The choice of targets was not random. These brigands began with the closest places, the most accessible. An economist would say: low cost of entry. These targets, moreover, were held by infidels, and this alone sanctified the venture. The Muslims call the non-Muslim world the Dar el-Harb, the House of the Sword, thereby designating it as fair game for conquest. The Christians had no such term, but acted as though they had.
Beyond these nearby victims lay an alluring array of distant temptations: gold that came by camel from no one knew where across the African desert; spices imported from the Indian Ocean through the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, then overland to ports in the Levant, passing through numerous hands along the way and rising in price with every transaction; fabulous silks come by caravan all the way from China. All of these precious things were held ransom by Muslim traders. Could a way be found to bypass these infidel middlemen, one might grow rich in the service of God.
Those were only the known treasures of the East, things people could hold in their hands. Rumor and legend told of greater wonders, the stuff of dreams: on the other side of Africa, the kingdom of Prester John, a Christian enclave in the world of Islam; somewhere nearby, the lost paradise of Eden; farther east, the land of Xanadu; and going west, well, that was the unknown. Most people understood the world was round and that one could in theory go east by sailing west. But the Atlantic was a terrifying ocean for those used to the waters of the inland sea. Even the seaboard populations saw only the awful emptiness. Names like Land’s End and Finisterre were more than mere statements of topographical fact.
Where there is ignorance, fantasy reigns. The west was the place of the Blessed Isles, of the mysterious Atlantis now sunk beneath the waves—of magical realms guarded by monsters and whirlpools and sea spouts—all the hazards that realism and imagination could put together. It took tremendous courage to venture into the ocean sea, well beyond any of the landmarks that dotted the portolan maps and gave reassurance from point to coastal point. The Viking voyages, west and north and west again, testify to their seamanship and courage; also to an intimate knowledge of the water (its color, moods, and depths, even its bottom) and the fauna (the fish and birds) that enabled them to know the presence of land long before they saw it and thus to island-hop around the top of the Atlantic. The Genoese and other Italians came later, learning first to round Iberia and sail to England. By the fourteenth century, in the company of Portuguese and Basques, they found the near Atlantic isles: the Azores, Madeiras,12 Canaries—all but the last, which lie close to the African mainland, uninhabited.* (The Cape Verde Islands, which lie south of Bojador at north latitude 15, were not found by Europeans until the mid-fifteenth century; So Tome, in the Gulf of Guinea, was not opened to settlement until the 1490s.)
These tiny islands do not seem much today. They have been reduced to outposts, visited only by tourists or by residents returning from studies or jobs on the mainland. In the decades following their discovery, however, they represented a major addition to European space. Note that the Canaries were known to the ancient Romans, who learned of them from the king of Mauretania. They did not add to Roman space. It takes a mix of knowledge, means, and need to turn discovery into opportunity.
All were there in the fifteenth century. In particular, the southern islands (Madeiras and Canaries) proved superbly suited to the cultivation of sugar cane, destined to become Europe’s greatest money crop. Europeans first encountered this plant in the Middle East, where the Arabs had brought it from India and thence into the Mediterranean, to Cyprus, Crete, and the Maghreb. Returning crusaders in turn introduced it into Europe—into Greece, Sicily, the Portuguese Algarve.
Sugar is powerfully addictive, naturally pleasing to the palate (not a learned taste) and comforting to the human psyche. It cost a great deal at first and was limited to pharmaceutical uses; one bought it at the apothecary’s, and most Europeans got their sweetness from fruit and honey. But this was not the first time that a medicinal substance came to appeal to the healthy as well as the sick. Thanks to spreading cultivation, price fell to the point where sugar could be found at the grocer’s. Now it began to be used as a condiment with all manner of fare; as the German saying had it, there’s no food can be spoiled by sugar. (Germans still cook that way.) It also proved useful as a preservative or flavor camouflage in a world of easy spoilage. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sugar was a luxury: mistresses locked the loaves up to keep them from the servants; but it was becoming a necessity, spreading from the top of the social hierarchy on down.
