Godly Pirates

Clarence Henry Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century (1910) lacks the reticence of today's historical scholarship. Haring's criticism of Spanish mercantilism and Spanish national character fills the text with the sort of judgement that historians eschew today. The book was an Oxford University thesis for the Bachelor of Letters degree in 1909. Haring earned his B.A. at Harvard in 1907 and then attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. The book marked the beginning of a long and distinguished career in the study of Latin America.

His discussion of the religious motivation of English privateers is typical.

The Spaniards, ever since the days of the Dominican monk and bishop, Las Casas, had been reprobated as the heartless oppressors and murderers of the native Indians. The original owners of the soil had been dispossessed and reduced to slavery. In the West Indies, the great islands, Cuba and Hispaniola, were rendered desolate for want of inhabitants. Two great empires, Mexico and Peru, had been subdued by treachery, their kings murdered, and their people made to suffer a living death in the mines of Potosi and New Spain. Such was the Protestant Englishman's conception, in the sixteenth century, of the results of Spanish colonial policy. To avenge the blood of these innocent victims, and teach the true religion to the survivors, was to glorify the Church militant and strike a blow at Antichrist. Spain, moreover, in the eyes of the Puritans, was the lieutenant of Rome, the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, who harried and burnt their Protestant brethren whenever she could lay hands upon them. That she was eager to repeat her ill-starred attempt of 1588 and introduce into the British Isles the accursed Inquisition was patent to everyone. Protestant England, therefore, filled with the enthusiasm and intolerance of a new faith, made no bones of despoiling the Spaniards, especially as the service of God was likely to be repaid with plunder.
Haring, Buccaneers, 33.

The religious conflicts of the Reformation entwine with national rivalries. Privateers were outfitted by their governments and sent out to make war upon sworn enemies. But, if they attacked and plundered ships of the wrong nation, the penalties could be severe.

The briganteen, Charles, was outfitted in Boston in 1703, "to War, Fight, Take, Kill, Suppress and Destroy, any Pirates, Privateers, or other Subjects and Vassals of France, or Spain, the Declared Enemies of the Crown of England" (The arraignment, tryal, and condemnation, of Capt. John Quelch ... [London, 1705], 20).

These orders were issued to Captain Daniel Plowman, but there was a mutiny on board the ship shortly after leaving port. The Charles was not specifically named as a privateer ship in its commission and orders, although it was to "take, seize, sink, or destroy any of the Ships, Vessels or Goods belonging to France or Spain" (Quelch, 21). After the mutiny, however, and the actions under the leadership of Captain John Quelch, it became a pirate ship.

Plowman's instructions included moral and religious leadership. Swearing, drunkenness, and profanity were to be punished.

First, You are to keep such good Orders among your said Briganteen's Company, that Swearing, Drunkenness and Prophaneness be avoided, or duly Punished; and that GOD be duly Worshipped.
Quelch, 20.

In the trial of John Quelch, the Charles is termed a "Private Man of War" (Quelch, 2), hence a privateer vessel. Quelch neglected Plowman's orders after the commissioned captain had died aboard ship, orders that required the ship to return to Boston. Moreover, he led the crew, some against their will, to attack and plunder Portuguese ships--a crime against an ally of the queen.

You neglected his Orders, and those of your Owners, to return with the said Private Man of War to Boston, would not set on Shore Matthew Pymer and John Clifford, Two of your Company (who dreading your Pyratical Intention) ernestly desired the same; but bore up the Helm to Sea, directing your Course for Ferdinando Island, and the Coast of Brasil, whereby it is open, manifest, you intended Murders; Piracy, and Robberies; which afterwards you perpetrated.
Quelch, 2.

In the charges against John Quelch detailing each of nine ships plundered over the course of two months, certain phrases are repeated.

[B]y Force and Arms upon the High Sea, (within the Jurisdiction of the Admiralty of England,) Piratically and Feloniously did Surprize, Seize, and Take a small Fishing Vessel, (having Portuguise Men on Board) and belonging to the Subjects of the King of Portugal, (Her Majesty's good Allie) and out of her then and there, within the Jurisdiction aforesaid, Feloniosly and Piratically, did by Force and Arms take and carry away ...
Quelch, 2.

