Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [83]
The accusation of cannibalism was a calumny, not very different from the accusation that Jews crucified children and drank their blood.37 However, like the “cruelty” of the Muslims, it served to detach the Caribs from the protection to be accorded to peaceful Indians.
As the political dangers from an expansive Muslim power increased, so new and potent meaning was given to ancient fears and prejudices. Civilized Renaissance scholars no longer believed that Muslims had heads like dogs and barked, but they nevertheless attributed brutal and monstrous qualities to them: ancient visceral prejudices were transmuted.During the reign of the Catholic Kings, a new theory of the infidel was beginning to develop. In 1517, Cardinal Tomás de Vio Cayetano developed a novel doctrine of degrees of infidelity. There were those infidels actually under the jurisdiction of Christianity, of whom the Muslims in Spain were the classic example. There were those who by law but not in fact were under Christian rule, like the inhabitants of North Africa or the Holy Land; and there were those who like the Indians of the Americas had never been under Christian rule.
While it was legitimate and laudable to coerce the first two categories, it was not legitimate to enslave and punish the natives of the New World. They were “to be sent good men who by their preaching and example would convert them to God.”38 This was exactly the policy that Talavera had sought to apply (with some success) in Granada, before it was replaced by the more robust methods of Jiménez de Cisneros. The same debate over baptism and honest conversion that had resonated in Granada between 1499 and 1501 was played out again. The good intention behind the baptism came to dominate the theory, a view expressed definitively by Pope Paul III in his bull Altitudo divini consilii (the height of divine providence): “Whosoever baptised those Indians who came to the faith in Christ in the name of the Blessed Trinity without following the ceremonies and solemnity observed by the Church, did not sin for they thought rightly it was proper to do so.”
Thus the view of Ferdinand and Isabella that the good objective of conversion for the Muslims of Granada outweighed any doubts about the methods used was retrospectively endorsed. But the view of Las Casas, not circulated in print until four centuries after it was written, of the consequences of this style of conversion for the Indians applies just as readily to the Muslims of Spain. They would thereafter be
dominated by perpetual hatred and rancour against their oppressors … And therefore, even when they may sometimes say they wish to convert to the Christian faith and one can see that it may be so by the external signs that they use to show their will; you can always, however, be suspicious that their conversion does not come from a sincere intention nor their free will, but it is a false conversion, or one accepted to avoid some future evil that they fear would overcome them again.39
Ironically, it was Jiménez de Cisneros, the pioneer of mass conversion, who in 1516 had set the course for Las Casas’s life’s work by appointing him to head a commission of inquiry into the evils done to the Indians. But Las Casas’s prophecy applied with even greater force to his homeland than it did in Spain’s American possessions.
The critic Stephen Greenblatt has noted that the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadores in the Americas (who brought with them their experience of conquering Islam in Spain) saw their language as a mechanism of conquest. He cited Antonio de Nebrija, whose Gramática de la lengua castellana—significantly—was published in 1492, and presented to Queen Isabella by the bishop of Avila. The queen asked what the book was for, and the bishop replied, “What is it for? Your Majesty, language is the perfect instrument of empire.”40 Greenblatt