The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Gerald Horne
In other words, the religious persecution endemic in late feudalism prepared the stage for the racism that was so crucial to the rise of capitalism, and settler colonialism in particular.
By 1471 the Portuguese had reached as far as the River Volta in Africa and by the 1480s were trafficking in the enslaved in Benin.76 Even as Portugal and Queen Isabel were crossing swords, boldly she announced that she and her subjects “always enjoyed the right of the conquest of parts of the Africa and Guinea,” as if she were asserting that feasting on the continent to the south served to curb often fatal conflicts in Europe. And even before her reign, Andalusians frequently sailed to the African coast and snatched and enslaved the unlucky, adding them to an already burgeoning slave population in Sevilla.77 By 1475 in eastern Iberia, the authorities were devising provisos concerning Africans.78
Yet, despite the pillaging of this portion of Africa, by 1428 Yeshaq I, emperor of today’s Ethiopia—across the sprawling continent—was proposing to the royal court of Aragon an alliance via marriage targeting Islam, and by 1487, Lisbon was proposing something similar to Addis Ababa,79 suggesting that it would be an error to assume without nuance a transhistorical version of the subsequent anti-blackness in full force in the late eighteenth century.
THE DELIRIUM INSTIGATED BY 1453 and the ascendancy of the Ottoman Turks was reflected in the continuing resonance of the legend of Prester John of East Africa,80 who would supposedly aid Christians in defeating Islam. Thus, in December 1456 Pope Calistus III contacted the “King of Ethiopia” requesting an envoy in a desperate ploy to defeat the Ottomans, a repetitive plea. Apparently, the idea still reigned that Africans could be helpful in making Christian domination of Jerusalem permanent, a replay of the Crusades in other words.81 After all, Christianity had been weakened by the internal revolt embodied by John Huss and the “Hussites,” a century before the rise of Martin Luther, making the search for allies (even African allies) imperative with Islam looming menacingly.82
The mid-fifteenth century also featured certain influential Christians castigating Egypt as “our enemy,” linking Cairo with the Ottomans, with both allegedly “aiming at the downfall of Christianity,” underscoring the importance of Ethiopia as the guardian of the Nile, Egypt’s lifeblood.83 The Ottomans were such a fearsome foe that it is possible to frame the Crusades, not least in the latter phases, as targeting a formidable “Race” that had yet to supplant Religion as an axis of society.84 It is fair to say that simple notions of “White Over Black” had yet to take hold,85 and would only take hold not just with the rise of colonialism but, more specifically, the rise of settler colonialism, when the oppressor and oppressed resided side-by-side and a mechanism was needed to demonize enslaved Africans and indigenes alike.
THE HYSTERIA ABOUT ISLAM WAS occurring as a chaotic free-for-all of enslavement gathered speed. As the fifteenth century approached, Valencia’s captives included Moors, Tatars, Circassians, Russians, Greeks, Canary Islanders—and Africans from the north and farther south. It is also true that as this century rushed to a bruising conclusion, almost 40 percent of the enslaved were African,86 though given what was to occur in North America this percentage seems paltry. The diversity of the enslaved in pre-1492 Spain was extraordinary, ensnaring Circassians, Bosnians, Poles, Russians, and Muslims of various ethnicities.87 As of 1492 in Spain, there was a startlingly eclectic array of the enslaved, including Moorish, “Turkish” (actually Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese); “white” Christians, including Sardinians, Greeks, Russians; Canary Islanders (Guanches); Jews; and those described as “Black Africans.”88
Converting captives to slaves was standard operating procedure for the invading Mongols, steadily moving westward, especially in the midst of the earthshaking uprisings in 1262 of northeastern Russian towns. Eastern Europe generally, from the Caucasus to Poland-Lithuania, was, according to scholar Christopher Witzenrath, second only in numbers to sub-Saharan Africa as a source of the enslaved. Between 1475 and 1694 this beleaguered territory provided an estimated 1.25 million slaves. Crimean Tartars captured about 1.75 million Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians from 1469 to 1694. Post-1453 and the seizing of Constantinople not only meant hampering access to the riches of Persia, India, and China, it also blocked Venice’s eastward slave trade, helping to topple this once would-be superpower into enervating desuetude. As in points westward, the Black Death was impactful too, as it complicated the evolution of the slave trade.89
That is, post-1453 there was a drop in the number of Slavic and other European slaves in the Mediterranean, and, concomitantly, an increasing number of Africans, which was to grow spectacularly in coming centuries as a direct result.90
The immediate island neighbors of the Iberians, including the Canary Islands, were the immediate victims of these Europeans’ rapacity. Revealingly, joining the looting were Genoese, Flemish, and French merchants, yet another Pan-European project pointing to the artificial identity of “whiteness.” Genoese, well established in Andalusia in any case, participated actively in the trade in slaves, an ugly trait that was to characterize the most notorious of their many compatriots: Columbus. Blocked in their Mediterranean trade by Ottomans and Muslims and Italian rivals, they flocked westward in order to take advantage of the ascendant post-1492 new order. Sugar and slaves were the death-dealing duo that was to wreak so much havoc in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America as well, and the Canary Islands provided a kind of mortal blueprint.91
Post-1453, 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