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CHAPTER 1

Approaching 1492 | Approaching Apocalypse

Did anti-African racism emerge from the Arab world and enslavement of Africans in the Islamic world? Is contemporary racism a function of this encounter with forces eastward, just as today the norm is to use Arab—not Roman—numerals? As far back as the eighth century, this racializing process was unfolding—or so it is said—though, as noted, enslavement in that part of the world did not only encompass Africans. One historian has contrasted the way in which “white mamluks” (European might be a more apt term to affix to this exploited humanity) were treated versus their darker brethren, though the substantial Christian ransom of the former might account for any difference.¹ And, in any case, comparing the legacy of racism centuries later in North America, including lynchings and immolations, with what unfolded in what is now Iraq centuries earlier, seems once again to be an extended effort to exonerate perpetrators in London, then Washington: that is, “the Arabs made them do it.” Perhaps English anti-Semitism (or even the German variant) should be laid at the doorstep of Pontius Pilate or post-Constantine Rome, again exculpating London elites. Or, is attenuation or even the chain of causation disrupted in this instance?²

Whatever the case, the fact remains that enslavement of Africans reached a high point under the aegis of London and its descendants, not least because it was turbo-charged with emerging notions of “race” (a term with hazy roots at best in the mire of 1,300 years ago) and the shift from religion as the axis of society, which characterized the post-1492 dispensation.³ For in examining fifteenth-century Valencia, on a peninsula deeply influenced by Muslims for hundreds of years, the scholar Debra Blumenthal argues—correctly, I think—that it is “misleading to label what we see here … as ‘racism’ or even ‘protoracism.’”⁴

Because the Iberian Peninsula played such an instrumental role in the story of conquest, it is a focus in these pages. Thus, from the eighth to eleventh centuries, neighboring France was a center of selling of Irish and Flemish slaves, while in the ninth century the Vikings sold tens of thousands of Europeans to the Arabs of Spain.⁵

Moreover, during the seventh and eighth centuries, predominantly Muslim regions commanded the mightiest gold reserves in the world, not least because of their tie to Africa where this precious metal proliferated. Buoyed by this wealth, these forces ruled in Iberia, the southern Mediterranean, and due east from there. The gravity of the situation was signaled when a subsequent analyst announced gravely that back then “an Iron Curtain now divided the Mediterranean”⁶—featuring Muslims not Communists—which provoked a kind of angst that rivaled the sentiments of recent history when this poisonously marbled phrase was first enunciated. This difficult moment for the Western Europeans tended to provoke the kind of imprecations toward Muslims, including inventing racism, that had been thought to be peculiar to twentieth-century Moscow.

Nonetheless, the conflict on the Iberian Peninsula between Arabs and those we now call Spaniards⁷ was a critical factor contributing to the post-1492 apocalypse, since the invaders were constructed as “black” when there was a long medieval tradition of associating blackness with devils and of seeing dark-skinned Muslims as quasidiabolical creatures. Eerily, in pre-1492 Christian-dominated areas on the Peninsula, there was often an attempt to bar sexual relations with “Saracens” or Muslims and other non-Christians (for example, those of the Jewish community), just as anti-miscegenation statutes were a fixture in the United States, at least until 1967.⁸ Moreover, at times during the ninth-century reign of Alfonso III on the Peninsula, the descriptors “Moor” and “Negro” were used interchangeably,⁹ which did not bode well for what was to become the beleaguered continent, namely Africa.

The plundered riches of Africa notwithstanding, the Iberian Peninsula too was a target-rich environment. Sparsely defended churches and monasteries were repositories for gold, silver, and bejeweled items of all types, all poised for plucking. The bounty could also include crops, livestock, and people that could be transported eastward and southward to North Africa. Slaves were a valuable commodity and foreign women seemed to be particular prizes.¹⁰

Likewise, slavery was not unknown on the Peninsula pre-1492. In Andalusia, for example, slaves were in great demand and there was an abundant supply as a result, with many taken in raids on the Christian North or “pagans” seized in eastern Europe and imported by merchants described as being Frankish and Jewish, notably those among the latter described as “Radhanites.”¹¹ Jewish merchants were accused of providing the ships that carried Muslim troops to the European shore and, subsequently, Muslim chroniclers alleged that this same group collaborated in the conquest and rule of the Peninsula, volunteering to serve in the garrisons of towns. Basque women were sold as slaves to Medina, and Berbers were recruited to cross the Mediterranean to protect the regime, which in turn drew Europeans into African events more closely. The ubiquity of the enslaved and their influence within the regime was pervasive. The royal court employed them by the thousands, as did the estates of the Umayyad royalty. Some slaves acquired great influence, unlike those who were to languish in North America, while, à la the Ottomans, some became eunuchs. This Almoravid imperium established an empire on the Peninsula and northern Africa in the eleventh century, which then extended its tentacles deeper into Africa, where the flow of gold (and slaves) from the Niger delta served as a precursor of the post-1492 debacle.¹² Southern Spain was propelled economically as an entry point for trade with an Africa that had yet to be devastated.¹³

