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CHAPTER 2

Apocalypse Nearer

Upon arriving in the Americas in October 1492, Columbus compared the palm trees he saw to those of “Guinea,” West Africa, a land where he had sojourned earlier. “I have travelled to Guinea,” he confessed, though his experience there put him on guard, as he set out to enslave Tainos, Arawaks, and the indigenes of the Americas. “When men have been brought from Guinea to Portugal to learn the language,” he said a few weeks after landing in the “New World,” Lisbon was traduced when “they returned and the Portuguese thought that they could make use of them in their own country, because of the good treatment and the gifts they gave them,” but “when they got to land they … [dis]appeared.”¹ Early on Columbus rounded up about 1,200 indigenous prisoners-of-war and selected five hundred for sale in Spain. This was not an extraordinary event in that it was the Crown that had enslaved the entire population of Malaga in 1487 and sold enslaved Muslims throughout the Mediterranean. Still, the Americas’ main crop seemed to be the enslaved.²

Columbus’s crew had been trained and disciplined in earlier voyages to Guinea, which hardly predisposed them to humanitarianism in the Caribbean. That is, there had been Castilian voyages to Guinea as early as 1453, but as these would-be conquistadors encountered stiff opposition there, they were impelled to sail westward, bulked up on the wealth of the Americas, and then returned post-1492 with a vengeance, as the zeal of the crusader was replaced, if not supplemented, by the zeal (and greed) of the merchant.³

Columbus, the Genoan, had a Portuguese spouse, a precursor of the Pan-Europeanism that was to take flight subsequently. Although the countries were neighbors, Portugal and Castile/Aragon often were at odds; as early as the thirteenth century they were jousting over the bounty that was the Canary Islands. Papal bulls backed one side, then the other, until the Treaty of Alcacovas in 1479 seemed to disfavor Lisbon.⁴ It was also in 1479 that Aragon and Castile united, and the resultant monarchy also controlled parts of what became Italy, all of which meant being well positioned for the final push against Islamic rule on the Peninsula. As these opponents were subdued, those remaining were ordered to convert, inflaming sentiment in North Africa, which London was to leverage against the Peninsula in due time. Muslims of Portugal were also being quietly expelled.⁵

Simultaneously, there was an attempt by Lisbon to delimit the ability of Madrid to help London sail southward to Africa, indicating that as early as this pivotal moment, England was being eyed, though on the fringes of the continent and continental power.⁶ This was understandable since the Italian navigator John Cabot, under London’s aegis, in the late fifteenth century found himself off the coast of North America.⁷ Revealingly, as Cabot was preparing to sail from Bristol, rebellions were rocking Cornwall and did not cease simply because the seaman crossed the Atlantic and made landfall close to what is now called Cape Breton, near Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Soon Breton and Norman fishermen would be found in the same waters.⁸ Similarly, as the end of the fifteenth century approached, a trade that was growing in West Africa was often an offshoot of Anglo-Iberian commerce.⁹

As a Genoan and cosmopolitan, Columbus probably knew that those from his hometown, as well as Pisa—along with those of Provence and Catalonia—fetched leather, wool, and gold from the ports of North Africa. Trade in gold was also part of the mix, with the metal coming from deeper in Africa’s interior, Sudan, and the valley of the Senegal River, all providing a hint of the immense wealth—and talent—to be seized on this continent.¹⁰ As for talent, it is probable that there was an African pilot alongside Columbus during his 1492 voyage.¹¹

Columbus, in any case, was well suited for this 1492 venture.¹² Slavery was common in Genoa and Venice from about 1000 to 1350, and by the fifteenth century the enslaved were about 5 percent of Genoa’s population. Post-1453, slaves became more expensive in Genoa, given the disruptive capture of Constantinople, though sub-Saharan slaves were quite rare in Genoa during this pivotal century. Unsurprisingly, early on and writing from Hispaniola, Columbus pointed out that this island could export thousands of slaves annually, which would boost the market in Europe, as it drove down prices.¹³

So schooled, the Caribbean interlopers perceived that harsher methods would be needed to entrap these latest victims of exploitation. When Columbus’s band of outlaws routed Tainos in what has been billed as the “first major contest between Europeans and Native Americans,” their prevailing was vouchsafed with the use of what has been called “hand cannon.” Though advancement in the art and science of killing served to guarantee European conquest, Mayans in Yucatan shortly thereafter repulsed the enslavers in the face of cannon fire. Just in case, as early as 1501 an arms embargo was imposed upon indigenes that, despite leakiness in coming centuries, was generally effective.¹⁴

(Tellingly, there was an etymological similarity between pistol and the coin referred to as “pistole,” a Spanish gold piece, at the beginning of the sixteenth century.¹⁵ Appropriately so, given how “pistols” were deployed to extract wealth.)

