It is also worth remembering that the idea of a slave would have been a christian european captured by Muslim Africans and sold into slavery. that is why the term slave and slav were synonymous. Slave raiding of the European coast by African slavers devastated the mediterranean economy, and extended to Britain Ireland and Iceland. Slavery was not an 'internal' west European phenomena it was something that Europeans were subject to. Slaving raids into the Slavic countries continued until the eighteenth century, after the trans Atlantic slave trade had been abolished (depending on countries - it was illegal to have an african slave in Russia before it was illegal to have a slave slav.).
The Africans most Europeans would have been familiar with would have been in the relatively sophisticated North African Islamic states. They also 9the Barbary staes had an extensive trans saharan trade in black slaves from sub Sahara. Slavery was common in sub-saharan African cultures pre-European contact.
My guess is that white supremacism really began with the contact of the Spanish with the stone age cultures of meso and south America. The trans Atlantic slave trade required white supremacism to justify its existence, white supremacism was not the cause of the trans atlantic slave trade. The slave trade* existed before the Europeans arrived, Europeans just magnified it hugely.
*That is trade in slave, not trans atlantic slave trade.
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