SNIFFING WEALTH, ENGLISHMEN were flocking to Iberia too,¹⁴ which brought them into closer contact with Africa and the fortunes to be made there. As early as the eighth century and continuing thereafter, Muslims, pre-1492 rulers of a good deal of Iberia, commanded the mightiest gold reserves within thousands of miles, with Africa often being the source, which then provided strength in the Mediterranean, the Peninsula, and what has been called the “Near East.”¹⁵ As more African gold began to pour into Europe via the Peninsula, increased trade resulted continentally to the point that by the early 1100s the Bay of Biscay was termed the “Sea of English,” and English pirates were detained in Galicia.¹⁶

It was in 1290 that the Jewish community was ostensibly expelled from England, though some never left. It was ironic that Oliver Cromwell’s mid-seventeenth-century embrace of this community helped London surpass the Spanish Empire in many respects. Interestingly, England was then besieged by savage anti-Jewish pogroms, leading to property seizures and expropriation of those perceived as akin to them, for example, Cahorsins, who were involved with banking; with roots in southwest France they too were associated with alleged usury,¹⁷ with some refugees alighting on the European mainland, perhaps making their way to a more welcoming Muslimdominated Iberia.

Coincidentally, the first recorded commercial treaty between Portugal and England was signed in 1294, binding London to the Peninsula and allowing England not only to capitalize upon Lisbon’s subsequent perambulations but also to counter Madrid’s thrust into Ireland by backing the Portuguese against the Spaniards. Of course, Portugal and Spain often backed different sides during the frequent conflicts between England and France, a crucial shaper of the balance of power continentally, with lethal implications for Africa and the Americas. For as this thirteenth-century trend began to assert itself, several of the West African coastal peoples had quite advanced civilizations, though their trade connections were with the interior, not the ocean, that evolved subsequently. East Africa long had been linked to a wider world, via the maritime superhighway known as the Indian Ocean.¹⁸

ENGLISH PIRATES WERE PERCEIVED regionally as a menace as early as the 1300s in the German Hanse.¹⁹ Their depredations were to prove essential to the rise of London, as the otherwise dismal archipelago leveraged its sea-bound locale. The same could be said about trade with the Iberians, which was waxing as early as the fourteenth century, and which may have brought London in touch with North Africans.²⁰

In a continuation of a lengthy trend, Lisbon’s tensions with Castile deepened an ongoing alliance between Portugal and England. By 1380, London had dispatched an army of 3,000 lancers and archers to their ally, allowing them to confront more effectively their Iberian foe. As peace emerged, Portugal then accrued the “advantage” of having experienced fighters with time on their hands, which led to the seizing of Ceuta on the African continent by 1415, a signpost en route to this continent’s subjugation. It was also in the early fifteenth century that Madeira was settled by Portuguese, whose sugar plantations were worked by enslaved Africans, providing a model for Brazil in the following century.²¹

AS THIS RAMPAGING WAS occurring, there was a gnawing fear in Europe that the fate of the Muslim-dominated Peninsula would soon be theirs, which by 1095 led the Crusades to seize Jerusalem, to make the Muslims play defense, in other words. There is also evidence to suggest that from 1095, Western Europeans had Turks in the crosshairs, suggesting the existential fear that arose in 1453 when Constantinople was taken.²² This was a Pan-European Christian crusade, which was galvanizing continentally and which imbricated a fungible religious intensity that could be transferred into the succeeding epoch of white supremacy and conquest. In any case, the conflict between Islam and the Iberians in Spain had long been placed in terms of a crusade. By the late eleventh century, the Pope encouraged French knights to aid Castilians and Aragonese against Muslims,²³ a project that also carried the seeds of Pan-Europeanism, “whiteness,” and the borderless essence of what became capitalism and imperialism.

