Behind the Bastards - Part One: Christopher Columbus: Bringer of the Apocalypse

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Robert is joined by Michael Swaim to discuss Christopher ColumbusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ho, ho, ho, merry late summer. I'm Santa Claus. Normally I'd come to you from the North Pole, but due to a series of DEA raids and boho-ho-ho guess felony charges, I'm in hiding right now. My friend Robert Evans has agreed to help me with all of the charges against me, and as thanks to him, I've used some of my Christmas magic to put together the perfect

behind the bastard script. But of course, a perfect script needs a perfect guest, so I've used Santa's Luciferian Hellforge, powered by the bones of the devil himself, to conjure up the greatest podcast guest in history, Michael Swame. Alright, that's all from Santa until the holidays, kids, and remember, those children were dead when Santa got there. Oh, thank you, Santa. Ah, Robert Evans here with the newly conjured Michael Swame. Michael, how does it feel to have been birthed from Santa's Luciferian Hellforge? What the fuck? What the fuck was that? He's an immortal North Pole man, just told us. Robert, everything about my conception of metaphysics has shattered.

Now, Michael, this is interesting. Is it true that you never existed prior to this point, and all of the memories that people have of your many hours of content were created by the devil in the last several seconds? I come from the yes and school of improv, so absolutely. That's my entire backstory and identity now. Well, now that you exist and have an extensive backlog of content and projects in that have been well underway for several years at this point going on, why don't you tell the audience what kind of stuff you do and where they can find you before we get into this yuletide extravaganza of an episode. Thank you so much, Robert. Well, it's true. I was busy in Santa's sack, and I don't mean his toy sack. But when I was but a gleam

in Santa's eye, I was, let's see, where can I take the elf metaphor? Cobbling together, a brand new show about video games with my friend Adam Ganza right here on the iHeart Network, so check us out. We're called One Upsmanship. That's the number one. And then the wordlet Upsmanship used to say word, but Adam told me that that's bullshit. But I need people to know that it's the number one. So yeah, we deep dive into various video games and argue about whether they would be shown to aliens if we wanted to like impress them and not have them destroy humanity. But it seems like the window is closing on that opportunity. But let's put it this way, when they sift through the ruins of Earth, these are the video games we want them to encounter.

Now, Michael, it's it's very appropriate that you just talked about what we would show aliens if they came to Earth, because today we're kind of talking about that kind of story. This is the story of essentially a group of aliens led by the most alien creature in all of the universe, an Italian, who come upon a world filled with people who, you know, are going to have to endure the realities of their of their appearance in this world. I am, of course, talking about Christopher Columbus and his voyage to the quote unquote New World. Masterful Segway, not planned. Very not not at all. Not at all. Michael, what do you what do you what do you know about? Oh, Chris Columbus, not the director, but also the director. I assume they're guilty of the same

crimes. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So the angrier you get at this, Chris Columbus, if you have a chance to do harm to the other Chris Columbus, just take a swing, man, it's fine. Yeah, they both are noted for their similar like rapport with children, both Chris Columbus's have a well, I know, of course, the Pat version, which I wonder if it's still taught in elementary school, but I first imbibed like the classic happy Thanksgiving, everything's fine, Christopher Columbus story. And my eyes were ripped from the veil, whatever you know what I mean, probably middle of high school, where I learned a few let's say fun facts about Christopher Columbus that I bet will come up over the course of this podcast. And then this all culminated for me,

personally, when at cracked among many, many sketches, I got to portray Chris Columbus in a series we did called dead talks, which is an exhaustive like Chris Columbus bragging basically about the triangle trade. And, you know, putting it in sort of Neo tech, like we're going to change the world for the better terms is the premise of that sketch. And I learned a lot through that, actually, because cracked, as you know, is very fact based something you brought to it. Honestly, before you were hired, I got to make shit up a lot more. And then they were like, these kids really like the facts. Let's do the facts. I murdered the fun. That's right. No, we hybridized it. We got jokes in there. I know the feeling he does murder the fun. I do murder the fun,

just like Santa murdered those kids, according to the DEA. That's right. Yep. There it is. So Santa does not admit any wrongdoing in this case. So before we get into this episode, Mike, I think we should probably have an discussion about morality and the distant past. Because whenever we talk particularly about dead famous white guys who were once worshiped as heroes and are now being criticized for bad things they did, there's a cry that goes up from a certain corner that's like, you can't judge people from the past by modern moral standards. This is usually meant as a callow and cowardly attempt to stop all critical moral analysis of these people. But also the sentiment is not entirely without value because things are different in the past. And if you are

applying entirely modern standards to things, then you're going to like wind up just getting angry at shit and condemning people rather than kind of understanding their actual place in the moral universe of the time. And I think slavery is a good example of that. Because viewing all slavery and all people who have owned slaves in history as the same as the worst slave owners in history, and I'm generally talking about the American Confederacy in this period of time, when I say that, is kind of counterproductive because slavery has been the normal state of affairs in most society throughout human history. Most societies either had slaves or individuals in them were always at risk of being enslaved. This is the thing that has gone on basically forever. There

have been some notable exceptions like the Persian Empire and whatnot where like there was no such thing as slavery. But there were generally structures within things like the Persian Empire or like structures like Serfdom that even though they weren't technically slavery were worse off than slaves were and a lot of other, like you could compare a Serf and the Russian step to like a slave in urban Rome. And the slave in urban Rome has a lot more autonomy as a general rule. So like discussing all of these things as if they're kind of the same, I think does lose us some nuance. And so when we're talking about Christopher Columbus, I obviously, none of this is set up in order to defend him or mitigate his history. But four hours of defending him. No, just yeah. I think if you

want to actually understand what he did that was like super fucked up. It's important not to just kind of look at here's the things he did that we can say now in 2022 are bad. But here is the things that he made worse. Here are the things that like he he ways he changed the world in ways that made it more brutal and horrific than it had been because he came into a pretty gnarly fucking world and he made it a lot worse. And I think that's the reason to condemn him rather than being rather than stuff that he did that was like more or less in line with common morality at the time. So I think you do have to have an understanding of like what was accepted in his culture to understand the things he did that were particularly fucked up. If that makes sense. Oh, it absolutely makes

sense. Although I do want to say something that came to mind for me was a trip to the slavery museum in New York that I where I encountered like a series of letters from people at the time. When the triangle trade was first like getting built and the slave ships were coming to the shore. And what was really eye opening for me is several of the letters are and I'm paraphrasing here. Holy shit. These are human beings and they're enslaving them. They're doing this now. What the fuck is going on? That's insane. We can't do that. What is this? So it's interesting that and it was on rare occasion, but there were people who saw it with modernized instinctively. Like you can't do that to a human being. Well, here's the thing. I will argue we'll get into

this more. They're not seeing it with modernized because most of those people accepted slavery in other forms, specifically the kind of slavery that Columbus instituted. They were like, oh my God, this is so much worse than anything we've seen. Like everybody does a little bit of slave trading. But what he is introduced is like a new plague upon the world and is is is so much worse than anything that had been seen before. I think that's part of what's interesting about him. Because like some of the people who are condemning him like Daedalus Cossus are people who like grew up with slave trading in their local in their own society and like didn't really speak out about that being an issue. Yeah. And yeah, Daedalus Cossus is I take the podcast wherever

you want to steer it. But if you do get into the list of just like imagery, it's pretty grim Kronenbergian shit. It is a nightmare. But I do want to in order to actually I think in order to properly condemn Christopher Columbus to the with the most understanding that we can condemn him, we have to set the moral scene and talk about the world he came into and like what was the norm in the society that he and his critics came into. So this is not just when we talk about the shit that was normal in Columbus's world. This is also the thing that the people who condemned him at the time saw is normal, which gives you an idea of like how fucked up what Columbus does later is because it's bad. But yeah, we will be talking about a number of different kind of

historic defenses because we had this. So if you want to look at the broad sweep of how people have talked about Columbus, you had Columbus, great guy, hero, schoolhouse rock, you know, yada, yada, yada. Let's let's show him dancing. And then you have Columbus is was a monster and and a war criminal on a on a on a historic scale. And now you've got a pushback largely coming from conservatives. If you want to go Google Columbus misunderstood or like Columbus, you know, revisiting or whatever, you'll find a bunch of daily wire fucking articles and shit about him. And a lot of them are going to quote one of the books that also is going to be a source of our in our episode today. And it's a book by Carol Delaney that is about it's called

Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem. Now, this is a book that has some original research in it, we'll be quoting from it quite a bit, but we will also be quoting from other sources to point out how fucked up what Delaney is trying to do in rehabilitating Columbus is. She is clear to note that she's trying to look at him quote from a contemporary perspective rather than from the values in practice. Or she's she's she complains that people try to judge him quote from a contemporary perspective rather than from the values and practices of his own time. And then she goes ahead and leaves out all of the different judgments that people out at his own time made about him and a whole bunch of other details too. That's just why I'll do it was a

different time like stabbing pregnant people in their bellies. You're like, yes, that was always a problem. But it's interesting, I think part of the value of this episode is as we go through Columbus's life, we will be going through Delaney's book and pointing out all of the things she leaves out because it's useful when you try to engage with people who are currently in the process of trying to rehabilitate Columbus because that is like, you may not have noticed it and all of the other problems, but it's like a thing the right has been trying to do particularly in the last two years. So I think it's worth not just being like fuck that book, but also being like here is why that's books fucked up and here is the things that it leaves out and here's the holes in her

research that other people have not had holes in. So yeah, Christopher Columbus was born not at long after the Black Death finished its last series of waves throughout his world. He's a child of the Mediterranean. He's born on the Italian coast. Probably we don't know exactly, but there's a bunch of records of him as a young man in the city of Genoa and he always claimed to be from Genoa. So it's pretty safe to say probably born somewhere around Genoa. And you know, Genoa is it's worth like, again, to kind of set the stage for like the kind of people who are around when he's a kid. The plague is still kind of in its last waves when he's born. And the Mediterranean is particularly like one of the places where the Black plague does them.

There's a lot of cities and towns, including Genoa, where it's not uncommon for like plague waves to kill 50 to 75 percent of the population. Whereas if you're looking at like England and stuff, it's often more like 20 or 30 percent, which is still devastating, right? You think about how bad COVID has been and how much damage like a million dead has done in a country of 320 million. And like you're talking about, you know, 75 times that many people dying more or less in like, or actually no, like 150, I don't know, I'm not great at math, a lot more as a percentage of your population, much more people. So number one, one of the things that this sets up understanding like the fact that an apocalypse has just occurred when Christopher

Columbus comes in the world. So let's go over there and do another one. He is going to cause an apocalypse, but he's also he is the child of an apocalypse. So he's he's born into a world where like a whole lot of shit got fucked up really hard very recently in ways that are it would be difficult for us to put our heads, to put ourselves in the place of like people living in that world, because the collapse that they endured was like so much more severe than anything we've seen yet, you know, check back in in about a month and a half. But at the moment. And obviously, slavery was extremely common in the world he grew up in. The city of his birth, Genoa, was an influential Italian city state that made a significant amount of its income through

slavery. Italy is not a thing. Like it's a geographical thing. But like, nobody would say that like, I'm an Italian, you'd say like, I'm Genoese, you know, I'm from Venice, I'm a Roman, and they all hate each other. They hate each other. And they're yeah, they're city states, and they're constantly murdering each other. And yeah, it's it's it's Italian's favorite thing in this period is killing each other. It's like the thing that they they do the most of. Other than make a shitload of money through trade, a lot of which is the slave trade. Well, that was a good historic upgrade that rebrand in Genoa from slavery to Salami, which I think are most associated with now major upgrade. Yeah. No, it sounds like Genoa was a fucking nightmare back in the day.

And it is worth noting when we talk about this city, there's about 75,000 people in Genoa when he's a kid, which makes it I think it's like in the top five or 10 cities in Western Europe by population. It's one of the most I mean, it's which makes it one of the most populous cities in the world at the time. Because there's not all that many people, you know. Anyway, the book Columbus by Lawrence Beargreen, who's a much better historian than Carol Delaney, I think, ably describes the status quo in his home when he was born R.E. Slavery, quote, slavery was deeply woven into the fabric of the Genoese economy, especially traffic and girls who were only 13 or 14 years old. Every Genoese household, even modest ones had one or two female slaves. Although Christianity

prohibited bondage, an exception was made for these non Christian slaves. They were Russian, Arab, Mongol, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Albanian and Chinese slave traders and pirates sold them on a regular basis to Genoa. Occasionally, their wide net included a Christian girl whom they kidnapped and would return for a high ransom. The transactions were formal, norerized and deeded. Most slaves were sold as is. If others whose health had been guaranteed developed epilepsy or other health problems, the owner demanded an annulment of the contract. Some cautious buyers kept the girl of their choice on a trial basis to judge whether she would remain charming and adapt to a life of slavery in Genoa. Once acquired by a Genoese master, girls became mere property bound to gratify his sexual

wants as well as those of his friends. Merchants able to afford a concubine and many in this prosperous city could maintain them in households separate from their families. The master of the house specified the terms of the arrangement with the local notary public, especially concerning sensitive matters such as inheritance rights for children born out of wedlock. So a couple of things here. Number one, that's bad. It's bad to have your society based heavily around child sex trading. But also, this is the norm. This is what he's born into. It's just hard to put yourself truly in the mindset of an actual other time with truly different social morays in the sense that this is someone who's going, here's a 14-year-old girl I purchased. If you'd like to have sex with

her, my friend, we're doing it. We're doing a society. This is civilization now. It's so inconceivable through modernized. And yeah, I totally get what you're saying in the opening about the contrast between what you accept and what is normalized. And it is important, again, obviously, it is bad to sexually traffic children as slaves. But also, this is not just the norm in Genoa in the 1400s. This has been going on for a very long time. And you could argue the system is less shitty than it was, for example, at the height of the Roman Empire. Because slaves in Genoa are primarily this kind of slave, like house slaves who exist to satisfy old dude sexual whims, which is gross and bad. But a major factor of ancient Roman slavery was we are going to enslave these people

and work them to death in a mine, like in the worst conditions imaginable by the thousands, which is probably worse. And the fact that that's less common in the 1400s, you could say is better. I don't think it's super useful to look at it that way. But like six or one, man. Yeah, it's important to note that like all like Italian wealth for the last 3000 years prior to this was built on the back of slavery on a massive scale, right? Always had been, you know. And that's that's the world Columbus comes into, not just a world in which the trade in girls is a major industry in his city, but also a world in which no one can remember a time in which Italians did not make, did not base a significant portion of their economy on slavery, right? And this is still

pre taken one, as old as that movie is. Yeah, there's no Liam Neeson. Not a single Liam Neeson. No, so nothing can free these people. And yeah, so by the standards of the time, an individual who like accepts within this society that like, yeah, there's just going to be slavery around me, that's pretty normal. And it's worth noting, well, actually, there's debate as to whether or not Columbus himself owned a slave. This is the kind of thing that you're not going to get a satisfying answer on. But it is probably fair to say that like, if Columbus were just another Italian who existed within a slave owning society and perpetuated it, he would not get an episode on his own. Because there's like, like every Italian prior to this point in history was

involved in the slave trade, basically. So yeah, anyway, what I think is important is kind of setting the scene because the thing that he creates is like, it's not just worse than slavery that exists in Genoa of his birth, it's something that the Roman Empire would have looked at and been like, Jesus Christ, dude. Like, what the fuck? And he would have been like, that's right, Jesus Christ told me to do this. Yes, I mean, yes, he literally would have. But also, like, not not only did people at the time judge him, but like, if you could go back and talk to like fucking Cicero, he would have been like, what the fuck, man, this is like, this isn't how you treat people. So yeah, Christopher Columbus was not as I think he gets described a lot by people

on the left, just an ear capitalist who wanted to enslave people and like, mine their society because he was personally greedy. What's interesting about him as a bastard is that the reason for everything he does is that he becomes a messianic Christian holy warrior. And the genocide that he's going to commit, which heavily involves slavery, is done in the name of funding a war to retake the holiest city in Christendom, Jerusalem. Like, that's why he does it. And so his excesses that we're going to be covering are just because he's greedy, although he certainly is. But it's because he's a frenzied narcissist who believes he's chosen by God to bring about the apocalypse, which is a different story than the one I had heard even on the left for the most part.

