One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Disappeared into the dark hold of a European ship as thousands of others like him would be, young Mustafa surely should have been forgotten by history, just another casualty of the ancient grudge between the forces of Caliphates and Christendom. Instead, precisely because of his ability to move between faiths, he survived the confines of slavery to become the first man of the Old World to make his way across the vast expanse of the New.

  For nearly a millennium, the city that gave this boy the name Zemmouri had been a place known for its blending of beliefs. From the earliest arrival of Islam in Morocco in the seventh century, Azemmour became home to a variant of the Muslim faith that commingled the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad with doctrines borrowed from Judaism and Christianity, while also making free use of the ancient astrology that guided the nomadic tribes of the region as well as popular rituals of magic and witchcraft.

  Moroccan religious life was remarkable mainly because of a syncretic system of local devotion known as maraboutism, named for murabits, mystic teachers largely of the Sufi school of Islam who gathered followers within fortified strongholds called ribats. Within these ribats, which were built in coastal cities like Azemmour as bulwarks against European invasion, each mubarit instructed his disciples with his own idiosyncratic interpretations of the many religious experiences available at the time. They were linked by a common element: the training of disciples as defenders against crusaders from the north. Guided by maraboutism, Azemmour for centuries had been open to the blending of practices and belief within, but watchful for the imposition of faith from without.

  Closer to Mustafa Zemmouri’s time, Azemmour served as a refuge for Jews and Muslims driven from Catholic Spain. A city of thousands in the year of his birth, it remained home to sizable Jewish and Christian minorities, who lived more or less in peace among the Muslim majority, a miniature convivencia—coexistence—that had proved tragically ephemeral across the Strait of Gibraltar.

  Yet the peace of Azemmour was challenged throughout the years of Zemmouri’s childhood. After a failed attempt to take the city in 1508, and a refusal by local leaders to pay tribute to a Christian monarch, the Portuguese returned in force in 1513. As the sixteenth-century diplomat and historian Leo Africanus described the onset of the invasion, “the king sent another navy of two hundred sail well furnished, at the very sight whereof the citizens were so discomfited, that they all betook themselves to flight.” Addressing his reader, he notes, “Neither could you… have refrained from teares, had you seene the weak women, the silly old men, and the tender children run away bare-footed and forlorn.” If Mustafa Zemmouri and his family were among those trying to escape, they would have been disappointed. “The throng was so great at their entrance of the gates, that more than fourscore citizens were slain therein,” Leo Africanus writes, “and so the Christians obtained the city.”

  In the aftermath of the naval invasion (which counted among its 15,000-strong landing force Ferdinand Magellan, just six years before he set off to circumnavigate the globe), economic conditions became dire enough that children of working age sold themselves into slavery, trading their poverty and freedom for the possibility of food and shelter.

  This, it seems, was the decision made by young Mustafa Zemmouri, or perhaps by his parents, or else by those who had either economic or legal control over the boy and his family. The circumstances that led to his departure were part of a systematic assault on the culture of the region, a set of repressive measures that soon would lead the locals to wage an armed insurgency against the Christian invaders. As in other places at other times where devout Muslims had attached religious significance to their guerrilla campaigns, those fighting against the Portuguese identified themselves by the same term that had been used for the disciples of the murabits within the ramparts of religious and military instruction: mujahideen. And they knew their mission by the Arabic word for struggle: jihad.

  Zemmouri would not be there to join this struggle, or to revel in its success when the Portuguese evacuated in 1541. He would see neither his city nor his family again. He was transported out of Africa, first to Portugal and then Spain—and, in the process, he became someone new. Like virtually all of the Muslims brought in bondage to a land that had chased Islam from its shores just a generation before, he was converted to Catholicism, either by the slaver who sold him or by the man who bought him. If by the former, his conversion was likely accomplished for marketing purposes: A Christian slave had fewer restrictions placed on where he could live and work, and so was a more portable asset. If, on the other hand, he was converted by his new owner, it was likely for the belief that a slave of one’s own faith was easier to control. Conversions at the time were most often practical and pro forma; they said little conclusively about the convert’s loyalties or his beliefs, as Spain’s obsessive fear of secret Jews and crypto-Muslims well proved.

  Regardless of the sincerity of his conversion, Zemmouri became known in his captivity as Esteban, the name of the first Christian martyr, and sometimes by the diminutive Estebanico, “Little Stephen.” Yet even after he had been renamed, he still was frequently referred to simply as “the Arab,” “the black,” or “the Moor.” The place he had come from, the color of his skin, and the faith he had professed when he boarded the slave ship in Azemmour, these were the things that defined him—certainly to others, and likely to himself.

  It was fitting, then, that he would soon find himself undertaking a righteous struggle of his own—not for faith but for his freedom. While his countrymen had fought for their own land, the jihad of Mustafa Zemmouri would take him across an ocean, and into the heart of America.

  To understand what became of the boy from Azemmour in the mostly unknown place to which he was soon sent, we need to return for a moment to the earliest encounter between Europe and the New World. Within twenty years of Columbus’s collision with the Taino people, the Spanish began to realize they had stumbled onto more than a scattering of islands. And while Columbus himself had fixated, until his death in 1506, on his own imagined individual role as a divinely inspired explorer-king predicted by biblical prophecy, the religiously obsessed civilization that had birthed this “Christ-bearer” had its own preoccupations.

