The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Gerald Horne
to Africans and lessons for them too, in terms of aligning with one power against another. The Frenchman and his hearty crew of a mere 53 men had leveraged African disgruntlement when he freed the enslaved in attacking Margarita, Cabo de la Vela, La Burburata, Santa Maria, Cartagena, Santiago de Cuba, and Havana—and, for a while, captured all of these enriched sites.59
TO BE SURE, EVEN IF London were to surpass Madrid or Paris, it would not guarantee European supremacy, setting aside the ultimate goal of global dominance. For in the sixteenth century, in some ways the most fearsome of them all was the Ottoman Empire. The potency of the Ottomans was signaled when Christians, sensing the directions of the prevailing winds, began defecting to the Ottoman side.60 Yes, some of these “defections” were coerced, but many were not. In any event, the formidable Ottoman fleet was a microcosm of the Ottoman Empire. Commanders tended to be Turks, but the oarsmen were Greeks and Bulgarians, and the specialists emerged from the heart of Christian Europe: Genoese, Catalans, Sicilians, Provençals, Venetians.61
So bolstered, as Madrid was seeking to repress Africans, Constantinople captured Belgrade in 1521, conquered Rhodes in 1522, destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohacs in 1526, and besieged Vienna with a massive army of 400,000 in 1529. On the western Mediterranean front, the Turks seized Tripoli from the Knights of Malta in 1551, destroyed a Spanish armada at the island of Djerba in 1560, and besieged Malta in 1561.62 The Ottomans seemed to be soaring from strength to strength in the early sixteenth century, not only bombarding Serbia and Buda but more generally besieging eastern Europe too. Syria and Palestine were subjugated, along with Baghdad, Basra, Aden, and Cairo. Bases were established in Ethiopia and Algeria. In the prelude to 1492, the Ottomans were seeking to bolster their fellow Muslims in Andalusia. Ironically, as the Habsburgs, as well as Spain, expanded into the Americas, this made it easier for the Ottomans to expand into Europe and nearby regions. Ultimately, however, the wealth accumulated by Spaniards and other Western Europeans in the Americas allowed Madrid and their immediate neighbors to reverse what appeared to be insuperable advantages enjoyed by the Ottomans.63
Yet, as matters evolved, 1516–17 was a critical time, not only because of the ascendancy of Martin Luther64 and the expansion of the Ottomans into North Africa and beyond, but also because of the consolidation of Spain and the Habsburgs. The split among Christians appeared at first glance to provide an immense opportunity for the Ottomans, but instead, in the longer term it boosted Luther’s heirs.
Western Europe’s contestation with the Ottomans was a precondition of the rise of plundering of the Americas and Africa. The Iberians pirouetted deftly from the directive of Pope Nicholas V in 1452 sanctifying Lisbon’s praxis of selling into slavery all “heathens” and “’Foes of Christ’”—principally Moslems—to the broader application in the Americas.65 This fifteenth-century edict was an extension of the Crusades.66 That is, a Pan-European Christian campaign against Islam extended to a campaign against non-European/non-Christians (especially in the Americas and Africa); arguably, this Pan-European initiative was a prelude to the rise of the similarly devastating “whiteness” project. Thus, in fifteenth-century Valencia, Spain, captors sought to misrepresent what amounted to Senegalese and Gambians (West Africans) as Moors (North Africans)—religious-cum-political antagonists—so as to enslave them consistent with theological mores.67
As suggested earlier, with the taking of Constantinople in 1453, Christian Europe endured an existential crisis, a calamity that was seen as almost unprecedented in history. Unshackled ire was not caged when Ottomans began gifting Hungarian slaves to their North African allies.68 Defeated Christians were forced into slavery, contributing to a growing sense of “Europe” against “Asia,” a confrontation that was fungible and easily transferable to “America” and “Africa.” The explosive charge was made that the 1453 setback meant “virgins prostituted, boys made to submit as women,” garnished with the repeated use of the term “inhuman race” affixed to victorious Turks. By 1530 the eminent Dutch Christian philosopher Erasmus continued to charge that even God would sanction war against the Turks, this “race of barbarians,” a fury then being transferred to Africans and “Americans” too.69 “We are far inferior to the Turks unless Christian Kings should unite their forces,” said Pope Pius II in 1462,70 a putative precondition for the racial vehemence—white supremacy, in other words—that was to be unleashed in the sixteenth century in the Atlantic corridor.
