by Alan Mikhail
JUST AS ISLAM INFLUENCED Spanish warfare in the Americas, it also affected the administrative structures of Spain’s New World empire. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Spanish faced a more extreme version of an earlier challenge: how, as Christian rulers, to govern a vast population of non-Christians—this time, on the far side of an ocean.
The sacking in 1085 of the picturesque city of Toledo, just south of Madrid, was the first major victory of the Reconquista. When the triumphant King Alfonso VI, a shrewd prince who had come to power through an Ottoman-like outmaneuvering of his older brother, began to grapple with the problem of ruling this majority-Muslim city, he sought the advice of Siznado David, a Portuguese Muslim convert to Christianity. David suggested that he follow the lead of the city’s previous Muslim sovereigns, who, when they took control in 1035, imposed on the then majority-Christian population a head tax, known as the jizya, in return for protection. Recognizing the value of this advice, Alfonso adopted this and many other Muslim practices. Certainly no crypto-Muslim—in truth, he reviled Islam—Alfonso nevertheless saw that his religious enemy’s governing strategies had proven their effectiveness. Moreover, maintaining them would ensure the least disruptive transition of power. Indeed, following the numerous waves of the Reconquista, Christian rulers often maintained the practices—from taxation schemes to market regulations to administrative assignments to modes of warfare—of the Muslim regimes they had just unseated.
Nearly all Muslim polities had assigned Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims to the category of dhimmi. Dhimmis were offered specific rights in exchange for certain obligations, the major one being the payment of the jizya. This was a personal tax, not a tax on property or commerce—a tax for simply being a non-Muslim in a Muslim state. Unquestionably, it represented a humiliating subjugation. Still, it enshrined a pact between the non-Muslim taxpayer and the Muslim sovereign: in exchange for payment of the jizya, the sovereign was obliged to protect dhimmi rights to freedom of worship and the open exercise of each community’s religious laws. In stark contrast to Spain’s bloody Inquisition, Muslim policies allowed non-Muslims to practice their religion without fear of death.
As occurred after the conquest of Toledo, Spain’s Christian rulers sometimes instituted a variation of the jizya over the non-Christians they conquered, termed the tributo (tribute). The tributo was put into effect almost exclusively in cities and towns where the majority of the population was non-Christian and hence needed to be convinced to accept Spanish Christian rule. In locales with Christian majorities, the conquerors imposed the harsher policies of the Inquisition.
The Requirement took the jizya-inspired tributo to the New World. Like the Islamic tax, the Spanish version was a mark of vassalage. America’s native peoples had to pay simply for existing as non-Christians in a Christian state. In assessing the Spanish colonial transfer of this Muslim practice to the New World, Seed writes that the “indigenous peoples of the Americas became New World dhimmīs.” As with those subjected to the jizya and tributo in Spain itself, American Indians, in exchange for payment of this tax, were allowed to maintain the autonomy of their communities, to practice their beliefs, and to govern themselves according to their own rites and laws—that is, once they had acknowledged the superiority of the Christian faith. Given the haphazard nature of Spanish administration in the first few decades of colonization, however, the guarantee of these rights was often an unmet ideal.
AS THEY HAD DONE since 1453, Spain and the Ottoman Empire continued after 1492 to battle over the legacy of the Roman Empire, long understood as the Old World’s paradigmatic political entity. An empire was not simply a succession of systems of rule on the ground but also an ideal, a set of universal governing principles put into practice. The Romans had, it was thought, perfected this seamless melding of real-world action and political theory, and so both the Ottomans and the Spanish (as well as others) sought to claim the Roman legacy for themselves. Asserting their descent from this universalistic tradition, both empires hoped to don the Romans’ mantle—territorially, ideologically, administratively. Continuity with the Roman past bolstered the legitimacy and authority needed to govern in the early modern present.
Thus, the Ottomans would regularly refer to themselves as Rum, Turkish for “the Romans,” and, by the end of Selim’s reign, their empire would come the closest in world history to holding all the territory the Romans had once controlled. Not for nothing have the Ottomans been described as “the Romans of the Muslim world.” The Spanish, too, often compared themselves to the Romans, especially during the reign of Charles V. In 1519, Charles joined the Spanish Empire to what remained of the Holy Roman Empire, politically unifying Europe as had not been done since Charlemagne, but still falling far short of the territorial breadth of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, even as far away as Mexico, a resurgent Spain asserted its Roman heritage. Aiming to capture the maize-rich ancient city of Tlaxcala in the 1519 Battle of Otumba, Cortés inspired his troops by saying, “As for your observation, gentlemen, that the most famous Roman captains never performed deeds equal to ours, you are quite right. If God helps us, far more will be said in future history books about our exploits than has ever been said about those of the past.” The complicated intertwining of the Romans, the Ottomans, and the Spanish grew ever more complex in the New World.
