hands, which led to the seizing of Ceuta on the African continent by 1415, a signpost en route to this continent’s subjugation. It was also in the early fifteenth century that Madeira was settled by Portuguese, whose sugar plantations were worked by enslaved Africans, providing a model for Brazil in the following century.21
AS THIS RAMPAGING WAS occurring, there was a gnawing fear in Europe that the fate of the Muslim-dominated Peninsula would soon be theirs, which by 1095 led the Crusades to seize Jerusalem, to make the Muslims play defense, in other words. There is also evidence to suggest that from 1095, Western Europeans had Turks in the crosshairs, suggesting the existential fear that arose in 1453 when Constantinople was taken.22 This was a Pan-European Christian crusade, which was galvanizing continentally and which imbricated a fungible religious intensity that could be transferred into the succeeding epoch of white supremacy and conquest. In any case, the conflict between Islam and the Iberians in Spain had long been placed in terms of a crusade. By the late eleventh century, the Pope encouraged French knights to aid Castilians and Aragonese against Muslims,23 a project that also carried the seeds of Pan-Europeanism, “whiteness,” and the borderless essence of what became capitalism and imperialism.
The Crusades also fueled transport generally and the concomitant imperative to gain wealth and influence in the face of the “Islamic Threat,” so by 1291 the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa were seeking to reach India by sailing southward. The thought had dawned that the fabled lure of “Muslim Gold” could be reached by heading in a like direction.24 In a sense, this was a rehearsal for 1492, because when the Crusades failed in Acre, it threatened Christian overland routes via Mespotamia to the east and the spices, silks, and riches to be accrued.25
The eminent warrior Sultan Saladin had won Jerusalem (though losing the aforementioned Acre on the battlefield in a seesaw of victory and defeat). Saluted since that time at the end of the twelfth century, he has also been blamed for blunting the intellectual growth of Islamic societies and has not been viewed benignly by non-Sunnis. Even the praise of him in Western Europe may have been a function of Christians seeking an excuse for losing to a man and his troops characterized as being larger than life.26
In a sense, these were journeys of desperation, since by 1300 it seemed to many that Christianity generally and Christian Europe specifically were in terminal decline and the future rested with a triumphantly ascendant Islam. This desperation served to compose a “convert or perish” ethos among sectors of European Christendom, in contrast to what was perceived as a more tolerant Islam.27 The hysteria and revenge-seeking that was gripping European Christendom was manifested in 1250 when the Moors were expelled from Portugal.28 The collective depression was so profound that some within Western European Christendom hailed the mindboggling sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the then rising Mongols on the premise that a new putative ally would aid in destroying Islam and arrest the rampant idea that God was on Islam’s side, given that it generally seemed to be prevailing, fomenting a widespread and destabilizing theological crisis.29
The very compactness and contiguity of Western Europe, combined with the overlapping and often borderless warfare that eventuated, served to contribute to advancements in warfare and weaponry that ultimately leveled then destroyed cultures and polities in the Americas and Africa. By 1350 cannons were common in Europe.30 According to one account, the first mention of a handgun in England occurred on 7 November 1388, with the earliest breech-loading handguns emerging, not coincidentally, during the century of conquest, in 1537.31 In Sheffield since the time of Chaucer from the middle to the end of the fourteenth century, sharp blades had been made, propelled by the ruthless Earl of Shrewsbury. He imported French craftsmen to upgrade forges, coincidentally accelerating Pan-Europeanism, a trend that proved crucial to conquest in the Americas. He was also a precursor of the robber barons, a phenomenon also essential to conquest.32
The scholar Priya Satia asserts: “The first European firearms were late fourteenth-century ‘hand cannons,’ essentially tubes mounted on a pole. Shoulder arms, such as muskets, rifles and shotguns followed. Pistols could be fired with one hand,” unleashing unrivaled firepower in aid of conquest. Birmingham had been a center of metalwork since the fourteenth century, and by the pivotal sixteenth century its workers had supplied bridle bits and horseshoes for the army of Henry VIII and nails for Hampton Court and Nonsuch Palace in Surrey. Gunmakers, straining to keep up with demand, were also proliferating. Eventually, the gun trade was critical to Birmingham’s—and Britain’s—rise, and the entire existence of this ugly commerce depended on the African market, as the beset continent absorbed otherwise worthless unserviceable arms in return for immense value, thereby facilitating war, dislocation, prisoners, and slavery to fuel the gargantuan wealth of plantation slavery.33
These malignant trends were hardly unique to England. By 1470 in France there was an effective matchlock musket: the harquebus was developed, preceded a decade earlier by the hexagonal nation’s reputation for having high-quality guns. By 1494 France had developed the high-wheeled gun carriage with its long tail, complemented by plentiful supplies of saltpeter for gunpowder. Like other Western European powers, Paris, despite this firepower, had difficulty competing in the Mediterranean with the Ottomans and North Africans and, almost by necessity, had to utilize strength in the Atlantic, especially the Americas and Africa. By the late fifteenth century, France had what has been described as the “first modern army,” integrating cavalry, infantry, and artillery, which, combined with the gritty ability to absorb heavy casualties, guaranteed a premier role at the top table of enslavement and colonialism.34
Advances in making weapons were also generated by conflicts between, for example, the English and Scots, with the latter often assisted by France,35 a manifestation of the once mighty “Auld Alliance” that was to be somewhat blunted as Edinburgh was invited to feast alongside their erstwhile foes at the colonial and enslaving banquet. Edward I’s attempt to crush Scotland in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries led to two centuries of conflict that the lucrative diversion into the Americas and Africa served to divert.36 Similarly, when Wales revolted against England in the fourteenth century, France was blamed, just as when King João I in Portugal defeated Castile in a protracted conflict from 1385 to 1433, English aid was essential.37 When Wales revolted again in the early fifteenth century, again France was fingered as a collaborator, an easy conclusion to reach given the presence on Welsh soil of French troops, inducing London to get further involved in France’s internal affairs.38 In one of the decisive elements of the sixteenth century, much collaboration emerged between Catholic Scots and Irish—not to mention English Catholics—with Spain and other so-called Catholic powers.39 In the long run, this bellicosity honed the fighting machines of Western Europeans, contributing to their conquests in the Americas and Africa.
THE ASCENDANCY OF DEADLY martial tools also was useful in coercing religious minorities. Writing in 1750, a Londoner observed that “Jews are very numerous at Algiers,” and “the greatest number are those who have been banished out of Europe. As from Italy in 1342, from the Netherlands in 1350, from France in 1403, from England in 1422 [and earlier] and from Spain in 1462 [and later].”40
More to the point, in the wake of the hysteria created by the Black Death and scapegoating of the Jewish minority pogroms, befell their precincts on the Peninsula in 1391,41 igniting their dispersal deeper into Africa. Thus, by 1350 in Iberia, mortality rates in certain areas reached an eye-popping 90 percent, which was bound to induce hysteria in the reigning atmosphere of obscurantism. Of course, such bigotry was nothing new in Europe.42
Even as this fourteenth-century trend was unwinding, events in Europe were already emerging with dire implications for Africa and the Americas. More than a century and a half before Columbus headed westward, a Tartar army besieged his own Genoa, then the Black Death arrived and the defense observed happily as the marauders began dying. But then joy became horror as the attackers began catapulting their dead combatants over the city walls, intentionally creating an epidemic inside. The Genoese
