Slaves and native Americans: the Iberian POV

[Monte Davis]

As noted in an earlier post, three times as many African slaves were
transported to the Spanish Americas (and twelve times as many to Brazil) as
to North America. Among the many rich themes of Greg Grandin's _The Empire
of Necessity_ is that many of the slaves were Muslims -- and that that
shaped rationales of slavery for the Spanish and Portuguese, who had behind
them  the long reconquista (with both Catholic and Islamic doctrines for
enslaving POWs). I especially like this passage, which makes an interesting
sidebar to M&D:

"In January [1492], Catholic soldiers drove Muslims out of Granada,
Europe’s last Islamic stronghold. In April, Christopher Columbus sailed to
America, shortly followed by ships full of warriors who imagined themselves
extending a fight that had begun in Europe. 'With the completion of the
conquest of the Moors, which lasted more than eight hundred years,' wrote
one chronicler in 1552, 'the conquest of the Indians began.'

Catholic theologians, however, couldn’t justify waging war on Native
Americans the same way they justified doing so on Muslims in Iberia,
because Spain—or Portugal, in the case of Brazil—couldn’t invoke a
historical claim to the land. And the fact that Native Americans, unlike
Muslims, had never “known” Christ and therefore had never had the
opportunity to reject him took away another pretext to subjugate them. For
Spain, these facts posed, as one historian writes, a 'legal and moral
problem of enormous proportions,' for other European empires were
challenging Iberia’s exclusive dominion over the Americas ('I wish someone
would show me the clause in Adam’s will that disinherits me,' the Catholic
king of France reportedly said when he heard that the pope had given the
New World to the Spaniards and Portuguese).
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