1492
Page 9
On May 3, 1491, King Nzinga Nkuwu and his son, Nzinga Mbemba, were baptized. Their conversion may have started as a bid for help in internal political conflicts. The laws of succession were ill defined, and Nzinga Mbemba, or Afonso I, as he called himself, had to fight for the succession. He attributed his victory to battlefield apparitions of the Virgin Mary and St. James of Compostela—the same celestial warriors that had often appeared on Iberian battlefields in conflicts against the Moors and would appear again on the side of Spain and Portugal in many wars of conquest in the Americas. Kongo enthusiastically adopted the technology of the visitors and embraced them as partners in slave raiding in the interior and warfare against neighboring realms. Christianity became part of a package of aid from these seemingly gifted foreigners. The royal residence was rebuilt in the Portuguese style. The kings issued documents in Portuguese, and members of the royal family went to Portugal for their education. One prince became an archbishop, and the kings continued to have Portuguese baptismal names for centuries thereafter.
The Portuguese connection made Kongo the best-documented kingdom in West Africa in the sixteenth century. However Afonso I came to Christianity in the first place, he was sincere in espousing it and zealous in promoting it. Missionary reports extolled the “angelic” ruler for knowing
the prophets and the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ and all the lives of the saints and everything about our sacred mother the church better than we ourselves know them…. It seems to me that the Holy Spirit always speaks through him, for he does nothing but study, and many times he falls asleep over his books, and many times he forgets to eat and drink for talking of Our Lord,…and even when he is going to hold an audience and listen to the people, he speaks of nothing but God and His saints.26
Thanks in part to Afonso’s patronage, Christianity spread beyond the court. “Throughout the kingdom,” the same writer informed the Portuguese monarch, Afonso
sent many men, natives of the country, Christians, who have schools and teach our saintly faith to the people, and there are also schools for girls where one of his sisters teaches, a woman who is easily sixty years old, and who knows how to read very well and who is learned in her old age. Your Highness would rejoice to see it. There are also other women who know how to read and who go to church every day. These people pray to Our Lord at mass and Your Highness will know in truth that they are making great progress in Christianity and virtue, for they are advancing in the knowledge of the truth; also, may Your Highness always send them things and rejoice in helping them and, for their redemption, as a remedy, send them books, for they need them more than any other things for their redemption.27
Afonso may have loved books. His own priority, however, was to ask for what we would now call medical aid—physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and drugs—not so much in admiration of Western medicine as in fear of the link between traditional cures and pagan practices, for, as Afonso explained to the King of Portugal,
we always have many different diseases, which put us very often in such a weakness that we reach almost the last extreme; and the same happens to our children, relatives and natives owing to the lack in this country of physicians and surgeons who might know how to cure properly such diseases. And as we have got neither dispensaries nor drugs which might help us in this forlornness, many of those who had been already confirmed and instructed in the holy faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ perish and die; and the rest of the people in their majority cure themselves with herbs and spells and other ancient methods, so that they put all their faith in the said herbs and ceremonies if they live, and believe that they are saved if they die; and this is not much in the service of God.28
Not all Afonso’s efforts to convert his people were entirely benign. The missionaries also commended him for “burning idolaters along with their idols.” How much the combination of preaching, promotion, education, and repression achieved is hard to gauge. Portugal stinted the resources needed to Christianize Kongo effectively. And the rapacity of Portuguese slavers hampered missionary efforts. Afonso complained to the king of Portugal about white slavers who infringed the royal monopoly of European trade goods and seized slaves indiscriminately. “In order to satisfy their voracious appetite,” they
seize many of our people, freed and exempt men, and very often it happens that they kidnap even noblemen and the sons of noblemen, and our relatives, and take them to be sold to the white men who are in our Kingdoms; and for this purpose they have concealed them; and others are brought during the night so that they might not be recognized. And as soon as they are taken by the white men they are immediately shackled and branded with fire…. And to avoid such a great evil we passed a law so that any white man living in our Kingdoms and wanting to purchase goods in any way should first inform three of our noblemen and officials of our court whom we rely upon in this matter,…who should investigate if the mentioned goods are captives or free men, and if cleared by them there will be no further doubt nor embargo for them to be taken and embarked. But if the white men do not comply with it they will lose the aforementioned goods. And if we do them this favor and concession it is for the part Your Highness has in it, since we know that it is in your service too that these goods are taken from our Kingdom.29
Despite the limitations of the evangelization of Kongo, the dynamism of Christianity south of the Sahara set a pattern for the future. The region was full of cultures that adapted to new religions with surprising ease. Until the intensive missionary efforts of the nineteenth century, Christianization was patchy and superficial, but Christians never lost their advantage over Muslims in competing for sub-Saharan souls.