Yeah, I've only heard the Chamber of Horrors version. I have not heard the messianic cultist version. Yes, he is. He is a messianic apocalypse cultist. And that's why he does a genocide. So Christophero Colombo, which is his actual birth name, and it's ridiculous. So we're not going to call him that again, was born near Genoa in the summer of 1451, quite possibly around July 25. We don't know the exact date or even month. But Carol Delaney notes that St. Christopher's Day was celebrated on July 25, and that his first name might be a hint as to when he was born. I have my issues with Carol, but this is not an unreasonable deduction. Delaney also notes, quote, the name given to a child at baptism was believed to have an influence on the child's character.

So when Susanna, that's his mom, selected the name Christophero, she may well have been trying to affect his destiny. The name Christophero, Christopher, means Christ-bearer, and is derived from the story of a pagan man, Reprobus, who once carried a small child across a river. As they crossed, the child became heavier and heavier until he revealed to Reprobus that he was carrying the weight of the entire world. With that, Reprobus realized that he was carrying the Christ child. For his service, Reprobus became a saint known as Christopher. So that's the guy he's named after, and that's relevant because he is going to take that name that he gets super literally. Someone sold you

a bag of rocks, dude. You've been scammed, history dude. Yeah, you have been scammed. And you know who else has been scammed, Michael? Oh gosh, me in the future after I hear these great, wonderful products and services. I would say the people who haven't heard of these products and services have been scammed, but you can judge for yourselves. Wow, you really turned me around on that issue. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly

a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system

today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So Christopher is born just two years before one of the most critical events

in Christian history, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire. Now this is a really fascinating story and end of itself. But its importance to our story is that this was both seen as a sign of the looming apocalypse. The enemy was quite literally at the gates, and it was a calamity for European access to global trade. Constantinople was one of the, I mean, it still is like one of the major, if you just look at it on a map, you can see why it's an important port city, right? It's you can't get shit by sea from from Asia to the Mediterranean without sailing around a bunch of fucking extra bullshit, unless you cross through the Bosphorus in the Dardanelles, which Constantinople effectively allows you to guard. And prior to its fall,

Christian control of the city gave Europe basically all of its access to spices and textiles from the Orient, right? That's how you get stuff from China. That's how you get stuff from like even like Eastern, you know, the Russian provinces, places like Kazakhstan, it flows to you through over the Black Sea through fucking Constantinople. Constantinople falls, the Ottomans blast the shit out of it with some very cool cannons. And then suddenly, Christians are like, oh, no, we're we're fucked. And there's a fun little story here. They almost end the Eastern Orthodox Church as part of an agreement with the Pope to like send reinforcements to save them. But it doesn't quite work out in time. And it falls anyway. And then I guess the

Eastern Orthodox Church is like, well, why are we going to you know, yeah, fuck it, I guess. Roll and keep this party going. Yeah. So when the Ottomans take Constantinople, which they call Istanbul, there's a good song about this setting up me finding my favorite bands a thousand years later or whatever. Although, you know, a lot of different ethnic groups in the region would say that it's quite a few other people's business but the Turks, although under Erdogan, the Turks would say that there are only Turks in Anatolia. This is a whole contentious history. Particle man hates universe man. Yeah. Particle man hates universe man and recognizes the reality of the Armenian genocide. Good for him. That's

what everyone knows about particle man. So when the Ottomans take Constantinople, they get the ability to tax and control all trade throughout the city or that comes through the city, right? And so and obviously, like, you know, they're Muslim, Christians are Christian, there's some like bad blood there. So they don't have like the most interest in making it easy for Western Europe to like get goods from the east. They want to make their fucking cut. They've spent a lot of time going to war in order to get the ability to do this. And, you know, this is a problem for Europe. There's attempts at crusades. None of them really work out very well, which is generally what happens with crusades. Usually they go very badly.

And as Christopher goes, grows up, he was probably a little too young, you know, when Constantinople falls to remember it. But a lot of his early memories are going to be adults talking about these attempted crusades, talking about the need to reconquer Constantinople, and talking about fallen Jerusalem, right? And the fact that like that is a thing that Christians should be trying to reconquer. So Jerusalem, it was believed again, this is not like this is a belief at the time, but it's also a belief among a lot of Christians today, that Jerusalem has to be in Christian hands and particularly there's some fucking temple there that has to be returned to like being a Christian church or turned into a Christian church. I don't

know if whoever I I'm not an expert on Jerusalem history. Don't yell at me. But like there's a Jerusalem has to be in control like the Christians have to be in control of it so that God can in the world, right? That's that that's the idea. That's what Metatron said word for word. Yes, yes. But the problem is that Jerusalem fell to Saladin in 1187, because again, crusades, bad idea. What? That's not what we predicted. What? And Saladin, very cool guy. We'll talk about him one of these days. But it's worth noting that like this is very recent. Number one, things move a little bit more slowly back then in terms of history. This is 300 years before his birth. But this is also very recent history to everybody in a lot of ways. And to think about

like the way in which like this might have been talked about at the time. Remember, the founding of the United States is a political entity is about the same distance from you and me as the fall of Jerusalem was to Columbus as a young person. Think about the degree to which that period of time shapes all of our lives right now, the degree to which every people still talk about the quote unquote founders and shit. And that'll give you an idea of like how immediate and relevant the fall of Jerusalem would have been to Christopher Columbus as a kid, right? Yeah, you can still win any argument if you can prove that Thomas, well, that's what Thomas Jefferson would have wanted, which is exactly so. Why? Who cares about that? And in his day, the Trump card is, well,

this will help us retake Jerusalem. You're not focusing enough, right? You know, totally makes sense. Yeah. So for young Christopher and for any good Catholic, it would have been taken as read that the chief goal of Christian civilization ought to be the reconquest of the Holy Land. Now, this was for some people, an actual fervent belief that they devoted their lives to. For most people, this is kind of like the way old people today talk about the deficit, right? Like they'll say like, well, of course I want to retake Jerusalem, but like, we got to do this to first. And like, we got all this other stuff to do, right? Like it wasn't really on their front burner, you know, which is why it never gets retaken, among other reasons. So since there was no real

hope of taking the city, and most of the actual rulers were not going to burn all of their treasure and all of their armies, probably failing to retake Jerusalem, Christians at the time who were fanatics had to content themselves with fantasies in order to like feel like there was a chance of actually retaking the city. One of the most common fantasies was about a guy named Prestor John, they believed in, who is this like mythical Christian warrior king. He's supposed to have a powerful kingdom with a mighty army somewhere between Russia and China. A lot of times people would say it was like kind of where Tibet actually is. And basically, the way people talk about it is that like any day now, Prestor John is going to save us from the rampaging Muslim hordes,

you know, he's going to come down from somewhere in Asia and we'll, we'll, we'll beat those devious Muslims, you know, the other hope they had, and this may be surprising to people was the Great Khan. Now, they're generally talking about Genghis or, or, or Kubla Khan, right, when they talk about the Great Khan, that none of those guys were around in Columbus's day. They were still talking about the Great Khan. The Western Khanate had ended, which is like Russia-ish, had ended in 1370, and the Eastern Khanate was deep into decline by the late 1400s. But news didn't really travel back then, right? So like people just knew that a couple hundred years ago, the, the Mongolians had been unstoppable and assumed they still were. And one of the things that the Mongolians did was fucking

absolutely curb stomp a big Muslim empire. Like they, they fucking melt Baghdad, basically. It is gnarly shit. And so another thing is that, like, you get these stories from Marco Polo, right, who's like 150, 200 years earlier than this period and still would have been very relevant in the day that Columbus is going up in part because Columbus tells the story of like his magical journey to Asia while he is captured by Genoese soldiers and imprisoned in Genoa, right? Like he's another Italian and he like gets captured in a war and he tells this fucking story. That's at least the, the, the story about how the story comes out. Hey, everybody, I screwed up here at this point and at a couple of other points, I say Columbus, when I meant to say Marco Polo, makes it a little

bit confusing. I apologize for the error and will burn a city in penance. And Columbus, one of the things he'd said in his purported voyage to like hang out with the great Khan in Asia is that the Khan was really interested in Christianity. And if we could just get some guys to go talk to him about Jesus, he might convert and then we'll be able to retake the Holy Land, right? Because the Mongols will do it for us once they're Christian, you know? Yeah. And so yeah, these are the stories people and particularly people in young Columbus's orbit would have been telling themselves and we know from his own writings and from things he says later, he grows up believing all this, both that there is a great Khan with a powerful army

