So that's why. No wonder these guys are not afraid. It turns out someone has arrived ahead of time. In that case, let's see if we can make a deal with him. There are so many low-level beasts that we need to manage as excellent people.
Hernan, who regarded the slowly approaching Favia as the same as countless other colonists, finally breathed a sigh of relief. After all, although he might not get much wealth, it was always better to survive.
"Hello, sir, I am Hernan, a Spaniard—"
"You used a musket?"
Just as Hernan was about to introduce himself, Favia suddenly spoke.
This question confused Hernan. Is it strange to use a musket? The reason why these beasts are not afraid is because you have used it before.
However, he only said this in his heart and would not say it out loud. After all, he was at a disadvantage now, so Hernan nodded.
"Um......"
Then, Hernan, who wanted to say more, noticed that Favia's eyes swept across their group and finally set his sights on Bartolomé.
"Are you a priest of the church?"
"Ah..." Bartolomé, who seemed to be in a daze for a while, quickly came back to his senses and nodded. "I am a priest of the church in Spain. My name is Bartolomé de Las Casas. Who are you?"
Bartolomé had an indescribable feeling towards the silver-haired man in front of him. Not only were his eyes a little cold, but he could also feel his unique style just from his behavior... If he hadn't controlled himself, he would have felt like he couldn't look directly at him, as if he had done something irreparable.
"I know why you came."
Click.
The silver-haired man struck the ground with the obsidian sacrificial knife in his hand.
"But you are just the pioneers. It won't be long before the Governor of Cuba's troops follow closely behind you."
Click, click.
He returned to the Aztec warriors.
The air was filled with the residual smell of gunpowder, which mixed with the coolness of the densely forested coast to form a unique atmosphere.
"Let me introduce myself first. My name is Favia, and I am the messenger of the Aztec Second Sun."
Click, click, click.
"You know, I've heard this from other people before—"
The silver-haired man stood in front of Aztec and looked at these people indifferently.
These words were like a sudden storm, restoring the entire scene to its original tension, making it impossible to predict what would happen next. The obsidian reflecting the sunlight was like a prelude to the discovery of this isolated continent, foreshadowing the brutal war that was about to take place.
“And you, my friend, from your height of sorrow, can you rage, rage against the dying of the light?”
The atmosphere of harmony disappeared and turned into a breath of killing. As Favia's voice fell, the Aztec leopard warriors who had been waiting for a long time immediately rushed towards the Spaniards and started killing.
"........"
Bartolomé looked at the battlefield in a daze.
He felt that he should use magic to assist, but he felt powerless to use his magic.
This group of people, who were not sure whether they were Indians, just waved their weapons and killed people. The people who followed the Spaniards were not particularly professional soldiers so they were quickly defeated. The smell of blood spread all over the coast.
And there was the silver-haired man who was still standing there, watching all this happen silently.
Bartolomé had some kind of illusion at this moment. He seemed to see a huge angel statue holding a sword and a scale. He was very familiar with it because it looked very much like the statue of Michael on Mont Saint-Michel.
Archangel Michael is undoubtedly one of the most famous angels, judging the sins of the dead with the scales and repelling the 'snake' with the sword.
"This is......"
The priest didn't know what to say, but his inner faith didn't allow him to look away.
This can be considered blasphemy, right?
Because in his eyes, the Archangel holding up the holy sword was not announcing the victory of faith, but more like following the swing of the obsidian sacrificial knife.
What it wants to penetrate and tear apart is──
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light,
And you, my friend, from up there in your sorrowful heights, rage, rage against the dying of the light."
A gospel stained with blood and black.
Yao
240: Indian Guardian (4k5)
"And you, my friend, up there in your sorrowful heights, rage, rage against the dying of the light."
When Favia's words reached Bartolomé's ears, the old priest couldn't help but feel a little dazed.
Over the years, as a Spaniard, he defended the rights of the Indians on the island of Cuba. Therefore, he was regarded as a "traitor" to the Spanish people, while some Indians regarded him as a "saint among bandits."
Bartolomé's father was a businessman and his family had been Christians for generations. He was smart and clever since he was young and often went to play in Porto Palos near his hometown of Seville.
It can be said that if Bartolomé had continued like this, his life would have been ordinary, but fate is unpredictable. When he was nine years old, the arrival of a person not only changed his fate, but also changed the fate of the whole of Spain.
