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“Racial Apocalypse is an original exploration of how concepts of race
emerged in early modern Spain and England through the belief that Christ
would establish an eternal kingdom. Villagrana illustrates how a form of
white supremacy emerges as Spanish and English Christians struggled to
understand how indigenous peoples and Black Africans might be incorpo-
rated into the kingdom of God. This book will importantly add to our
understanding of how religious doctrine informs racial formation and
racism.”
Dennis Austin Britton, University of New Hampshire

“Villagrana brings English and Spanish colonial and apocalyptic

narratives—rationalizing rhetoric about providential preference and racial
hierarchy—into conversation, revising in the process our view of race in the
premodern era and advancing premodern critical race studies in crucial
ways.”
Patricia Akhimie, Rutgers University, Newark

“This book is an important addition to critical conversations about race in

the early modern era. Not only does it provide a compelling comparative
reading of processes of racialization involving Spanish, British, American
Indigenous and Black African cultures, the book debunks popular notions
that racialized thinking of the era primarily came out of fears and anxieties
about European encounters with foreign cultures. Villagrana makes a
strong case that race also was predicated on a sense of hope, of optimism
as England, in particular, understood racialization as the fulfillment of
biblical prophecy. The book provides wonderfully nuanced readings of the
ways in which religion, appearing most often in terms of apocalyptic
discourse, was bound up with racial formations and vice versa.”
Cassander L. Smith, University of Alabama
Racial Apocalypse

This book reveals the relationship between apocalyptic thought, political

supremacy, and racialization in the early modern world. The chapters in
this book analyze apocalypse and racialization from several discursive and
geopolitical spaces to shed light on the ubiquity and diversity of apocalyptic
racial thought and its centrality to advancing political power objectives
across linguistic and national borders in the early modern period.
By approaching race through apocalyptic discourse, this volume not only
exposes connections between the pursuit of political power and apocalyptic
thought, but also contributes to defining race across multiple areas of
research in the early modern period, including colonialism, English and
Hispanist studies, and religious studies.

José Juan Villagrana is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative

Literature at San José State University.
Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities

Series Editors: Nicholas R. Jones, Bucknell University and

Derrick Higginbotham, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities focuses on

archives—historical, literary, visual—that link the analytics of critical
theory and cultural studies to the early modern period in locations across
the globe from 1400 to 1700. The series publishes monographs and/or
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expression, and visual ideations from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe,
and/or the South Pacific speak into or resonate with contemporary debates
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the purpose not only of scrutinizing their socio-political meanings, but also
of creating new archives that reframe different aspects of early modernity
within and outside of Europe.

Pornographic Sensibilities
Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish
Cultural Production
Edited by Nicholas R. Jones and Chad Leahy

Racial Apocalypse
The Cultivation of Supremacy in the Early Modern World
José Juan Villagrana

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Racial Apocalypse
The Cultivation of Supremacy in the
Early Modern World

José Juan Villagrana

First published 2022
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
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© 2022 José Juan Villagrana
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has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
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explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 9780367774578 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032268033 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003171478 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003171478

Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: “All nations and kindreds” 1

1 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation in Spanish Colonial Texts:
Motolinía, Mendieta, and Acosta 25
2 Goths and Magog: Asserting and Disputing Spanish Global
Supremacy in Spanish Ethnic Origin Myths and English Black
Legend Polemic 79
3 Making a Prophet: Greville, Sidney, Drake, and the Cultivation
of English Colonial Supremacy 111
Coda: The Legacy of Apocalyptic Racism 148

Bibliography 154
Index 169
Acknowledgements

I appreciate the mentorship of Regina Schwartz, Reginald Gibbons, and

Christine Froula at Northwestern, and Emilie Bergmann, David Marno,
David Landreth, Genaro Padilla, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and James
Grantham Turner at Berkeley. I thank them especially for their encourage-
ment to pursue comparative literary study and translation in early modern
English and Spanish.
I have benefitted intellectually and professionally from the welcoming
environment created by the colleagues at the International Sidney Society—
Mary Ellen Lamb, Timothy D. Crowley, and Rob Stillman. The intellectual
framework for this project was informed by my conversations with collea-
gues from a number of disciplines at conferences convened by the Arizona
Center for Medieval Studies RaceB4Race symposia, the Renaissance Society
of America, and the Modern Language Association. I warmly thank for
their expertise Patricia Akhimie, Dennis A. Britton, David Sterling Brown,
Margaret Rich Greer, Kelsey Ihinger, Jennifer Lorden, and Raphael
Magarik.
It has been an honor to be part of a peer working group alongside
Alejandro Olayo-Méndez, SJ, Gabriel Rodríguez, and Jesús Tirado orga-
nized through the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity.
Thank you for our frank discussions and joyful exchanges.
From my time at Bates College, I value the support and fellowship of
Laurie O’Higgins, Baltasar Fra-Molinero, Lillian Nayder, Eden Osucha,
Steve Dillon, Sylvia Federico, Sanford Freedman, Cristina Malcolmson (in
memorium), Tiffany Salter, Myronn Hardy, and Therí A. Pickens. I extend
my thanks to the colleagues in the Department of English and Comparative
Literature at San José State University for welcoming me into the department
and enthusiastically receiving my research agenda. I further wish to
acknowledge the College of the Humanities and the Arts at San José State
for funding this project.
I am deeply grateful to Christina Bell and Chris Schiff, librarians at
Bates, for facilitating the acquisition of research materials during the early
stages of this project. Emily Chan and Peggy Cabrera, librarians at San José
State, and the colleagues at inter-library loan and circulation, including
 Acknowledgements ix
student workers, have labored diligently to make library materials available
during a global public health emergency. I thank them heartily.
The students at the University of California, Berkeley, Bates College, and
San José State University have been my teachers over these many years.
Their resourcefulness and curiosity are a source of inspiration. Of these
students, I am especially grateful to Mamta Saraogi and Maddie Rozells for
working as research assistants with great skill and dedication.
This book would not be possible if not for the scholarly interest and
engagement from Nicholas R. Jones and Derrick Higginbotham, editors of
the Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities Routledge series. I thank
them and the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful suggestions and
comments and for their confidence in the project. I appreciate the work of
Jennifer Abbott, Dominic Corti, Anna Thomas, and Mitchell Manners,
editors at Routledge, for navigating this book through the publication
process.
A section of chapter 2 originally appeared as “The Apocalyptic Spanish
Race” in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20.1 (2020): 1–28. I
would like to thank the University of Pennsylvania Press for permission to
reprint that material here.
I thank Aileen Liu and Spencer Strub for generously reading and
commenting on multiple drafts of this project. Thank you both for our
treasured friendship. Isaac Zisman, Emily Laskin, Linda Louie, Jason
Treviño, Evan Klavon, Aristides Dimitriou, and Brandon White, thank you
for our fellowship.
My family have sustained me with love and laughter. I dedicate this book
to Ana, Walter, Angela, Bruce, Joanna, Lizzie, Marc, the niblings, and to
Rachel.
Introduction
“All nations and kindreds”

Modern systems of racist power emerge from the apocalyptic thought of

the early modern period. This book will trace that emergence. Biblical
apocalyptic works envision a time in the future when social differentiation
will not exist in any meaningful way between those humans that God has
elected to live as his eternal subjects. Within God’s future kingdom, the
elect will enjoy a kind of social parity. Before this time, however, ethno-
national and biological characteristics will mark those who oppose Christ
and are therefore destined for ultimate destruction. The apocalyptic dis-
course maintains that God, the ultimate power in the universe, has
ordained that his chosen people shall defeat their opponents and hold
dominion over the world. Such works synoptically view history from
humanity’s origin through to its end; they predict the rise and fall of earthly
powers; and they distinguish between forces of good and evil according to
ethnic, national, linguistic, and embodied characteristics—the elements that
inform conceptions of race in the premodern era. Racism and racialization,
in turn, are essential to realizing the objectives of universal dominion
according to the political apocalyptic framework by defining who is good,
who is evil, and who may or may not hold universal political dominion.
Early modern colonial works, in particular, channel the discourse of apoc-
alypse and race because these themes speak to the broadest interests of
European colonial expansion, especially claims to territorial possession and
dominion as well as the subjugation of Native peoples and the commerce in
the human chattel of Black Africans. Early modern English and Spanish
authors used the apocalyptic and prophetic biblical works that describe
social disparities between humans based on perceived biological and beha-
vioral differences as a social and political template to subject Native peo-
ples of the Americas, enslave Black Africans, and monopolize commercial
interests by excluding competing European powers. I further argue that
instead of viewing racialization as a product of a sense of fear and crisis,
especially as it pertains to early modern Anglo-Spanish relations, racializa-
tion should be viewed as the product of optimistic and opportunistic
apocalyptic beliefs about political hegemony. In effect, apocalyptic thinking
is race thinking and vice versa.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003171478-1
2 Introduction
Racial Apocalypse: The Cultivation of Supremacy in the Early Modern
World examines early modern English and Spanish authors’ use of political-
apocalyptic discourse to assert for their nation, their patrons, or for them-
selves supreme dominion over the American continent, the Native peoples
that inhabited it, the Black Africans that Europeans enslaved to work there,
and their fellow European competitors. I analyze in particular the apoc-
alyptic and prophetic ideologies espoused in sixteenth-century Spanish
colonial reports and chronicles as well as in Elizabethan English Black
Legend polemic. While other studies have noted the centrality of apoc-
alyptic discourse to Spanish colonial literature and to the Anglo-Spanish
conflict, the role of early modern apocalyptic thought as an engine for
racialization has received little attention. For its part, this book places the
critical analysis of race and racism at the center of its discussion of Spanish
colonial apocalyptic thought, the Anglo-Spanish conflict, and the Black
Legend. In my theorization of apocalyptic racialization, I highlight three
signal areas of the broader sixteenth-century discourses of English and
Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Anglo-Spanish conflict.
First, I discuss the colonial accounts of Spanish evangelical activity by the
Franciscans Toribio de Benavente Motolinía and Gerónimo de Mendieta,
and by the Jesuit José de Acosta. Motolinía formed part of the group of
twelve Franciscan friars that Hernán Cortés transported from Spain to
Mexico in 1524. Mendieta followed in 1554 in the subsequent wave of
Franciscan evangelical missions to Mexico. Unlike Motolinía and Men-
dieta, the Jesuit Acosta resided in Peru for most of his time in the Americas,
arriving there in 1572. Although these three authors write from different
places and contexts in sixteenth-century Spanish colonial America, they
commonly focus on evaluating through the lens of apocalyptic prophecy the
bodies and behaviors of Amerindians, Black Africans, and Europeans. They
argue that there are innate differences between these groups, and that these
differences affect how easily each of these groups can be Christianized and
civilized, in the case of the Amerindians and Black Africans, or, in the case
of the Europeans, be improved in discipline and faith. Motolinía and
Mendieta were guided in large part by Jesus’ apocalyptic pronouncements
in the Gospels, particularly Jesus’ promise that the consummation of the
world and the arrival of a just future kingdom would occur after Jesus’
message was published to all nations of the world in all languages. In their
accounts of evangelization in Mexico, the Franciscans regard Native peo-
ples’ languages, their social and religious customs, and their perceived bio-
logical and behavioral traits as obstacles to realizing Jesus’ charge to his
disciples. Acosta vehemently rejects the position held by Motolinía and
Mendieta that Spanish efforts to Christianize the people of the world were
anywhere near their advanced stages. Centered on his observations of nat-
ural philosophy, geography, and biblical history, Acosta maintains that
Europeans’ increasing encounters with more peoples and languages
throughout the world previously unknown to them dilates the timeframe of
 Introduction 3
evangelical labor necessary to disseminate the Gospel to all peoples of the
world. Besides the diversity and amount of peoples in the world, Acosta
argues, there is an apparent disparity between different nations and peoples
in terms of their civility. As such, Acosta’s works routinely degrade Black
Africans as uncultivated people. At the same time, he holds up Christia-
nized Black Africans as evidence that greater evangelical efforts from
Spanish missionaries can cultivate not only Black Africans but also
Amerindians.
Second, I consider the role of political supremacy in the apocalyptic
racialization operating in English Black Legend polemic and in Spanish
chronicles. The Black Legend is the name Julián Juderías, an early twen-
tieth-century Spanish historian and journalist, gives to the body of polemic
literature primarily originating in England in the sixteenth century that
racializes the Spaniard as incorrigibly cruel, bloodthirsty, and greedy. To
racialize the Spaniard as inherently cruel and menacing, English authors
used the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas’ account of
Spanish colonial brutality against Amerindians as evidence for their claims.
At the same time, English authors invoked Spain’s internal anxieties about
pureza de sangre, the fixation with Christian-Spanish blood purity in light
of the longstanding presence of Jews and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula.
As this study shows, Spanish sixteenth-century court chroniclers argue that
Charles V and Philip II were entitled to absolute dominion in the Americas,
Europe, the Levant, and Asia because they inherited their claims from
Noah’s preferred descendants that settled the Iberian Peninsula since the
earliest moments after the General Flood described in Genesis. As part of
the broader wave of Black Legend polemic, English writers challenged
Spanish dominance by arguing that Spaniards are in fact descended from
Magog, a branch of Noah’s offspring that is aligned with Satan, and,
according to Ezekiel and Revelation, is justly destined for annihilation. As
such, English polemic predicts that Spain’s dominance will wane while
England’s power, particularly in colonial ventures, will grow, not only
because God favors Protestants over Catholics but also because Spaniards’
blood lineage—their racial background—is corrupted.
Third and finally, from the analysis of Spanish assertions of universal
dominion and English negative racialization of the Spaniards, I turn to a
discussion of how Englishmen racialize each other by invoking prophecy,
family lineage, and embodied virtue to assert one Englishman’s right to
colonial dominance over another’s. Fulke Greville’s biography of his friend,
the renowned English courtier and poet Sir Philip Sidney, argues that
Sidney inherited biological traits that made him the best candidate to dis-
possess Spaniards of their American colonies, and he urges Englishmen of
lower birth to imitate Sidney’s qualities to advance England’s colonial pro-
jects. In particular, Greville fashions Sidney as a prophet who, before his
death resulting from wounds he received fighting Spanish forces in the Low
Countries in 1586, predicted the political fortunes of individuals and
4 Introduction
nations based on their respective perceived inherent traits. If the Sidney-
prophet had not died prematurely, according to Greville, he would have
managed to take the Spanish Main with the help of Black Africans and
Amerindians who escaped Spanish enslavement. In reality, it was the pri-
vateer Sir Francis Drake who forged a temporary alliance with the Cimar-
rones—Black Africans who escaped Spanish enslavement in the Americas
and established their own independent communities—when he raided ports
in Panama in search of gold and silver. In effect, Greville negatively char-
acterizes Drake’s ancestry and his behavioral traits, and he plagiarizes
Drake’s deeds. He then attributes them to Sidney’s foresight because Sidney
is of noble birth while Drake is not.
Although these examples represent a variety of early modern English and
Spanish modes of apocalyptic colonial thought, taken together they espouse
what I term apocalyptic racialization, the imputation of fictional immutable
somatic and behavioral traits to human beings within a universal spatial
and historical context to assign them an imprescindible place in a social
hierarchy in the immediate present moment. I use the term apocalyptic to
denote the biblical and secular ideas that undergird universal supremacy—
the broadest assertions of entitlement to hegemonic political and mercenary
power by a select group—in spatial and temporal terms. Though apoc-
alyptic ideas are numerous and varied, their common trait is that they
speak of events and people in expansive and binary terms—good versus
evil, eternal death versus eternal life, finite history versus universal history.
I therefore define apocalyptic racialization as the process by which groups
or individuals claim universal political supremacy through providential
designations of ancestry and social estate that produce racial fictions to
dispossess others. Put another way, the apocalyptic denotes broad power
objectives, and racialization denotes the racial fictions created to advance
such broad political power objectives. Crucially, apocalyptic racial fictions
of biological and behavioral traits can degrade a person or group, and they
can elevate or ennoble a person or group. Apocalyptic racialization is as
much a means for those claiming hegemonic dominion to create affirmative
racial self-descriptions, as it is a means to create negative racial fictions of
others to justify dispossessing or killing them.
The three chapters that I outline above reflect this project’s contributions
to several fields within the study of early modern literature and culture. In
particular, the structure of my project indicates its efforts further to bridge
English and Hispanist fields of study by parsing first Spanish claims to the
dominion of the Americas through the lens of colonial missionaries’ apoc-
alypticism. The subsequent chapter introduces further Spanish claims to
dominion, and at the same time, it shows how English polemicists contest
it. The final chapter registers English fantasies of dominating the Americas
centered on the figure of Sir Philip Sidney that negates and excludes Spain.
Throughout my analyses, I maintain that racial thought in early modern
England is inextricable from that of Spain.1 Given that justifications for
 Introduction 5
colonial expansion and the dispossession of indigenous peoples are pro-
duced through racial fictions, English writers channeled their colonial
ambitions through Spanish colonial reports. Kim F. Hall recognizes the
English gathering of linguistic “tropes of blackness” from the content of
colonial matter: “the economic expansion of England was linguistic and,
ultimately, an ideological expansion in which writers and travelers grappled
with ways of making use of the foreign materia ‘produced’ by colonial-
ism.”2 Barbara Fuchs, moreover, documents how Englishmen in the Eliza-
bethan period learned Spanish and produced translations of Spanish
grammar primers, literary texts, and military manuals in an effort to absorb
the matter that represented Spain’s growing wealth and colonial imperium. 3
English practices such as the translation and emulation of Spanish texts helped
constitute England’s identity as a nation and as an expansive empire.4
Racial Apocalypse responds to the ongoing debate in the field of early
modern studies about the social function, nature, and origins of race dif-
ference, and the emergence of more familiar, modern notions of race. Pre-
modern definitions of race center on blood lineage, family background,
language, kinship, and geographic location, while pseudo-scientific notions
of race such as skin color, phrenology, and perceptions of inherent ability
dominate modern categorizations of race. Jean Feerick notes that pre-
modern conceptions of race are constructed by imputing human beings
with perceived indelible behavioral, biological, and ethno-cultural traits
whose immutability results from their blood inheritance. In turn, race
became “frequently used and understood as a mode of social differentiation
that naturalizes a rigid social hierarchy within a polity.”5 In Race and
Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarous Errors, Ian Smith explains that
“language in the Renaissance is a vehicle through which individual and
group identities are marked, distinguished, and imbued with racial sig-
nificance in a dynamic social and international framework.”6 Blood and
language are signifiers of race whose primary function is to sustain strati-
fied social differences that are artificially constructed. Or as Geraldine Heng
succinctly puts it, “race has no singular or stable referent: that race is a
structural relationship for the articulation and management of human dif-
ferences, rather than a substantive content.”7 Etienne Balibar calls the
representation of the “inequality of social classes as inequalities of nature”
a “caste signification.”8 When applied to the early modern era, Balibar’s
conception explains how aristocrats signaled their portable social value
above that of the laboring class based on their inherited title and the per-
ceived innate superior traits that accompanied it. Patricia Akhimie further
defines the parameters of such early modern class ideologies by examining
how social elites’ cultivated behaviors signify their capacity for self-
improvement—a trait on which such elites base claims of natural super-
iority. All the while, laboring individuals are designated as social inferiors
by others who stigmatize imagined or perceived bodily marks. According to
Akhimie,
6 Introduction
the labor that enables landed elites to engage in cultivation also pre-
empts working folk from participating in those same activities. It is
within this relationship of unequal exchange that the exclusionary
practices of class racism take shape and become justifiable in the minds
of some.9

