La leyenda nueva

I'm reading R. Alan Covey, Inca Apocalypse. This runs a parallel-life "buried mirror" thesis contrasting Habsburg and specifically Spanish thought circa AD 1530, against Inca / Quechua thought at that time. Covey takes Restall's approach, source-criticism. I'm at page 126 of 519; I'm here to take issue with this book's take on Spain.

Covey is aware of the Black Legend of old: Protestants casting judgement on Spain's New-World policy, as a means toward casting judgement on Spain itself. At the same time he is also aware of the growing European consensus about nonEuropeans, today called "racism". Covey implies he is above both.

Covey's stance on the latter comes out over pp. 21-8. Here the book considers Jared Diamond's classic Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond was writing a long book, not an entirely good book, arguing against racism for the most part, except where it comes to disease-resistance. For the Inca, Diamond fixated on a single battle: Cajamarca. Covey concedes that the Spaniards, certainly, won Cajamarca but he argues that as watershed it was shallow. That's fair. But Covey goes on to ding Diamond for being racism-adjacent. (I'll interject other critics have hit Diamond on how he lets us wicked whiteys off the hook. Geneticists laugh at Diamond from the other side.) As far as Cajamarca goes, Covey has the right of it. As a side effect Covey has set himself up as a moral superior, even over Diamond.

Covey who isn't a racist, just ask him, then goes off against fifteenth-century Spanish propaganda. He had the opportunity to dig into whence the Spanish elite got its proto-racist ideas. I do not find Goldenberg's Curse of Ham in the references p. 540. I do not find Ibn Khaldûn p. 541 - I don't find Ibn Anybody. Nothing on the dhimma which is plain Jim Crow. Now, Goldenberg could be wrong; but if he is, Covey needs to weigh mediaeval Arab / Berber views on race against Spanish (and Sephardic).

Instead Covey finds a tradition of Spanish historiography full of self-serving myth. This is a chapter on "The Invention of Catholic Spain", in the Whitelam / Sand tradition of "Invention of Ancient Israel" text. It is Covey's contention that the Reconquista was a simple Conquista, by various north-Iberian Catholic dynasts over a vast region which never owned a united identity. The Reconquistadors themselves pointed to the Visigoth kingdom, that which lost out to Tariq and the Umayyads behind him. To that, p. 76:

Today, historians view the Islamic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula as an imperial renaissance that followed centuries of political fluctuations. Corruption, unrest, and foreign invasion marked the last years of Roman rule, in the fifth century, and the political organization of the succeeding Visigoths appears to have been decentralized and fluid. After years of raiding the Iberian coast, Berber forces loyal to the Umayyad Caliphate invaded Gibraltar in 711, and a decisive battle the following year led to the extention of Umayyad control over the southern part of the peninsula. This new imperial era united regions that Carthaginian and Roman colonization had, almost a thousand years earlier, pulled into Mediterranean trade routes and political hierarchies. The Umayyads called the new domain Al-Andalus, and it grew over time from a remote province into an autonomous realm, the Emirate of Córdoba, which at its peak ... As did earlier imperial invaders, the Umayyads brought peace and order, along with new technologies, religious values, and trade opportunities. The secular Muslim government guaranteed Christians and Jews considerable religious freedom, establishing a coexistence (convivencia) that endured for centuries.

Covey for that farrago brings four: Collins 2004, Hillgarth 2009, Grieve 2009, Lowney 2006. Note: all four are Anglo, and ten years old by time of writing. No Fernández-Morera, for Covey. Nothing specific about the religious values in question, from Awza'i then Malik; nothing about how Andalusian Islam interpreted the dhimma. Covey goes on to weep tears over the fate of the Jews p. 105; with no mention of the Almohad bigotries in Andalusia pp. 85-94. The Almoravids aren't even mentioned - good luck finding here that 1066 pogrom in Grenada. Covey gives over to Muslim apologetic a rein which he never offers to the Catholics.

Covey defends his erasure - as we call it - of the Visigothic system because the Visigoths ruled mostly-indirectly through local elites. Leaving aside the standard Visigothic law-code, which he ignores, decentralised governance is exactly as the Incas had ruled - and as the Romans. Centralised government is better, he claims. But only when Umayyads like 'Abd al-Rahman do it. When Catholics insist on a common law and a common governing ideology, that's bad.

[INTERJECT 8/28/21: as to that "renaissance" meme, LOL.]

So I'll go further. This p. 76 paragraph is a brief for colonialism. Here colonialism was great when Carthage was "bringing peace and order". It was fine when Rome was doing it, although maybe not so much in the fifth century [when Rome was Catholic]. Fortunately Damascus came back to restore Spain's natural state, as subjects to the east. Outside authority is Not Okay only when Catholic Toledo makes a play for it. You know, the city on the same peninsula.

There's all sorts of Approved Opinion in these early pages. Page 86, The Christian realms established [in the Holy Land] after the initial successes of the First Crusade could not be sustained, and they fell one by one between 1150 and 1291. Besides this weaselly passive-voice, these realms absolutely were sustained - the Crusade even had Jerusalem again in the early 1200s, for a full generation. Joachim "of Fiore" (da Fiore / of Flora) didn't live to see that resurgence; that's where Covey needs to set his marker, not at 1291.

As for Joachim's Last Emperor, Joachim didn't invent that trope. It's in pseudo-Methodius for which Petrus' Latin translation was rife in "Gaul". Petrus wasn't very good at his job and I dimly recall that Spain owned a further Latin or Spanish retranslation straight from the "Chaldean" (as Comey calls Syriac, p. 105)tho' I am unsure when. UPDATE 9/11: Roda Codex, Latin: Navarre / Asturias 900s AD. So Pablo Ubierna, "Byzantine Greek Apocalypses and the West", also pointing out Ps-M's resurgence in Joachim's Italy late 1200s.

Now, let us look in which direction Covey's errors and omissions all turn. Covey doesn't allow for the Visigothic state. He doesn't allow that the Muslims preceded Spain on racism, or on antiJewish attacks. He prefers Damascus over Toledo as overlords. He sneers at the Crusade. He doesn't recognise pseudoMethodius, that most famous Christian voice under Islamic rule.

Covey is an antiCatholic bigot; and as for the Spanish, he believes that they don't deserve to rule their own peninsula, nor themselves. His pretensions otherwise ring hollow.

And you know what? That's not even what I care about. I am the very last person on Blogger to deny one's right to hold a prejudice. I also recognise that if Spanish Catholics learned it from watching YOU that does not grant to them any moral right to pick up where the Almohads left off. Still. Some of this mitigation needs bringing to evidence.

R. Alan Covey is unethical. Don't buy his book.