A Kongo king takes baptism and a Portuguese name in his own capital

The fourth Portuguese expedition to the Kongo landed in 1491 carrying priests, stonemasons, carpenters, horses, a few women, cloth and tools. The Mani Soyo, who governed the coastal province, was baptised at once together with his son while the implements of the old religion were piled up and burned. Two months later the party reached the capital, Mbanza Kongo, in the interior. The king, Nzinga Nkuvu, welcomed them and accepted baptism under the name Joao I, in honour of the reigning king of Portugal. Christianity in the Kongo, and in central Africa, starts here. The two societies were less foreign to each other than later accounts suggest. In both, disaster was explained by spiritual causes, sacred objects held real power, and religion belonged to the king, so that conversion was a decision taken at the top and then arranged between two crowns. Ordinary people in Iberia were as surrounded by saints and relics as villagers on the Zaire were by their own protectors.

The island Europeans came to call Hispaniola was Taino country. Something like five hundred thousand people lived there in 1492, organised into five chiefdoms, each under a cacique, feeding themselves mainly on manioc. They had a long standing rivalry with the Carib peoples of the Lesser Antilles, and older scholarship confused them with the Arawak of Trinidad and Guyana, relatives who lived somewhere else entirely. Within a few decades of contact almost none of them were left. Disease did part of the work, forced labour in the mines did more, and Spanish violence finished it. The speed matters as much as the total. Spain destroyed its own workforce faster than it could use it, and the colonists then declared themselves short of hands. Africans were bought to fill the gap. So the first shipment of enslaved people to this island was a direct consequence of the killing that had gone before it. One catastrophe wrote the order for the next.

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.

The reconquest of the Iberian peninsula was completed in January 1492. The Spanish crown held a papal mandate to overcome unbelievers wherever it met them, and Pope Alexander VI tied that mandate directly to the exploration and conquest of the Americas. Muslims who had accepted baptism in Spain were called Moriscos. A number of them returned to Islam once they were across the ocean and set about preaching it among the indigenous people they found, with enough success to bring a series of anti Muslim decrees from King Ferdinand. Those decrees still reserved that Moors were not to be taken as slaves. Later the French applied the same religious reasoning to enslaving Muslims of the Barbary coast, and then Muslims of any origin at all. Toleration in Iberia had covered only those willing to convert, and only until about 1500. Suppression of Islam in the Americas continued into the last decades of the twentieth century.