The Crusades also fueled transport generally and the concomitant imperative to gain wealth and influence in the face of the “Islamic Threat,” so by 1291 the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa were seeking to reach India by sailing southward. The thought had dawned that the fabled lure of “Muslim Gold” could be reached by heading in a like direction.²⁴ In a sense, this was a rehearsal for 1492, because when the Crusades failed in Acre, it threatened Christian overland routes via Mespotamia to the east and the spices, silks, and riches to be accrued.²⁵

The eminent warrior Sultan Saladin had won Jerusalem (though losing the aforementioned Acre on the battlefield in a seesaw of victory and defeat). Saluted since that time at the end of the twelfth century, he has also been blamed for blunting the intellectual growth of Islamic societies and has not been viewed benignly by non-Sunnis. Even the praise of him in Western Europe may have been a function of Christians seeking an excuse for losing to a man and his troops characterized as being larger than life.²⁶

In a sense, these were journeys of desperation, since by 1300 it seemed to many that Christianity generally and Christian Europe specifically were in terminal decline and the future rested with a triumphantly ascendant Islam. This desperation served to compose a “convert or perish” ethos among sectors of European Christendom, in contrast to what was perceived as a more tolerant Islam.²⁷ The hysteria and revenge-seeking that was gripping European Christendom was manifested in 1250 when the Moors were expelled from Portugal.²⁸ The collective depression was so profound that some within Western European Christendom hailed the mindboggling sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the then rising Mongols on the premise that a new putative ally would aid in destroying Islam and arrest the rampant idea that God was on Islam’s side, given that it generally seemed to be prevailing, fomenting a widespread and destabilizing theological crisis.²⁹

The very compactness and contiguity of Western Europe, combined with the overlapping and often borderless warfare that eventuated, served to contribute to advancements in warfare and weaponry that ultimately leveled then destroyed cultures and polities in the Americas and Africa. By 1350 cannons were common in Europe.³⁰ According to one account, the first mention of a handgun in England occurred on 7 November 1388, with the earliest breech-loading handguns emerging, not coincidentally, during the century of conquest, in 1537.³¹ In Sheffield since the time of Chaucer from the middle to the end of the fourteenth century, sharp blades had been made, propelled by the ruthless Earl of Shrewsbury. He imported French craftsmen to upgrade forges, coincidentally accelerating Pan-Europeanism, a trend that proved crucial to conquest in the Americas. He was also a precursor of the robber barons, a phenomenon also essential to conquest.³²

The scholar Priya Satia asserts: “The first European firearms were late fourteenth-century ‘hand cannons,’ essentially tubes mounted on a pole. Shoulder arms, such as muskets, rifles and shotguns followed. Pistols could be fired with one hand,” unleashing unrivaled firepower in aid of conquest. Birmingham had been a center of metalwork since the fourteenth century, and by the pivotal sixteenth century its workers had supplied bridle bits and horseshoes for the army of Henry VIII and nails for Hampton Court and Nonsuch Palace in Surrey. Gunmakers, straining to keep up with demand, were also proliferating. Eventually, the gun trade was critical to Birmingham’s—and Britain’s—rise, and the entire existence of this ugly commerce depended on the African market, as the beset continent absorbed otherwise worthless unserviceable arms in return for immense value, thereby facilitating war, dislocation, prisoners, and slavery to fuel the gargantuan wealth of plantation slavery.³³

These malignant trends were hardly unique to England. By 1470 in France there was an effective matchlock musket: the harquebus was developed, preceded a decade earlier by the hexagonal nation’s reputation for having high-quality guns. By 1494 France had developed the high-wheeled gun carriage with its long tail, complemented by plentiful supplies of saltpeter for gunpowder. Like other Western European powers, Paris, despite this firepower, had difficulty competing in the Mediterranean with the Ottomans and North Africans and, almost by necessity, had to utilize strength in the Atlantic, especially the Americas and Africa. By the late fifteenth century, France had what has been described as the “first modern army,” integrating cavalry, infantry, and artillery, which, combined with the gritty ability to absorb heavy casualties, guaranteed a premier role at the top table of enslavement and colonialism.³⁴

Advances in making weapons were also generated by conflicts between, for example, the English and Scots, with the latter often assisted by France,³⁵ a manifestation of the once mighty “Auld Alliance” that was to be somewhat blunted as Edinburgh was invited to feast alongside their erstwhile foes at the colonial and enslaving banquet. Edward I’s attempt to crush Scotland in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries led to two centuries of conflict that the lucrative diversion into the Americas and Africa served to divert.³⁶ Similarly, when Wales revolted against England in the fourteenth century, France was blamed, just as when King João I in Portugal defeated Castile in a protracted conflict from 1385 to 1433, English aid was essential.³⁷ When Wales revolted again in the early fifteenth century, again France was fingered as a collaborator, an easy conclusion to reach given the presence on Welsh soil of French troops, inducing London to get further involved in France’s internal affairs.³⁸ In one of the decisive elements of the sixteenth century, much collaboration emerged between Catholic Scots and Irish—not to mention English Catholics—with Spain and other so-called Catholic powers.³⁹ In the long run, this bellicosity honed the fighting machines of Western Europeans, contributing to their conquests in the Americas and Africa.

