ABSTRACT

In the late summer of 1446, nearly half a century before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a Portuguese knight and adventurer named Nuno Tristao sailed an armed caravel down Africa's west coast and into the mouth of the Gambia River. For several years prior to this, Sailors such as Tristao had been capturing Africans along the Atlantic coast north of the Gambia River and spiriting them back to Portugal. A year later Niumi's mansa befriended Portuguese trader Diogo Gomes and mediated a dispute Portuguese merchants were having with coastal peoples north of Niumi. What brought the two groups—residents of the small southwestern European kingdom of Portugal on the one hand and the small western African kingdom of Niumi on the other—into conflict that summer day in 1446, to be followed within a decade by friendlier commercial contact, was a process of history that began centuries earlier and involved people across the central expanse of the Africa-Eurasian landmass.