columbus and Spain’s New World empire.

(This material is adapted from America’s Hidden History

“It’s the — the cross is the — is the most common symbol of — of — of the resting place of the dead.”

Those were the words of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia during a Supreme Court questioning session. The case involves a cross honoring veterans that has been placed on federal lands. The fuller context of Scalia’s exchange with an attorney arguing the case can be found in Professor Geoffrey Stone’s recent blog on the Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/justice-scalias-cross_b_314752.html
I’ll leave the legal aspects of this comment to others, like Professor Stone. But I am not sure if Scalia’s assertion is even correct. In many cemeteries –certainly many of those around old New England—a headstone, often devoid of any religious marking, is quite a common symbol of a resting place.

To be precise, we should say that a crucifix and not simply a cross is in question. The empty crucifix is, of course, the central symbol of Christianity as it represents the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I was pondering crosses before I read Scalia’s rather extraordinary remarks about the cross being such a common symbol.

Crosses –or crucifixes—come to mind whenever Columbus Day rolls around. One of the things they never told me back in grade school when we drew pictures of those three iconic sailing ships, was that Columbus used to crucify the natives –the people he misnamed “Indians”—in rows of thirteen; one for Jesus and each of the disciples. This technique was part of Columbus’s work incentive program. If the natives didn’t produce enough gold, he would cut off a hand. Crucifixion was the next step.

In the Caribbean, under Columbus, Justice Scalia may have been right. The cross was the symbol of the resting place of the dead. But I’m not sure that’s what Justice Scalia had in mind.

The catalog of the cruelty of Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors who followed in his wake has been well documented, even in Columbus’ own time. Far less familiar is the story of the French Protestants executed by the Spanish near St. Augustine, Florida on October 12, 1565. The spot where this atrocity took place is now marked by Fort Matanzas, a national monument whose name comes from the Spanish word for “slaughters.”

The point is not that the Spanish had any monopoly on religious cruelty or sectarian violence. The Protestant majority in America has a lengthy victims list as well –Quakers, Catholics, Mormons and other minority Christians and other groups of believers and nonbelievers have all felt the sting of secular violence. The litany of sectarian killings and religious intolerance that has been such a grotesque but significant piece of America’s “hidden history” is exactly the reason that some of the Framers thought the First Amendment was so necessary. George Washington said so himself to a group of people who did not recognize the cross – the members of America’s first synagogue:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.

You can read more about Columbus and his impact in Don’t Know Much About History and the story of the Fort Matanzas massacre in America’s Hidden History.