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THE ITALIAN LEGACY IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
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ing each other on April 25, 1520. In truth, Figueroa was a controversial figure who had little empathy for the
clergy, the indigenous people, those who criticized the Spanish officials, and the inhabitants in general of Santo
Domingo. It is no coincidence that Charles V ended up sending him off to Cuba. In one truly terrifying section
of the
Itinerarium,
Geraldini denounces the often-gratuitous violence which the Spaniards meted out on the
indigenous peoples.
Itin
. XVI 24-25
And I add, in God’s immortal name—in fact, since I was a child, I have abhorred the rumors—that
many of our Spanish men, who have nothing in common with nobility of the mind, when they wanted
to test whether the blade of the swords was sharp or dull, would cut a leg or arm or the naked bodies
of those innocent men! I add, Your Holiness [Pope Leo X], that for nothing more than to satisfy their
abominable lust, they kidnapped children from the wombs of miserable mothers, citing some pretext;
and with inexorable violence, in front of their own mothers, they beat them against a beam or a stone,
and they killed there and then what they wanted from the mothers who were still wailing.
Here we have the problem (not just historiographic) of Geraldini’s attitude toward the world of the “sav-
ages.” In general, it was believed that the “natives” could not govern themselves and could not be compared
to Europeans. The revolt of the Taíno
cacique
Enriquillo, in the Bahoruco forest, ended up exacerbating the
tensions between the two ethnic groups. Geraldini was a man of his time, a cultured humanist (even the
acclaimed Greeks and Romans had been pagans), who showed a paternalistic ecumenical approach to the
indigenous people of the Caribbean islands (in ep. 19.35 he referred to himself a “homo Latinus” in contrast
to the “barbarians”). He was able, for example, to discern differences between one tribe and another, without
inserting them all under one label. He described the Taíno people in the
Itinerarium
as a peaceful and innocent
population, torn from their happiness by the arrival of the Europeans, and who suffered from material and
ethical misery that pushed them to forms of collective suicide, while attributing to the most aggressive Caribs
the egregious practice of cannibalism.
Itin
. XIII 1-5
Now, Most Holy Father, I must return to my journey. Three days after leaving the Island that bears
my mother’s name, I arrived most tempestuously at the island of Caruqueria, which Columbus had
previously called Guadalupe, in honor of the Monastery of Guadalupe, in Spain, well known through-
out Iberia, where given the sign of peace from the Caribs, our sailors disembarked for provisions. At
such juncture, as many leaders of this race of cruel people came to the ship to see me, I refused to
receive such criminal and infamous men, and through Ribera, I exhorted them to leave such a life.
Because, as the lion respects the lion, and the bear, the bear, and as the tiger does not devour the tiger,
and the snake lives in utmost harmony with the snake, and each and every animal with those of its
kind, even though totally lacking in judgment, it was an abominable thing that the Carib people, being
men, committed crimes from which even the brutes would abstain. And being that every person with
a good heart refuses to kill harmless animals, it is something nefarious that with nothing sacred they
can expiate themselves or with any human influence justify themselves, that the Carib people cannot
retract from killing human beings, in order to lengthen, with repeated bites of meat from fattened boys
or men, the day of their racial feasts or any other day of revelry.
Conversely, he never hesitated, as has been already noted, to firmly condemn the atrocities committed by
the Spaniards against them. From his standpoint, four peoples coexisted in the New World: the fierce Caribs,
the mythic Taíno, the Europeans, and the African blacks (
Ethiopes
). And in none of these (except, perhaps,
the last), does there appear to be a trace of the “slave by nature” type of the Aristotelian conception, which