who's probably, you can convert to Christianity if you can just, he just is waiting for a guy to come talk to him, you know? He's just got to get the right dude and he'll be like, all right, we're Christians. Well, we almost got him, but we ran out of pamphlets. We ran out of pamphlets. He's so close we could have turned him. We tell, we got right up, we got right up to Jesus, but then no one could tell what had happened after Jesus turned like 30. And so he was like, well, I don't see why this is, yeah, we forgot, you know? Bible got wet. Prith got smudged. If only the Pope had been there. None of us knew what Jesus did because we're not allowed to read the Bible in this period,

which is actually not wildly far from the truth. So, Columbus grows up believing all this and so probably do most of the people around him because Genoa is kind of, people are pretty fanatically fucking Catholic there. His family is middle class, probably upper middle class, although again, those terms and the 1400s not super useful for actually understanding. For one thing, politics, so obviously all of the city states are constantly murdering each other. All of the different political factions in the cities are also constantly murdering each other. And so your ability to be like quote unquote middle class or whatever is heavily tied to like you being friends with the people who are in power. And if they happen to get murdered,

which happens constantly, shit can change very quickly for you because you're very much reliant upon them for like the right to sell or buy certain things or get this, you know, whatever, government job. His father, Domenico, is a cloth weaver who does good enough. He makes friends with the people who are in charge of the city when Columbus is a little kid. He gets a cushy job at one point, like as the gatekeeper, which is a pretty, pretty sweet gig. Now, as Columbus grows up, he goes to obviously he's attending church constantly, the cathedral that he would have gone to as a kid was most noted by this gigantic fresco it has of the apocalypse, which he's probably spending a lot of time thinking about the end of the world. Interestingly, it was the

first thing he saw and he was gazing upon it as he lost his virginity for some reason. He got like really into it. Yeah, weird. It's his Star Wars personality. Yeah. Yeah. He's got like all sorts of fucking. What do you call them? Funko pops of like Pagans wailing as Christ burns them. The heads really bubble. One of the most influential religious minds of his day or slightly before his day would have been the Franciscan monk Saint Bernardino, who would give him famous sermons in Genoa about a generation or so before Christopher was born. Bernardino was an apocalyptic preacher. He warned of an imminently coming end time and he would screech that today's Christians had slipped into sin and were in danger of damnation. God was angry at them because they

weren't Christian enough. Yada, yada, yada. If you ever visited San Bernardino, it's pretty apocalyptic. It is. It is. It's the end of days. It's a blasted wasteland. That is how I feel. Well, we got a nuke it just like the great light. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. Carol Delaney writes, quote, people would gather in town squares day after day, sitting for hours, listening transfixed by this fascinating but horrific moral tales about the wages of sin. Bernardino focused especially on sins committed by witches consorting with the devil, the sin of sodomy and the sin of fraternizing with the Jews. You have to do that voice in that tone of voice. Of course. Yeah, it's the only way. Specifically, you also are supposed to go sodomy. Sodomy. Yeah, thank you.

That's good. Yeah. His sermons were important enough that they were transcribed, copied and distributed widely by the time Christopher was a kid. When he was nine, this fixation with sin and a need to fight for God would have been reinforced by the launching of a crusade by Pope Pius II. Being a port city, Genoa was a major rallying point for crusaders. So as a little kid, he's probably seen a bunch of guys go off to do a crusade, which again, doesn't go great, because none of them do. It is noteworthy that young Christopher grows up knowing how to read and write. This is not common at the time. And it is, in fact, widely agreed upon that his penmanship was gorgeous and that he could have made a solid living on the fact that he was really

good at writing. Maybe he fucking should have done that then. Maybe he fucking should have done that. We aren't certain where he learned to read and write. His family was friendly with a group of wealthy nobles, the decuneos, who will be relevant later in the story. It's also possible that he attended classes with them just because they're like, oh, yeah, you know, we've got a tutor for our rich kids. You're a friend of the family. Come on, learn how to read. He also might have just gotten educated through the guild that his father belonged to. Guilds are kind of doing, running a lot of civil society in Genoa, and they do provide educations to kids of people who are in guilds sometimes. It's worth noting also that because Genoa is a port city and the economy focused

entirely around maritime trade, the fall of Constantinople leads to like economic shitfuck for Genoa. To make matters worse, the French, who are allied with some of Genoa's enemy city-states, are like in the period where he is a child and a young man steadily raiding Genoa and shipping and dominating its economy. Lawrence Bergreen, author of Columbus, The Four Voyages, notes that there are rumors that the Columbus family had once been wealthy, but like Genoa, had fallen from their past glory by the time Christopher came into the picture. Bergreen proposes that he may have been motivated to regain that lost glory and build a legacy for himself because both his city and his family used to be doing good. Sure. Yeah, you think a guy named

Christ Farrow might have grandiosity or like- Yes, Christ Farrow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, didn't you say Christa Farrow? It's also got Farrow in it. Yeah, Christa Farrow. It does, it does a little bit. It does a little bit. You're not that far from Egypt. So in late 1459, when Columbus was around eight, his family home was 50 yards from the Porta de San Andrea, where the doge, who's basically the mayor of the town, gets cornered by a gang of rivals who were backed by the French and like murdered in the street like he's beaten to death with iron rods and his corpse is torn apart in front of everybody. This is 50 yards from Columbus's front door. There's a good chance he watches this, right? Like a pretty good shot. He's just looking at this from his window

or something. And his father is allied with the guy who gets torn apart in the street. So this is, this causes problems. He thought that mural was good. Get a load of this shit. This is his, this is his watching the Rugrats on Nickelodeon, you know, is seeing this man torn apart in front of his house. What is that? What is that, an iron rod? That's pretty good. Yes, that's the, that's the, I don't know, Simpson's season four of his childhood. Well, the iron rod would be Angelica, clearly. Oh, okay. That's fair. I was going to just, I was going to compare that man getting torn apart and beaten to death in front of his house to the Montereyel episode. But yeah, it's all good. So I can't emphasize enough just how religious his upbringing would have been.

The Genoese for all of the fact that they're Italians and sailors are a dour and joyless people. They are members of a fucking death cult, which is premillennial Catholicism. And in order to make that point, I want to quote from Lawrence Bergreen's book now. Clothing worn by the Genoese was strictly regulated by the Office of Virtue beginning in 1439. The office enforced a series of sumptuary laws to regulate morality by curbing luxury and excess as well as prostitution. These laws limited the amount of money Genoese could spend on luxury items and even on weddings limited to 50 guests. They regulated the days on which prostitutes, a staple of Genoese nightlife could roam the streets. They measured their time with clients by the half hour marked by a flickering

candle. Girls with a candle, as the prostitutes were known, were forbidden to enter a cemetery or approach a church and had to wear insignia indicating their profession. If caught out of bounds, the prostitutes were punished by having their noses amputated and their livelihood ruined. Holy shiiiice. So it's again, not fun people. No, it never surprises me when it's like and they were executed, but when it's so specific when they're like and their left eye was plucked out and pinned to their breast and they wore it for a week. You're like, damn, they really sought this through. Yeah, they really put a lot of put a lot of work on the back end of this. Exactly. So these sumptuary laws mandated that men should wear only gray clothing, red and purple were

strictly forbidden. Women had limits on how much jewelry they could own and how much money they could spend on dresses. They were fined if they violated these limits. Adultery also had a series of fines and a woman who failed to pay her adultery fine would be beheaded. It is unclear if Columbus found these rules stifling as he was a religious extremist himself, but he also spends most of his life in Lisbon, Spain, or in like in Portugal and in Spain or at sea. So like maybe he kind of was like, Jesus fuck, Jenna was bullshit. He's living on us over here on the boat. He does. He does get the fuck out of there about as quickly as he can. I mean, it feels like the dad to love the city. So it feels like the dad from the witch would get the fuck out of there. Yeah, it does.