The second charge replaces "a small Fishing Vessel" with "a small Brigantine of the Berthen of about fifteen Tons" (Quelch, 3), and so on.

Under the leadership of Captain Plowman, had he lived, the Charles could have plundered French and Spanish vessels for the glory of England and to God. Doing so would have brought profits to the merchants who owned and financed the ship. The crew would have been godly pirates, thus not pirates in the language of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Under the leadership of Captain Quelch, however, they plundered the ships of an ally, and hence were criminal pirates. For these crimes they were executed.

My Journey to Medieval Spain

When I began reading A Patriot’s History of the United States eight months ago, perusing the footnotes quickly carried me astray. I’ve mentioned repeatedly that a long footnote embedded as a two and one-half page sidebar was the critical prompt the motivated my purchase of this text and the beginning of this blogging project (See especially “Patriot’s and People’s Histories” and “Depopulation and Demography”). Footnotes are central to my focus, but the text itself also beckons. I’ve been neglecting the text during my blogging holiday, but have been reading.

This morning’s coffee went down with a narrative lauding the intellectual contributions of Moses Maimonides, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd (known in European literature as Averroes). Wikipedia describes Ibn Rushd as “the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe.” I’m reading a celebration of the development of Western secular thought in a book written by a former Jesuit seminarian whose book on Medieval Spain has much of prescriptive value for the twenty-first century: Chris Lowney, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Earlier in this book Lowney delves into two classic European texts, Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) c.1100 and Poema de Mio Cid (Poem of My Cid, or commonly called El Cid) c.1201-1207. Lowney writes, “the confrontation between Christianity and Islam forms a overriding preoccupation of both these semi-legendary tales” (119). His narrative offers brief summaries of these texts, including discussion of how their legends square with history. His chief concern through this section, however, highlights the complexity of El Cid in contrast to the simplistic ideology of Roland.

Roland painted a global struggle between Christian right and Muslim wrong as Charlemagne squared off against Baligant, emir of Babylon. Roland’s universal struggle between good and evil contrasts with El Cid’s personalized study of the noble person. What makes the Cid, or anyone, honorable is neither station in life nor religious beliefs but deeds. … In Roland, honor includes religious creed. Some of Roland’s Christian characters may fail the standards expected of honorable men, but all Muslims fail the same standard simply by virtue of their pagan beliefs. … El Cid’s very different outlook is personified in the Muslim Abengalbón, El Cid’s vassal and friend. In a remarkable gesture, the Cid confides his daughters to this Muslim’s care as they journey through Spain’s frontier. Abengalbón serves the Cid’s family “for the love he bore to the Campeador.” In the Cid’s world, so profound a bond as love can even bind Muslim to Christian.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 137.

The more nuanced relationship between Christians and Muslims in El Cid, Lowney argues, reflects the realities of multicultural Spain. But he warns against oversimplification of this point.

It is gross oversimplification to pluck Barbastro and Toledo from the Reconquest’s long history as Exhibit A demonstrating that El Cid offers a more enlightened vision of a multifaith Spain because its authors hailed from Spain, whereas Roland reflects the outsider’s harsher viewpoint. A century separates the epics and three centuries the historical events on which they are based; both bear many authorial fingerprints, from chroniclers determined to advance particular religious or political views to entertainers determined only to tell a good story.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 141.

He goes on to note some practical realities of our world today vis-à-vis Charlemagne’s perspective as depicted in Roland. The notion of a Frankish king invading Spain, driving out the Muslims, and then returning home “is an elegantly simple worldview,” but not one embraced by twelfth- or thirteenth century Spanish monarchs. Yet, “Ferdinand and Isabella’s counselors would goad them into just such a policy and devise ways to make it eminently (if tragically) practical by banishing Jews and Muslims who refused to embrace Christianity” (141).

