Free 1492: The Year Our World Began by Felipe Fernández-Armesto Page A

reigned in a time of aggressive religious fervor, induced by the alarming territorial gains Islam had made in the previous years. It was natural that Ferdinand’s Aragonese counselors, bred in fear of the Turks, would brim over with excitement at the hope their master’s new Castilian connection would bring the accession of strength they needed to strike a decisive counterblow for Christendom, while Castilians in their turn expected Aragonese help to be valuable in the continuing war against the Moors. Mingled with these expectations was millennial fever. Nothing Ferdinand and Isabella did can make perfect sense except against the background of renewal of the long-persistent belief that a Last World Emperor would appear who would defeat Islam and face the Antichrist. They were consciously preparing for the end of the world. Instead, they helped bring into being a new order, in which credal boundaries coincided with the frontiers of civilizations.
    For a moment, in the aftermath of the fall of Granada, it looked as if a “concert of Christendom” and a crusade against the Turks were about to take shape. Islam and Christendom clawed at one another across thesea, at times exchanging rhetoric, at times overtly waging war, at times merely struggling to win the outlying and uncommitted peoples of the world to their cause. A local victory seemed to have acquired global importance. And while Ferdinand and Isabella struggled to cope with the consequences of their success, events—to which we must now turn—across the Strait of Gibraltar combined to settle the future limits of Christendom and Islam in Africa.

Chapter 3
“I Can See the Horsemen”
    The Strivings of Islam in Africa
    December 20: Sonni Ali the Great of Songhay dies.
    H e can have been only five or six years old when his family joined the flood of refugees from Granada, but al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan always called himself “the Granadine.” His exile was the beginning of a life of travel, first as a fugitive, then as a merchant, later as an ambassador, and later still as the captive of Christian pirates. He claimed unconvincingly to have been as far as Armenia, Persia, and the Eurasian steppes. He certainly knew much of the Mediterranean and of West and North Africa at first hand. His spiritual journeys were equally far-reaching. As a prisoner in Rome, he became a Christian, a papal favorite, and under the name of Giovanni Leone—or “Leo Africanus,” as most title pages say—was the author of the most authoritative writings on Africa in his day. When invaders sacked Rome in 1527, Leo fled back to Africa and to Islam.
    His most spectacular itineraries were across the Sahara to what he and his contemporaries called the Land of the Blacks. He could never quitemake up his mind about black people, for he felt torn between conflicting literary traditions that clouded his perceptions. Prejudices about black people were routine in Morocco and other regions of North Africa where black slaves arrived as common items of trade. Leo inherited those prejudices from Ibn-Khaldūn, the greatest historian of the Middle Ages, whose works he plundered. “The inhabitants of the Land of Blacks,” he wrote, “…lack reason…and are without wits and practical sense…. They live like animals, without rule or law.” Leo found, however, “the exception…in the great cities, where there is a little more rationality and human sentiment.” Blacks generally, he concluded, were:

    The northwest Africa of Leo Africanus.
    people of integrity and good faith. They treat strangers with great kindness, and they please themselves all the time with merry dancing and feasting. They are without any malice, and they do great honor to all learned men and all religious men. 1
    This disposition was the key to the slow but sure success of Islam in the region, seeping gradually south of the Sahara, into the Niger Valley and the Sahel, the great savanna.
    By his own account, Leo