THE HISTORY OF Azemmour at the time Esteban was there, sometime between 1500 and 1520, is inseparable from the origins of the Atlantic slave trade. The people of the Mediterranean, Muslim and Christian, European and North African, were fascinated by the almost mythical world that lay beyond the vast, sandy sea of the Sahara Desert. They marveled at the strange stories told by the few merchants who made the long journey across the sands, and they were drawn by the gold and commodities the merchants brought with them. They were especially interested in “black gold,” sub-Saharan Africans from the Land of the Blacks who had been sold into slavery and brought for sale in the Mediterranean markets.
For centuries only a few black slaves at a time could be brought north across the desert by the camel trains. But the number rose dramatically when the Christian Spaniards and especially Portuguese defeated the last Islamic kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula. Eight hundred years of the reconquest, eight centuries of continual conflict, had forged a warmongering culture and a warrior aristocratic class. The Portuguese now turned that bellicose and acquisitive approach on Africa, taking control of important Muslim towns such as Azemmour and exploring far down the west coast, raiding for slaves.
For six centuries the Portuguese had ridden side by side with their Spanish cousins, waging holy war, pursuing a crusade against the Muslim presence on the Iberian peninsula. But by the early 1400s, the Spaniards had claimed exclusive rights of conquest over the last Islamic kingdom in Spain, Granada, a place far from the Portuguese frontier, steeped in romantic legend and ruled by indulgent sultans from their opulent palaces of the Alhambra.
The Portuguese aristocracy had a long and noble history of winning their spurs by waging war on the frontiers of Christendom and Islam. But now, without that religious borderland, they were deprived of an infidel adversary and instead went to war with Spain. The fratricidal butchery continued until shedding the blood of fellow Christians began to weigh so heavily on the pious Portuguese monarch and the Spanish king that a truce was called, in 1411. But peace brought a new problem: a generation of Portuguese noblemen who had been bred for war faced the unexciting prospect of living out their lives as gentlemen farmers on their estates at home, idly watching the Atlantic waves break on the rocky shores of their isolated homeland.
A young prince was born into that atmosphere of imminent ennui, almost exactly a century before Columbus returned from America. Prince Henry, “the Navigator,” as nineteenth-century historians labeled him, grew into a brave and warlike prince. But he was also a hotheaded fool who promised to give the Portuguese nobility a valiant cause in which they might legitimately invoke God and the Virgin Mary on the battlefield. This quixotic royal maniac was the youngest son of the Portuguese king, John I, by his English queen, Philippa of Lancaster; and in his adolescent lunacy he sired a delusional but noble plan that was conceived in the chivalric spirit of his Plantagenet ancestors.
The mouth of the Mediterranean is guarded by two great limestone crags, which the ancient world knew as the Pillars of Hercules. Exactly seven centuries after the first Islamic army captured the Rock of Gibraltar at the southern tip of Spain, Prince Henry proposed that the Portuguese should capture the fortified port city of Ceuta, the Muslim stronghold on the African shore. It would be a deed that gloried in the pious poetry of its symmetry.
This plan was as ludicrous as it was audacious, but Henry was his father’s favorite and somehow managed to convince the aging monarch that such an expedition would be to the greater glory of God. To the blank astonishment of an unwitting Mediterranean world, a Portuguese force of about 18,000 men-at-arms sailed for Ceuta in 1415 and took the town. Henry distinguished himself by charging headlong into battle, oblivious of all danger, an action that cost the life of a trusted royal retainer who was slain saving the young prince. But it was an act that went down in the annals of chivalric folklore. Portugal had a warrior prince more than worthy of the name. The Portuguese conquerors of Ceuta also captured a rich booty, the goods of wealthy merchants who traded across the Sahara Desert.
