by Alan Mikhail
Unbeknownst to Henry (as well as to Columbus), Islam had been introduced to West Africa in the eighth century by Muslim merchants from the East trading across the Sahel. By the time the Portuguese arrived there—as they found, to their utter dismay—Islam had grown from a minority faith of a few adherents to the state religion of several West African empires, most prominent among them the Mali Empire, which adopted Islam as its official religion in 1324. By then, West African Islam had incorporated and adapted longstanding local cultural practices, aesthetics, and even other religious ideas, becoming a unique version of the faith that today is a major force in the region. The “discovery” of Muslims in West Africa in the fifteenth century further deepened the belief among European Crusaders that their Christian faith had become sclerotic, was surrounded by the powerful forces of Islam, and could only be saved through drastic action.
As Prince Henry continued his explorations, revealing Muslims in places he had never known existed and proving the need to intensify Christianity’s war against a flourishing Islam, he pushed for an enlarged legal purview to extend Catholicism’s political and military reach beyond Europe. He received this from Pope Nicholas V, who, incidentally, established the Vatican Library using many of the Greek manuscripts that scholars fleeing Constantinople had taken with them. In 1452—the year before Constantinople fell—Nicholas issued a papal bull entitled Dum Diversas, which bestowed upon Portugal “official dominion” over the west coast of Africa and all the islands of the eastern Atlantic. This legalized Henry’s territorial gains as a part of Portugal’s empire. The bull specified that Portugal had the right to enslave any “Saracens” (another term for Muslims) and pagans living in the region. Still decades before Europeans would cross the Atlantic and centuries before the transatlantic slave trade would peak, the significance of this stunning papal document cannot be overstated. It provided the first legal basis for the European enslavement of Africans.
In a world of Christians Crusading against Islam, Europeans warring against the Ottomans, this bull equated the legal status of West African Muslims with that of pagans—both considered unbelievers, of course, and both now subject to enslavement by Christian Europeans. Given the history of encounters between Christendom and Islam, Muslims were the closest, most familiar, and ultimate “other” for Europeans—the political, military, and ideological enemy against whom all other enemies were measured and through whom they were understood. Because West Africa’s non-Muslims were also non-Christians, they were interpreted through the primary category of non-Christian “otherness” available to Europeans—Islam. For Christians, then, pagan equaled Muslim, making it possible for the Portuguese in West Africa to understand both non-Muslims and Muslims as part of the same conceptual category of “Muslim”—a category of person which a Christian was allowed to treat with great force and violence.
The papal conjoining of Muslim and non-Muslim is what ultimately allowed both to be taken “legally” from West Africa to the New World as slaves. The repurposing of the category of “Muslim” to encompass non-Christians outside of Europe was hence a constituent element of the birth of the much-vaunted European age of discovery—an age built, of course, on Europe’s territorial conquests in West Africa and the enslavement of its people.
Pushed out of the Mediterranean by Ottoman military and economic power, Columbus would export this conceptual innovation across the Atlantic, which would soon allow Europeans to expand their understanding of “Muslim” otherness to encompass not just West African non-Muslims but Native Americans as well. In the Americas, where of course no Muslims existed in 1492, European Christians again filtered the unknown peoples they encountered through their notions of Islam and anti-Muslim Christian Crusade.
THE FARTHEST POINT SOUTH on the African coast reached by the team of explorers Henry had organized was São Jorge da Mina, on the Gulf of Guinea—today, Elmina in Ghana. That town would soon prove the linchpin of Portugal’s empire in West Africa, a key conduit for the funneling of African gold to Lisbon. In 1481, Portugal’s new king, João II, recognized the need for a stronghold there, so he dispatched a heavily armed fleet to build a fortified trading post—the first European-built structure in sub-Saharan Africa. Aboard ten caravels and two transport ships, João sent foundation stones, roof tiles, nails, and provisions. Columbus, now thirty and leaving a young son in Lisbon, sailed south on one of these ships.