Moreover, blackness emerges in early modern texts as a somaticized

marker of incorrigibility—a sign that people with dark skin were morally,
intellectually, and culturally deficient. Cord Whitaker’s Black Metaphors
sheds light on the metaphoric and metonymic rhetorical figures that med-
ieval and early modern texts deploy to outline the “relationship between
black and white” as “the notion that blackness indicates sin, or moral
deficiency, and that whiteness indicates the opposite, through the notion
that blackness, whiteness, and racial difference more generally are mirages
created and maintained through rhetoric.”10
Early modern ideologies and terminologies of race and racialization gain
greater meaning when they are viewed through the lens of early modern
apocalyptic thought. The apocalyptic elements of futurism and universality
undergird notions of social difference. According to Revelation’s vision of
universal harmony and justice, “a great multitude, which no man could
number, of all nations and kindreds, and people, and tongues stood before
the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with long white robes, and palms
in their hands” (7.9). In this future moment, God’s justice shall reign
supreme. Notably, God’s justice is not synonymous with effacing human
differences such as nation, language, or blood kinship. Revelation discloses
that in the New Jerusalem, class hierarchies between humankind will cease
to exist—or that they will cease to matter—because all humankind that is
initiated into God’s kingdom will partake in the joys of God’s glory.
However, the aspects of human difference that will cease to matter in the
New Jerusalem are the very same that are used to produce fictions of racial
difference in the present moment—nation, language, and blood lineage.
God’s justice in Revelation and elsewhere is centered on delivering human-
kind from the bondage to sin and death that is perpetuated by Satan and
his proxy, false religion. In the racial ideology of the Franciscans Motolinía
and Mendieta and the Jesuit Acosta, therefore, the apocalyptic passages in
the Bible express God’s justice in terms of transferring the subjection of
humankind from Satan to God. These Spanish missionaries hold that
colonial class differentiations are not only natural but also providential.
The subjection of peoples to the Spanish crown is a prerequisite for
becoming God’s subjects in the world to come. The vision in Revelation of
all nations and kindreds forming part of God’s kingdom in the future as
well as Jesus’ pronouncements in the Gospels that his disciples must preach
to people of all nations and languages represent key nodes in the biblical
prophetic tradition. Since these prophecies envision that human differences
such as language, kinship (blood lineage), or nation will play a major role
 Introduction 7
in confirming the fulfillment of such prophecies, early modern commenta-
tors maintain the expectation that such human differences will and must
endure.

Biblical Racialization
In its examination of English and Spanish political relations and transat-
lantic colonialism, Racial Apocalypse bridges discussions between early
modern critical race studies and religious studies. Although there are a
number of studies to date on early modern millenarian thought and colo-
nialism, none explicitly articulates the relationship between apocalyptic
thought and racism.11 Because these studies primarily focus on defining the
theological and exegetical underpinnings of apocalyptic literature, they
overlook the fact that disparate or competing apocalyptic positions in
colonial works nonetheless pursue similar racist political objectives. In the
introduction to the edited volume Prophecy and Eschatology in the Trans-
atlantic World, 1550–1800, Andrew Crome views millenarianism as a
“predictive sense of prophecy” that deals with speculations about when
predicted events in apocalyptic history will occur and how human agency
can inaugurate them. Crome further explains, “the belief in the coming of
the millennium was important across the Atlantic world in the early
modern period,” but “the precise nature that this millennium would take
differed from group to group.”12 Yet unlike the objectives of medieval and
early modern scholastic commentaries––who sought to predict the future
coming of Christ through numerological reckoning––the aim of early
modern apocalyptic racialization was to define and fashion a future
through the social differentiation of human bodies. Studies that focus
mainly on transatlantic and colonial millenarianism, therefore, account for
a limited amount of biblical apocalyptic material that contributes to our
understanding of early modern racialization and colonialism. Below, I offer
a broader account of biblical sources that contribute to early modern racial
and colonial ideologies.13
Recent scholarship shows how early modern authors looked to biblical
examples from Genesis and Jeremiah to arrange humankind into hier-
archical estates by elevating and denigrating ancestral blood lineage as well
as by asserting immutable somaticized markers of difference, such as
blackness. David M. Whitford argues that early modern commentators
transformed the Curse of Ham—Noah’s curse of servility to the progeny of
his son Ham—into a curse of sinfulness used to justify the enslavement of
Black Africans.14 Furthermore, as Whitford explains, the Curse of Ham is a
“text of opportunity” that justifies and enforces social distinctions. In the
medieval period, the Hamitic curse of servitude was used to justify Eur-
opean serfdom. The association of the Curse of Ham with blackness
develops alongside the rise of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century trans-
atlantic slave trade that transports Black Africans to the Americas.15 Colin
8 Introduction
Kidd shows that European nations derived ethnic origin myths from figures
in the Table of Nations through what he calls “ethnic theology” in order to
ennoble themselves and degrade their rivals.16 Meanwhile, Dennis A. Britton’s
Becoming Christian argues that English Reformation readings of Jeremiah
13:23 denied the possibility that Black Africans could wash their skin of its
blackness—the visible signifier of spiritual and moral incorrigibility—to
connote the implausibility of Black people fully partaking in Christian
catechism, conversion, and baptism.17 Building off the scholarship of
Britton, Kidd, and Whitford, I demonstrate how early modern expositions
on prophecy and apocalypticism produce a broad network of biblical racial
thought. While the Curse of Ham, the Noachic Table of Nations, and the
washing of the Ethiop trope in Jeremiah each carry profound racial sig-
nificance, these tropes of biblical racialization as well as many others can be
understood in relation to each other by looking at them through the lens of
apocalypticism.
Slavery is a commonplace social estate in the works of classical antiquity
and in the biblical texts and commentaries that inform premodern learning.
Aristotle’s Politics divides social estates between “natural” masters and
slaves; meanwhile, notable accounts of slavery and captivity, such as the
Israelites’ slavery in Egypt in Exodus to Jesus’ parables of servitude in the
Gospels, permeate the canon of biblical scripture. Biblical episodes further
racialize distinct social estates by tying servitude or nobility to family line-
age, bloodline, or pedigree. The racist myth of the Curse of Ham is derived
from readings of Genesis 9. After the Fall, generations of Adam and Eve’s
offspring fall into sin and corruption, so God decides to destroy his creation
with a great flood, saving in an Ark only the righteous Noah, his family,
and animal life. After the floodwaters subside, Noah and his family begin
to repopulate the Earth. One day, Noah gets drunk off the wine he made from
the grapes he cultivates; his son Ham stumbles upon his drunk, naked
father; Ham calls his siblings, Shem and Japheth; and they clothe their
father while not looking upon his nudity. Upon sobering up, Noah curses
Ham for seeing him in his naked shame, saying that Ham’s offspring, Canaan,
“a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren,” or as the Geneva Bible
glosses it, “a most vile slave” (Genesis 9.25).18 This episode generates a
hierarchical social caste system between members of the same race, or
family bloodline, by branching off races from a single common ancestor,
Noah, in order to designate those who are masters and those who are slaves.
The curse of servitude thrust upon Ham and his descendants, including
Canaan, is not the only racist myth to emerge from Genesis’ account of
Noah’s lineage. Commentators from antiquity to the early modern era
fashioned ethnic mythologies and national identities based on the figures in
the Noachic Table of Nations, a genealogy of Noah’s offspring. According
to the genealogy in Genesis 10, the generations of each of Noah’s three
sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, went on to found “nations” throughout the
world. Though numerous iterations of the geographical situation of Noah’s
 Introduction 9
offspring exist, one common version holds that the offspring of Japheth
founded the nations in Europe and western Eurasia; Shem’s descendants
populated the Levant, Arabia, and South and East Asia; and the sons of
Ham settled the continent of Africa. Furthermore, in a pronouncement that
endures as a justification for Black people’s perceived state of spiritual and
moral immutability, Jeremiah chastises Jews for their sinfulness by asking,
“can the black Moor change his skin? or the leopard his spots, then may ye
also do good, that are accustomed to do evil?” (13.23). The comparison
suggests that Israelites are unable to shed their sinfulness just as leopards
are unable to change their spots and Black people are unable to change or
wash their skin. Jeremiah makes a false comparison between Israelites,
leopards, and Black people because he expects Israelites to improve their
conduct, yet he presents Black people as being unable to change their
supposed marker of sin, their blackness.
Racial Apocalypse, for its part, advances our understanding of biblical
racialization by showing how early modern English and Spanish commen-
tators organized elements of the examples of above—the Curse of Ham,
Jeremiah’s association of blackness with sin, and Genesis’ ethnic mytholo-
gies—under broader prophetic and apocalyptic narratives that center on the
universal political dominion of privileged groups. Indeed, it is important to
note that the prophet Jeremiah’s pronouncements about blackness as a
somatic marker of sinfulness gain greater importance due to the authority
that prophets command in the biblical tradition. The Old Testament
represents prophets such as Jeremiah as being divinely inspired to commu-
nicate God’s will to the rulers, priests, and people of Israel. Sometimes
prophets predicted the future course of history; other times, they revealed
the mysteries behind irregular dreams and events through interpretation. In
particular, prophets speak of history and divine justice in terms of ethno-
national differentiation. Isaiah tells that God delivered Israel to the Assyr-
ians because of Jews’ ritual impurity and idolatry, and it promises to the
righteous the restoration of Jerusalem. Jeremiah prophesies of the desola-
tion of Judah by the Babylonian Empire and the Babylonian captivity of the
Judean elites beginning in 586 BCE.
The sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan missionaries studied in chapter
1 find an apocalyptic mandate in the Gospels to impose forced labor on
Amerindians in order to fashion them as Christian subjects. By contrast,
Acosta rejects the view that the timing of the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise
can be reckoned according to how many nations have been evangelized
because Europeans in the late sixteenth century continued to encounter
peoples and languages that they had previously not known. In the synoptic
Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus tells his followers that he shall
establish an everlasting kingdom for the righteous, but before this time
comes, his followers must preach his message to all nations of the world.
When Christ returns, all humankind will be judged, with the righteous
joining Christ’s eternal kingdom and the wicked being condemned to
10 Introduction
destruction. Although Jesus does not give a certain date for his return, he
tells his followers that they can look to certain events that signal his return
is nearby. In Matthew, Jesus declares, “this Gospel of the kingdom shall be
preached through the whole world for a witness unto all nations, and then
shall the end come” (24.14). According to the Gospels, Jesus’ return is
predicated on his disciples’ agency and successful labor to spread his mes-
sage and baptize the faithful. In Matthew, Jesus urges his disciples to “go
therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them” (28.19). Mark’s Jesus
states, “the Gospel must first be published among all nations” (13.10), and
Luke’s Jesus commands that “repentance and remission of sins should be
preached in his Name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem” (24.47).
Although the Gospels do not specify the timing of Christ’s return, for
Motolinía and Mendieta, Jesus’ mandate to preach “among all nations”
suggests that the coming of the “end” is an immediate consequence of
accomplishing the work of preaching to all peoples of the world.
In the context of Christ’s parables, predictions, and admonitions in
Matthew, the differentiation of nations at the end of time is figuratively
represented through the segregation of species. When the end comes and
Jesus returns to judge humankind,

