Spanish Protestants also found it highly expedient to relocate to the Americas as fast as possible since their discovery in Spain all too frequently resulted in a quick death. Although there's little history written about these people, it's worth noting that one of the last of Pizzarro's Conquistidores, a Senor Carvajal (Carvalho) actually rejected the ministrations of a Catholic priest just before his execution. As a direct consequence of this clear profession of his Protestant beliefs he was drawn, quartered and his parts tossed into the fields to be devoured by dogs and wild animals.
What a mensch!
It's worth noting, too, that Pizzarro worked initially for DeSoto, and he'd begun his search for a homeland in FLorida, also known as what is now the Midwest, in 1541 - this is the same year French and Breton Protestants sailed West to begin a similar search in the New World. Given the close relationship of both parties to the de la Garde and Carvajal multi-national families of Protestant adventurers, I think a fair case could be made for assigning the "steal" and "pillage" attitudes to the Protestants, with an assignment of the "settlement" attitudes to all parties.
Europe was, after all, a cesspool in that time and one of the major driving forces behind European conquest of the world was to get out of Europe.
The initial article was a comment on the "miraculous" victory of the Christians at Lepanto.
Harpseal used this to make two observations about Islam;
the Islamic war machine conquered most of what is now Islam militarily
One either converted to Islam or faced death
I commented that the same two observations applied equally to Christendom. Nothing either of you has said contradicts the first point...and the exceptions to the second point apply equally to Islam.
That said, I'm not really interested in the fine points of the treatment of the Indians - Catholics vs. Protestants, English vs. Spanish. To what extent la leyenda negra is true will be disputed long after we're gone. It is enough to observe that, human nature being what it is, there are plenty of non-Spanish mestizos in the North. I meet them all the time (or maybe they're lying about their Indian ancestry because it's chic to do so).