Born In Blood And Fire Summary

The Land of the Free or the Land of the Lost? For centuries the indigenous people have lived in what is now called the Americas before the Europeans came for conquest. They had culture and heritage that was unique and never before gazed upon by the rest of the world. However, when the Europeans came, instead of preaching the Gospel and showing love like their savior Jesus Christ did, they let their greed for silver and the riches of the “new” land consume them. By doing so they killed the indigenous people and corrupted their view of it. As a result of the corruption the Europeans displayed, they plundered riches and also effaced the practices belonging to the “native” Americans. This process of separation of cultures to a hasty fusion of …show more content…
In fact, the idea of divide and conquer flourished and it seem like everyone wanted to add on to their empire. The Spanish around this time had lost land to the Muslim Iberian Moors. This left the Spanish envious and placed the desire to reclaim what they had taken from the Roman’s back. Then when they found what they believed to be the casket of one of their saints, they had a boost in moral and rallied. The book, Born in Blood and Fire by John Chasteen, describes their rally as “they pushed the Moors south toward Africa over thirty generations,” (18). With the new found victory over the Moors an even greater desire for conquest was born. New places to conquer would be expensive, however, and trading with Asia was in high demand at the time. To solve this problem for trading, the Portuguese decided to find a shortcut to India by using a water route to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of getting goods. This is what led the two worlds to meet for the first …show more content…
To supply their desire for slaves they imported Africans in the 1600s. Again the Europeans corruption was displayed when they justified slavery with the “notion that buying such captives to Christianize them was actually doing them a favor” (29). It is unfortunate how easily they would ignore other teachings of the bible to distort their means of justification. The longer Europeans stayed in the New World the more they conquered, and this time their sights were on the Aztecs and the Inacs. The Europeans were outnumbered by the thousands, but the indigenous didn’t stand a chance. The disease was a far more formidable foe than any of the Europeans, and it was merciless. Swarms of ingenious people disappeared, and thus the Spanish Empire was born. Born from the blood of the