It does feel like this. Yeah. It's a little stern for me. We're going to live in the woods. Yeah. So we don't know when he goes sailing for the first time, but as a Genoese boy, he would not have lacked opportunities to do so. Later in life, he wrote that he started sailing at a young age and that he was particularly drawn to the art of navigation, which he said, quote, incites those who pursue it to inquire into the secrets of the world. For whatever reason, I often find myself reiterating to the audience that for most of Western history, 14 counted as an adult. And so when Christopher was that age, he starts working full time as a sailor. He probably started out sailing on a caravall, which is a sail bearing merchant vessel. Mainly it was supposed to like

kind of stick either close to the rivers or to the coastline. And he seems to have been good at this enough that he signed on for several more trips. This is dangerous, backbreaking work. Young sailors are made to do the kind of tasks that older men with their ruined joints and off broken bones could no longer handle. As is always the case when young boys put to see there was a significant risk of being sodomized. We have no information about this whatsoever. So I'm not going to like belabor the point. But that is that is a fact of sea life. Yeah. Refer to the Pogues album Rum Sodomy and the Lash for more information on that part of sailing. In addition to the obvious dangers of the sea in the 1400s, Italian sailors and the Mediterranean

lived under constant threat of attack. Every city in Italy was always at war with every other city. And they can always like if you're always allowed to be a pirate to other Italians. Um, so Italians haven't changed all that much in the last couple hundred years. It is not unlikely that Christopher would have found himself in the midst of several small naval skirmishes in his early 20s. All we know for certain though is that by the time he was 21, he had mastered the skills of a sailor and he had proven himself to be a particularly gifted navigator. He'd also developed a talent for manipulation. I'm going to quote from Carol Delaney here. He was commissioned by King Rene of Anjou who would continue to oversee the government of Savona to capture a Galleus,

a very large three-masted galley that included rowers as well as sails off the coast of Tunis. In route, Columbus learned that in addition to the Galleus, there were two ships and a Kerak which frightened my people and they resolved to go no further but to return to Marseille to pick up another ship and more men. I, seeing that I could do nothing against their wills without some ruse, agreed to their demand and, changing the point of the compass, made its sail at nightfall and at sunrise the next day we found ourselves off Cape Carthage. While all aboard we're certain, we will bound for Marseille. So he like, as the navigator secretly takes them into battle when they think they're going back for reinforcements because he doesn't want to like fuck up this

deal he's got going on with this king. And one of the things that saves him on this, because this goes pretty well for them, Genoese are like the best sailors. They are famously good at fighting at sea. The first time we can confirm Christopher experienced ship-to-ship combat was in 1476 when he was 25 and his convoy, so he's in a convoy of ships and they get accosted by a group of French privateers allied with an Italian city-state and they're outnumbered. I think it's something like two to one. Like this is a disastrous looking battle but the Genoese lose three ships including the boat that Columbus is on and the attackers lose four hundreds and hundreds of men die and this is, they have like rudimentary guns and cannons at this point for the most part. They're slamming

their boats into each other and beating each other to death with sticks and knives at close range and lighting each other on fire with petroleum. It's just iron rods all the way down. It's all they have. And he fights in this battle. He fights in this battle very nearly dies. His ship sinks and he has to swim six miles to shore clinging to an ore. Like this is, it is, it is very unlikely that he survives the circumstances he finds himself in but he manages to do it. He eventually calls that land America and he finds himself in Lagos in Portugal. They take care of him because there's generally all the seafaring cities like even if they're at war are kind of like well if you're a sailor who like washes up we have a duty to like take care of you because that's

just kind of good business you know for everybody. So they take, they patch him up and he eventually gets back in the convoy which had survived the battle and he finishes his voyage in London. While he's in London he takes on another gig and he actually sails as far north as Iceland which at that point is known as Thule. I think it's actually pronounced Tula. Now it was during this far northern voyage that Christopher first felt the easterly currents of the Atlantic which helped to inspire an idea in him. If he were to voyage far to the west beyond the routes known to any European he could probably count on those eastern currents to carry him back to Europe. It was also on this trip that he visited Galway where several frozen dead bodies had washed up

and they appeared. Columbus says that they're Asian people. He has never met anybody from that part of the world. He has read descriptions in Marco Polo and these are waterlogged corpses. Who knows what dead people he encounters. There's three John Wayne. He has no idea who these people are. He decides they're probably from like China and he concludes because of these waterlogged corpses that Asia is much closer to Western Europe on the western side than previously guessed. Right. So he's like, ah, look at these. So you can see things coming together based largely on like a mix of accurate things. Yes, those currents can in fact carry you back from the west to Europe. We gotta ask the queen for jewels. Why? Look at this bloated corpse. What do you

mean why? Look at this dead body. This dead ass motherfucker means that I'm gonna get rich. So in between his voyages, Christopher settles into a new life in Lisbon among the expat Genoese community there. Again, they're the best sailors pretty much in the Mediterranean. So like they're kind of in demand everywhere else that has ports. So they set up a lot of different like little little Lisbon. Everybody wears gray and traffics children. I know the sailing thing because of the video game. They're very, yeah, super good at sailing and yes, the sex trafficking doesn't make it into civilization. I never unlocked that perk. I wanted it so bad. See, that's why you're

that's why you keep losing, Michael. Gandhi nukes me always. So he gets married in 1479. She's gonna die right away. Don't worry. And he has a child Diego in 1480. Now his wife's father participated in Portugal's first colonizing mission in Porto Santo between Europe and Africa. The island is Portugal's base of operations for their colonizing in Africa, which had started in this period. Portugal is starting to operate and it's not this is not colonization in the sense that you are going to see it later during the scramble to Africa where they are taking in and governing large land masses. They are setting up kind of trading missions on the African coast, right? And it's here that we're going to need to leave Carol Delaney's account of Columbus's life

behind because she leaves this part entirely out. This is the first major bit of whitewashing in her Columbus and Jerusalem book. She she does talk a little bit about the time he spends on the African coast. She notes that in late 1481 or early 1482, he participates in a trip to Portuguese controlled Ghana for a bunch of complicated reasons we don't need to get into. The Pope had given Portugal the right to handle all trade on the West African coast. Only Portugal gets to do that in this period. This comes with the rights to enslave any pagans or Muslims they encounter. Now again, this is slavery. This is not yet racial slavery because if people convert to Christianity before they're enslaved, they cannot be enslaved. So this is religious slavery, right? Like that is the

basis for it as opposed to what's going to be the basis for it in the future. Which is nice, but it's different. I'm hung up on the fact that it's the Pope's call. That the Pope decides it's the right to go to spoil Africa. It's bizarre. And he says Portugal. So Delaney mentions this that like they have the right to enslave people that they encounter on the African coast. Oh, well, then by all means. Yeah. But she spends most of her time just talking about like, so there's these series of beliefs that Europeans have about skin color in the equator. It is generally taken that people skin gets darker closer to the equator. There are some attendant racial beliefs that are kind of like the early stirrings of the kind of white racial hierarchy that's going to be in place,

not that far in the future. This is where all like those ideas are coming together. But there's this understanding that like people near the equator have darker skin. They are very smart, but they can't control their emotions. Whereas people who are like further north are are dumb, but calm and then like mad who are in people in Europe are the perfect balance of everything. So that's why we're the best, right? Surprise. Surprise. This is more or less their understanding of like and they also at the same time again, because everyone's very dumb back then, they believe that all metal is the same thing and that the closer you get to the equator, the more time metal has to like ripen and that's what makes it gold. So this is valuable context

for what comes next, that Europeans at the time believe your skin gets darker closer to the equator and all metal is metal. And all metal is metal and you find gold at the equator, right? This is again why he winds up because again, you think about Columbus is trying to sail west to find land. Why wouldn't he start his voyage like from the coast of Iberia, you know, further north or further north in Europe as opposed to he sails to the Canary Islands and then he goes into the Caribbean. He goes down south because the equators where you find gold, right? So it's because of these beliefs that he picks the route that he picks. So this is valuable context for what comes next. But Carol Delaney just when she talks about Columbus's time on the African coast,

this is all she talks about like the geographical knowledge he acquires, his growing understanding of winds and currents, the notes he makes in his logbook. That's all the detail that like this line here is about all of the detail you get about Columbus's time in Ghana. Quote, with the new information about winds and currents that Columbus absorbed on this trip, combined with his belief about the width of the ocean, he concluded that the ocean could be crossed and that on the far side of it in the same climactic zone, there would be gold. Now, again, that's not useless context. But if you have an inquisitive mind, you might be going, hmm, right now, I bet he probably did other stuff when he was on the coast of Africa, because he spends eight years in Lisbon and he