By adhering to Christianity, the Kongolese elite compensated, to some extent, for the isolation and stagnation of Christian East Africa at about the same time. Christianity had been the religion of Ethiopia’s rulers since the mid–fourth century, when King Ezana began to substitute invocations of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” for praise of his war god in the inscriptions that celebrated his campaigns of conquest and enslavement. The empire’s next thousand years were checkered with disaster, but Ethiopia survived—an aberrant outpost of Christendom, with its own distinctive heresy. For the Ethiopian clergy subscribed to the doctrine, condemned in the Roman tradition in the mid–fifth century, that Christ’s humanity and divinity were fused in a single, wholly divine nature. In the late fourteenth century, in near-isolation from contact with Europe, the realm again began to reach beyond its mountains to dominate surrounding regions. Monasteries became schools of missionaries, whose task was to consolidate Ethiopian power in the conquered pagan lands of Shoa and Gojam. Rulers, meanwhile, concentrated on reopening their ancient outlet to the Red Sea and thereby the Indian Ocean. By 1403, when King Davit recaptured the Red Sea port of Massaweh, Ethiopian rule stretched into the trade route along the Great Rift Valley, where slaves, ivory, gold, and civet headed northward, generating valuable tolls.
Map redrawn from Fra Mauro’s Venetian Mappamundi of the 1450s, showing how well informed Latin Christendom was about Ethiopia.
Fra Mauro’s Ethiopia map from O. G. S. Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries, circa 1400–1524 (Cambridge, 1958). Courtesy of The Hakluyt Society. The Hakluyt Society was established in 1846 for the purpose of printing rare or unpublished Voyages and Travels. For further information please see their website at: www.hakluyt.com.
Yet by the time of the death of King Zara Yakub, toward the end of the 1460s, expansion was straining resources, and conquests stopped. Saints’ lives are a major source for Ethiopian history in this period. They tell of internal consolidation rather than outward expansion as monks converted wasteland to farmland. The kingdom began to feel beleaguered, and rulers sought outside help, looking as far as Europe for allies. European visitors were already familiar in Ethiopia, for Ethiopia’s Massaweh Road was a standard route to the Indian Ocean. Italian merchants anxious to grab some of the wealth of the Indian Ocean for themselves would head up the Nile as far as Keneh, where t
hey joined camel caravans across the eastern Nubian desert for the thirty-five-day journey to the Red Sea. Encouraged by these contacts, Ethiopian rulers sent envoys to European courts and even flirted with the idea of submitting the Ethiopian church to the discipline of Rome. In 1481, the pope provided a church to house visiting Ethiopian monks in the Vatican garden.
The kingdom was still big enough and rich enough to impress European visitors. When Portuguese diplomatic missions began to arrive—the first, in the person of Pedro de Covilhão, in about 1488; a second in 1520—they found “men and gold and provisions like the sands of the sea and the stars in the sky,” while “countless tents” borne by fifty thousand mules transported the court around the kingdom.30 Crowds of two thousand at a time would line up for royal audiences, marshaled by guards on plumed horses, caparisoned in fine brocade. To the ruler of Ethiopia, Negus Eskendar, Covilhão was immediately recognizable as a precious asset, whom he retained at his court with lavish rewards.
Ethiopia, however, had already overreached its potential as a conquest state. Pagan migrants permeated the southern frontier. Muslim invaders pressed from the east, building up the pressure until within a couple of generations they threatened to conquer the highlands. Ethiopia barely survived. The frontier of Christendom began to shrink.
