The reconquest ends and its mandate crosses the ocean

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.

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.

Hispaniola was forested when Columbus arrived and held more than six thousand plant species. Less than two percent of Haiti carries forest today. The decline is documented and its mechanism is dull. Around sixty percent of the country was still wooded in 1920. The population grew through the twentieth century, no electricity or gas supply was built for ordinary households, and people cooked with charcoal, which is made by cutting trees. Cover fell below twenty five percent by 1980 and has kept falling. Each stage feeds the next. Bare slopes lose soil, thin soil grows less food, poorer families burn more charcoal. Rain that intact forest would have absorbed now runs off in mudslides that kill people in their houses. USAID has planted more than sixty million trees in Haiti since 1990 and most of them have been cut for fuel, because nobody supplied the cooking energy the trees were being burned to provide. Planting without fuel is a way of looking busy.