Soon, Columbus’s brigands had rounded up 1,200 captives and selected 500 for sale in Spain. Although gold was a lure, as it was in West Africa, it was evident that for the conquistadors, slaves would soon become the main bounty of the region.¹⁶ “I took by force in the first island that I discovered some of these natives,” he boasted, adding crudely, “They have been very serviceable to us.” Perhaps averring to foul play in West Africa, he mentioned, “Nor are they black, as in Guinea.”¹⁷

It did not take long for the newly arrived exploiters to say of the Caribbean islands that “there is much gold in this land, but few slaves to get it out,” since a considerable number “hanged themselves because of the harsh treatment received in the mines from Christians.” Indigenes were also fleeing in all directions, attacking the invaders too,¹⁸ necessitating a shift to a newer labor force if the entire colonial project were to survive. For Iberians and other continental neighbors were discovering that escape by European slaves was made easier by the fact that slaves carried no special sign, wore no distinctive clothing, and besides were aided in rescue by fellow Christians,¹⁹ all of which contributed to the escalation of enslavement by epidermis, the hallmark of what befell Africans in the Americas. Early on in the Spanish colonies, the enslaved were purchased in the Balearic Islands—or Majorca (Mallorca)—and Sardinia, many of whom were either Moorish or Muslim converts or even those of partial Jewish ancestry. Over time, however. there was a shift to others, especially as the “Negro trade” became a large and regular source of income.²⁰ For from about 700 to 1500, enslaved sub-Saharan Africans that flowed from south to north and west to east, ranged from 1,000 to 6,000 annually, rather small in comparison to the millions that were to be captured.²¹

Predictably, other potential victims of enslavement chose the path of homicide, not suicide. One of the early heroes of resistance was Hatuey, a Taino with roots in Hispaniola who fled to Cuba and waged war against the usurpers, but in early 1512 he was tied to a stake and burned alive. Earlier, indigenous comrades in Puerto Rico rebelled, perhaps seeking to forestall what had befallen their compatriots in St. Croix where Ponce de León captured indigenes with malign purposes in mind. For by the early 1520s in the vicinity, there was a thriving slave trade in indigenes.²² As early as 1513, Ponce de León traveled from Puerto Rico to Florida, planning to enslave indigenes, this after the Bahamas had been virtually depopulated as a result of the same impulse.²³

Actually, the purported seeker of the “Fountain of Youth” had fought Moors in Granada before accompanying Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. He was as a result well positioned to fight Caribs, who were fighting invaders furiously to the point that there was a possibility that Puerto Rico would be abandoned. By 1514, King Ferdinand ordered three vessels, well armed and staffed, to sail from Sevilla to the Caribbean with the aim of reversing this seemingly dire fate. Ponce de León was put in charge. Yet by 1515, on what is now Guadeloupe, Caribs continued to rampage, leaving the would-be conquerors depressed, humbled, mortified.²⁴

Ponce de León, supposedly in search of a youthful elixir, found its antipode in 1521 when he sought to form a colony in what is now Florida, and was attacked by combative indigenes and wounded mortally. The continuing attempt to create slaves to create wealth by compelling them to toil ignominiously in mines and on sugar plantations and cattle ranches was encountering a fierce reaction, engendering fiercer still violence and then a shift to enslaved African labor. As early as 1514, this cruel search for free labor had brought conquistadors to what is now South Carolina, where some were snared and deposited in Iberia.²⁵ Yet, in the long run, both Spaniards and the indigenous weakened each other in repetitive rounds of battling, allowing both to be ousted eventually by London, then Washington.

Also wandering into today’s Carolinas was a Florentine seafarer in the pay of France. Giovanni da Verrazano, in what was becoming the parasitic norm for those who wished to weaken Spain, attacked the latter’s commerce in 1523 as he and his crew crossed the Atlantic in futile search of a route to Cathay. The next year he reached the vicinity of today’s Carolinas, then sailed northward for hundreds of miles. He spoke of seeing individuals whose “complexion … is black, not much different from that of the Ethiopians; their hair is black and thick,” who could have been escaped and once enslaved Africans or, alternatively,²⁶ Africans who had crossed the Atlantic without European escorts, riding escalator-like currents.

SURELY AS EARLY AS 1503, enslaved Africans were arriving in the Caribbean, and as the Spaniards busily exterminated indigenes, they felt compelled to increase the number by 1511, as indigenous resistance mounted, with an assumption afloat that African labor was worth more effectively than that of the indigenous.²⁷

As early as 1514, however, the rapid increase in the number of enslaved Africans in Santo Domingo already had become a source of nervousness besetting the colonizers.²⁸ In 1521, Spaniards were heading northward from their base in Santo Domingo to seize and enslave indigenes on the North American mainland, before being massacred in response by the would-be captives, a bloody process repeated in 1524,²⁹ establishing a trend that was to continue in the early history of the resultant United States until 1865. It was precisely in the early 1520s that the Spaniards, with enslaved Africans in tow, built what amounted to the first settlement of colonizers in what is now the United States. Quite appropriately, given the subsequent history that unfolded on this territory, these Africans were also implicated in the uprising that destroyed this settlement, then fled into the embrace of indigenes.³⁰ It was there that they bonded with the Guale in one of many unions of Africans and indigenes, a process that was to characterize northern Florida as a whole.³¹