One is tempted to think that Lowney had the current American adventures in Iraq in mind as he crafted those sentences, and this presumption is borne out on the next page.

[One cannot] forcibly reorder another community’s lives and affairs, then assume, as Charlemagne did, that it will be possible to separate oneself from the consequences and repercussions. To assume the posture of the outsider is as naïve as to imagine that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can today carve out completely separate futures in a world that will continue to grow smaller with each passing generation.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 142.

The Route to Spain from A Patriot’s History

Schweikart and Allen’s A Patriot’s History relies upon Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture for its account of the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. Hanson’s depiction of Cortés’s Spain as exemplar of Western Reason was the source for Schweikart and Allen’s image of Spanish proto-republicans. Their views caught me by surprise, which led to my preliminary assessment in “Sixteenth Century Spain: Contrasting Images.” There I noted that my own knowledge of Spanish history was shamefully deficient, and I alleged that such deficiency was characteristic of Americanist historians as a group with a handful of exceptions. A Patriot’s History drove me to Hanson; Hanson drove me to Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico and other texts, including Lowney’s A Vanished World. I’ve mentioned a few tidbits from Thomas, including his demythologizing of the story that Cortés burned his boats. Lowney adds a piece of information that further contextualizes this legend. The Muslim conqueror of Spain in 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad, allegedly burned his boats after landing at Gibraltar—a rock named for him, Jabal Tariq, Tariq’s Mountain.

Chroniclers credit Tariq with the gutsy gesture of burning his ships on the spot and weaving his soldiers’ resulting dilemma into a stirring oratorical exhortation: “Whither can you fly,—the enemy is in your front, the sea at your back. By Allah! There is no salvation for you but in your courage and perseverance.”
Lowney, A Vanished World, 30.

The legend of Cortés in Mexico reveals his debt to legends of the Muslim conquest of his native Spain eight centuries earlier. This legacy is not surprising when we contemplate the degree to which Renaissance Europe, and all that is civilized on that continent, to the extent that it can be traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans, also must be traced through Muslim civilization. During the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, science and reason continued its development in Muslim society. It may be simplistic to assert that Europe’s Crusaders that sought to wrest the Holy Land from Muslims brought home the seeds of the Renaissance, but it is far closer to the truth than to assert that Petrarch reinvented classic learning from sources wholly European.

Roland’s Patriots

In response to my “The Sixties: A Patriot’s History,” Historiann quipped regarding Schweikart and Allen, “They want to mislead their readers into believing that Democrats are all bad, and Republicans are all (or mostly) good (if they are "true conservatives," anyway.)” As she understands A Patriot’s History—and I suspect she’s close to the mark, if not right on,—Schweikart and Allen’s narrative resembles a modern day Chanson de Roland. Paraphrasing Lowney, some of Schweikart and Allen’s Republican characters may fail the standards expected of honorable men, but all Democrats fail the same standard simply by virtue of their misguided beliefs. Their simplistic moral tale that distinguishes the true Republicans—Reagan and Bush—from the fallen ones—Nixon and McCain, and all Republicans from Democrats, who can never be right is less nuanced than even that of some of their ideologically driven sources. Hanson, for example, was once a Democrat, and may still be so on paper.

All I can tell you is I'm still a registered Democrat. I have a liberal twin brother who disagrees with everything I write. And I have a far more liberal older brother who not only disagrees with what I write, but I imagine is really bothered by it. I had two conservative Democratic parents who were in the Populist tradition of farmers, sort of William Jennings Bryan types.
Interview with Victor Davis Hanson, The Naval Institute: Proceedings

I will show in blog entries still to come how some of the nuances of Hanson’s history in Carnage and Culture morph into something far more simplistic in the hands of Schweikart and Allen.

Sixteenth Century Spain: Contrasting Images

Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, Cortés’s Castilians fought from a long tradition of tactical adaptation based on individual freedom, civic rights, and a “preference for shock battle of heavy infantry” that “grew out of consensual government, equality among the middling classes,” and other distinctly Western traits that gave numerically inferior European armies a decisive edge.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 7.

Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land.
Zinn, A People’s History, 2.

Was there a middle class in sixteenth century Spain? What civic rights existed for Spanish peasants? Neither Howard Zinn’s emphasis on gross disparities of wealth, nor Schweikart and Allen’s image of Spanish proto-republicans offers substantive information concerning the European society that initiated the centuries long conquest of the Americas. The portrayals of American indigenes vacillate between prelapsarian hunters and farmers living in harmony with pristine nature and brutal, warlike savages. Likewise, sixteenth century Europeans are caricatures offered in fleeting images.

Zinn’s image of the desperate circumstances of the Spanish peasantry obscures both the existence of large commons in early modern Spain and clear evidence of rights of citizenship. David Erland Vassberg’s The Village and the Outside World in Golden Age Castile: Mobility and Migration in Everyday Rural Life (1996) points out that commons were “under the jurisdiction of a powerful city, bishop, military commander, or noble lord” (7), but does not quite present the image conjured by Zinn’s word “owned”. Vassberg also supports part of Schweikart and Allen’s emphasis on civic rights. Sixteenth century Spanish villagers knew theirs.

Rural people of the day were keenly aware of their citizenship rights, locally and in federations. For example, in 1542 a villager testified that he was a native of La Bóveda, but was currently a vecino of Villaureña, and of the Tierra of the city of Toro (Zamora), where he had certain rights.
Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World, 7.

Vassberg also notes that diversity existed among Spanish villagers in different geographical areas from “independent landowners” to “landless wage-earners” (11). Zinn’s emphasis on disparities of wealth may hold true for Andalusian peasants, but not for Basque farmers. Schweikart and Allen’s tradition of civic participation finds further support in Vassberg’s text.

Since the High Middle Ages the monarchs of Castile had recognized the right of municipal self-government, and had accepted the principle (although they occasionally violated it) that local offices should be held by local citizens, with preference to the native-born. … The right to local self-government was regarded as the natural birthright of every Spaniard. We can see that in the actions of the conquistadores in the New World: one of the first things that they did everywhere was to set up municipal governments, following the Spanish model familiar to all of them. … Although they were divided by social and economic inequalities, rich and poor felt united by strong bonds of mutual privilege and responsibility.
Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World, 12-13.

During the Reconquest, “settlers moving into new areas were typically allotted lands; therefore, the norm in these medieval settlements was for vecinos to be adult male property-owners (Vassberg, 16). This practice seems to render Zinn’s 2 percent figure unlikely, although it seems a reasonable figure for feudal societies. It may be worth noting that an article claiming to be “the first quantitative assessment of Castilian ennoblement,” published in 2007 would make it unlikely that Zinn’s figures could be any more than a crude guess.* In any case, Zinn’s figure may be more accurate for the seventeenth century than for the fifteenth and sixteenth. There certainly was a polarization between rich and poor in Spain during its decline from preeminent power during the days of Columbus and Cortés. Indeed, migration patterns that resulted from conquests in the Americas were one of the contributing factors to the seventeenth century crisis that included urban decline, economic stagnation and ruralization, and consolidation of polarized class structures. These are central themes in The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: New Perspectives on the Economic and Social History of Seventeenth-Century Spain (1994), edited by I.A.A. Thompson and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla.

The performance of the Castilian economy was thus [due to economic and geographic centrality of the new global economy] a crucial factor in the performance of all the other major European economies. For the first three-quarters or more of the sixteenth century Castile’s population multiplied, the arable was extended, agricultural production increased, the level of urbanisation rose, the manufacture of silks and woollens flourished in the great textile centres of Toledo, Granada, Segovia and Cordoba; wool exports remained buoyant until the 1590s, and traffic with the Indies until the 1610s. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century this expansion first petered out and then fell back on itself. The progressive downturn of the Castilian economy was arguably one of the triggers of the general crisis of the European economy in the seventeenth century, the mark of the shift of economic preponderance from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and the archetypical model of the ‘failed’ economy.
Thompson and Casalilla, Castilian Crisis, 2.