THE ASCENDANCY OF DEADLY martial tools also was useful in coercing religious minorities. Writing in 1750, a Londoner observed that “Jews are very numerous at Algiers,” and “the greatest number are those who have been banished out of Europe. As from Italy in 1342, from the Netherlands in 1350, from France in 1403, from England in 1422 [and earlier] and from Spain in 1462 [and later].”⁴⁰

More to the point, in the wake of the hysteria created by the Black Death and scapegoating of the Jewish minority pogroms, befell their precincts on the Peninsula in 1391,⁴¹ igniting their dispersal deeper into Africa. Thus, by 1350 in Iberia, mortality rates in certain areas reached an eye-popping 90 percent, which was bound to induce hysteria in the reigning atmosphere of obscurantism. Of course, such bigotry was nothing new in Europe.⁴²

Even as this fourteenth-century trend was unwinding, events in Europe were already emerging with dire implications for Africa and the Americas. More than a century and a half before Columbus headed westward, a Tartar army besieged his own Genoa, then the Black Death arrived and the defense observed happily as the marauders began dying. But then joy became horror as the attackers began catapulting their dead combatants over the city walls, intentionally creating an epidemic inside. The Genoese fled and the Tartars advanced, with the former spreading the disease in the sites where they arrived. This comprehension of the potency of infectious disease was to be unleashed in the Americas particularly.⁴³

Nonetheless, perhaps because it implicated Christians and Muslims too, the ferocity of anti-Semitism appeared to be especially intense in Aragon, with hundreds—perhaps thousands—slaughtered in a matter of months.⁴⁴ Ironically, just as anti-blackness tended to solidify an emerging “white” identity in the settler colonialism of North America in the seventeenth century,⁴⁵ and just as in the twentieth century in central and eastern Europe, the very vulnerability of the Jewish community reassured non-Jews that they were relatively safe, thus stabilizing society,⁴⁶ it is possible that anti-Semitism played a similar role in the fourteenth century, bracing and uniting Christians for the final push against the Muslims, which culminated in 1492 with their ouster.

In sum, 1391 was a crossroads. It led in part to the acceleration of the Inquisition, initiated formally decades earlier and assuming warp speed post-1492. Certainly, it allowed for the looting of more affluent Sephardim, which in turn allowed for war against Moors and Muslims and plundering of the Americas too.⁴⁷

THE ACCELERATION OF THE AFRICAN Slave Trade occurred as Western Europe was wracked with pressure from the Ottomans, disease, rancorous discrimination, and economic unease. Forced religious conversions followed these bloody riots,⁴⁸ creating “New Christians” who were to play an instrumental role post-1492.⁴⁹ In a way, the tremendous depopulation of the Black Death also drove the enslaving of Moors on the Peninsula and the compulsion for labor, especially in Valencia.⁵⁰

The historian Toby Green declares that this 1391 tumult sent these erstwhile Iberians fleeing to West Africa, where they became involved in various aspects of trade and commerce, which was to accelerate post-Columbus. Thus, he says, “In the fifteenth century when European ships first arrived on the West African coast to procure slaves, the economic difference between Africa and Europe was not vast; yet by the nineteenth century there was no denying the gulf,”⁵¹ as conquest and mass enslavement ensued.

It was also in the fourteenth century that cartographers in Majorca, described as Jewish, produced several useful maps of Africa containing information about the interior that proved to be a revelation to many. Their source for this information was apparently their co-religionists, chased there as a result of anti-Semitism. The presence of gold in Africa, which these informants helped to reveal, set pulses racing in Europe, a continent that continued to be dazzled by the wealth displayed earlier by Mansa Musa.⁵² Like others they had been attracted by the legend—and reality—of the fabled gold that was thought to rest in Africa.⁵³

For the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile (Spain in brief), as they were waging the Reconquista, had designs on the Maghreb since the thirteenth century, a process that was not deterred when agreements were inked allowing Christian merchants (Iberians and Italians) to settle in North Africa.⁵⁴ This was followed by the “Disputation of Tortosa,” yet another anti-Semitic marker that became linked with the emerging bludgeoning of Africa.⁵⁵

