The Conquest of the Canary Islands and the New World

This above and following 2 images are from Le Canarien, an early 15th century manuscript describing the 1402 Norman/French-led expedition to the Canary Islands. The artist did not ever see the Canaries himself, but based his illustrations on descriptions from the text. The French knights, led by Bethencourt and de la Salle, succeeded in taking Lanzarote, which was already underpopulated due to slave raiding since the 1300s by Iberian and Italians, establishing a settlement there and describing the island (as well as other islands they couldn't conquer, such as Gran Canaria and Tenerife) as being much more abundant and beautiful than it really was. Though not the first encounters between the indigenous Canarians and Renaissance Europe, this mounted expedition aimed at conquest and colonization established the precedent for New World Iberian conquests as well as the first encounters between Renaissance and Early Modern Christian Europe and so-called "primitive" societies using stone weapons and tools in the Canaries and the Caribbean. David Abulafia's The Discovery of Mankind expertly places the European conquest of the Canaries parallel with the upcoming discovery and conquest of the Caribbean, noting how the indigenous Canarians, using stone tools, lacking Christianity, and lacking many of the qualities inherent in European societies that marked them as non-savage, suitable for slavery and exploitation, and at times, obstacles to European settlers.

This depicts the expedition en route to the Canary Islands from France

The above image depicts the presentation of indigenous Canary captives to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Final conquest of Tenerife would not come until 1496, when European diseases, ecological changes, slave raiding, and outright warfare with the divided and "Neolithic" societies of the archipelago led to the loss of autonomous indigenous society. Some islanders, who allied themselves with conquering Castilian forces were able to survive with some power, such as don Fernando Guanarteme, who, brought to Spain, was rewarded with marginal territory on the island his people had been inhabiting for thousands of years. The indigenes would die out as an independent people in the 16th century, but elements of their culture, bloodline, and documented presence in Spain and elsewhere in the Spanish empire includes evidence for a  Canarian area in Seville, their presence in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, etc.

Nevertheless, the tale of Renaissance/Early Modern Europe's conquest of the Canary Islands is an important chapter in the tale of slavery, the discovery of the "New World, and just an interesting precolonial, pre-settler history. Since each of the seven inhabited islands were populated by related indigenes, they should have been in more contact and understood each other's dialects, but at the time of European contact since the 14th century, the different islands lacked seafaring technology and could not even contact people on say, Lanzarote or Tenerife, from Gomera or Gran Canaria. Thus, the Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands is the tale of seven different conquests of people who, though sharing a mutual heritage, were even isolated from each other and disunited on the islands they shared. Like the Tainos of Hispaniola, Spanish conquerors could use these internal divisions among chiefdoms led by caciques on a single island to facilitate complete subjugation of the island. Indeed, Spanish conquest of Tenerife in the 1490s was facilitated by one group of people, led by don Fernando Guanarteme, who recognized Spanish authority, received a feudal title in Spain, and lent military aid to Alonso de Lugo's forces. Moreover, despite the indigenes' lack of firearms, steel weapons, and armor or horses, Spanish soldiers encountered great difficulty in defeating the nimble, quick Guanches who were expert stone-throwers and knew the land better, often taking the high ground to pummel invaders with stones. Unfortunately for them, this eventually led to them allowing the Spanish (or, in the case of Lanzarote in the early 1400s with the French 1402 expedition) to eventually control the coast and lowlands of the islands. Inevitably the Spanish conquest of the archipelago would occur, but it just took almost a century for it to happen. Several decades of slave raiding from Portuguese, Italian, and Castilian raiders, the introduction of diseases the isolated population lacked immunity to, and increased interest on the part of Spain (partly fuelled by rivalry with Portugal over claims of the land) and desiring closer bases to "Guinea," or West Africa and its fabled wealth in gold, just made the Canary Islands attractive, despite the island's lack of resources beyond the shepherds kept by indigenous people.