before him shall be gathered all nations, and he shall separate them one
from another as a shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats. And
he shall set the sheep on his right hand, and the goats on the left. Then
shall the king say to them on his right hand, Come ye blessed of my
father: take the inheritance of the kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world.
(25.32–34)

The simile comparing the separation of nations to a shepherd separating sheep

from goats essentializes nations to a biological difference of species between
goats and sheep. Jesus nominates sheep and goats according to their internal
spiritual disposition, yet he distinguishes them through immutable biological
characteristics such as species. The biological simile governing the separation
of nations serves as a marker for those who receive the “inheritance” of pos-
sessing the “kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” On
the one hand, Jesus’ statements seek to break down the barriers of a discrete
community and speak in universal terms to all nations. On the other hand, the
pastoral-agricultural metaphors of the Gospels are primed for an essentializing,
racializing interpretation by commentators because they use the matter of
everyday life to signify spiritually profound things.
Paul’s expositions on Jesus’ apocalyptic teachings, moreover, emphasize
that Christ will “subdue” all earthly authorities and kingdoms to establish
God’s eternal kingdom. In the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul outlines
the reorganization of all earthly power under the Son who shall deliver
them to the Father:
 Introduction 11
Then shall be the end, when he hath delivered up the kingdom to God,
even the Father, when he hath put down all rule, and all authority and
power. For he must reign till he hath put all his enemies under his feet.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed, is death …. And when all
things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be
subject unto him … that God may be all in all.
(15.24–28)

In the context of Paul’s epistle, this passage follows a broader statement of

faith in Jesus’ resurrection and the promised resurrection of humankind in
the future. Paul’s affirmation of Jesus’ power to resurrect humankind is
centered on the notion that Christ will summarily defeat his enemies. The
resurrection shall take place, Paul avouches, because Jesus will defeat the
enemy of humankind, death. At the same time, Jesus will defeat the ene-
mies of the Christian church to establish himself as its head under the
Father.19
Whereas Matthew’s Jesus emphasizes the diversity of nations and the
separation of faithful and unfaithful humans as sheep and goats, the nar-
rator of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, underscores both the
uniformity of great multitudes of peoples and their national and linguistic
differences. Revelation tells that, before God’s angels unleash mass
destruction upon the world, God will gather saints and martyrs that suf-
fered persecution into “a great multitude, which no man could number, of
all nations and kindreds, and people, and tongues” who “stood before the
throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with long white robes, and palms in
their hands” (7.9).20 At this moment, John of Patmos envisages an ecume-
nical geographic, ethnic, and linguistic representation of God’s saints or
“servants” that are to be gathered, twelve thousand from each of the sym-
bolic twelve tribes of Israel, and sealed to God before four angels bring
“hurt” upon the Earth. God brings this “multitude” into one cohort whose
“long white robes and palms in their hands” abstracts them from their
diverse terrestrial ethno-national backgrounds and homogenizes them for
the common purpose of serving in the kingdom of heaven. At the same
time, the motif of the great multitudes recurs in the episode that describes the
millennium and the general resurrection. Revelation 20 tells that Satan is to
be bound in a pit for one thousand years. During Satan’s detention, the
narrator observes a multitude of people in heaven:

I saw seats: and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto
them, and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness
of Jesus, … and they lived, and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
But the rest of the dead men shall not live again, until the thousand
years be finished: this is the first resurrection.
(20.4–5)
12 Introduction
After these thousand years, Satan is loosed to “deceive the nations,” he is
defeated once again and cast into a lake of fire, and all of mankind rises in
the general, or second, resurrection to be judged: “And the sea gave up her
dead, which were in her, and death and hell delivered up the dead, which
were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works”
(20.13). This cycle of history is concluded. A “new heaven and a new earth”
appears, and “the holy city New Jerusalem come[s] down from God out of
heaven.”
As I describe in chapter 2, the Noachic Table of Nations is especially
central to the political pronouncements in the prophetic books in the Old
Testament. The Book of Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation invoke the
Noachic Table of Nations to single out the bloodline and nation of Magog
as an inherently violent antagonist to God’s chosen people. The Table of
Nations notes that Magog is the son of Japheth and the grandson of Noah.
Ezekiel names Magog the enemy of God’s people: “son of men, set thy face
against Gog, and against the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech
and Tubal, and prophesy against him” (38.2). John of Patmos, the narrator
of the Book of Revelation, emphasizes that the nation of Magog will play a
crucial role in the future millennium:

when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his
prison, and [Satan] shall go out to deceive the people, which are in the
four quarters of the earth: even Gog and Magog, to gather them together
to battle, whose number is as the sand of the Sea.
(20.7–8)

The millennium, a notoriously cryptic term, signifies how upon Christ’s

return, Satan will be bound in a pit for a thousand years, and the holy
martyrs and saints will rule alongside Christ for this period. At the end of
the thousand-year reign of Christ and his saints, Satan will be unfettered,
and he will make his last stand to drive the faithful from Christ by pro-
voking the antagonistic race of Magog to persecute them. Although in
Revelation, the reference to Magog as the antagonist to Christ’s faithful
may be a symbolic one, Magog represents a nation and a bloodline in the
context of Genesis and Ezekiel. As such, early modern English commenta-
tors created national origin myths and biological fictions that assign the
negative Magogian pedigree to those they wish to degrade, particularly
Spaniards.
Chapter 3 presents a counterpoint to the examples of biblical racializa-
tion that inform the previous chapters. To promote English colonial
supremacy, Greville summons on behalf of Sidney the weight of prophetic
authority that the Christian biblical tradition affords the title of prophet,
but he dispenses with the biblical prophetic motifs that describe the course
of universal history. Prophecy and apocalypticism does not necessarily have
to evoke biblical themes to convey racial ideas and supremacist ambitions.
 Introduction 13
This distinction is important for understanding how apocalyptic racializa-
tion operates in modernity even when it does not have a clear biblical
referent.

Theorizing Apocalyptic Racism: Cultivation and Supremacy,

Assimilation and Segregation
In my discussion of biblical racial ideas above, I identify a tension between
the two countervailing impulses of biblical apocalyptic thought. On the one
hand, the Gospels and Revelation promise that after Christ’s second
coming, God will establish an eternal kingdom for the righteous multitudes
from all nations of the world. On the other hand, Ezekiel and Revelation
say that there is a race of humankind, Magog, that is destined for destruc-
tion. In effect, this tension creates two classes of humans, those who are
capable of receiving election and those who are not. As this book shows,
distinct beliefs about who can form part of God’s Christian kingdom and
those who cannot inform the creation of colonial castes that assign
disparate social standings to Amerindians, Europeans, and Black Africans.
My conceptualization of apocalyptic racialization is grounded in Ibram
X. Kendi’s critical terminology of racism in his seminal work, Stamped
from the Beginning. Kendi demonstrates that racial fictions are developed
to enforce and sustain power objectives for the benefit of a select group.
My project introduces Kendi’s theorization into early modern studies by
showing how a prevalence of providential, futuristic, and supremacist
thinking gave rise to enduring forms of assimilationist and segregationist
social templates. The analysis of apocalyptically-minded Spanish colonial
and legal texts from the likes of Mendieta, Motolinía, and Acosta shows
that they sought to include Amerindians and Black Africans in their assim-
ilationist vision of the world to come by subjecting them to forms of
behavioral cultivation. These authors claimed that Amerindians and Black
Africans would conform to their inclusive apocalyptic visions but never-
theless asked how they might be assimilated. Such discussions of inclusive
assimilation into Christ’s future kingdom are key to understanding legal
justifications of colonial encomiendas and the chattel slavery of Black
Africans. It was thought that the paternal guidance of slave owners and the
subjection to hard labor would prepare Black Africans and Amerindians for
the future political order, with Black Africans requiring greater effort to be
cultivated than Amerindians. Meanwhile, English anti-Spanish or Black
Legend polemic––whose objectives were to take possession of Spain’s
colonial dominions––racialized the Spaniard as a menace predicted in
Revelation that had to be eradicated, thus proposing a genocidal, segrega-
tionist view of Spain. English colonial activities gave rise to a mythology of
English constitutional and behavioral exceptionalism centered on figures
such as Francis Drake and Philip Sidney. These accounts looked to English
bodies for evidence to confirm English providential dominance; in turn, any
14 Introduction
challenge to their belief in their own inherent supremacy came to be
regarded as an injustice, a persecution.
Kendi’s definitions of racist ideas provide a helpful blueprint to under-
stand how hegemonic power objectives racialize human beings by means of
different elements of apocalyptic thought that may seem contradictory.
Kendi organizes racist policies and ideas in terms of their assimilationist or
segregationist views of humans. Assimilationist racist policies and ideas
maintain that social differences between humans exist because some groups
of humans possess more socially desirable behavioral or ethno-cultural
qualities that determine their place in society while others possess less
desirable qualities. Those who are in the lower social rungs must strive to
improve themselves in order to transcend their perceived deficiencies to
merit being assimilated into the highest social castes. By contrast, segrega-
tionist racist policies and ideas hold that social differences between humans
exist due to natural biological differences between humans that cannot be
changed. Because perceived biological traits that denote a person or group
as inherently socially superior or inferior cannot be changed, according to
segregationist thought, disparate social castes, such as master and slave, are
fixed by nature.21
Channeling Kendi’s definitions of racism, I theorize that apocalyptic
thought produces assimilationist and segregationist perspectives of Spanish
colonial missionaries as well as competing European powers toward the
Native peoples of the Americas, Black Africans, Ottomans, and competing
Europeans.22 Motolinía and Mendieta posit assimilationist racist views of
Amerindians. They regard Native peoples as possessing behavioral and
biological markers of incivility and idolatry that need to be corrected for
the explicit purpose of advancing the church toward its latter age. Acosta
similarly holds the assimilationist view that Amerindians and Black Afri-
cans need to be cultivated by virtuous Europeans to bring the church closer
to Christ’s second coming. As such, the missionaries argue that Spaniards
naturally held dominion over the Americas and Amerindians to cultivate
the lands and the people so that they might be assimilated as subjects of
Spain’s Christian Empire and later Christ’s eternal kingdom. Meanwhile,
the English polemic that fashions Spaniards as the race of Magog espouses
a segregationist view of Spaniards by arguing that they are unable to
improve their tainted biological and spiritual states. Because of this
immutability, Spaniards are marked for defeat and eternal destruction at
the end of the millennium. These definitions of segregationism and assim-
ilationism map onto early modern apocalyptic colonial thought. As Claude
B. Stuczynski observes, early modern Spanish colonial evangelization man-
ifested in two competing versions: “the first was ethnically and culturally
inclusive, deeply imbued with Pauline theology …. [T]he second was
exclusive, influenced primarily by an interpretation of the Old Testament
idea of an elected people.”23 I propose that what Stuczynski calls the
apocalyptically minded “culturally inclusive” evangelization of Amerindians
 Introduction 15
as well as Africans corresponds to Kendi’s definition of assimilationist
racism. Similarly, what Stuczynski calls “exclusive” corresponds to Kendi’s
understanding of segregationist racism.
What is more, the ideology of cultivation, or personal self-improvement,
can be understood as a subset of one of Kendi’s core terms, assimilation-
ism. I draw a connection between racial assimilationism and the early
modern ideology of cultivation from Patricia Akhimie’s pioneering work
Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference. Akhimie demonstrates how
somatic markers racialize individuals into a class system that differentiates
those who can improve themselves and those who cannot:

while some individuals were imagined to be capable of moving between

groups by means of cultivation—the employment of strategies for self-
improvement through coded conduct—others were imagined to be
incapable of this feat. Furthermore, the rigidity of social groupings is
implicated as much in concepts of class as in concepts of race in the
early modern period. Class and race intertwine and, together, posit the
relative capacity of groups for social mobility or immobility. In the
early modern period, racialism involved a spectrum of mutability to
immutability, a hierarchy in which those at the top could change
themselves and those at the bottom could not.24

Although Akhimie’s study focuses primarily on Shakespeare and early

modern European conduct literature, it is nonetheless applicable to con-
siderations of early modern colonial racialization and apocalyptic politics
in English and Spanish contexts alike. For their part, Spanish missionaries
viewed baptism and catechism as a crucial step toward Amerindians’ culti-
vation. Since baptism and conversion were viewed as countermeasures
against the perceived satanic presence in the Americas, the Amerindians
who became baptized demonstrated their ability to improve their perceived
incivility and barbarity. The baptism of the Amerindians was not in itself a
form of improvement; it was an indicator of the potential for personal
cultivation because it countered Satan’s detrimental influence. At the same
time, the missionaries saw their work to baptize and catechize Native peo-
ples as a form of cultivation for themselves. For Acosta, it was crucial that
missionaries develop the most virtuous behavior to provide visible models
for the Amerindians to emulate. However, the cultivation of good behavior
by the missionaries such as industriousness and temperance further served
to build evangelical capacity. Acosta regarded the languages and customs of
the Native peoples of the Americas—and especially those of East Asia and
Africa—as so foreign to Europeans that only the most deliberate mis-
sionaries could sustain their efforts to acquire skills in language and pedagogy
that could ultimately lead to spreading the Gospel throughout the world.
In the early modern colonial context, the segregationist and assimila-
tionist contours of apocalyptic racism are defined by the pursuit of
16 Introduction
supremacy—the social, political, and mercantile dominance by one ethno-
national group. My conception of supremacy is indebted in part to what
Katharine Gerbner calls “Protestant Supremacy”: “over the course of the
seventeenth century, Protestant planters claimed Christian identity for
themselves, creating an exclusive ideal of religion based on ethnicity.”25
Whereas Gerbner’s understanding of “Protestant Supremacy” is anchored
in the latter seventeenth century, when England’s colonial holdings and
enslavement of Africans in the West Indies were growing, my conception of
supremacy includes Catholic and Protestant powers alike, for these com-
monly hoped to establish a global Christian empire. Walter D. Mignolo’s
observation regarding the project of Orbis Universalis Christianum illus-
trates the persistence of the belief in providential, absolute supremacy:
“behind the market as the ultimate goal of an economic project that has
become an end in itself, there is the Christian mission of the early modern
(Renaissance) colonialism.”26 In addition to racializing the indigenous peo-
ples of the Americas, Black Africans, Muslims, and Jews, English and
Spanish apocalyptic racialization gave rise to auto-racialization of supre-
macy, the inscription of supremacy onto biological and behavioral char-
acteristics thought to be grounded in apocalyptic texts and traditions.
While ultimately Spain’s transatlantic power declined as England’s grew,
upending any obvious providential election, both powers could nonetheless
assert their dominance over the peoples they colonized and enslaved by
looking to political prophecy.
Biblical episodes of prophetic eschatology present scenarios that pre-
modern princes saw as a template for the pursuit and justification of abso-
lute political power. In the Book of Daniel, the Israelite prophet warns the
Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar after interpreting his dream vision that,

in the days of these kings, shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom,
which shall never be destroyed: and this kingdom shall not be given to
another people, but it shall break, and destroy all these kingdoms, and
it shall stand forever.
(2.44)

Here, Daniel discloses that God orders the rise and fall of terrestrial king-
doms (the translatio imperii) and that God shall establish an indestructible
earthly kingdom that will surpass all rivals and predecessors. The Christian
understanding of history holds that God intended Adam to hold universal
dominion of the world as a single kingdom under God before the Fall.
After the Fall, Adam’s progeny was separated into distinct nations, lan-
guages, and kingdoms and dispersed throughout the world. The scrip-
tural prophetic-eschatological tradition, however, predicts that at the end
of terrestrial history, the nations of the world are destined to form part of
Christ’s triumphant kingdom. As with the numerous crusades of the med-
ieval period, Spain’s defeat of the Almohad caliphate and its expulsion of
 Introduction 17
Jews and Muslims in 1492 as well as the establishment of its colonies in the
Americas were viewed as a step toward attaining a universal Christian
kingdom. In the wake of Christopher Columbus’ claims in the Americas,
Pope Alexander VI issued the bull Inter caetera (1493) that granted Spain
dominion of lands and peoples to the west and to Portugal those to the
east. In its grant to Spain, the bull expresses that expansionist possessions
in the Americas are universal and perpetual:

we … give, grant, and assign to you and your heirs and successors,
kings of Castile and Leon, forever, together with all their dominions,
cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and
appurtenances, all islands and mainlands found and to be found,
discovered and to be discovered towards the west and south.27

Similarly, the Spanish “Requerimiento” of 1510 declares to Native peoples

of the Americas in terms of universal supremacy that they are subjects to
the Spanish monarchs and that Spain holds absolute dominion in the
Americas. The proclamation declares that God “gave charge” of “all these
nations” to Peter, and Christ,

commanded [Peter] to place his seat in Rome as the spot most fitting to
rule the world from; but also he permitted him to have his seat in any
other part of the world, and to judge and govern all Christians, Moors,
Jews, Gentiles, and all other sects.

Since Peter was given the entire world and all its nations to rule, then his
pontifical successor held the authority to donate dominions to the Spanish
kings in perpetuity.28 Although Inter caetera and the “Requerimiento” do
not reference prophetic eschatology explicitly, they construct their asser-
tions of perpetual and universal possession for the purposes of converting
Amerindians to Christianity with the expectation that they are preparing
the world for Christ’s impending kingdom.
Similarly, in sixteenth-century England, God’s election and England’s
rising supremacy was thought to manifest in how England navigated its
military relations with Spain and Catholic powers more broadly. Crawford
Gribben defines early modern England’s sense of “national election” as the
“idea … that God has chosen a nation, invested its progress with the earthly
display of his glory, and will therefore make certain its dominance.”29 For its
part, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments chafes against Spanish Catholic
influence during and after Mary Tudor’s reign, as it labels the Spanish mon-
arch the extension of the Pope-Antichrist’s power.30 Later in the sixteenth
century, Spain’s attempted invasion of England with the Armada of 1588
generated a wave of polemic that bolstered England’s claim to supremacy by
asserting Spain’s illegitimacy as a menace to Reformed Christianity, God’s
chosen church. English Reformation writers held that the Roman Catholic
18 Introduction
Pope as well as the Ottoman Sultan are the Antichrist (a false Messiah).
Sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers asserted that Charles V and his heir,
Philip II, played a messianic part in bringing Christianity to all nations of the
world.31 Meanwhile, Elizabethan English polemicists proclaimed that God
helped England defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588, and that this was a sign
that God showed his favor to the Protestant nation.

Reconsidering Crisis in the Black Legend

Previously, the critical discourse on the Black Legend and the Anglo-Spanish
war has described English and Spanish military and cultural interactions as a
“competition” or “rivalry.”32 I submit, however, that while a rivalry or
competition by definition suggests that any competitor can ultimately beat
out the other, English and Spanish supremacist thought held that universal
dominion was reserved for one ethno-national group alone. Spain’s American
colonies fueled its wealth and its military strength. European nations took
notice of Spain’s might, and they learned of Spaniards’ colonial practices
through a number of Spanish and Portuguese accounts that were translated
into several European vernaculars. The English Black Legend was a nation-
alist effort to delegitimize Spain’s claims to dominance in Europe and the
Americas while asserting English claims to dominion in these same terri-
tories. In the Brevísima relación, Las Casas decries Spaniards’ violent attacks
on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, depicting the Amerindians as
obedient innocents and the Spaniards as bloodthirsty and inhumane. Some
scholars have reasoned that Black Legend polemic was a symptom of reli-
gious antagonism between Protestant England and Catholic Spain. Others,
meanwhile, have explained the English degradation of the Spaniard’s com-
plexion in terms of a sense of rivalry or as an expression of anxiety over
military conflict.33 Critics note that Elizabethan propaganda portrayed the
Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England in apocalyptic terms.
Because they were menaced by a Catholic power, Elizabethans experienced a
moment of crisis. After the Spanish naval forces were dispersed, a sense of
providential election and jubilation marked the occasion.
Richard Bauckham’s Tudor Apocalypse posits that 1588, the year of the
Armada, “was a turning-point for Tudor apocalyptic thought” because
“Englishmen believed the defeat of the Armada to have been a genuinely
miraculous divine intervention” and because they understood the Anglo-
Spanish war in the religious terms of a righteous Protestant struggle for
truth against the Pope’s deception.34 In his historicist study of Thomas
Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, an Elizabethan play set in Spain that popu-
larized conventions of the revenge tragedy, Frank Ardolino reads the
wronged Hieronimo’s violent revenge against his fellow Spaniards as justi-
fied because Kyd creates an “apocalyptic revenge play which presents … the
overthrow of the Antichrist, Babylon/Spain by England in 1588.”35 Eric J.
Griffin’s English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics
 Introduction 19
and Empire accounts for how Spain as a cultural and political force loomed
large in signal works of English Elizabethan drama, including Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Othello, and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.
With regard to The Spanish Tragedy and the Spanish Armada, Griffin
traces Kyd’s identification of his Spanish and Portuguese characters with
the vain Tower of Babel in Genesis, the idolatrous Babylonian kings in the
Book of Daniel, and the Whore of Babylon in Revelation. In Griffin’s
critical chronology, the Armada is the watershed moment:

attacks on Spain increasingly came to be framed in ways that belittled,

demonized, and ethnicized all things Spanish. A decade after the Armada,
England’s ethnopoetics had become so overcoded that the mere men-
tion of a name could synechdochically evoke and entire Hispanophobic
sign system.36

While these studies stress the ubiquity and centrality of apocalyptic dis-
course in Black Legend polemic, they have a tendency to explain anti-
Spanish apocalyptic representations as a consequence of an English sense of
acute crisis, especially in the moments surrounding Spain’s attempted inva-
sion of England in the Armada of 1588. Moreover, scholars routinely note
that the volume and virulence of English anti-Spanish tracts grew in the
years surrounding the Armada and that such a rise corresponds to a
moment of perceived crisis. Critics’ implicit or explicit view that English
ethno-nationalist apocalyptic discourse waxes and wanes with historical
moments of military and political crises overlooks the powerful use of
apocalyptic crisis discourse in national power relations and racial thinking.
Norman Cohn’s classic study, The Pursuit of the Millennium, argues that
the plight of the poor in Europe shaped the development of medieval and
early modern movements of “revolutionary” political eschatology:

the usual desire of the poor to improve the material conditions of their
lives became transfused with phantasies of a world reborn into inno-
cence through a final, apocalyptic massacre …. The evil ones … were
to be exterminated; after which the Saints … would set up their kingdom,
a realm without suffering or sin.37

From Cohn’s perspective, premodern apocalyptic movements produced

alternative visions of social arrangements and social progress that chal-
lenged dominant political authority.38 As such, the biblical apocalyptic is
construed as a literature of resistance, a comfort for the downtrodden and
dispossessed, and a call for universal justice. However, early modern
imperial expansion, colonization, and Christian European interactions with
the Native peoples of the Americas, Black Africans, Ottoman Turks, and
rival European powers reconfigure the biblical apocalyptic from a literature
of resistance to a set of beliefs and motifs of aspirational hegemony.
20 Introduction
In response to Cohn’s claim that apocalyptic expectation is born out of
social upheaval and that it results in institutional critique, Bernard McGinn
remarks:

there are, after all, crises after crises. Almost every generation has been
tempted to see itself as undergoing a unique crisis …. No one would
want to deny that apocalypticism is frequently literature of consolation,
but it would be erroneous to think that it is only that.39