Thus, it was not only free labor but the presence of gold that helped to propel Africa on its downward slide, serving to exacerbate the “economic difference” between this continent and its continental neighbor due north. For as early as 1290, there was a mutually beneficial commercial treaty between Genoa and Ethiopia, and a Dominican monk who visited Alexandria in 1322 spoke of “warehouses … maintained” by merchants of Venice, Marseilles, and Genoa.⁵⁶

“The Africa of this period,” says French historian François Xavier Fauvelle, “was home to powerful and prosperous states” that were “integrated … into some of the great currents of global exchange…. The continent enjoyed a considerable reputation from Europe to China, a reputation exemplified by the celebrity that Musa, King of Mali … achieved in the Islamic world and Christian Europe.” Thus, in the mid-thirteenth century, King James, the Conqueror of Aragon, invited Solomon ben Ammar, a prominent member of the Jewish community of Sijilmasa at the northern edge of the Sahara, to come along with his co-religionists to settle Majorca and Catalonia; at that juncture, besieged as they were by Arabs, many Aragonese sought fervently to attract those with knowledge of these important African commercial networks, to the detriment of the Maghreb competition. Indeed, a good deal of the intelligence relating to Mali’s Musa was due to the Jewish communities established along these vital African routes that reached the western Mediterranean vicinity. As early as the fifteenth century, Portugal was snatching up to about 1,000 Africans from Arguin to be enslaved, with gold following soon thereafter, if not simultaneously. Eastward in Tuat in today’s Algeria, a gold trade erupted and, ironically, those that had fled anti-Jewish pogroms became critical to this commerce, given their refuge there and the existence of a diaspora network.⁵⁷

There was a perversity in the process that drove an ever-larger Jewish community, fleeing persecution into Africa, where they could then play a role in a similarly dastardly process that was emerging: the African Slave Trade. It was also in 1391 that murderous pogroms, of a kind that would become common in the Americas, erupted in Sevilla and Andalusia, eventuating in the devastation of members of the Jewish community, along with forced conversions. It happened again in Toledo in 1449, followed in 1478 by a Castilian Inquisition. The sequence of dates suggests the momentum of onrushing events: by 2 January 1492 Granada had been captured by the Christians, ending 800 years of the still potent shards of Islamic hegemony. By 31 March an edict was rendered to expel the Jewish community and some may have been alongside Columbus on 2 August.⁵⁸

Yet, as Africa went into decline, so did other regions disrupted by this radical change in the status quo. Quite logically declining was also Venice—then a major power—that has been adjudged to possess an “armed … navy since the early fourteenth century, the first state to do so,”⁵⁹ in order to enforce its diktat in the event of disputes, commercial or otherwise. Yet when Vasco da Gama “discovered” a new route to the east in 1498 via Africa, Venice was headed toward eclipse, yet another milestone in the rise of London in its stead.⁶⁰

ANOTHER REVEALING SIGN EMERGED in 1437 with Portugal’s successful attack on Tangiers, employing arms developed by craftsmen from Flanders and points north and east, yet another Pan-European project that carried the germ of an arriving “whiteness.”⁶¹ At least by the 1440s Lisbon was involved in enslaving Africans with the utterly cynical rationalization of converting them to Christianity as justification. (Of course, it was a capital offense for a Moor or one who was Jewish to own Christian slaves.) Simultaneously, Pope Eugenius IV provided his blessings to this enterprise.⁶²

Enslaving Africans in what is now Sierra Leone had begun as early as the 1440s, with interpreters aboard slave ships who often were “New Christians,” that is, those from the Jewish community who had “converted” and often had dispersed precisely to Africa.⁶³ Historians subsequently have seen the 1440s as a turning point in the rise of the Atlantic slave trade,⁶⁴ priming the pump for the post-1492 surge. Thus, in the century following the 1440s, Lisbon alone had an African population of 10,000 out of 100,000 with a similar percentage throughout Iberian cities. By the 1550s, enslaved Africans were a reputed 10 percent of Spain’s population.⁶⁵

In sum, even before the post-1492 devastation, the Iberians were enmeshed deeply in the horror of enslavement. As Portugal moved more intently into Africa in the 1400s, more gold poured into Europe, along with African pepper for Antwerp, a city that was to evolve as a prime partner of England.⁶⁶

Though Prince Ferdinand was taken prisoner earlier in North Africa—quite disastrous for Lisbon—the important city that was Tangiers was taken by 1471, yet another stepping-stone to a brutalizing penetration of Africa. The Portuguese also harmed the competition when they eliminated a pirate base on the present site of Casablanca and forced the chieftains of Safi and Azemmour to pay tribute.⁶⁷ Also, by the 1470s Portuguese adventurers had arrived in the region that came to be known as Calabar, to the detriment of the Ibibio and the Ijaw.⁶⁸