João’s fort immediately proved its worth. Between 1487 and 1489, 8,000 ounces of gold went from São Jorge da Mina to Lisbon; 22,500 ounces were shipped between 1494 and 1496; and by 1500, shipments totaled 26,000 ounces. Owing in large measure to the infamous papal bull that Henry had negotiated, the commerce of São Jorge da Mina soon came to include slaves as well, with ten to twelve thousand West Africans transported to Lisbon between 1500 and 1535 alone. In subsequent centuries, the fort that Columbus helped construct became one of the main export hubs of the transatlantic slave trade.
While he was in São Jorge da Mina, Columbus collected three pieces of information that solidified his resolve to head westward across the Atlantic, where—more sure than ever—he was convinced he would find Asia. First, in this region of Africa that would later be known as the Gold Coast, he saw seemingly endless supplies of the precious metal in the soils and rocks near the coast. Contemporary interpretations of geography had taught him that regions of the globe at similar latitudes enjoyed comparable climates and natural features. In his understanding, then, he would find lands rich in gold if he headed due west from São Jorge da Mina—perhaps even the Seven Cities of Cibola that had fired his imagination for so many years. The second piece—hearing from sailors in the African port that they often saw logs washed up on shore that seemed to have been carved by human hands—confirmed his experience in Galway with the two Native American corpses: Asia, apparently, was close. Thirdly, in São Jorge da Mina Columbus gleaned an understanding of the Atlantic’s predominant patterns of wind and current. On the West African coast, the prevailing winds blow out to sea, and the ocean’s dominant current is to the west as well. This is the exact opposite of the pattern in Portugal, where the ocean’s eastward currents make it difficult to sail westward for most of the year. To head west, Columbus correctly understood, it would be best to sail south along the African coast in order to pick up the westerly current.
São Jorge da Mina
Columbus now had, he believed, nearly all the information necessary to execute his plan to bypass the Ottomans and find the Grand Khan. The only thing missing was a benevolent patron.
COLUMBUS’S YEARS OF BACK-AND-FORTH negotiations with different European sovereigns—Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Venetian, and Genoese—is a well-known tale. Less well known is the role that Muslims and the Ottoman Empire played in this. Columbus’s major push for money occurred in the 1480s—the decade during which Isabella and Ferdinand, the eventual financiers of his voyages, declared war on Islam. It is hardly a coincidence that Europe’s war on Islam and Columbus’s voyages transpired at the exact same time. In the minds of Columbus and the Spanish sovereigns, the two were pieces of the same global war: Christianity against Islam. Ferdinand—“fit and athletic” and “swarthy in a rakish way”—and Isabella—“her eyes between gray and blue” and “her face very beautiful and gay”—were resolute Moor-slayers, as well as second cousins. As part of their global strategy against Islam, they dispatched their navies eastward in the Mediterranean to fight the Ottomans, endeavored to clear the Iberian peninsula of Muslims, and sent Columbus and his fleet off to the west to Asia in an attempt to surprise and surround the Muslims of the Middle East.
Ottoman advances in the second half of the fifteenth century directly affected Spanish holdings in the Mediterranean. After his capture of Otranto in 1480, Mehmet the Conqueror sent ships to Sicily, the Mediterranean’s largest island, to assess the prospects for a possible invasion. Once a Muslim possession, Sicily in the fifteenth century was nominally under the sovereignty of Ferdinand and Is
abella, so this move by the much more powerful Ottoman sultan instantly captured their attention. “Every day,” Isabella’s court chronicler wrote, “news came to the King and Queen that the Turks had a great armada on the sea, and that they were sending it to conquer the kingdom of Sicily.” At the center of the sea, Sicily functioned as a gateway between the eastern and western Mediterranean. Whoever controlled Sicily controlled the Mediterranean. The loss of Sicily to the Ottomans would mean, for example, that Chios, where Columbus had picked up the Spinolas’ mastic, would almost certainly be lost as well. It would also give the Ottomans an important launching pad for further invasions—farther north on the Italian peninsula, toward the holy city of Rome, and farther west against Spanish and other Christian territories. The Spanish sovereigns therefore leaped into action after Mehmet’s fleet was spotted off Sicily’s rocky coast, dispatching their own fleet to Italy’s western coast to join forces with the king of Naples, a cousin of Ferdinand’s, to move on the Ottomans in Otranto. Luckily for this combined Spanish–Neapolitan force, Mehmet died while it sailed toward Otranto, and the subsequent succession crisis that brought Bayezit to the throne forced the empire to give up on Sicily and indeed to withdraw from Italy altogether. In the end, the Ottomans held Otranto and its tiny crystal-blue harbor for only a year.
