Was Christopher Columbus a criminal?
For Columbus to be a criminal, he would have had to violate a law. There is no doubt that he did many things that were immoral, such as enslaving the native populations on the islands he visited in the Caribbean and brutalizing them (cutting off hands, working them until they died, and so on). However, enslaving conquered peoples wasn’t illegal at that time. His expeditionary forces also infected the native populations with European diseases for which they had no immunity, thus killing huge numbers of them. That occurrence was most unfortunate but not illegal, and in fact probably was part of a microbe exchange–measles and smallpox from Europe for syphilis from the Islands. He claimed the lands in the name of God and the Spanish crown, thereby wresting them from the occupants he found there; that action, too, was legal under the laws which governed Columbus although it led to the annihilation through genocide of the natives. After his fourth voyage and after colonization had taken pla