Ceuta was an important road head for the mysterious trans-Saharan trade routes, which had been become heavily romanticized in Christian minds. Camel trains took fifty days to cross the great deserts. There, beyond the known world, in nearly legendary places like Tombouctou, Muslim merchants engaged in strange exchanges with traders from the Land of the Blacks. There were extraordinary accounts of great quantities of gold bought with piles of salt, that most precious commodity in the heat of the desert. The haggling, it was said, took place in a most alien way. The merchants would find piles of gold at certain places. They would set a pile of salt beside the gold and retire to spend the night. In the morning, if they found the gold and salt still there, they would add more salt, until one morning they would wake to find that the salt was gone and they had been left with the much-treasured, glittering metal. The conquest of Ceuta offered the Portuguese real evidence that those legends and rumors of wealthy lands to the south were true. As a direct result, Henry now encouraged the seaborne exploration of west Africa with much more measured tread. While Henry was at the helm, Portuguese foreign policy steered a steady course of involvement in Africa that directly contributed to the growth of the Atlantic slave trade.
Gomes Eannes de Zurara’s famous Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea describes those expeditions to west Africa and shows us by example how the Atlantic slave trade began. Zurara explains that when Henry began to organize the first expedition to sail farther south than Europeans had ever explored before, it was difficult to find crews for the ships. Neither experienced nor inexperienced sailors dared to round Cape Bojador (the bulge in the west African coast); they all feared the seas and land beyond it. They had heard rumors of an arid zone described by Aristotle as a place too hot for men, a sandy desert without water, trees, or even scrubby grasses. Some said the seas were so shallow that even a league from the land the water was but a fathom deep. Others said that farther out the waters teemed with monsters that rose, with malign intent, from the darkest depths as though from hell itself. There were fast currents that could carry a ship into the nether regions of the world, from whence it would never return.
But when the Portuguese did finally pass that treacherous cape, they unexpectedly came across a more manageable world. Fifty leagues south of Bojador, they saw footprints of men and camels on the shore. The myth was conquered; they had seen evidence of life and trade beyond fearsome Cape Bojador.
With the phantasmagoric defenses of Bojador breached, Henry launched further expeditions of exploration. In due course, two of his ships—commanded by his young chamberlain, Antam Gonçales; and a young nobleman, Nuno Tristan—came across a group of Africans, a band of fifty or so blacks going about their business near the mouth of a river. The Portuguese attacked them.
Gomes Eannes de Zurara’s chronicle reports that the Africans fought fiercely to defend themselves, wielding their assegais, light iron-tipped spears, for, it is explained, “they did not know how to use any other kind of weapon.” Indeed, one man fought so bravely he might have been a model chivalric Christian knight worthy of Arthur’s table, engaging the well-armed Tristan face to face and defending himself until the Portuguese nobleman overpowered him with his superior weapons.
Of the ten prisoners taken by the intrepid Portuguese during this skirmish, Zurara reports that one was a man “of noble bearing” who offered a ransom of five or six of his own slaves as the price of his freedom. After some bargaining, the slavers exchanged this nobleman and another of their captives for ten more black slaves, some ostrich eggs, a shield of oxhide, and a little gold dust. This was the moment when the Atlantic slave trade truly began, for the young Portuguese adventurers, encouraged, took many more captives from up and down the coast as they sailed for home.
These were in fact the first slaves to be taken on the west African coast and shipped directly to Europe, but it has become traditional for historians to quote Zurara’s description of a cargo of slaves brought back by the next slaving expedition as though it were an account of the first black slaves landed in Europe.
Zurara reported that a captain called Lanzarote returned to Portugal with his ships crammed with slaves he had seized on the African coast. He hurriedly sought an audience with Prince Henry and explained that the slaves who had been taken captive “were poorly and out of condition” because of the long time they had spent at sea and “the great sorrow they had in their hearts at seeing themselves in captivity, far from their homelands, without any understanding of what their fate might be.” Lanzarote argued that it would be best to bring the slaves ashore as soon as possible. This, he said, should be done in the early morning before the heat of the day. He suggested that they should be taken to a field just outside the city gate and then be divided up into five groups.
