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.
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,
