1492: The Year Our World Began (7 page)

Not all the nobility upheld the standards of chivalrous behavior. One of the most barbarous cases on record concerned Don Fernando de Velasco, brother of the highest courtier in the kingdom, who burned to death some yokels who, in their drunkenness, had mistaken him for a Jewish rent collector and abused him accordingly. The king replied to subsequent complaints that he regretted the wretches’ deaths, without benefit of prior confession, but that Velasco had acted nobly in exacting satisfaction for the outrage they had committed against him.

Noble scions began to throng Castile’s many universities. Education, as well as arms, conferred nobility. “My lineage is for me enough, / Content to live without expensive stuff” was Alonso Manrique’s motto, but he was an accomplished poet. With the expansion of taste came an increased interest in the accumulation of wealth. The Admiral of Castile (whose title was a hereditary dignity, not a naval office) obtained a dyestuffs monopoly from the crown, though he employed an agent to run it for him: a wealthy Genoese merchant in Seville—Francisco da Rivarolo, who was one of Columbus’s financial backers. The Dukes of Medina Celi, who were in the vanguard against Granada, had their own merchant fleet and tuna fishery and processing plant. Their neighbors and rivals, the Dukes of Medina Sidonia, invested heavily in another growth industry of the time—sugar production. All noblemen had to be good estate managers in order to keep pace with inflation, which was beginning to be a normal feature of economic life. The Medina Celi dexterously increased their income from food rents and seigneurial taxes, and the record books of monastic and clerical lordships show how they increased incomes to match rising costs.

Some writers questioned the true nature of nobility, pointing out, under the influence of Aristotle and his commentators, whose works were easily accessible in every serious library, that gentility lay in the
cultivation of virtue. “God made men, not lineages” was a theme of Gómez Manrique, knight, poet, warrior against the Moors, and close courtier of the king and queen. This did not mean that all men were social equals, but that humble men could rise to power if they possessed the requisite merit. The king could ennoble those who deserved it. The merits that earned ennoblement could be intellectual. “I know,” declared Diego de Valera, “how to serve my Prince not only with the strengths of my body but also with those of my mind and intellect.” Alonso de Palencia’s
Treatise on Knightly Perfection
personifies Chivalric Practice as a Spanish nobleman in search of Lady Discretion. He finally encounters her in Italy, the homeland of humanism.

These modifications of noble behavior and language should not be mistaken for a “bourgeois revolution.” Although they spread their wings economically and culturally, nobles remained true to the traditions of their class, whose virtue was prowess and whose pursuit was power. As Isabella’s secretary wrote to a magnate wounded in battle with the Moors, “The profession you make in the order of chivalry obliges you to undergo more perils than common men, just as you merit more honor than they, because if you had no more spirit than the rest in the face of such affrights, then we should all be equals.”
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Because of the court’s obligation to impress, ostentation and pageantry were an important part of court daily life. The monarchs learned from Burgundy, and from the northern artists they employed at court, the importance of rich and impressive display in affairs of state and the usefulness of pageant that emphasized symbolically the preeminence of the king. Large numbers of observers detailed the apparel the monarchs wore on every occasion, because every gold stitch was significant. Isabella felt guilty about the opulence of her garb and liked to stress its relative simplicity. “I wore only a simple dress of silk with three gold hem bands,” she protested on one occasion in a letter to her confessor. Her affectations of austerity deceived no one.

Her biggest expenditure was on clothing and furnishings. Prodigious quantities of black velvet were used for mourning clothes, for
death was a frequent visitor to the family and the court. Jewels, especially those of a sacred nature, figure largely. From 1488 Isabella’s chapel must have been a veritable thesaurus of jeweled golden crosses, encrusted as they were with diamonds and rubies. Political expenditure thrust its way into these intimate ledgers. When Granada was conquered, Isabella contributed to the campaign for forcible acculturation of the Moors by providing cash for them to be reclothed in Castilian fashion. When the son of the king of Granada was a prisoner in 1488, she equipped him with the right clothes. She gave fat tips—bribes, in effect—to foreign ambassadors. She paid to rebuild the walls of the town of Antequera. And seven of those bolts of black velvet went to the messenger who brought news that Ferdinand had captured the Moorish town of Loja in 1486.

Alongside this sort of expenditure one finds the record of purchases of sweets for the children, wages for the masters who taught them Latin, and the upkeep of a painter to do their portraits. The monarchs liked to keep Christmas as a family occasion. They would stock up with quince jelly well in advance and buy presents to exchange at the end of the holiday. In 1492 they gave their daughters painted dolls with changeable blouses and skirts. Prince John, who as a man child and heir to the throne was meant to be above such things, got an embroidered purse and four dozen bolts of finely spun silk. For the family generally, the king supplemented the Christmas sweetmeats with plenty of lemon preserves.