The following day, August 8, 1444, very early in the morning, the seamen made ready their boats and slowly began to ferry the captives ashore. Zurara described the scene as astonishing. Among the slaves were some who were white, “indeed, fair to look upon, and well proportioned.” But others were “less than white, like mulattoes. Others still were as black as Ethiopians,” he wrote, describing them as “so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere.”
“But what heart could be so hard,” he continued, “as not to be pierced with piteous feeling to see that company? For some kept their heads low and their faces bathed in tears, looking one upon another; others stood groaning with great anguish, looking up to the heavenly firmament and fixing their gaze upon the skies, crying out loudly, as if asking help of the Father of Nature. Others struck their faces with the palms of their hands, throwing themselves at full length upon the ground; others made their lamentations in the manner of a dirge, after the custom of their country. And though we could not understand the words of their language, the sound of it right well accorded with the measure of their misery.”
Their suffering was to become still worse. The men in charge of dividing up the captives arrived and began to separate one slave from another, “in order to make an equal partition of the fifths.” Making no attempt to keep families together, they parted fathers and sons, took husbands from wives, and sundered brothers from brothers. No respect was shown for the ties of the past and “each fell where his lot took him.”
“O powerful fortune,” Zurara lamented, “that with thy wheels doest and undoest, compassing the matters of this world as pleaseth thee, do thou at least put before the eyes of that miserable race some understanding of matters to come; that they may receive some consolation in the midst of their great sorrow. And you who are so busy in making that division of the captives, look with pity upon so much misery; and see how they cling one to the other, so that you can hardly separate them.
“And as often as they had put one group of captives in one place, the sons, seeing their fathers in another, arose with great energy and rushed over to them. Meanwhile, the mothers clasped their children in their arms, throwing themselves flat on the ground to cover them, where they took the beating of their tormentors with little pity for their own flesh so long as their children were not torn from that embrace.”
The whole population of the town abandoned work for the day as word spread of the strange sight just outside the city walls. “The field was quite full of people, both from the town and from the surrounding villages and districts,” many of whom were moved by what they saw, and while some were weeping and others were dividing up the captives, others “caused such a tumult as greatly to confuse those who directed the partition.”
These scenes eloquently convey the terrible beginnings from which the Portuguese built the Atlantic slave trade. The high value of that human cargo intensified the greed of European merchants, who now eagerly prepared for future plunder. As the trade expanded rapidly, the Portuguese established their now notorious “factories,” fortified and garrisoned trading posts built at strategic places on the west African coast and on the islands in the Bight of Benin. These were the essential infrastructure of the trade, warehouses in which to store human beings. Feeding the men of the garrisons and the thousands of slaves imprisoned in the “factories” was a major problem for which Azemmour provided a ready solution.
Azemmour was an excellent port and the largest town in the Moroccan region of Dukkala, an agricultural land with abundant wheat fields and market gardens—the breadbasket of the western Maghreb. Exports from Azemmour and other Moroccan ports, would, quite literally, feed the slave trade, providing the “factories” with enough to eat. It is no surprise, then, that Esteban should have ended up in Azemmour.
TODAY, AZEMMOUR IS a small, tranquil, atmospheric town on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, a place of infinite afternoons and lazy backgammon evenings spent in narrow streets and shady courtyards. It is announced by a small and dusty signpost that lurches precariously into a dry ditch beyond the roadside embankment, an old world place with all the charm of authenticity. The river flows idly by the crumbling city walls that Esteban once knew; this is a place untouched by the tourist razzmatazz of nearby Marrakech or neighboring Essaouira. But this modern sleepiness belies a distant past that was both vibrant and violent. Azemmour was once a frontier trading post that uncomfortably straddled the great religious rupture of the pre-Reformation age, the rift between Christendom and Dar-al-Islam, the Muslim lands. It was a place of mystery, a gateway to a world of wonders, one of the African terminuses for the great sub-Saharan trading routes that brought gold and slaves to the threshold of Christendom.
