The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part two: Bartolomé de Las Casas as colonial reformer (1)
Giraldus Cambrensis discovers Ireland
Unless we make contact with extraterrestrials, it will never again be possible to meet new people. That is to say, people whose history, language and culture are entirely unknown to us, and who themselves have no acquaintance with our world. That was the strange experience of many Spaniards in the years after 1492. They were entering a new world. It may be interesting to compare some of their writers with Gerald of Wales, the 12th century Anglo-Norman writer who encountered Ireland.
When a French-speaking aristocracy, based in England and Wales, set out to conquer Ireland in 1169, they knew where they were going. Ireland was known, had been known from time immemorial. Besides, it was part of Christendom, and it had an important place in the English political and cultural history absorbed by the Anglo-Norman intellectual elite .
First of all, Christianity, with its common Latin language, linked the two islands. Saint Patrick, Ireland’s most important Christian missionary, was a Roman Briton. About a century after his death Irish Christianity was in full bloom, whereas the christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons was just beginning. Irish missionaries played an important part in this conversion; it has been argued that for most of the 7th century “Anglo-Saxon England was a cultural province of Ireland”. (1) Bede’s Ecclesiastical History has much to say about Ireland, including the fact that a good many Englishmen went there for religious study and to live the monastic life. However, a few centuries later the pendulum had swung back, and it was Ireland that was considered mission territory. In particular, Irish marriage customs were considered scandalously unchristian. The Anglo-Norman conquest was therefore justified, licensed by the Pope, and accepted (however grudgingly) by Irish clerics, as a Christian missionary enterprise.
As for political links, some chroniclers claimed that the kings of Ireland paid tribute to King Arthur. In Christian times English kings had been known to attack Irish territories (Ecgfrith of Northumbria, 684). English princes and nobles who lost out in dynastic battles might end up in Irish exile, or vice versa. There was also a kind of connection forged by the slave trade. Irish raiders made many swoops upon Britain, during one of them seizing Patrick. Later on, they were able simply to buy the slaves in Bristol – say, in the 11th century, when Bishop Wulfstan denounced this trade. According to Conor O’Mahony (1645), “there was scarcely any Irishman of moderate means who did not have one or more English slaves”. (2) A synod of the Irish Church in 1170 seems to have decided that the invasion was a judgement of God upon the Irish for this vicious practice and demanded that all English slaves should be freed.
Ireland was known. But how well? Did even an educated 12th century Anglo-Norman know much more about Ireland than a Spaniard in the 1490s knew about the Tainos of Hispaniola? No one had written an adequate guide to Ireland. The subject was not entirely untouched, but “no writer had comprehensively treated of it,” (3) Gerald of Wales claimed, writing about 1180. And so this masterly writer invented Irish sociology, and much else besides.
After a topographical description and a selection of marvellous things and miracles of the saints, he considered the people. They were, he thought, “barbarous both in dress and mental culture... A rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living like beasts... Abandoning themselves to idleness, and immersed in sloth, their greatest delight is to be exempt from toil, their richest possession the enjoyment of liberty...” (4)
The kings had a taste for luxury items, but they knew they would never acquire them unless some foreigner imported them, because the Irish were so idle. For that reason they had licensed some settlements of Viking traders. There were seams of precious metals on the island, but no one mined them. “Even gold, which the people require in large quantities, and still covet in a way that speaks their Spanish origin, is brought here by the merchants who traverse the ocean for the purposes of commerce.”
Why were the people so uncultured? One reason was isolation: they were practically in a different world. “As the people inhabit a country so remote from the rest of the world, and lying at its furthest extremity, forming, as it were, another world, and are thus secluded from the civilised nations, they learn nothing, and practise nothing except the barbarism in which they are born and bred, and which sticks to them like a second nature. Whatever natural gifts they possess are excellent, in whatever requires industry they are worthless.”
Over time this ignorant indolence had become a permanent, self-perpetuating quality of the Irish people, and they never made the normal progress of other peoples. “In the common course of things, mankind progresses from the forest to the field, from the field to the town, and to the social condition of citizens, but this nation, holding agricultural labour in contempt, and little coveting the wealth of towns, as well as being exceedingly averse to civil institutions, – lead the same life their fathers did in the woods and pastures, neither willing to abandon their old habits or learn anything new.”
But were they not Christians? The whole island had indeed been converted in the distant past. And that being so, “it is wonderful that this nation should remain to this day so very ignorant of the rudiments of Christianity. It is indeed a most filthy race, a race sunk in vice, a race more ignorant than all other nations of the first principles of the faith. Hitherto they neither pay tithes nor first fruits; they do not contract marriage, nor shun incestuous connections; they frequent not the church of God with proper reverence.” It was their custom to debauch (“I will not say marry”) their dead brothers’ wives, in which instance they were copying the vices rather than the virtues of Old Testament Jews.
One major problem was that the priests did not preach and correct the people. There was a bias towards passivity in the Irish Church. Nearly all the bishops were elected from monasteries and continued afterwards in the mentality of monks. Even the saints had not done the hard and dangerous job of preaching. “All the saints of the country were confessors and none martyrs, a thing which it would be difficult to find in any other Christian kingdom.” Currently, the clergy in general were not an impressive body. They did quite a lot of fasting, but after their fasts they habitually got drunk. In the clergy as a whole “there is very little grain, but much chaff”.
While Gerald in some ways is far ahead of his time, his ideas are rather undeveloped. He says that the Irish “live like beasts”, but draws no conclusions from this. He denounces them for their vices, yet they seem to be only quantitatively worse than others. Gerald cannot, of course, make the two very special accusations: human sacrifice and cannibalism. Even sodomy does not seem to be relevant here. The most lurid accusation of sexual irregularity (cohabitation with sisters-in-law) comes with an acknowledgement, which cannot help but be mitigating, that the Old Testament Jews had done the same. In another book Gerald gives five reasons why the kings of England have a right to possess Ireland, but (unlike, say, Francisco de Vitoria’s arguments for the Spanish conquest of America) none of them amount to saying that the Irish need to be saved from themselves or each other.
But of course, these ideas could be added to, supplemented, revised, creatively applied. They were rediscovered in Elizabethan times and printed, and in that context they were explosive. Gerald himself tells us that he was criticised by contemporaries for believing tall tales about the bearded lady, the wolf that spoke to the priest, and so on. No one seems to have cared about his view of the Irish people. But in the 17th century a whole series of Irish writers attacked him, sometimes at enormous length, because what he said had implications for how the Irish were to be treated and governed.