As far as government was concerned, the most important feature of court life was mobility. The monarchs ruled not as later Spanish kings did, from a fixed central capital, but led a peripatetic existence as they crossed the country from town to town, taking the court with them like a menagerie on a lead. They were Spain’s most-traveled rulers, penetrating parts of the kingdom that had not seen the sovereign for decades. Some areas were better frequented than others, according to their importance. They spent most time in the heartlands of old Castile between the central mountain ranges and the river Duero, but they often
visited New Castile and Andalusia. They would go to Extremadura when Portuguese affairs were prominent, and made excursions into Aragon and Catalonia. In this way not only was the monarchs’ contact with their subjects and personal role in government maintained, but the monarchs also spread the burdensome cost of entertaining the court, which fell on the localities where the court resided or the lords who acted as hosts. However, they had to meet the cost of transporting their own cumbrous and colorful caravan. The baggage that Isabella took with her wherever she went filled sixty-two carts.

Ferdinand and his wife were distinctly unmodern monarchs. They helped usher in the modern world by accident, as they adjusted to emergencies and reverted to traditions. Their conquests and “cleansings”—as we now say—of hated minorities were too cruel to be called Christian, but they were religious. The monarchs used credal differences to identify enemies, religious rhetoric to justify their campaigns. They reigned in a time of aggressive religious fervor, induced by the alarming territorial gains Islam had made in the previous years. It was natural that Ferdinand’s Aragonese counselors, bred in fear of the Turks, would brim over with excitement at the hope their master’s new Castilian connection would bring the accession of strength they needed to strike a decisive counterblow for Christendom, while Castilians in their turn expected Aragonese help to be valuable in the continuing war against the Moors. Mingled with these expectations was millennial fever. Nothing Ferdinand and Isabella did can make perfect sense except against the background of renewal of the long-persistent belief that a Last World Emperor would appear who would defeat Islam and face the Antichrist. They were consciously preparing for the end of the world. Instead, they helped bring into being a new order, in which credal boundaries coincided with the frontiers of civilizations.

For a moment, in the aftermath of the fall of Granada, it looked as if a “concert of Christendom” and a crusade against the Turks were about to take shape. Islam and Christendom clawed at one another across the
sea, at times exchanging rhetoric, at times overtly waging war, at times merely struggling to win the outlying and uncommitted peoples of the world to their cause. A local victory seemed to have acquired global importance. And while Ferdinand and Isabella struggled to cope with the consequences of their success, events—to which we must now turn—across the Strait of Gibraltar combined to settle the future limits of Christendom and Islam in Africa.

The Strivings of Islam in Africa

December 20: Sonni Ali the Great of Songhay dies.

H
e can have been only five or six years old when his family joined the flood of refugees from Granada, but al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan always called himself “the Granadine.” His exile was the beginning of a life of travel, first as a fugitive, then as a merchant, later as an ambassador, and later still as the captive of Christian pirates. He claimed unconvincingly to have been as far as Armenia, Persia, and the Eurasian steppes. He certainly knew much of the Mediterranean and of West and North Africa at first hand. His spiritual journeys were equally far-reaching. As a prisoner in Rome, he became a Christian, a papal favorite, and under the name of Giovanni Leone—or “Leo Africanus,” as most title pages say—was the author of the most authoritative writings on Africa in his day. When invaders sacked Rome in 1527, Leo fled back to Africa and to Islam.

His most spectacular itineraries were across the Sahara to what he and his contemporaries called the Land of the Blacks. He could never quite
make up his mind about black people, for he felt torn between conflicting literary traditions that clouded his perceptions. Prejudices about black people were routine in Morocco and other regions of North Africa where black slaves arrived as common items of trade. Leo inherited those prejudices from Ibn-Khaldūn, the greatest historian of the Middle Ages, whose works he plundered. “The inhabitants of the Land of Blacks,” he wrote, “…lack reason…and are without wits and practical sense…. They live like animals, without rule or law.” Leo found, however, “the exception…in the great cities, where there is a little more rationality and human sentiment.” Blacks generally, he concluded, were:

The northwest Africa of Leo Africanus.

This disposition was the key to the slow but sure success of Islam in the region, seeping gradually south of the Sahara, into the Niger Valley and the Sahel, the great savanna.

By his own account, Leo went twice to the Sahel—once as a boy, and later as an envoy of the ruler of Fez, where he spent part of his childhood and adolescence. He had to cross the Atlas Mountains, narrowly escaping robbers—on his first journey—by excusing himself in order to pee and then disappearing into a snowstorm. He must have seen the white peaks of the Sierra Nevada from his home in Granada, but after shivering nearly to death in the Atlas he hated snow for the rest of his life. He crossed a ravine over the Sebou River in a basket strung on pulleys. In retrospect, it made him sick with terror. He reached Taghaza, the flyblown mining town that produced the salt Sahelian palates craved. Here, where even the houses were hewn from blocks of salt, Leo joined a salt caravan, waiting three days while the gleaming slabs were roped to the camels.

