A flag of Saint James is handed to the king of Kongo

In 1491 Portuguese missionaries presented Nzinga Nkuvu, king of the Kongo, with a flag embroidered with the cross of Saint James. The gift opened three centuries in which an Iberian warrior saint reshaped Kongo ritual and Kongo kingship, a process historians have only recently begun to describe properly. The court took Christianity on its own terms and made the saint a patron of its armies. This matters for Haiti because Kongo people made up a large share of the captives shipped into Saint Domingue in the eighteenth century. They did not meet the mounted saint for the first time on a plantation wall. They arrived already holding two centuries of their own arguments about him, about what he protected and what he demanded, and about how a king should dance in front of a church on his feast day. The cloth itself was part of the message.

The island its inhabitants called Ayiti was baptised Hispaniola by Columbus in 1492. What followed there was genocide, and it belongs to the same sixteenth century transformation that connected European ventures across the Atlantic, carried enslaved Africans into the Americas and dismantled Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac. Out of that came a structure for controlling authority, economy, subjectivity and the norms of gender and sexual relations, driven by the Atlantic Europeans of the Iberian peninsula, Holland, France and England, in their quarrels with each other as much as in their exploitation of labour and their seizure of land. Africans and the peoples of the Americas took no part in setting the rules. The name Ayiti was recovered in 1804 by people who had been brought to the island in chains three centuries after its first inhabitants were destroyed, and who chose the word the destroyed had used.

Columbus reached Hispaniola on 5 December 1492 and claimed it for Spain. On Christmas Eve the Santa Maria, his flagship, went aground in shallow water near what is now Cap-Haitien and could not be got off. He had it broken up and raised a fort from the timber. When he sailed for Spain on 2 January 1493 he left thirty nine men in it, the first Europeans holding ground on the island. He came back on 28 November 1493 and found the fort burned and all of them dead. The Taino who had helped build the place had destroyed it, and even Spanish accounts blamed the garrison's treatment of local women and its appetite for gold. Three hundred years of the island's history sit inside those eleven months. Europeans arrive and declare ownership. The people already there resist. The reply escalates until the original population is gone and Africans are brought in to replace them.

When Portuguese priests reached the Kongo court in 1491 and explained that the king would have to set aside all his wives but one, those wives grasped that they would lose their standing as wives of the king. They combined with the wives of his most trusted nobles and worked on their husbands to have the king advised against conversion. The lobbying failed and the court accepted Christianity. One of the women, Leonor, then asked to be baptised herself. The priests reported that she learned the doctrine quickly and answered their questions accurately, and that she supplied them with food and with money of the country, almost certainly nzimbu shells, out of income she controlled in her own right. She was the first cousin of her own husband, an early sign of how tightly the elite married inside itself. Her son Afonso later credited her with telling him how to enter the capital in order to defeat his half brother in the war of succession.