Many scholars have portrayed England’s apocalyptic response to the Spanish

Armada along the lines of Cohn’s crisis-centered view in which Elizabethans
viewed themselves as unjustly subject to an evil force in a moment of crisis
and therefore depicted their foe in the apocalyptic terms of such evil. Those
studies that examine the racializing elements of English Black Legend
polemic in relation to its apocalyptic framework tend to endorse Cohn’s view
that events such as the Armada magnified England’s sense of crises that in
turn amplified racist depictions of the Spaniard. However, while these studies
locate in English propaganda pronouncements on Spaniards innate moral
and biological qualities, they routinely couch such racializing events in terms
of Protestant antipathy toward Catholicism and vice versa. By claiming that
English authors racialized Spain in apocalyptic terms due to a fearful sense of
impending crisis, critics have inadvertently justified and normalized Eng-
land’s racialization of Spain as a natural consequence of fear while over-
looking how apocalyptic racialization, whether motivated by fear or
optimism, advances English power objectives. England saw historical events
of crises as confirmation of its teleological trajectory, but it reasoned that the
traits associated with the biological complexions of their enemies were the
sources of their enmity that led to moments of crisis. Apocalyptic racism is
optimistic and opportunistic in the sense that it stems from a worry of being
entitled to power but not yet in possession of it, and is not merely a reaction
to perceived military threats or a fear of the other.
The association of the Armada and the Black Legend with an English
sense of apocalyptic fear is indebted to Adela Yarbro Collins’ influential
study on the Book of Revelation, Crisis and Catharsis. Collins explains that
“relative, not absolute or objective, deprivation is a common precondition
of millenarian movements. In other words, the crucial element is not so
much whether one is actually oppressed as whether one feels oppressed.” In
Collins’ view, the framing of acute social and political crisis in the compo-
sition of apocalyptic literature in the first century CE relates to the author’s
perception of persecution by a dominant force.40 By contrast, Christopher
A. Frilingos challenges the scholarly consensus that Revelation’s mystical
visions are the product of a sense of crisis and persecution, of which Col-
lins’ view is representative. Frilingos argues that the monstrous visions in
Revelation, instead of reflecting early Christians’ “fears” or Roman perse-
cution and “promising an imminent reversal of fortunes,” allowed
 Introduction 21
Christians to identify with the Roman Empire’s curation of spectacles to
“gaze on a threatening ‘Other,’ figured as the distant barbarians.”41 In
other words, Revelation’s narrator takes the perspective of an imperial
power such as Rome to imagine the destruction of his enemies as if it were
a theatrical spectacle.
This present book identifies the apocalyptic elements of the English Black
Legend with Frilingos’ reading of Revelation. I suggest that English Black
Legend polemic was primarily optimistic and opportunistic with regard to
the prospect of dominating the Americas. And while English polemicists
undoubtedly expressed fears of a Spanish invasion, the real sense of crisis
came from the fear of not having attained the universal supremacy to which
England felt providentially entitled. At the same time, the outsize threat
that Spain posed to English sovereignty in its attempted invasion of 1588
cannot be overstated. Yet the actual scope of Spain’s ultimately unrealized
designs for the English people and their property belonged to the realm of
speculative extrapolation based on earlier accounts of Spanish use of force
in the Americas and the Low Countries. George Gascoigne’s eyewitness
account of the Spanish siege of Antwerp in 1576 recounts how the Spanish
forces left “huge nombers, drowned in ye new Toune: where a man might
behold as many sundry shapes and formes of mans motion at time of death:
as ever Mighel Angelo dyd portray in his tables of Doomes day.”42 Here,
Gascoigne launches a figurative perspective that compares the Spanish
massacre at Antwerp with Michelangelo’s representation of the general
resurrection on Judgement Day. Such a comparison is ironic because the
Spaniards bring death to the people in the Low Countries. However, on
Judgement Day, God brings about life by resurrecting humankind. As such,
Gascoigne’s comparison functions as a shorthand to signify a vantage point
that beholds mass casualties while being devoid of divine justice.
As more studies on the Black Legend discourse that foreground its racial
contours emerge, it is my hope that we may newly conceptualize the Eng-
lish apocalyptic discourse around the Armada as a turning point for English
supremacy that is born out of optimism, not just fear and crisis.43 Thanks
in part to the volume Rereading the Black Legend edited by Margaret
Greer, Maureen Quilligan, and Walter D. Mignolo, the centrality of con-
ceptions of race in Black Legend discourse has seen increasing scholarly
interest. As Greer, Quilligan, and Mignolo explain,

the Black Legend was created when Spain’s enemies took Spain’s own
internal debates about its identity and ‘purity of blood’ and the mor-
ality of its behavior in the New World and constructed an image of the
Spanish as violent and close to barbarians.44

Furthermore, the English Black Legend, as Cassander L. Smith argues, often

depicts Black Africans and Native Americans as interchangeable victims of
Spanish cruelty and as willing allies and subjects to English interests.
22 Introduction
However, as Smith points out, English accounts of Black Africans in the
Americas never quite realized the liberation of Black Africans and Native
Americans from Spain. English authors routinely conflated their rhetorical
interest in retribution against Spain with the promise of liberating Black
Africans and Native Americans from Spanish subjection. When English
descriptions of exchanges with Black Africans contradicted or challenged
these formerly mediated rhetorical frames, the narrative tended to become
“ambiguous,” “messy,” and disrupted by its own ambivalence toward Black
voices.45 Meanwhile, Nicholas R. Jones, although primarily focused on
habla de negros in Hispanic literature, similarly identifies the “agentive
subject positions”46 of Black Africans in early modern literature. This
study, for its part, shows the overwhelming prevalence of apocalyptic
notions that restrict the agential latitude of dispossessed peoples. English
and Spanish apocalyptic representations of Black Africans, Amerindians,
Jews, Muslims, and each other stem from a sense that they are providen-
tially entitled to be the dominant colonial power in the Americas and
throughout the world.

Notes
1 See Sweet, “Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought”; Fuchs, “A Mirror
Across the Water,” 9.
2 Hall, Things of Darkness, 4. See also Erickson and Hall, “‘A New Scholarly
Song.’”
3 Fuchs, Poetics of Piracy, 3.
4 Chaplin, Subject Matter, 7–8; Anderson, Imagined Communities, 4; Along these
lines, Spiller’s thesis on the formation of race through reading is helpful:
“reading was closely tied to the body: it involved not just the eyes and the ven-
tricles of the brain, but the blood, vital spirits, and humors of the body. The act
of reading could change what you thought; it could also change who you were,
physically as well as emotionally. At a time when more readers were learning
about the world and its human boundaries through their experiences as readers,
racial identity was often a text based practice. As I will suggest … one place
where histories of race and histories of books intersect is thus in the bodies of
readers” (Reading and the History of Race, 2).
5 Feerick, Strangers in Blood, 6; Banton, Racial Theories, 1–6.
6 Smith, Race and Rhetoric, 3.
7 Heng, The Invention of Race, 19.
8 Balibar, “Class Racism,” 207.
9 Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, 25.
10 Whitaker, Black Metaphors, 3. See also Iyengar, Shades of Difference, 7–9.
11 See, for example, Pečar and Tricoire, “Introduction: Reformations, Prophecy
and Eschatology.”
12 Crome, “Introduction,” 5. See Gribben, Puritan Millennium, 1–20, for a survey
of scholarly studies on early modern millenarian thought. Gribben’s Evangelical
Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–2000 further locates the roots
of modern Christian evangelical thought in the transatlantic world.
13 For a survey and analysis of patristic commentaries on prophetic eschatology,
see Daley, The Hope of the Early Church. See Ball, A Great Expectation, and
Backus, Reformation Readings, for detailed studies of Tudor and Stuart English
 Introduction 23
apocalypticism as well as continental Protestant exegesis on biblical
eschatology.
14 Whitford, The Curse of Ham, 105–40.
15 Whitford, The Curse of Ham, 4, 19–20; Iyengar, Shades of Difference, 8–11. See
also Braude’s essays, “Michelangelo and the Curse of Ham” and “The Sons of
Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Med-
ieval and Early Modern Periods.”
16 Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism, 11.
17 Britton, Becoming Christian, 1–5.
18 Biblical quotations are drawn from The Geneva Bible.
19 See Vos, The Pauline Eschatology.
20 See Psalm 22.27: “All the ends of the world shall remember themselves and turn
to the Lord, and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.”
Elaine Pagels explains that John of Patmos’ reference to the 144,000 virginal
saints who serve in heaven, twelve thousand from each of the twelve tribes, may
hearken back to the gathering of soldiers in ancient Israel (Revelations, 50).
This detail speaks to the expectation of uniformity of those who are gathered in
heaven as well as their perpetual distinction by tribe and kinship. See also
Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, chapter 4, “The Victory of
the Lamb and His Followers”; Kadir, Columbus and the Ends of the Earth.
21 Kendi, Stamped, 1–2.
22 For a survey of Spanish perceptions of Amerindians’ potential for civilization to
1550, see Hanke, All Mankind is One, 1–17.
23 Stuczynski, “Providentialism,” 382. See also Silvério Lima and Torres Megiani,
“An Introduction,” 1–42.
24 Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, 8.
25 Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 2. Gerbner further argues, “since the ideology of
Protestant Supremacy used religion to differentiate between slavery and free-
dom, missionaries suggested that race, rather than religion, was the defining
feature of bondage” (3).
26 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 21–22.
27 Alexander VI, Inter caetera, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/alex06/alex06
inter.htm.
28 Council of the Indies, “Requerimiento 1510,” National Humanities Center, 2011,
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text7/requirement.pdf.
29 Gribben, Evangelical Millennialism, xiii. See Haller, The Elect Nation; and
Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 14.
30 Christianson, Reformers and Babylon, 5–6, 19–22.
31 While court chroniclers buoyed notions of Spanish monarchical messianism,
there are instances of lay Spanish political doomsaying. In particular, Richard L.
Kagan documents the inquisition of Lucrecia de León, a sixteenth-century Spa-
niard who predicted, among other events, the failure of Spain’s Armada
(Lucrecia’s Dreams, 2).
32 Fuchs, Poetics of Piracy, 15.
33 Bumas, “The Cannibal Butcher Shop,” 107; Maltby, The Black Legend in Eng-
land, 76.
34 Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 173.
35 Ardolino, Apocalypse & Armada, xiv; Haekel, “The Image of Spain in the Early
Modern English Revenge Tragedy,” 137–38.
36 Griffin, Specter of Spain, 96.
37 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 16–17.
38 Bostick, The Antichrist and the Lollards, 4.
39 McGinn, “Introduction,” 31.
40 Collins, Crisis & Catharsis, 84.
24 Introduction
41 Frilingos, Spectacles of Empire, 1–2.
42 Gascoigne, The spoyle of Antwerpe, C1r.
43 In Ania Loomba’s view, “England’s colonial ventures were not the result of its
having achieved a confident and secure national identity. Colonial ambitions are
often generated by anxieties about national identity” (Shakespeare, Race, and
Colonialism, 13). Although England was anxious and envious of Spain’s power,
it also drew some optimism from biblical prophecy to embark on colonial
projects.
44 Greer, Quilligan, and Mignolo, “Introduction,” 14.
45 Smith, Black Africans, 6–8.
46 Jones, Staging Habla de negros, 4.
1 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation
in Spanish Colonial Texts
Motolinía, Mendieta, and Acosta

