Charles V inherited more than territory. He inherited papal authority.

When Charles became Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, he assumed control over the largest empire in human history. Spanish territories in the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America. Portuguese outposts along the African coast. German principalities across central Europe. The Netherlands. Parts of Italy. And the legal machinery established by Dum Diversas — the 1452 papal bull authorizing the enslavement of all enemies of Christ.¹

The Spanish Inquisition was his instrument. The depopulation of indigenous America was his policy. The transformation of Cape Verde from uninhabited islands to Atlantic slave port was his system in operation.

Charles didn’t create the legal framework for perpetual slavery. But he perfected it.

In 1518, Charles V issued a charter authorizing the purchase of 4,000 people from the Cape Verde Islands.

Not from Africa. From Cape Verde.¹

This is seventeen years before the official narrative says the first enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas. But Charles was already authorizing the transport of 4,000 people from Cape Verde to Spanish territories in the Caribbean and Mexico. Who were these 4,000 people?

By 1518, Cape Verde had been receiving indigenous Americans for seventeen years. The Portuguese had been depopulating Labrador since 1501, shipping Beothuk and other American Indians to the islands.² Columbus had been sending Caribbean natives there since the 1490s.³ The islands that had been uninhabited in 1450 now had a population large enough to supply 4,000 workers to Spanish colonial territories.

Charles V’s charter was not the beginning of Atlantic slavery. It was the expansion of an existing system.

Charles V’s decrees were religious, not racial.

In 1539, he banned Moors, Jews, “and their children” from passing into the Indies. The language was religious and genealogical: Muslim, Jewish, and their descendants. No mention of color or continent of origin.¹

In 1535, he decreed that Carib Indians should be branded with hot irons — not because they were “Indian” but because they were deemed cannibals and enemies of the faith.² The branding was punishment for alleged religious practices, not ethnic identity.

The Inquisition didn’t sort people by skin color. It sorted them by religious confession, religious ancestry, and religious practice. Converso — convert — was the key category. Had you been baptized? Were your parents Catholic? Did you practice Christian rituals correctly?

The racial categories that would later define Atlantic slavery were not yet operative. The sorting mechanism was still religious. Charles V was implementing the papal bull of 1452, not a color-based caste system.

The portraits raise questions.

Paintings from the period show Charles V as a dark-skinned man with the distinctive Habsburg jaw. Contemporary Spanish sources refer to him using terms like “swarthy” and “Moorish.” Some portraits are explicitly labeled “Balthazar the Moorish King” — Balthazar being one of the three Magi, traditionally depicted as African.¹

If Charles V was himself what his era would have classified as “Moorish,” then the entire narrative of European versus non-European becomes more complex. The Holy Roman Emperor authorizing the enslavement of Moors and Jews may have been, by contemporary standards, Moorish himself.

This was not unusual. The “black nobility” of Europe included many figures who would later be racialized as white. The Medici family. The Borgias. Various Habsburg lines. The color-coding of European versus non-European was imposed retroactively, after the fact, to create clean historical categories that didn’t exist at the time.

In 1539, Charles V sent a expedition into the American Southwest. The leader was Esteban.

Standard history calls Esteban “a Moorish slave.” But the evidence suggests something different. Esteban was not taken captive; he was part of Charles V’s plan to invade the American Southwest.¹ He led the expedition into what would become New Mexico and Arizona, serving as advance scout for Spanish territorial expansion.

Esteban was dark-skinned. Charles V was dark-skinned. They were contemporaries, both operating under the same imperial authority at the same time. The narrative that frames this as European conquest of indigenous America obscures what may have been a more complex dynamic: different groups of dark-skinned people, some Christian and some not, competing for control of territory under the legal framework established by papal authority.²

The religious sorting, not the racial sorting, was still primary. Christian versus non-Christian. Catholic versus enemy of Christ. The color line was drawn later to simplify a more complex reality.

The Inquisition, the slave port, and the depopulation of America were not separate events.

They were components of a single policy, under a single authority, executing a single papal bull. Charles V inherited the religious framework established by Dum Diversas in 1452 and applied it systematically across his empire. Moors and Jews were expelled or enslaved and sent to Cape Verde. Indigenous Americans were kidnapped from Labrador and sent to the same islands. The mixing ground was created not by accident, but by design.¹

Cape Verde became the operational center of a religious sorting system. Christian versus non-Christian. Catholic versus enemy of Christ. The islands were where displaced populations were collected, relabeled, and redistributed throughout the Atlantic world as “negroes” without a recorded place of origin.

This was not about Africa versus America, or white versus non-white. This was about the systematic implementation of papal authority over all non-Christians “wheresoever placed” under the legal framework established in 1452 and perfected under Charles V.