These exerpts offer an enlightening glimpse into the social conditions of sixteenth century Europeans who left their homes to become 'founders' or 'pioneers' of present day America.
Europe
"The Spain that Christopher Columbus and his crew left behind just before dawn on August 3, 1492, as they sailed forth from Palos and out into the Atlantic, was for the most of its people a land of violence, squalor, treachery, and intolerance. In this respect Spain was no different from the rest of Europe."
"What J. H. Elliot has said of sixteenth century Spain had held true throughout the Continent for generations beyond memory: 'The rich ate, and ate to excess, watched by a thousand hungry eyes as they consumed their gargantuan meals. The rest of the population starved.' This was in normal times. The slightest fluctuation in food prices could cause the sudden deaths of additional tens of thousands who lived on the margins of perpetual hunger. So precarious was the existence of these multitudes in France that as late as the seventeenth century each 'average' increase in the price of wheat or millet directly killed a proportion of the French population equal to nearly twice the percentage of Americans who died in the Civil War"
Living conditions
"Roadside ditches, filled with stagnant water, served as public latrines in the cities of the fifteenth century, and they would continue to do so for centuries to follow. So too would other noxious habits and public health hazards of the time persist on into the future-from the practice of leaving the decomposing offal of butchered animals to fester in the streets, to London's 'special problem', as historian Lawrence Stone puts it, of 'poor's holes.' These were 'large, deep, open pits in which were laid the bodies of the poor, side by side, row upon row. Only when the pit was filled with bodies was it finally covered over with earth.' As one contemporary, quoted by Stone, delicately observed: 'How noisome the stench is that arises from these holes so stowed with dead bodies, especially in sultry seasons and after rain.'"
"Along with the stench and repulsive appearance of the openly displayed dead, human and animal alike, a modern visitor to a European city in this era would be repelled by the appearance and the vile aromas given off by the living as well. Most people never bathed, not once in an entire lifetime."
Crime
"Street crime in most cities lurked around every corner. One especially popular technique for robbing someone was to drop a heavy rock or chunk of masonry on his head from an upper-story window and then to rifle the body for jewelry and money. This was a time, observes Norbert Elias, when 'it was one of the festive pleasures of Midsummer Day to burn alive one or two dozen cats'."