The fragmentation of Christianity, following the rise of Martin Luther in 1517, was matched in an opposing devolutionary direction by the political fragmentation of the Maghreb, induced in no small measure by the Iberians. This latter trend accelerated post-1415, and Morocco, quite noticeably, was disrupted by the influx of those fleeing anti-Semitism, not to mention Muslim refugees escaping Iberia. The response in the receiving region of the Maghreb was the fomenting of religious fundamentalism, which was arguably not conducive to socioeconomic progress, as Western Europe began to take off post-1492. By 1444, Portugal was bringing enslaved Africans to Europe. From the early 1440s to 1521 an estimated 156,000 Africans arrived in Spain, Portugal, and the Atlantic islands, mostly from today’s Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Senegal, the Gambia, and parts of Mali and Burkina Faso.⁶⁹ (In 2019 the German Historical Museum in Berlin agreed to return to Namibia the Stone Cross of Cape Cross, an 11-foot-tall, 1.1-ton cross placed on the coast of southwestern Africa by Portuguese explorers, years before Columbus’s journey westward.)⁷⁰

By 1446, Senegal and Cape Verde had been reached by Portugal and by 1474 Benin and Biafra, along with Fernando Po and São Tomé. Fernando Po was larger, but São Tomé was favored since it was farther from the African shoreline, at times in an uproar about the presence of uninvited visitors. Again, ironically, colonization often was driven by those fleeing inquisitorial Lisbon, though generally, as in Upper Guinea, the invaders included Castilians, French, and Genoese, as a synthetic “whiteness” began to take shape, given the exigencies of colonizing, along with various exiles, convicts, and adventurers who provided the rough-and-tumble necessary for oppression.⁷¹

Portugal, whose contemporary population is a mere 9 million, exemplified this Pan-Europeanism or what morphed into “whiteness” in that as early as the 1460s Lisbon granted concessions to Flemish captains in the Azores, which had been seized in 1431,⁷² and by 1475 Flemish ships were trading on the Gold Coast.⁷³

EVENTUALLY, A NINETEENTH-century scholar concluded that a “Frenchman, a Briton, a Dane and a Saxon make an Englishman,” as full-blown “whiteness” had emerged. What had occurred beginning in the sixteenth century is that Protestants flocked—often fled—to London from various European sites, bringing their ingenuity and capital, enhancing England, then Britain, and germinating “whiteness.”⁷⁴ There was another essential element involved in this Pan-Europeanism. It is also worthy of reiteration that as the Portuguese reached what is now Sierra Leone by 1446 and began enslaving Africans, aboard ship were translators of African languages. These were “New Christians” or forced converts to Christianity, who had been chased southward.⁷⁵ In other words, the religious persecution endemic in late feudalism prepared the stage for the racism that was so crucial to the rise of capitalism, and settler colonialism in particular.

By 1471 the Portuguese had reached as far as the River Volta in Africa and by the 1480s were trafficking in the enslaved in Benin.⁷⁶ Even as Portugal and Queen Isabel were crossing swords, boldly she announced that she and her subjects “always enjoyed the right of the conquest of parts of the Africa and Guinea,” as if she were asserting that feasting on the continent to the south served to curb often fatal conflicts in Europe. And even before her reign, Andalusians frequently sailed to the African coast and snatched and enslaved the unlucky, adding them to an already burgeoning slave population in Sevilla.⁷⁷ By 1475 in eastern Iberia, the authorities were devising provisos concerning Africans.⁷⁸

Yet, despite the pillaging of this portion of Africa, by 1428 Yeshaq I, emperor of today’s Ethiopia—across the sprawling continent—was proposing to the royal court of Aragon an alliance via marriage targeting Islam, and by 1487, Lisbon was proposing something similar to Addis Ababa,⁷⁹ suggesting that it would be an error to assume without nuance a transhistorical version of the subsequent anti-blackness in full force in the late eighteenth century.