That day, the entire port of Palos was surrounded by people.
Bartolomé squeezed into the crowd and saw the navigator with white hair and a tired look. There seemed to be nothing special about him until he spoke word by word:
"I, Columbus, have discovered a new route to India!"
People cheered like crazy, "Oh my God, Columbus discovered a new route." The news spread throughout Spain like the wind, and people remembered the name Christopher Columbus, and Bartolomé was no exception.
It wasn't long before Bartolomé's father was inspired to sign up to join the crew on Columbus' second voyage.
In 1498, his father returned and brought back an Indian boy as a servant.
This was the first time Bartolomé had seen Indians—they were very dark-skinned and looked hesitant and frightened.
However, he thought that the Indians were not the monsters as imagined. They were no different from ordinary Spaniards.
In 1500, Bartolomé, who was already sixteen years old, came to study at the University of Salamanca. This ancient university was the center of Spanish humanism. The teachers spoke freely, talked about the justice of the war, questioned the legitimacy of the colonial cause, and talked about the idea of "equality".
At that time, he could not understand these complex concepts, but the humanistic thoughts still permeated his soul.
By the time Bartolomé came of age, people already knew that the land Columbus discovered was not "India" but a land that had never been marked - America.
However, this land also has countless opportunities and wealth. Like many Spaniards, Bartolomé could not resist the temptation and wanted to see it for himself.
He signed up to be a member of the Odowan expedition team, and on the blue Atlantic Ocean, his heart surged like waves.
A few months later, we arrived at the "Spanish Island" 6000 kilometers away as we wished.
It is said that when Columbus arrived, there were 300 million Indians on the island. However, nine years later, everything had changed and it was no longer as prosperous as it once was.
In any case, as the number of Indians decreased, there was more unowned land, which was a good thing for the Spanish colonists.
In this way, the adult Bartolomé became a "guardian lord" on the Spanish island, owned a piece of land and some slaves in Cibao, and stepped into the ranks of the ruling class. A few months ago, he was just a young boy in Seville, but in a blink of an eye, he became a big man in Cibao.
Bartolomé was extremely excited. He now had his own "little kingdom" and could exercise the power of life and death. In Europe's Spain, this was a prestige only enjoyed by noble lords.
In 1510, he was appreciated by the bishop of the Spanish island and successfully became a priest. At this time, he was young and promising and extremely glorious.
If there had not been the "Call of Montesinos", Bartolomé might have been like most believers, indifferent to the lives and deaths of the Indians.
In fact, a group of Spanish Dominican priests were very dissatisfied with the atrocities of their own colonialists. So in 1511, they jointly drafted and signed a sermon, and decided to use a sermon to launch a public condemnation. They nominated the most eloquent Anton Montesinos as the main speaker of the sermon.
On December 1511, 12, just four days before Christmas, the colonists on the Spanish island waited to confess, hoping that God would forgive the sins they had committed that year. However, on this day, the colonists, including Diego Columbus, the son of Columbus, heard a thunderous condemnation:
"I am the cry of the desert Christ on this island."
"So you had better listen carefully, and not just listen carefully, but listen with all your heart; this is the newest, the crudest, the most severe, the most terrifying, the most dangerous cry you have never heard and never expected."
Montesinos' sermon began with a famous quote from the Gospel.
"This cry means that all of you have committed a capital crime."
"You were born in sin and you will die in sin because of the cruelty you inflicted on these innocent people."
"Answer me, what right do you have, what justification do you have for imposing such cruel and terrible slavery on the Indians?"
"What right have you to wage a disastrous war against these people who live in their own quiet and peaceful land, causing the death of so many Indians and unheard-of destruction?"
"How do you oppress and enslave them, deprive them of food, deny them medical care, and subject them to unbearable labor until they die?"
"Shouldn't it be said that you are killing them every day in order to dig out the gold?"
"Are they not persons? Unreasoning souls? Have you no duty to love them as yourself?"
This is the "Cry of Montesinos" that cut through history. The phrase "Are they not human beings?" can be seen as a more thorough declaration of human rights that is earlier than and higher than the British Magna Carta, the American Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, because the people it refers to come without any additional conditions, including the Indians who were regarded as savages at the time.
