The World полностью

Both Genoa and Venice became rich by trading slaves. The beleaguered emperor of the Romaioi, Michael VIII Palaiologos, granted the two cities and the Mamluks rights to the Black Sea slave trade. The Genoese entrepôt Kaffa was the capital of its territory Gazaria in Crimea, governed from 1281 by a Genoese consul and later by special government offices – the greatest slave market in Europe. The Venetians used Tana, a Mongol port in Crimea. Italians bought mainly female slaves for service, personal and sexual; as we will see, the Medici owned both white and black female slaves. The identity of the slaves depended on the wars being fought at any given time: the Mongol wars generated incalculable numbers of slaves, as every Mongol soldier was expected to own two as part of his equipage. Enslaved Turks, Russians, Circassians and Georgians poured into Europe and Egypt. The greatest demand for male slaves came from the military commandos of Egypt: Sultan Qalawun, himself formerly enslaved, promised Italian traders to pay over the market price, and his household contained as many as 12,000 Mamluks. Later sultans owned 25,000, but they were ultimately manumitted and could rise to be generals if not monarchs.

The Genoese were more adventurous than the Venetians, paying for their Asian goods in bullion, which originated in western Africa at a time when Genoese and Catalan sailors began to venture down the Moroccan coast. In 1291, two Genoese brothers, the Vivaldis, tried to find a route ‘by the Ocean Sea’ to India, sailing down the Moroccan coast and then out in the unknown, whence they never returned. Later, another Genoese, Lancelotto Malocello, set off to find the Vivaldis. The Venetians meanwhile concentrated on their Mediterranean empire and the Egyptian trade.

The gold that lubricated all this trade was now in the hands of a powerful African dynasty. Just at the time of Marco’s return, a mysterious African potentate named Sakura emerged out of the Sahara and arrived in Cairo on his way to make the hajj. Sakura was mansa – emperor – of a rich new realm built on military conquests and gold trading on the ruins of Wagadu.

Its founder, Sundiata Keita,^* was the outcast son of a Mandinke farma or king, Naré Maghann Konaté, who was told in a vision that he would marry an ugly woman who would deliver a great king. Instead this junior wife, Sogolon, gave birth to a cripple, Sundiata; mother and son were mocked by the king’s senior wife, Sassouma Bereté, and the crown prince, Dankaran. Sundiata did not walk until he was seven. When Naré died, Dankaran ordered Sundiata’s killing. Mother and son fled to the court of the Sosso king Soumaoro Kanté, encouraging him to expel the vicious Dankaran, but the Sosso instead occupied the kingdom. The Mandinke elders then invited Sundiata to return. Around 1235, he raised an army and at Kirina defeated the Sosso, after which the Gbara assembly, made up of grandees, sorcerers and Islamic holy men (marabouts), chose him as mansa in return for his recognition of an oral law code^* and agreed that mansas would be chosen from the Keita family – which ruled until 1610.

Basing himself at a new capital Niani (Mali), Sundiata – known as the Lion King – expanded to Senegal and Gambia on the Atlantic and along the Niger River to northern Nigeria, co-opting conquered princes. The mansa controlled the supply of gold from the Bamaka and Bure mines worked by Akan people (Ghana), the ultimate source of their wealth, but as the Lion King’s descendant Musa explained, they did not own the mines; instead they procured the gold by trade or tribute: ‘If we conquer them and take it, it won’t yield anything.’ But the gold was all-important. Indeed, one of Sundiata’s titles was Lord of the Mines of Wangara.

Islam had been brought across the desert by Berbers and Arab traders. Sundiata claimed descent from the Abyssinian freedman Bilal, Muhammad’s first muezzin, but he was also described as a Mandinke magician. This empire was fuelled not just by gold but by textiles and slaves, the latter usually pagans captured in Sundiata’s endless wars who served as labourers, servants and concubines.^*

Around 1255, Sundiata somehow drowned in the Sankarani River – at a place still called Sundiatadun (Sundiata’s Depths) – but his son, Uli (Yérélinkon), continued the expansion, making the first mansal pilgrimage to Mecca. But when two Keita brothers fought for the throne, Sakura, a freedman general, seized power, rebuilt the realm and set off to Mecca, only to be killed on the way home, at which the Keitas were restored.