  The vast interior of North America was thought by some to be home to the Seven Cities of Cibola, which according to legend were not only kingdoms made entirely of gold but were, like Mustafa Zemmouri’s exile from Azemmour, born of the clash of Christendom and the Islamic world. As pious stories passed down for generations told the tale, some eight hundred years before, seven bishops had fled the Iberian Peninsula ahead of invading Moorish armies. Each had escaped along with a crowd of the faithful on vessels left by their attackers at Gibraltar. As the legend continued, these bishops and their followers, upon reaching an island in the “sea of darkness,” had burned their ships to ashes to avoid the temptation of return. They then built seven cities, each home to a single bishop and the souls in his care, each rich with treasures saved by Christians from the infidel hordes.

  This saga was undoubtedly a fairy tale, albeit one of epic proportions. The supposed site of the seven bishops’ landing and subsequent construction of their cities had island-hopped across the Atlantic in the European imagination with each successive discovery of terra incognita. Placed variously on the Canary Islands and the Azores, the mythical cities also cast a shadow in the form of the most enduring lost civilization story, Atlantis. As recorded in perhaps the first-ever global depiction of the earth’s geography, the German cartographer Martin Behaim placed the cities on the island of Antilia:

  In the year 734 of Christ when the whole of Spain had been won by the heathen of Africa, the above island Antilia called Septa Citade [Seven Cities] was inhabited by an archbishop from Porto in Portugal, with six other bishops and other Christians, men and women, who had fled thither from Spain by ship, together with their cattle, belongings and goods. 1414 a ship from Spain got near it without being endangered.

  Far from c
onfirming that these legends were nothing but the daydreams of devout imaginations, the inability to substantiate the rumors of their existence became proof that they must lie somewhere in the expanse of the newly discovered territories. The hope of finally locating the Cities of Cibola was one of the earliest and most provocative enticements to undertake the arduous exploration of the North American continent.

  The journey into a region subsequent explorers came to refer to as the Northern Mystery was not only about laying claim to riches or mapping the unknown. It was, for the Iberian adventurers who began the European plunder of America, about the recovery of a supposedly lost religious heritage. If found, the cities would of course make their rediscoverers rich. More importantly, their reclamation would ease the centuries-old national embarrassment of having lost “the whole of Spain” to “the heathen of Africa” and their alien faith, Islam. The enduring rivalry between these two empires of belief made the position of anyone with a foot in each world particularly precarious yet also particularly open to the possibility of transformation—as the boy from Azemmour would soon discover.

  While the facts of his youth can only be conjectured, it is certain that upon leaving North Africa the young Moroccan eventually arrived in Spain, where he was sold into the service of a man roughly his own age, the nobleman Andrés Dorantes. Though only in his twenties, Dorantes had already seen his share of fighting, and had the scars to prove it. He wore the mark of a saber slash across his face from his experience suppressing an uprising of Castilians against the youthful King Charles V during a clash known as the Revolt of the Comuneros of 1520. As it is likely Zemmouri had come into the service of Dorantes before or during the battle that left the latter disfigured, it is possible that the two men were already comrades-in-arms by the time they set sail for America seven years later.

  Peers they were not, however. The choice to join such an expedition belonged to Dorantes alone. When the apparently adventure-hungry Spaniard was invited by a fellow veteran of the Comunero revolt to join some six hundred soldiers, sailors, and slaves on a voyage to New Spain, Zemmouri had no choice but to go along. Had he been asked, he would have had ample reasons to decline. To begin with, a person owned was far less likely to return from such a voyage than the one who owned him. Moreover, the family history of the man responsible for their participation—Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca—might have seemed a bad omen for what lay ahead.

  Cabeza de Vaca, ten years senior to Zemmouri and Andrés Dorantes, was to be treasurer of the expedition and would later become its accidental scribe as the author of a chronicle of one of the most calamitous journeys in history. In the 1542 relación he wrote about the ordeal, he is also cast as the expedition’s hero.

  To the men who struggled with him, this was likely not a surprise. Taking credit for the exploits of others was written into his very name. According to possibly apocryphal tradition, his odd moniker, which literally means “Head of the Cow,” had been earned through one of the violent intersections of faith that punctuate Spanish history. Passed down for centuries on his mother’s side, the honorific “Cabeza de Vaca” had been bestowed originally on a medieval Iberian shepherd named Martin Halaja, who once infamously used a bovine skull to mark a hidden pass to an encampment of Moors, allowing the Catholic armies of the Reconquista to march under cover of darkness, surprise their enemy at daybreak, and kill them in their tents. Thus awarded a dubious title, Halaja passed it down to his heirs, and they to theirs, ten generations of Cows’ Heads until the Moor-killing legend of Cabeza de Vaca was carried across the sea. It is a great joke of the fates that we know of Zemmouri’s life mostly because of Cabeza de Vaca’s account of their journey together. They were a Morisco and a man named for a slaughter of Muslims, joined by disaster.