makes a number of voyages for Portugal. And in order to talk about what he's doing in that period, I'm going to quote now from the book, The Other Slavery by Andres Recindes, Andre Recindes, sorry. The early Portuguese slave trade assumed several forms from inherited slavery to indentured servitude, forced labor for a fixed period of time, occasionally with modest wages. This was the form of slavery with which Columbus was familiar. He briefly wrote about his experimenting with importing entire families from Guinea to Portugal, not just men, and his disappointment that the experiment did not ensure greater loyalty or cooperation among the slaves. The problem, as Columbus saw it, was the babble of tongues spoken in Guinea. Now, the fact that Columbus is importing entire,

enslaving and importing entire families from the African coast to Europe, Carol Delaney doesn't think that's worth talking about because she makes a major, the through line in her book is that he wasn't pro-slavery and he was horrified at the fact that people kept getting enslaved. Like, it's one of those like Casablanca gambling occurring in this establishment moments, but with, you know, the ownership of human beings. She's like, well, he was there. He accrued people skills and management opportunities. He didn't like slavery. She completely leaves out the fact that he is enslaving and importing entire families into Europe in this period of time. Now, obviously, this is, again, pretty normal behavior for a guy at the time. The slavery that the

Portuguese are engaged in is not pretty, but again, it's also not what it is going to become yet. But he is enslaving people. He is in the business of being a slave trader way before he is sailing to the new world. So when we talk about what comes later, slavery is not something that does not come naturally to Christopher Columbus. But Michael, it's time for a word from our sponsors. And I want to talk about a special thing that we're supporting today. Michael, you love the environment, right? I'll think about it. Big fan, big fan of it. Look, we'll see. I think we can all agree wastefulness, one of the major problems that that are species, right? Yeah, half of the food grown in the United States, you know, gets gets wasted. You know, vampire drain, which is just the power

we use on devices that no one is using, just completely unnecessary power drain, multiple countries, you know, powered by what we were very wasteful people. And nothing embodies that better than our nuclear weapons stockpiles. Michael, did you know that the United States spent trillions of dollars building a nuclear arsenal, researching nuclear weapons from the time of the Cold War up to the present day, and we never used those weapons after 1945? Did you know that, Michael? Horrible way. Yeah, it occurs to me that that's a waste. Now, Michael, in order to be environmentally friendly, I think we got to use those nukes and nowhere makes more sense than nuking the Great Lakes. Now, Michael, I know this is a controversial thing. I'd like to

make two points. Number one, number one, Sophie, number one, all of those cities basically Canadian, right? Number two, Michael, are you a fan? Are you? Yeah, exactly. Are you a fan of the song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald? Very much so, yeah. Great song. Lake Superior is killing our sailors. It killed our sailors. We got a nuke it. We wouldn't have that song. We wouldn't have that song if that was. Well, but we have the song. I mean, but it's such a sad song. Say nuke it now, okay. Nuke it now, protect our sailors, nuke the Great Lakes. This has been sponsored, especially Huron. It knows why. This has been a podcast ad for Behind the Bastards, sponsored by the committee to nuke the Great Lakes. No.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do

we just have to do the ads? From iHeart podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country,

the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So Columbus, the slave trader, comes along away from his time enslaving people in order to profit for Portugal, convinced that he could sail west and reach Asia. This would allow him to avoid the Muslim blockade on trade from that part of the war. It's not really a blockade, but it makes it a lot more expensive and difficult whenever you have political shit with the Ottoman Empire. They're not going to let you trade. So it's like a problem for the

Christians. So he sees this both as if we can get to Asia from the West. Number one, we can get all their good shit. Number two, we can get all that gold because if we can get down, if there's this land, there's probably a fuckload of gold there. And we can convert all these good willed heathens who, as we know from Marco Polo, are just waiting for a guy who likes Jesus enough. And then they're going to, they're all going to give up whatever they've been doing, you know? It's going to be fine. And yet the Ottomans are an obstacle, as they so often are. Ask Dick Van Dyke. Oh, I'm sorry for that one. That was good. That was upsetting to me. That was not good. You go ahead. No, that was fine. That was fine because the only person who's committed more genocide than Christopher

Columbus is famously Dick Van Dyke. Dick Van Dyke. The walnuts that came out of closet each represented a village that he that's right. That's right. That's right. That's why I don't know how to continue this bit. Anyway, as one scholar, Columbus exchanged letters with said, quote, it will also be a voyage to kings and princes who are very eager to have friendly dealings and speech with the Christians of our countries because many of them are Christians. So again, they also believe that there's all these Christians stuck over in Asia who are like isolated from broader Christendom that they can like make deals with. This is not entirely, there are like groups of Christians in the east that like are kind of separated from the main.

There's like Nestori and Christians and stuff. So it's not this doesn't come out of nowhere, right? But obviously, like among other things, there there winds up, you may not know this, Michael, there's actually a couple of continents in between Europe and Asia and the West like, yeah, and they're pretty big ones. So much of the next bit of stuff is things you're going to remember from your time in middle school, social studies class, Columbus spends the years going to all of the rich people, the nobles and kings that elicit him. He tries to sell them on his grand scheme to cross the ocean. This brings us back to Carol Delaney, because she is very much in the right by trying to return to a historic understanding of the fact that Christopher Columbus is not

motivated primarily by a desire to explore or to some capitalistic urge to find new markets. He is a religious extremist, and he wants to sail west in order to fund a holy war. Now, during this period, he's living in Lisbon, he starts reading the Bible. And this is a weird thing for him to do. People don't read the Bible back then, right? Normal people do not. Most of them are literate, for one thing. And there's also a strong understanding, sometimes enforced through law, that the word of God is not supposed to be consumed directly by worshipers. It is supposed to be transmitted through the clergy to worshipers, right? But Columbus starts reading the Bible for himself. And it's only available in Latin, right? You're not getting the Bible in

other languages. It's considered kind of like sacrilege to translate the fucking Bible. So he starts reading the Bible, and he's starting to read the Bible primarily because he wants to calculate when the end of the world is coming. Because he needs to, he knows that Christians have to reconquer Jerusalem, and he's trying to figure out like how much time is on the clock, right? How much time do we have to retake this city? Twist ending is, he is the end of the world. He is the end of the world, yes. Quote, there were 1759 years left, plenty of time for 15th century Christians to complete the necessary tasks before the end time. 20 years later, however, Columbus revisited and

revised his calculations and drastically reduced the number of years left to 155. If his earlier vision had been focused primarily on wrestling Jerusalem from the Muslims, he was now beginning to see that it as an integral part of the world historical drama that would culminate in the end of the world. So again, his goal is to end all life on earth, right? That is his motivation. What a fortunate coincidence that after revisiting the information, it turns out I'm the most important one to ever live, and it's all going to happen during my watch under my auspices, yeah. Yeah, I am the special boy who gets to end all life on earth. That's that's a pretty again. Shoot for the stars so you'll land on the moon or whatever. He almost got there.

