The World полностью

While Isabella fought Granada, El Hombre dispatched a courtier, Diogo Cão, to push further south, where he penetrated the Congo River and heard of the powerful Kongo kingdom inland. Cão started to negotiate with the manikongo Nzinga a Nkuwu, who saw the Portuguese as useful allies. In 1491, Nzinga gave João II’s delegation a magnificent welcome – 3,000 warriors with bows and parrot-feathered headdresses, dancing to drums and ivory trumpets, who escorted them to his capital Mbanza. There, holding court, he agreed to an alliance with Lisbon in return for his own baptism, taking the Christian name João I of Kongo, while his son Nzinza a Mbemba became Afonso. Their vision of Catholicism was a syncretic merging with their own religious customs, a royal cult linked to the sacred power of the manikongo, suffused in baKongo spirituality. When Portuguese priests demanded he dismiss his harem, João changed his mind, but his son Afonso, a regional governor in his thirties, went on to study Catholicism. On his father’s death in 1505, aided by his mother, Afonso bid for the throne and defeated his anti-Christian brother in a battle in which he was aided by a vision of St James. Creating a Portuguese-style nobility with titles, family crests and Christian religious-military orders, he learned to read, built schools for biblical studies and founded a capital of stone palaces and churches. Using Portuguese muskets and horses, he expanded his kingdom, keeping some of his captured slaves to work on his own plantations, giving hundreds to the king in Lisbon while selling thousands to Portuguese merchants.

But this was not the only choice for African kings. Oba Esigie of Benin traded captives and pepper with the Portuguese, but devised a wiser relationship, strictly maintaining his independence.^*

In 1488 El Hombre sent a squire, Bartolomeu Dias, to sail round Africa’s southern tip, which he named Cape of Storms (later Cape of Good Hope), opening a route to the spicy riches of the Indian Ocean – just at the moment when Columbus may have proposed his own voyage in the opposite direction – though there is no evidence he spoke to João. But the Iberian courts were one big vicious family. João had just married his son to Isabella’s eldest daughter – so Columbus moved on to the Trastámarans. Around 1482, he had arrived in Seville to find a place to educate his son, visiting the Franciscan convent La Rábida, where he met the brilliant, well-connected friar Antonio de Marchena, who encouraged the idea of sailing to India across the Ocean Sea (Atlantic) – enabling a Last World Emperor to conquer Jerusalem. This was Ferdinand, who as king of Aragon had a claim to Jerusalem (a fief of Naples). Marchena introduced him to the aristocrats who launched him at court.

Columbus dispatched his brother to propose the plan to the new English king, Henry Tudor. Insecurely established and notoriously miserly, Henry demurred, thus missing an opportunity to create an earlier English empire. Columbus therefore trailed after the Spanish monarchs. Just after the birth of her youngest daughter Catalina, Isabella listened to the fascinating and frequently preposterous Genoan. Often she and Ferdinand burst out laughing at his performances, moments he mentioned proudly in his letters.

Just as the monarchs called an end to their crusade, leaving Muhammad XII with Granada as a tributary city state, he defied his Christian patrons. They moved in for the kill. As they besieged the city, Isabella resided in an almost caliphal tent in camp. When she went to view the battlements, Arab knights sortied out; she watched as 600 were killed. Granadans were now eating ‘horses, dogs, cats’. Finally the amir negotiated peace with the monarchs’ general, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, who spoke fluent Arabic.

On 2 January 1492, Isabella, dressed theatrically in Arab morisca style in al-juba (an all-embracing cloak), knee-length skirt, long sleeves, brocaded silk, accompanied by Ferdinand and their son Juan, themselves in Arab gear, together with their retinue, including the white-haired Columbus, watched Muhammad XII ride out towards them. The amir doffed his hat, unstirrupped one foot and leaned forward to kiss the queen’s hand, until she magnanimously waved this aside and handed over his son El Infantico Ahmed, receiving in return 400 Christian slaves and the city keys. After taking his leave, Muhammad paused at the top of the hill – the Moor’s Last Sigh – to look back on 700 years of al-Andalus as the Catholics celebrated mass. While the Granadan nobility sailed for Morocco, the Trastámarans now had around 400,000 Muslims to add to their 150,000 Jews.^*

Appreciating the feverish millenarian exhilaration of this moment, Columbus requested an audience. Finally he had timed it perfectly.

ANACAONA, THE ADMIRAL AND THE QUEEN