By adding some Christian elements to an embellished Aztec legend, Cortés claimed that the Aztec emperor Montezuma—described by the expedition’s chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo as “of good height, well proportioned, spare and slight, and not very dark”—“donated” his empire to Charles V because the Aztecs believed Cortés to be the prophesied “Great Lord” who would one day come from the east. This invented “donation” deliberately echoed another fictitious Old World tale the Spanish used to justify their politics, both past and present: the Donation of Constantine. As the story goes, Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, in 330 transferred his capital to a new city, which he named Constantinople, thereby purposefully leaving—“donating”—Italy and the rest of western Europe to the pope and his successors. Charles V stood then as the rightful heir of both Constantine and Montezuma, a descendant of the Roman legacy and the custodian of New World imperial power. By logical extension, anyone in the Ottoman and Aztec empires who resisted Spanish rule prevented Charles V from fully possessing what was rightfully given to him as “monarch of the universe.” As with the expansion of the Crusades to the New World, the competition between the Spanish and the Ottomans to be the early modern world’s new Roman Empire crossed the Atlantic too.
BETWEEN 1492 AND COLUMBUS’S death in 1506, both he and Selim served on their empires’ frontiers. Comparing Hispaniola and Trabzon, two regions not often considered together, illuminates some of the key differences in the governing philosophy of these early modern states. Populations of indigenous Americans who were not obliterated by European diseases fell instead to the sword of Christianity, as instructed by the Requirement. The decimation perpetrated by Spanish rule in the Americas resulted both from the initial ethos of Crusade that sent Columbus west and a political ideology that demanded the submission of conquered peoples.
Selim was not the buccaneer Columbus was. He imposed Ottoman sovereignty not by erasing what existed before conquest, but rather by co-opting often hostile subjects and reshaping existing institutions along Ottoman lines. Surrounded his whole life by imperial administration, he was through learning and experience a bureaucrat. With an understanding of the reciprocity of rule embedded in the Circle of Justice, and having been informed by his mother’s far-sighted strategizing, he understood how to navigate the choppy social and political waters around him. In many ways, his success was a matter of class and upbringing as much as temperament and interest. Above all, sage governance and provident strategy drove Selim, rather than an apocalyptic imagination or dreams of gold and unconverted souls in far-off lands.
CHAPTER
10
THE TAINO–MUSLIMS OF HISPANIOLA
A native dance for courage on Hispaniola
SLAVERY, UNWITTINGLY, HASTENED THE INTRODUCTION OF ISLAM in the New World. With conquest had come land, and this land clearly needed labor to make it productive. Given massive native resistance and the increasing ravages of disease, Spain’s rulers quickly understood that they faced a labor deficit. The importation of West African slaves to the New World offered a solution—one derived not from the compassion for native oppression expressed by the likes of Bartolomé de Las Casas, but rather from economic exigency and European self-interest.
Slavery was ubiquitous in the Old World, shared alike across the centuries by large and small states in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and throughout Asia. In the Mediterranean, Muslim slavery differed from Christian slavery in several significant respects. In Islam, slavery was temporary, not hereditary, and it did not necessarily sever ties between slaves and their own families. Most often, slaves in the Muslim world performed domestic functions rather than brute labor in agriculture, mining, transport, and the like. Fundamental to understanding slavery in the Ottoman Empire, and indeed throughout Muslim history, is the insight that in fact it served as a conduit for upward social mobility. The Janissary Corps—the empire’s most prestigious military cadre—was comprised of men who had begun their lives as Christians, mostly in Balkan villages. For these men, as wrenching as their early loss of freedom was, forgetting one’s origins offered a new kind of freedom—freedom from the pain of losing one’s family and homeland, freedom to focus on the prospects of their current station. Slavery, as we have seen, was even a feature of the imperial family. Every sultan’s mother was technically a slave, having been captured during battle, given over by her family, or acquired through the slave trade. Yet, in spite of this status, these women—think of Gülbahar—operated at the very highest levels of government, often wielding more power than their sons and sometimes even more than their owners, the sultans themselves. Despite the obvious coercion, Ottoman slavery ultimately functioned in an integrative fashion. In fact, it was far easier for a converted Christian slave born in the Balkans to become a member of the Ottoman elite than it was for a freeborn Muslim from Anatolia to do so.
European slavery was vastly different. Christians regularly captured non-Christians (most often Muslims) in war and held them as slaves—the trade in African slaves, too, had been flourishing for decades before it expanded across the Atlantic—but these human possessions were seldom integrated into their captors’ society. Most often they lived out their days performing hard labor in mines, the lower decks of galleys, or other grim surroundings. Indeed, Spain frequently fought its Muslim enemies at sea with Muslim slaves in the bellies of its ships pulling the oars. In Europe, slavery was hereditary, and even though captives or their families technically were allowed to purchase freedom (a process known as redemption), most could not meet the prohibitively high cost.