This chapter examines the writings of the Franciscans Toribio de Benavente

Motolinía (1482–1568) and Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525–1604), and those
of the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600). Motolinía, author of the Historia
de los Indios de la Nueva España, came to New Spain along with eleven
Franciscan friars in 1524 with Hernán Cortés, the conquistador of Mexico.
His account is an ecclesiastical history of the foundation of an Amerindian
Christian church in New Spain that primarily advertises the Franciscans’
successes in transforming Mexico from a land of idolatry to a model for
global Christianization. A member of the subsequent generation of Fran-
ciscan missionaries to arrive in Mexico in 1554, Mendieta wrote his own
history of the Franciscans’ activities, the Historia eclesiástica indiana. For
his part, the Jesuit José de Acosta joined the mission to the Spanish King-
dom of Peru in 1572, traveling also to Mexico before returning to Spain in
1587. Known primarily for the Historia natural y moral de las Indias,
Acosta wrote extensively about the Christianization of Amerindians and
prophetic eschatology in De procuranda indorum salute (On the salvation
of the Indians) and De temporibus novissimis (On the End Times).
Although these figures’ presence in the Americas spans numerous decades in
the sixteenth century and encompasses various regional and political con-
texts, they collectively theorize through an apocalyptic perspective how
Black Africans’, Europeans’, and Amerindians’ perceived inherent biologi-
cal and behavioral characteristics factor into Spain’s military, political, and
evangelical dominance of the Americas. While there has been a long-
standing scholarly interest in the role of millenarianism in sixteenth-century
Spanish colonialism and evangelization, especially as it concerns Motolinía
and Mendieta, there has not been a substantive account of the relationship
between race and colonial apocalyptic thought. This chapter places raciali-
zation and the expression of racist power objectives at the center of the
study of sixteenth-century Spanish colonial apocalypticism. An analysis of
the writings of Motolinía, Mendieta, and Acosta reveals how their various
discourses on apocalypse and colonial power generate enduring caste
hierarchies in their efforts to build an exmplary Christian church.1
DOI: 10.4324/9781003171478-2
26 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation
That the Franciscans explicitly couch their ecclesiastical and political
histories of the Americas within apocalyptic universal history has garnered
the attention of critics who wish to identify the intellectual origins of
Motolinía and Mendieta’s eschatology. The two main positions within the
scholarly debate about the origins of the colonial Spanish Franciscans’
eschatology can be summed up as those who propose Joachimist millenar-
ianism versus those who posit a variety of biblical and popular eschatolo-
gical ideas as the main ideological influence on the Franciscans. In the
influential views of Georges Baudot and John L. Phelan, the eschatological
beliefs of sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan colonial missionaries can be
traced to the influence of the Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202) on
the Spiritual Franciscans of the thirteenth century.2 Since the Franciscans’
inception in the early thirteenth century, according to Phelan, the Spiritual
movement within the order demonstrated a commitment to the “the image
of the Apocalypse and the sanctification of poverty,” and it brought them
and “the followers of Joachim of Fiore into a working alliance.” The
Spirituals’ influence, Phelan argues, lasted into fifteenth-century Spain and
found its way into Mendieta’s writings. At the same time, Phelan concedes
that “although Mendieta did not cite Joachim, … his mysticism is per-
meated with a Joachimite spirit.”3 Baudot, for his part, explains that “the
connection between the Joachimist teachings … and [the first Franciscan
missionaries’] interest in the pre-Columbian world” stems from “a need to
tie the Indians … to Adam’s descendants and to the peoples of the Old
Testament” in “preparation for the approaching arrival of the Millennium”
as a “fulfillment of the promises of the Apocalypse.”4 Phelan stresses the
significance of Joachimist spirituality in Mendieta’s advocacy for a uni-
versal Spanish monarchy, while Baudot suggests that Joachimist spirituality
was significant for Motolinía and Mendieta because, as chroniclers, they
were intent on incorporating Amerindians into a universal spiritual history
by studying their origins and carving out their role in the Church Militant.
Furthermore, Baudot’s seminal volume Utopia and History in Mexico is
emblematic of scholarship that imputes the works of Motolinía and
Mendieta with the presumed millenarian belief that they were initiating a
utopia of sorts, a New Jerusalem, in Mexico. José Antonio Maravall’s
Utopía y reformismo en la España de los Austrias argues explicitly that the
Spanish Franciscan missionaries held a utopian outlook that encompassed
political and religious institutions in Mexico, noting that Thomas More’s
Utopia was among the books of Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of
Mexico. At the same time, Maravall points out that Mendieta’s utopian
hopes were tempered by his view that if it were not for it being an article of
faith that all humankind, including Amerindians, were descended from
Adam and Eve, he would believe that Amerindians were an entirely differ-
ent “species” because he perceived them as strange and different.5 If the
Franciscans held a utopian vision of the political and religious institutions
they helped shape in Mexico, it was not one that promoted social parity
 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation 27
between Amerindians and Spaniards. While utopian thinking was part of
the idealizing impulses of the Franciscans, whether in the form of the mil-
lenarian New Jerusalem or More’s text, the Franciscans’ proposed idealized
political and religious structure in colonial Mexico was for the Spaniards,
not the Native peoples. The Franciscans’ misgivings about Amerindians’
bodies and behaviors fashions a society, unlike the one promised in Reve-
lation, in which social disparity is the point. In contrast to Phelan, Baudot,
and Maravall, it is my contention that apocalyptically minded European
evangelical and colonial activity in the Americas and throughout the world
can be understood independently of millenarian exegesis by accounting for the
common political and mercantile interests that inform the variety of apoc-
alyptic ideas. In reality, the vast differences in apocalyptic beliefs—whether
they were Augustine’s view that the millennium was already underway or
Joachim’s view that a spiritual millennium was to be inaugurated through
human agency—espoused by the Spanish writers did not alter their avowed
objectives to establish political, ideological, and commercial dominance in
the Americas and throughout the world.
In a revision of Baudot’s and Phelan’s positions, Delno C. West asserts
that evidence of a direct debt to Joachim is elusive in the colonial writings
of Mendieta and Motolinía, arguing instead that their eschatological
thought emerges out of “other, more general, apocalyptic expectations in
this period.”6 Simone Fracas concurs with West’s conclusion that “explicit
references to Joachim’s thought in Mendieta’s writings … seem completely
absent.” Fracas does not discount the possible influence of Joachimist
apocalyptic spirituality on the sixteenth-century Franciscans, but instead argues
that it is suffused amongst expressions of apocalyptic themes gathered
from the Gospels and the Pauline epistles as well as Revelation and the Old
Testament prophets. Fracas holds that whereas Joachim’s writings criticize
the institutions of the church and temporal political power, “in Mendieta’s
writings, apocalypticism is but a narrative tool to support Franciscan
action” in Mexico that advances Spanish imperial objectives:

Mendieta’s ideas about the Franciscan mission in New Spain rely strongly
on the conviction that the new Indian Church, since the very beginning,
was a return to the prototypical model [of early Christianity] …. This
conception stands in direct opposition to Joachim’s thought, as Gioac-
chino relentlessly insist[s] on the progressive action of the Trinity
through history.7

For its part, this chapter posits that the Franciscans’ apocalyptic ideas are
varied and diffuse, and that they are sourced from various biblical epi-
sodes—ranging from Exodus, to the prophetic works of Isaiah and Daniel,
the Psalms, to the Gospels. Moreover, while Fracas and West note the wide
array of the Franciscans’ sources, they fail to account for how such a
plurality of biblical sources and themes are central to the racialization of
28 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation
the Native peoples of the Americas, Black Africans, Ottoman Turks, and
Europeans. In its analyses of various episodes contained within Motolinía
and Mendieta’s histories, this chapter demonstrates how these authors
imbued various eschatological biblical episodes with their immediate pre-
occupations about the embodied and behavioral traits of Amerindians. By
espousing an apocalyptic outlook to their colonial proselytizing, they
authoritatively enact a vision of the world where Spaniards and Native
peoples, Ottomans, and Black Africans form one Christian church that is
nonetheless organized in a highly differentiated caste system under Spanish
subjection.
Motolinía and Mendieta’s evangelical work was guided primarily by the
eschatological passages in the Gospels, especially those that invoke geo-
graphical, linguistic, and ethnic differences between “tribes” and “nations.”
In Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples that “this Gospel of the kingdom shall
be preached in the whole world for a testimony to all nations, and then
shall the consummation come.” In the meantime, Jesus predicts, there will
be times of desolation, tribulation, and false prophets. To the stalwart elect, he
promises salvation upon his return when “all tribes of the earth … shall see
the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with great power and
majesty” (24.13, 14, 30). Although the Franciscans believe their evangelical
efforts contribute to hastening Christ’s return, they do not speculate about
when Christ will return. They hold a general belief that they are in the last
days—a belief they have in common with Christ’s early disciples—because
they understood Europeans’ newly acquired awareness of Native peoples’
existence as a providential sign that uncovers those nations that have yet to
hear the Gospel. Moreover, Motolinía organizes his history of the conver-
sion of the Amerindians in parallel to biblical history, and he figuratively
compares Amerindians, Spaniards, and Black Africans to biblical figures
and nations. He uses the Book of Exodus to describe Native peoples’ con-
dition of idolatry and slavery before the arrival of the Spaniards, and to tell
how they were liberated by Spanish conquest and Christian baptism. He
then likens the newly established Amerindian Christian church in the
Americas to a holy Jerusalem, and he implies that it prefigures the military
defeat of Ottoman Muslims and the conversion of Jews and Muslims to
Christianity that will occur in Jerusalem.
Notably, the evangelical-apocalyptic passages in the Gospels that Motolinía
and Mendieta cite as the inspiration for the mission were widely considered
by fellow sixteenth-century Spanish colonial thinkers. The Dominican
Domingo de Soto held that Christ’s command to “Go ye into all the world,
and preach the Gospel to every creature” (Mark 16.15) gave Spaniards the
right to dwell in lands claimed by others for the purpose of preaching while
maintaining their own security based on the principles of open commerce
and intercourse between nations. However, in contrast to the Franciscans’
position, he argued that the command to preach the Gospel “to every
creature” did not confer to the Spanish Emperor the right to universal
 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation 29
dominion. His objection is grounded in considerations about private prop-
erty and sovereignty, saying that “seizing [Indians’] goods and subjecting
them to our Empire” is incompatible with the biblical commandment.8
Similarly, Las Casas’ introduction to his treatise on the conversion of the
Amerindians, Del único modo (1537), echoes the eschatological passages in
the Gospels that God’s chosen

should be culled from every race, every tribe, every language, every
corner of the world …. Some of them, be they few or many, are to be
taken into eternal life. We must hold this to be true also of our Indian
nations.9

Soto and Las Casas agreed with Motolinía and Mendieta that the broad
preaching of the Gospel to distinct peoples and nations would precede
Christ’s return, but they opposed the view that the Spanish crown held
universal sovereignty.
As a counterpoint to the Franciscans’ optimistic evangelical histories, the
chapter concludes with an examination of the Jesuit Acosta’s writings that
discuss the evangelization of the Amerindians with regard to Jesus’ pro-
phecy that the end will come when all nations have heard the Gospel.
Acosta argues that Europeans’ increasing awareness of diverse languages,
lands, and peoples throughout the world is evidence that the Gospel’s reach
has been relatively limited, and the time when the Gospel will have reached
all peoples is not likely to be near at hand. Furthermore, whereas Motolinía
and Mendieta indicate in both figurative and literal terms that God exerts
his influence in support of the Franciscans’ mission, Acosta argues vehe-
mently that God works no miracles in the conversion of the Amerindians
for the benefit of alleviating missionaries’ labor. This point is significant
with regard to Acosta’s racialization of various peoples. Because God does
not perform miracles, Acosta holds, Spanish missionaries must labor ardu-
ously to appeal to Native peoples’ reason because their native languages
and customs are a barrier to Christian doctrinal instruction that the mis-
sionaries must help them overcome. As evidence for Amerindians’ potential
for embracing Christianity, Acosta holds up the conversion of Black Afri-
cans to Christianity, positing that Black Africans possess inherent defi-
ciencies that Christian missionaries have labored to improve. Although
Acosta’s apocalyptic outlook differs extensively from that of the Francis-
cans, his views on universal history and his appraisals of Amerindians and
Black Africans nonetheless mirrors theirs by producing a system of apocalyptic
racialization that promoted Spanish colonization and dominion.

The Origins of Motolinía’s Political Eschatology

Motolinía’s observations of and interactions with the indigenous peoples of
Mexico and Hispaniola as well as his political relationships with his fellow
30 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation
Spanish colonists shaped his political eschatology. While an influential cri-
tical tradition holds that the eschatology of Motolinía and Mendieta
belongs to a distinct spiritual Franciscan eschatological tradition indebted
to the medieval exegete Joachim of Fiore, the analyses of Motolinía and
Mendieta’s writings throughout this chapter reveal that these missionaries
looked to a broad patchwork of apocalyptic themes that they sourced from
the Old and New Testaments. By using such a broad array of biblical
examples to convey the history of conquest and conversion of Amerindians
in figurative and spiritual terms, the Franciscans avail themselves of a
variety of frameworks of biblical racialization that they harness in service
of their apocalyptic outlook.

