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
