Es lo que leo en este artículo de Gates of Viena (How Muslim Piracy Changed the World). La morisma no solo habría acabado con la civilización clásica mediterránea (continuada en la Cristiandad, se entiende) sino que habría sido una de las causas del descubrimiento de las Américas:
Whilst the impact of Muslim piracy was thus decisive in the seventh century in terminating Classical Civilization, it was equally decisive in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in forcing Europeans out into the Atlantic in search of safer ways to travel to the Far East. With the blockade of the Mediterranean, Europeans were debarred from the rich spice trade with the Indies. For a brief period in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Mongols had opened trade to the Orient, at least by overland routes, and Europeans dreamed of a sea-route that would bypass the Muslim territories and the Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean. First, under Henry the Navigator, they sought a way round the southern tip of Africa, and later, under Columbus, they sought a quick route by sailing directly westwards. Columbus believed the earth to be much smaller than Eratosthenes had calculated, and imagined that China and the Indies lay roughly where we now know North America lies.
The Age of Discovery was therefore launched to find a way around the threat of Islamic piracy. Yet these journeys had another, more military, purpose in mind. In his representations to the Spanish King and Queen, Columbus made it clear that the discovery of a “short” route to China might open the possibility of an alliance against Islam. The main purpose of the projected expedition was, in the words of Louis Bertrand, “to take Islam in the rear, and to effect an alliance with the Great Khan — a mythical personage who was believed to be the sovereign of all that region, and favourable to the Christian religion …” (Louis Bertrand, The History of Spain, p. 163) Bertrand was very insistent on this point, which he emphasized in half a dozen pages. The voyage of discovery was to begin a new phase, he says, in “the Crusade against the Moors which was to be continued by a new and surer route. It was by way of the Indies that Islam was to be dealt a mortal blow.” (Ibid.)
So certain was Bertrand of the connection between the exploits of the Conquistadores in the Americas and the war against Islam that he actually describes the conquest of America as the “last Crusade.”
Nada que objetar hasta este punto. Pero veamos lo que sigue.
The record of the Conquistadores in the New World needs no repetition here: It is one of cruelty and greed on a truly monumental scale. Yet the habits of the Spaniards here, habits which gave rise to the “Black Legend,” were learned at the school of the Caliphs. In Bertrand’s words: “Lust for gold, bloodthirsty rapacity, the feverish pursuit of hidden treasure, application of torture to the vanquished to wrest the secret of their hiding-places from them — all these barbarous proceedings and all these vices, which the conquistadores were to take to America, they learnt at the school of the caliphs, the emirs, and the Moorish kings.” (Ibid. p. 159)
Se está afirmando que los abusos fueron la norma. ¿Hay algo parecido a las Leyes de Indias en toda la historia del imperialismo británico (no digamos holandés, que me entra la tembladera)? Nótese que pone Leyenda Negra entre comillas ¿querrá decir que no es tal leyenda sino la mera verdad de los hechos? ¿Se creerá de verdad que la crueldad fue aprendida de los moros?
Indeed all of the traits associated with the Spaniards, for which they have been roundly criticized by Anglo-Saxon historians, can be traced to the contact with Islam.
Pues sí, parece ser que se lo cree. Los españoles serían especialmente crueles por su contacto con el Islam. Curiosamente, la crítica esa de los historiadores alglosajones, solo aparece tras la Protesta (y la competencia de ambos imperios). Antes de la Protesta no se oye ni una sola crítica al respecto.
Vamos a recordar este hecho histórico (en dos años celebraremos el 800 aniversario) en el que los ultramontanos (esos europeos tan cándidos por no haber conocido al Islam de cerca) se retiraron de la Cruzada española que tendría su desenlace en las batalla de las Navas de Tolosa por el tratamiento demasiado humanitario que el rey castellano daba a moros y judíos vencidos:
There were some disagreements among the members of the Christian coalition: French and other European knights were not used to the Iberian summer heat, but more importantly, they did not agree with Alfonso’s humanitarian treatment of Jews and Muslims that were previously defeated in the conquest of Malagón and Calatrava la Vieja. Previously, they had caused problems in Toledo, (where the different armies of the Crusade gathered), with assaults and murders in the Jewish Quarter. More than 30.000 men deserted and returned to their homes across the Pyrenees.
¿Cómo cuadra eso con la crueldad debida al contacto con el Islam?
“The worst characteristic which the Spaniards acquired was the parasitism of the Arabs and the nomad Africans: the custom of living off one’s neighbour’s territory, the raid raised to the level of an institution, marauding and brigandage recognized as the sole means of existence for the man-at-arms. In the same way they went to win their bread in Moorish territory, so the Spaniards later went to win gold and territory in Mexico and Peru.
¿Parasitismo? ¿Cuándo se estableció la primera universidad en las Américas? ¿Cuál era la situación económica de la América española en los tiempos de la independencia? La mayor ¿qué hubiera pasado si hubiera sido la Protesta la que hubiera colonizado poblaciones cuyo estado cultural era el neolítico?
“They were to introduce there, too, the barbarous, summary practices of the Arabs: putting everything to fire and sword, cutting down fruit-trees, razing crops, devastating whole districts to starve out the enemy and bring them to terms; making slaves everywhere, condemning the population of the conquered countries to forced labour. All these detestable ways the conquistadores learnt from the Arabs.
Este parece que se ha tomado las patrañas del de las Casas al pie de la letra. Da pena leer esto en Gates of Viena.
“For several centuries slavery maintained itself in Christian Spain, as in the Islamic lands. Very certainly, also, it was to the Arabs that the Spaniards owed the intransigence of their fanaticism, the pretension to be, if not the chosen of God, at least the most Catholic nation of Christendom. Philip II, like Abd er Rahman or El Mansour, was Defender of the Faith.
Tiene narices que uno de los países que primero abolió la servidumbre sea acusado de esto. La esclavitud nunca fue económicamente relevante en España.
“Finally, it was not without contagion that the Spaniards lived for centuries in contact with a race of men who crucified their enemies and gloried in piling up thousands of severed heads by way of trophies. The cruelty of the Arabs and the Berbers also founded a school in the Peninsula. The ferocity of the emirs and the caliphs who killed their brothers or their sons with their own hands was to be handed on to Pedro the Cruel and Henry of Trastamare, those stranglers under canvas, no better than common assassins.” (Ibid. p. 160)
De nuevo ¿no hubo guerras nobiliarias la norte de los Pirineos? ¿No hubo reyes que asesinaron a numerosos rivales y esposas?
Me parece increíble que se de pábulo a estas patrañas a estas alturas de la partida. El hereje que firma esto debería saber que si no hubiera sido por la lucha de la Monarquía Católica española (no me refiero solo a los reyes sino a reyes y nación) contra el Islam, posiblemente, no pudiera escribir esas ficciones. Y recuerde: la Reforma fue objetivamente aliada del Turco. Solo pudo triunfar porque la Monarquía Española tuvo que hacer frente a ambas a la vez.
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PS: Recordemos que recientemente un historiador islamófilo aseguraba que el surgimiento de los parlamentos en la Cristiandad medieval tuvo lugar en España por el contacto con el Islam: Democracy, “a gift of Islam to the modern world”.
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