It was understandable why the conquistadors would stray from the Caribbean northward since in December 1521 a major revolt of the enslaved rocked Hispaniola, reportedly executed by Jolof (or Wolof), who came from a powerful state that ruled parts of Senegal from 1350 to 1549; and by 1532 the shaken Europeans passed a law seeking to bar this ethnicity from the Americas.³² It was in 1521 that, quite appropriately, a sugar mill owned by Columbus’s greedy son was rocked by revolt. This was viewed worriedly as an attempt by the enslaved Africans and their indigenous comrades to seize control of the island, an eventuation that emerged finally by 1804. Arguably, this tumult motivated the move to the North American mainland, today’s South Carolina, a few years later.³³

In Hispaniola the Wolof were blamed when in 1522 about twenty Spaniards were killed in the midst of five days of furious fighting.³⁴ Still, the continuing resistance of indigenes and Africans repelled Madrid, creating an opening for London in the following century, which was then bequeathed to Washington. In a sense, the unrest in the Caribbean compelled Madrid to seek other sites of exploitation, dispersing their forces and perhaps weakening them overall. At the other end of the continent, in what is now Massachusetts, Miguel Corte-Real’s ill-fated 1502 expedition arrived.³⁵ Less than two decades later, Europeans had reached Texas, inaugurating centuries of enhanced conflict.³⁶

Stymied by the strength of the Ottomans in raiding the usual sites for slaves in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, the Western European invaders turned to West Africa. Indeed, it was in 1463 that an analyst warned, “The Turk, not content with what he has, is making eager preparation to subjugate the entire world, starting with Italy,” which could easily be interpreted as a threat to the Vatican itself.³⁷ The Catholic Church provided “indulgences” to those so bold as to fight the Ottomans, while Turks figured as an object of terror to many a European state to the west.³⁸

As the sixteenth century unwound, Spain, England, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark, among others, all constructed sites in Africa where they traded for slaves and a range of goods.³⁹ Driven by the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, gunpowder weapons were honed and then deployed promiscuously for conquest, which then stimulated the development of the modern state.⁴⁰ While the invention of the cannon came earlier, in the thirteenth century, the so-called Military Revolution, a critically important factor in propelling colonialism, also arrived in the sixteenth century at a time of population increase and even what was thought to be overpopulation, which technological advances in the ability to kill brutally addressed.⁴¹

Yet, even as Spain began its vertiginous rise post-1492, there already were troubling openings that competitors, especially London, could well exploit. For 1492 also meant the final expulsion of Muslim rule from the Peninsula and their subsequent expulsion altogether and, as well, the acceleration of the Inquisition that proved to be catastrophic for the Jewish community. As early as 1501, those preparing to set sail for Hispaniola were instructed that “no Jews, Moors, reconciled heretics or recent converts from Mohammadanism [sic] … allowed.” This proved to be self-defeating, not least since it served to create an embittered class bent on revenge. Moreover, Spain deprived itself of the diaspora networks of the Jewish community that it had helped to create by periodic expulsions, in 1391, for example, paving the way for exploitation of Africa. “New Christians” or “Crypto-Jews” often comprised the very group most apt to control the capital needed to develop colonial trade.⁴²

The foregoing notwithstanding, it is possible that Inquisitorial targets may have had an incentive to flee the Peninsula for the Americas, where the colonizers were desperately in need of forces to confront often rambunctious indigenes, creating “whiteness” by subterfuge in other words. Thus, despite the official ban on their presence, there were reports of Moors and Jews in the Caribbean as early as 1508; their exile to Africa has been noted already.⁴³ Purportedly, there were at least six Jews accompanying Columbus in 1492, and they may have found less overt anti-Semitism upon arrival,⁴⁴ not necessarily because colonialism was more enlightened than the metropole but because colonizers and settlers needed all the help they could get, including the disfavored back home. Supposedly, “New Christians”—or those who may have been Jewish originally—invested in Columbus’s initial voyage.⁴⁵ On the other hand, Madrid may have placed itself at a disadvantage in the eventual competition with London by pursuing inquisitorial policies.

Given the Lisbon-London tie, England may have been the beneficiary when Portugal post-1492 allowed certain Jews to arrive—forking over a hefty fee, of course—with about 100,000 accepting this deal. However, some wound up against their will in São Tomé, where the attempt to establish slavery off the west coast of Africa, as we shall see, was thwarted by repetitive rebellions, with the crowning glory spearheaded by the heroic Amador.⁴⁶ Nonetheless, this African dumping ground had the advantage for these forced exiles in that it was more conducive to being integrated into a cohesive Portuguese identity with their Christian counterparts than in the Peninsula itself. These “Christian” trespassers were more concerned about being overrun by malcontented Africans, ⁴⁷ and had less fear of what befell their peers in Lisbon in 1506—bloodthirsty massacres of “New Christians.”⁴⁸

It would have been understandable if this beset community decided that the anti-Semitism of London was tolerable compared to what they had endured to this point. Assuredly, it is now well known that “New Christians” of Portugal and their Sephardic relatives dispersed to Holland, England, France, and the Baltic region, playing a salient role in the colonization process that commenced in the early sixteenth century. In fact, the sugar they helped to capitalize propelled their fortunes and the new order generally.⁴⁹