As successful as the Mediterranean centers of cultivation were, they could not compare with the Atlantic islands, for reasons both climatic and social. Sugar cane grows best in tropical or subtropical climes. It needs a lot of regular water, and it likes steady heat—both found in these near-equatorial lands set down in the path of rain-heavy trade winds. It also takes a lot of hard gang labor, the sort of thing shunned by free men, so that cultivators preferred slaves where available. This is what the crusaders found when they captured such Mediterranean islands as Cyprus: the Arab sugar industry ran on slave labor, most of it brought in from East Africa.
But this regime could not easily be installed in Christian Europe, where it would have entailed a reversion to earlier, now unacceptable institutions. Slavery had long since given way to serfdom, in part because Christians were not supposed to be held as slaves (among other things because chattel status was incompatible with the sacrament of marriage), in part because the supply of pagan or infidel slaves was small and unreliable—also self-liquidating by conversion. Blacks, to be sure, might be seen as an exception. One might question whether they had a soul, whether they could become Christian. We know the Portuguese had no qualms importing black slaves for domestic service or for labor in the cane fields of the coastal plain; some 10 percent of the population of Lisbon in the mid-sixteenth century was apparently black.13 Yet many (how many?) of these were eventually manumitted, and they merged into the population at large. The institution of black slavery, in spite of occasional “blackamoor” servants come down to us in oil paintings of elegant interiors, never took hold in Europe. If Europeans were going to use black slaves for field work, they wanted it done far away.
The Atlantic islands were far away. Here was a tabula rasa, a laboratory for new social arrangements. One can follow the progression. The Azores and Madeiras were initially peopled by European settlers or by unfree persons who had no choice in the matter—convicts, prostitutes, victims and orphans of religious persecution.* The Cape Verde Islands, on the other hand, off the coast of Gambia, were ideally placed to tap the slave trade that flourished a short reach away, and were soon shipping blacks to Lisbon and to some of the other islands.
When African slavers found that the white man, come for gold and pepper, was also interested in this human commodity, they were ready. In the quarter century before Columbus, the Cape Verde Islands and to a lesser extent the Madeiras became a testing ground for slave sugar plantations, to be followed by So Tome in the sixteenth century. Those planters tough enough to drill and squeeze labor while standing up to hardship and climate made fortunes; so did the Italian merchant shippers. Meanwhile the Portuguese crown took a third or more of the gross in the form of license fees, sugar contracts, and taxes. These plantations then served as models for later, even more profitable developments in the New World.
The Atlantic islands enormously extended Europe’s reach. In a few bold leaps, seamen found sailing platforms hundreds of miles westward and southward, launching pads into the unknown, harbors home. Here were oases in the ocean desert: they eased the pain and made the impossible possible. Was it luck or forethought that led Columbus to the farthest Canary isle, right in the path of the great easterlies, before setting out? Whatever; he found himself on the boulevard of the equatorial trades, and those warm, steady winds drove him across the Atlantic in a month.
Crazy. But in 1492 the Spanish thought they could do anything. Columbus was a ma
verick. He wanted to go to Asia by going west, which held no interest for Portugal. But the plan made sense to Spain, which had agreed to divide the world with Portugal and had conceded the eastern (African) route to its rival—another testimony to the hubris of these kingdoms. For Spain, it was westward ho! or nothing. Columbus happened to underestimate his task: he thought the world much smaller than it was. But that was not a bad way to begin; the ocean was in fact narrower than he thought.
What Columbus found was a new world. Even on his deathbed he did not believe that, thinking he had come on an archipelago off the coast of China and Cipangu (Japan). Nor did he know that beyond the islands lay two large landmasses, the continents that came to be known as North and South America. He found naked or near-naked people still living in the Stone Age, who cut their hands at first grasping the Spaniards’ swords by the blade.14 He brought some of them back to Spain as specimens—like animals for a zoo.