Meanwhile, beyond Ethiopia, the east coast of Africa was accessible to Muslim influence but cut off from that of Christians. In the sixteenth century the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope brought Portuguese merchants, exiles, and garrisons to the region. Here, however, Christianity never had the manpower or appeal to compete with Islam, while the inland states remained largely beyond the reach of missionaries of either faith.
Diogo Homem’s map of West Africa (1558) shows São Jorge da Mina (topped with five-dotted flag), indigenous slave-raiding, and the ruler of Songhay, extravagantly behatted.
Diogo Homem’s map of West Africa from J. W. Blake, Europeans in West Africa, I (London, 1942). Courtesy of The Hakluyt Society.
The greatest of these states were at the far end of the Rift Valley, around the gold-strewn Zambezi. The productive plateau beyond, which stretched to the south as far as the Limpopo River, was rich in salt, gold, and elephants. Like Ethiopia, these areas looked toward the Indian Ocean for long-range trade with the economies of maritime Asia. Unlike Ethiopia, communities in the Zambezi Valley had ready access to the ocean, but they faced a potentially more difficult problem. Their outlets to the sea lay below the reach of the monsoon system and, therefore, beyond the normal routes of trade. Still, adventurous merchants—most of them, probably, from southern Arabia—risked the voyage to bring manufactured goods from Asia in trade for gold and ivory. Some of the most vivid evidence comes from the mosque in Kilwa, in modern Tanzania, where fifteenth-century Chinese porcelain bowls—products Arabian merchants shipped across the whole breadth of the ocean—line the inside of the dome.
Further evidence of the effects of trade lie inland, where fortified, stone-built administrative centers—called “zimbabwes”—had been common for centuries. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the zimbabwes entered their greatest age. The most famous, Great Zimbabwe, included a formidable citadel on a hill 350 feet high, but remains of other citadels are scattered over the land. Near stone buildings, the beef-fed elite were buried with gifts: gold, jewelry, jeweled ironwork, large copper ingots, and Chinese porcelain.
In the second quarter of the fifteenth century, the center of power shifted northward to the Zambezi Valley, with the expansion of a new regional power. Mwene Mutapa, as it was called, arose during the northward migration of bands of warriors from what are now parts of Mozambique and KwaZulu-Natal. When one of their leaders conquered the middle Zambezi Valley, he took the title Mwene Mutapa, or “lord of the tribute payers”—a name that became extended to the state. From about the mid–fifteenth century, the pattern of trade routes altered as Mwene Mutapa’s conquests spread eastward toward the coast. But Mwene Mutapa never reached the ocean. Native merchants, who traded at inland fairs, had no interest in a direct outlet to the sea. They did well enough using middlemen on the coast and had no incentive for or experience of ocean trade. The colonists were drawn, not driven, northward, though a decline in the navigability of the Sabi River may have stimulated the move.
The events of 1492 hardly affected the remote interior and south of Africa. But the death of Sonni Ali Ber in the waters of the Niger, the consolidation of Portuguese influence that followed the baptism of Nzinga Nkuwu in Kongo, and the renewal—which was going on at about the same time—of Ethiopia’s diplomatic contact with the rest of Christendom were decisive events in carving the continent between Islam and Christianity. With Askia Muhammad’s triumph in Songhay, the accession of Afonso I in Kongo, and the success of Pedro de Covilhão’s mission to Ethiopia, the configurations of the religious map of Africa today—where Islam dominates across the Sahara and in the Sahel, as far as the northern forest belt, and along the Indian Ocean coast, with Christianity preponderant elsewhere—became, if not inevitable, highly predictable.
Chapter 4
“No Sight More Pitiable”
The Mediterranean World and the Redistribution of the Sephardim
May 1: The royal decree expelling unbaptized Jews
from Spain is published.