But unlike the priest, the people present were very annoyed when they heard such words.
They thought, we went through so much trouble to come to America just to steal money and territory.
You want to block our way to wealth just by saying "love and peace"? Go somewhere cool!
So they discussed it together and jointly filed a complaint to the King of Spain.
So after this sermon, Montesinos and his colleagues were threatened by the Spanish royal family and had to return to Spain, but were forced to regret their words during the second sermon. However, when he stepped onto the pulpit for the second time, Montesinos issued a more severe condemnation.
Bartolomé was also present at the time. He may have felt that what the old priest said made some sense, but it was not enough to dampen his enthusiasm for achieving success.
It was not until 1513 that Bartolomé followed the Governor of Cuba to suppress the Indians.
During the Hatui massacre, he witnessed thousands of indigenous people falling under the butcher's knife, which made him realize the bloodiness of the colonial movement and reminded him of Father Montesinos's sermons.
Although Bartolomé obtained rich "trophies" after the massacre - rich territory in central Cuba, he fell into deep guilt and self-blame.
The subsequent Spanish massacre of the Taino people completely broke his bottom line. He wrote in his diary:
"I have never seen or imagined such a large-scale cruelty. Under the ravages of Spanish colonialism, this once vibrant island became a deserted place. As for the docile Taino people, they were completely extinct, and only some of the relatively strong Caribbean people who bravely defended their homeland survived."
It was at this moment that Bartolomé understood Father Montesinos and his teacher at the University of Salamanca.
After that, he gave up everything in America, gave up his land, freed his slaves, gave up the possibility of becoming an American "noble", and returned to Spain to preach the disaster suffered by the Indians and advocated an end to this atrocity.
In a debate hosted by the Spanish royal family on whether American Indians had souls, Bartolomé and Montesinos, as well as some Dominican priests, sided with the empire.
Even though the results were minimal and he was hated, cursed, and stabbed by the majority of people who benefited from the colonization, none of this could scare him.
Because Bartolomé firmly believed that what he was doing was right.
Because, there stands a statue of Novia in the Dominican Order. Novia, the founder of the church, stands in front of a pulpit carved from a huge stone, his eyes stern and deep, his left hand raised to his mouth like a microphone. The declaration when the Cathedral Church was founded was heard from the dead silent desert, and it has been thousands of years since then.
The words of the past are like light slowly falling into the dark world.
The faint light floats and floats towards the world, as if saving the distressed people who long for rain, or as if guiding those who have lost their way.
"Bartolomé, you know what? I actually know about you, Montesinos, and the priests who firmly disagree with Spanish colonization. You have done a great job and are all respectable believers."
In the quiet after the bloody massacre, Favia walked up to Bartolomé and said with a smile.
Although the actions of Bartolomé and others did not achieve effective results in the 16th century due to the excessive colonial forces, it was they who spread their ideas through books, and finally, three centuries later, at the call of Father Hidalgo, they kicked off the Mexican independence movement, known in history as the "Cry of Dolores."
Almost at the same time, wars of independence were in full swing in various parts of America. The call for freedom resounded throughout the New World, and the royal power fell.
As long as the pace of moving towards the ideal does not stop, the efforts of the pioneers will never be in vain.
Bartolomé did not answer immediately because he did not know what he should say.
“You need to say ‘I hope you can eat well’, but you also need to take action to say ‘I will cook for you myself’.”
He went on to say,
"I'm going to Cuba to bring back those Indians. Do you want to come with us?"
"What......"
At that moment, Bartolomé's eyes widened, and he could hardly believe that what Favia said was true.
In fact, Favia did think about this for a long time, because this would be considered as alerting the enemy, which would make Spain notice Mexico in advance and start a war. But then he thought again that the Governor of Cuba after Hernan would also be here, and the difference would only be a few months, so he decided to do so.
In addition, there is another reason -
"Ouch!"
A huge wolf howl was heard from the dense forest, and along with the sound, its body was revealed to everyone. It was a wolf.
This was the giant coyote that Favia had seen before in the Guamal Alliance formed by the Chichimecs, a branch of Indians known as the "nomadic people". They regarded it as a god and called it "Coti".
This name is the patron saint of Indian mythology and also the patron saint of Mayan mythology.