Conversion of the 'king' of Lanzarote from Le Canarien

Soon Spanish use of indigenous slaves as well as imported slaves from North and West Africa ensured the development of sugar plantations, a similar process taking place in Madeira and Cape Verde, Portuguese colonies in the eastern Atlantic that were previously uninhabited islands. The Canarian peoples, as agro-pastoralists, were adept shepherds and highly prizes for that form of labor while others ended up enslaved in Iberia or Italy, where descriptions of the indigenous Canary Islanders verge from beautiful, primitives to ugly, dark-skinned savages (Black Africans in Renaissance Europe includes a chapter where Canary Islander slaves were described oscilliating between those two extremes, while another chapter on Blacks in Spanish Golden Age literature included Canary Islanders, West Africans, dark-skinned Berbers and Arabs, and people from southern India as part of a denigrated "black" group). For Abulafia, the contrasting opinions of Petrarch and Boccaccio on the humanity of the indigenous Canarians, their skin color, and whether or not pagans have the right to live independently of Christian authority would have ramifications for relations with the New World. Thus, for people like Boccaccio, who perceived the people of the Canaries as innocent, good people, sort of like a pre-Rousseau "noble savage," meant that enslavement and conquest by Christians was not necessary (and he saw the Canarians as being like how Petrarch described his skin color, intermediate or between black and white). Petrarch, on the other hand, and many other future European commentators on the Canarians and Indians of the Americas, saw them as dark-skinned, too dark, and observed what they called savage traits or customs that, in addition with their paganism, condoned Spanish Catholic conquest. Influenced by Aristotelian notions of natural slaves, wherein someone who is seen as lacking self-control or too savage, animal-like, can be justifiably enslaved by superior peoples, in this case European Christians, it's easy to see how the conquest was justified. It is interesting how settler colonialism and slavery could reduce what appears to be light-skinned, "Caucasian" indigenes to the level of "black" savages for some Renaissance European observers, but, as Abulafia indicates, people like Columbus considered the Canary Islanders to be neither black nor white, and compared the Taino of the Caribbean to them.

Anyway, the long precolonial history of the archipelago is interesting in itself. There were likely a few different waves of humans to the archipelago over the last 2000 years or so, and some evidence on their language indicates similarities with the Saharan Berbers across the sea. And since they came to the Canaries with agriculture and animal husbandry, they must have crossed the sea (back when they still had shipbuilding skills and technology) sometime after the spread of food production among Berber-speakers in northern Africa. Furthermore, some of them must have came after the development of the tifinagh script, an ancient Libyco-Berber writing that can be seen throughout North Africa, the Sahara, and Sahel, still evident among some Tuareg people. Thus, we can surmise that at least some of the waves of human occupants in the early human history of the Canary Islanders were Berbers with goats, wheat agriculture and other evidence of food production, as well as some coming to the islands after the development of a script, seen in Saharan rock art and elsewhere, from Libya to Mauritania. This would conform well with perceptions of the Canary Islanders by Europeans, too, since some some them as brown, like the Azenagues and other Saharan/Sahelian Berbers, such as the Tuareg. Interestingly, European art of the 15th century depicts very 'white-looking' Canarians, which may be similar to conventions in a lot of European art of this century and future centuries of depicting African and indigenous peoples of the Americas as having a "Caucasian" morphology with darker skin. Regardless of European pictoral representations, the Canary Islanders were likely related to Berber-speaking peoples who were migrating across and around the arid Saharan and Sahelian zones, leaving evidence of their presence in petroglyphs of pastoralists, chariots, and the tifinagh script, which has appeared in the Canary Islands, too. Besides their connections to Northern Africa, the Canary Islands was also visited in Classical times, being known to the Romans as the Fortunate Isles, and apparently Juba II, a king of Mauretania, also knew of the islands.

But whatever contacts were had back then were not lasting and by the time of continued European contact in the 1300s, the indigenes of the islands were, as previously mentioned, lacking contact with each other, politically fragmented, had trouble understanding each other, and, depending on the island they lived on, severely limited in terms of political organization. If they had knowledge of metallurgy, it was lost as soon as they arrived in the Canary Islands. As for their cultural practices, some had forms of simple mummification, caves were religious sites, and some small numbers took to Christianity. Perhaps on Lanzarote, where a small settlement was founded in the early 1400s, some were interested in Christianity, but, for the most part, cultural contact and change for the Canarians who survived to the 1490s was limited. But Columbus knew of the island and sailed west across the Atlantic from that area, another instance of its parallels and ties to European 'discovery' of the 'New World,' Africa, and the future economy of the New Canaries, the Caribbean's sugar-plantation economy. Read David Abulafia's fascinating text, Discovery of Mankind, for a far more detailed, ingenious coverage of the Canary Islanders in an Atlantic context, as well as the debate within Renaissance European consciousness on the humanity, enslaveability, and placement of indigenous societies they would soon encounter negatively in future centuries. Intriguingly, Abulafia sees the Iberian perception of the naked, Stone Age societies of the Canaries as different from that of contemporary relations with West Africans since the latter possessed larger towns, kingdoms, many were Muslim, and they had trade, metal weapons, and other forms of contact with the outside world through the trans-Saharan trade and  North Africa.