London was then lagging in comparison to its European peers; still, English vessels may have reached what became Newfoundland as early as the 1480s and areas to the south soon after but found that to claim the territory, boots on the ground were needed, which opened the door for expulsion of dissidents and the attracting of adventurers, all for the aim of settlement. And this in turn led to a newer identity: “whiteness.” Though the area south of what became Florida was the major site, not far from Newfoundland in what became Maine, a Portuguese freebooter—less than a decade after Columbus’s initial arrival in the hemisphere—abducted about four-dozen indigenes for trafficking purposes.⁵⁰ Soon, Breton and Norman fishermen were found off the coast of Newfoundland, as the scavenger hunt was on.⁵¹ By 1521, the peripatetic Portuguese had landed at what is now Cape Breton, Canada, but as so often happened, were chased away.⁵²

Enslavement had always been an exceedingly ugly process but seemed to reach new depths of decimation when combined with the untold wealth introduced by plundering the Americas. By January 1499, Vasco da Gama was sailing past Mogadishu on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa; it “belonged to the Moors,” meaning Muslims. And as casually as flicking dandruff from his shoulder, he observed, “As we passed before it” and “nearly upon it we fired off many bombards.” Africa was being targeted in part because it represented the path of least resistance for plunderers, as evidenced by a lucrative slave trade then emerging in Congo and the “bombards” aimed at Mozambique, south of Mogadishu.⁵³ The fact that “degradados”—the degraded, the lumpen—were often exiled to Africa, including to da Gama’s vessel, facilitated the utilizing of degraded methods of subjugation.⁵⁴ And these degraded elements with their degraded methods were essential as Cape Verde, off the coast of western Africa, became a depot for the slave trade by the early 1500s.⁵⁵ By 1524, exploitative Portuguese had established a foothold in Mombasa, north of Mozambique, which was to become one of the strongest and most important fortresses along the East African coast, complementing the influence they had initiated in the fortified town of Qasr al-Saghir, Morocco, as early as 1458.⁵⁶

Thus, as the Iberians were bombarding eastern and southern Africa, by 1505 corsairs from Mers-el-Kebir in North Africa were launching a series of devastating raids against the Iberian coast, leading to years of internecine conflict. There were thousands of casualties, leading to the inference that as the Iberians were losing population at home, this fed the felt need to compensate by seizing bonded labor abroad. Iberians were not solely victims either, because from about 1492 and thereafter Christian knights and inhabitants of Granada frequently banded together to launch an annual raid against the Barbary Coast.⁵⁷

This Mediterranean conflict was nothing new. During the summer of 1397, North African pirates attacked the Valencian port of Torralba, burning it down and seizing the inhabitants as slaves. Arguably, the “threat” from Islam had helped to unite Castile and Aragon and, possibly, a good deal of Europe itself in a Pan-European enterprise, a predicate to “whiteness” and the transition from religion to “race,” a condition precedent for mass enslavement of Africans and dispossession of indigenes in the “New World.” In response, by 1492 Swiss and Germans joined in the final push in Granada to oust the Muslims. Not to be left behind, King Edward IV of England opportunistically dispatched a top admiral to Lisbon, then Cordoba, where the monarch garlanded this seafarer with gifts.⁵⁸

Decades earlier, in 1437, the Portuguese were subjected to a punishing defeat in Algiers, leading to a virtual cessation of the supply of captives fueling Europe, a trend hastened with 1453. This also led to Castilians and Portuguese bumping up against each other in the Canary Islands, as they hunted for Guanches to enslave, although there were hardly enough to satisfy their seemingly unquenchable hunger for slaves, a hunger that was to be somewhat sated in coming decades when West Africa was targeted. In the half century preceding 1492, one estimate concludes that Portugal seized 80,000 captives from sub-Saharan Africa while ports from Sevilla to Valencia witnessed an increase in the number of enslaved sent from Lisbon, especially after 1480.⁵⁹

The number of enslaved Africans brought to Iberia and the Caribbean beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing thereafter was astounding by any measure. On the Peninsula itself, including Portugal, there were perhaps 100,000 enslaved of various origins by 1600. Sugar plantations in Valencia and the Canary Islands and salt mines under Madrid’s jurisdiction relied on enslaved labor. At the same time, according to scholar Antonio Feros, Spaniards “feared Africans” yet “tended to see Africans as more useful and superior to Indians,” an awkward combination that guaranteed combustibility.⁶⁰ This reliance contributed to the aforementioned role of Africans in St. Augustine, Florida, a city that was to bedevil English settlements to the north for some time to come, before the successor state in Washington finally moved to swallow this citadel and impose their rigid racialism in return in the nineteenth century.⁶¹

Hence, in nearly all the territories invaded by Spain—sadly enough—Africans and those defined as “mulatto,” often enslaved but with a modicum of the “free” also, accompanied the first arrivals and played a military role that was not insignificant. Some hailed from Angola or thereabouts,⁶² a nation whose martial traditions continued to flourish in the twentieth century.⁶³