  Together with Dorantes, Cabeza de Vaca, and some six hundred others, Zemmouri set out in late 1527 as part of a mission to explore, colonize, and gain the riches of the New World, though doubtless he knew none of this wealth would be his. Most of it would go to the expedition’s official leader, Pánfilo Narváez, who had served in the Spanish territories before, as lieutenant governor of Cuba, and was returning now for a piece of what he considered his due.

  Eight years earlier, Narváez had been sent on an ill-fated mission to arrest the conquistador Hernán Cortés for the crime of keeping too much plundered Aztec gold as personal property. His hope at the time might have been to garner some of those riches for his own use, but he ended up losing more than he had gained. Cortés had bribed much of Narváez’s forces into defection, then routed those who remained in a vicious inter-Spanish battle. With many of his men lying dead around him, Narváez was fortunate to lose only an eye.

  Now he set his sights—limited by injury, blinkered by greed—on the vast interior of North America, surmising that treasures similar to those Cortés had won could be found in the region rumored to be home to the Seven Cities of Cibola. In 1527, Narváez was named governor of all that lay north of modern-day Texas and Florida. While in theory rule over this domain made him one of the most powerful men on earth, in practice it would cost him everything, including his life.

  The folly now known as the Narváez Expedition was doomed from the start. Beginning with five ships and six hundred voyagers, Narváez saw more than a hundred men flee his command immediately upon their arrival on the island of Santo Domingo. Rumors of the cruelty of Indian attacks in the land they hoped to conquer passed among his sailors like a virus, causing a quarter of the fighting force to either brave the return journey across the ocean or to seek out less dangerous missions. Others simply remained in the Caribbean and disappeared into the original American melting pot, a place where Indians, Africans, and Europeans were already blending to create the culture for which the region now is known.

  Following the loss of personnel in Santo Domingo, the expedition sailed on to Cuba, a short voyage that saw two of the five ships sink in a hurricane. Along with the ships, sixty soldiers and twenty horses disappeared into the deep. The Narváez Expedition had not even seen the shore of the Northern Mystery, but already the resources upon which they would rely were cut nearly in half. And it only got worse when they finally reached the mainland.

  The early European expeditions into the Americas are generally thought of today as excuses for gold lust, but their unmistakably religious nature has been largely forgotten. One reminder can be found in the requirement of all Spanish explorers to read an official declaration of faith upon each encounter with native peoples. The Requerimiento, as this declaration was called, was put forth in 1513, the same year Azemmour was conquered by the Portuguese, and also the year in which the conquistador Juan Ponce de León arrived in Florida, twenty-one years after Columbus came ashore on the islands to the south. By royal decree, all those conquering the terra incognita on behalf of the Catholic monarchs were called upon to make use of a prepared text that at once announced their intentions and offered a bargain before the inevitable killing began:

  We the servants [of King Ferdinand of Aragon and his daughter Queen Joanna of Castile] notify and make known to you, as best we can, that the Lord our God, Living and Eternal, created the Heaven and the Earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and we, and all the men of the world, were and are descendants, and all those who come after us.

  It started, ecumenically enough, with an acknowledgment that both those who delivered this notification and those who heard it were, at least, all part of the same human family. This genealogy would become a matter of some debate through the century that followed, when certain Spanish philosophers argued that indigenous Americans were not truly human at all and thus did not have souls worthy of concern. The notion that Christians and the inhabitants of a supposedly godless land shared a common ancestor was nearly progressive for its day, but that is the extent of positive things that might be said of the Requerimiento. Its nod toward common ground soon proved to be little more than the throat clearing of a people who intended to turn the Americans’ world u
pside down. The text continued:

  Of all these nations God our Lord gave charge to one man… that he should be Lord and Superior of all the men in the world, that all should obey him, and that he should be the head of the whole human race, wherever men should live, and under whatever law, sect, or belief they should be and he gave him the world for his kingdom and jurisdiction. And he commanded him to place his seat in Rome, as the spot most fitting to rule the world from; but also he permitted him to have his seat in any other part of the world, and to judge and govern all Christians, Moors, Jews, Gentiles, and all other sects. This man was called Pope.

  As historian Ralph T. Twitchell noted with some understatement, it is a “remarkable document,” recounting as it does the history of the universe, a justification for the papacy, and the governance of the earth with nary a pause for breath. Its supposed purpose was to give the natives of this new land an opportunity to accept the Christian religion, and in so doing to receive the protection of both the pope and the Spanish Crown. “As best we can, we ask and require you that you consider what we have said to you,” the Requerimiento continues, “and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world.”

  Because this offer of protection was made in the tongue of the invaders, often in the dead of night before entry into an Indian village, at times while natives watched from a wary distance, there was never much possibility that its tenets would be accepted. Nonetheless, the Spaniards’ sense of protocol, to say nothing of their desire to feel justified in the righteousness of their actions, made this proclamation necessary. As god-fearing Christians of the time would have seen it, not only the natives’ souls but their own hung in the balance. And so the offer of deliverance was made whenever there was an encounter between those who carried the banner of Christ and those who fell under its shadow.