There was not a Christian who did not feel their pain,” reported Andrés de Bernáldez, priest and chronicler, who watched the crowds of Jews making their way into exile from Castile in the summer of 1492. Making music as they went, shaking their tambourines and beating their drums to keep their spirits up, “they went by the roads and fields with great labor and misery, some falling, some struggling again to their feet, others dying or falling sick.” When they saw the sea, “they uttered loud screams and wailing, men and women, old and young, begging for God’s mercy, for they hoped for some miracle from God and that the sea would part to make a road for them. Having waited many days and seen nothing but trouble, many wished they had never been born.” Those who embarked “suffered disasters, robberies, and death on sea and on land, wherever they went, at the hands of Christians and Moors alike.” Bernáldez knew “no sight more pitiable.”1
Despite this avowal of compassion, Bernáldez hated Jews. By contumaciously refusing to recognize their Messiah, they had forfeited to Christians their heritage as God’s chosen people. The roles in the book of Exodus were now reversed: the Jews were the “evil, unbelieving idolaters,” and Christians were “the new children of Israel.” Bernáldez hated Jews for their arrogance in claiming God’s special favor. He hated the stink he scented on their breath and in their homes and synagogues, and which he attributed to the use of olive oil in cooking—for, amazing as it seems to anyone familiar with Spanish cooking today, medieval Castilians eschewed olive oil and used lard as their main source of dietary fat. He hated them with hatred born of economic envy, as dwellers “in the best locations in cities and towns and the choicest, richest lands” and as work-shy capitalists who “sought prosperous occupations, so as to get rich with little work,…cunning people, who usually lived off the many extortions and usuries they gained from Christians.” 2
He hated them, above all, for their privileges. Jews were exempt from tithes and, if they lived in their own ghettoes (which by no means all did), were not obliged to pay municipal taxes. They elected the officials of their own communities. They enjoyed their own jurisdiction, and until 1476 they regulated their own business affairs among themselves according to their own laws. Even after that date, lawsuits between Jews were settled outside the common legal system, by judges specially appointed by the crown. The Inquisition—the tribunal everyone else feared—could not touch them unless they were suspected of suborning Christians or committing blasphemy. Because their own customs allowed higher rates of interest than those chargeable under Christian law, they had an advantage in any form of business that involved handling debt. They farmed taxes and occupied positions of profit in royal and seigneurial b
ureaucracies—though diminishingly so by the late fifteenth century. They lived—in many cases—as tenants and protégés of church, crown, or aristocracy. Most Jews, of course, were poor artisans, small tradesmen, or laborers, but Bernáldez observed what we would now call a trickle-down effect, with the wealthy members of the community supporting the less fortunate. In that respect, Jews were a typical group in medieval society—an “estate” that transcended class, with fellow feeling and a sense of common interest uniting people at different levels of wealth and education in defense of their shared identity and collective privileges.
“Jew” became a term of abuse. Terms of abuse are rarely used literally. Nowadays “fascist” is an insult hurled undiscriminatingly at people who have no resemblance to fascists. “Liberal” is fast becoming a similarly unspecific term in the United States. Few of the people foulmouthed as “motherfuckers” in gangland parlance actually practice incest. Of most of the people denounced as Jews in fifteenth-century Spain, there is no independent evidence to connect them with Jewish ancestry, culture, or beliefs. If the term meant anything, it seems to have meant something like “thinking in an allegedly Jewish way”—which meant, in practice, thinking pharisaically: having, for instance, a literal-minded attitude to the law, or being more concerned with material or legalistic values than with spirituality. Of course, these thought patterns were not genuinely Jewish—you can find them in people of all religions and none—but readers of the letters of St. Paul would recognize them as the sort of thoughts the apostle regarded as un-Christian.
Anti-Semitism is so perversely irrational that it is hard for any clearheaded person to understand. Christians, especially, ought to be immune to its venom, because their religion originated in Judaism and owes much of its doctrine, ritual, and scripture to the Jewish past. Christ, his mother, and all the apostles were Jews. The good that Jews have done the world by way of science, art, literature, and scholarship has been out of all proportion to their numbers. No community of similar size can rival Jews for the blessings they have brought the rest of us. Yet any conspicuous minority—and Jews have always formed conspicuous minorities—seems to ignite prejudice and attract odium. Privileged minorities stoke hatred even more intensively. And though Christianity did not cause anti-Semitism, which was rife in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds before Christ, it provided a new pretext. Mobs regularly plundered Jews when readings in church reminded them that Christ’s co-religionists demanded his crucifixion and cried, “His blood be upon us and on our children!”