Spain’s initial success in the colonizing enterprise may have produced the opposite of its desired goal of extending national wealth. This lesson should give us pause when we think we comprehend our own long-term economic self-interest.

Academic Tribalism: Neglect of Spain

Americanist historians as a group often seem ignorant of Europe, although some take a few courses in European history as graduate students. In this ignorance, historians reflect the sort of knowledge that characterizes the United States population as a whole. We are a provincial people. But, historians of England, France, and Germany often are lacking appallingly in knowledge of Spain as well. Academic specialties in the past of certain nations generally develop through cultivated gaps in knowledge regarding others. Thompson and Casalilla note the effects of superficial analysis.

[T]he failure of the Spanish economy has in a long tradition that extends from the seventeenth century to the second half of the twentieth been explained in terms of arbitrary government, a bad religion, the tyrannical Inquisition, reactionary hidalgo values, the wretched laziness of the people, the absence of a capitalist and entrepreneurial spirit and other failings of the national character, as much as in terms of objective economic analysis.
Thompson and Casalilla, Castilian Crisis, 3.

Why was Spain's early lead eclipsed by France and England, which became the dominant power? Schweikart and Allen, for their part, emphasize England’s “adoption of the joint-stock company as a form of business,” its greater openness to “risk taking and innovation,” and “property rights and political rights” that grew out of labor scarcity (15-16). England’s state sponsored pirates also played a significant role in retarding the growth of Spain’s American colonies (11-12), they suggest. Zinn, for his part, is less concerned for the differences among European colonizing powers than for their shared ideologies of supremacy over indigenous peoples.

However, in a strange twist of ideologically driven scholarship, Zinn’s greater attention to the works of Bartolomé de Las Casas does more than shelves of work by conservative writers to advance the idea that “concepts of equality and freedom” are central to European thought.

Even if the curriculum were confined to thought strictly European in origin, it would still present a rich variety of conflicting ideas, including the very concepts of equality and freedom from oppression invoked by those who would reorient the curriculum.
Statement of the National Association of Scholars

Conservatives claiming left-wing bias in the Academy chant this mantra while scholars focused upon the ideologies of European global hegemony delve into the writings of Las Casas. While Schweikart and Allen decry the “crescendo of damnation” (7) of Columbus and his heirs during the quincentennial, the 1991 publication Rethinking Columbus: Teaching about the 500^th Anniversary of Columbus’s Arrival in America offers a synopsis of Las Casas’s History of the Indies: “The Spanish Fight for Justice in the Indies” (82-83). Conservative pundits claim that liberation from slavery was a European idea, a point they allege left-wing scholars suppress, but Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004) includes ten pages from the writings of Las Casas (35-44).

European Political History

The long road to American democracy as a fit product for export may have grown from seeds planted in ancient Greece, but there were many setbacks along the way. England’s thirteenth century Magna Carta was one episode, later muted by the tyranny of the Crown. Likewise, thirteenth century Spain showed more incipient democracy than would be true three centuries later.

There were early Reconquest towns and villages that functioned as direct participatory democracies: all the citizens of a place would meet in open assembly (concejo general de vecinos, or concejo abierto) to make governmental decisions. But with population growth, and the increasing complexity of municipal life, the open assembly was gradually supplanted by the governing council (concejo reducida, or cabildo). This council was increasingly dominated by the local socioeconomic elite, especially the hidalgos. The old direct democracies had largely disappeared by the mid-1300s, but they survived much longer in certain small and remote villages where universal poverty encouraged the maintenance of egalitarian customs.
Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World, 15.

Neither A Patriot’s History nor A People’s History offers sufficient detail regarding the worlds of colonizing Europeans to locate their partially accurate facts in a trustworthy narrative. The Spanish conquistadors and the Indians they subjugated lived in and produced a richly varied world that defies the gross generalizations of ideologically driven histories.

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* Mauricio Drelichman, “Sons of Something: Taxes, Lawsuits, and Local Political Control in Sixteenth-Century Castile,” The Journal of Economic History 67 (2007), 608-642.