Spain continued to expand its jurisdiction, reaching to the River Plate, or Rio de la Plata, in today’s Argentina and Uruguay, by 1516,⁶⁴ with Africans crossing the South Atlantic in greater numbers thereafter. Sebastian Cabot arrived in what is now Paraguay as a result of his 1526–29 journey, but his attempted settlement was squashed by those they had invaded.⁶⁵

Indicative of the estimated strength of prevailing winds is that this younger Cabot was sailing on behalf of Spain from 1533 to 1547, departing in the latter year for England, indicative of the borderlessness that was to fall intentionally on the rest of the planet. His alleged betrayal was said to surprise Madrid, especially when he became “Chief Pilot” of London. The ever-entrepreneurial Cabot also had sought Venice to fund his voyage to Cathay, as he claimed not without justification that it was he, and not the elder Cabot, who was the great navigator and explorer. This younger Genoan also visited Jiddah. He was in London when Columbus’s voyages were “much discussed.”⁶⁶

Madrid should not have been surprised by the footloose Cabot, since by the early sixteenth century, King Ferdinand accorded to English and other foreigners who had been residing in Andalusia for the space of fifteen or twenty years and possessed real estate and a family the right to exploit the new overseas trade opportunities opened up in the “New World.” Nicholas Arnold can claim to be the first English merchant-settler and factor to have been authorized to do business in the Caribbean.⁶⁷

THE ASCENT OF MARTIN LUTHER in 1517 was of monumental significance for the evolution of the apocalyptic events then emerging in the Americas and Africa. On the surface it seemed that Christian unity in the face of the Ottoman challenge had been torn asunder, allowing the Turks to play off one religious faction against the other, and it did seem initially that predominantly Catholic France and soon-to-be Protestant England were more than willing to consort with the Turks against perennial foes. It appeared as well that religious wars would erupt between Protestants and Catholics, a suspicion reinforced when in 1521 the Edict of Worms called for complete suppression of Luther’s teachings.⁶⁸ In the short term, Luther’s initiative may have fueled the flames of anti-Semitism, spurring more migration across the Atlantic in order to escape an increasingly bigoted Europe. Contemporary writers, for example, have cited Luther as an inspiration for the diabolical anti-Jewish schemes of Nazi Germany.⁶⁹

Though the acidulous anti-Semitism of Protestantism was to dissipate over time, the dehumanizing nature of this bigotry may help to explain why the Reformation became so closely associated with enslavement. It was Luther who demanded the destruction of synagogues, books, schools, and homes of the Jewish community and insisted upon barring rabbis from preaching and that their congregants’ property should be seized. He recommended that this minority have no legal rights and argued for their deployment as forced labor or banished altogether; of course there was no sin involved in liquidating them altogether, he said. Over time, this astonishing bias began to shrivel, but it was then directed against Africans, as Protestants made a peace of sorts with the Jewish community in the face of a stubborn Catholic challenge.⁷⁰ Still, this ersatz peace, as later centuries were to reveal, was hardly sincere and heartfelt.

The unperceptive observer in the 1530s could have easily concluded that because London was enmeshed in internecine crisis as Spaniards began to approach the vast and golden territory they called California,⁷¹ leaving mayhem in their midst and weakening the indigenes as they had to confront a surging republic by 1848, that all this meant England was forever doomed.

Yet, for an ambitious Henry VIII in London, breaking with the Catholic Church made sense, the need for divorce and remarriage aside. The portly monarch reportedly had a gambling addiction—and seceding from Rome was no minor matter in lining his pockets for further mercantile adventure. Besides, he needed financing to bolster the apparatus of the state, not to mention funds to confront an ever-expanding array of internal and external foes. The Catholic Church in his jurisdiction was too lush a target to ignore.⁷² Assuredly, he did not hesitate to employ murderous tactics against foes. Those unwilling to accept his diktat were executed. In 1535, several prominent Carthusians, a Catholic religious order, were dragged (Negro-style) across London from the Tower to Tyburn, now Marble Arch, where they were half-hanged, disemboweled, quartered, and beheaded. In nationalist London, the hegemonic line was to reject the “Bishop of Rome” but, as well, to despise the words of the “heretic” Martin Luther.⁷³

The One True Faith had sided with the Iberians in divvying up the planet, which facilitated the Vatican’s role as a major landowner and enterpriser, not least in London’s backyard. Already this had led to much conflict between the monarch and his ostensible Church. The Vatican was slow to realize that the very nature of the Crusades, mandating sacrifice and trading indulgences, leading to wealthy clerics and rampant corruption, was made-to-order for schismatic reform. As matters evolved, the resultant conflict between Catholics and Protestants compelled the latter—as scrappy underdog—to jettison Luther’s initial virulent anti-Jewish fervor in favor of an entente with a beleaguered Jewish community. Likewise Protestant England was to seek entente with Moors and Turks to outflank Catholic Spain and this too helped to propel London into the ionosphere of nations.⁷⁴ In retrospect, it is apparent that these profound maneuvers were driven more by life-or-death calculation, pragmatic maneuvering as philosophy driving strategy.

