Afonso I dies after fifty two years as a Christian and thirty seven on the throne

News of Afonso's death survives in a letter his brother Manuel wrote to the Queen of Portugal on 15 July 1543. Afonso had sent that brother on an embassy to the Pope in 1539 and the Portuguese had never let him travel beyond Lisbon; now he wanted only to go home. Afonso may have been in his eighties. A Portuguese priest, Rui d'Aguiar, had written in 1516 that the king knew the prophets and the gospels better than the visiting clergy did, fell asleep over his books, forgot to eat while talking about God, and preached to his people himself after mass. Some of that is flattery. It also fits the correspondence that survives across nearly thirty years. Kongolese tradition afterwards called him the apostle of the Kongo. His successors quarrelled with whatever missionaries they had, and none of them was ever described by a Portuguese priest as resembling an angel.

In 1544 Spanish officials on Hispaniola reported that the indigenous population had effectively ceased to exist. Fifty-two years had passed since Columbus anchored off the northern coast. Inside one long lifetime a society of hundreds of thousands of people, organised into chiefdoms with their own leaders, farming systems, ceremonial centres and trade links across the islands, had been reduced to a handful of survivors absorbed into colonial households. Nothing on that scale had happened in the Atlantic world before. What the report meant in practice was that the labour question was settled. Spanish Hispaniola would run on Africans from then on, and it did, for the two and a half centuries that followed. The island's later history, French Saint-Domingue, the revolution and the republic, takes place on ground whose original population had been erased before the French arrived. Haiti keeps the Taino name for the island. It is the largest thing the Taino left in the world.

In 1494 the pope divided the earth between Castile and Portugal and handed them the trans-Atlantic sphere. A second agreement, which this account dates to 1542 and which is usually dated 1529, ran the same operation through the Pacific and produced the Indias Orientales, the eastern Indies, as a legal category standing beside the Indias Occidentales that contained South America, Mexico and the Caribbean. The division that organised the modern world therefore ran west to east. Everything later called the Orient begins here, as a line drawn by two Iberian crowns across water most of which nobody involved had sailed. Orientalism as a body of scholarship arrived two centuries afterward, once the lines of possession were fixed and the theological division had gone secular. The Caribbean islands entered European law in the same act, as one half of a planet assigned to owners who had not yet seen it.

Lebna Dengel had smuggled a Portuguese named John Bermudez out of Ethiopia in 1535 to beg for help. It came in 1541, when four hundred Portuguese with cannon landed at Massawa under Cristovao da Gama. The Queen Mother Sabla Wangel joined them from Dabra Damo. Ahmed Gran called in eight hundred Turks with artillery, overwhelmed the small force, and had da Gama beheaded in front of the displayed heads of a hundred and sixty of his men. Gran then dismissed his Turkish allies and went home to his camp near Lake Tana. Sabla Wangel, who had bandaged the wounded during the fighting, escaped with the Portuguese survivors and reached her son Galawdewos. They rearmed from a store da Gama had left behind, gathered thousands of Ethiopians, and attacked on 21 February 1543 at Woguera. A matchlock ball killed Gran and his army scattered. The Muslim kingdom he had built collapsed with him.