ABSTRACT
The Canary Islands (see Map 14.1) might appear to be a subject very much on the fringes of the history of medieval Europe. This would be to forget that the late fifteenth-century Catalan writers Joannot Martorell and Joan Martí de Galba recorded how Abraham, ‘the King of Canary, a hardy youth whose virile and restless soul was stirred by dreams of conquest’, invaded England via Southampton, attacked London and Canterbury, and even captured Kenilworth Castle.1 In attributing the Muslim faith to the Canarians the spirited authors of the prose romance Tirant lo Blanc further revealed that lively inventiveness which was to inspire Cervantes. But this is only one of a good many late medieval references to the Canary islands, including, as will be seen, a number of Italian sources in which the pagan identity of the islanders was better understood. For the discovery, penetration, conquest and colonisation of these smallish islands off the Atlantic coast of Africa tells us much about attitudes to non-Christian peoples in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, peoples (in this case) who had never heard the name of Christ and, unlike their fellow Berbers of the Sahara, had never been overwhelmed by Islam.2 Even the most energetic Muslim armies seem to have found the inhabitants of the islands too fierce for comfort, and they were left alone by both Almoravids and Almohads in their triumphant re-Islamisation of north-west Africa.3
