Ned Sublette: Cuba and Its Music

I ran across the following quote in Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music (pp. 34-36). I had picked up some of this around the 500th anniversary of 1492, but I hadn't dug very deep, so much of this is new to me.

It was in the annus mirabilis of 1492, and before Columbus sailed, that Elio Antonio de Nebrija (1444-1522), a Renaissance humanist and Spanish nationalist who had spent nine years at the University of Bologna, published in Salamanca his Gramática de la lengua castellana. Though not the first grammar of a modern European language (that was the Occitan Donatz proensals), it was an innovative work. Formalized grammars at the time were for Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, not for the languages people actually spoke, so Nebrija;s work was a grand declaration of the prestige of the Castilian tongue. Its dedicatory preface to Queen Isabel prophetically asserted: "Language was always the companion of empire."

The impact of Nebrija's work would echo through the centuries. Unlike English, a bastard language notoriously irregular in its spellings and grammatical forms, Nebrija's Castilian was highly regular, following the example of the pedagogies of the classical languages. To this day Spanish -- which has changed less in the last five hundred years than English -- is still, because of that regularity, relatively easy to learn. In presenting the Castilian language as described by a group of rules, Nebrija provided a model for subsequent grammarians in other European languages. In 1495, Nebrija published a Castilian dictionary, more than a hundred years before such a thing existed for English. A great believer in the importanc e of the alphabet, he created a set of uniform spelling rules. So castellano (Castilian) became español (Spanish), and the Castilian language was imposed across the New World the way Arabic had been previously imposed from Kabul to Portugal, and before that the way Latin had been imposed on western Europe.

A far-flung empire united by the one true faith and one language: where had we seen that before? One thing was still lacking: a ready supply of gold.

On April 17, 1492, the royal couple sealed the deal for Columbus's exploration, with a promise from Columbus to use his proceeds from the voyage to retake Jerusalem from the infidels. On September 6, his three ships pushed off from the Canary Islands (off the northwest coast of Africa) on their voyage through the Mar Tenebrosa, the Sea of Darkness.

Among the ninety men Columbus took with him was an Arabic interpreter. When he made landfall five weeks later, he called the people who met him "Indians." On the island that he named La Española (Hispaniola in English), the Indians spoke of Cibao, a place that Columbus believed to the end of his life was Japan.

The Indians were friendly at first. But Columbus treated them in accordance with the way he had seen blacks treated at the Portuguese slave castle off the coast of Ghana; the first model for dealing with the indigenous peoples of the New World was the African slave trade. In 1493, when Columbus made the second of his four voyages, fortune-seekers clamored for a piece of the action, and 1,200 people sailed with him. The history of how they raped and murdered the natives of La Española is too well known to requir ecomment here. On that voyage, Columbus brought to La Española seedlings of sugarcane, which was being successfully cultivated in the Canary Islands.

Columbus was obsessed with his divine mission: finding gold. The discoverer of the New World was an apocalyptic, millennial visionary who calculated -- and wrote to Fernando and Isabel -- that there were only 155 years left until the end of the world, which would occur 7,000 years after the world's creation.

He had plenty of company in his messianic beliefs. Central to the mythology of the Reconquest was the idea that a Spanish king from the line of the Visigoths would drive out the Moors and eventually unite all of Christendom. Columbus believed, as did Juan Ponce de León (the future colonizer of Puerto Rico) and others of his time, that King Fernando was the new David who would retake Jerusalem from the infidels and rebuild the temple at Mount Zion, thus setting the stage for the final battle with the Antichrist, as prophesied in the Book of Revelations.

Columbus was convinced that he had been chosen by God to provide the gold that would make this possible. When on his third voyage he discovered Venezuela's Orinoco River, larger than any in Europe, he realized from its force that he had discovered a continent. Not far up the river, he knew, would be the Garden of Eden. On this continent he would surely find King Solomon's mines, whose gold would finance the campaign to expel the infidel from the Holy Land.

As far as I know, Spain never made a move towards Jerusalem, despite pocketing unimagined riches in gold from the Americas. So it's not clear how how much weight to put on their proposed Crusade. As an idea, it probably made sense as an extension of the long war against Muslims and Jews in Andalus, but that would have meant tangling with the Ottoman Empire at a point when it was still expanding. Instead, Spain launched its Inquisition to blot out all traces of Islam and Judaism. While the Inquisition worked to unite most of the peninsula, excepting Portugal, it cast a dark spell over what had just a few centuries earlier been the brightest and most fertile intellectual grounds in Europe. Within a century, Spain lost the advantages its discovery and early conquests in Americas had provided, and was well on the way toward becoming a benighted backwater in Europe. As this happened, the religious idea of the Crusades faded, but that didn't stop European powers from demanding capitulations from the Ottomans in the 19th century, citing a need to protect various Christian churches in the Holy Land, nor England from adopting the Zionist movement to colonize Palestine.

posted 2006-03-26