When Christopher Columbus left Spain, the place was considered "a land of violence, squalor, betrayal and intolerance". Spain at the time was so backward that “it was no different from the rest of Europe”. The only thing that kept these cities from becoming ghost towns was “immigration”. People would migrate into cities keeping them populated, but diseases would kill newcomers in a short period of time. The rich of the time had food. “The rich ate, and ate to excess, watched by a thousand hungry eyes as you ate gigantic meals. The rest of the population died of hunger." These days the price of food would change from one day to the next. The price of food affected the poor population so intensely that even if prices fluctuated even slightly, thousands of people died of hunger. Famine in the countryside would force people to flee to the city for help. This sudden increase of people in the city would cause large epidemics of disease due to the poor diet of the people who were there to begin with. The quality of life in the countryside was slightly better. There were not as many diseases as in the city, but the country people were constantly tormented by bad harvests. So even though there weren't that many diseases causing death, there was a vast food shortage causing thousands of people to die. Living conditions in the city were so desperate that crime was now around every corner. The most common surprise method would be to drop a rock or piece of masonry from a window and knock out the target. They would then ambush the target taking everything they had with them. Because the death toll was so high, large pits were dug in the city. When these wells we... middle of paper... the deaths of tens of thousands of people were caused by smallpox. Columbus returned from England on his second voyage to the islands which he found suffering from the disease known as smallpox. In some cases the Spanish used smallpox as a weapon. They would take an article of clothing from someone who was or had been ill with smallpox and give it to one of the natives. When that native brought him back to his village. It would infect the entire village, effectively using that one piece of clothing as a bioweapon. When we think of the Holocaust we usually think of what the Germans did to the Israelis. But in reality what Columbus did to the Indians was much more horrible. Columbus killed over eight million people, many more than Hitler did. This was caused by greed for gold and disregard for human life. Luckily today we live in a better world than that.