Askia the Great goes to Mecca with three hundred thousand gold pieces

An emperor of the Askia dynasty, remembered as Askia the Great, made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1495 with an escort of 500 horsemen and 100 foot soldiers and three hundred thousand gold pieces. He was out of his states for nearly two years. He gave away a hundred thousand pieces in Medina and Mecca, spent as much again on the upkeep of himself and his large suite, and put the rest into purchases that he carried home to Gao, his capital, in 1497. He governed for thirty six years and kept peace across territory as large as half of Europe. He built a standing professional army, divided the empire into viceroyalties under men of his own family or household, set up a system of weights and measures to hold traders to honest dealing, and used the waters of the Niger in a canal system that carried cultivation to the edge of the desert. Letters and science were taught at the mosque of Sankore in Timbuktu.

Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas on 7 June 1494. It ran a meridian down the Atlantic and awarded everything found west of the line to Spain and everything east of it to Portugal. The pope had already blessed the principle. Between them the two crowns assigned themselves Africa, Asia and the Americas, which is to say most of the inhabited world and nearly all of the people in it. Nobody living in those places was asked, informed or represented. The assumption underneath the document did the lasting damage. Land held by people who were not Christians counted as available, and the peoples on it counted as an asset attached to the soil. That premise licensed four centuries of conquest, the whole of the Atlantic slave trade, and every legal argument by which a European state later claimed a Caribbean island. When France took the western third of Hispaniola it was working inside a frame two Iberian kings had drawn on paper.

Returning to the northern coast of Haiti on 28 November 1493, Columbus found La Navidad wrecked and the men he had left there dead. Guacanagari, the cacique of Marien who had helped build the fort, told him Caonabo had done it. Caonabo ruled Maguana, a chiefdom in the interior, and the explanation offered was that his people had been abused by the Spaniards and that he had struck back on their account. Rouse reports the accusation as Guacanagari's, which is the correct way to handle it. The one man with a motive to steer Spanish anger elsewhere was the ally on whose territory the fort had stood. Columbus took the story. The Spanish later seized Caonabo by a trick and put him on a ship for Spain, and he died at sea. Guacanagari kept his alliance and lost his chiefdom anyway. Both routes arrived at the same place inside twenty years.

By the 1490s the enslaved people held in Sicily were more often black than white, and the notaries who wrote them into contracts used the phrase sclavi negri. Sicily had been a slaveholding society for centuries under a succession of rulers, and the people held there came from wherever war and raiding could reach: the Balkans, the Black Sea, North Africa, the lands south of the Sahara. What changed in this decade was the proportion. Captives moving north on the caravan routes across the desert, together with Portuguese trading on the Atlantic coast, arrived in numbers that tipped the balance. Eltis and Richardson use Sicily as a marker for a shift running through the whole Mediterranean world. The timing is the part to hold. The identification of slavery with African skin was already settled in southern Europe in the 1490s, before a single sugar estate existed in the Americas. The Caribbean inherited that assumption ready made.