The Glitter Of Gold

Time to change the titles.  I know, Gratitude was kind of fun to type one hundred forty-three times, and even if gratitude remains an ongoing theme and thread in my blogposts (I promise that it will) I think I was getting new-title lazy.  So, this is about the lure of gold and of riches, or should I say, greed?  Especially in terms of its ongoing influence over the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish thugs.

Yes, they were thugs.  Had the Geneva Convention and UN charters that are widely and shamelessly flouted nowadays been in force during the Sixteenth Century the Spaniards would have been in deep doo-doo for all the nasty things they did to the native peoples of the Americas (as would the English.  Hey, equal opportunity blaming only is allowed on this blog!).   Oh, the finger-wagging!  And, Oh, the public scolding!  The shunning, the shaming!  Had the covenants and charters of the UN and Geneva been in force five hundred years ago, as they are now, no quarter would have been spared to tell the Spanish how naughty they were, how absolutely not nice they were to all the native peoples that they slaughtered (and the English would have been made to feel equally bad!)

Spain of the Middle Ages was powerful, but not wealthy.  They were a developing power, getting their chops as they chucked out the Muslims, imprisoned and tortured Jews, and rounded up and publicly burned heretics at the stake.  Feeling strong and powerful, but wanting gold and resources(or, should we just say they were consumed by greed) King Fernando and Queen Isabel sent off Columbus to open up trade routes in the west with the Far East.  They were in search of spices and gold.  And whatever else their greedy little hands could scoop up.

Discovering America, Columbus and his lackeys found, not China, nor Japan (though it had been assumed otherwise) but the islands of the Caribbean, well-populated by people they never would have imagined.  A few decades later, Cortes, then Pizarro were dispatched, respectively, to Mexico and Peru, in search of gold, conquest and souls for Holy Mother Church.

The greed of Spain (and England) for resources, was especially insatiable, particularly Mama Espana's rapacious greed for gold.  They plundered and robbed the Americas of precious yellow metal, all to fatten their coffers and enrich their big war machine.  The aboriginals of the Caribbean, the Aztecs of Mexico and the Inca of Peru, didn't quite get their lust for this shiny yellow rock.  They agreed it was pretty, for which reason it adorned everything of value in their cities, temples and palaces, but to kill and risk being killed for its possession?  A lousy, but admittedly beautiful metal?

Let us not forget that they were also representatives of Holy Mother Church and second (or maybe third) place to gold, they valued also the immortal native souls that they could somehow win as bounty for the Catholic Faith.  So divorced were clergy and laity to the most basic commands of the Christian Gospel, while claiming to be God`s sole representatives on Earth.

Apparently some of the natives managed to beat these pale-skinned and unwashed foreign invaders with a brilliant little ruse.  El Dorado. They told Columbus and his lackeys about other cities, hidden in the heart of inaccessible jungles and mountains in deepest South America.  They were believed and countless expeditions of greedy Spaniards died in search of nonexistent cities of plunder, and at least momentarily, the local indigenous could be rid of them.