The object of the journey was to exchange salt for gold, literally ounce for ounce. You can live without gold, but not without salt. Salt not only flavors food but also preserves it. Dietary salt replaces the vital minerals the body loses in perspiration. Dwellers in the Niger Valley and in the forests to the south, where there were no salt mines and no access to sea salt, lacked a basic means of life. The Mediterranean world, meanwhile, had adequate supplies of salt but needed precious metals. From the northern shores of the Mediterranean, the source of the gold could be glimpsed only with difficulty across the glare of the Sahara. Even the Maghrebi merchants who handled the trade were unsure of the location of the mines, secreted deep in the West African interior, in
the region of Bure between the headwaters of the rivers Niger, Gambia, and Senegal, and, farther west, around the middle Volta.

The gold came north along routes secret to the traders who handled it along the way. “Dumb trade” procured it, according to all the accounts Europeans had at their disposal, written perhaps from convention rather than conviction. Merchants supposedly left goods—sometimes textiles, always salt—exposed for collection at traditionally appointed places. They then withdrew, and returned to collect the gold that their silent, invisible customers left in exchange. Bizarre theories circulated. The gold grew like carrots. Ants brought it up in the form of nuggets. It was mined by naked men who lived in holes. It probably really came from mines in the region of Bure, around the upper Gambia and Senegal, and perhaps from the middle Volta.

In the mid–fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta, the most-traveled pilgrim in the Islamic world, joined a southbound trading caravan at Sijilmassa, where the gold road began, and headed south in search of the place of origin of the trade. His motive, he claimed, was curiosity to see the Land of the Blacks. He left an unsurpassed description of the terrible journey across the desert, between “mountains of sand…. You see them in one place. Then you look again, and they have shifted to a new position.” Blind men, it was said, made the best guides, because in the desert visions were deceptive, and devils amused themselves by misleading journeyers.

It took twenty-five days to reach Taghaza. The water here, though salty, was a precious commodity that the caravanners paid dearly for. The next stage of the journey usually involved ten days with no possibility of replenishing water supplies—unless perhaps occasionally by extracting it from the stomachs of dead animals. The last oasis lay nearly three hundred kilometers from the caravan’s destination, in a land “haunted by demons,” where “no road is visible,…only the drifting, wind-blown sand.”
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Despite the torments of the road, Ibn Battuta found the desert “luminous, radiant,” and inspiring—until his caravan reached an even
hotter region, near the frontier of the Sahel. Here they had to travel in the cool of the night, before at last, after a journey of two months, they reached Walata, where black customs officials were waiting and vendors offered sour milk laced with honey.

Here, at the southern end of the Golden Road, lay the empire of Mali, renowned as the remotest place to which gold could reliably be traced. Mali dominated the middle Niger, controlling, for a while in the fourteenth century, an empire that included all three great riverside emporia—Jenne, Timbuktu, and Gao. The power of the Mande, the West African elite who ran the empire’s affairs, extended over great stretches of the Sahel and southward into the edges of the forest. They were a commercial and imperial people, strong in war and wares. The merchant caste, known as Wangara, thrust colonies beyond the reach of the empire’s direct authority, founding, for instance, a settlement inside the forest country, where they bought gold cheaply from the local chiefs. It was frustrating to be so close to the source of such wealth while having to rely on middlemen to supply it.

But they never succeeded in controlling production of the gold, for the mines remained outside their domains. Whenever they attempted to exert political authority in the mining lands, the inhabitants resorted to a form of passive resistance or “industrial action”—downing tools and refusing to work the mines. Mali, however, did control the routes of access to the north and the points of exchange of gold for salt, which tripled or quadrupled in value as it crossed Malian territory. The rulers took the gold nuggets for tribute, leaving the dust to the traders.

The Mansa, as the ruler of Mali was known, attained legendary renown because of the fame of Mansa Musa, who reigned from about 1312 to 1337. In 1324 he undertook a spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca, which spread his reputation far and wide. He was one of three Mansas to make the hajj. This alone shows how stable and substantial the Malian state was, for the journey took over a year, and few rulers in the world could risk such a long absence from their bases of power. Musa made his trip in lavish style, with conspicuous effect. People in Egypt remembered it
for centuries, for the Mansa stayed there for over three months and distributed so much gold that he caused inflation. By various accounts, the value of gold in Egypt fell by between 10 and 25 percent. Musa gave fifty thousand dinars to the sultan of Egypt and thousands of ingots of raw gold to the shrines he visited and the officials who entertained him. Though he traveled with eighty camels, each laden with three hundred pounds of gold, his munificence outstripped his supplies. He had to borrow funds on his homeward journey. Reputedly, on his return to Mali he repaid his loans at the rate of seven hundred dinars for every three hundred he had borrowed.

