Philip II: Exporting  Atrocities From Europe Abroad, Transforming Victims into God and Gold

            The Spanish Inquisition had been set up in 1480 and continued the work Innocent III had begun nearly three centuries earlier. At least 2000 were burned at the stake under Isabella. The Jews were forced to leave Spain, or convert, and the converted Jews, then called Marranos, or 'swine', were, under Philip II, subjected to the Inquisition on the belief, largely erroneous, it turns out, that their conversions were insincere. Many were killed. Philip (r.1556-1598) also oversaw the Inquisition and murder of many Moors, who had also converted, called Moriscos. On top of this, he fought wars against the Ottomans, taking 127 Ottoman ships in 1571 and killing thousands. He was also fighting wars with France and England as well as in the Netherlands. At the height of the Spanish Empire Philip was at war with nearly everyone. His will to war was matched only by his greed.  Between 1503 and 1505 Spain had imported 445,266 ducats of treasure from the Americas. Between 1696 and 1700, at the end of Phillips reign, Spain took in 41,314,201 ducats of treasure. This is almost 100 times the amount that was brought in when Columbus was still overseeing the plunder of the New World. The enormous income convinced Philip of his divine destiny and encouraged him to yet more wars for territory. The greater Spain's wealth, the greater the need of more wealth to pay for the wars against those who envied Spain.  The cycle of knowledge and power ground down its victims literally into more gold, requiring more victims, requiring more war and yet more victims. Under Philip the  Portuguese and Spanish begin slave trade to the Americas, as a new way to maximize gold, war, victims and gold for the glory of god and king.       

           Philip II set up the Inquisition in the Netherlands; the historian B. Netanyahu describes this in a recent book:

On the 16th of February, 1568...the Inquisition condemned all the inhabitants of the Netherlands to death as heretics...The proclamation of King Philip II, dated 10 days later...ordered it to be carried into instant execution...three million men, women and children were sentenced to the scaffold in 3 lines...[1]

Netanyahu writes that the Spanish racism of this period prefigures the racism of the Nazis, and this is probably accurate, but I would add that it also prefigures the racism of the British and Americans and their treatment of Africans and Native Americans. Philip's state is in many ways the first international combination of religious merchant warriors, whose power depends upon the capacity to exploit and whose "transcendent" quality is correlated to its murderous rapacity. Philip enjoyed watching the cruel public ceremonies, the Auto de Fe, in which the Inquisition publicly humiliated people, stood them in a mock trial and often tortured and killed them before large crowds, sometimes reaching 100,000 viewers. Philip also oversaw the setting up of the Inquisition in the 'New World', and following the pattern set up against the Jews and the Moslems in Spain, the Inquisitors, priests and Conquistadors in the New World would try Jews, Protestants, Irish, and Peruvian and Mexican Native Americans suspected of still practicing their religion and torture them, burning them at the stake in many cases.  By the 1570's most of the Indians were dead,  and while the apocalyptic fervor of the Spanish mystics enabled them to luxuriate in romantic dreams of  'dark night of the soul', the Spanish were turning an entire continent into bones and blood [2]

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