What Columbus did not find was great treasure of gold or silk or spices or any of the other valuables associated with the Orient. Gold above all he wanted, not so much for himself (he wanted rank and fame more) as for his monarchs, for he understood that nothing was so likely to keep the crown interested and supportive.
The scarcity of gold was a disappointment, but he made the best of things and assured that these islands could be an abundant source of slaves; that they were moreover eminently suitable for sugar cultivation, which he knew from the Canaries and Madeiras. They would also support livestock; and so it went. Caribbean history after the coming of the white man was in large part the replacement of people by cattle, followed by a repeopling with black slaves to work the sugar plantations.
The process of depopulation was hastened by massacre, barbarous cruelty, deep despair. The natives committed suicide, abstained from sex, aborted their fetuses, killed their babies. They also fell by the tens and hundreds of thousands to Old World pathogens (smallpox, influenza). The Spanish debated whether the savages they encountered had a soul and were human; but the record makes clear where the savagery lay. When Columbus met his first Indians, he could not get over their trust and friendliness; to this the Spaniards, frustrated for gold, returned bestialities unworthy of beasts:
They came with their Horsemen well armed with Sword and Launce, making most cruel havocks and slaughters…. Overrunning Cities and Villages, where they spared no sex nor age; neither would their cruelty pity Women with childe, whose bellies they would rip up, taking out the Infant to hew it in pieces. They would often lay wagers who should with most dexterity either cleave or cut a man in the middle…. The children they would take by the feet and dash their innocent heads against the rocks, and when they were fallen into the water, with a strange and cruel derision they would call on them to swim…. They erected certains Gallowses…upon every one of which they would hang thirteen persons, blasphemously affirming that they did it in honour of our Redeemer and his Apostles, and then putting fire under them, they burnt the poor wretches alive. Those whom their pity did think to spare, they would send away with their hands half cut off, and so hanging by the skin.15
No need to multiply these testimonies. The reader would only recoil from so much blood and evil. They were all there: the spontaneous expressions of wanton brutality; the random, carefree, thoughtless murders; the good-natured competition in imagining torments; the refinements of pain; the unprovoked explosions of collective killer frenzy; the hatred for life.
One surprise here: rationality was absent, even in the treatment of valuable labor. Very early on, a group of Dominican friars wrote the king of Spain complaining that so many miners died of hunger on forced marches from one site to another that later groups needed no guide to follow. (Tom Thumb dropped pebbles to mark the way; the Spaniards left corpses.) The same letter spoke of a shipload of over eight hundred Indians brought to a place called Puerto de Plata (Silver Harbor) and held on board for two days before being disembarked. Under what conditions? No details, but six hundred of them are said to have died and been thrown overboard, to float like planks on the waves. African slaves would have a higher survival rate.16
Nothing like this would be seen again until the Nazi Jew hunts and killer drives of World War II. Within decades, the native Arawaks (Tainos) and Caribs were largely wiped out.*
The Caribbean conquest, of course, only began the story. The Spanish thirst for gold and treasure was unassuaged; the enterprise of factious malcontents irrepressible. Mission leaders, agents of the Spanish crown, found that one of the best ways to deal with disobedience and rebellion was to ship the troublemakers off to unknown shores. Let them hunt the Fountain of Youth; with luck they might die in the search. The desperate readiness and hardiness of these adventurers surpass belief. The history of Spanish conquest, then, is in part a story of ill-starred voyages and futile marches into legend and oblivion. But also of lucky strikes like Mexico and Peru. One find, even one report, could provoke and justify a dozen expeditions. Such were the ingredients of empire: power, greed, and mission, seasoned with credulity, wrath, and madness.
Black Gold17
The gold that found its way from somewhere in Africa to the Mediterranean coast held European merchants in thrall. They went to places like Tunis to trade silver and arms, textiles and leather, rice and figs, nuts and wine (presumably for re-export) for grain and fodder, oils, fats, semolina, and honey; and then—to balance payments—for gold. Gold dust, gold ingots, gold coins (Moorish ducats). Not only did the yellow metal cast an almost hypnotic lure, the rate of exchange made these transactions extremely lucrative.