Isabella and Ferdinand with their daughter Joanna
Despite this retreat, the Ottomans continued to push westward in the Mediterranean over the course of the 1480s, testing the resolve of Spain as well as other European powers. In 1488, Bayezit attacked, but failed to seize, another of the central Mediterranean’s most strategic islands, Malta, prompting Spain to send reinforcements to its garrisons in Sicily. Between 1487 and the middle of the 1490s, Ottoman ships continued west, reaching Corsica, Pisa, the Balearic Islands, and even breaching the Iberian mainland itself at Almería and Málaga. Although these were not full-scale invasions resulting in permanent Ottoman settlements, the sight of a fleet of Ottoman ships pulling into port panicked already frightened European states, especially Spain, because of its large Muslim population. The propulsive power of the Ottomans was everywhere in the Mediterranean, even in Iberia itself.
These gains in the western Mediterranean made the already precarious situation of Spain’s Muslims much more dire. Muslims on the peninsula were equated with Spain’s external Muslim enemies—the Ottomans and the many independent Muslim principalities in North Africa that Spain had long sought to conquer. Especially in the fifteenth century, as Spain extended its empire in North Africa and after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, Spain’s besieged Muslims sent desperate appeals for help to the most powerful Muslim states—the Ottomans and the Mamluks. Their pleas sparked the Spanish monarchs’ deepest fears—the potential alliance of their Muslim “fifth column” population with the Mediterranean’s Muslim powers in the impending, and to the royals’ mind inevitable, global religious war. In the 1480s, the Mamluk navy proved far too weak to threaten Spain, because it was already stretched thin from doing battle with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the Mamluks too, like Spain’s Muslims, eventually turned to the Ottomans for help in those years.
In 1487 or 1488, as Selim and Gülbahar settled into their new home in Trabzon, Bayezit, sensing opportunity, sent a privateer named Kemal Reis into the western Mediterranean on a reconnaissance mission, charging him to return with a realistic picture of the situation in Spain and the position of Muslims in Iberia and North Africa. Arriving first in the ports of Almería and Málaga, Kemal met clandestinely with members of Spain’s Muslim community. He sent messages to Bayezit describing how weak and frightened they had become after repeated waves of Catholic repression, and advising that the only way to properly support them would be a full-scale Ottoman invasion of Iberia.
Such an offensive was a financial and logistical impossibility at that point, so Bayezit instructed Kemal to assess the possibilities of an alliance with the North African Muslim principalities in Spain’s orbit—those directly under its rule as well as those that had managed to remain independent. From Spain, Kemal sailed south and followed the North African coast east from Ceuta to Tripoli, stopping in every port to see where alliances could be forged and where ramparts seemed weak, and also where inroads would be impossible. Typically, a single family or household controlled each of these walled cities. These families had submitted to Spain, successfully fought it off, or reached some sort of rapprochement with the far more powerful empire. Encouraged by the interest of the Ottomans, these North African potentates saw opportunities to alter the balance of power with Spain and extend their influence beyond their city walls.
For example, in the port of Bougie (now Béjaïa), east of Algiers and due south from Menorca, Kemal found a willing ally in the city’s ruler, Sayyid Muhammad Tuwalli, who claimed to possess magical powers that had allowed him to fend off the Spanish. Sayyid Muhammad allowed Kemal and his men to stay in the city for a few weeks. From there, Kemal made further alliances with leaders in Bone, east of Bougie, and even as far east as the island of Djerba, off the southeastern Tunisian coast. While these agreements gave the Ottomans some degree of influence in North African affairs, their foothold remained tenuous, since the local leaders could renege on their promises or be ousted at any time. Even so, the alliances allowed Bayezit to maintain geostrategic pressure on Spain in the western Mediterranean. From 1490, when Kemal Reis first arrived in North Africa, until 1495, when Bayezit summoned him back to Istanbul, Kemal and his men, along with some of their new allies, undertook several successful raids against Spanish positions in Morocco and even on the Iberian peninsula.