Through war, piracy, and the slave trade, thousands of Muslims reached Europe as slaves. In the sun-drenched Italian coastal city of Livorno, for example, at almost the exact moment when Spain gave its final order to expel Iberian Muslims in 1614, one out of every twelve persons was an enslaved Muslim (there were also non-Muslim slaves). The situations in other large European cities were similar. As the Ottomans did with their Christian slaves, the Europeans forcibly converted the Muslims and other non-Christians they transported to their slave markets, but their conversion was in many cases questionable, if not wholly fictitious. Thus, even as Spain expelled its freeborn Muslims, it replaced them with increasing numbers of Muslim slaves, mostly from North and West Africa. Because of slavery, Muslims—albeit in far different circumstances—retained a place in the heart of Christendom.
AMONG WEST AFRICA’S LARGEST Muslim populations were the Wolof people. The first contact between the Wolof and the Portuguese occurred in 1446, when Nuno Tristão, one of Henry the Navigator’s mariners, sailed inland along the lush banks of the muddy Gambia River. He and most of his crew were killed on this expedition. Several years later, in 1452, Europe secured papal sanction for the enslavement of West Africans with the bull Dum Diversas that Henry received from Pope Nicholas V.
A fierce zeal to fight the Moors and extend Christianity’s global Crusade spurred the expeditions of Henry and his men. These forays were organized mostly from the largest of the Cape Verde islands, Santiago—tellingly, named for the patron saint of Moor-slayers. A little more than four hundred miles due west of Dakar in present-day Senegal, the rocky island was settled by the Portuguese in 1462. Safely offshore yet within easy striking distance of Senegambia—the region of West Africa between the Senegal and Gambia rivers—Santiago proved the perfect perch from which to raid and trade along the African coast. Indeed, a robust commerce soon emerged, in which Portuguese iron, weaponry, and finished goods were exchanged for African slaves. When the Spanish entered the West African slave trade a few years later, hoping to displace the Portuguese, they came to rely on the routes and contacts established by their Iberian rivals.
The first African slaves arrived in Iberia almost immediately after the papal bull of 1452, and their numbers quickly ballooned. In fact, the slave trade was a crucial element of early modern European society and the continent’s economy. Between 1489 and 1497, for example, Spanish traders sold 2,003 West Africans in Valencia, one of the largest slave markets in Iberia and indeed in the entire Mediterranean. Valencians constituted about a third of Iberia’s slave dealers in the fifteenth century, and the city’s government imposed a hefty 20 percent tax on all sales of slaves. When the frightened Africans arrived in the harbor, haggard and disoriented, they were first allowed to rest—with Valencia’s famous ramparts functioning as their prison walls—before being displayed for sale on its thoroughfares.
The majority of the slaves transported from West Africa in the late fifteenth century were Wolof Muslims. Buyers in Valencia and throughout Iberia paid the lowest prices for Wolofs, because they were perceived as requiring more training and acculturation than others. Black slaves who had lived in Christian or Muslim kingdoms in North Africa or the Iberian peninsula were more expensive, because they were seen as more knowledgeable about slave life in Spain than those arriving directly from West Africa. Adult males were usually more expensive than women and children, and those with particularly coveted skills drew higher prices.
During this period, the Wolof Empire split into smaller rival states that took up arms against one another. This internecine warfare provided an enormous boost to the slave trade. Most of the men captured during wars in West Africa became soldiers in the armies that captured them, but those deemed less useful were sold to the Portuguese to subsidize the ongoing conflicts. These human beings for sale included not only those eliminated from the soldiering ranks but also “criminals, witches, outcasts, and perhaps, enemies of the chief.” West Africans thus used the slave trade, in part, to eliminate “undesirables” from their own societies.
Given their growing need for manpower across the Atlantic after 1492, the Spanish soon realized that the Wolof and other West African slaves arriving in Iberia constituted a ready labor pool. But having just defeated Iberia’s last Muslim polity in Granada, they did not want to inadvertently take Islam to their colonies in the New World, so they were at first wary of dispatching West Africans, even those who had ostensibly converted to Christianity.
The Americas represented new territory, a tabula rasa that became a promised land of sorts, where Catholicism could be imposed completely, wholly free of Islam—very different from the situation that greeted Europeans in West Africa, where Islam was thriving even in regions where it was not the majority religion. Shock at the geographic spread and strength of Islam only compounded Catholic notions that Muslims were advancing all around them. The Spanish fantasy that Native Americans might somehow be linked to Muslims was a major reason for the European dread of importing Islam to the Americas through slavery.