as a consequence of Christian religious and legal superiority.”81
A central and non-trivial difference is that by the late sixteenth century, Algiers barely contained a purported enslaved Christian population of 25,000 of what were termed “valuable possessions,”82 some of whom were English and many of whom could easily be described as “white.” As slavery evolved and as London and republicanism rose, African and enslaved became coterminous.
However, indicative of the constellation of forces then, Paris saw the ascendancy of the Habsburgs as a central threat, and as early as 1500 sought a treaty with the Ottomans to that effect, which led the latter to attack Vienna a few decades later.83 London also served as supplicant when engaging the Ottomans. The Ottoman conquest of Syria, Palestine, the Hijaz, and Egypt in 1516–17, ultimately may have been as weighty historically as Martin Luther’s demarche as the preeminent Islamic Empire rose; these new conquests compelled the Turks to improve their navy, leading to conflict with the Habsburgs, along with increased influence in Algiers and Tunis, which was to bedevil Western Europeans sailing southward to the riches of Africa.84 By 1519, after at least seven years of warfare on the Barbary Coast, Khayr al-Din Barbarossa and his comrades in the western Mediterranean sought aid from the Ottomans and against the Spaniards. The bolstered Ottomans proceeded to augment their holdings in the Balkans and as far west in what is now Romania.85
A problem for the Ottomans in their contest with the Spaniards was the latter’s geographic reach,86 arriving in what became Micronesia and the Philippines in the first few decades of the sixteenth century, providing Madrid with seemingly limitless sources of free labor and stolen resources. The explorer known to some simply as Magellan was aided by the indigenes of the Pacific, who gave him and his crew food and water, which was countered by burning homes, destroying water vessels, and killing men. Ferdinand Magellan himself died at the hands of indigenes in what is now the Philippines in 1521,87 but not before establishing a toehold that was to bring Madrid untold wealth.
Tunis was the site of a ferocious conflict between the two giants, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, by 1534. This ostensible religious war between the two had erupted in earnest as early as 1521 and climaxed fifty years later with the Turks back on their heels, though far from being defeated wholly; yet this setback did open the door for yet another showdown between Catholics and their growingly potent rivals, English Protestants,88 who were to benefit by the incessant focus on Islam.
Coincidentally, pirates of various sorts began to sprout, not just in Tunis but also in Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli, all of which to a greater or lesser extent was fed by the Ottomans, along with complementary trends in Western Europe. Pirates pillaged the coasts of Spain and due east continually, weakening Madrid as London began to rise. Mercenaries, the comrades of the pirates, began to grow, and London employed disaffected Spaniards and “Germans” too in this parasitic role, which could be seen as another stage in the evolution of what was becoming “whiteness.”89
Part of what was occurring was what appeared to be not just a degrading of Catholicism but religion itself. “People learned to devalue sacred properties and objects,” says Dan O’Sullivan, facilitating the shipping of so much materiel to Ottoman Turkey. “The livery men whose cushions were made of altar cloths,” he says, and the “woman whose crystal perfume bottle once held the finger bone of a saint, the carpenter who made his living making and dismantling sacred objects, the yeoman whose doorstep had been an altar, and all the families whose fortunes were improved by the dissolutions had lost their fear of the sacred,” which did not bode well for religion generally, not just Catholicism, a trend that spurred the rise of a kind of neo-religion: capitalism. Catholicism at the pinnacle, in any case, was seen as a repository of wealth, rather than religious comfort, which helped to create a void then filled by settler colonialism driven by the emerging “race” construction and the devaluing and revaluing of Africans, and attendant commerce.
Catholicism could both absorb and administer blows. It was not just the Lutherans, it was also the Calvinist Protestants, who often disdained monarchs—and monks—who were thought worthy of liquidation. Certain Catholics were starting to believe that unless Calvinists were liquidated, there could be no peace, especially in France. This was at odds with the opposing idea that real security meant the utter devastation of the Vatican.90
THE OTTOMANS AND THEIR FOES were also jousting in East Africa, involved in what has been described as a “proxy war” with Lisbon as early as the 1520s, as the Portuguese crept up the Indian Ocean coast from Mozambique. Here the Ottomans were aided immeasurably—including in Goa—by understandably embittered members of the exiled Jewish community, still angry about their persecution. By 1538, there was a massive Ottoman expedition to India, possibly the largest flotilla in that region since Zheng He’s Chinese-sponsored journey about a century earlier. Thus unwound what has been described as “history’s first world war,” between the Portuguese and the Ottomans with the Horn of Africa as a major site of contention.91
During the wars against the Ottoman Turks in the 1520s, their Spanish and what could be described as Italian antagonists lost far more than they gained, an indicator that the strongest horse was to the east.92 The wider point being that it was not easy for Spain and the Habsburgs to sense the rise of England when the Ottomans were so formidable.
In any case, Spanish colonizers were encountering a hailstorm of unrest in the Caribbean and the Americas. For it was also in 1538—and previously in 1533—that revolts of the enslaved shook Cuba with indigenous from there and the Yucatan as well fighting alongside the bonded laborers of varying ancestries.93 A few decades earlier, a voyage from Cuba to the Yucatan was punctuated upon arrival by a punishing encounter with indigenes. Hernán Cortes thought he was sly when he induced one group of indigenes to work against another in the Yucatan. He felt compelled to tell the emperor that “the Indians had attacked the garrison on all sides, and set fire to it in many places…. Our people were in extreme distress and begged me to come to their aid with the greatest possible haste.” This bruising reality did not prevent the would-be conquistador from alleging that the “people are rational and well disposed and altogether greatly superior to the most civilized African nations,” a high compliment indeed.94
They moved on at the instigation of these “civilized” indigenes, scurrying to their vessels bearing heavy losses. Then it was on to Florida, and a captain who had visited there earlier with Ponce de León cautioned his comrades to be vigilant in light of the inhospitality of indigenes, who rather promptly and, like their peers in Yucatan, caused a scurried flight back to vessels. Yet they did return with gold, serving to justify the loss of life, spurring a journey to what is now Mexico.95
Understandably, France, which bordered Spain, looked on nervously as Madrid swelled with the loot plundered from the Americas and Africa and the Asia-Pacific, but preexisting tensions with London meant confronting a two-headed antagonist, an untenable position that should have become clear by 1525 and the defeat at Pavia and the capture of the French king by the Habsburgs.96 London was not displeased by this French misfortune and contributed to it by earlier declaring war on Paris, a decision punctuated in May 1522 when Charles V of the Habsburgs arrived in England for an extended six-week visit.97
France was not without weapons in confronting the antagonist across the Channel, allying with Scotland, placing enormous pressure on London, and forcing the kingdom to seek to gain more strength, particularly by colonial conquest, in order to stymie this alliance.98 Another by-product of this alliance was a growing French presence in Scotland, placing considerable pressure on London to reverse this threat to sovereignty.99 This “auld alliance” at least reached 1295 when the two parties inked a pact targeting their mutual target in London.100 There was also Catholic collaboration that included not just Scotland and France but Ireland too.
Likewise, there were a growing number of Irish in Spain, including soldiers, seafarers, and, looming above all, co-religionists. Many were noblemen forced to flee their estates, though departing with political wherewithal capable of being wielded against London. Ireland had been conquered by England effectively as early as the twelfth century, but the rise of Protestantism inflamed what