Joachim of Fiore’s Structural View of Universal History

Before turning to a discussion of the origins of the Franciscans’ colonial
apocalyptic ideology, it is necessary to outline Joachim’s teachings to pro-
vide a starting point of contrast. In the Expositio in Apocalypsim (Expli-
cation of the Apocalypse), Joachim espouses a mystical view of universal
history of the church according to a five-part scheme. The second, third,
and fourth of these ages correspond to the Holy Trinity, the Ages of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: “The first age existed before the Law,
the second exists under the Law, the third under the Gospel; the fourth
shall unfold under the reign of the Spirit; the fifth, finally, shall take place
in the manifestation of God.”10 Joachim posits that there is a continuous
reconciliation between the word of the Law (the Old Testament) and the
Gospel to that of the Spirit, and he stresses that Christian devotional prac-
tice is a foundational element to attain a spiritual understanding of scrip-
ture. In the Psalterium decem cordarum (The Psalter of Ten Strings),
Joachim teaches that the recitation of the Psalms is a spiritual practice that
helps devotees reconcile diverging accounts of universal history contained
in the New Testament and Old Testament genealogies. Joachim further
locates a special significance in the conventional monastic practice of sing-
ing the Psalms with regard to numerology. The abbot reckons that the sum
of the one hundred fifty psalms, as they are so numbered in the Vulgate,
generate a recurring sequence based on the number fifteen that evokes the
Holy Trinity. The recitation of the Psalms by members of monastic orders
allows them to ascertain the mystical nature of the Holy Trinity. Since,
according to Joachim, universal history is organized according to the three
ages corresponding to the three entities of the Trinity, the spiritual knowl-
edge about the Trinity that monks gain by reciting and studying the Psalms
translates into their acquisition of the knowledge of universal history.11
Joachim’s teachings on the millennium—regarded as heterodox by
the church—differ significantly from Augustine’s influential positions. For
the abbot, the age of the Gospel, or the age of the Son, spans the
length of the Christian church through to his moment, and the age of the
 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation 31
Holy Spirit will subsequently manifest in humankind in its earthly habita-
tion.12 Augustine says that Revelation’s millennium is already underway. It
spans from Christ’s first coming until his second coming, and that it cor-
responds symbolically to the sixth day of creation before the Sabbath. The
Sabbath signifies Christ’s everlasting kingdom. For Augustine, the millen-
nium’s relationship to human history can be understood in two ways.
According to De civitate Dei, John of Patmos either named the lattermost
part of history the millennium as a synecdoche to mean the sixth day that
“remained before the end of the world,” or he “used the thousand years as
the equivalent of the whole period of this world’s history, in order to indi-
cate by a perfect number the fullness of time.”13 In either case, Augustine
maintains that the millennium is a symbolic measure, not a literal span of
one thousand years. Since he places the symbolic millennium between
Christ’s first and second arrivals, Augustine indicates that the entire span of
the Christian church’s history is contemporary with the symbolic millen-
nium.14 For Joachim, by contrast, the church is not in a millenarian age
because the millennium is yet to come and to bring with it an age as yet
unknown to the Christian church. In Joachim’s scheme, whereas the second
and third ages of universal history are concerned with the word of God, the
first age, which he calls the age of the law of nature, and the fourth age of
the Spirit are concerned with an intuitive, spiritual understanding of God.
For Joachim, the age of the Holy Spirit is to be the final stage of the church
before the arrival of Judgement Day and the establishment of the New
Jerusalem. In the age of the Spirit, friars will spread the gospel of spiritual
love, the institutional church will become obsolete, Greek and Latin
Christianity will reconcile, and the conversion of the Jews will occur.
Joachim claims that evangelizing friars would lead the transformation of
the church in the age of the Spirit through the conversion of non-Christians. It
is crucial, furthermore, to understand Joachim’s eschatology as a reformist
critique of the institutional church. Marjorie Reeves explains that Joa-
chim’s tripartite view of spiritual history emerged out of an impulse to
reform the church and reject temporal power. Bernard McGinn stresses
that Joachim’s geographical and historical situation may have informed his
critique of church and secular power because Joachim lived through
Muslim and Norman occupations of Sicily and southern Italy as well as
moments of schism in the church. It is unsurprising that Joachim’s hetero-
doxy and his implicit critique of the church caught the attention of cano-
nical authorities, for not long after Joachim’s death, the church swiftly
condemned Joachim’s teachings in the Lateran Council of 1215.15
For their part, Motolinía and Mendieta differ from Joachim on the key
point of temporal power. Whereas Joachim teaches that the coming age of
the Spirit will make the institution of the church and earthly powers obso-
lete, Motolinía and Mendieta regard the expansion of Spain’s power as the
central pillar that lends authority to their evangelical project to build a
universal Christian church. The seventeenth-century Spanish jurist Juan de
32 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation
Solórzano Pereira sums up the Spanish Franciscans’ investment in Spanish
colonial power: “Spain as saviors and announcers of the Gospel will
become masters of the cities … of the New World … and thus, once the
Gospel has been preached throughout the world, the Day of Judgement will
come.”16 The sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscans, meanwhile, share the
Calabrian abbot’s conviction that mendicant orders are at the vanguard of
the church’s spiritual expansion and transformation. Furthermore, in con-
trast to Joachim’s biblical exegesis that seeks to systematize and reconcile
universal time, Motolinía and Mendieta gather their eschatological themes
from various localized biblical episodes to shape their immediate political
and evangelical beliefs in relation to their racialized perceptions of the
Native peoples of the Americas. The diversity, inconsistency, and contra-
diction in eschatological views belonging to Motolinía and Mendieta are a
function of the diversity and inconsistency that is part of creating racialized
fictions of Amerindians, Ottomans, Black Africans, and Europeans. Instead
of developing a systematic eschatological system through scriptural exeg-
esis, these authors expostulate on discreet biblical themes in order to
accommodate their ideological interests. Beginning with an examination of
the biography of Fray Martín de Valencia, the leader of the Twelve
Franciscans, the discussion that follows examines several instances in
Motolinía’s Historia in which various biblical episodes underwrite justifi-
cations for the conversion of the Native peoples of Mexico and for Spain’s
political dominion there.

Fray Martín de Valencia and the Prophetic Origins of the

Franciscan Mission
Fray Martín de Valencia, the leader of the Franciscans’ mission to the
Americas, cites an experience of visionary prophecy as the genesis of his
mission. This vision frames Motolinía’s account of the Franciscans’ mission
in generalized prophetic-apocalyptic terms. According to the biography of
Fray Martín contained in Motolinía’s Historia, Fray Martín’s prophetic
imagining of the mass conversion of the Native peoples of the Americas
evinces the Franciscans’ dual interests in pursuing spiritual edification
through preaching abroad and martyrdom, on the one hand, and curtailing
Islamic power, on the other. The story of Fray Martín is important to
Motolinía’s account because it justifies the first Franciscan missionaries’
authority to establish a Christian church in Mexico from divine inspiration
(Fray Martín’s vision), ecclesiastical authority (the Franciscan Rule and
papal consent), and from temporal powers (Cortés and the Spanish crown).
The imaginative experience of Fray Martín’s spiritual calling, as Motolinía
tells it, appears not to disclose any specific knowledge of the circumstances
he would encounter in the Americas. Instead, his prophetic imagination
focuses on the prospect of universal evangelization. For Fray Martín and
for his companion Motolinía, the biblical typology of prophecy provides
 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation 33
them an authoritative narrative to undertake their missionizing activity and
to accomplish their political goals in relation to their sponsor, Cortés, and
the Spanish crown.
Motolinía’s biography of Fray Martín emphasizes the friar’s prophetic
pronouncements and spiritual visions that he regards as providential. Fray
Martín’s impetus to undertake an evangelical mission to the Americas
comes in the form of a spiritual revelation during the course of what
Motolinía describes as his dutiful yet perfunctory liturgical duties. Motolinía
tells that Fray Martín’s missionary calling emerged as a spiritual corrective
to his disinterest in serving his fellow man. The Valencian friar left for
Extremadura in the north of Spain to join the convent of Santa María del
Hoyo, where he hoped to nourish his spiritual condition because the “ene-
migo le procuró muchas maneras de tentaciones, permitiéndolo Dios para
más aprovechamiento de su ánima” (149) (the enemy offered him up many
kinds of temptations that God allowed for the betterment of his soul).17
The temptations manifested as an inability to regard his brothers with
“amor y caridad” (love and charity); praying while distracted and sorrow-
ful (“pesadumbre”); and as “una terrible tentación de blasfemia contra la
fe … parecíale que cuando celebraba y decía misa, no consagraba” (150) (a
terrible temptation to blaspheme against the faith … it seemed that when
he celebrated mass, he did not consecrate). His lack of love and charity
toward his fellow Christian brothers would be cause for concern because it
is a prerequisite for a Franciscan to treat members of his order and
humankind in general with love and charity in order to alleviate the suf-
fering of the poor and sick. The satanic interference in Fray Martín’s
spiritual life further recalls Motolinía’s belief described elsewhere in the
history that there is satanic presence in the Americas that negatively affects
the native inhabitants of Mexico. Although at this point in the narrative of
Fray Martín’s life the prospect of traveling to the Americas has not
emerged, Fray Martín’s experience of overcoming the satanic temptation to
“blasfemia” (blasphemy) foregrounds Amerindians’ struggles to overcome
idolatry. In this regard, the Historia holds up implicitly the friar’s struggles
as an example to Spanish and Amerindian Christians to look upon as they
overcome satanic adversity toward their construction of the universal church.
The pivotal moment in Fray Martín’s spiritual remediation occurs when
he visualizes the image of converted multitudes of all nations during the
recitation of the Psalms in the matins office. The spiritual revelation that
Fray Martín experiences addresses the lack of love and charity that he feels
toward his fellow man in broad apocalyptic terms:

luego que se comenzaron los maitines comenzó a sentir nueva manera

de devoción y mucha consolación en su ánima; y vínole a la memoria
la conversión de los infieles; y meditando en ésto, los salmos que iba
diciendo en muchas partes hallaba entendimientos devotos a este pro-
pósito, en especial en aquel salmo que comienza: Eripe me de inimicis
34 Apocalypse and Racial Assimilation
meis: y decía el siervo de Dios entre sí: “¡Oh! ¿Y cuando será esto?
¿Cuando se cumplirá esta profecía? ¿No sería yo digno de ver este
convertimiento, pues ya estamos en la tarde y fin de nuestros días, y en
la última edad del mundo?”
Pues ocupado el varón de Dios todos los salmos en estos piadosos
deseos, y lleno de caridad y amor del prójimo … le encomendaron que
dijese las lecciones, y se levantó y las comenzó a decir, y las mismas
lecciones, que eran del profeta Isaías y hacían a su propósito, levantá-
banle más y más su espíritu, tanto, que estando las leyendo en el
púlpito vió en espírítu muy gran muchedumbre de ánimas de infieles
que se convertían y venían a la fe y bautismo.
(151–52)

(when the matins prayers began, he started to feel a new manner of

devotion and great consolation in his soul; and the conversion of the
infidels came to his mind; and meditating on this, he found devotional
understandings to this purpose in many of the Psalms he was reciting,
especially in that Psalm that begins: Eripe me de inimicis meis: and this
servant of God said to himself: “Oh, and when will this come to pass?
When shall this prophecy be fulfilled? Am I not worthy to see this
conversion, since we are now in our late and final days and in the last
age of the world?”
Being thus taken by the Psalms and his pious desires, this man of
God, full of charity and love for his fellow man, was asked to read the
lessons. And he got up and began to read, and these very scriptures
that were of the prophet Isaiah and that spoke to his purpose raised his
spirits more and more, so that, as he read the scriptures from the
pulpit, he beheld in spirit a great multitude of heathen souls that were
converting and coming to baptism and faith.)

This passage provides key insights into Fray Martín’s apocalyptic ideas.
Fray Martín experiences a sequence of feelings and imaginative visions that
culminate in the expressed desire to realize the vision of the conversion of
the infidels. Notably, the temporal perspective of the friar’s vision of the
multitudes is situated in the future temporal world, not in Revelation’s
account of the heavenly multitudes during Christ’s reign. This perspective is
indicated by the friar’s vision in “espíritu” (spirit) of souls “que se con-
vertían y venían a la fe y bautismo” (that were converting and coming to
baptism and faith). The assembly of multitudes and the moment of their
conversion that ushers them into the church defines the future temporal
limit of the vision. Whereas Joachim posits a comprehensive millenarian
scheme of church history centered on reform and spiritual progress, Fray
Martín’s expectations about the latter ages of the church’s history and
composition before Christ’s institution of the New Jerusalem are mostly
concerned with universal baptism and conversion. The eschatological
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Persian War and its preliminaries
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Title: The great Persian War and its preliminaries

A study of the evidence, literary and topographical

Author: G. B. Grundy

Release date: January 13, 2024 [eBook #72704]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT

PERSIAN WAR AND ITS PRELIMINARIES ***
 Transcriber’s Note
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selecting an option to view them separately, or by tapping and/or stretching
them. See below for additional transcriber notes.

THE GREAT PERSIAN WAR.

To

MY WINTER-FRIEND

HENRY FRANCIS PELHAM.

 THE

G R E AT P E R S I A N WA R

AND ITS PRELIMINARIES;

A STUDY OF THE EVIDENCE, LITERARY

AND TOPOGRAPHICAL.