Like Columbus, Henry, and Pope Nicholas V, Isabella and Ferdinand regarded their war against Islam as a civilizational struggle. The Ottomans’ increasing influence on the threshold of their territory in the western Mediterranean, especially among their own reviled Muslim subjects, seemed to accelerate the arrival of the portended final apocalyptic conflict between Christendom and Islam. Spain in the 1480s was an amalgam of some half dozen independent states. Isabella ruled Castile, Ferdinand Aragon, and various independent Muslim emirs held territories in the south of the peninsula. At the end of the fifteenth century, Catholicism and antipathy toward Islam were the only shared tenets among Spain’s non-Muslim states. Isabella especially took it as her duty, as sovereign of one of the largest and most influential of Spain’s Christian states, to lead the global war against all Muslims—whether in Castile, across Iberia, in North Africa, in the Ottoman Empire, or anywhere else. (Ironically, there were more Christians in the Ottoman Empire at the time than in the whole of Spain.) For both Ferdinand and Isabella, any Muslim anywhere was a potential threat, but they regarded those living under their own rule as the most dangerous. Iberia’s independent Muslim south was also a potential territorial foothold for the Ottomans. As the Catholic sovereigns saw it, the only way to counter both these threats, the one internal and the other to their south, was to completely eliminate Muslims from the Iberian peninsula, a community with nearly eight hundred years of history.
The process of attempting to make Spain wholly Christian was known as the Reconquista (or “Reconquest”), a perceived (and expected) “return” to the status quo ante of the early eighth century, before Muslims arrived in Spain. The Reconquista sprang from the same ethos as the Inquisition: the belief that non-Christians threatened and weakened Christian Spain and therefore had to be eliminated either through conversion or expulsion. Thus, the Reconquista also targeted Spain’s other major non-Christian community, the Jews. But unlike Jews, Muslims controlled territorial entities in Iberia and beyond and were thus perceived as a more dangerous military and political threat. Jews never had a formal state in Spain, nor an external state that was alleged to be supporting the Judeo-Spanish community. Spain’s Jews, unlike Muslims, were not locked in a battle with Christendom for global territorial and religious domination. Spain hence justified violence towards its Jews, as we will see in more detail later, on the basis
not of international politics but of anti-Jewish theology.
After the Ottomans’ forays into the western Mediterranean in the 1480s and early 1490s, the Reconquista became something more than merely a campaign for political and religious consolidation on the Iberian peninsula. It became a crucial battle in the greater existential war to roll back Islam and its foremost representatives, the Ottomans, from the Mediterranean and eventually from the face of the earth altogether. It was, in short, a Crusade.
STEEPED AS COLUMBUS WAS throughout his life in the rhetoric and reality of the Crusades, he used the notion of a global civilizational war between Christendom and Islam—the idea that he and the Spanish sovereigns were all “Matamoros”—to push his case for the Atlantic voyage. He was confident that if he could demonstrate that heading west across the ocean would help to defeat Islam, Ferdinand and Isabella would finance his journey. But how to gain an audience with either of them? Given her consternation about the Ottomans, and locked as she was in battle with the Muslim kingdom of Granada and some of the smaller Muslim principalities in the south, Isabella had little time to heed what she must have assumed was a far-fetched—never mind expensive—proposal from a dreamy-eyed Genoese buccaneer. Although there is a stark lack of female leaders in the historical record, here we see how Columbus, like Selim, relied on powerful women. For several years, he tried to get a chance to pitch his ideas to the queen, following her from place to place, using his connections to try to set up a meeting. Columbus’s exploring exemplar, Prince Henry the Navigator, was her great-uncle, but he had died decades earlier. Isabella captiously strung Columbus along until May 1486, when she finally offered him a few minutes of her time in Córdoba.
