1492—Not Just Discovery
WHY is 1492 such an important date in human history? It is usually remembered as the year in which Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain to discover the New World in the west. However, in his book The Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale also recalls the date for other reasons. He writes:
“On August 2, 1492, the day before Colón [Columbus] sailed from Palos [Huelva, Spain], the final deadline arrived for the expulsion from Spain of its entire Jewish population. According to a royal decree . . . , all Jews, of whatever age or station or position, were to be summarily expelled. The best estimates are that some 120,000 to 150,000 people were forced to flee from homes and lands their families had occupied for generations, in some cases centuries, and to take with them only their immediate personal possessions—not, however, their gold, silver, jewels, or currency, which were to be left behind for the [Catholic] crown and its agents.”
In Sale’s book, that same year goes down in history for another infamous event:
“On the night of August 10, 1492, with the power and money of Ferdinand of Aragon behind him, Rodrigo de Borja, a Spanish member of the noted Borgia family, bribed, threatened, argued, and blackmailed his way into becoming the supreme pontiff, Vicar of Christ and Pope of the Church of Rome, taking the papal name Alexander VI. A man of great wealth and unabashedly high living, he was, despite his holy vows, the father of an unknown number of children in both Castile and Rome, including Cesare and Lucrezia, . . . and even in his own time acknowledged as the ultimate symbol of a papacy then in the dregs of a century-long decadence. His papacy was marked . . . by the open auction of lucrative ecclesiastical offices to the richest and most corrupt of his holy curia, and by his own personal chicaneries in office, including bribery, sexual assignations, live-in mistresses, and oral readings of pornography from the papal library.”—The Conquest of Paradise, pages 13, 16.