This was an era of an enslaving free-for-all in any case, one that ensnared others besides Africans; the Turks and those in their vicinity were preeminent in this regard but part of the diabolical “genius” of settler colonialism, notably as it matured in North America, was that those who had once been victimized by enslavers instead were invited to become enslavers themselves—or perfidious discriminators—in the new guise of “whiteness.” About 2,000 Slavs yearly were enslaved by Crimean Tartars and sold to the Ottomans in the fourteenth century, with that figure rising in the fifteenth century; slave raiding into Muscovy reached crisis proportions after 1475 when the Ottomans took over the Black Sea trade from the Genoese, as the Crimeans were instigating industrial-scale enslaving, especially between 1514 and 1654.71
Indeed, it is easy to surmise that the impetus impelling Europeans westward—particularly the Spaniards who had endured the most bracing experience with Islam, arriving at a terminal point (ironically) in 1492—was the continued push westward of Islam, veritably chasing the Iberians in that direction too. Periodic defeats at the gates of Vienna failed to squelch fears altogether of being overrun, especially given that Islam long since had established a beachhead in North Africa, visible from Gibraltar. Algiers alone—whose very name sent frissons of nervousness coursing down the spines of Western Europeans—was said to have an enslaved population of at least 25,000 Christians by the late sixteenth century, many of whom were Spanish, Portuguese: and English.72 These latter nations, particularly London, “won out” in the sixteenth century, replacing West Asia and Turkey as the core of the world system,73 argues contemporary analyst, Bruno Macaes, though he could have added that this was done by way of imposing apocalyptic conditions on Africans and indigenes of the Americas.
Thus, a telling indicator is that from the sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, Russia’s trade with the East was more profitable than European trade, but then, as the impact of slavery and settler colonialism in the Americas began to assert itself, this commerce with the Ottomans, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, and China began to decline,74 then reawakened in the twenty-first century.
Yes, the Ottoman Turks also enslaved Africans: each year from the sixteenth century through the late nineteenth century thousands of slaves from Ethiopia, Nubia, and Southern Sudan arrived in the slave markets of Cairo—seized by the Ottomans in 1517, as post-1492 competition with the Habsburgs and Spain accelerated—then hundreds of these manacled workers made their way to Istanbul and provincial capitals of the empire alike. Ironically, as embodied in the power and influence wielded by the eunuchs of African descent,75 the Ottomans’ designation of Africans differed from that created by London, then Washington, with the latter waiting until the twentieth century to create a virtual equivalent of the “Black Eunuch.” Moreover, unlike the “whiteness” project captained by the slaveholders’ republic that led to the creation of a powerful capitalist economy, the Ottomans deigned to enslave Europeans too.
There were a number of signposts on the road to Ottoman decline, a power that by the mid-sixteenth century seemed to be an unstoppable juggernaut with their equal-opportunity enslaving. But surely one of these emblazonments was their defeat at Lepanto in 1571 when the Christian, principally Catholic, powers ganged up and administered a withering setback on their foe to the east. No, the Ottomans did not sink into precipitous decline thereafter, but as the nineteenth-century historian Leopold Ranke put it succinctly, “The Turks lost all their old confidence after the Battle of Lepanto.”76
A predicate to the rise of London was the deal that it brokered with the Ottomans, then the Moroccans, against Spain, not altogether unlike the deal brokered by China in the late twentieth century with those thought to be its capitalist antagonists, which has left this Asian giant in the passing lane.
London, in other words, which had been buying an