The Protestant Reformation was not simply a top-down coup. The seeds of Puritanism were planted perhaps as early as the fourteenth century with the rise of the Lollards and John Wycliffe and the notion that the Church should aid folk to live a life of evangelical poverty and emulate Jesus Christ. Their example shaped John Huss (or Jan Hus) who in turn influenced Martin Luther. By 1526, William Tyndale was inspiring growing numbers of the English in a way that would give impetus to Henry VIII.⁷⁵

The English monarch’s break with the Vatican also served to buy him favor with the Turks. For, as the Ottomans sought to advance to Persia, more munitions were needed and crafty Englishmen would deliver to them the scrap metal resulting from the upheavals of the Reformation—for example, dismantling of monasteries and other Church property. Lead from the roofs of ecclesiastical buildings, old bells and broken metal statuary, all sailed eastward on flotillas bringing Turkish gratitude.⁷⁶ During the 1530s virtually all the monasteries in the kingdom were liquidated and their expansive property empire was transferred to others, especially Cambridge colleges (yes, Massachusetts can also be referenced). Colleges plundered countless buildings made empty for stone and tiles, or even lead. Suddenly, monks and friars and their distinctive dress disappeared, as in a fantasy.⁷⁷ In a sweepingly draconian manner, made all the more remarkable in light of today’s blather about “totalitarianism,” Catholic literature was repressed systematically.⁷⁸ Likewise, dissident and radical Protestants too were suppressed; in a notorious example, a Wiltshire farmer was burned at the stake for reading Tyndale’s Bible.⁷⁹

As could have been envisioned, Ottoman Turks were an early beneficiary of the split in Christendom. For even the seemingly all-powerful Turks had to proceed cautiously given their proximity to Russia and its feisty neighbors. By 1501, Crimean Tatars had seized 50,000 Lithuanians, doomed to an uncertain fate as captives, and as this was occurring, Russia itself was steamrolling eastward into Siberia and into some Cossack areas as well, with both trends opening the door to mutually advantageous business with London.⁸⁰

The Ottomans could not be reassured by trends due west in Spain: in Valencia, Muslims were being forced to convert at swords’ point. Madrid had been unsettled by a revolt in 1501 in the Aplujarras, blamed on Muslims, that was crushed bloodily. By 1526, all Muslims were being ordered to convert or depart, a prelude to their total expulsion by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The ostensible reason was yet another Muslim revolt, where these believers were accused of assaulting and killings of Christians and despoiling their places of worship. Soon thereafter, Ottoman comrades in Algiers dispatched a clandestine flotilla to evacuate tens of thousands of newly minted refugees, which served to reinforce—if not create—yet another base to target Spain. The coerced Muslims were being accused of conspiring with the Ottomans against the Habsburgs. Muslims in Spain were boxed in, with even concessions to them boomeranging. “Much like has happened with African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement,” says scholar Brian Catlos, “the theoretical removal of Muslims’ subordinate status provoked a hostile reaction among those non-noble Christians who saw Moriscos [Muslims] as economic competitors and who no longer enjoyed an advantage over them as a consequence of Christian religious and legal superiority.”⁸¹

A central and non-trivial difference is that by the late sixteenth century, Algiers barely contained a purported enslaved Christian population of 25,000 of what were termed “valuable possessions,”⁸² some of whom were English and many of whom could easily be described as “white.” As slavery evolved and as London and republicanism rose, African and enslaved became coterminous.

However, indicative of the constellation of forces then, Paris saw the ascendancy of the Habsburgs as a central threat, and as early as 1500 sought a treaty with the Ottomans to that effect, which led the latter to attack Vienna a few decades later.⁸³ London also served as supplicant when engaging the Ottomans. The Ottoman conquest of Syria, Palestine, the Hijaz, and Egypt in 1516–17, ultimately may have been as weighty historically as Martin Luther’s demarche as the preeminent Islamic Empire rose; these new conquests compelled the Turks to improve their navy, leading to conflict with the Habsburgs, along with increased influence in Algiers and Tunis, which was to bedevil Western Europeans sailing southward to the riches of Africa.⁸⁴ By 1519, after at least seven years of warfare on the Barbary Coast, Khayr al-Din Barbarossa and his comrades in the western Mediterranean sought aid from the Ottomans and against the Spaniards. The bolstered Ottomans proceeded to augment their holdings in the Balkans and as far west in what is now Romania.⁸⁵

A problem for the Ottomans in their contest with the Spaniards was the latter’s geographic reach,⁸⁶ arriving in what became Micronesia and the Philippines in the first few decades of the sixteenth century, providing Madrid with seemingly limitless sources of free labor and stolen resources. The explorer known to some simply as Magellan was aided by the indigenes of the Pacific, who gave him and his crew food and water, which was countered by burning homes, destroying water vessels, and killing men. Ferdinand Magellan himself died at the hands of indigenes in what is now the Philippines in 1521,⁸⁷ but not before establishing a toehold that was to bring Madrid untold wealth.