The ritual magnificence of Mali’s court impressed visitors almost as much as the ruler’s wealth. Ibn Battuta thought the Mansa commanded more devotion from his subjects than any other prince in the world. Arab and Latin authors were not always appreciative of blacks’ political sophistication. This makes the goggle-eyed awe of the sources in this case all the more impressive. Everything about the Mansa exuded majesty: his stately gait; his hundreds of attendants, bearing gilded staves; the way subjects communicated with him only through an intermediary; the acts of humiliation—prostration and heaping one’s head with dust—to which his interlocutors submitted; the reverberant hum of bowstrings and murmured approval with which auditors greeted his words; the capricious taboos that enjoined death for those who wore sandals in his presence or sneezed in his hearing. The range of tributaries impressed Ibn Battuta, especially the cannibal envoys, to whom the Mansa presented a slave girl. They returned to thank him, daubed with the blood of the gift they had just consumed. Fortunately, reported Ibn Battuta, “they say that eating a white man is harmful, because he is unripe.”
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This exotic theater of power had a suitably dignified stage and numerous company. The Mansa’s audience chamber was a domed pavilion in which Andalusian poets sang. His bushland capital had a brick-built mosque. The strength of his army was cavalry. Images of Mali’s mounted soldiery survive in terra-cotta. Heavy-lidded aristocrats with lips curled
in command and haughtily uptilted heads come crowned with crested helmets, riding rigidly on elaborately bridled horses. Some have cuirasses or shields on their backs, or strips of leather armor worn apron-fashion. Their mounts wear halters of garlands and have decorations incised into their flanks. The riders control them with short reins and taut arms, like practitioners of dressage. For most of the fourteenth century they were invincible, driving invaders from desert or forest out of the Sahel.

Around the Mediterranean, Maghrebi traders and travelers scattered stories about the fabled realm, like grains of sand dusted from expansive hands. The image of the Mansa’s splendor reached Europe. In Majorcan maps from the 1320s, and most lavishly in the Catalan Atlas of the early 1380s, the ruler of Mali appears like a Latin monarch, save only for his black face, bearded, crowned, and throned—a sovereign equal in standing to any Christian prince. “So abundant is the gold that is found in his country,” reads the text placed alongside his picture, “that this lord is the richest and noblest king in all the land.”
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The image might have been transferred, with little modification, to a painting of the Three Kings of Christ’s epiphany—which was the context in which European artists regularly painted imaginary black kings at the time. And the black king’s gift to the divine infant would be the mighty gold nugget the Mansa brandished in the map.

Europeans strove to cut out the middlemen and find routes of access to the gold sources for themselves. Some of them tried to follow the caravans over the desert. In 1413 the trader Ansleme d’Isaguier returned to his native Toulouse with a harem of negresses and three black eunuchs, whom he claimed to have acquired in Gao, one of the great emporia of the middle Niger. No one knows how he can have got so far. In 1447, the Genoese Antonio Malfante reached Tuat, garnering only rumors about the gold. In 1470, in Florence, Benedetto Dei claimed to have been to Timbuktu and observed a lively trade there in European textiles. Between 1450 and 1490, Portuguese merchants strove to open a route toward the Niger across country from their newly founded
trading station at Arguim on the Saharan coast, and succeeded in diverting some gold-bearing caravans to trade there.

Like every El Dorado, however, Mali and its people could be disappointing to those who actually got that far. “I repented of having come to their country,” Ibn Battuta complained, “because of their deficient manners and contempt for white men.”
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By the middle of the fifteenth century, as Mali declined, impressions were generally unfavorable. The empire was in retreat, ground between the Tuareg of the desert and the Mossi of the forest. Usurpers eroded the edges, while factions subverted Mali at the center. The emperors lost control over great marketplaces along the Niger. Cut-price successors to the famed poets and scholars of earlier generations cheapened arts and learning at the court. When European explorers at last penetrated the empire in the 1450s, they were disillusioned. Where they had expected to find a great, bearded, nugget-wielding monarch, such as the Catalan Atlas depicted, they found only a poor, harassed, timorous ruler. New maps of the region cut out the image of the sumptuously arrayed Mansa and substituted crude drawings of a “stage nigger,” dangling simian sexual organs. It was a dramatic moment in the history of racism. Until then, white Westerners saw only positive images of blacks in paintings of the magi who acknowledged the baby Jesus. Or else they knew Africans as expensive domestic slaves who shared intimacies with their owners and displayed estimable talents, especially as musicians. Familiarity had not yet bred contempt.