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