We will never know how Esteban came to Azemmour. In all likelihood he was brought as a slave, either in one of the trans-Saharan camel trains of the Muslim merchants or, more likely, aboard a Portuguese slaving ship plying the coastal trading route. Perhaps his parents had been taken as slaves and brought to work in North Africa as household servants, laborers, or craftsmen and Esteban was in fact born in in the town.
By contrast with those obscure beginnings, the story of how Esteban came to Spain from Morocco is more easily surmised. In the late 1510s, the great breadbasket of Dukkala, with Azemmour at its heart, was struck by famine and pestilence. Esteban almost certainly arrived in southern Spain as a refugee from these terrible natural disasters that destroyed the region forever.
Drought came first, in 1517, and then the resulting failed harvests brought the terrible suffering of famine to the region. Wheat and hardtack biscuit were shipped to Azemmour from Spain, but no sooner had recovery begun than drought struck again, bringing more failed harvests and further famine. Now, an incessant, distressing drama was played out against the backdrop of the threat of plague, which was then spreading steadily across northern Morocco, perhaps arriving on the very same boats that had first brought food and relief from southern Spain.
A chronicler of the period tells of how, in 1522, the first Portuguese merchants arrived at Azemmour, as they did every year, to load their ships with the abundant fish that the inhabitants took from the river and salted for this trade. But these merchants and sea captains soon changed their plans. The desperate people of the town crowded around their ships, pleading that the merchants take them as slaves, willingly selling themselves into captivity for the price of a meal. The captains filled their ships and set sail for Lisbon and Seville carrying their unexpected human cargo.
Up the coast, in Asilah, a wily merchant saw this as an opportunity to help out a needy widow who had no doubt caught his eye. He had just negotiated a deal with some well-connected businessmen and was about to set out for Azemmour to make the most of the opportunities offered by the misery of the people there. As a favor to the widow, he offered a place on his ship to her youthful son, Bernardo Rodrigues.
Fortunately for us, the young Bernardo was so struck by what he saw that he wrote a detailed description of his experiences. He was shocked. Fathers sold their sons and daughters, and brother sold brother. Bernardo said this was so contrary to human nature, so perfidious and unheard of, something so etched on his memory, that he knew he had to record what he had seen.
At Azemmour, Bernardo saw the massed starving people for the first time. Emaciated families were dying like beasts alongside the camels and cats that others had slaughtered in the vain hope of a meal. But soon, many ships arrived, bringing reports that the situation was even worse at Safi and Azemmour. And as evidence of this, the ships had come packed with people from those towns who had sold themselves to avoid starvation.
Bernardo’s captain set sail immediately for Azemmour. As soon as they arrived they saw the river packed with ships that seemed to overflow with beautiful girls, for Moorish women were much prized as concubines by the Portuguese. Bernardo boasted that when he was at Azemmour, for a few nickels he had bought a tall Moorish girl who was less than twenty-five years old. She was very pale and beautiful, much to his taste, and he had kept her at home ever since. No doubt she had sold herself to this conceited young man for the sake of her six-year-old son.
In hope of adding to his earlier purchase of a mistress, Bernardo now set out for the suburbs of Azemmour. There, among the dried-out irrigation systems and parched fields, he found a man who was selling his daughter and his granddaughter, “both good looking.” Bernardo paid thirty-two nickels for the one and twenty-eight for the other. With the transaction over, the desperate man nobly offered the new master of his womenfolk a little roast camel meat, perhaps hoping to soften Bernardo’s heart. But Bernardo did not eat the flesh, perhaps out of pity for the hungry man, perhaps out of prudence toward his own stomach.
Bernardo made one last purchase, a young man of noble disposition, for whom he paid sixteen nickels. These sales, he explained, “should be enough for you to understand the terrible hunger.”
It will almost certainly remain impossible to prove that Esteban was among the desperate refugees who escaped famine in Azemmour on ships manned by bargain hunters like Bernardo. But until a better and more probable explanation is argued from the evidence available, this must surely be considered his most likely route to Spain.