202 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Many of the new souls his sailors found were living in black-skinned
bodies and had commercial value as slaves, it turned out, and Prince
Henry the Navigator morphed into Prince Henry the Slave Trader. In
addition to slaves, as the Portuguese made their way south, they found
all sorts of other marketable commodities such as gold dust, salt, ostrich
eggs, fish oil-the list goes on and on. The constant discovery of new
trade goods infused the crusader's dream with an economic motive, and
the Crusades gave way to what Europeans call the Age of Discovery. Per-
haps the most dramatic discovery occurred in 1492, when Christopher
Columbus sailed across the Atlantic, looking for a route to India, and
stumbled across the Americas. His voyage was funded by Ferdinand and
Isabella, the Christian monarchs who completed the Crusade against the
Muslims of Iberia and founded a single, unified, Christian kingdom of
Spain.
When Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, he fa-
mously believed he had reached the Indies. Mter his mistake became
known, the islands east of India were called the East Indies, and these is-
lands in the Caribbean the West Indies. Most Muslims were only vaguely
aware of this momentous discovery. Ottoman sources mention Colum-
bus's voyage in passing, although by the 1570s, a few Ottoman cartogra-
phers were creating fairly accurate maps of the world showing the two
Americas right where they are in fact located. By then, Spain had built the
rudiments of a new empire in Mexico and the English, French, and others
had planted settlements further north.
Meanwhile, at the eastern end of the Middle World, Muslims had al-
ready discovered what the Europeans were originally seeking: Muslim
traders had been sailing to Malaysia and Indonesia for centuries. Many
Muslim traders who plied these waters belonged to Sufi orders, and
through them Islam had taken root in the {east) Indies long before the first
Europeans arrived.
Even before the Portuguese, Spaniards, English, Dutch, and other
northern Europeans caught the exploring fever, southern Europeans were
already making their clout known at sea, for their civilization had emerged
out of seafaring, and their sailing prowess went back to the Romans, the
Greeks, the Mycenaeans before them, and the Cretans and Phoenicians be-
fore that.