Tunis was the site of a ferocious conflict between the two giants, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, by 1534. This ostensible religious war between the two had erupted in earnest as early as 1521 and climaxed fifty years later with the Turks back on their heels, though far from being defeated wholly; yet this setback did open the door for yet another showdown between Catholics and their growingly potent rivals, English Protestants,⁸⁸ who were to benefit by the incessant focus on Islam.

Coincidentally, pirates of various sorts began to sprout, not just in Tunis but also in Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli, all of which to a greater or lesser extent was fed by the Ottomans, along with complementary trends in Western Europe. Pirates pillaged the coasts of Spain and due east continually, weakening Madrid as London began to rise. Mercenaries, the comrades of the pirates, began to grow, and London employed disaffected Spaniards and “Germans” too in this parasitic role, which could be seen as another stage in the evolution of what was becoming “whiteness.”⁸⁹

Part of what was occurring was what appeared to be not just a degrading of Catholicism but religion itself. “People learned to devalue sacred properties and objects,” says Dan O’Sullivan, facilitating the shipping of so much materiel to Ottoman Turkey. “The livery men whose cushions were made of altar cloths,” he says, and the “woman whose crystal perfume bottle once held the finger bone of a saint, the carpenter who made his living making and dismantling sacred objects, the yeoman whose doorstep had been an altar, and all the families whose fortunes were improved by the dissolutions had lost their fear of the sacred,” which did not bode well for religion generally, not just Catholicism, a trend that spurred the rise of a kind of neo-religion: capitalism. Catholicism at the pinnacle, in any case, was seen as a repository of wealth, rather than religious comfort, which helped to create a void then filled by settler colonialism driven by the emerging “race” construction and the devaluing and revaluing of Africans, and attendant commerce.

Catholicism could both absorb and administer blows. It was not just the Lutherans, it was also the Calvinist Protestants, who often disdained monarchs—and monks—who were thought worthy of liquidation. Certain Catholics were starting to believe that unless Calvinists were liquidated, there could be no peace, especially in France. This was at odds with the opposing idea that real security meant the utter devastation of the Vatican.⁹⁰

THE OTTOMANS AND THEIR FOES were also jousting in East Africa, involved in what has been described as a “proxy war” with Lisbon as early as the 1520s, as the Portuguese crept up the Indian Ocean coast from Mozambique. Here the Ottomans were aided immeasurably—including in Goa—by understandably embittered members of the exiled Jewish community, still angry about their persecution. By 1538, there was a massive Ottoman expedition to India, possibly the largest flotilla in that region since Zheng He’s Chinese-sponsored journey about a century earlier. Thus unwound what has been described as “history’s first world war,” between the Portuguese and the Ottomans with the Horn of Africa as a major site of contention.⁹¹

During the wars against the Ottoman Turks in the 1520s, their Spanish and what could be described as Italian antagonists lost far more than they gained, an indicator that the strongest horse was to the east.⁹² The wider point being that it was not easy for Spain and the Habsburgs to sense the rise of England when the Ottomans were so formidable.

In any case, Spanish colonizers were encountering a hailstorm of unrest in the Caribbean and the Americas. For it was also in 1538—and previously in 1533—that revolts of the enslaved shook Cuba with indigenous from there and the Yucatan as well fighting alongside the bonded laborers of varying ancestries.⁹³ A few decades earlier, a voyage from Cuba to the Yucatan was punctuated upon arrival by a punishing encounter with indigenes. Hernán Cortes thought he was sly when he induced one group of indigenes to work against another in the Yucatan. He felt compelled to tell the emperor that “the Indians had attacked the garrison on all sides, and set fire to it in many places…. Our people were in extreme distress and begged me to come to their aid with the greatest possible haste.” This bruising reality did not prevent the would-be conquistador from alleging that the “people are rational and well disposed and altogether greatly superior to the most civilized African nations,” a high compliment indeed.⁹⁴

They moved on at the instigation of these “civilized” indigenes, scurrying to their vessels bearing heavy losses. Then it was on to Florida, and a captain who had visited there earlier with Ponce de León cautioned his comrades to be vigilant in light of the inhospitality of indigenes, who rather promptly and, like their peers in Yucatan, caused a scurried flight back to vessels. Yet they did return with gold, serving to justify the loss of life, spurring a journey to what is now Mexico.⁹⁵

Understandably, France, which bordered Spain, looked on nervously as Madrid swelled with the loot plundered from the Americas and Africa and the Asia-Pacific, but preexisting tensions with London meant confronting a two-headed antagonist, an untenable position that should have become clear by 1525 and the defeat at Pavia and the capture of the French king by the Habsburgs.⁹⁶ London was not displeased by this French misfortune and contributed to it by earlier declaring war on Paris, a decision punctuated in May 1522 when Charles V of the Habsburgs arrived in England for an extended six-week visit.⁹⁷

France was not without weapons in confronting the antagonist across the Channel, allying with Scotland, placing enormous pressure on London, and forcing the kingdom to seek to gain more strength, particularly by colonial conquest, in order to stymie this alliance.⁹⁸ Another by-product of this alliance was a growing French presence in Scotland, placing considerable pressure on London to reverse this threat to sovereignty.⁹⁹ This “auld alliance” at least reached 1295 when the two parties inked a pact targeting their mutual target in London.¹⁰⁰ There was also Catholic collaboration that included not just Scotland and France but Ireland too.