There's a lot of people who are like, I want to sail to this place. People haven't been able, as far as I'm aware of, that people have never sailed to before. And there's also a lot of people who are like, I'm fine with selling slaves. Not a lot of people are saying I am taking personal responsibility for heralding the apocalypse. I would like to break the seal of the beast and leash the energy of God upon the people. Yeah, yeah. It's quite a goal. What do you want to be when you grow up? Yeah, the bringer of the end of all things. Wait, wait. In a good way. In a good way. Yeah. Yeah. So like many fanatics before and after, he saw himself as a key ingredient in God's plan. And he came to believe that his budding understanding

of how he might sail west to Asia was a key aspect in God's design. Quote, he knew that another crusade would be necessary if Jerusalem was to be retaken from the Muslims. He knew that there was enough gold in the east to finance such a crusade. He also knew that if the grand con and his people could be converted, as seemed likely, he could count on their support. Well, super likely. Yeah. Yeah. So many of us probably did learn in school that Columbus believed the world was round and most people thought it was flat. I think this has been debunked fairly well. Well, anyone who thought about it was probably true that a lot of people didn't think about the shape of the world because like there's plagues and stuff like you got shit to do. But anybody who

sailed and navigated knew that the earth was broadly spherical. Columbus was not a trailblazer here. And in fact, his understanding and theories of he's terrible at geography. He felt that Asia was so huge that there was very little ocean between Europe and Asia. And generally, he believed that like a sixth of the land's surface was ocean and the rest of it is all land. He also ended his life thinking the earth was pear shaped rather than round. So again, not great at the stuff that everyone gave him credit for when we were kids. Yeah. Most of Columbus's attempts to convince royalty to back his plan failed. The king of Portugal is more interested in getting around the Horn of Africa. He's also put off by Columbus's list of demands for carrying out the exploration,

which are bug fuck. And I'm going to quote from Bear Green's book, Columbus. Only green M&Ms upon the ship. It's kind of worse than that. The personal demands that Columbus made of King João were far more onerous and unrealistic. He wanted a title preferably Night of the Golden Spurs that would permit him in his descendants to style themselves dawn. He also wished for himself the grandest title he could think of, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, with all the privileges of rank, prerogatives, rights, revenue and immunities enjoyed by the admirals of Castile. Even to Portuguese ears accustomed to overstatement, this description verged on the absurd. A tireless conversationalist and self-promoter,

Columbus never knew when to stop. And he demanded appointment as Viceroy and Governor in perpetuity of all the lands and terra firma discovered either personally by him or as a result of his voyage. And he planned to award himself one tenth of all the monies accruing to the crown and respective gold, silver, pearls, gems, metals, spices and other articles of value and merchandise of whatever kind, nature or variety that should be purchased, bartered, discovered or won in battle through the length and breadth of the lands under his jurisdiction. So he doesn't just want to discover things. He wants to personally be the emperor of everything discovered under the King of Portugal, but he wants it to be his property, whatever they find basically.

He wants the Elden Ring and the Iron Throne. He wants it all. So that again, it's not to say that he's not greedy. He's an extraordinarily greedy man. It's also that his greed is focused on he wants to build riches so that he can contribute to the conquest of Jerusalem and in the world. So his demands are extreme and outlandish. And Bergeri notes that he was basically trying to, he was basically saying, hey, if I do this, you have to make me almost as powerful as you, King of Portugal. Right. Now, the Portuguese King, for a little bit of context, this guy once stabbed his child nephew to death in a jealous rage. So this is like not a man you fuck with. And in fact, a lot of historians are kind of surprised that Columbus doesn't just

get murdered for saying this kind of shit to the King of Portugal. Well, they were in the middle of an iron rod shortage. Yeah. And this, this dude, again, the King of Portugal is a crazed, violent narcissist. And he's like, wow, this Christopher Columbus dude is a crazy violent narcissist. Yeah. Jesus. This guy needs therapy. Am I right? Oh, I stabbed you to death. Sorry. So Christopher, you know, things don't work out. There's some back and forth with Portugal. We're not going to go into tremendous detail about all this. Christopher tries with other sovereigns. He sends his brother Bartholomew, who's like better at talking to England to try and convince that king to fund the voyage. He doesn't have any luck with that. Eventually,

at age 40, and kind of feeling like because at 40, you're kind of old to be a sea captain. He travels to Spain, which is kind of his last hope, right? That like maybe I can convince these fucking monarchs to fund my shit. Now, again, he's an old man. He's starting to panic that like he's never going to get to do these things that he think God wants him to do. But over the course of several years, he manages to like wrangle an audience with Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. A lot of this is because he gets in good with a bunch of monks and like there's some like rich dude who visits the monks and the rich dude is like, this is a good idea. I know the King and Queen and it's a whole process. You can learn all of the history if you want by reading about it.

I think it's kind of boring. I'm like a place mat in a chain restaurant. Yeah, exactly. It worked, right? And both of these Ferdinand and Isabella, again, for first off, not a love match, not very similar people. Both of them had just spent the last few years unifying Spain, which is a pretty violent process. They kick out all of the Muslims or force them to convert. They also force all of the Jewish people to convert or leave. They like ethnically cleanse all of the Jewish people who won't leave their religion and those people have to sail to the Ottoman Empire, which is like the only place that will take them. It's a pretty gnarly process. There's an Inquisition, right? That happens in this period. There's all these crimes against humanity. Maybe we'll talk about

it one of these days. These are not nice people, which is fun because they're both going to be much more moral people than Christopher Columbus as the story goes on. But I just want you to know these are the Inquisition people. So when we're talking about them being outraged at Christopher Columbus's behavior, it's the people who started the Inquisition who are like, wow, this guy is not very like very bad person. Anyway, Christopher manages to get a sit down meeting with the queen in May of 1486 for the first time. Carol Delaney makes sure to note that he's hot, which is a little weird. But then Beargreen also kind of says that he's hot. So maybe he was hot. He is a charismatic dude, obviously, because he talks them into this eventually. So yeah, maybe he's hot. I don't know.

He does succeed in talking the king and queen into funding his expedition, mainly the queen. The king never really buys into Columbus, but like his wife is on board and he's like, yeah, what are you going to do? You know, diversify portfolio, throw some gems this way, some gems that way, see what happens. And this is a law he has to follow. He's kind of like following the king and queen for half a decade while they finish the series of battles to like unify their realm. He actually fights in a battle to take the city of Baza in Grenada in order to impress them. And apparently fights very well. Like, yeah, like he goes to war for them and stuff during this period to try to convince them to let him take a bunch of boats. They conquer Grenada. And despite the fact that a commission

they convene to study his proposal is like, this is impossible. Queen Isabella decides to trust Columbus more than her advisors, and she approved the expedition. Ferdinand, again, doesn't fight his wife on the matter. Now, you know what comes next, right? In 1492, Columbus sails his ass across the ocean blue in three ships. The Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria. He set sail on August 3, 1492. One bit of fun trivia. The Nina and the Pinta are assembled last minute by a Spanish town that had like pissed off the king and queen and owed them a bunch of money. So like two thirds of the fleet was built at the last minute as kind of a bribe. The ships are technically the property of these brothers who Columbus is going to have an issue with, but we'll talk about that in the next episode.

I'm not going to go into... The Wright brothers, they were called, and they were like, we'll do even better than that. You'll see as they shook their fists at the diminishing boats. They almost figured it out. So I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the voyage. It's worth noting that Columbus was the thing that he's best at is navigating, not geography. He's constantly wrong and he gets into a lot of trouble and gets other people into trouble because he refuses to accept that he's terrible at like geography, but he's incredible at what's called dead reckoning. And this is, I don't, this sounds like magic to me. You're basically sitting in a dark room building charts and estimating distances based on compass readings that you've taken.

And normally when people do dead reckoning, they have other data that like other sailors have taken sailing the same route. So they're just kind of modifying it slightly in order to like optimize the route. No one has done this route before. So Christopher is flying purely on instinct and just like doing math in his cabin to figure out how to get from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. And the route he picks is is still to this day basically the best sail route between Europe and the Caribbean. Like if you're sailing that distance, you more or less do just what Columbus figures out without any benefit of anything, but like a compass and like his ability to do math. It is an astounding achievement in navigation. Samuel Morrison, who's a Harvard sailor who

recreated Columbus's voyage in 1939, wrote when he was analyzing. Genocide and everything. He did the whole bit. He does. He kills so many people. Yeah, Harvard. Quote, no such dead reckoning navigators exist today. No man alive limited to the instruments and means that Columbus's disposal could obtain anything near the accuracy of his results. So he's pretty good at this one thing. Perfect pitch of navigating the ocean. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing that he's good at. Redeem. Credit where it's due. Now, as we're all aware, again, bad at actual geography. He's not fine. He sure knew his way around this old pair. Yeah. Well, a little bit of it. So he lands eventually after like 33 days on a little island off the

coast of Hispaniola or modern day Haiti in the Dominican Republic. Here is how Carol Delaney describes the moment of their first landing. Quote, as the anchors were dropped, the men stood on the decks and gazed at the Green Island, a soothing sight after so long at sea with only gray blue water and sky and saw naked people. Columbus summoned the Pinzone brothers, the captains of the other two ships, dawned his armor and went to shore in the launch, carrying the royal banner and two flags emblazoned with a green cross and the initials of Ferdinand and Isabella. Now, the Spanish sailors, they're relieved. First of all, the fact that these natives, you know, they're naked, they have paint that's not familiar, they look peculiar,