THE DELIRIUM INSTIGATED BY 1453 and the ascendancy of the Ottoman Turks was reflected in the continuing resonance of the legend of Prester John of East Africa,⁸⁰ who would supposedly aid Christians in defeating Islam. Thus, in December 1456 Pope Calistus III contacted the “King of Ethiopia” requesting an envoy in a desperate ploy to defeat the Ottomans, a repetitive plea. Apparently, the idea still reigned that Africans could be helpful in making Christian domination of Jerusalem permanent, a replay of the Crusades in other words.⁸¹ After all, Christianity had been weakened by the internal revolt embodied by John Huss and the “Hussites,” a century before the rise of Martin Luther, making the search for allies (even African allies) imperative with Islam looming menacingly.⁸²

The mid-fifteenth century also featured certain influential Christians castigating Egypt as “our enemy,” linking Cairo with the Ottomans, with both allegedly “aiming at the downfall of Christianity,” underscoring the importance of Ethiopia as the guardian of the Nile, Egypt’s lifeblood.⁸³ The Ottomans were such a fearsome foe that it is possible to frame the Crusades, not least in the latter phases, as targeting a formidable “Race” that had yet to supplant Religion as an axis of society.⁸⁴ It is fair to say that simple notions of “White Over Black” had yet to take hold,⁸⁵ and would only take hold not just with the rise of colonialism but, more specifically, the rise of settler colonialism, when the oppressor and oppressed resided side-by-side and a mechanism was needed to demonize enslaved Africans and indigenes alike.

THE HYSTERIA ABOUT ISLAM WAS occurring as a chaotic free-for-all of enslavement gathered speed. As the fifteenth century approached, Valencia’s captives included Moors, Tatars, Circassians, Russians, Greeks, Canary Islanders—and Africans from the north and farther south. It is also true that as this century rushed to a bruising conclusion, almost 40 percent of the enslaved were African,⁸⁶ though given what was to occur in North America this percentage seems paltry. The diversity of the enslaved in pre-1492 Spain was extraordinary, ensnaring Circassians, Bosnians, Poles, Russians, and Muslims of various ethnicities.⁸⁷ As of 1492 in Spain, there was a startlingly eclectic array of the enslaved, including Moorish, “Turkish” (actually Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese); “white” Christians, including Sardinians, Greeks, Russians; Canary Islanders (Guanches); Jews; and those described as “Black Africans.”⁸⁸

Converting captives to slaves was standard operating procedure for the invading Mongols, steadily moving westward, especially in the midst of the earthshaking uprisings in 1262 of northeastern Russian towns. Eastern Europe generally, from the Caucasus to Poland-Lithuania, was, according to scholar Christopher Witzenrath, second only in numbers to sub-Saharan Africa as a source of the enslaved. Between 1475 and 1694 this beleaguered territory provided an estimated 1.25 million slaves. Crimean Tartars captured about 1.75 million Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians from 1469 to 1694. Post-1453 and the seizing of Constantinople not only meant hampering access to the riches of Persia, India, and China, it also blocked Venice’s eastward slave trade, helping to topple this once would-be superpower into enervating desuetude. As in points westward, the Black Death was impactful too, as it complicated the evolution of the slave trade.⁸⁹

That is, post-1453 there was a drop in the number of Slavic and other European slaves in the Mediterranean, and, concomitantly, an increasing number of Africans, which was to grow spectacularly in coming centuries as a direct result.⁹⁰

The immediate island neighbors of the Iberians, including the Canary Islands, were the immediate victims of these Europeans’ rapacity. Revealingly, joining the looting were Genoese, Flemish, and French merchants, yet another Pan-European project pointing to the artificial identity of “whiteness.” Genoese, well established in Andalusia in any case, participated actively in the trade in slaves, an ugly trait that was to characterize the most notorious of their many compatriots: Columbus. Blocked in their Mediterranean trade by Ottomans and Muslims and Italian rivals, they flocked westward in order to take advantage of the ascendant post-1492 new order. Sugar and slaves were the death-dealing duo that was to wreak so much havoc in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America as well, and the Canary Islands provided a kind of mortal blueprint.⁹¹

Post-1453, the Ottomans were the best bet to become the world’s preeminent power. By 1487, they were aiding the Moors in Andalusia, and the success of this venture would have undermined the other competitors. In coming decades, the Turks were to take Syria and Palestine in 1516 and establish bases in Ethiopia and Algeria by 1517. They captured Belgrade in 1521; Buda in 1526; besieged Vienna in 1529; Baghdad, Basra, Aden, and Southern Yemen by the 1530s. Indeed, as Spain expanded into the Americas, this allowed the Ottomans to expand. Madrid was moving westward precisely because the competition to the east and south was so stiff.⁹²

A cause and result of this state of affairs was the reality that the Ottoman field army was probably superior to any other in the world, and it also possessed a superior logistical organization. It was likely that the ban on alcohol was yet another advantage they held over their often inebriated opponents with their clouded thinking. They certainly were experienced, for during the long sixteenth century, from 1453 to 1606, they were continuously at war.⁹³ Moreover, the Ottomans had raw materials for both gunpowder and guns, unlike many of their rivals.⁹⁴

