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,
