Philip advised Sebastian against his plan, but in 1577 the Desired landed at Tangier with the cream of Portuguese nobility, 17,000 men and many volunteers,* who marched in full armour into the interior. The heat was so intense that Sebastian had cold water poured into his armour, but he was unprepared when, on 4 August 1578, at Ksar el-Kebir, he encountered 60,000 Moroccan troops. Sultan Abd al-Malik was dying but his brother Ahmed encircled the Portuguese. Sebastian had three horses shot from under him. Then he charged and was cut off; his Moroccan pretender was drowned (later flayed and stuffed) and the victor Abd al-Malik expired – three kings dead during one battle. Eight thousand Portuguese were killed, 15,000 – many of them female camp followers – were enslaved. Sebastian’s body was never found: he became the Sleeping King, expected to awaken and rule in the End of Days. But two monarchs benefited from his folly.
Abd al-Malik’s brother, Ahmed – now Sultan al-Mansur, the Victor, later known as the Golden – was ferociously capable, making Morocco a pivotal power and allying himself with Elizabeth of England, with whom he hoped to reconquer Spain. Al-Mansur also hoped to colonize America with Moroccan settlers, blessed by a transatlantic advent of the Mahdi, which did not come to pass. To the south, he envied the wealth of the Songhai kingdom that replaced Mali, demanding revenues from their salt and gold. The
Philip was the other beneficiary. The Aviz were almost extinct and he was the heir: he seized Portugal and united the first two world empires. His flashy brother Don Juan died ingloriously of typhoid, but his death undermined negotiations with the Dutch, who went back to war – and this time Philip appointed his talented Italian nephew, the duke of Parma, who captured Antwerp and the southern provinces. The division was decisive: at Utrecht in 1579, the seven northern provinces – Holland, Zeeland and others – formed a military defence union, directed by their States-General, with help from William and the Orange family. Two years later, the United Provinces declared independence, while the south (Belgium) swore allegiance to the Habsburgs. The union had just 1.5 million people and its forces under William and his brother were defeated by Parma. Elizabeth helped with a meagre army that Parma trounced. Yet the United Provinces, forged by religious war, rising patriotism and international voyaging and well served by their many walled cities and watery terrain, proved resilient; the union was also powered by a pluralistic society that welcome talented immigrants, by a sophisticated economy and financial markets, and by an early welfare system for poor relief. As the Sea Beggars harassed Habsburg shipping, Elizabeth unleashed her own privateers – the ‘seadogs’ led by Jack Hawkins and Francis Drake – for a spree of English raiding. The war against the Habsburgs became a fight to the death.
KING BAYANO, DRAKE AND DIEGO
On 26 September 1580, a grizzled Devonian sea captain, Francis Drake, sailed into Plymouth with the most profitable cargo ever for an English raid on Habsburg treasure. But he arrived back with just one of the five ships in his flotilla and only fifty-six of that ship’s original crew of eighty. Elizabeth was delighted: her profit is estimated at 4,700 per cent.
Drake was the scion of a cousinhood of Devon seafaring families – Hawkins, Gilberts, Raleighs – that would form the spearhead of English expansion and of involvement in the slave trade. At its centre were Drake’s kinsmen, the Hawkinses, to whom he owed his rise. The Hawkinses had long traded English wool with the Italian cities, and in 1530 William Hawkins started trading ivory in Guinea. As a boy, his son Jack had met and served Philip of Spain (‘my old master’) when he landed to marry Queen Mary, but he embraced the opportunities of the rising tension with the paramount Catholic power. In 1562, he raised funds from London merchants to raid the African coast and trade slaves, setting off with his twenty-year-old cousin Drake to attack Portuguese traders, taking ‘into his possession, partly by the sword and partly other means, to the number of three hundred Negroes’. He then sailed to Hispaniola, where in exchange for the slaves ‘he received such quantities of hides, gingers, sugars, pearls’ that he filled five ships. He sold 500 slaves on his second voyage; on his third he was contacted by two African kings asking for his help against their rival, for which his payment was to take ‘as many Negroes as by warres might be obtained’.
