The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, April 7, 2024

Notably: A quick shout-out to two forgotten men of history, one very good–Bartolomé de las Casas–and one not so good, but interesting: James of Vitry. As Howard Zinn points out in his depressing history of this country and its hegemonic spheres, by 1550 the European genocide of natives in the Caribbean (“through murder, mutilation or suicide”) had wiped out 250,000 natives on what was to be Haiti alone, the people known as the Arawaks. By 1650, they had been eradicated. It was Las Casas, a one-time slave-holder himself, who first brought to Europeans’ attention the limitless cruelty of Spaniards in the (to them) New World, Spaniards who “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades,” and how “two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.” Las Casas had arrived in Haiti in 1508, when “there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.” He was a rare voice against genocide. James of Vitry, also known as Jacques de Vitry (1160-1240), did the same thing in the Levant during the latter part of the Crusades. The mass murders there were less genocidal in that Europeans and locals had no epidemiological differences, so the mass deaths of the Americas that followed Europeans’ introduction of diseases did not happen in the Levant. There, mass deaths were restricted to wars and enslavement. Like las Casas, de Vitry, a dour puritan sort, was a believer in the cause, a preacher and a participant of the crusades. Unlike las Casas, he never converted, he never let his conscience replace his prejudices, he never abjured the crusading ideology. He only found it wanting, and in so doing, revealed to what extent the enterprise had never really had anything to do with anything spiritual or redeeming, and everything to do with rape and rapine: “I found that the men born in this land were called Pullani, which in French is translated as Poulains. They alone acknowledged that they were under my concern and jurisdiction. It was hard to find one in a thousand who was willing to keep his marriage lawfully for they did not believe that fornication was a mortal sin. They have been spoiled from childhood and they are utterly devoted to the pleasures of flesh. They were unaccustomed to listening to the Word of God and seemed to regard it as worthless. I found, moreover, foreigners who had fled from their own lands as outlaws because of various appalling crimes. Having cast aside their fear of the Lord, they were corrupting the whole city by their wicked deeds and evil example.” Writing of the city of Acre, where he had landed (in present-day Israel): “The city was everywhere filled with prostitutes, and because these prostitutes paid higher rents for their lodgings than did other people, not only laymen but even churchmen and some members of the regular clergy rented out their lodgings to public prostitutes through the whole city. Who would be able to list all the crimes of this second Babylon, where Christians refused baptism to their Saracen servants, even though these Saracens earnestly and tear fully begged for it?” By then Acre was one of the few cities on the Levantine coast that the crusaders had not lost to the reconquering Muslims, and it, too, would soon fall to Egypt’s brutal Mamluks. Vitry went on to preach in Tyr, Sidon (“which the Saracens hold”), Beirut, Byblos and Tripoli, cities of my childhood, and seems to have had a better time there, preaching his rabid Islamophobia (“I uncovered to them to the best of my ability the deceit of Mohammed and his damnable teaching, because some of them were limping along, as if hesitating between the law of the Christians and that of the Saracens.”) He eventually returned to Rome, where he died a cardinal after warring against heretics in Liege and, apparently, having a hand in that other too-little known genocide of the Albigensians in southern France, at least in its last years.

—P.T.