but they also look like normal humans, which is a huge relief because at the time, all of these guys believe what Pliny the Elder wrote about geography, which is that these other islands are like, there's these things called Anthropophagi, which are like headless torsummen with like torsummen that like are cannibals and stuff. So they see these guys. It's normal people. Great. Like that. That is kind of like the first overwhelming reaction is like, oh, thank God, they're not monsters. Yeah, they're not monsters. Oh, cool. We were really worried about that. All right. Well, let's read about the apocalypse. Yeah. Columbus never believed there were monsters on his part. He is moved to comment on how attractive they are, which everyone does in

this period. He names the island which had been inhabited basically forever, San Salvador. Quote, he called for the Escrivonio scribe and as protocol dictated, he had him record as witness that he took possession of it in the name of the Catholic sovereigns with appropriate ceremony and words. Taking possession of lands, hitherto unknown or undiscovered was primarily a signal to other European nations to keep off a sign that whoever took possession first had the preeminent right to discover, explore and establish trading posts. It did not automatically imply conquest or ownership. Now, that's what Carol writes. And it's really interesting to me that she's trying to push this claim that like, well, he wasn't really he was just this is just a warning

to other Europeans. He wasn't really saying we own this now. Obviously, that's not what this means necessarily, which is very silly because that's exactly what it means and exactly what he's done. And she later writes about the process of him conquering and like taking and governing these islands for Spain. It's extremely funny that she even now has to like pretend that that he's not just seeing islands inhabited by people and immediately being like, we own this shit now. I'm governor, which is exactly what he actually is doing. So he writes excitedly about the resources on the islands. He keeps finding like, we'll talk more about this in episode two, but he keeps seeing people like little gold pieces of jewelry. And he spends a lot of the next couple

of weeks eagerly searching to go for gold, trying to find mines that Spain can exploit because that's really everything to him, right? He has promised the sovereigns, I'm going to find gold and we're going to use that to fund an army that we can use to bring about the apocalypse but metal is very ripe here. Yes, the metal is ripe. More to the point, though, he writes very enthusiastically and positively about the local culture. And in fact, it's probably worth noting that there's elements of what he writes that are not terrible. What should we call it diminishing their culture or reductive? No, he's he's super. There are elements of that. He's but he's also there's like a lot of like one of the things that's noted is that he's one of the few guys

in these voyages who's like all about trying out the native foods and stuff. And he writes early, there's there's things that he does minimize and stuff. It's worth noting that like, Carol points out a lot about how enthusiastic, enthusiastic and positive he is about them. But also she kind of again, among the other things she ignores is that he's enthusiastic about them because of what good subjects they're going to make for the Spanish crown, right? That's the thing he's most excited about. Delaney gives Columbus great credit for the fact that his immediate thing is like, oh, these people are if you want to talk about diminishing, he decides based on a couple of days of communicating with them through hand signals that they don't have

a real religion. Now, what he means by that and Carol's like, all he means by that is that they're not Muslim or or, you know, some other kind of clear pagan religion, they don't have strict beliefs. So he thinks that they'll take to Christianity. He's literally saying based on hand gestures, I'm pretty sure they don't believe in anything so we could make him Christian real easy, right? The other thing that Carol, this is where we're really getting into the shit about her that's fucked up. She's like, look, the fact that he thinks the natives will be easy to convert to Christianity. It's a compliment. It's not just that it's a compliment. It means that he doesn't want to enslave them because you can't enslave Christians. You can enslave someone and then

they can convert to being Christian and that doesn't free them. But if you convert them into Christianity, they cannot be enslaved, right? So she's like, look, Christopher Columbus clearly didn't want anything bad for these people because he wanted to convert them. This is, again, very fucked up of her, very manipulative and sketchy. It's also fucking nonsense. Lawrence Bergreen describes things rather differently. Quote, the Spanish should come all this way across the ocean sea, expecting to confront a superior civilization. How disconcerting to be confronted with naked people who were very poor and everything. Columbus and his men would have to be careful not to hurt them rather than the other way around. I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies

and made signs for them to ask what it was. And they showed me that people of other islands, which are near, came there and wished to capture them and they defended themselves. And I believe that people do come here from the mainland to take them as slaves. Slaves. The idea is... The idea instantly struck Columbus as plausible, even desirable. They ought to be good servants, he continued, and of good skill, for I see they repeat quickly everything that is said to them. So Delaney's like, of course he doesn't want to enslave him, he wants to convert them. And fucking Lawrence Bergreen just points out the first thing he writes about these people is they're going to be great slaves. That's like servants, right? Servants. But what happens

is they all get enslaved. So I think it's clear what he means. So he has discovered, quote, unquote, new people. And thought number one is like, oh man, number one, these people are not as good at fighting as at us. And number two, it's going to be really easy as shit to enslave them. Hot dog. And we're going to talk about what comes next and everything Christopher Columbus does. And we will try to give some insight into these people that he has found too, because they go extinct very quickly. And so there's not as much known about them as is ideal. But there is some there are some people trying to do decent anthropology in this period, including Delas Casas, to try to like save something of like, yeah, these folks. So we'll

talk, we will be talking about that. And we will be talking about everything else that Christopher Columbus is about to do, which is much worse. It gets a lot worse after Episode one. I know he's been a very likable guy up to this point. Yeah, as another famous Colombo once said, one more thing. And then genocide. Yeah. And then genocide. So, Michael, how are you feeling at the end of Part One? Has this changed your mind on Christopher Columbus? I'll tell you, I thought Amerigo Vespucci was a piece of shit. This guy. Yeah, no, I'm uneasy, Robert. I'm leaning on puns for my own comfort. Yeah, I mean, Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus. Look, do we need to figure out what's going on with Italians? You know, maybe shut down

immigration from that from that perfidious art isthmus? I don't understand geographic terms like Columbus. I broaden it to all humanity. I mean, we're all just metal ripening in the wind. We're all just metal ripening in the wind. That's right. That's right. Until next time, find the director, Chris Columbus, and just hook a beer bottle at him. Like really, really brain him hard right in the side of the head. Fuck him up. Or at least pull your arm back in anticipation of a hook and then tune in for the next episode. Yeah. Yeah. What is he, what is he directed? What are his movies? I just know that there's a director name. Oh, he did the Harry Potter's movie. Well, there you go. That's reason enough.

Yeah. Screw that turf, I guess, by association, even though there's, I've heard nothing but fine things about Chris Columbus. Great. Literally never heard anything about him. Really glad you maneuvered me into that. Yeah. He has the name of the other guy. I don't know. He looks like a guy who would immediately enslave an entire people. You know what I say? Screw people who have the same name as someone else, right? Robert Evans? Fuck them. Hey, all my namesake ever did was a hell of a lot of cocaine. Yeah. Yeah, he's a great, yeah, there's nothing wrong with either Robert Evans, if you ask me. Nope. Not going to read into that anymore. So, Michael, you got any plugables to plug?

Oh, sure. I'll do a second plug. Thank you so much. Specifically, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention One Upsmanship. If you like hearing about video games as an art form and sort of the whole medium and the ongoing dialectic of what games are real good, me and my buddy Adam Ganser discuss that at length every week on One Upsmanship. That's the number one UPSmanship. Check us out. Now, Michael, I just learned something fucked up about Christopher Columbus, the director. Oh, no. Oh, my God. Oh, a real thing. His production company, 1492 Pictures. Does this mean that the Harry Potter movies were created as part of an occult right to in the world because our Christopher Columbus

also views himself as an agent of the apocalypse? Yes. Harry has to re-establish the Promised Land as like the magical kingdom needs to take over the Marvel world. Perhaps this Christopher Columbus is gathering gold to himself by making movies in order to retake Jerusalem. And you said he was hot, but we're not sure exactly what he looks like. I'm going to assume he has just slits for a nose and is basically a Voldemort character. All I'm saying is it took Robert, I don't know, 20 seconds to turn a man into a bastard? 20 seconds. That's it. Anyway, hunt him down, folks. Bring him to justice.

Oh, he directed the Home Alone films. Yeah. And Mrs. Doubtfire. Oh, no. Call off your dogs. No hunting. No hunting. This is the greatest mortal quandary in Behind the Bastards history. We'll have to crack that next time. Bye-bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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