The World полностью

Sugar originated in the South Seas, probably in Papua New Guinea, reaching India around AD 350 and then the Arab caliphate. Al-sukkar was a labour-intensive crop, worked by zanj, African slaves, in their Iraq plantations, later transplanted by the Arabs to Sicily and al-Andalus. As the resurgence of the Ottomans was blocking sugar supplies from the east, Henry, backed by the Genoese, brought sugar saplings from Sicily and planted them on Madeira. There Perestrello, capitão donatário and Lord of Porto Santo, one of the islands of the archipelago, used Italian and Portuguese workers, soon joined by 2,000 slaves, probably Berbers from Morocco. Later his daughter married a young Genoese sailor: Columbus.

Next, Henry developed the Azores, tried to steal the Canaries from Castile and then in 1434 commissioned his men to sail further south. Three years later, realizing that Saharan caravans were avoiding Ceuta and arriving at Tangier, he persuaded his brother King Duarte to back a Tangerine assault, which was a disaster.^* Henry’s sailors started to sail around the coast of west Africa.

In 1444, one of Henry’s henchmen arrived at Lagos on the Algarve with caravels filled with 225 slaves, some Berbers, some black Africans: ‘some white enough, fair to look upon … others … less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops, and so ugly’. Henry exhibited them on the river front. ‘It’s not their religion but their humanity that makes me weep in pity for their sufferings,’ wrote a witness, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, royal archivist and Henry’s biographer. ‘To increase their sufferings still more they now began to separate one from another in order to make the shares equal. It now became necessary to separate fathers from sons, wives from husbands, brothers from brothers …’ Much of the slave trade had originally been driven by demand for domestic slaves who joined family households. Now at the birth of Atlantic slavery, slave traders captured entire families and then tore them apart. Slavery was an anti-familial institution. This small scene, filled with cruelty, hypocrisy and avarice, was the beginning of an industry that would sweeten European palates and poison society for five centuries.^*

After 1445, Henry’s captains travelled past the Senegal River and started to negotiate with African potentates who had their own complex interests, experienced as they were in trading pepper, ivory, gold and slaves with Arab or Berber merchants across the Sahara.^* Portuguese venturers exchanged horses or paid in local currencies, iron bars, cloth or, most commonly, cowrie shells, receiving in return slaves, usually prisoners from wars against neighbouring enemies, pepper, gold and ivory. These traders divided the region known as Guinea (based on a Berber word for black people) into product sections – Gold Coast, Pepper Coast, Ivory Coast and Slave Coast – like a continental hypermarket.

On the coasts of west Africa, palm tappers were drinking palm wine and playing akonting music beside the beach when suddenly, lit by lights on the sea, ‘cannibal ghosts’ landed and seized them, never to be seen again. These handed-down memories, recalled by Daniel Jatta, a Gambian musician-historian, mark a pivotal moment: the ‘cannibal ghosts’ were Henry’s Portuguese; the palm tappers were among the first to be seized from African beaches and enslaved – probably taken to work on Perestrello’s Madeiran plantations. As the Aviz probed Africa, in Lisbon Henry sent a gift to Pope Martin V, who was already interested in Africa and slavery. In 1418, soon after his election, Martin recognized the Portuguese campaign in Morocco as a crusade, but African slavery was not yet an issue. Mediterranean slaves were still usually Turks, Slavs and Georgians traded by Genoa, Venice and Egypt via Crimea to the Islamic and Christian markets. In 1425, Martin banned the sale of Christians to Muslims, but not to Christians because wealthy Italians often owned Slavic (Orthodox) slaves, usually girls for domestic work and sexual exploitation. But now Henry sent the pope ten African slaves.

Martin was engaged in a world-changing project – the re-establishment of a single, Roman papacy after a century of multiple simultaneous popes and anti-popes, backed by German and French potentates, and brought with him a family that defined a new mercantile world and a new sort of dynasty: the Medici.

COSIMO AND THE PIRATE POPE: IN THE NAME OF GOD AND GOOD BUSINESS