Silver traded for gold at 10 to 1 in Tunis in the first half of the fourteenth century, but that same gold would buy 13 units of silver in the markets of Valencia. Such a disparity could not last; active trade makes a working market, and a market makes for homogeneous prices. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the ratio was 10.5:1 in Naples, 11:1 in Florence. The influx from Africa was such that much of the western Mediterranean went over to a gold standard, as reflected in new coinages: the pierrale d’oro in Sicily, the reial d’oro in Majorca, the alfonsino in Sardinia (1339), the gold florin in Aragon (1346).
Literary and cartographic sources dating back to the mid-thirteenth century attest to the Latin fascination with this gold and its unknown mother lode. The suppliers, however, took pains to keep the source secret—no doubt wisely, for they correctly surmised that the Christian infidels would kill and die for gold. We know now that the gold came from deep in the interior of West Africa, somewhere along the upper reaches of the Niger and near the headwaters of the Gambia and Senegal rivers. The story has it that the blacks who mined the gold exchanged it by “dumb” barter: the buyers left trade goods at an appointed place and then withdrew, and the miners then took the goods and left what they felt was an appropriate amount of gold in payment. The mystery, needless to say, was an invitation to fantasy. Some said the gold grew there like carrots; others affirmed that it was brought up from under the ground by diligent and serviable ants; others that it was mined by naked men who lived in holes.
In any event, the precious metal had to pass from its source through the legendary African kingdom of Mali, which controlled access to Timbuktu and the cross-Sahara camel routes and was the farthest “upstream” source known to the Mediterranean merchants. There the bullion traders paid a heavy tribute to the local middlemen and the ruler, known as the Mansa; as the story has it, Mali took the nuggets and left the dust to the traders. (A mill to grind and flake the nuggets might have proved handy.) From time to time, the Mansa and his agents tried to increase revenue by forcing the diggers to produce more. Such efforts foundered on the passive resistance of the miners, who just stopped delivering.
In the meantime, the Mansa was getting more than enough for his laisser-passer. One Mansa, by name Musa (Arabic for Moses), went on pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. Such a trip took more than a year, and the Mansa was determined to do it in style. He stayed three months in Egypt, and the visit was rememb
ered for centuries thereafter. He gave 50,000 dinars to the Sultan, who was not above taking so princely a gift, and thousands of ingots to the shrines he visited and the officials who entertained and ministered to him. By the end of his stay, we are told, the value of gold in Egypt had fallen by 10 to 25 percent.
Though the Mansa had come with a fortune in expense money—eighty to one hundred camels bearing 300 pounds of gold each (equals from 110 to 135 million of our dollars!)—he was penniless by the end of his pilgrimage and had to borrow for his return. His creditors were well reimbursed for their confidence, at 700 dinars for every 300 he had borrowed.
The opulence impressed. Arab authors such as Ibn-amir Hajib and Ibn Battuta have left us detailed accounts of the Mali king and kingdom. The Mansa, they tell us, commanded more devotion from his people than any ruler anywhere. He was the living embodiment of majesty—from the way he held himself and walked to the way his subjects showed their abject humiliation in his presence, prostrating themselves, touching their heads to the ground, greeting his every word with murmurs of wonder and approval. Let no man enter his presence informally dressed; let no one even sneeze. Such signs of impertinence brought death.
The legend of the Mansa’s greatness reached Europe at second hand. Maps, particularly the Catalan Atlas of 1375, showed the ruler enthroned like a European monarch, crown on head, orb and scepter in hand. “So abundant is the gold that is found in his country,” the Catalan Atlas noted, “that this lord is the richest and noblest king in all the land.” This admiration and esteem were not to last. The gold trade diminished; Mali declined. In the later fourteenth century, when the Portuguese got down to the African “gold coast” and were able to penetrate Gambia, the successors of Mansa Musa came to be seen as crude, pretentious stereotypes. Sic transit.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 10