Similarly, just before Columbus’s voyage, dozens if not hundreds of English merchants were operating in Andalusia, a major depot of the enslaved. The Treaty of Medina del Campo concluded between Catholic monarchs and in 1489 their London counterpart granted Englishmen the right to trade in Spanish dominions, the Canary Islands included, the latter then being decimated by the rising era of slavery and the slave trade that was tugging at the outskirts of Africa.⁹⁵ A few years before this date, two Englishmen were equipping an expedition with the aim of becoming involved in trade to West Africa; the London monarch requested permission to do so from the Vatican but was ignored, a possible prelude to the Protestant breakaway under Henry VIII.⁹⁶ In these halcyon days—in contrast to what the next century was to deliver—this Anglo-Spanish treaty envisioned a merger of the royal families of the two powers.⁹⁷

Facilitating these new developments was the ascendancy of new technologies. By the early 1400s, the Portuguese—a maritime nation, facing the Atlantic—had made advances in shipbuilding, including the caravel, making it easier to reach Africa. Spain had made advances in artillery and cannon during the same time. As this was occurring, a merger of the interests of the Crown and merchants was taking place, an evident precondition for the emergence of capitalism, that is, capital backed by the state. This also meant that West Africa was lured away from trade in the interior and north and instead toward where the Iberians were arriving along the shoreline, just as the Iberians were lured away from North Africa (where Ottoman and Islamic strength did not seem to be declining) toward the easier pickings of the Americas.⁹⁸

Nevertheless, Portugal’s increasing mastery of the dual potency of the caravel and the cannon, not to mention artillery, did not allow for superiority of the Ottomans, though it did allow for superiority in Africa.⁹⁹ Portuguese navigators mastered Greek and Arab maritime science, connecting the outskirts of Europe to the Atlantic world and in the process shaping Europe’s global vision. Portugal pioneered the oceanic sailing ship, building large vessels for Asian trade and, not coincidentally, made advances in naval warfare as well.¹⁰⁰ Meanwhile, at this juncture, though similarly facing the sea, England lagged behind Iberian mariners and many of their works on navigation were translations from Spanish and Portuguese. ¹⁰¹

Europeans were seeking the source of the famed gold of Guinea, from which the English coin of the same name was minted, and when by 1482 Lisbon erected its largest castle in Africa, São Jorge de Mina, it was not just slaves but gold that was contemplated.¹⁰² Indeed, the gold trade in Africa proved more valuable to Lisbon than the slave trade until about 1650, revealingly, when this latter odious commerce took off under London’s aegis.¹⁰³

This imposing edifice—this castle—complemented what was seen as their first outpost, south of the Sahara: El Mina in 1469. A Portuguese explorer had arrived farther south in the Kongo (Congo) by 1483.¹⁰⁴ The resultant conversion of the African elite there to Catholicism did not save the Congolese from mass enslavement but most likely facilitated it as this vast land became one of the first victims of the new epoch featuring “race” replacing religion as a marker.¹⁰⁵

In some ways, the smaller Portugal, despite its grand pretensions, was to serve as an advance guard for England. London allied with Lisbon early on as a counterweight to a rising Madrid. As was the pattern, this was reflected in marital patterns as the fabled “Henry the Navigator” of Portugal had an English mother (this too undergirded the coming “whiteness” project). Feeding into this project as well was Lisbon’s heavy reliance on “New Christians” in Africa, which was eroding religion as an axis of society and propelling the rising identity that was “race.”¹⁰⁶

Despite this early reliance on Lisbon, London, according to scholar Andrew Lambert, “carefully obscured Portuguese input,” though even such pioneers as Walter Raleigh worked closely with Iberian seafarers. The Dutch too exploited Portuguese expertise, then in turn were plucked by Englishmen. On the other hand, the advent of movable type printing gave the English access to the intellectual and cultural riches of sea-power precursors.¹⁰⁷

Thus, in the prelude to 1492, enslavement was an established fact in Europe and Europeans had been enslaving Africans—and others—for decades. With 1492, this heinous process was extended to the Americas and deepened in Africa. However, the Spanish, the first movers, and taking religious seriously, made the fateful decision (admittedly under pressure) to develop a Free Negro population in the Americas, not even taking the precaution of depriving them of arms. Like an adroit chess grandmaster, London countered eventually by seeking to tighten the enslavement noose around the necks of Africans, while incorporating other Europeans into the favored category of “whiteness,” or Pan-Europeanism—up to and including, admittedly with bumpiness, the persecuted Jewish minority—which proved to be the winning ticket in the valuable sweepstakes of settler colonialism.