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simplicity of mind would have reduced it to a matter of corrupt human beings, destined for eternal damnation, redeemed by a merciful savior. Christ saved those who believed in him, and it was the duty of Christians to spread his gospel and thus rescue the heathens from the fate that would otherwise await them.
    Although Christianity was in itself a sufficient justification for dominion, Columbus would also carry civilization to the Indies; and this, too, was a gift that he and his contemporaries considered adequate recompense for anything they might take. When people talked about civilization—or civility, as they usually called it—they seldom specified precisely what they meant. Civility was closely associated with Christianity, but the two were not identical. Whereas Christianity was always accompanied by civility, the Greeks and Romans had had civility without Christianity.
    One way to define civility was by its opposite, barbarism. Originally the word “barbarian” had simply meant “foreigner,” to a Greek someone who was not Greek, to a Roman someone who was not Roman. By the fifteenth or sixteenth century, it meant someone not only foreign but with manners and customs of which civil persons disapproved. North Africa became known as Barbary, a sixteenth-century geographer explained, “because the people be barbarous, not onely in language, but in manners and customs.” Parts of the Indies, from Marco Polo’s description, had to be civil, but other parts were obviously barbarous, for example, the lands where people went naked. Whatever civility meant, it meant clothes.
    But there was a little more to it than that, and there still is. Civil people distinguished themselves by the pains they took to order their lives. They organized their society to produce the elaborate food, clothing, buildings, and other equipment characteristic of their manner of living. They had strong governments to protect property, to protect good persons from evil ones, to protect the manners and customs that differentiated civil people from barbarians. It was conceded that barbarians might have governments of a sort but insufficient to curb their depraved habits or to nurture better ones. The superior clothing, housing, food, and protection that attached to civilization made it seem to the European a gift worth giving to the ill-clothed, ill-housed, and ungoverned barbarians of the world.
    The Europeans’ knowledge of barbarians did not all come from books. They had had contact with nearby Barbary itself and also with the much more barbarous Canary Islands, which they had rediscovered in the fourteenth century. By 1492 the Spaniards had subdued every island but Tenerife to Christianity, civilization, and slavery.
    Slavery was an ancient instrument of civilization, and in the fifteenth century it had been revived as a way to deal with barbarians who refused to accept Christianity and the rule of civilized government. Through slavery they could be made to abandon their bad habits, put on clothes, and reward their instructors with a lifetime of work. The Spanish government frowned on the enslavement of submissive natives, and in the Canaries it was mostly the recalcitrant who became slaves. But not all Europeans, or indeed all Spaniards, discriminated between submissive and nonsubmissive barbarians. Throughout the fifteenth century, as the Portuguese explored the coast of Africa, large numbers of well-clothed sea captains brought civilization to naked savages by carrying them off to the slave markets of Seville and Lisbon.
    Since Columbus had lived in Lisbon and sailed in Portuguese vessels to the Gold Coast of Africa, he was not unfamiliar with barbarians. He had seen for himself that the torrid zone could support human life, clothed as well as unclothed, and he had observed how pleased barbarians were with trinkets on which civilized Europeans set small value, such as the little bells that falconers placed on