Likewise, there were a growing number of Irish in Spain, including soldiers, seafarers, and, looming above all, co-religionists. Many were noblemen forced to flee their estates, though departing with political wherewithal capable of being wielded against London. Ireland had been conquered by England effectively as early as the twelfth century, but the rise of Protestantism inflamed what appeared to be a burning religious conflict.¹⁰¹ The ties between Ireland and Spain were as longstanding as the winds from the southwest and concomitant trade. A lingering query is this: Did London’s subjugation of Ireland act as a precursor for the rise of sixteenth-century colonialism, or did London merely see Spain’s conquest of the Americas as a model to impose on Ireland (or both)?¹⁰²

The intensifying conflict between and among England, Scotland, and Ireland stimulated the growth of an arms industry,¹⁰³ which then proved to be quite useful in subjugating Africans and the Americas alike. Indeed, according to one analyst, “The colonists in America were the greatest weapon-using people of that epoch in the world.” But it was not just weapons—or technological determinism—that led to the massive defeats of indigenes; after all, by 1514 Mayans in the Yucatan repulsed the Spanish invaders in the face of cannon fire. However, what occurred was the would-be conquerors learning from their setbacks because some years later the matchlock arquebus, despite poor and often unreliable performance, supplanted the crossbow at the point of attack, not least because of its enhanced deadliness. By 1535 Spain had successfully standardized the martial matchlock arquebus and its ball to permit interchangeability, advantaging Madrid vis-à-vis its wide array of enemies.¹⁰⁴ By 1537, as the arms race proceeded, the earliest breech-loading handguns had arisen in the vicinity of England, complementing the first mention of a handgun there, many decades earlier.¹⁰⁵

These militarizing trends also proved essential in yet another development that marked the surge of London: the defenestration of Ireland, which at the beginning of the sixteenth century was essentially medieval and feudal but by century’s end was yet another appendage of the Crown in London,¹⁰⁶ albeit after devastation that drove many of Eire’s finest sons and daughters across the Atlantic. Then there were the direct descendants of the Scots who colonized the north of Ireland during the reign of Henry VIII and to the time of William II, who wound up settling again, this time in Virginia, where they wreaked much havoc, a praxis honed decades earlier. Ulster, a byword for murderous conflict in the twentieth century, was their haven before descending upon North America.¹⁰⁷ Conversely, the Reformation guaranteed that Catholic Spain and heavily Catholic Ireland would align against Protestant London, instigating immense conflict for years to come.¹⁰⁸

There were good reasons to flee London in the sixteenth century. Many infants died because of the insalubriousness of urban life; if an indigene from North America had visited a typical town across the Atlantic, he or she would have been stunned by the proliferation of pollutants and the dearth of personal hygiene. Actually, the search for perfumes in Asia to deodorize this nostril-wrinkling problem led directly to navigation feats and colonialism itself. Dysentery, smallpox, cholera, plague—and worse—were generally diseases unknown in the precincts invaded by the English and their allies in the Americas, along with the horrid unsanitariness that rampaged in crowded cities on the northeast bank of the Atlantic. This stinking stew of rankness along with an unbalanced diet would have been a step backward if experienced by indigenes of the Americas. Families were suffering from famine, especially when the price of basic foodstuffs rose. Flight from the countryside generated a tidal wave of vagabonds in the cities. High rates of mortality curbed the ability of parents to show “undue” affection to children, to avoid the psychological backlash of early death of infants. The stratified nature of land ownership and the yawning chasm between rich and poor would have alienated many an indigene from North America, though this was precisely the system that was imposed in the “New World,” albeit on a racist basis.¹⁰⁹

Given the ugly travails of Africans in the Americas, many of them, given the subsequent trajectory of white supremacy, would have been shocked by the underdevelopment of Western Europe. Certainly, given the prohibition of miscegenation that characterized the subsequent history of the United States, even today there are those who are taken aback by the existence of the “Black Prince of Florence,” Alessandro de’ Medici, who in 1532 with the backing of the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire became the Duke of Florence at the tender age of nineteen. Of course, by 1537 he was murdered by his cousin, but even this was par for the course in terms of the customary palace intrigue that characterized royal life throughout the continent. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about 1.5 percent of the population of what is now Italy were enslaved—which was not precisely coterminous with being African—although Sicily had a high percentage of enslaved Africans resident. The tawny “Black Prince” was the son of a dark-skinned mother and, consistent with the power dynamic of the era, at times dressed as a Turk, the meaning of which was unclear.¹¹⁰

What was clear then was the potency of the Turks, which at once kept Spain occupied and England in a state of pandering toward them. Ottomans battling Spaniards allowed Englishmen to prevail.