By G. B. GRUNDY, M.A.,
LECTURER AT BRASENOSE COLLEGE, AND UNIVERSITY LECTURER
IN CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY, OXFORD.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1901.
 PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
 PREFACE.
The publication of a version of an old old story which has been retold
in modern times by famous writers, demands an apology even at this
day of the making of many books. It can only be justified in case the
writer has become possessed of new evidence on the history of the
period with which the story is concerned, or has cause to think that
the treatment of pre-existing evidence is not altogether satisfactory
from a historical point of view.
I think I can justify my work on the first of these grounds; and I
hope I shall be able to do so on the second.
Within the last half-century modern criticism of great ability has
been brought to bear on the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides.
Much of it has been of a destructive nature, and has tended to raise
serious doubts as to the credibility of large and important parts of the
narratives of those authors. I venture to think that, while some of this
criticism must be accepted as sound by every careful student, much
of it demands reconsideration.
A large part of it has been based upon topographical evidence. Of
the nature of that evidence I should like to say a few words.
Until ten years ago the only military site of first-rate importance in
Greek history which had been surveyed was the Strait of Salamis,
which the Hydrographic Department of the English Admiralty had
included in the field of its world-wide activity. A chart of Pylos made
by the same department was also available, but was quite
inadequate for the historical purpose.
Since that time Marathon has been included in the survey of
Attica made by the German Staff Officers for the German
Archæological Institute.
 The surveys of Thermopylæ, Platæa, and Pylos, I have myself
made at different times between 1892 and 1899. Pylos does not
come within the scope of the present volume.
In the absence of these surveys, this side of Herodotean criticism
was founded upon such sketches as Leake and other travellers had
made of important historical sites, and upon the verbal description of
them contained in their works.
It is superfluous to praise the labours of such inquirers. No
amount of later investigation in Greek topography can ever supplant
much that they have done. But I am quite certain that Leake would
have been the last to claim any scientific accuracy for the sketch-
maps which he made; and I think it will be agreed that maps without
accuracy cannot be used for the historical criticism of highly
elaborate narratives.
The present volume, deals exclusively with the Græco-Persian
wars up to the end of 479 b.c. I propose to deal with the Hellenic
warfare of the remainder of the fifth century in a separate volume.
Some of my conclusions are not in accord with the commonly
accepted versions of the history of this period. But, when the
circumstances of the work are considered, it will, I think, be
conceded that such a result was almost inevitable.
I have supported my conclusions, especially in such cases as I
believe them to be in disagreement with accepted views, by
arguments taken from the evidence. Where those arguments are in
my opinion likely to be of interest to the general reader, I have
inserted them in the actual text; where they are of a very specialist
character, I have put them in the form of notes.
I have but little more to say with regard to my own work in
general. In the form in which I have presented it in this volume I have
tried to make it constructive rather than destructive. I have, I believe,
confined my destructive criticism to passages in which I found myself
in conflict with accepted authorities on the subject who had
presumably enjoyed equal opportunities with myself of becoming
acquainted with the facts. I have purposely avoided criticism of those
who, not having had the opportunity of visiting the scenes of action,
but yet having made the best use of the evidence available at the
time at which they wrote, have, in my opinion, been led into error by
the defectiveness of the evidence they were obliged to use.
Early in the course of my inquiries, the results of investigation
suggested to me that Herodotus’ evidence as an historian differs
greatly in value, according as he is relating facts, or seeking to give
the motives or causes lying behind them. Further investigation has
tended to confirm this view. My conclusions on these two points will
be made sufficiently clear in the course of this work.
In his purely military history Herodotus is dealing with a subject
about which he seems to have possessed little, if any, special
knowledge, and hardly any official information. The plan or design
which lay behind the events which he relates can, therefore, only be
arrived at, in the majority of instances, by means of an induction from
the facts he mentions. This will, I think, adequately define and
account for the method I have adopted in treating his evidence.
The necessity of employing various words indicating probability
rather than certainty does not add adornment to style, but is
inevitable under circumstances where the evidence is of the nature
of that which is presented to any one who attempts to write the
history of any part of the fifth century before Christ.
The spelling of Greek names is a difficulty at the present day.
Many of the conventional forms are absolutely wrong. I do not,
however, think that the time has yet come when it is convenient to
write Sikelia, Athenai, Kerkura, etc. I have therefore used the
conventional forms for well-known names, but have adopted the
more correct forms for names less known, with one or two literal
changes, such as “y” for upsilon, where the change is calculated to
make the English pronunciation of the name approximate more
closely to that of the original Greek.
As one who is from force of present circumstances laying aside,
not without regret, a department of work which has been of infinite
interest to him, and whose necessary discontinuance causes him the
greatest regret, I may perhaps be allowed to speak briefly of my own
experience to those Englishmen who contemplate work in Greece.
Firstly, as to motive: If you wish to take up such work because you
have an enthusiasm for it, and because you feel that you possess
certain knowledge and qualifications, take it up by all means; you will
never regret having done so. It will give you that invaluable blessing,
—a keen intellectual interest, lasting all your life.
But if your motive be to acquire thereby a commercial asset which
may forward your future prospects, leave the work alone. You will, in
the present state of feeling in England, forward those prospects
much more effectively by other means.
In all work in Greece malaria is a factor which has to be very
seriously reckoned with. There has been much both of exaggeration
and of understatement current upon the subject. It so happens that
many of the most interesting sites in Greece are in localities
notoriously unhealthy —Pylos and Thermopylæ are examples in
point. Of the rare visitors to Pylos, two have died there since I was at
the place in August, 1895; and of the population of about two
hundred fisher-folk living near the lagoon in that year, not one was
over the age of forty. The malaria fiend claims them in the end, and
the end comes soon. At Thermopylæ, in this last summer, I escaped
the fever, but caught ophthalmia in the marshes. An Englishman who
was with me, and also our Greek servant, had bad attacks of fever.
On the whole, I prefer the spring as the season for work. The
summer may be very hot. During the four weeks I was at Navarino
the thermometer never fell below 93° Fahrenheit, night or day, and
rose to 110° or 112° in the absolute darkness of a closed house at
midday. What it was in the sun at this time, I do not know. I tried it
with my thermometer, forgetting that it only registered to 140°, with
disastrous results to the thermometer.
At Thermopylæ in 1899 the nights were, in July and August,
invariably cool, though the heat at midday was very great; so much
so that you could not, without using a glove, handle metal which had
been exposed to it.
 The winter is, I think, a bad time for exploration,—in Northern
Greece at any rate. Rain and snow may make work impossible, and
the mud on the tracks in the plain must be experienced in order to be
appreciated. Snow, moreover, may render the passes untraversable.
To one who undertakes survey work in circumstances similar to
those in which I have been placed, the expense of travelling in
Greece is considerable. Survey instruments are cumbrous, if not
heavy paraphernalia. Moreover, as I have been obliged to do the
work within the limits of Oxford vacations, and as the journey to
Greece absorbs much time, it has been necessary for me to labour
at somewhat high pressure while in the country. Twelve hours’ work
a day under a Greek sun, with four hours’ work besides, demands
that the doer should be in the best of condition. One is therefore
obliged to engage a servant to act as cook and purveyor, since the
native food and cooking are not of a kind to support a Western
European in a healthy bodily state for any length of time. In case of
survey, moreover, it is just as well to choose a servant who knows
personally some of the people of the district in which the work is
carried on, as suspicions are much more easy to arouse than to
allay, and original research may connect itself in the native mind with
an increase of the land-tax.
There are very few parts of Greece where it is dangerous to travel
without an escort. Since the recent war with Turkey, the North has
been a little disturbed, and brigandage has never been quite
stamped out in the Œta and Othrys region. But it is not the organized
brigandage of old times; nor, I believe, in the vast majority of cases,
are the crimes committed by the resident population. The Vlach
shepherds, who come over from Turkish Epirus in the summer with
their flocks, are usually the offenders. Throughout nine-tenths of the
area of the country an Englishman may travel with just as much
personal security as in his own land.
The Greeks are a kindly, hospitable race. The Greek peasant is a
gentleman; and, if you treat him as such, he will go far out of his way
to help you. If you do not, there may be disagreeables.
 I cannot acknowledge all the written sources of assistance to
which I have had recourse in compiling this volume, because I
cannot recall the whole of a course of reading which has extended
over a period of ten years.
Of Greek histories I have used especially those of Curtius, Busolt,
Grote and Holm; of editions of Herodotus those of Stein and Macan.
Of special books, I have largely used the French edition of
Maspero’s “Passing of the Empires,” and Rawlinson’s “Herodotus.” I
have read Hauvette’s exhaustive work on “Hérodote, Historien des
Guerres Médiques.” I have not, however, been able to use it largely,
as I find that my method of dealing with the evidence differs very
considerably from his.
Where I have consciously used special papers taken from learned
serials, I have acknowledged them in the text.
Many of my conclusions on minor as well as major questions are
1
founded on a fairly intimate knowledge of the theatre of war.
I have dealt with the war as a whole, as well as with the major
incidents of it, because it is a subject of great interest to one who,
like myself, has, in the course of professional teaching, had to deal
with the campaigns of modern times.
I cannot close this Preface without expressing my gratitude for the
help which has been given me at various stages of my work.
Mr. Douglas Freshfield, himself a worker in historical research,
and Mr. Scott Keltie gave me invaluable assistance at the time of my
first visit to Greece, when I was holding the Oxford Travelling
Studentship of the Royal Geographical Society.
My own college of Brasenose generously aided me with a grant in
1895, which was renewed last year.
In reckoning up the debt of gratitude, large items in it are due to
my friends Mr. Pelham and Mr. Macan. As Professor of Ancient
History, Mr. Pelham is ever ready to aid and encourage those who
are willing to work in his department, and I am only one of many
whom he has thus assisted. Such grants as I have obtained from the
Craven Fund have been obtained by his advocacy, and he has often
by his kindly encouragement cheered the despondency of a worker
whose work can only be rewarded by the satisfaction of having done
it,—a reward of which he is at times, when malarial fever is upon
him, inclined to under-estimate the value.
I owe much to that personal help which Mr. Macan so kindly gives
to younger workers in the same field as his own. He has also been
kind enough to read through the first three chapters of this book.
Though he has suggested certain amendments which I have
adopted, he is in no way responsible for the conclusions at which I
have arrived.
To Canon Church, of Wells, I am deeply indebted for those
illustrations which have been made from the beautiful collection of
Edward Lear’s water-colour sketches of Greece which he
possesses.
My father, George Frederick Grundy, Vicar of Aspull, Lancashire,
has read through all my proofs, and has done his best to make the
rough places smooth. I have every reason to be grateful for this
labour undertaken with fatherly love, and, I may add, with parental
candour.
The chapters in this volume which deal with the warfare of 480–
479 were awarded the Conington Prize at Oxford, given in the year
1900.
G. B. GRUNDY.
Brasenose College, Oxford,
October, 1901.
 NOTE.
Note.—After nearly a year spent in learning the principles and
practice of surveying, I went to Greece in the winter of 1892–93, and
made
1. A survey of the field of Platæa;
2. A survey of the town of Platæa;
3. A survey of the field of Leuctra.

I also examined
1. The western passes of the Kithæron range;
2. The roads leading to them from Attica by way of Eleusis and
Phyle respectively;
3. The great route from Thebes northward, west of Kopais, as
far as Lebadeia and Orchomenos.

In the summer of 1895 I revisited Greece.

During that visit I did the following work:⁠—
1. A survey of Pylos and Sphakteria;
2. An examination of the great military route from Corinth to
Argos, and from Argos, by way of Hysiæ, to Tegea;
3. An examination of the military ways from the Arcadian plain
into the Eurotas valley;
4. I also followed and examined the great route from the
Arcadian plain to Megalopolis, and thence to the Messenian
plain;
5. An examination of the site of Ithome.

In the recent summer of 1899 I did further work abroad in

reference to Greek as well as Roman history. The Greek portion
consisted of:⁠—
1. A visit to the site of and museums of Carthage, with a view to
ascertaining the traceable effects of Greek trade and Greek
 influence in the Phœnician city;
2. A detailed examination, lasting ten days, of the region and site
of Syracuse;
3. An examination of the field of Marathon, which I had
previously visited, though under adverse circumstances of
weather, in January, 1893;
4. A very careful examination of Salamis strait;
5. A voyage up the Euripus, and such examination of the strait at
Artemisium as was necessary;
6. A survey of the pass of Thermopylæ;
7. A detailed examination of the path of the Anopæa;
8. An examination of the Asopos ravine and the site and
neighbourhood of Heraklea Trachinia;
9. An examination of the route southward from Thermopylæ,
through the Dorian plain, past Kytinion and Amphissa to
Delphi;
10. A second examination of Platæa and the passes of Kithæron.

Other parts of Greece known to me, though not visited with the
intention of, or, it may be, under circumstances permitting, historical
inquiry are:⁠—
1. Thessaly, going
(a) From Volo to Thaumaki, viâ Pharsalos;
(b) From Volo to Kalabaka (Æginion) and the pass of
Lakmon;
(c) From Volo to Tempe, viâ Larissa;
2. The great route from Delphi to Lebadeia by the Schiste;
3. The route up the west coast of Peloponnese from Pylos,
through Triphylia and Elis to Patras;
4. The neighbourhood of Missolonghi;
5. Corfu and Thera (Santorin).
 CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE
I. Greek and Persian 1
II. Persian and Greek in Asia. The Scythian
Expedition 29
III. The Ionian Revolt 79
IV. Persian Operations in Europe: b.c. 493–490.
Marathon 145
V. The Entr’acte: b.c. 490–480 195
VI. The March of the Persian Army. Preparations
in Greece 213
VII. Thermopylæ 257
VIII. Artemisium 318
IX. Salamis 344
X. From Salamis to Platæa 408
XI. The Campaign of Platæa 436
XII. Mykale and Sestos 522
XIII. The War as a Whole 534
XIV. Herodotus as the Historian of the Great
War 556
INDEX 581
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

TO FACE PAGE
Marathon: from the “Soros,” looking towards Little
Marsh 163
The “Soros” at Marathon 165
Marathon from the “Soros” 187
The Vale of Tempe 231
The Harbour of Corcyra 241
Mountains of Thermopylæ, from Phalara 257
Mount Œta and Plain of Malis 259
Asopos Ravine 261
The Gorge of the Asopos 261
Thermopylæ, from Bridge of Alamana 263
View from Thermopylæ, looking towards
Artemisium 264
Channel of Artemisium, from 1600 Feet above
Thermopylæ 264
On Thermopylæ-Elatæa Road (viâ Modern
Boudenitza) 265
Thermopylæ between Middle and East Gate 290
The East Gate of Thermopylæ 291
Summit of Anopæa, looking East 301
Coast at Middle Gate of Thermopylæ in 480 310
Thermopylæ 311
Thermopylæ: the Middle Gate 311
First and Second Mounds, Middle Gate, Thermopylæ 312
Plain of Eubœa 321
The Narrows at Chalkis 323
Salamis, looking South from Mount Ægaleos, with 392
the Island of Psyttaleia in the Centre
Plain of Thebes and Mount Kithæron 436
Plain of Kopais, from Thebes 452
Plain of Platæa and Kithæron 454
The First Position at Platæa 460
Platæa: “Island,” from Side of Kithæron 480
Bœotian Plain, from Platæa-Megara Pass 482
Platæa—West Side of Νῆσος 482
Platæa: Panorama from Scene of Last Fight 502
 MAPS.

Battle of Marathon 166

Region of Thermopylæ and Malian Gulf 266
Isthmus of Corinth and West Attica 368
Salamis 384
Thermopylæ At end
Platæa At end