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.
